In his mind Louis saw himself among them. He pictured the friars in their rough robes, saw Eleanor of Aquitaine on her horse, wearing silk and gold, surrounded by guards and servants, saw the merchants and tradesmen who had left their families and the wealth they had acquired from their tanneries, stables, and vineyards to walk across France and Spain, and there to prostrate themselves on the spot where Saint James, the Apostle, had landed in Europe. To prostate themselves and to be redeemed. After all, Louis was a pilgrim if ever there had been one.
Louis did not think he was exactly in search of redemption. Yet this long walk, day after day, alone with himself and his thoughts, felt like something he had no choice but to do. He equipped himself with a backpack, sturdy shoes, and a thick packet of maps and books, and flew one day in late May from Washington to New York, and from New York to Charles DeGaulle Airport in Paris. The plane arrived in the morning twilight. The day was overcast. The runway was wet; the grass beside it seemed exceptionally green.
He retrieved his backpack from the baggage carrousel, showed the customs agents his passport, and started walking. His first steps were around the great donut-shaped airport terminal. He was tired from the overnight flight and restless at the same time, so that it only slowly dawned on him what a new place this was he was walking through. The faces around him were different in subtle and inexplicable ways. Was it how they held a cigarette, was it their animation, their shrugs and gestures when they spoke? The language was different, of course, but so was their use of it. A woman’s voice announced the incoming flights softly, it almost seemed so as not to disturb anyone who didn’t need the information. Chimes rang out before each announcement on the public address system. Outside, policemen in blue uniforms stood by a small car and watched the goings on. Little trucks and cars whizzed around and around the terminal building.
It was chilly. There was a drizzle. It took him half an hour to walk out of the airport by a service road which took him through a little-used gate. When he was approached by airport police, he explained in his halting French that he had just arrived and was beginning a walking tour of France. They understood his French and, to his surprise, seemed to accept without question his explanation for being on foot in the middle of the airport. They looked at his passport and then wished him a good journey, “bonne route,” touching their hats as they watched him go.
This back gate from the airport opened directly into the town of le Mesnil-Amelot. Because other airport exits led to all the main highways, there was no traffic in the town, despite the airport’s proximity. The street was broad and cobbled and lined with ancient plane trees. Their mottled tan-and-white bark shone brightly against the backdrop of dull stone houses. Despite the damp chilly air, windows were open, and here and there mounds of white bedding hung over the sill. Someone had hung a canary cage in the window. The little yellow bird hopped from the perch to the side of the cage and back again. It sang as Louis passed below.
From le Mesnil-Amelot, Louis headed northeast along a narrow farm road lined with poplars. The new leaves on the poplars shimmered in the silvery light. He walked the three kilometers to Moussy le Vieux. From there, he turned northwest along the Biberonne which was overflowing its narrow banks. He reached Moussy le Neuf and went on to Saint Ladre, which, although it was on his map, was little more than an ancient, rambling farmstead. The high gray walls that enclosed the farm did not allow even a glimpse of what went on inside.
Louis studied the map carefully. The route he meant to follow—it was indicated by a small wooden sign stuck on the wall, painted with a bright red GR-1—was a double-rutted farm track that disappeared between tall hedge roses on one side and an ancient stone wall on the other. He peered down the way and then back at his map. His hesitation came neither from fear nor uncertainty, but rather from something that most closely resembled exhilaration.
Louis moved his finger slowly on the map along the route he had taken to Saint Ladre where he stood, hesitated a moment as if his finger were himself, then moved it along the route he intended to follow from there. It was as though he hoped that, seeing the roads and towns reduced and summarized on the map, reading their names to himself like some lovely poem might even further intensify his joy.
The airport, with its great jets, lay less than three hours’ walk behind him. If he had listened for them, he might have heard the airplanes taking off and landing. But now he was walking where pilgrims had walked many centuries before. The little wooden sign indicated by means of its GR-1 that this was the Grande Randonnee number 1, the first of many ways and paths that led through towns and fields and forests. These old walkways, farm roads, and tracks had gradually been consolidated into a system of walking trails which now covered the whole of France. Another even smaller sign indicated that Beaumarchais lay two kilometers through the fields to the north. He set off again.
The bell in the tiny church at Beaumarchais chimed noon as Louis reached the town. He found a small store and bought a baguette, some Gruyere cheese, and a bottle of grape juice. He stopped beside the small stone obelisk in the middle of the town square where the names of the children of Beaumarchais—”les enfants de Beaumarchais”—who had died in the two great wars were listed on bronze plaques around its base.
Louis read through the two dozen names—an unthinkably large number of war dead, an unspeakable loss for this hamlet with its few dozen houses. Halfway down the list of dead from the First World War, he came to the Morgons. There were nine of them: Charles Morgon, Felix Morgon, Gaspard Morgon, Gerard Morgon, Guy Morgon, Jean Marie Morgon, Jean Pierre Morgon, Louis Morgon, Onesime Morgon. Were they cousins? Were they fathers and sons? Were they all brothers? There was no way to tell since it only gave the year they had died. That fact, their violent and futile deaths, had obliterated everything else about their lives. The shorter list of dead from the Second World War included no Morgons. Perhaps all the Morgon men had been killed in the first war. He read through the nine names once more, and after that could recite them from memory for the rest of his life.
Louis knew he was not related to the Morgons of Beaumarchais. His grandfather’s grandfather had come to the United States from Odessa, and before that, from a stetl in the Ukraine. He had arrived in America in the 1850s. The exact date was uncertain. He had held onto his first name—Avraham. But his last name had disappeared into oblivion. He was renamed by an immigration agent on the docks of New York. You were given one opportunity to state your name. The agent wrote down what he heard, handed you a paper, and you moved on.
Avraham did not mind the loss of his old last name. To him that name had represented persecution and poverty. His new name—Morgon—signified a brand new beginning. In Avraham Morgon’s case, as in countless other cases, the great American melting pot had not only worked, it had done so instantaneously. A few years later, still carrying around a thick Russian accent, Avraham, or Abe, as he now proudly called himself, joined the Irish Brigade being put together by William Meagher, an Irish nationalist, himself newly arrived from British imprisonment in Tasmania. Avraham swore he was Irish when he was asked and proudly wore the distinctive orange and green epaulets at the battle of Manassas, where he distinguished himself and was made a sergeant.
Louis knew Avraham Morgon’s story, so there was no reason he should feel that he was kin to the dead Morgons of Beaumarchais. Maybe it was just the fact that nine from one family in that tiny village had died. Maybe it was seeing his name nine times on that stone on his first day in France. Whatever the reason, when he moved to France and considered changing his name to make it more difficult for others to find him, he could not bring himself to do it. Before now, he had felt no loyalty to the name that was his by accident. But giving it up now, even in a provisional way in order to take on an alias, would have seemed a betrayal of the Morgons of Beaumarchais, toward whom he felt a strong and inexplicable allegiance.
In some mysterious way, Louis’s arrival in France had echoed Avraham’s arrival in New York.
His name, which had been a fiction founded in an almost comic mistake, now had suddenly taken on the weight of tragic history, again by accident, this time the accident of his walking through a village and reading the list of its war dead. Just as suddenly as Avraham had lost his name five generations ago, Louis had found his.
Louis ate the lunch he had just bought, sitting on a bench in the square in Beaumarchais, not far from the monument. The town presented a somber, gray face across the square. The sky was overcast. A wet, chilly wind blew in from the west.
XII
LOUIS FOUND LODGING FOR THE NIGHT, HIS FIRST NIGHT IN FRANCE, eight kilometers further on, in a small hotel over a bar in the village of Ermenonville at the edge of the great forests of Ermenonville and Chantilly. He slept deeply that night. He dreamt of dead horses floating down a great river, then of bees swarming together into great balls of bees, trying to fly together, lifting off briefly, buzzing frantically, then falling, stirring up clouds of dust, and lifting off again.
The next day, Louis walked through the forests of Ermenonville and Chantilly. Great masses of rain clouds rushed in from the English Channel where the late spring storms were still following one behind the other. The storms brought cold, windy showers. These were interrupted, as suddenly as they had come, by blue sky and sun that shimmered in the water dripping from the leaves and lying in puddles along the forest roads.
Yellow birds flashed across in front of him, sounding their alarm. Once, two wild boars, small low creatures that seemed to be half head, crashed out of the brush ahead of him. They galloped along the muddy road for a short distance, and then bolted across and into the brush on the other side. The forester passed in his small truck, moving swiftly along the parallel tracks as Louis stood aside. Even the familiar sound of the truck did not diminish the sensation Louis had that he was walking in a new world, inhabited by different creatures, where different laws prevailed, where life was ordered along different axes, to different ends.
Louis turned south, once he was past Paris, then west, then south again. He walked through fields, along small roads, along canals, over tiny rivers. He stayed in small village hotels, when he found them, where the room often cost less than supper, where there was no bath and the toilet was down the hall. When there were no hotels, he found rooms by asking where a room might be found. To his astonishment, he was often welcomed into people’s homes and given a meal and a bed for the night. When they learned he was American, they wanted to talk about the liberation. It seemed, when they spoke of it, as though it had just happened. They described how the American tanks had come through town, how there had been a battle in the next town where the Germans had had a fuel dump. Emboldened by the approaching Americans, the local partisans had blown the dump sky high. They drank a toast to the Americans, to the liberation.
He crossed the Seine at La Roche Guyon, at the great bow the river makes just above Giverny. He did not visit Giverny, where Monet had had his house and splendid gardens, but instead continued southwest. East of Dreux he joined the Eure River—that was how he thought of himself now, as having a relentless motion of his own, which allowed him to join rivers. The Eure led south into the great flat plains of the Beauce.
The storms ended. The dry summer season took hold. The days, which had seemed endlessly long already, got even longer, and he began to sleep under the stars. He set out each morning with the sun already high in the sky, and he walked until it dropped beneath the brim of the straw hat he had acquired. He enjoyed seeing the farmers, the shopkeepers, the housewives working their gardens as he passed.
He studied the map or read until it got dark. Then he lay down under his blanket, savoring the chilly air on his bare arms and face, watching the sky fill with stars as it slowly darkened, watching the Milky Way emerge from the blackness, until the entire sky seemed to be made of stars, a skein of stars, a quilt of stars, an ocean of stars. He could not find the words. Then, every night as he lay there, the same thing happened. And that was, that the great arching bowl of sky turned into space. That is, the sky suddenly took on something resembling its true nature—vast empty space—and assumed, to the extent that Louis’s mind could apprehend it, its own true immensity. Louis was overcome by a terrifying and simultaneously delicious dizziness, and he spread his arms into the tall, cool grass, grabbing bunches of it in each hand, so that he would not go hurtling off into space.
“I am coming undone,” he thought to himself. The thought made him happy. It was undoubtedly a kind of madness, this new state of mind into which he was finding his way. But he found the idea that he might be going mad, may indeed have already gone mad, to be far less of a worry than it was a relief that he had left his old madness behind.
One night, Louis slept in a pasture beside a broad pond. It was a clear moonless night. He awoke suddenly, and had the short-lived recollection that he had heard an animal cry in his dreams. He saw the dark shape of an owl move between him and the stars above him. He stood up. He had taken to sleeping naked. He walked through the tall grass to the edge of the pond and, after a moment’s hesitation, walked into the pond. The muddy bottom oozed around his feet. He walked in until the black water was up to his chest, then he stopped and stood unmoving. The surface of the pond became still again. And as it did, it filled with the reflection of stars. Now it was as if he were completely surrounded by stars, above and below, surrounded by the universe of stars, as if there were no earth that could fling him from its surface, as if he were the center of the universe, the planet of Louis Morgon, providing his own gravity, his own reason for being. “Reason for being.” He spoke the words aloud to himself, then repeated them, so that the planet of Louis Morgon would have its own sound.
The vast fields of wheat were turning yellow, as Louis approached the great cathedral town of Chartres. He saw the cathedral much as the early pilgrims had seen it, in the twelfth century, when it was first built, rising bright and enormous out of the vast treeless plain of the Beauce. It lay before him for hours. Louis slowed his pace to hold it there longer. The site had been chosen so that the cathedral seemed to actually emerge from the wheat as one approached, with the town, below and around it, only becoming visible as you reached its outskirts.
From Chartres he walked south and joined the tiny Loir—not la Loire, with an “e”, but le Loir, a tributary of the larger river. The landscape gradually became rolling again. It began to be laced with small river valleys, with villages in the valleys, and farms and orchards on the plateaus above the valleys. The fields were smaller than in the vast Beauce and produced a greater variety of crops—wheat, soybeans, but also sunflowers, corn, and apples, pears, asparagus, tobacco, and hazelnuts. He followed the course of the river. It led through Chateaudun, with its feudal chateau and fortifications, to Vendome, where the Loir, by now a full-fledged river, split into branches dividing the medieval town into islands, then reunited and flowed on to Lavardin, with its ruined castle fought over during the Hundred Years War, and its ancient church of Saint Genest.
Louis had started visiting churches when he was still near Paris. His true purpose was unclear. The explanation he offered himself was ironic: he was a pilgrim, and pilgrims stopped at churches. At first, he was relieved when the church doors were locked, as they often were, and he could walk on without losing time. But at Chars, in the pretty Viosne valley, the church’s heavy oak door had been unlocked. He had pushed it open and stepped across the raised threshold. The church had massive columns supporting the gray ceiling with its clumsy and rudimentary vaults revealing the first beginnings of the gothic age. The church’s windows were pointed and narrow and unexpectedly graceful. Their glass was plain, letting in the gray daylight.
There had been no one in the church at Chars. A few votive candles flickered in front of a small side altar. He smelled the paraffin from the cheap candles. Louis heard cooing and the flapping of wings from pigeons that had found their way in through a broken pane or through the bell tower. They had made their nest somewh
ere in the shadows above.
He took off his pack and sat down. On the worn bench beside him lay a black lace glove. It was small and exquisitely made, a glove to be worn at a funeral, perhaps at a wedding, certainly at some solemn ceremony, not the kind of glove to be taken off. He picked it up with great care, as though it might have lain there for centuries and might disintegrate at his touch. The glove was so light and insubstantial, that he could only tell he was holding it by seeing it lying in his hand. The initials AMM were embroidered on the back. Without thinking, he raised the glove to his nose. To his surprise, he detected a faint perfume. He had a strong sense of the woman’s presence. He turned around to see whether the glove’s owner, perhaps having removed the glove to light a candle for someone recently dead, might still be in the church.
He might have found the owner, AMM, if he had chosen to inquire at the market that was going on in the town square. He might also have stopped at the cemetery as he left Chars, to see whether there were any new graves. He did not seek the glove’s owner, but from then on, he stopped at churches, and regretted it when the doors were locked.
The church of Saint Genest in Lavardin was decorated with frescoes from the Middle Ages, which had only recently been discovered, and were just now being restored. They were of mythical beasts and saints, all in red and ochre, crowding shoulder to shoulder, along the ceiling, and up and down the columns. Since that first visit on foot, Louis had come back many times to look into the oval eyes of the saints, the lions, the lambs, and to revel in the glorious solitude of his life in Saint Leon, which lay just half a day’s walk further on.
XIII
A French Country Murder Page 8
