Once in Europa

by John Berger

  FOR NELLA

  “Others have laboured and ye are entered into their labours.”

  ST JOHN 4-38

  Contents

  The Leather of Love

  The Accordion Player

  Boris Is Buying Horses

  The Time of the Cosmonauts

  Once In Europa

  Play Me Something

  Their Railways

  Acknowledgements

  A Note on the Author

  By the Same Author

  Also Available by John Berger

  The Leather of Love

  Weathered as gate posts

  by departures

  and the white ghosts

  of the gone,

  wrapped in tarpaulins,

  we talk of passion.

  Our passion’s the saline

  in which hides are hung

  to make from a hinge of skin

  the leather of love.

  The Accordion Player

  Will you play at my wedding? Philippe the cheesemaker asked him. Philippe was thirty-four. People had been saying he would never get married.

  When is it?

  Saturday next.

  Why didn’t you ask me before?

  I didn’t dare. Will you?

  Where does the bride come from?

  Yvonne comes from the Jura. Drop into the Republican Lyre tonight and she’ll be there—her parents have come and some friends from Besançon.

  The same evening the accordionist, a man in his fifties, found himself sitting in the café, drinking champagne offered by the bride’s father, next to a plump woman who laughed a lot and wore dangling earrings. The accordionist had been looking hard at the young bride and he was sure she was pregnant.

  You will play for us? Philippe asked, filling up the glasses.

  Yes, I’ll play for you and the Yvonne, he said.

  On the floor at his feet lay a dog, its coat turned grey with age. From time to time he caressed its head.

  What’s your dog’s name? asked the woman with earrings.

  Mick, he said, he’s a clown without a circus.

  He’s old to be a clown.

  Fifteen Mick is, fifteen.

  You have a farm?

  At the top of the village—a place we call Lapraz.

  Is it a big farm?

  Depends who’s asking the question, he answered with a little laugh.

  Delphine is asking you the question.

  He wondered if she was often drunk.

  Well, is it a big farm? she asked again.

  One winter the Mayor asked my father: Have you got a lot of snow up at Lapraz? And do you know what Father replied? Less than you, Mr. Mayor, he said, because I own less land!

  That’s beautiful! Delphine said, knocking over a glass as she put a hand on his shoulder. No fool, your father.

  Have you come for the wedding? he asked her.

  I’ve come to dress the bride!

  Dress her?

  It was me who made the wedding dress and there are always finishing touches to make on the Great Day!

  Are you a dressmaker? he asked.

  No! No! I work in a factory … I just pin things up for myself and friends.

  That must save you money, he said.

  It does, but I do it because it amuses me, like you play the accordion, they tell me …

  You like music?

  She disentangled her arms and held them wide apart as though she were measuring a metre and a half of cloth. With music, she sighed, you can say everything! Do you play regularly?

  Every Saturday night in the café, weddings excepted.

  This café?

  No, the one at home.

  Don’t you live here?

  Lapraz is three kilometres away.

  Are you married? she asked, looking him straight in the eye. Her own eyes were grey-green like the jacket she was wearing.

  Unmarried, Delphine, he replied. I play at other men’s weddings.

  I lost my husband four years ago, she said.

  He must have been young.

  In a car accident …

  So quick! He pronounced the two words with such finality that she was silenced. She fingered the stem of her glass, then lifted it to her lips and emptied it.

  You like playing the accordion, Félix?

  I know where music comes from, he said.

  That it was going to be a bad year had been evident to Félix from the moment in the spring when the snow thawed. All around the village there were pastures which looked as though they had been ploughed up the previous autumn and they hadn’t been. In the orchards the fruit trees were growing out of mud instead of grass. The earth everywhere was like an animal whose fur was falling out. All this was due to the invasion of the moles. Some maintained that the moles had multiplied so catastrophically because the foxes had died or been shot the year before. A fox eats thirty or forty moles a day. The foxes had died because of the rabies which had been brought to our region from the distant Carpathians.

  He was standing motionless in the garden in front of his house. Across his body he was holding a spade. He had been like that for ten minutes. He was looking at the earth just ahead of his boots. Not a grain of soil stirred. Towards the mountain, a buzzard was circling, otherwise nothing in sight was moving. The leaves of the cabbages and cauliflowers in the garden were wilted and yellow. With one hand he could have lifted any one of these plants off the earth, as you lift a candlestick off a table. All their roots had been severed.

  When he saw the soil stir, he raised his spade and struck, grunting as the spade entered the earth. He kicked the soil away. There were the disclosed tunnels and the dead culprit mole.

  One less! he said, grinning.

  Albertine, Félix’s mother, was watching her forty-year-old son through the kitchen window when he killed the mole with the spade. She shouted to him to come in because the meal was on the table.

  With today’s sun, she said whilst they were eating, the potatoes shouldn’t be dirty.

  They shouldn’t be, he replied.

  The pup under the table looked up, hoping for a bone or some cheese-rind. He was large and black with blond marks shaped like almonds over each eye which made him look comic.

  Ah, Mick! said Félix, our Mick’s a clown without a circus, isn’t he?

  If you like, said Albertine, I’ll make potato fritters tonight.

  With cabbage salad! He took off his cap and smeared his sleeve across his hot forehead. Why not?

  Years before, when Albertine had been strong enough to work in the fields, they used to lift the potatoes together. Whilst working they would recite all the ways in which potatoes could be eaten: potatoes in their jackets, potatoes with cheese in the oven, potato salad, potatoes with pork fat, mashed potatoes with milk, potatoes cooked without water in the black iron saucepan, potatoes with leeks in the soup—and, best of all, potato fritters with cabbage salad.

  The potatoes, unearthed that same morning, had dried well in the sun on the topsoil of the field. As Félix gathered them by hand into buckets, he sorted them. The small ones for the animals and poultry, the large ones for the table. Sometimes he moved forward stooping, sometimes he knelt between the rows and went forward on his knees, like a penitent. Mick, panting in the heat, lay on the ground and each time Félix moved forward, he accompanied him. When the buckets were full the man emptied the potatoes into sacks along the side of the field. The sacks were of strong white plastic and had contained fertiliser. When they were full, they looked liked praying drunks in white shirts.

  Suddenly the dog became alert, his head down, nose in the broken earth. Breathing out heavily, he started to scrabble with his front paws and to scatter the soil behind him.

  Fetch him! Mick, f
etch him! Félix sat back on his heels to watch the young dog. He was happy to be diverted and to rest his back, which ached. The dog continued to dig excitedly.

  You want him, Mick, don’t you?

  At last the dog deposited a mole on the earth.

  You have him, don’t let him go!

  The dog tossed the mole into the air. For an instant the little animal in its grey fur coat, measuring fifteen centimetres in length and weighing a hundred and fifty grammes, with paws like hands, with very weak eyesight and acute hearing, renowned for his testicles and the exceptional amount of seminal fluid they produced, for an instant the little animal was hapless and alone in the sky.

  Quick, Mick!

  Fallen back onto the soil, the mole, no longer capable of flight, began to squeal.

  Have him!

  The dog ate the mole.

  Alone in the house, Albertine asked herself for the hundredth time the same question: when she was gone, what would Félix do? Men, she considered, were strong-backed, reckless and weak, each man combining these essential qualities in his own way. Félix needed a woman who would not take advantage of his weakness. If the woman were ambitious or greedy, she would exploit him and use his strong back and his recklessness to ride him where she wanted. Yet now he was forty and the woman had not been found.

  There had been Yvette. Yvette would have cuckolded him, just as she was now cuckolding the poor Robert whom she married. There had been Suzanne. One Sunday morning, just before Félix did his military service, she had seen him caressing Suzanne on the floor beneath the blackboard in the schoolroom—the same schoolroom where he had learnt as a boy! She had crept away from the window without disturbing them, but she repeatedly reminded her son, when she wrote to him in the army, that school-teachers can’t sit on milking stools. Suzanne had left the village and married a shopkeeper.

  Was it going to be worse for her son to be alone than to have married the wrong woman? This question made Albertine feel as helpless as she had sometimes felt as a child.

  In the evening Félix emptied the sacks full of potatoes into a wooden stall in the cellar under the house. Potatoes just lifted from the earth give off a strange warmth and in the darkness of the cellar they glow like children’s shoulders after a day in the sun. He looked at the heap critically: there were going to be far less than last year.

  Did you finish? asked Albertine when he entered the kitchen.

  Four more rows to do, Maman.

  I’ve just made the coffee … Get under the table! You’re not firm enough with that pup, Félix.

  He caught five moles this afternoon.

  Are you going out tonight?

  Yes, there’s a meeting of the Dairy Committee.

  Félix drank the coffee from the bowl his mother handed him and began reading the Communist Party paper for peasants and agricultural workers.

  Do you know where the biggest bell in the world is, Maman?

  Not round the neck of one of our cows!

  It’s called the Tsar Kolokol, it weighs 196 tons and was cast in Moscow in 1735.

  That’s a bell I’ll never hear, she said.

  When he went into the stable to start milking, she took out his suit from the wardrobe which her husband had made one winter when they were first married, and brushed the trousers with the same energy as she had once groomed their mare. Then, having laid the suit on the high double bed beneath her husband’s portrait, she did something she had never done before in her life. She took off her boots and lay, fully clothed, on top of the bed.

  She heard Félix come back into the kitchen, she listened to him washing by the sink. She heard him taking off his trousers and washing between his legs. When he had finished, he came into the bedroom.

  Where are you? he asked.

  I’m taking a rest, she said from the bed.

  What’s the matter?

  A rest, my son.

  Are you ill, Maman?

  I feel better now.

  She watched him dress. He stepped into the trousers with the creases which she had ironed. He put on the white cotton shirt buttoned at the cuffs, which showed off his handsome shoulders. He slipped into the jacket—he was putting on weight, no question about that. Nevertheless he was still handsome. He ought to be able to find a wife.

  Why don’t you go to a dentist? she asked. He glanced at her, puzzled.

  He could arrange your teeth.

  I haven’t a toothache.

  He could make you more handsome.

  He could also make us poorer!

  Let me see you in your cap.

  He put it on.

  You’re even more handsome than your father was, she said.

  When Félix returned to the farm that night, he was surprised to see a car, its lights on, parked outside the house. He entered hurriedly. The doctor from the next village was in the kitchen washing his hands in the sink. The door to the Middle Room was shut.

  If there’s no improvement by the morning, your mother will have to go to the hospital, the doctor said.

  Félix looked through the kitchen window at the mountain opposite, which, in the moonlight, was the colour of a grey mole, but he could not see around what had happened.

  What happened? he asked.

  She telephoned your neighbours.

  She won’t want to go to the hospital.

  I have no choice, said the doctor.

  You’re right, said Félix, suddenly furious, it is her choice which counts!

  You can’t look after her properly here.

  She has lived here for fifty years.

  If you’re not careful, she may die here.

  The doctor wore glasses and this was the first thing you noticed about him. He looked at everything as if it were a page to read. He had come straight to the village from medical school full of idealism. Now, after ten years, he was disillusioned. Mountain people did not listen to reason, he complained, mountain people drank too much, mountain people went on repeating what they thought they had once heard as children, mountain people never recognised a rational process, mountain people behaved as if they thought life itself was mad.

  Have a drink before you go, Doctor.

  Does your mother have a supplementary insurance?

  Which do you prefer, pears or plums?

  Neither, thank you.

  A little gentian? Gentian cures all, Doctor.

  No alcohol, thank you.

  How much do I owe you?

  Twenty thousand, said the doctor, adjusting his glasses.

  Félix took out his purse. She has worked every day of the year for fifty years, he thought, and tonight this shortsighted quack asks for twenty thousand. He extracted two folded bank notes and placed them on the table.

  The doctor left and Félix went into the Middle Room. She was so thin that, under the eiderdown, her body was invisible. It was as if her head, decapitated, had been placed on the pillow.

  An expression of irritation, like that on a dog’s muzzle when it sniffs alcohol, ruffled her face whilst her eyes remained closed. When the spasm was over, her face resumed its calm, but was older. She was ageing hour by hour.

  Noticing the dog lying on the floor at the foot of the bed, Félix hesitated. She would have insisted on the dog being put out.

  Not a sound, Mick!

  He climbed onto the bed beside his mother so that he would be reassured by her breathing throughout the night. She stirred and, turning on the pillow, asked for some water. When he gave her the glass, she could not raise her head. He had to hold her head up with his hand, and her head seemed to weigh nothing, to be no heavier than a lettuce.

  They both lay there, awake and without saying a word.

  You’ll get the rest of the potatoes in tomorrow? she eventually asked.

  Yes.

  Next spring there’ll be fewer moles, she said. There won’t be enough for them all to eat to survive the winter.

  They breed quickly, Maman.

  In the long run such troub
les correct themselves, she insisted, if not by next year, by the year after. Yet you, you, my son, you will always remember the Year of the Thousand Moles.

  No, Maman, you’re going to get better.

  The next day whilst he was cutting wood on the circular saw, Félix stopped every hour to go into the house and reassure himself. Each time, lying on the large bed, her arms straight by her side, she opened her eyes and smiled at him.

  Everything was ready and prepared, she knew, in the second drawer of the wardrobe. Her black dress with the mother-of-pearl buttons, the black kerchief with blue gentian flowers printed on it, the dark grey stockings, and the shoes with laces which would be easier to put on than boots. How many times had Marie-Louise promised to come and dress her if it was she, Albertine, who was the first to go?

  That night after Félix had come to lie down beside her, she said: It’s years, my boy, since you played your accordion.

  I don’t even know where it is.

  It’s in the grenier, she said, you used to play so well, I don’t know why you stopped.

  It was when I came out of the army.

  You let it drop.

  Father was dead, there was too much to do.

  He glanced at the portrait hanging above the bed. His father had a thick moustache, tiny comic eyes and a strong neck. He used to tap his neck, as if it were a barrel, when he was thirsty.

  Would you play me something? Albertine asked.

  On the accordion?

  Yes.

  After all this time I won’t get a breath out of it.

  Try.

  He shrugged his shoulders, took the electric torch off its hook on the wall, and went out. When he came back he extracted the accordion from its case, arranged one strap round his shoulder and, slipping his wrist under the other, started to pump. It worked.

  What tune do you want?

  “Dans tes Montagnes.”

  The two voices of the accordion, tender and full-blown, filled the room. All her attention was fixed on him. His body was rolling slowly to the music. He has never been able to make up his mind, she reflected, it’s as if he doesn’t realise this is his only life. I ought to know since it was I who gave birth to him. And then, carried away by the music, she saw their cows in the alpage and Félix learning to walk.