A Strange Country

by Muriel Barbery

  Now he was standing, dying a thousand deaths, before the highest authorities of his world.

  “We shall have to find a way to preserve your privacy,” said the Head of the Council, who was trying hard not to laugh (which so surprised Petrus that he blushed all the deeper).

  “A bit more discretion would do your quest no harm,” said the guardian (who was having a very good time as well), “and you have emptied two innocent pillows of their feathers.”

  There was, in fact, a moment when Roselyne, naked as a worm, had stood up on the bed and, laughing hysterically, had tossed all the duck feathers in the air, above her lovely tousled head.

  “I am sorry,” said Petrus, who was thinking of jumping out the window.

  “We must agree to a signal to help us anticipate the nature of your activities,” said the guardian.

  They agreed, and Petrus went on with his explorations interspersed with wine and comely young women.

  He was in the habit of saying he was traveling on business, and if anyone asked him, what sort of business, he would simply say, family business, because family business is family business, after all, and anyone who tries to stick their nose in it is simply a boor. But the gentlemen he met at the winemakers’ did not refrain from divulging their identities and positions, and Petrus learned all about the enterprises and professions on the planet, as well as the splendors of a species he’d learned to love despite all their vanities. One day, when he was at a winemaker friend’s, somewhere in the Côte-d’Or, he met a writer for the first time. He was impressed by his bearing, his mustache and his little beard, but surprised by what he heard him saying when he entered the cellar where the great man was drinking and joking with a few others. It sounded like they were exchanging dirty jokes, one after the other, and so on for a good while, and Petrus was disappointed not to hear the writer telling proper stories. Then he forgot his frustration and began to laugh heartily himself. There were a few unforgettable witticisms—of all the sexual aberrations, the worst is chastity, Christianity did a lot for love by making it a sin—with, toward the end, a more serious conversation where Petrus was on his own to put his questions to the writer.

  “Have you been to war?” he asked.

  “I wasn’t at the front,” the writer replied, “but I have written about war and I will continue to do so, particularly because the one that is coming will be even more terrible and deadly than the previous ones.”

  “The one that is coming?”

  “There is always a war coming. Always a civilization dying, which the next civilization will refer to as barbarian.”

  “If everything is doomed, what can we do?” asked Petrus.

  “We can drink wine and love women!” the writer said. “And believe in beauty and poetry, the only possible religions in this world.”

  “You’re not Christian?” asked Petrus.

  “Are you?” asked the writer, looking at him, amused.

  “No, no,” said Petrus, “I’m—”

  He broke off, at a loss to say what he was.

  The writer looked at him, even more amused.

  “Do you read?” he asked.

  “Yes,” said Petrus, “as much as I travel.”

  “We spend too much time in books and not enough in nature.”

  “I learn a great deal from traveling, but mainly from books,” said Petrus.

  “So, as I did not study, I learned a great deal,” answered the man. “I wrote that one day in a book no one will read anymore, once flowers wither on my tomb.”

  “So there is no hope?” asked Petrus.

  “It is because we believe in roses that we make them blossom,” said the writer. “The fact they end up dying does not change anything. There is always one war coming and another one ending, and so we must relentlessly start dreaming again.”

  They were silent as they emptied their last glass.

  “Do you know who is the first to die?” the writer asked at last, thoughtfully.

  Petrus could find nothing to say.

  “The visionary,” continued the writer. “It is always the visionary who dies, in the first exchange of gunfire. And when he falls in the snow, and knows he is dying, he recalls the hunts of his childhood, when his grandfather taught him to respect the deer.”

  There was another moment’s silence.

  “Farewell, friend,” he said at last. “May life bring you gaiety, which is the most amiable form of courage.”

  Petrus often pondered this conversation, and had no trouble honoring its premise—wine and women—and he understood how one could learn without studying. That is the virtue of the novel, he thought, at least for the reader; writing one must be another kettle of fish.

  That day, in addition to his meeting with the great writer, Petrus also received a surprising piece of information from his winemaker friend in la Côte, and he decided to look into it further.

  “I recently went to Spain,” the winemaker (whose name was Gaston Bienheureux) told him suddenly.

  As he said this, his expression grew wistful, which surprised Petrus, who was used to seeing him frank and talkative.

  “In a place in Extremadura called Yepes,” continued Gaston. “There’s a castle there, with an extraordinary wine cellar, and all the winemakers in Europe go there.”

  He fell silent, took a sip of his vin d’amitié, a vintage reserved for friends that he would never sell, and seemed to forget what he’d said. When at dinner Petrus raised the subject again, Gaston didn’t know what to say.

  The next day, in Nanzen, the guardian shared the vision of a stony, arid plain, broken now and again by sun-baked trees and hills and, on the horizon, a village dominated by a fortress. One hour later, Petrus landed there. It was hotter than hell, and Petrus grumbled at having to wear a bamboo hat that felt itchy on his forehead. Need I tell you that thirty years—which amounts to barely four in an elf’s lifetime—had gone by since our hero became the Council’s special envoy to the human world? That there is not a trace, anywhere, of the two children of November and snow, and that the entire matter seems to be frozen in permafrost? Patience, however—for everything has been set in motion and is coming together, and one day soon Petrus will find out what to expect from Yepes. In the village, he didn’t meet a soul. He went into the inn and, after the torrid heat outside, it felt as cold as the grave, no one came. After a moment cooling down and growing impatient, he went back out and took the steep path that led to the fortress.

  At the gates to the fortress, he came upon a young boy who waved at him.

  “What fair winds bring you here?” he asked politely.

  But the boy barred the way.

  “I’ve come upon the recommendation of a winemaker friend,” said Petrus.

  “Are you a winemaker yourself?” asked the boy.

  “No,” said Petrus, who at the time was not prepared to lie.

  “I’m sorry, but you must go on your way,” said the young guard.

  Petrus looked up at the stone walls and studied the narrow windows. An eagle was flying very high in the sky and there was a sharp hardness to the air, but also the fragrance of wonder, a perfume of fury and roses which made him think of the poetry of his mists. Worlds are born because they die, he murmured, before waving goodbye to the boy and turning on his heels. Then he remembered another line and, finally, he begged Nanzen to repatriate him.

  “We are all about to be born,” he said to himself again, upon landing on the red bridge.

  He delivered his report on his visit to the guardian and the Head of the Council, who were also puzzled, and it was decided he would go there again the very next day.

  But it was at this very moment in the story that news from Rome caused the sky of quests to explode, upending the calendar of actions, diverting Petrus from Yepes, and precipitating a historical decision on the part of the Head
of the Council himself.

  Roberto Volpe was dead, and he had left all his belongings to his son Pietro, from whom the Head of the Council—still going by the identity, in the human world, of Gustavo Acciavatti, orchestra conductor by trade—had tried to purchase the painting. Pietro had refused to sell it, but they had become friends. Prior to this, Leonora Volpe, Pietro’s young sister, had fallen in love with the Maestro, who often came to visit her father on the pretext of acquiring Renaissance drawings. The Head of the Council, who had also fallen in love with Leonora, did not see how he could go against these workings of fate, because this woman’s presence had become more vital to him than anything else on earth. Tall, dark-haired, languorous and elegant, she gave a texture to his life that it had always lacked. Her rather austere beauty, without adornment or artifice, gave him a feeling of land and rootedness that contrasted with the evanescence of his misty world; but she also had something of a dancer about her, a languid way of moving that evoked the trees in his homeland. And so, he was going to reside permanently on the other side of the red bridge, although he hadn’t uncovered the secret of permanent passage into the world of humans, and had to conceal his elfin nature. The painter in Amsterdam, through the transformation he had transmitted to the bridge, had taken on the genetic characteristics of the species but, as the gray notebook was still unrecovered, for the moment the new Gustavo had to remain content with merely pretending to be a human.

  For the first time in the history of the mists, a Head of the Council was resigning from office and calling for new elections. He gave no reason. The world of elves was in turmoil, and resented this man they loved and admired for abandoning ship just as the mists were declining even further.

  Naturally, the head of the garden ran in the new elections with a profession of faith that was even more pathetic than the previous time, and his campaign was bitter and ugly. His opponent, a councilor from Inari, in the province of Snows, took after his dear friend who had resigned and strove to win the highest office with the same elegance and ability to distance himself. He was narrowly elected, and now I can refer to him by the name you are familiar with, that of Solon, Gustavo’s old friend, but also the guardian’s, which he reaffirmed in Nanzen immediately after his accession to the leadership of the Council. I’ll wager you will not be surprised to learn that this guardian you have known for a long time was called Tagore by humans; and so now we have caught up with all the elfin protagonists from the beginning of our tale—those who, in slightly less than forty years from now, will welcome Alejandro de Yepes and Jesús Rocamora to Nanzen, fresh from their castillo.

  For the time being, however, Solon, Tagore, and Gustavo are working to thwart the enemy’s maneuvers. In the person of the head of the garden, baptized Aelius by the opposite camp, the devil is sharpening his knives and rallying his loyal supporters. Does he really believe that humankind is responsible for the extinction of the mists? Who can really know these things? Between the lies our hearts tell us, and the truths we will not admit to, everything has ended up looking like a puzzle where the pieces are mixed and muddled. The fact remains that Aelius’s crusade, unable to obtain weapons legally, is now borrowing the weapons it had always coveted, and is conspiring to provoke total war. It is not yet the war that will break out in the human world and last three years, filling the elves of Nanzen with dismay—but the master of Ryoan will find inspiration in it for his own patiently instigated war. A few more years and, once he has gained possession of the gray notebook, he will construct and conceal his own bridge. Then he’ll be able to come and go between the two worlds without resorting to the services of a traitor, and will begin to move his pawns on the chessboard of the earth. Appropriately, his first move will be to send his most faithful right-hand man to Rome: the Hanase piglet has become Raffaele Santangelo, the future governor of the capital and subsequent president of the Italian Council, upon the orders of his master in Ryoan.

  Every story has its traitors. Our story has one in particular, who wrought so much evil that, out of weariness or sorrow, we shall not speak his name, for he belonged to the respected elite of assistants to the pavilion, and no one had ever witnessed perfidy of this extreme in the mists. He passes information to his master, removes all trace of his passage, executes his orders in both worlds, and delivers the gray notebook by resorting to corruption and murder. Due to a consubstantial impossibility in the species, which has endured despite all its mutations, Aelius will require the complicity of human assassins for his despicable plans. The traitor recruits them, then makes them disappear in a fashion we will learn of soon, the same which saw the murderers in Yepes vanish into thin air without a trace.

  The world of mists will be confronted with the first internal division in its history, and Aelius is recruiting new partisans every day, with his speeches filled with anger and fear. I believe this goes to show that something among the elves has been broken, for they’d always been impermeable to fear, doubt, and the question of decline.

  Petrus continues to read and travel. Despite his efforts, the guardian cannot get him into the fortress at Yepes, but only as far as the gates, where he is sent away, every time. Marguerite dies of old age, Jean-René of ill health. Petrus makes friends all over Europe, a continent in turmoil, at a time when rumors of war can be heard, despite the pledge that the last war would really be the last. Silence and shadow lengthen and spread like a flood over the continent.

  Now it is 1918 on the human calendar, fourteen years before the beginning of the greatest conflict in the history of elves and humans combined, fourteen years of intensifying intrigue, while the armies begin to form.

  But first a night of November and snow.

  Worlds are born because they die

  We are all about to be born

  Book of Battles

  ROSES

  It is said that everything was born from the void the day a brush drew a line through it, separating earth from sky. And so, a rose must have followed, then the sea, the mountains, and the trees.

  It is in drawing a line of ink that one makes the earth emerge; it is in believing in roses that one makes them bloom.

  So much effort for such mortal creatures, so much beauty doomed to flourish and die. But the battle for the birth of this beauty—doomed to die that night—is all we will ever have in this life.

  SNOW

  It is said that everything was born from the void the day a brush drew a line through it, separating earth from sky. And so, snow must have fallen, a soft snow that made the chill of the dawning of the world less cruel.

  Maria was the lady of snows, of the thawing of bodies and hearts, of light snowflakes and dawns full of promise. It had snowed in the first scene, it would snow in the last, and she wondered if the balm would appease her troubles—the snows of the beginning and the snows of the end are the same, they shine like lanterns along a path of black stones, are a light inside us piercing the night, and fall on the plain where worlds dissolve and take with them sighs and crosses.

  OF SOLITUDE AND OF THE MIND

  1918–1938

  Night of November and snow—somewhere in central Italy a young woman gives birth to a little girl, and in Katsura, the companion of Solon, the Head of the Council, gives birth to their first elfkin, also a girl.

  Both newborn babies are miracles.

  The young woman’s name is Teresa and she will die that same night. The child should never have been born: her father is an elf, and unions between the two species are sterile. It’s in Rome, at the home of Gustavo Acciavatti, that Tagore met Teresa, a young virtuoso pianist who belonged to the group of artists and friends, including Sandro Centi and Pietro Volpe, who often met at the Maestro’s villa. Solon, Tagore, and Gustavo were childhood friends before they became companions and allies in power—but that was not their only bond, for both of them, among the most powerful elves in all the land of mists, had fallen in love with human women. Who co
uld ever have suspected that one of those unions would produce a child?

  In Katsura, another child was welcomed into the world: the infant did not look anything like an elfkin, but rather like a human baby, unable to change into a foal or a doe or any other animal—a high-elf resembling a human child, looking out at the world with her big black little girl’s eyes.

  Tagore has left Italy to go to the upper chamber where a select council is being held with the councilors Solon can trust. They have been preparing for it since the announcement of Teresa’s pregnancy, but they did not suspect the clauses of fate would be so clear. Now the two children of November and snow have been born, and the prophecy will live.

  the rebirth of the mist

  through two children of snow and November

  the rootless, the last alliance

  “Rootless ones,” murmurs Gustavo, the former Head of the Council, who has just arrived from Rome.

  Solon nods. Petrus, recently repatriated from a holiday on the banks of the Loire (and vats of a sparkling wine apt to raise the dead) feels his heart sink (while his head is like a watermelon).

  “We have to hide them,” he says.

  “I will have your daughter taken to the Abruzzo,” Gustavo says to Tagore. “There is a presbytery there, with an orchard. Sandro has often spoken to me about the place because his brother is the priest at the presbytery, and he will take care of her.”