Vango

by Timothee de Fombelle

  “At the beginning of September 1914, all the young people from the island left to fight. Germany had invaded Belgium. France was going to war. I was the same age as them, and I wanted to join up too.

  “The superior at the abbey was named Mother Elisabeth. She gave me her consent. She thought it would make me wiser. I took the train to Challans. I went to see the bishop in Paris, warning him that I was Italian. He replied that this wasn’t a sin. He needed men, so he took me.

  “We were expecting a quick war, and I thought I’d be back in Rome the following summer to relax for a few days, climbing in the hills, walking through the orange trees of the Villa Bonaparte, where I had friends. After that, I hoped to rejoin my monastery at La Blanche, facing the ocean, surrounded by green oak trees, prayers, and potato fields.

  “But, two years later, the war had sunk itself into the trenches of Verdun, in Lorraine. And I was blessing more corpses than fighters. We lived underground, together with shells that rained down into the mud, rampant epidemics, and men with beards who had aged by a hundred years and who cried like children. I had become chaplain to the rats.

  “When I said mass in my trench, I didn’t know if the arm of one of the faithful would be ripped off by a grenade before it had made the sign of the cross. That’s war for you, Vango.

  “On August fifteenth, my trench was filled to overflowing with bombs. Filled to overflowing, do you hear me, Vango? My battalion disappeared. But I was spared. I left with a young doctor I liked very much. He was named Esquirol. On his shoulders he carried a black soldier, Joseph, an infantryman whose stomach had been ripped open by a burst of shell fire. That’s war for you, Vango.

  “There’s a small wood near the village of Falbas, with a clearing in the middle and a large five-hundred-year-old oak tree. The three of us stopped there. An airplane was caught in the tree’s branches, like a child’s toy. It was a German plane. The canvas on the wings wasn’t even torn. I climbed up to see if the pilot was alive. He wasn’t there, but the engine was still warm.

  “The doctor lowered Joseph the infantryman and put him down on the grass. It was a fine day. The explosions seemed far off. Esquirol took out the implements he needed to stitch the soldier back up.

  “Half an hour later, Joseph was saved. We lay down twenty paces from him to sleep.

  “A man woke us up. A German officer in an aviator’s uniform: the pilot of the plane in the large tree. He was aiming his pistol at each of us in turn. He hadn’t seen Joseph.

  “The German was wounded. His thigh was open just above his knee.

  “‘You, you’re a doctor,’ he told Esquirol in French. ‘Treat me.’

  “‘Throw down your weapon.’

  “‘No.’

  “Esquirol wiped his instruments. He operated on the pilot’s leg with the pistol butt pressed against his forehead. That’s war for you, Vango. But thanks to Esquirol, the soldier could soon stand.

  “That evening, infantryman Joseph, coming up from behind, was able to disarm the German with his bare hands. Joseph had fists as tough as shell heads, and he went on to use them after the war. Under the name Joseph Puppet, he boxed against the greatest.

  “And that is how the four of us — a German, an African from the Ivory Coast, an Italian in a combat cassock, and a French doctor — came to find ourselves lying under the oak tree, stunned, exhausted, half crippled, not understanding what had brought us there or what we were going to do next.

  “Night came, and one of us dared to open his mouth. It was the German officer. He was called Mann. Werner Mann. He spoke perfect French.

  “‘I’m trying to remember the name of a street in Paris just beyond the Porte Saint-Denis — do you know the one I’m thinking of?’ Mann asked.

  “Nobody answered.

  “‘A street with a little café called Chez Jojo,’” he continued.

  “It felt as if the question had come from another planet. A planet with shiny brass counters that smelled of ground coffee, a planet where someone named Jojo could chat with his customers while drying the glasses about the nice weather they were having.

  “‘Chez Jojo, Rue de Paradis,’ said Esquirol.

  “‘Yes, that’s it.’

  “We couldn’t hear the sounds of the fighting anymore. Mann and Esquirol fell quiet for a long time. But since none of the four of us were able to sleep, Werner Mann picked up again: ‘In that street, there’s a girl who sells flowers. When I went to study in Paris, I had a room on Rue Bleue, the next street along, and I was very fond of that girl. Does anyone here know her?’

  “That’s people for you. If you’re a native of New York and you’re far away from home, on a journey, people will ask you if you know someone named Mike who’s blond and also lives in New York. And they’ll want to know if you’ve got any news of him.

  “Esquirol looked like he wanted to say something again. I think he was wondering if it was legal to talk to a German about a girl who sold flowers next to Chez Jojo. Men had been shot for less. They called it ‘fraternizing with the enemy.’ It was a crime. And so he tried to keep quiet, but after half an hour, Esquirol couldn’t resist revealing, in one breath, ‘The girl, she’s named Violette.’

  “It was thanks to those words, thanks to Violette, that it all started. In a flash, the absurdity of war was clear to all four of us. If combatants could find themselves on the edge of a battlefield that was dug over like a cemetery, sharing a memory as fragile and fleeting as the face of a girl, then anything was possible.

  “War was not inevitable. We talked throughout the night. And in the morning, Project Violette was born. Each of us rejoined our ranks. Mann on the German side and us on the French side. We finished the war as soldiers, without our paths crossing. And when the peace was signed, on November eleventh, 1918, I went back to my monastery at La Blanche on the island of Noirmoutier.

  “I was so weakened, Vango, so shocked by my years serving on the front, that at night, the crashing of the waves behind the abbey terrorized me like the sound of canon fire. I took my time getting my strength back. The nuns baked me walnut tarts with salted butter.

  “On Christmas Eve 1918, still feeling a bit shaky, I asked for permission to go to Paris for three days. Mother Elisabeth gave me leave. Which is how I found myself, on Christmas night, walking through the snow on Rue de Paradis. I got to Chez Jojo’s a little before the agreed time.

  “Two years earlier, in our clearing in Verdun, we’d arranged to meet there. On the first Christmas after the end of the war, whenever that might be, in the café that had started it all. Chez Jojo, Rue de Paradis.

  “Joseph Puppet arrived after me, dressed like a prince with a silk waistcoat under his jacket. I whistled to him. He stared at my medieval attire. He laughed out loud and told me that if I was looking for a tailor, he could recommend Michel, near the clothes market at Temple. We fell into each other’s arms.

  “A man sitting nearby waved a newspaper.

  “‘Is that you?’”

  “He pointed to a photo at the bottom of the front page. It was indeed Joseph, J. J. Puppet, victorious the previous evening after knocking out Kid Jackson, the champion boxer from Liverpool, in the seventh round. Joseph laughed as he signed the photo. Then Esquirol appeared. He hugged us. I hardly recognized him in his gray hat and his wool coat with its upturned collar. Each of us spoke about his experience of the last months of the war.

  “Esquirol kept checking his watch. Mann hadn’t showed up. Joseph tried joking: ‘I bet he’s one street along, in the arms of young Violette. He wanted to see her first before joining us.’

  “But we all knew what his absence really meant. He didn’t come. A man arrived in his place. He was in his midforties and had been Mann’s flying instructor. Mann’s plane had gone up in flames on the last day of the war. Despite putting up a fight, he had died from his burns the next day. We were shattered. Our friend was dead.

  “Project Violette had kept me going for the rest of the war. Nothing made an
y sense if there wasn’t a German in our group.

  “‘Werner asked me to replace him,’ the man added. ‘If you’ll have me, then I am on your side. My name is Hugo Eckener.’

  “We were slightly suspicious at first. I stared at Eckener, who hadn’t taken off his snow-flecked hat. Esquirol was the first to shake his hand, saying: ‘Willkommen . . . welcome . . .’

  “We stayed at Chez Jojo’s until late. Afterward, setting off alone down the street, I was thinking about Mann. I wanted to pass by Violette’s shop. The shutters were down. I asked the caretaker what had become of the flower girl. He replied that she had died of tuberculosis the previous autumn. So Joseph had been right all along. Mann was in Violette’s arms, somewhere. . . .”

  Vango had been listening all this time. He had slowly crawled under the fig tree to stay in the shade.

  He couldn’t see what any of this had to do with a French superintendent turning up on the island of Arkudah more than fifteen years after the events described. But he felt shattered by what he had heard. He suddenly had a better understanding of what war meant. Before, war to him had been about flowers on monuments, medals, mothers who had lost their only son, drums beating out their rhythm once a year, men who were missing an arm or a leg.

  War . . . Zefiro’s memories turned that word into flesh and blood.

  “We met up again two years later. Things got off to a very bad start for Project Violette. It was an idea dreamed up by choirboys, a simplistic and naive plan that could be summed up in just two words: never again. Fight the war before it began. Attack its roots before it grew out of the earth. All that remained was to put this into action.

  “But something was happening. The dragon’s head was growing back exactly where it had been chopped off. Arms dealers and others were rubbing their hands with glee. From early 1919, they were there, just ahead of us, the future wars. The treaty that would be signed at Versailles was an invitation to further battles. The punishment against Germany was so violent that it would inevitably lead to hatred and revenge.

  “Hugo Eckener made us weigh all this. On the maps where he showed us the new borders that had been drawn up, everything looked like a minefield. We didn’t even have time to react. What could four ordinary men do, faced with this war machinery?

  “Project Violette was going to perish before it had sprung to life. We wrote letters and opinion pieces in the newspapers, and met with MPs who smiled and took us for dangerous pacifists.

  “I remember Puppet wanting to make a speech at the end of a boxing match he’d won, but the cries of the crowd drowned out his voice. From the front row, Esquirol told him to abandon his plans. And so the public carried off their champion triumphantly, without him being able to say a word. That day, looking at the newspaper photos, everyone thought he was weeping with joy.”

  Zefiro paused for a moment. Who doesn’t recall the day when they gave up on their greatest dream? His next words sounded like a funeral dirge.

  “Christmas 1919, over a hot chocolate at Chez Jojo’s, Project Violette was buried by three voices against one. A freezing wind was blowing across Paris. Over on the upholstered bench, Hugo Eckener in his fur hat looked like a washed-up polar bear. I held out for several minutes, saying that I still believed in it, that I had a plan.

  “That day, we hardly dared look one another in the eye. Esquirol had recently opened a swish doctor’s office in Paris. Eckener had settled by the shores of Lake Constance. J. J. Puppet had just broken Joe Beckett’s nose magnificently. And I had become the wise monk the hierarchy had wanted to make of me, with the result that my name was being mentioned at Saint Peter’s in Rome.

  “Most of us had our eyes in our hot chocolates. Joseph was looking at the clock. We said our good-byes. I was thinking about what Mann’s judgment on the four of us would have been. We walked for a while together down Rue de Paradis. And when we passed the hardware store that had replaced pretty Violette’s flower shop, I saw Esquirol cross over to the other side, because he felt so ashamed.

  “Perhaps it was that image that stopped me from giving up on our idea. I worked alone. I followed a lead I had, and eleven months later, I became confessor to Voloy Viktor, an arms trafficker working for the worst warmongers. Europe and the whole world made a show of pretending to be after him, but all the while they were signing contracts with him.

  “He switched identity every three months, transforming his face and his nationality. He had been an English lord, a Spanish merchant, a circus ringmaster, and even, according to some people, the star singer in an Istanbul cabaret. There were plenty of people who claimed he didn’t really exist.

  “Viktor only had one fear: burning in hell after his death. And so he sought out a confessor to reassure him. I volunteered my services with a view to getting close to him. He would arrange meetings in deserted churches, a different one every time: a bell tower in the Italian mountains, a chapel in the Alpilles. He always came alone. Back then, Voloy Viktor was only twenty-five or thirty years old. He was mostly unrecognizable. He spoke with the voice of a child trying to be good. He would complain about a big boss, whom he called the Old Man. He said the Old Man was too hard on him, that he felt frightened. He would rant and rave.

  “He only revealed his tiniest sins to me: a fly he’d drowned in his honey at breakfast, a swearword that had escaped his lips. ‘Oh, Father, I am so wicked,’ he would say, beating his chest. He would start crying, clinging to the confession grille. I tried to pass myself off as indulgent in my handling of him, but the violence was mounting inside me.

  “I was hatching my plan. In November 1929, I wrote to Esquirol. I asked him to warn Superintendent Boulard, at the Quai des Orfèvres, that Voloy Viktor would be at Sainte-Marguerite church, in the suburb of Saint-Antoine, five days later at three o’clock in the afternoon. They couldn’t miss him.

  “A hundred men were conscripted. The streets were marked out all the way to Bastille. There were even marksmen on the rooftops.

  “At a quarter past three, I gave absolution to Voloy Viktor and he went outside. There was a policeman behind each pillar. The church was surrounded. But they missed him. Yes, Vango, they let him get away. And from that day, Voloy Viktor put a price on my head. The traffickers wanted me dead. They were prepared to pay anything for it.

  “I would never get away from them. I made it as far as Rome by foot, crossing the mountains, and requested an audience with the pope. The next day, in the newspapers of France and Italy, the death of Padre Zefiro, priest, monk, gardener, and beekeeper, was announced against a black background. He had died in his thirty-seventh year. The funeral would be an intimate affair. No flowers or wreaths.

  “The day of the burial, while Puppet, Esquirol, and Eckener, along with a few monks, were bearing a coffin that was too light, I landed on this tiny island of Alicudi, which I rebaptized by its Arabic name: Arkudah.

  “I founded the monastery in order to continue living while being dead for the rest of the world. Not even Joseph and Esquirol knew where the monastery was. Eckener was the only one I told. So it must have been him who sent Boulard to me.”

  “And what about the others?”

  “Who?”

  “Brother John, Brother Marco, Pierre — all the other monks in the monastery,” Vango said. “Where have they come from?”

  “Those here with us are religious men who all have good reasons for being on this island. They come from all over.”

  And so Zefiro started telling their stories. The story of the men with whom Vango lived was the story of their century.

  Some monks had escaped the fascist regime of Mussolini, others that of Hitler, or Stalin in Moscow. There were enemies of the Mafia, those who had infiltrated them, those who had repented. There were even two orthodox monks who had confronted the wolves of Siberia after escaping a gulag. They had arrived close to a hermitage in a forest in Finland and told their story. After being listened to (and their case being referred from Constantinople to Rome), they had be
en directed toward Zefiro’s little paradise, where they were able to practice their religion while joining in the life of all the monks.

  Some had escaped the penal colonies of Lipari, the neighboring island, where opponents of the fascist regime were kept in captivity.

  Another monk, John Mulligan, was an Irish priest who had baptized the son of Al Capone, king of the Chicago Mafia. Mulligan had accidentally seen something he shouldn’t have in Al Capone’s office: two corpses wrapped in red-and-white-checked restaurant tablecloths. He’d had to vanish.

  “None of my brothers still exist outside of this island,” Zefiro summed up. “They’ve all been reported dead or missing. Which is why we call it the invisible monastery. This is a hideout for ghosts.”

  The padre was overcome with emotion. He was gently rocking his head.

  “Yes, ghosts.”

  He looked at Vango.

  And what about this boy? Who was he, really? What was he fleeing?

  The sun was high in the sky now. The fig tree gave off a sugary scent above them.

  “And Boulard, this morning?” Vango finally asked.

  “Boulard came to tell me that he’s got Voloy Viktor, who was arrested at the Spanish border. I have to go to Paris to identify him. It’s impossible to recognize that man from any photograph. He’s a chameleon. But I could recognize him from the slightest movement. We used to be twenty centimeters apart when he visited me in the churches.”

  “You’re going to Paris?”

  “Yes. I’m positive it won’t be him.”

  Vango turned to face Zefiro.