Shaking off his astonishment, he recounted Lysia Verhareine’s visit. His story was straightforward and it wasn’t any help, but I enjoyed hearing her talked about by someone else, someone not from our town. It was proof I wasn’t dreaming, that she’d really existed, this guy I didn’t know from Adam summoning her in front of me. On my way out I shook Mazerulles’s hand and wished him good luck; I don’t know why, it just slipped out. He didn’t seem surprised. He said to me simply, “My luck, you know—” I didn’t know, but looking at him I could imagine.
Now what should I say? I could describe Lysia Verhareine’s burial. It was on Monday. The weather was as beautiful as the day she’d chosen to take her leave of us, maybe even warmer. Yes, I could tell about all that: the sun, the children who’d woven garlands of grapevines and wheat, every last inhabitant crowded into the church, which seemed it might burst, Bourrache and his little girls, the prosecutor in the first pew like a widower, and the fat priest, Father Lurant, newly arrived, whom we’d distrusted until then but who found some very apt words to express what many of us had in our hearts—a priest who could truly make the funeral seem something only natural. I could tell about all that, but I haven’t the heart.
Actually, it was the prosecutor who was most changed. He kept on asking for a head now and then, but it seemed his heart was no longer in it. Worse, he sometimes muddled up his closing arguments. Well, that’s not completely accurate. It would be better to say that sometimes, in the course of reiterating the facts and drawing his conclusions, he would slow down, stare into space, and just stop talking. As though he weren’t there anymore, in his speaker’s chair at the courthouse. As though he were absent. It would never last very long, never to the point where someone might have thought of tugging at his sleeve to get him started again; but there was a certain embarrassment, and when he resumed his closing argument, everybody seemed relieved, even the guy on trial.
The prosecutor had the little house in the park bolted up. There was never another tenant there, just as there wouldn’t be another teacher at the school until the end of the war. Destinat stopped strolling in the park as well. He went out less and less. We learned somewhat later that it was he who had paid for the coffin and the monument. We all considered this a handsome gesture on his part.
A few months after the teacher’s death, I learned from Léon Schirer, a guy who served as a kind of handyman at the courthouse in V, that Destinat had requested retirement. Schirer wasn’t one for idle talk, but I could hardly believe him. For one thing the prosecutor, though not a kid, still had some good years ahead of him. More than that, I couldn’t imagine what he could possibly do with himself, alone in a house big enough for a hundred, with two servants he barely said three words to on any given day.
But I was wrong. Destinat delivered his last closing argument on June 15, 1916. He delivered it without believing it. And in fact he didn’t get the defendant’s head. Once the courtroom emptied out, the president made a speech, sober and short, and then a sort of aperitif was served, with the whole bench—headed up by Mierck—lawyers, court clerks, and some others. I was there too. Most everyone went to the Rébillon for a farewell meal. I say most. As for me, I wasn’t there. For some sparkling wine, they could suffer my presence; but for the truly good things—things meant to be savored by those born to them—I would go back where I came from.
After that, Destinat entered into silence.
XII
To continue, I must go back to the December morning of 1917 when I left the little body of Morning Glory at the edge of the freezing canal, along with Judge Mierck and his shivering entourage.
All this must seem a muddle, back and forth in time, but in fact it’s the very image of my life, made of nothing but jagged bits and pieces, impossible to stick back together. If you would try to understand a human being, you have to dig down to the roots. It’s not enough to nudge him along through time, into a flattering light: You have to probe the cracks and let all the poison seep out. You need, in other words, to get your hands dirty. But nothing disgusts me, it’s my job. Besides, it’s dark outside. What else could I do at night but get out the same old sheets and mend them a little more, and a little more?
Mierck with egg yolk still stuck to his moustache, and his haughty air of a gouty ambassador. His delight at the proximity of the château to this scene of death lingered in the corners of his mouth. The little door that led into the park was open, and the grass was trodden here and there. The judge started to whistle and swing his stool, like a gay blade. The sun had now pierced the fog and was making the frost drip. We were stiff, our cheeks as hard as wooden soles. Crusty had stopped taking notes—notes on what anyway? Everything had been said. “Well, well, well,” Mierck continued, rocking on his heels.
Then he turned quite suddenly to the city policeman. “Give him my compliments!”
The other man was taken aback. “Who do you mean, Judge?”
Mierck looked at him as though he had a bean where his brain should be. “Who? Why, the person who cooked the eggs, my friend. They were excellent. Where is your head? Get a grip on yourself!” The city policeman saluted. The judge’s way of calling people my friend—a perfect example of his knack for using words to say things they normally weren’t intended for.
We could have lingered there a good while longer: the judge, the policeman (exemplary fetcher of eggs), Crusty, Bréchut’s son, Grosspeil, Berfuche, and myself. The judge hadn’t said a word to me; it was always like that. The doctor, with his leather bag and his kid gloves, had taken off a while before. He had left Morning Glory—or rather the outward form of a little girl’s body—under the wet blanket. The canal continued reeling out its swift waters. I then remembered a Greek saying, without recalling it too well, one that spoke about time and running water, some simple words that said everything about life. Above all, they made you understand you could never go backward, no matter what you do.
Two ambulance orderlies finally arrived, biting their lips, freezing in their thin white smocks. They’d come from V and driven around a long time before finding the place. The judge beckoned to them, pointing at the blanket. “It’s all yours!” he called out, as if it were some old piece of furniture he had sold them. It was then I left, without a word to anyone.
Of course, I was obliged to come back to the waterside. I had to do my job, to say nothing of the duty of being human, which isn’t all that easy. I waited till early afternoon. The sharp bite of the morning had relaxed; the weather was almost mild. It seemed like another day entirely. Grosspeil and Berfuche had been relieved by two other policemen guarding the scene and fending off the gawkers. As they saluted me, some carp slipped between the algae. Now and then one of them rose to the surface to test the air before swimming off with a swish of the tail to take its place again in the little school. The grass shimmered with countless drops of water. Everything had already changed. You could no longer discern out the outline that Morning Glory’s body had impressed on the bank. Two ducks were fighting over a watercress cushion. One of them ended up snapping at the other’s neck; the loser went off, scattering plaintive cries in his wake.
I dawdled awhile, trying to look for clues but unable to think of much except Clémence and the baby in her womb. In fact I felt a bit ashamed, as I recall, to think of them and our happiness, as I was walking near the place where someone had killed a little girl. I knew I would be seeing them again in just a few hours: her and her belly, round as a prize pumpkin, through whose shell I could hear the heartbeat and feel the sleepy movements when I put my ear against it. Without a doubt, on this icy day I was the happiest man on earth, the same earth on which, not far from here, men were killing and dying as freely as we draw breath; on which, right beneath my feet, a murderer without a face could strangle little ewe lambs ten years old. Yes, the happiest of men, without a shred of guilt about it.
The strange thing about the inquiry was that it got assigned to everybody and nobody. Mierck made a mess of it. The
mayor stuck his nose in. The policemen sniffed the pile of shit from a distance. But taking the lead was a colonel who showed up the day after the crime and used the state of war and our being in the front-line zone as an excuse to claim authority to give us orders. He was called Matziev, a vaguely Russian name. Elegant, he looked like a Neapolitan dancer, with an oily voice, a glossy head of hair he kept brushed back, a thin moustache, supple legs, and the torso of a Greek wrestler. In short, an Apollo with rank.
We sized him up right away. He had a taste for blood but, being on the right side, he could make it flow and drink it without giving offense. The hotel having closed for lack of guests, he set up quarters at the home of Bassepin, who rented out a few rooms and sold charcoal, oil, grease, and canned beef to all the regiments that passed through.
The war years were the best of Bassepin’s life. Selling exorbitantly what he’d gone far away and bought for peanuts. Stuffing his pockets, working day and night, palming off the essential and the superfluous alike on the quartermasters who came through, at times taking back what he’d sold to regiments now departing so he could pass it on to the ones relieving them. A typical commerce-made man.
The postwar years weren’t so unpleasant for him either. Very quickly, he understood the municipal frenzy to honor those who had died in combat. Bassepin expanded his business and sold life-size cast-iron soldier boys and French cockerels by the ton. All the mayors of the eastern region snapped up his rigid warriors, with flags in the air and rifles aimed; he had them designed by a tubercular painter, an “award-winner in the exhibitions.” They came in any price range, suitable for all budgets: twenty-three models in the catalog, with options ranging from marble pedestals and gold lettering to obelisks. There were little tin children holding out laurels to the victors and allegories of France as nubile goddess, her breast bare and comforting. Bassepin was selling memory and memento. The cities settled their debts with the dead in a very visible way, one that would last. On every November 11, before those monuments surrounded by gravel walks and linden trees, a full-throttled brass band would blast out the lively airs of triumph and the bleary ones of pain, while at night stray dogs would lift their legs all around and pigeons would add their decorations to those bestowed by men.
Bassepin had a big pear-shaped belly and sported, regardless of season, a stick of licorice hanging from his mouth, blackening his teeth evermore. A fifty-year-old bachelor, he’d never had so much as an affair as far as we knew. The money he had, he kept; he didn’t gamble and was never to be seen in the brothels of V. He didn’t even take a drink. No indulgence, no appetite, just the mania of buying and selling, of stashing gold away for its own sake. A bit like those who stuff their barns with hay up to the gills when they don’t have any animals. But after all, that was his right: to die as rich as Croesus in 1931 of a septicemia. Incredible how a tiny wound can wreck your life and even end it. It started on his foot, just a graze, hardly a scratch. Five days later he was stiff, blue all over, mottled from head to toe, like an African savage covered with paint but without the kinky hair and the assegai. Not a single heir. Not a tear shed by anyone, in fact. It wasn’t that people loathed him—far from it. But his preoccupations were known, and they did not invite pity. He had had everything he wished for; not everyone can say the same. Maybe that was the reason for Bassepin’s life, to come into this world and collect its coins. In the end it’s no stupider than anything else. He made the most of it. On his death, all the money went to the government, a very fair and merry widow.
Bassepin gave Matziev the finest room he had and would raise his moleskin hat to the colonel whenever their paths crossed. It was a rare chance to see—among the three or four hairs dueling for supremacy on his bald pate—a large strawberry mark quite remarkably shaped like the North American continent.
Matziev’s first important order of business in town was to have his aide find him a phonograph. He could be seen for hours at the window of his room, shutters open despite the unremitting cold, smoking cigars as slender as shoelaces and pausing every five minutes to wind up his crackly companion. He always listened to the same song, a catchy hit tune from several years ago, when we all still believed the world was eternal and when to be happy required only our believing we would be:
Caroline, put on your li’l patent-leather shoes . . .
Caroline, I’m telling you . . .
Twenty times, a hundred times a day, Caroline put on her adorable shoes while the colonel smoked his little brown stinkers with an elegant air, a limp wrist, and rings on every finger, letting his black eyes dally on each surrounding roof. The song still runs through my head today, setting my teeth on edge. It was the theme of our bereavement, our thoughts of Morning Glory and of the face of the beast who had done that unspeakable thing. The colonel had cranked his phonograph like a drill, which slowly made its meticulous hole in our skull, to let the treacly tune seep in. A “little world” to be savored, to deliver one from the dreariness of the cadaver. No wonder those two, Mierck and Matziev, though different as they could be, got on like old friends.
XIII
Considering what he did—and I’ll get to that soon enough—we might put Matziev squarely in that most numerous species of bastards on earth, the one that breeds like rabbits and thrives like roaches. But nothing is simple. Only saints and angels never make mistakes.
He is the same man who in 1894—twenty-three years before the Case—had scuppered his own career, owing to a much more famous affair, and had languished as a lieutenant for ages while the others earned their stripes in due course. Mind you, he was not a tinsel Dreyfusard or one who spoke up only at the family dinner table; there were thousands of those. No, in those days Matziev had the balls of a bull, and he supported the little captain quite publicly, declaring sincere faith in his innocence. This rearguard action, so to speak, attacking the good judgment of the staff officers, won him no friends in their ranks. With one gesture, he fell from grace in the eyes of all those who would most likely have been content to see a man of his ilk handsomely promoted and propelled toward the stars—the ones that are sewn on, made of solid gold.
All that is History with a capital H, as they say, but it often falls between the cracks and only gets fished out by accident, while we’re rummaging through attics or old heaps of trash.
I happened on it that way: It was in ’26, the year my father died. I had to return to the ramshackle house where I’d been born and raised. I didn’t want to hang around. My father was one more dead man, and I’d already had my fill of those for a lifetime. That house was the house of my dead; my mother—God keep her soul—had passed long ago, when I was still a little rascal, and now my father. It was no longer the home of my early years. The house now smelled of the grave.
The village too no longer resembled the one I had known. After four years of endless bombardments, everyone had left, abandoning the gutted buildings and the pitted streets. The only ones to stay were my father—because for him, leaving would have meant victory for the Krauts, despite their defeat—and Fantin Marcoire, an old kook who talked to trout and lived with a very old cow he called Madame.
Fantin and his cow slept side by side in the stable. They had ended up resembling each other, as to odor and the rest, except that the cow was undoubtedly more sensible than the man and less aggressive. Fantin detested my father, and the feeling was mutual. They had known each other since their schooldays, and neither could explain the persistent grudge. They had chased the same girls, played the same games—felt the same pains, no doubt—and time had worn them down just as it wears down the bodies and hearts of all men. But not the mutual loathing of those two. And so there they were: two madmen in a ghost town, hurling abuse and, occasionally, stones at each other among the ruins, like two urchins but with wrinkled foreheads and crooked legs. Every morning before dawn, Fantin Marcoire came to pull down his trousers and shit in front of my father’s door. And every evening, my father would wait till Fantin Marcoire bedded down ag
ainst the flank of his cow to do likewise in front of his neighbor’s door.
That went on for years, like a ritual form of greeting: the manners of the lower abdomen.
“So he’s dead?”
“Dead as can be, Mr. Marcoire.”
“The son of a bitch, how could he do that!”
“He was on in years.”
“That means I am too, I suppose?”
“That’s what it means, Mr. Marcoire.”
“The bag of shit, how could he leave me here alone? What am I supposed to do now?”
“You’ve got to leave, go somewhere else, Mr. Marcoire.”
“You’ve got some bright ideas, don’t you, you little shit. You’re a dumb-ass like your bastard father, put on earth just to plague me! . . . You think he suffered much?”
“I don’t think so. Sorry.”
“Not even a little?”
“Maybe, I don’t know. Who can tell?”
“Me, I’m going to suffer—for sure. I feel like it’s already starting, the son of a bitch!”
Fantin left by what had been the main street of the village. He avoided the old bombshell craters only by theatrically serpentine detours. Every three meters he cursed the dead. Then he disappeared, after turning the corner at Camille’s store, Favors, Notions, and Novelties, its shutters gutted like the shattered keys of a gigantic derelict piano.
By a Slow River Page 7
