By a Slow River

by Philippe Claudel

  My father’s house was a pigsty. I tried hard to summon up lost tunes, memories, images of yesteryear, but nothing came to me anymore. Filth and dust had stiffened everything. It was like the large coffin of a fool who thought he could take everything with him but who had lost his nerve in the end. I recalled what the teacher had told us about Egypt, about its pharaohs’ tombs crammed with their earthly riches. My father’s house was a bit like that, though never having been a pharaoh, he had laid away, in the place of gold and jewels, towers of dirty dishes and empty wine bottles, stacked in all the rooms in large piles, wobbly and translucent.

  I never loved my father, and I didn’t even know why. I never hated him either. We just hadn’t spoken much, that’s all. My mother’s death had come between us early on—a thick muffling curtain. Neither of us had dared to draw it open and hold out a hand to the other.

  In what had been my room, he had taken up an entrenched position, a rubbish fort with parapets of old newspapers piled high. Of the window there remained only a thin slit through which he could spy Fantin Marcoire’s ramshackle stable. On the floor, there were two slingshots of hazelwood and inner tubing, such as boys make to shoot at crows and the butts of policemen. Next to them, a munitions dump of rusty staples and twisted screws, a bitten piece of sausage, a half-empty bottle of heady wine beside a dirty glass.

  From this position my father had waged his war, bombarding the perennial enemy with small bits of scrap iron whenever the latter emerged from his beastly dwelling. I imagined him spending hours there, brooding and drinking, his eyes glued to the slit of light, his ears cocked for sounds from the street. And then suddenly he would load his slingshot, hold his breath, and take aim, not exhaling until he heard the yells, saw Fantin bitterly rubbing his side or his cheek or his ass, maybe wiping a bit of blood on a good day, before defiantly brandishing a fist and spewing his venomous curses. Thus my father earned the right to slap his thighs and dissolve into side-splitting guffaws, on and on, till the laughter petered out in grotesque hiccups, not a laugh anymore but a mutter. Catching his breath, he’d turn serious again, go back to his boredom, his emptiness. Pouring himself some more wine with a trembling hand, he’d drink it in one gulp, like hard spirits, and then reflect that there’s not much to us, no, not much, and even this can’t last much longer, even though a day is very long, and you’ve got to keep going, because there will be other days to take a gulp from the bottle and consider that we’re nothing.

  On the way out my shoulder unsettled a stack of newspapers, which collapsed with the rustle of withered leaves. Lost days scattered at my feet, dead years, bygone dramas. From among the jumble of headlines that had lost all urgency, one jumped out at me, with Matziev’s name in big letters, above a short item from 1894.

  It was late in the year, on a December day. Evening, to be precise. Lieutenant Isidore Matziev, it reported,

  had proclaimed his belief in the innocence of Captain Dreyfus in the back room of a café. Applauded by the assembly of unionists and revolutionaries, Matziev, in full uniform, also declared his shame at serving in an army that would imprison the just while letting real traitors go unpunished.

  The approval of the crowd was interrupted by the arrival of the police. Several arrests were made, including the lieutenant, and a more than sufficient number of blows were dealt with billy clubs. Considered a troublemaker for breaking the code of silence and tarnishing the French army’s honor, Lieutenant Matziev had appeared two days later before a military tribunal that condemned him (two days prior to this report) to six months of close arrest.

  The hack who’d written the piece concluded by huffing about the young officer’s insolent manner and his name, which “smacked of a Jew, or a Russian, unless it was both.” It was signed Amédée Prurion, a nice idiotic name for a real bastard. Whatever became of this Prurion? Did he keep on vomiting his petty bile for years and years? If he’s dead today, that makes one less bag of shit on earth. If he’s still alive, he can’t be a pretty sight. Hate is a cruel marinade; it gives meat a flavor of trash, no doubt about it: Though I knew him only as a son of a bitch, Matziev was worth ten Prurions. At least he could point to one time in his life when he hadn’t disgraced his humanity. How many can say as much?

  I kept the article as proof—of what I don’t know. I never went back to the house; life can’t stand returns. I remembered the Matziev I had known: his thin waxed moustache, his twisted cigars, his phonograph scratching out the little song. He disappeared eventually, with all his kit, once the Case had been settled—settled for them, you understand. No doubt he’d gone on lugging his “Caroline” around with him, going through the motions. Whenever our eyes had met, he gave the impression of a man who had reached his destination. Wherever he happened to be, it no longer served any purpose for him to put himself out. All that was behind him. The only thing left for him was to wait for the final rendezvous.

  The snow fell for hours tonight. I kept hearing it as I sought sleep in my bed. Or perhaps it’s better to say I was hearing its silence and sensing its pervasive whiteness behind the improperly closed shutters, a whiteness that intensified hour by hour.

  All that silence and whiteness, cutting me off still more from the world. Just what I need! Clémence loved this snow. “If it comes, there couldn’t be a more beautiful blanket for our baby.” She would never know the extent of that truth. The beautiful blanket would cover her too.

  At seven o’clock I pushed the door open. The landscape was out of a pastry shop: cream and powdered sugar everywhere. I blinked as though before a miracle. The low sky was rolling its heavy humps on the crest of the hill, and the factory, which usually blew its stack with rage, was reduced to purring, almost a pleasant sound. A new world. The first morning of a new world. Like being the first man. Before the stains, the trail of footprints—and of misdeeds. I don’t really know how to put it better. Words were never easy for me. I hardly used them when I was still alive. If I write as if I’m a dead man, as a matter of fact, that’s true, true as true can be. For a long time I’ve felt like one, just keeping up a pretense of living for a while longer. I’m serving a suspended sentence, you might say.

  My movements betray rheumatism, but they still have a mind of their own. They want to make me go round in circles, like a donkey tied to his millstone, grinding the last grain. To lead me back to feeling. It’s their fault I found myself on the bank of the little canal, which traced, in the whiteness, a green net trimmed with melting stars. As I sank into the snow, I thought of Napoleon’s bloody retreat across the Berezina River: an epic. Maybe that’s what I need to persuade myself there really is some meaning to life, that for all my feeling lost I’m headed in the right direction, straight into the history books, for centuries to come; that maybe Fate had a plan in causing me to postpone my departure so many times, the barrel of Gachentard’s rifle pulled away fast at the last moment, not slowly as I had slipped it down my throat, on mornings when I awoke to feeling like a dried-out well. The taste of a rifle—what an odd thing! The prickling in your tongue when it’s peeled off the freezing barrel. The flavors, like wine, pale rocks.

  Some stone martens had fought a skirmish here. Their clawstudded paws had left calligraphies, arabesques, a madman’s testimony on the snow. Their bellies left molds and described shallow paths that diverged and then crossed, melting into each other, and then diverged again before stopping short, as though suddenly, at the end of their little battle, both animals had taken flight.

  “So old and so fucking dumb . . .”

  I thought the cold was playing tricks on me.

  “You want to catch your death?” the voice continued, coming as though from afar, all raspy consonants, clinking medals. No need to turn around. It was Joséphine Maulpas. Born the same year I was, in the same village too. Moved here when she was thirteen years old and went to work as an all-purpose maid. She kept it up till she was twenty, passing from one well-to-do family to another as she cultivated a taste for the bottle,
bit by bit—until there was not another family that would have her. Thrown out, chucked, rejected, done for. To survive, she took up the stinking trade of selling animal skins: rabbits, moles, weasels, ferrets, foxes, all sorts, dangling by her side still bloody, freshly stripped with a pocketknife. Thirty years and more of trundling her goitrous cart through the streets, bleating out monotonously, “Rabbit skins! Animal skins! Rabbit skins!” Most people simply stopped hearing her after a time, as she took on the butchery scent of her carcasses and, before long, their appearance too—their purple complexion, their leaden eyes—she who once had been a real beauty.

  For a few coins, Joséphine—dubbed the Skin by the kids in town—sold her prizes to Elphège Crochemort, who tanned them in an abandoned mill on the banks of the Guérlante, six kilometers upstream from us. Half in ruins, the old mill took on water like a big open ship; but it remained standing all the same, season after season.

  Crochemort rarely came to town, but when he did you could follow his trail. You could easily tell which street he’d gone down, his stench was so awful, regardless of season or time of day, as if he himself had soaked in those alkali vats. Notwithstanding, he was a tall, rather handsome man, with swept-back shiny black hair and lively eyes of a beautiful azure blue. A very handsome man indeed, and quite alone. I always saw him as one of the perpetually condemned, like the ones they say existed among the Greeks, forever rolling their boulders uphill or getting their livers eaten. Had Crochemort done something awful that haunted him? Maybe he was making himself pay for it by wreaking solitude, for if he’d only been rubbed with lavender and jasmine, he’d have had all the women at his feet.

  Joséphine took him her booty every week. She’d long since been indifferent to the odors and—even before she took up her trade—to men as well. But Elphège Crochemort received her like a queen, or so she told me. He would offer her a glass of wine, speak graciously of the skins, of the fair weather or foul, and smile in a way that showed his fine features to advantage. Then he would pay her and help her unload her cart before escorting her back to the road as a beau might have done.

  For twenty years Joséphine had lived at the far end of rue des Chablis, almost in the fields. Not a house, really, just a few planks blackened by the rain, held together thanks to some daily miracle. A shack so dark it scared the kids. We all imagined it was chockful of stinking hides, dead animals, dismembered birds, and mice with limbs outstretched tacked to little boards.

  I did go there, twice. I wouldn’t have believed it but for having seen it with my own eyes. It was like passing through the doors of a shadow world and emerging into a realm of light. You would have thought you had entered a doll’s rooms, an immaculate place, all in rosy tones with little curls of ribbon tied everywhere.

  “So you thought I would live as I work,” Joséphine said to me the first time, as I stood openmouthed, like a bream at the market, taking it all in. There was a bouquet of irises on a table spread with a lovely cloth; on the walls, painted frames surrounded pictures of cherubs and saints, the kind priests give to altar boys and to children at First Communion.

  “You believe in all this?” I asked her, pointing with my chin at the graceful gallery. She shrugged her shoulders, less in mockery than to suggest the obvious: There was hardly any point in discussing the matter.

  “If I had beautiful copper pans, I’d hang them up just like that, and they’d create the same effect—the feeling that the world isn’t so ugly, that there’s a bit of gilding here and there.”

  I felt her hand on my shoulder. Then her other hand, and finally the heat trapped in her woolen layers.

  “Why’ve you come back here, Dadais?”

  It was the nickname Joséphine had used for me since we were seven years old, but I’d never asked why. I was about to answer, to launch into grandiose sentiments right by the water, standing in my shirtsleeves, my feet in the snow. But the cold made my lips tremble, and suddenly I felt the shock of imagining never being able to leave again.

  “You’ve come back, haven’t you?”

  “I’m only passing through; it’s not the same. There’s nothing for me here. I don’t have regrets. I did what had to be done. I did my part, and you know it.”

  “But I always believed you!”

  “You were the only one.”

  Joséphine rubbed my shoulders, as if to shake some sense into me. The pain of the blood returning to my veins gave me a tonic jolt. Then she took me by the arm and we ambled along, an odd couple in the snow that winter morning. We walked without saying a word. Now and then I glanced sideward, looking in her ancient face for her former girlish features, a futile effort. I let myself be led around like a child. I would’ve gladly closed my eyes and somnambulated, placing one foot in front of the other, hoping deep in my heart never to open my eyes again, to go on and on like this in what might have been death or else a slow stroll, without aim or end.

  At my house, Joséphine sat me down with authority in the big armchair and wrapped me snugly in three coats, one layered on the other; now I was an infant again. She went off to the kitchen. I put my feet up near the stove. In my body, bit by bit, everything was coming back—the stirs and the aches, the creaks and the cracks. She handed me a boiling-hot bowl of steaming plum brandy and lemon. I drank without saying anything. She drank too. When she finished her bowl, she clicked her tongue regretfully.

  “Why didn’t you ever get married again?”

  “What about you? You’ve stayed all alone.”

  “I knew everything about men by the time I was fifteen. You have no idea what it’s like to be a servant! Never again, I said to myself, and I’ve kept that promise. But you; it’s not the same.”

  “I still talk to her, you know, every day. There just wasn’t room for another woman.”

  “Admit it: You’ve assumed the airs of the prosecutor!”

  “Nothing to do with it.”

  “Says you. You’ve been brooding so long, you’re even starting to look like him—that’s how old couples are.”

  “Don’t be stupid, Fifine.”

  We fell silent for a while, then she picked it up again. “I saw him that evening, I swear I did, with my own eyes. Even if that other bastard didn’t want to believe me—what was his name again, that pig in a suit?”

  “Mierck.”

  “He’s dead, I hope?”

  “In ’thirty-one. His horse kicked his head in.”

  “Better than he deserved. But what cause could he have had to doubt you? You were the policeman!”

  “He was the judge.”

  I couldn’t keep my mind from rushing through the years once again, ending up at the same point where I always do. Rather like reaching the outskirts of one’s region. From here, I know the road too well.

  XIV

  Joséphine had come to find me three days after the discovery of Morning Glory’s body. The inquiry was leading nowhere. The police were questioning people as if at random. Matziev was cranking his phonograph, listening to his song. Mierck had returned to V. As for me, I was trying to understand.

  Clémence had gone to answer the door, her hands, as always, on her great belly, as one might lay hands on a globe of the earth. She knew Joséphine slightly and let her come in, despite her terrifying appearance and her reputation as a witch.

  “Your wife was so gentle.” Joséphine handed me the bowl refilled. “I don’t remember her features well, but I do remember that she was gentle, everything about her, her eyes, her voice.”

  I said, “I don’t have her face anymore either. I look for it often; I have the impression it’s coming to me, but then it fades away. At that moment I could beat myself senseless.”

  “What for, stupid?”

  “Not remembering the face of the woman I loved. What kind of bastard does that make me?”

  Joséphine shrugged. “Bastards, saints—can’t say I’ve ever seen one or the other. Souls are never black or white; they’re all gray in the end, Dadais. You’re a g
ray soul for sure, just like the rest of us.”

  “It’s just words, Fifine. They don’t change a thing.”

  “What have you got against words?”

  I had offered her a seat and she’d told me her story at one go, in very specific terms. Clémence had retired to our bedroom. I knew what she was making in there—with needles, lace, balls of blue and pink wool—for weeks already. I thought about her in the room nearby as Josephine spoke: thought of her fingers flying over the needles, of her belly and those feet kicking hard from inside.

  And then, bit by bit, as Morning Glory’s sodden body entered the room, she came and sat down beside me, as though to listen to what Joséphine had to tell and say yes or no. So bit by bit, I could think of nothing. I was listening to Joséphine. I was seeing Morning Glory—the dead girl’s dripping face, her closed eyes, her lips chilled blue. I seemed to see her smile. She nodded her head now and then; her mouth appeared to say, Yes, it’s true, that’s right, it’s just like the Skin says. Everything happened like that.

  So. On the day before the body was discovered, about six o’clock, she tells me—dusk, the hour of daggers and stolen kisses—Joséphine heads for home, pulling her cart, taking a swig of warmth from a brandy flask always in the pocket of her smock. Strangely, despite the cold, the walking wounded crowd the streets as on red-letter days; all of them out on the town—the amputees, the legless, the broken-faced, the eyeless, the trepanned, the half mad—wandering from bistro to bar, emptying glasses to fill their hearts.

  At the outset, after the first battles, it had seemed very odd to us to see these guys who were our own age, coming back with their faces redrawn by shell bursts, their bodies shredded by sudden downpours of bullets, while we led our narrow little lives in warmth and peace.

  We weren’t unaware of the war. We’d seen the mobilization posters. We followed it attentively in the papers. But in fact we were miming; we’d come to terms with it, as you do with bad dreams and bitter memories. It really didn’t belong to our world. It was something out of the movies.