By a Slow River

by Philippe Claudel

  And so, when the first convoy of wounded—I’m speaking of the truly wounded, those of whom there was nothing left but a reddish pulp and who lay in trucks on flea-infested stretchers, softly groaning and chanting their mother’s name or their wife’s—when that first convoy showed up in our town, it hit us right between the eyes. Suddenly there was a great silence, and we all came to see them, these shadows of men, when the litter bearers brought them out to carry them into the clinic. Double file, dense and thick—a hedge of honor, a hedge of horror—as the women bit their lips and wept continuously, while the rest of us, dumb-asses at heart, felt shamed. But also—it’s awful but it has to be said—we felt happy, an overwhelming and unwholesome joy, that it was them and not us lying there.

  All that was in September 1914. This first wave of wounded were spoiled rotten. Endless visits, bottles, pies, madeleines, liqueurs, fine batiste shirts, corduroy trousers, pork treats, stoppered wine.

  And then time went to work. Time and toll, because they started arriving every day by the truckload. We got used to it. We even got a bit sick of it. They resented us for sheltering from the action, and we resented them for their unchanged dressings, their lopped-off legs, badly relidded heads, twisted mouths, missing noses: everything we didn’t want to see and which they thrust in our faces. Soon there would be insults and sometimes fistfights.

  In a way we were two towns then, two towns in the same place that turned their backs on each other, each with its promenades, its cafés, its hours. Two worlds. Only the widow Blachart reconciled them, opening her thighs to one and all, civilian and military, without rationing or discrimination, at every hour of the day or night. The line to her house sometimes reached ten meters; it was neutral territory, where men at odds could speak again, look at one another, fraternize while awaiting the great forgetfulness that holed up in the widow’s belly. As for her, she spent the whole day—or just about—stretched out on the big bed, under her deceased husband’s portrait. He was dressed for his wedding day, but black crêpe obscured his smile. It was only right, since every ten minutes an impatient guy took the place he’d deserted three years before, when a ton of coal fell on his head at the factory.

  Old biddies used to curse the widow and spit at her back in the street. Agathe—that was her first name—didn’t give a damn. After the war, some of those who received medals had not served as well as the widow had. We have to be fair. How many are even capable of offering their body and their warmth for a few coins?

  In 1923, Agathe Blachart closed her shutters and her door, picked up a fairly light suitcase, and, saying good-bye to no one, left for V on the mail coach. There she boarded the express for Chalons. At Chalons she changed trains, taking the one to Paris. Three days after that she was in Le Havre, where she set sail on the Boréal. Two months later she debarked in Australia.

  The books say that in Australia there are deserts, kangaroos, wild dogs, flat and limitless expanses, human beings who still live like cavemen, and cities new as coins from the mint. I’m not too sure we should believe them. Sometimes books lie. All I know for a fact is that the widow Blachart has been in Australia since 1923. Maybe she remarried over there. Maybe she even has children, a shop. Maybe everybody greets her with a respectful hello and a big smile. Maybe the oceans she put between herself and us enabled her to forget us completely—to be without past or sorrow, without anything.

  Anyway, on the evening in question not all the wounded were at her place. The streets were full of them—flooded, actually— and most of them were tanked, hassling passersby, yelling and vomiting, ganging up for trouble. To avoid them, Joséphine pulls her cart through the side streets. Instead of going down the rue du Pressoir, continuing on rue des Messiaux, skirting the church, coming back up behind city hall, and making a beeline to her shack toward the cemetery, she prefers to walk along the little canal, even though it’s pretty narrow there—and she knows that with a full cart she’ll have a hard time—even though this detour adds more than a kilometer.

  It’s cold. The frost makes everything crackle. Joséphine’s nose is running and her flask is empty. The sky has become a roof of gray-blue tones that the first star pierces like a silver nail. The cart crushes the snow crust; the skins are stiff enough to stand like brooms. Joséphine raises a hand to wipe her nose, before an icicle can form. It’s then and there that she sees in the distance, without any possible doubt, about sixty meters away—she swears it—young Morning Glory standing on the bank of the little canal, talking to a tall man bending down slightly to meet her. And this unmistakable figure in black, stiff as a living thing could be, standing by the little canal as the worn-out winter day prepares to take its leave, is none other than the prosecutor, Pierre-Ange Destinat himself. A testimony beyond the shadow of a doubt. Him, with the little girl, at the fall of night. The two of them, him and her. Alone.

  This twilight scene stopped Joséphine in her tracks. Why? No reason in particular. If we always had to explain everything we do, the gestures, the thoughts, the feelings, the movements, we’d never get to the end of it all. So Joséphine freezes in place like a pointer—what’s odd about that?—on this Sunday, December 2, as night falls, and that because she’s just seen, straight ahead in the cold, the prosecutor of V chatting with a young flower, laying his hand on her shoulder—yes, his hand on her shoulder; she swears to that as well. “Sixty meters away in the dark, a hand on a shoulder, when you’re blind drunk? Come, now!” they’ll tell her when they start harassing her later on—I’ll come back to that. Joséphine doesn’t give an inch. It was him. It was her. And no five sips of brandy could make her start seeing things!

  So what? What’s wrong with a conversation between Destinat and the little flower? He knew her. She knew him. To have seen them in this place where the next day she would be found strangled: What does that prove? Have we taken leave of our senses?

  There was no more sound coming from the bedroom. Maybe Clémence had gone in and fallen asleep. Joséphine had finished her story and was looking at me. I was still seeing the scene she’d just described, but Morning Glory had left the room, in silence, her drenched clothes clinging to her slim body of ice. She had smiled at me and disappeared.

  “And then?” I ask Joséphine.

  “Then what?”

  “You went toward them?”

  “Approach the prosecutor? I’m not crazy. I keep my distance from him.”

  “And so?”

  “So I turned back.”

  “You left them like that?”

  “What should I have done, set up a lantern for them and a foot warmer, perhaps?”

  “And the little girl. You’re sure it was her?”

  “That golden-yellow hood of hers, how many of those do you see around? Anyway, I’d seen her sometimes going into her aunt’s house. It was her for sure, you can take it from me.”

  “What would she be doing at the edge of the canal?”

  “Same as me, I’d guess: avoiding the drunks. A little ways farther on, she would have come out on the square and taken the six o’clock mail coach. You got anything to drink? All this talk is making me dry.”

  I set out two glasses, a bottle, some cheese, a sausage, and an onion. We drank and ate in silence. I looked at Joséphine as though to see through her the picture she’d painted for me. She nibbled like a mouse and drank big gulps of wine, making a fluent, pretty music with her tongue. Outside it was snowing heavily, not straight down but on a bias, against the windowpanes, on which it seemed to be writing letters, letters that melted and streamed in rapid lines, like tears on an absent cheek. The weather was turning to muck. The frost was picking up its tattered finery and everything was dispersing. The next day would be all drips and mud.

  It was late. In a corner of the kitchen, I laid out some blankets and a mattress. I’d succeeded in persuading Joséphine to go with me to V and tell everything to Mierck. We would leave at dawn. She nodded off almost immediately but slept fitfully, muttering things I couldn’
t make out. The big gun fired from time to time but without conviction—only to remind us it was there, like a bell of evil.

  I didn’t dare go back to the bedroom for fear of waking Clémence. I sat down in the armchair, the one I’ve still got, which holds me like a big gentle hand. I closed my eyes.

  We left at dawn. Clémence had gotten up and made us a full pot of coffee, boiling hot, and some mulled wine swirled into a bottle. At the door she gave us a little wave; but at me and me alone, she smiled. I took several steps toward her. I wanted so much to kiss her but felt embarrassed in front of Joséphine. So I returned her wave. And that’s all.

  Since then I haven’t had a day without regret over that kiss I withheld.

  “Have a nice trip,” she told me. Her last words, and my little gems. I still have them in my ear, intact; I play them every evening. Have a nice trip. I don’t have her face anymore, but I swear I have her voice.

  XV

  It took four hours to reach V. The horse kept bogging down in the mire, and the ruts were actually pits. In places the snow was melting like barrels that had been overturned, flooding the way until running water flowed into the ditches ahead and vanished. There were also troop convoys heading to the front line—on foot, in carts, in trucks—obliging us to heave to the side to let them pass as best we could. We caught their melancholy gaze. Not a one of them reacted; not a one spoke, these denizens of the other world. Pale calves dressed in blue, meekly headed for the great abbatoir.

  Crusty, Judge Mierck’s clerk, left us seated in an antechamber lined with red silk. I knew the room well. I had had frequent occasion to brood there about the universe—about boredom, the endlessness of an hour, a minute, a second. Without looking I could have drawn a perfect map of that room, showing the exact position of each piece of furniture, every decorative object, the number of petals on each dried anemone that sighed in the stoneware vase perpetually set on the mantelpiece. Joséphine drowsed with her hands on her lap, waking abruptly from time to time as though struck by an electric shock.

  After an hour Crusty reappeared, picking at his cheek. He’d evidently been at it since seating us, since there were lapels of dead skin on his black suit, which was worn to a shine at the elbows and knees. He showed us into the judge’s office.

  At first we almost couldn’t see anything, but we heard two laughs. One, as thick as spit, I already knew. The other was totally unfamiliar, but I would get to know it soon enough. A haze of stinking smoke floated in the room, obscuring both the fat judge seated at his desk and the fellow standing near him. As my eyes grew accustomed to the pea soup, the judge’s companion revealed himself. It was Matziev. They continued laughing, just as though we weren’t there three steps in front of them. The officer was puffing on his cigar. The judge had his hands folded contentedly on his stomach. They were slow to let the laughter die, picking at the scraps of their joke. And when they were sure there was absolutely nothing left to laugh about, Mierck peered at us with his big green fish eyes.

  “Well? What now?” The judge harrumphed in irritation, as if we had killed the gag. He was sizing up Joséphine as though I had come in with a head of livestock.

  Mierck had no use for me, and the feeling was mutual. Our jobs—or, rather, my job and his office—often forced us into contact, but we never exchanged an unnecessary word. Our conversations were brief and without warmth, and when we spoke we hardly looked at each other.

  I made the introductions, but before I could even summarize what Joséphine had told me, Mierck cut me short to address her.

  “Profession?” Joséphine opened her mouth wide and thought for two or three seconds, but that was already too long for the judge. “Is she an idiot or is she deaf? Profession?”

  Joséphine cleared her throat, glanced at me, and at last spoke. “Salvage dealer.”

  The judge looked at the officer; they traded smiles. Finally, something else to laugh about. Then Mierck continued. “And what is it she salvages?”

  This was the judge’s way of reducing people to nothing. He spoke as if you weren’t there, as if you didn’t exist, were something to be commented upon rather than addressed. He deleted people this way with nothing but a pronoun. I’ve already said he knew how to use the language.

  I saw Joséphine’s face turn deep red, and her eyes held a glint of menace. I’m sure if she’d had her skinning knife to hand, she would have gutted Mierck right there without a second thought. She’s not so strange that way. We kill a lot in the course of a day, in thought and in words, without fully realizing it. In light of all these abstract crimes, actual murders are pretty rare when you consider it. In fact, it’s only in wars that our actions keep up with our impulses.

  Joséphine breathed deep and took the plunge. She stated her humble trade openly and clearly, without shame. Mierck resumed his petty abuse: “Imagine that! In other words, she lives off carcasses!” He tried to coax a false laugh, intrusive as a tumor; it would have died if Matziev—still sucking on his cigar, as if only that kept the world spinning—had not ratified it and joined in.

  I laid my hand on Joséphine’s and started talking. Simply, without omitting any of the details, I recounted what she’d told me the night before. Mierck became serious again and listened without interrupting. When I had finished he looked up at the officer. They exchanged an inscrutable look. Then the judge picked up his letter opener with two fingers and set it dancing on its point on the blotter of his desk: a lively and nimble dance, between a polka and a quadrille, which ended as suddenly as it started. And that’s when Joséphine’s torture truly began.

  The judge and the colonel launched a joint offensive, without even conferring in advance. Men cut from the same cloth don’t need to talk things over much in order to agree. Joséphine endured their broadsides painfully, sticking to her version; sometimes she looked over at me, with her eyes seeming to say, Why the hell did I listen to you? When are these bastards going to stop?

  I couldn’t do anything for her. I was just witnessing the sabotage. When Joséphine allowed in all innocence that she’d warmed herself several times with a sip from her brandy flask, Mierck and Matziev set about finishing her off. When they got through flaying her, she lowered her head, let out a long sigh, and looked at her hands, swollen from cold and work. In ten minutes she had aged twenty years.

  Then they simply let up. You might have thought a game of cards had ended. Matziev lit another cigar and paced a few steps. Mierck leaned back in his chair and relaced his fingers across the vest that covered his ballooning belly. It seemed my chance to speak now, but when I made to start, the judged stirred in his chair. “Thank you. You’re no longer needed. Dismissed! As for her, she’ll remain until we can verify her statement.”

  Joséphine turned to me, more frightened than ever. Mierck got up to show me to the door. I laid a powerless hand on Joséphine’s shoulder. In the antechamber, Crusty was dozing. Mierck signaled him to clear out, closed the doors again, and came up to me as he’d never done before, almost nose to nose, toe to toe. He spoke with a faint voice; I could see all the ruptured veins on his face and smell his breath: onions, fine wines soured, cured meats, and bitter coffee.

  “You’ve been here a long time, so I’ll excuse your zealousness in bringing that madwoman to my office to spout her drunken hallucinations. You meant no harm, I’m sure, but I’ve already informed you that Colonel Matziev is in charge of the inquiry. You’ll take your orders from him. But if you breathe a word of this lunacy to the prosecutor, it won’t go so easily for you next time. Now you can go.”

  “And Madame Maulpas?” I said defiantly.

  “Three days drying out in a cell should clear her head.”

  He turned on his heel and went back in his office, leaving me standing there like a damn fool.

  “Three days?” Joséphine squawked. “He held me for a week, that pig, on stale bread and pea soup brought to me by a pickax in a nun’s habit. . . . You sure he’s dead?”

  “Positive.
”

  “Better than he deserves! And the other one, the little shit with the cigar—is he dead?”

  “I have no idea.”

  We went on a lot longer, Joséphine and I, threading our way through the tangles of our lives. Talking of the distant past, we basked in the illusion that the game wasn’t over yet, that there might yet be a place for us in the great mosaic of chance. And then, imperceptibly, we gravitated toward our childhood, toward the fragrant meadows where we played blindman’s buff, the fears we shared, the songs, the water of the village springs. The steeple bell rang noon, but we couldn’t tell anymore whether it was the noon of our youth or that of the present, rasping and rusted over.

  When Joséphine left, she kissed me on both cheeks. She’d never done that. I was grateful for that kiss. It sealed our kinship in a family of solitude, the cousinshood of a story that was old but still raw. She turned the corner of the street. And when I was alone, once again, my thoughts went back to Morning Glory.

  Every Sunday the little girl had come to our town, ever since she was eight years old. Eight years then wasn’t like eight years now. At eight you could handle most anything, you had good sense and strong arms. You were almost an adult.

  Bourrache had a flair for money. I’ve already said so. He’d chosen godparents for his daughters by following the scent of cash. That’s why at her christening the little girl had found herself carried by a vague relation, an inhabitant of our town who by the time of the Case was pushing eighty. Adélaïde Siffert was her name. A tall woman once, she was all gnarled up, her face carved with a knife, her hands like a butcher’s, her legs like a logger’s: an old maid and glad of it but very good-hearted.

  For forty years she’d been the bookkeeper at the town hall, less on account of any numerical skill than because she could handle pen and ink gracefully, without mistakes or smudges. On a small pension she managed to live if not indulgently then well enough, eating meat often and having her glass of port each evening.