“Where’s he got to?” said Jean, lowering his voice.
He leaned on one of the posts holding up the barbed wire. A notice stapled onto the wood said: PROCEED WITH CAUTION. HUNTING SEASON. NOVEMBER 1986.
“Well, it doesn’t matter,” he said at last. “He’ll catch up. To your cars, gentlemen.”
“But we can’t leave,” said Georges.
“Why’s that?”
“Your father has my car keys. He kept them for some reason.”
The line of cars was stuck. There was no way to move a single one of the four-by-fours, not even a meter, without Georges moving his first. And his was locked and the hunter who wasn’t there had the keys.
Jean’s hands flew to his head. He looked at the beaters. He was about to order them to go and look for his father and bring him there as quickly as possible, when Respin and Cambronne emerged beside the wire fence.
“Monsieur Moré,” said Respin, “can you come with us?”
“You blew the horn? Which one of you was it?”
There was no answer.
“Really, my friends, men with your years of experience . . .”
But the beaters didn’t say anything.
Jean felt for a cigar, felt for his lighter. Georges, although from a distance, managed to see that his thumb was clumsy as it sparked the lighter, and that the tall flame trembled in the hand that trembled. Jean’s hand had trembled. Georges gathered up the sympathy he was unable to feel at that moment and offered:
“Go with them. I’ll come with you, I’m right behind you.”
Jean’s eyes shone. His feet had turned to stone and did not want to move.
“Please, Monsieur Moré,” said Cambronne, “come with us.”
Jean and Georges followed them in the direction of the forest, trying to keep up. Georges felt in his chest and thighs the effort that pace was costing him. From behind he could see the two beaters, the line of their shoulders that rose and fell in a terrible cadence, the color rising in their cheeks. Still from behind he saw them stop and look at each other (not with a look of someone questioning or conversing, but with a vacant expression that only wants to avoid the present urgency), and then look at Jean, who arrived alongside them. In the center of that incomplete picture, framed by three pairs of rubber boots—one gray, another tobacco-brown and filthy, the third pair green and tied up with fine laces over long woolen socks—was Stalky, shot several times. A wide gash in his side stained his coat; some fur stuck to the viscous flesh. His still-palpitating guts steamed in the cold air, and the blood was an intense red against the green of the grass. Two steps from the animal, fallen in the undergrowth, Xavier’s lifeless body came into view.
Georges saw Jean lose his self-control. He saw him throw himself on his father’s body and open his shirt without really knowing what he was doing, as if the impulse to do something, anything, was moving his hands with memories of imagery picked up from films. The chest was pale, and the hairs that outlined a snowy forest formed, as they reached the neck, a tangle of stiff, dry clots. Jean spat on his hands and tried to clean his father’s shoulders off with the saliva on his palms. Then he began to pummel the body. “Get up, Papa,” he said. “The hunt’s not over, it’s just that the novice blew the horn too early.” When Georges put a hand under his arm to lift, Jean had a tuft of wool between his fingers. Just like when he was a child, thought Georges, just like when the three of them went fishing and Georges would be shocked at how much patience Xavier had with that spoiled little boy who was always wanting piggyback rides and digging things out of his father’s belly button with his baby finger.
—
“EVERYONE LEFT SO SOON,” said Catherine quietly. “I never thought I’d feel so lonely in my own house.”
Georges looked around: indeed, the hunters had slipped away without a word, little by little, like the tide going out. At our age, he thought, nobody likes to think of someone else’s death. He was wearing his leather shoes, and the feeling on his feet was agreeable, fresh and firmer, because in old age his ankles had started to ache after wearing rubber boots. In the reading chair that no one in this house used for reading, Charlotte was sitting in an oblivious position, as if she’d forgotten she wasn’t alone. She crossed her legs, and her drill pants rode up above her ankle, revealing porous white skin and a sock whose elastic no longer worked very well. There was some wisdom in her dark drill pants and man’s shirt and her face with no makeup. She’d always refused to have children, and now that he was old, Georges had convinced himself that this characteristic formed part of the same description in which he would have included the masculine cut of her shirt. And now Georges was looking at her. You’re thinking about him. He realized his forehead was heating up and took off his overcoat. Under his arms were dark sweat stains. But earlier, when he’d had to embrace Jean to distract him, he’d behaved with an unfamiliar calm. When he’d held Jean’s head between his hands, to draw his attention away from the fissure in his father’s skin and the vision of the destroyed muscles and the appearance of a thick, white tendon like a worm in the burned flesh, at that moment, Georges was another person. The people from the Modave commune took forty minutes to get there. The ambulance, with its siren and flashing lights turned off, five minutes more. In all that time Georges did not move. His feet were planted on the ground like a bullfighter. Jean wanted to be cradled in his arms. The woman from the commune began to ask questions, and Catherine answered them as if she were taking an oral exam. Only when the body was ready to be transported did Georges begin to feel a headache from the deferred tension. Catherine approached Jean. “They’re asking if you want anything, or if they can take him.” Jean turned on her.
“How stupid you can be sometimes,” he said.
And he climbed into the ambulance.
Now, Catherine walked between the swinging kitchen door and the table where the spout of the coffeepot had stopped steaming. She poured herself a glass of port and went to sit under the floor lamp, closer to Charlotte than to Georges. She looked pale, and her voice was laden with sadness.
“What did they do with Stalky?” she asked.
“Respin,” said Georges, “and some others. They buried him right there, in the forest. They’d already seen some vultures circling.”
“You should have gone with him, dear,” said Charlotte.
“With whom?”
“Jean,” said Charlotte.
“No, he shouldn’t,” said Catherine. “There are lots of people with him, people who know about these procedures. I need company, too, Madame Lemoine. I think I’m more bewildered than my husband.”
She took a sip from her glass. An imprint of her lip remained on the edge, because Catherine used a moisturizing balm before going out hunting to keep from getting chapped lips. Then they heard the noise of a car’s engine, and the sound of gravel displaced by tires. Catherine stood slowly, went out to the porch, and returned and sat down. “It wasn’t him,” she said. It was Respin, coming back.
“What will it be like now? Madame, what was it like when your father died?”
“You’d better ask him,” she said, gesturing toward Georges. “I barely remember.”
Georges kept his face blank. He preferred to avoid the subject.
“He was with me,” said Charlotte. “It was the beginning of the war. I saw it all from the window. My father ran, it was stupid to run when we hadn’t done anything, the soldiers fired and he slipped and when he fell to the ground some crows were startled.”
“How old were you?”
“Seventeen.”
They looked at the pale rectangle of the window. Respin walked past in the direction of the stables, his hands holding up the lapels of his coat, his hair blown about by the wind. “He can’t keep still,” said Catherine. “When he’s nervous, he’ll invent any excuse not to sit down. There are times when Jean can’t stand
it.” The novice followed him with a shovel over his shoulder. Georges thought he saw a trace of blood on the edge of the aluminum, but then he thought that shovel had been used to bury the dead dog, and maybe knowing that detail was manipulating his imagination. Away from the hunt, an animal’s death always shakes us up, thought Georges, perhaps because it seems not to have any justification.
“One of the crows had a blue ribbon tied to its leg,” said Charlotte. “I guess it must have escaped from somewhere.”
“They weren’t getting along,” said Catherine. “Now it’s going to stay like that. That’s what I don’t like.”
Catherine had changed into a more comfortable outfit—now she was wearing a green sweater with a roe deer embroidered across the left-hand side of the chest—and, after unplugging the phone from the front hall and plugging it in behind the reading chair, brought a chair from the dining room, placed it beside Charlotte, and began to make calls with an address book open on her lap. The pages were thick embossed paper, and the panels of her small and full address book looked hand-drawn. While she spoke, Catherine ran her index finger down the black lines. Georges listened to her dictate the details of a notice for Le Wallon. Xavier Moré. M-O-R-E. Comblain-la-Tour, 1917. “He just died,” she said, and hearing the deliberate imprecision of her phrase seemed to surprise her. Charlotte, meanwhile, distracted herself with the illustrations that appeared in the notebook, on the facing pages of the directory. She lit a cigarette. Georges watched her inhale deeply; the straight line of the smoke, bathed in yellow light, was like the trail of one of those planes Georges hated, because they brought back memories of the war, and flew over the Ardennes frequently these days, toward the NATO military base.
Catherine covered the mouthpiece with her hand.
“They’re maps of places that don’t exist,” she said. “Chinese, Armenian, things like that.”
“Maps of paradise,” said Charlotte.
“Yes. Some of them. But they’re not all religious, look. This is a map of the center of the earth.”
“Are they not helping you?”
“They asked me to hold. This is the first time I’ve done this. You two don’t have to stay until Jean arrives, Monsieur Lemoine. You look tired.”
“I am a bit.”
“We can stay a little longer,” said Charlotte. “It’s no trouble, is it, dear? Besides, I want to see more of these maps, they’re fascinating.”
“I don’t know. It’s almost dark.”
“It’s barely five,” said Charlotte.
“Seriously? And night’s almost fallen, how incredible.”
“They’ve got this little tune playing,” said Catherine. “Funeral parlors are so funny . . .”
Charlotte put a hand on the book. Her skin was dry and blue veins mingled with wrinkles. Beneath her long, marmoreal fingers were the phone numbers for the letter H and a sort of aerial view (as might have been produced by one of the MiGs that flew over them) of the Labyrinth with Happiness in the Center. ENGLAND, 1941, was printed in the margin.
“Xavier gave it to you, didn’t he?”
“To both of us. Before we were married. One day he showed up with it as a present, just like that, for no special reason.”
“No reason,” Charlotte repeated.
“I mean, it wasn’t Christmas, or either of our birthdays.”
“Yes,” said Charlotte. “I knew what you meant.”
Then someone came back on the line, and Catherine held the receiver between her shoulder and head to take down the details of the ceremony. Tomorrow, 2 pm. Burial 3 pm. Charlotte took the pencil from her hand, crossed out tomorrow and wrote Friday.
“For later,” she said. “One likes to remember what day it was.”
She smiled a sad smile and added:
“Who knows why.”
Catherine looked at her. Then she lowered her head.
“Is it going to be really horrible? For Jean, I mean.”
“Make love,” said Charlotte. “That helps, I think.”
—
IT WAS COMPLETELY DARK when Georges pulled up to the junction of the road to Hamoir and the road to Marches. He turned right where Catherine’s pickup truck once ran out of gas, several years ago, and Georges and Charlotte tossed a coin to see which of them had to go collect her. The twenty-franc coin had landed with the king faceup, so Georges had to put on his white dressing gown and siphon some fuel out of the smallest tractor with a piece of hose, sensing at each suck the imminent taste of gasoline and feeling sick from the vapors. Now—it seemed implausible to him—that ingenuous memory didn’t end with early-morning laughter, with Charlotte’s refusal to kiss him or even get close to him because his breath stank of gasoline, but in a question: Had they spoken in his absence? That night, while he was rescuing Catherine, had Charlotte phoned Xavier? Georges feared that the past was beginning to transform. He slowed down as they passed the gypsies’ place, a mobile home embedded on the edge of the access road for so long that the lawn had devoured the tires and struts. On the aluminum steps leading to the little door slept a white rabbit, luminous in the night and puffed up with cold.
The house was getting to the stage when it seemed to be shrinking, because fewer rooms got used with the passing years, until some were opened only to dust them. It wasn’t a spacious place, but they’d been able to build two stories and an attic in spite of the restrictions in force at the time. The front hall smelled of leather and furniture polish. As they went inside, Charlotte and Georges knew that falling asleep would be impossible. That fixed and invariable routine a couple of their age gets into was in their case one of fascinating symmetry: Georges took off his shoes and put on his slippers while Charlotte got the coffeepot and filter ready for morning; Georges went up to their bedroom while Charlotte took her arthritis medication, in the kitchen and almost behind his back, as they both maintained the fiction that she wasn’t old enough to need it yet. But that night, none of that happened: they walked into the dining room listening to the wooden floorboards creaking under their steps, and while Georges sat down in his green velvet chair, Charlotte dug out the Stéphane Grappelli record. It was Xavier’s favorite. After the concert in Liège in 1969, Georges had gone up to Grappelli and asked for an autograph. “For Xavier Moré,” he’d said. Grappelli had signed the cover with a black felt marker.
She let the needle down onto the vinyl. The music sounded distant, as if coming from the other side of a curtain. Charlotte sat on the other side of the fireplace and switched on the radiator. Seeing her so distracted, in that effort to maintain her serenity, in that dispute with her own affections and with twenty-year-old ghosts, made Georges feel strange, almost superfluous in his own house.
“Do you know why he did it?” he said.
“As if you care,” answered Charlotte.
Georges stood up and offered her a cigarette. Charlotte was not surprised that he’d guessed her wish. The lighter’s flame whispered as it burned the paper around the tobacco.
“He was my friend, too, you know,” said Georges. “Or rather, he was my friend most of all.”
“That address book was going to be a gift for me,” said Charlotte. “Or rather, he did give it to me.”
Georges had imagined. He chose not to say so.
“But you didn’t accept it.”
“I couldn’t. But it’s so pretty.”
“That was after you’d decided to end it.”
Georges’s phrases walked a fine line between statement and query. As he spoke, he looked at the bellows and old newspapers; he stared at the wood in the fireplace although it wasn’t lit. He knew he was irritated with Charlotte, and the effect seemed obscurely agreeable or necessary.
“A long time later. Like four years. We’d drifted apart, there wasn’t any risk. Nothing would have happened if I accepted. But I didn’t accept it.”
Georges made no comment. He listened to her describe the paper Xavier had used to wrap the gift, a page from the newspaper. But not just any page, it was the front page of Le Wallon from March 11, 1963, the date of the last time they’d made love. It was here, said Charlotte, it was in our guest room, Xavier was my guest for a couple of hours and then he left, before you got back from Liège, because he knew he wouldn’t be able to look you in the eye that afternoon. Charlotte had torn the paper angrily and thrown the notebook, with all her might, and it had ended up in the hydrangeas and they’d had to ask Nadia, the youngest daughter of the gypsies, to climb into the shrub to retrieve it. Xavier behaved very stupidly afterward. He gave Nadia a hundred-franc note and told her not to tell anyone about what had happened, and she, with hydrangea petals in her hair, took it without knowing what it was all about. “Why, dear?” said Charlotte. “Why bribe an eight-year-old who’s done nothing but look for a book in the flowers? You’ll scoff, but at that moment Xavier struck me as a faint-hearted coward.” Georges did not scoff. He just listened.
“But it was a lovely little address book,” said Charlotte.
“Useless, though,” said Georges. “Maps of places that don’t exist.”
She pretended not to have heard.
“Later, I asked him if I could borrow it to photocopy one of the maps. Xavier had already given it to Catherine, but he took it for an hour and photocopied all the maps at the paper shop in Aywaille, the one beside Riga. I saved one of those photocopies, just one, the one I liked best. I still have it, dear. If you want I’ll show it to you.”
—
THE ENGINE GAVE three false starts before finally firing up properly. As far back as he could remember, driving a tractor relaxed him, but this was the first time he’d done it at night. Luckily there was no wind, because the cold would have been unbearable; the night was dark, the clouds invisible, the threat of rain persistent. The field where the neighbors’ cows occasionally grazed was less than one hectare; the grass grew during the spring and part of the summer, and Georges waited anxiously for the moment he could climb on his tractor to mow it. It was an old machine, a Ford 5000, but it still worked well; the Gallignani baler it towed collected the hay with its forks and bundled it into cubic-meter bales, which it tied up with a rough cord, so later the youngsters, Jean and his friends and sometimes Catherine, could go around the field picking them up with a pitchfork and taking them to the barn to store until they were sold. This year, the summer was long; at the end of September there was still hay to cut, and tonight, the last Sunday Georges had climbed on his tractor to cut and bale hay seemed recent to him. The land was covered in dry yellow stubble, and had taken on that look of an old dog who’s lost too much fur. Georges flipped a switch; above his head, three white lights came on, the yellow of the loose hay brightened, and shadows appeared behind the wooden posts. It was as if Georges was wearing a gigantic miner’s helmet. The serenity of the night—the crickets rubbing their legs, the short howling of wind in the trees—was soon drowned out by the private racket of the engine. Under the dome of the night sky, in that clearing of light that seemed to come from a reflector hanging from the heavens, Georges felt vulnerable.
Lovers on All Saints' Day Page 7
