By a Slow River

by Philippe Claudel

  So every Sunday, Bourrache sent the little girl to visit her godmother. She would arrive on the noon mail coach and return on the six o’clock. Adélaïde Siffert would serve a pork roast, green beans—fresh in season, from jars the rest of the year—a salad, and an apple cake. An unchanging menu; she told me herself. The little girl always had three helpings of cake. She told me that too. Then they would spend the afternoon sewing. Sometimes Morning Glory also did a bit of housecleaning. At five o’clock she would have another helping of cake, drink a cup of café au lait, and kiss her godmother, who would give her a five-franc bill. The old woman would see her off. She had enjoyed her company, the little girl enjoyed her cake, and Bourrache would relish the five francs, which he would take from Morning Glory as soon as she returned. Everybody was content.

  When the weather was bad, the little girl would stay the night at her godmother’s house. There was never cause for concern: The next morning she would take the mail coach, specifically the eight o’clock.

  The evening of the crime—for according to Victor Desharet, who stuck his dirty paws into the child’s body, opening her belly as you would unbutton a shirt, it was that very evening the crime was committed—Adélaïde had tried to keep the little girl with her. It was already cold enough to split a rock; you felt, drawing breath, like you were cracking apart from the inside. But the kid wouldn’t be made to listen. “I’m not cold, Godmother. Your hood keeps me warm as toast!” That had flattered the old lady, since she herself had made the hood, from velvet plush of a striking golden yellow, lined with rabbit fur. She’d given it to her for her seventh birthday. Morning Glory had drawn the strings and pulled on her mittens, and then, like a gust of wind, she’d hopped into the cold air and vanished.

  Sorrow kills. In no time. The feeling of guilt does just as well, at least among those who have a shred of decency. Adélaïde Siffert followed her goddaughter to the cemetery. Twenty-two days between the two burials, not an hour more. And for those three weeks the tears flowed without end down Adélaïde’s face, stopping neither by day, which I could witness, nor by night, as I’d be ready to swear. Good people go quickly. Everybody appreciates them—death, no less. Bastards, on the other hand, die old as a rule, and sometimes even in their beds, peaceful as can be.

  Having left Joséphine in Judge Mierck’s office, I didn’t feel very proud of myself. I hung around V awhile, hands in my pockets, my trousers getting filthier by the minute from all the mud splattering on the sidewalks.

  The city was giddy, a city of drunks. Recruits stamped here and there, glutting the streets with their asinine jokes and horsing around. A new batch, sizable this time, were gearing up to have a go at the Krauts, and for now they could all still laugh about it. The streets as well as the cafés were given over to uniforms: a river of brand-new leggings, shiny buttons, smartly sewn epaulettes. Here they were singing, there they were yelling—or whistling at the few girls who hurried past into the stores. It was like the onset of a rutting season—massive, wild, communal, and bloody— a thrust of raw life you could feel welling up, on the verge of gushing out.

  I wondered what I could come up with to do among all these suckers who hadn’t figured out the score. Soon enough, most of them would be making the trip back packed in four lousy planks of larch, if they were lucky enough for someone to find their scraps at the bottom of a shell crater or dangling from barbed wire.

  Drifting along, walking like a blind man, I ended up at the door of the Rébillon. I was taken aback. Then I thought that this was the only place I could have gone: I had to come here and push the door open to see Bourrache, with his dark eyes and hulking frame, had to shake his hand and mumble the stupid words you say on such occasions.

  Never before had I seen the big dining room empty. Not a sound. Not a single table set. Not a voice. No tinkle of glass or silver. No pipe smoke. No smell of food. Just a meager fire in the enormous hearth, and Bourrache before it, seated on a footstool, his feet stretched toward the few live embers, his head hunched over: a lifeless giant.

  He hadn’t heard me come in. I stood near him and said the practiced words. He didn’t move, made no reply. I watched the fire fall back; the last beautiful flames shrank and twisted, still struggling to stay erect, until they finally suffocated and disappeared. Then I saw the gaze of Clémence, her eyes and her smile. I saw her belly. I saw my shameless happiness and I saw the face of Morning Glory, not dead and drenched but as I’d glimpsed her for the last time in this very dining room, alive and rosy and lush as young wheat, slipping between the tables to bring the patrons their pitchers of Toul and Vic.

  The flames had given way to acrid gray fumaroles that escaped from the hearth, jigged around the room, and crashed into the darkened ceiling. At that point Bourrache, slow as an exhausted ox, turned his face toward me—a face that showed no feeling or expression. Then he got up, reached for my neck with his massive hands, and started to squeeze and squeeze, harder and harder—but strangely, I wasn’t afraid. I let him do it: I knew I wasn’t dealing with a murderer, nor even with a madman, but simply a father who’d just lost his child and for whom the world was now like a huge sun spotted with black. I felt myself choking. Everything was buzzing inside me. I saw before me white dots, flashes, and the scarlet features of Bourrache, who trembled, trembled—and suddenly tore his hands from my neck as though from a red-hot iron, fell to the floor, and cried.

  I caught my breath again. I was dripping with sweat. I lifted Bourrache and helped him to the nearest table. He offered no resistance. He was sobbing and sniffling. I knew where the bottles of plum brandy were kept. I went and fetched one, along with two glasses I filled to the brim. I helped him drink his, then knocked mine back, followed by another. Like a robot, Bourrache poured himself three, tossing them down in single gulps. I saw his eyes gradually refocus on our world and look at me with surprise, as if wondering what on earth I was doing there. A prick soldier tapped on the windowpane right beside us. Clownishly, he peered into the room, pressing his nose against the glass. But then he saw us. He lost his grin and was gone. I stayed there for four hours. Four hours and two bottles of booze. Four hours and hardly three words. I thought it was the very least I could do.

  During that time, Clémence was beginning to groan and writhe, alone. Without me. Without my knowing it.

  XVI

  When I came out of the Rébillon, a frigid rain braced me somewhat. The sky seemed to have it in for all mankind. Massive bands of water lashed the façades. There weren’t too many people in the streets. I hugged the walls as best I could, using my hands to shield my eyes at least. Joséphine in her jail cell no doubt was cursing me now, I thought, calling me every name in her substantial arsenal of insults. I believe I even smiled a little over that.

  By the time I reached the post office, I was drenched. My feet were numb, but at least my mind was clear again. My head wasn’t spinning anymore, despite the brandy. The mail coach was there, and a great many people were gesticulating around it; a captain of the corps of engineers was trying to make himself heard. I drew closer. The officer’s attempt to reason with the crowd provoked some menacing stances among the men. The women, more reasonable or simply resigned, stood around waiting like cattle, indifferent to the downpour. At that point somebody laid a hand on my shoulder. It was our parish priest, Father Lurant. “There’s no way back for us. The road’s been commandeered for the convoys. Two regiments are headed for the front tonight.”

  I hadn’t noticed them initially. But as soon as the priest pointed them out I could see nothing but the dozens—hundreds—of men, maybe more, waiting in utter silence, rifles on their shoulders and kits on their backs. They seemed to encircle us, almost blending into the night, which had begun to lap at day. Standing there with absent eyes, without a gesture, without a word, like the women-folk, they were indifferent to the rain. You might have taken them for an army of shadows. And yet they were the same lads who’d roamed around V all day long, heading toward the cafés like
animals to a water trough, belting out songs, spewing obscenities, unbuttoning themselves in the bordellos, staggering with wine bottles in hand. Now, not a one of them was laughing. All were leaden as toy soldiers, in both their bearing and their color.

  “Come,” the priest said. “There’s no point in standing around.” I followed him as submissively as any recruit.

  It wasn’t the first time that staff headquarters had commandeered the road. I have to say it was very narrow and in a sorry state, after three years of passing trucks and the hooves of thousands of nags. So when they were gearing up for an offensive there was really no choice but to reserve it for the convoys, which proceeded sometimes all day and all night, without interruption, a sad jolting line of ants, filing slowly toward the gutted remains of their anthill of metal and earth.

  Father Lurant took me along to the bishop’s palace, where a caretaker let us in. The priest explained the situation, and without comment the man led us, through a labyrinth of hallways and staircases redolent of wax and soft soap, to a large room where two rickety iron beds were making conversation.

  When I saw the small beds I thought of ours, so big and so deep. I’d rather have been beside Clémence, seeking that sweetness in her arms I always knew how to find there. I asked if I might send her word, which I did as a rule whenever I couldn’t get home. In such cases I would call the mayor, who would send his maid Louisette with the message. But the caretaker recommended I save myself the trouble: The telephone lines, like the road, were commandeered until further notice. A pang went through me to imagine Clémence worrying, but there was nothing to be done about it. With luck I’d be back in time for lunch tomorrow.

  The priest undressed, with no ado. He removed his cape, then his cassock, and stood before me in his underwear, his belly sticking out before him like a gigantic quince swinging in a flannel hammock. He arranged his damp clothes near the oven and huddled near it, spreading his hands at intervals over the lid. Without his clothes, he seemed not as old as I had thought. No doubt he was my own age, but I had never seen him as a man before. He must have suspected everything I was thinking. Priests are very clever; they know exactly how to enter people’s heads. He looked at me, smiling as the heat made his cape smoke like a censer, and his drying cassock filled the air with the scents of humus and burnt wool.

  The caretaker returned with two bowls of soup, a big loaf of brown bread, a piece of cheese hard as a block of oak, and a jug of wine. He left all of it on a little table and bade us good night. I undressed and laid my outer clothes near the fire as well. They produced the scorched odors of woods and suint that mixed with those of the priest.

  We ate earnestly, with no care for our manners. Father Lurant’s hands were large, hairless, and plump. Whatever he put in his mouth he chewed for an age, and he drank the wine with his eyes shut. We finished everything. We left the table clean, our stomachs full. Then, dressed as equals, we set about talking as we’d never done before. We talked about flowers—they were his passion— “the most glorious proof, if one needed any, of God’s existence,” he said. It seemed odd even then: talking about flowers in that room while the night and the war surrounded us, while somewhere nearby the villain who’d strangled a ten-year-old girl roamed free or slept in his bed. It seems ludicrous now as I imagine Clémence lying in our bed at that moment, bleeding helplessly.

  I didn’t know you could talk so about flowers. I mean, I didn’t know you could talk about human beings while speaking of nothing but flowers, without mentioning the words man, destiny, death, and loss. I found out that evening. The priest knew the science of words—like Mierck, like Destinat—but unlike those two, he did beautiful things with them. He rolled them like cigarettes with his tongue, and all at once a nothing appeared to be a marvel. They must teach such things in the seminaries: how to catch the imagination with a few well-turned phrases. He told me about his garden, which we never saw because of the high walls that enclosed it behind the presbytery. He told me about the chamomiles, the hellebores, the petunias, the sweet williams, the wild pinks, the anemones, the sedums, the candytufts, the peonies, the Syrian opals, the daturas, the flowers that live for only a season, the ones that come back year after year, the ones that open only in the evening and vanish in the morning, and the ones that beam from dawn to dusk, displaying their delicate corollas of rosy or mauve convolvulus, only to close abruptly at nightfall, as if a wrathful hand had squeezed their velvet petals and choked them.

  The priest spoke of these last in a different tone from the others. Not as a priest anymore—not as a horticulturalist either—but as a man full of misery and wounds. I cut him off as he was about to name this flower aloud, in the darkened room. I didn’t want to hear that name. For two days it had been drumming in my head. The little girl’s face came back to me like a slap across the face. The priest fell silent, perhaps a bit embarrassed. Outside, the rain had turned to snow again, and the flakes crowded against the windowpane like fireflies of ice. Without life and without light, for two or three seconds they yet managed to give the illusion of life and light.

  Afterward, for years, I tried to get morning glories to grow in our little garden. I never succeeded. The seeds stayed in the ground, and there they stubbornly rotted, refusing to climb toward the sky, to issue from the humid, gluey dark mass. Only the couch grass and thistles flourished, invading everything, growing incredibly high, spreading over the few square yards with their dangerous corollas. In the end I let them have their way.

  I’ve often thought back to the priest’s comment about flowers, God, and proof. And I’ve said to myself that there are undoubtedly places in the world where God never sets foot.

  Father Lurant went off to evangelize the tribes of Annam, in the mountains of Indochina. That was in ’25. He stopped by to let me know. I really don’t know why he troubled himself. Maybe it was because one day the two of us had talked for a long time in our underpants, had shared the same room and the same wine. I didn’t question his decision to go—just like that—even though he was hardly a young man by then. I simply asked, “And your flowers?”

  He looked at me, smiling, now as ever since our talk with that priestly gaze designed to reach in and pull out our souls like a cooked snail from its shell. He told me that where he was going there were thousands of flowers, thousands he didn’t know, that he’d never seen, except in books, and you couldn’t live forever in books: One day you had to take a firm hold of life and its beauties.

  I was about to tell him I took the opposite view: I had had it up to here with life, and if there were books where I could live I would plunge right into them. But when two people are so far apart, there’s no point debating it. I held my tongue and wished him well on his trip.

  After that, I can’t say that I thought of him often. But sometimes I did. Edmond Gachentard, my old colleague, had given me a few images of those yellow countries, in addition to his rifle. I’m not talking about images on paper, I mean the ones that get inside your head and stay there.

  In his youth, Gachentard had belonged to the expeditionary corps sent to Tonkin. Apart from the fever that would suddenly turn him white as a leek, he returned with a jar of green coffee he would keep on his dining room table like a relic, a photograph of himself in uniform with rice paddies in the background, and above all a slowness in his eyes, a kind of absence that seized him whenever he spoke about them: the nighttime melodies of bullfrogs; the incessant stickiness of the body; the great muddy river carrying trees as well as goat carcasses, water lilies, and bindweed torn from its banks. At times Gachentard even mimicked the women’s dances for me, their graceful hand movements with curved fingers, the rolling of their eyes, and the flute music too, which he re-created by whistling as he pretended to play on the sawed-off handle of a broom.

  I sometimes visualized the priest in that setting: his arms full of unknown flowers, wearing a colonial hat and a tropical cassock— hemmed at the bottom by a scallop of dry mud—watching the warm rain fall o
n glossy forests. I would see him smiling. Always smiling. I don’t know why.

  When I awoke in the room at the bishop’s palace, I had an insistent thought of Clémence. I had to get home, at all costs—leave right away, bypass the road if it was still off limits—nothing mattered but to get back to her. I can’t say it was a premonition. I wasn’t worried. No, I simply had the most urgent need for her skin and her eyes, I wanted to hold her and briefly forget the works of death everywhere around me.

  I put on my clothes, not quite dry. I filled the basin and scrubbed my face. Father Lurant was still dead to the world, a broad smile on his face. Beaming, really. I figured that even in his sleep, he must be finding armfuls of flowers. Looking at the table, I remembered we had finished every scrap from the night before, so I took off on an empty stomach.

  Berthe is in the kitchen. I can’t see her, but I sense her huffing and shaking her head in disgust. Whenever she sees my notebooks, she huffs. What’s it to her how I spend my days? It must be the mere markings that bother her. She’s never learned to read. For her these lined-up words are a great mystery. Fear and envy, perhaps.

  But whose, really? Now I am coming to the point I’ve been eyeing for months, for the longest while visible but not yet present. Like a dreadful horizon, a disfigured hill: Behind its hideous face, you don’t know what might be hiding.

  I am coming to that sordid morning. To that point when all pendulums stop. To that infinite fall. To the death of the stars.

  When all is said and done, Berthe isn’t wrong. Words are frightening, even to those who know and can decipher them. Here I am, a man in his fifties, flailing like a teenager trying to express himself. I don’t know how to do it on the best of days. Today it’s hard just holding the pen. As soon as I pick it up, my insides get knotted, my eyes sting. I drink a glass of wine. Then another, knocking it back. Maybe what’s said about writers is true: Words come out of the bottle. I grab my bottle and gulp it all down. I can feel Clémence draw near, her breath, always young, stirring the gray hairs on the back of my neck.