by John Berger
Father poured coffee into a cup, took off his cap and adjusted it further back on his head.
She’s never been difficult, has our Odile, he said.
Her intelligence—
I don’t know how you see it, Mademoiselle Vincent, but to my way of seeing, intelligence is not—
She is a pupil of great promise.
Wait a year or two, she’s only thirteen, said Father. In a year or two her promise—do you take sugar?
It’s just because she’s thirteen that we have to decide things now, Monsieur Blanc.
Even in my day, Father said, nobody married before sixteen!
I want to propose to you, Monsieur Blanc, that we send Odile to Cluses.
You said she’s causing no trouble, Mademoiselle. At least that’s what I understood, what sort of trouble?
Mademoiselle Vincent took off her hat and laid it on her lap. Her greying hair, a little damp, was pressed against her scalp.
No trouble, she said slowly, I want her to go to Cluses for her sake.
How for her sake?
If she stays here, Mademoiselle Vincent went on, she’ll leave school next year. If she goes to Cluses she can continue until she gets her CAP. Let her go to Cluses. She was fanning herself with a little notebook taken from her handbag.
She’d have to be a boarder? asked Father.
Yes.
Have you mentioned it to her?
Not before talking to you, Monsieur Blanc.
He shrugged his shoulders, looked at the barometer, said nothing.
Mademoiselle Vincent got to her feet, holding her hat.
I knew you’d see reason, she said, offering him her hand like a present.
I was watching through the stable door.
Nothing to do with reason! shouted Father. In God’s name! Nothing to do with reason. He paused, gave a little laugh, and leered at Mademoiselle Vincent. She was an old man’s last sin—I wonder if you can understand that, Mademoiselle—his last sin.
It will mean a lot of work, she said.
Don’t push her too hard, said Father, it won’t change anything. You’ll see I was right one day. Odile will be married before she’s eighteen. At seventeen she’ll be married.
We can’t know, Monsieur Blanc. I hope she goes on to take her Baccalaureate.
Back of my arse! You see Odile as a schoolteacher?
She might be, said Mademoiselle Vincent.
No, no. She’s too untidy. To be a teacher you have to be very tidy.
I’m not very tidy, said Mademoiselle Vincent, take me, I’m not very tidy.
You have a fine voice, Mademoiselle, when you sing, you make people happy. That makes up for a lot.
You’re a flatterer, Monsieur Blanc.
She’ll never be a teacher, Odile, she’s too … he hesitated. She’s too—too close to the ground.
Funny to think of those words now in the sky.
Twice in my life I’ve been homesick and both times it was in Cluses. The first time was the worst, for then I hadn’t yet lived anything worse than homesickness. It’s to do with life, homesickness, not death. In Cluses the first time I didn’t yet know this difference.
The school was a building of five storeys. I wasn’t used to staircases. I missed the smell of the cows, Papa raking out the fire, Maman emptying her piss-pot, everyone in the family doing something different and everybody knowing where everybody else was, Emile playing with the radio and my screaming at him, I missed the wardrobe with my dresses all mixed up with Maman’s, and the goat tapping with her horns against the door.
Ever since I could remember, everyone had always known who I was. They called me Odile or Blanc’s Daughter or Achille’s Last. If somebody did not know who I was, a single answer to a single question was enough for them to place me. Ah yes! Then you must be Régis’s sister! In Cluses I was a stranger to everyone. My name was Blanc, which began with a B, and so I was near the top of the alphabetical list. I was always among the first ten that had to stand up, or to file out.
In the school there I learnt how to look at words like something written on a blackboard. When a man swears, the words come out of his body like shit. As kids we talked like that all the time—except when we made traps with words. Adam and Eve and Pinchme went down to the river to bathe, Adam and Eve were drowned, who do you think was saved? At Cluses I learnt that words belonged to writing. We used them; yet they were never entirely ours.
One evening after the last lesson I went back into the classroom to fetch a book I’d forgotten. The French mistress was sitting at her table, her head buried in her hands, and she was crying. I didn’t dare approach her. On the blackboard behind her, I remember it so well, was the conjugation of the verb fuir.
If somebody had asked me in 1952: What place makes you think of men most? I wouldn’t have said the factory, I wouldn’t have said the café opposite the church when there was a funeral, I wouldn’t have said the autumn cattle market, I’d have said: the edge of a wood! Take all the edges of all the forests and copses in the valley and put them end to end like a screen, and there’d be a frieze of men! Some with guns, some with dogs, others with chain saws, a few with girls. I heard their voices from the road below. I looked at them, the slimness of the young ones, the way their checkered shirts hung loose, their boots, the way they wore their trousers, the bulges just below where their belts were fastened. I didn’t notice their faces, I didn’t bother to name them. If one of them noticed me, I’d be off. I didn’t want to say a word and I didn’t want to approach them. Watching was quite enough, and watching them, I knew how the world was made.
Take this loaf to Régis, said Mother. When it’s freezing so hard the cold penetrates to your very bones and a man needs his food in such weather.
She handed me the bread. I ran as fast as I could towards the factory; there was ice everywhere and I had to pick my way. All was frozen—railway points, locks, window frames, ruts, the cliff face behind the factory was hung with icicles, only the river still moved. At the entrance I called to the first man I could see, he had bloodshot eyes and spoke with a strong Spanish accent.
Régis! Big man of honour! he shouted and jerked his thumb upwards. I waited there on the threshold for several minutes, stamping my feet to keep them warm. When Régis arrived he was with Michel. They were of the same class: ’51. They had done their military service together.
You know Michel? asked Régis.
I knew Michel. Michel Labourier, nephew of the Marmot.
For God’s sake come in and get warm, hissed Régis between his teeth as I handed him the loaf.
Father—
It’s not the same if you’re with me. Give me your hand. Jesus! you’re cold! We’ve just tapped her.
They led me away from the big furnaces and the massive cranes overhead, which moved on rails in heaven, to another much smaller workshop.
You’re going to school at Cluses? Michel asked me.
I nodded.
Do you like it?
I miss being at home.
At least you’ll learn something there.
It’s another world, I said.
Nonsense! It’s the same bloody world. The difference is the kids who go to Cluses don’t stay poor and dumb.
We’re not dumb, I said.
He looked at me hard. Here, he said, take this to keep your brains warm. He gave me his woolen cap, red and black. I protested and he pulled the cap down on my head, laughing.
He’s a communist, said Régis later.
At that time I didn’t know what the word meant. We sat against a wall on a pile of sand. I let a handful of it run through my frozen fingers. I could feel its warmth through my stockings, touching my calves. Régis rummaged in a tin, took out his knife, and began cutting a sausage. There were some other men at the end of the shop.
So here’s your sister come to see us! shouted one of them.
Odile’s her name.
There’s a Saint Odile, did you know that?
Yes, I shouted, her fête is the thirteenth of December.
She was born blind in Alsace, the man shouted back. He was at least fifty and thin as a goat’s leg.
Was she?
She saw with her eyes for the first time when she was grown up. Then she founded a monastery.
The thin old man, who wasn’t from the valley and who knew all about Saint Odile, was pulling on the chains of a pulley which worked a machine for grasping and lifting massive weights.
Now he’s going to take the hat off the bread, said Régis.
I’ve just given you the bread, I said, understanding nothing.
See over there what’s sizzling?
In the sand?
That’s the bread with its hat on. Now watch!
Several men began to prod at the bread with long bars. To every blow the thing responded by spitting out fire. I was eating sausage. The old man’s machine came down and lifted the top off the bread as if it were a cap. Under the cap everything was incandescent. I could feel the onrush of heat, although I was at the other end of the shop. The edges of the white-hot underneath were dribbling like a ripe cheese. When a dribble fell off and hit the ground it made a brittle noise like glass and turned black. All the men were holding up shields in front of their faces.
Each bread weighs a ton, said Régis. He drank from a bottle of wine and some of the wine ran down his neck. A ton, he continued, and ferromolybdenum is worth six thousand a kilo—work it out for yourself, you’re still in school—one bread is sold for how much?
Six million.
Correct.
The bread, one and a half metres in diameter, was now phosphorescent in the sand. Régis wasn’t looking any longer. I couldn’t take my eyes off it.
Do you know the story of the Two Hunters? Régis asked.
Which story?
The story of the Two Hunters in the Forest.
The bread was changing colour. Its whiteness was turning violet. The violet of a child with croup.
I don’t think I know the story of the Two Hunters.
Once there were two hunters in the forest up at Peniel: Jean-Paul and Jean-Marc.
Water from a pipe in the roof, with hundreds of holes in it, was falling like rain onto the bread. It was scarlet now.
Jean-Paul stops and says: Look over there, Jean-Marc! I can’t see anything, replies Jean-Marc. Jean-Paul, still pointing, says: You must be blind, over there by the spruce, the one that’s been uprooted. I can see the root and the earth and the stones, Jean-Paul, I can’t see more.
The rain falling on the bread was making steam and it was hissing like a cricket.
The two hunters go deeper into the forest. Can you see her now? shouts Jean-Paul. Where? By the snow under the roots, Jean-Marc. In God’s name, yes! screams Jean-Marc. Both men stop in their tracks, then they start making their way towards the tree. The snow is up to their waists. After a while they stop to get their breath back.
The bread was getting darker and darker in colour and I could scarcely see it anymore because of the clouds of steam coming off it.
Alive? asks Jean-Marc. Jean-Paul pushes his way forward. I can feel it from here! he cries. Be careful, Jean-Paul! Careful, Jean-Paul! Jean-Paul disappears. After a moment Jean-Marc hears his friend laughing, then his laugh changes into a sigh. The happiest sigh in the world, my friend. Jean-Marc knows what is happening so he looks at the tree tops. Whilst he looks at the tree tops, he counts. When he’s counted to five thousand, he looks down, towards the spruce. No sign of Jean-Paul. Now it’s Jean-Marc’s turn.
The rain on the bread had stopped.
Jean-Marc too can feel it. He can hear the dripping. Like Jean-Paul, he falls forward onto his face and starts to laugh. His laugh too becomes a sigh.
The bread was black now, with colours in it like oil.
Do you know what they were doing, Jean-Paul and Jean-Marc?
I shook my head.
You don’t know, Odile, what the two hunters were doing?
No.
They were doing the lying-down waltz!
I looked at Régis and I thought: My kid brother—he was nine years older than I—you’re drinking too much.
The sheet sail and everything hanging from it is turning south, towards the sun in a sky of the deepest winter blue, like the blue we had to wash clothes with.
On the day when Christ ascended to heaven, the Brass Band went from hamlet to hamlet in the village playing music. Their uniforms were newly pressed, their instruments were glittering in the sun, and the leaves of the beech trees were fresh as lettuces. They played so loud they made the windows rattle and tiles fall off the roof. And after each concert in each hamlet the public offered them gnôle and cakes, so that by the end of the afternoon on Ascension Day, after a number of little concerts, the first and second saxophones were drunk as well as several trombones and a drum or two. On Ascension night, Father came home with his trumpet a little bit the worse for wear. With Father, though, nobody could tell till the evening. He never let it influence his fingers when playing.
He died on February the ninth, 1953. The next Ascension Day the band came to play in our orchard in his honour. They played a march from Verdi’s Aïda and a tune called “Amazing Grace.” Men from the factory lined the fence of the orchard listening to the music. Mother stood by the stable doors, arms folded across her bosom, looking up at the sky. And suddenly Papa’s house with its three rooms, its hayloft, its little wooden balcony, its chopped wood, dwarfed the factory which was the size of six cathedrals.
“Amazing Grace” begins sad and gradually the sadness becomes a chorus and so is no longer sad but defiant. For a while I believed he was there. Later the music listens to itself and discovers that something has fallen silent. Irretrievably. He had left.
Whilst I was listening to “Amazing Grace” on that afternoon in May 1953, I touched something which I wouldn’t be able to name until twenty years later. I touched the truth that the virility which women look for in men is often sly, slippery, impudent. It’s not grand, what they’re looking for. It’s cautious and cunning, just like Father was.
The men on the other side of the fence started to clap and Michel waved at me. I turned away, saying to myself that only a communist would wave at a moment like that!
Michel’s motorbike was red and was made in Czechoslovakia. The spare parts for it were cheaper than for any other bike, Michel said, because Czechoslovakia was communist and the communists didn’t put profit before everything else. On several Sundays he asked me if I’d like to go for a spin with him and each time I refused. He was too sure of himself, he thought he knew better than anybody else in the valley. He had called my father a Chopping Block. Not to me. I heard about it from a friend. Achille Blanc has been a chopping block for others all his life! Those were his words. So I said no to him.
The sixth time he asked me was in August. We were both on holiday. The hay was in the barn. Régis had bought an old third-hand Peugeot and was painting it in the orchard. Emile was there in the house when Michel came. He drives well, Odile, said Emile, you’ve nothing to be frightened about. On Wednesday morning early, Michel announced, I’ll pick you up at five. At five! I protested. Five’s not too early if we’re going to Italy! Italy! I screamed. Yet, however loud I screamed it, the word was having its effect. If we were really going to drive to Italy, everything was beyond my control. I said nothing more. And on Tuesday night I prepared my trousers, my boots, and a haversack with a picnic for us both.
We went over the Grand St. Bernard a little to the east of the Mont Blanc where the wind now is blowing the snow like my chiffon scarf against the blue sky. Neither of us knew what life had in store. Nothing happened. Michel had brought a thermos of coffee which we drank from for the first time near Chamonix. We passed a factory which, Michel said, was like a copy of ours. It took up less space. On the bike we climbed higher and higher. We ate our picnic above the tree line. I never breathed so much air in my life. Mouth, nose, ears and ey
es all took in air. At the summit we threw snowballs at each other and saw the dogs. They were as big as ponies. There was a lake. A lake at that height was as surprising as tears at a victory. When the wind was too cold I put my head down against his leather jacket. I tucked my knees under his legs and held on with one hand to his leather belt. Around the hairpins I lay down with the bike like grass blown by the wind.
She overheated a bit on the last stretch, he said. You probably smelt the burnt oil?
Motor oil, I said, I don’t know what it smells like.
On the red 3 50CC two-stroke twin motorbike made in Czechoslovakia we came down into Italy, on the other side of the mountain. The cows looked poorer, the goats thinner, there was less wood and more rocks, yet the air was like a kiss. In such air women didn’t have to be like we were on our side of the mountain. Where we have wild raspberries in ruined pine forests, I told myself, they have grapes on vines which grow between apple trees! For the first time in my life I was envious.
Did you notice the Saumua coming down to Aosta? he asked.
No.
It’s the biggest truck since the war. Takes a load of thirty tons.
We arrived back before it was dark. I was in time to shut up the chickens and take the milk on my back to the dairy. My behind was sore, my hands were grimy, my hair was tangled. It took me hours to untangle it before I went to sleep. But I was proud of myself. I’d been to Italy.
We’ll do another trip, Michel proposed.
School begins next week.
You’re a funny one, Odile, there’s no school on Sunday.
No, I said, thanks for this time.
You’re a good passenger, I’ll say that for you.
Are there bad ones?
Plenty. They don’t trust the driver astride the machine. You can’t ride a bike if you don’t let go. I’m willing to bet you weren’t frightened for a moment, Odile. You had confidence, didn’t you? You weren’t frightened for a moment, were you?
Maybe yes and maybe no. His sureness made me want to tease him.
A weekend, two months later, I was coming home from Cluses and the bus driver said:
Have you heard what happened to Michel?
