A Prince Without a Kingdom

by Timothee de Fombelle

  “I don’t think Saint John would like that.”

  “I want to meet this Saint John.”

  “I’ll ask him. He only talks to me. Let me go now.”

  “Ask him. It’s very urgent.”

  As she stood up, Mouchet grabbed her hand. Their neighbor was watching them. Mouchet started whispering into the Cat’s hair as if they were lovers.

  “Those people you wanted to find — the Atlases — they’re no longer at the camp at Pithiviers. They left on the twentieth of September.”

  “Where?”

  “They’re still taking them eastward. We don’t know where. They’re not in France anymore.”

  Some medieval music was now accompanying the film.

  “One of the envelopes is for Caesar again; it contains some very important documents. The other one is for you — it’s about your friends.”

  “They’re not my friends.”

  “Silence, up front!” called out the man who was dozing in the back row.

  “I’ve put in everything I could find out about the Atlases,” whispered Mouchet. “There’s a form with all the places they’ve been to. One last thing, Marie. I need to speak with Boulard as well. Where is he?”

  “I don’t know.”

  She left, without mustering the strength to open her own package. That evening, she was back on the roof of the Palais-Royal. After sliding the new piece of mail through the gap in the shutter, she warmed herself up for a moment against the clumps of terra-cotta chimney pots that jutted out from the rooftop. Beneath her woolen vest was the envelope from Mouchet. She still couldn’t bring herself to open it.

  La Reine Morte was playing at the Comédie-Française. Tonight’s performance was over. Some of the spectators lingered in the foyer, making the most of the warmth.

  The Cat spent the night in the theater’s attic, where she was reunited with a violin. She had hidden it there, a long time ago now, between the beams. She didn’t touch it.

  In the morning she took a train to Le Mans, then caught the express Manche-Océan ferry, which dropped her off in Nantes.

  The day passed by in a flash, and by six in the evening she was walking along the exposed path that linked the mainland to the island of Noirmoutier at low tide. It was dark. She avoided the German guardrooms, whose lights she could spot on both shores, and cut across the sandbanks instead. Saltwater pools were bristling with life. She heard the crabs scuttling away.

  The Cat knew that she couldn’t turn up on Saint John’s doorstep in the middle of the night. So she slept in a tiny hut between the salt marshes, warmed by three donkeys huddling below her.

  La Blanche Abbey, Noirmoutier, off the shores of western France, December 22, 1942

  Mother Elisabeth (all one hundred kilos of her beneath a spotless habit) was the most terrifying force known to the island of Noirmoutier since its invasion by the Vikings in the ninth century after Jesus Christ. She had reigned over the abbey at La Blanche for forty years. No bishop had ever dared mention the word retirement to her. And not even the German soldiers who had set up headquarters in the château a few kilometers away were prepared to take any risks inside the abbey’s high walls. They had trampled over three quarters of Europe, but they took off their boots at the threshold when they turned up timidly at La Blanche in order to buy a small pot of honey or some radishes.

  Everyone was frightened of Mother Elisabeth, but she was universally admired. The large walled garden at the abbey fed a good proportion of the island. Three of the sisters ran a health center in the mill to the south of the abbey, which had a better reputation than some provincial hospitals. The choir was magnificent. The services for Christmas and the Assumption attracted the whole diocese.

  People would have been even more amazed if the public had been able to glimpse, at nightfall, the fiercely contested soccer matches that the nuns played on the beach, or the midnight swims on Easter Sunday, after prayers. Hallelujah! The shrieks of joy from the waves must have traveled all the way up to the Loire estuary.

  And yet, aside from these openings onto the world, La Blanche was a citadel that no one could enter. The few children who had tried scaling the wall in order to steal a Z pear — allegedly the juiciest pear in the west, and a sub-species of the classic Williams Bon Chrétien variety — bitterly regretted it. They had received an almighty walloping on the backside from the holy mother.

  The Cat rang the bell at the main gates. Two black eyes appeared behind a small grille.

  “Our holy mother is in the chapel. She’s singing.”

  “Tell her that the Cat wishes to speak with her.”

  “The Cat?”

  “Yes.”

  “As in —”

  “As in the small furry animal.”

  “Don’t you have a name that’s a bit more . . .”

  “Serious sounding?”

  “I’ll have to interrupt the Christmas rehearsal. The sisters will all be staring at me. So, if I announce that the Cat —”

  “Are you new here, Sister?”

  “Yes.”

  “Tell her it’s about Saint John.”

  “The Evangelist?”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s better. That’s what I’ll say. And you can talk to her about the Cat, if you like. Take a seat on the bench. I feel bad about leaving you out in the cold.”

  Sister Bertille walked across a former lawn, which had been transformed into a potato field when war had broken out: a fine example of the nuns’ pragmatic approach. She headed along the cloister and pushed open a door. Strains of Christmas carols could be heard. Sister Bertille crossed a courtyard and entered the chapel.

  Fifty nuns were singing “Mid the Ass and Oxen Mild” in six- or seven-part harmony, their eyes raised heavenward, with enough emotion to make the listener forget that this was hardly a masterpiece of religious music. The carol’s thousand divine angels could be heard hovering beneath the vaults. Mother Elisabeth was standing on a box before the choir, stirring the air convincingly.

  It took her a while to notice Bertille blushing by the door. She conducted until the end of the refrain before bringing the choir to a halt.

  As Mother Elisabeth turned around, there was a splitting noise from the wooden crate beneath her clogs.

  “Well, Sister Bertille? Is it the general?”

  “No, Mother Elisabeth.”

  The question “Is it the general?” was Mother Elisabeth’s stock-in-trade. She requested not to be disturbed unless General de Gaulle was landing with the English. It was her only way of ensuring peace and quiet. Whenever someone came to ask her a question while she was meditating in the garden, whenever someone interrupted her while she was at work, whenever someone raised her hand in the course of the nuns’ silent meals, she always responded with: “Is it the general?”

  “So, Bertille, you’re not guarding the gates?”

  “There’s a young lady who wishes to speak with you.”

  Bertille didn’t dare pronounce the Cat’s name.

  “She says it’s about Saint John.”

  “Sister Marieke, would you kindly replace me?”

  A pretty nun stepped out from one of the rows and helped Elisabeth get down off her crate before climbing up onto it herself. The abbess was now reunited with her walking stick, and she began issuing instructions as she made her way toward the chapel door.

  “It’s not working with the twelve sisters at the front; we can’t hear ‘Sleep, sleep, sleep, my little child.’ So, Sister Marieke, you’ve got a choice: either make them sing more loudly, or remove the basses. I’m thinking of Sister Véronique, right at the back, who would be most useful in the kitchen when it comes to peeling the Jerusalem artichokes.”

  Everyone turned toward one of the choristers in the back row, who went pale beneath her freckles.

  “Do your best, my sisters. May I remind you that Christmas is in three days’ time, and I’m counting on the collection to mend the roof. Be brilliant. I don’t want to le
ave you in abject poverty when I die. Which won’t be long now: I’m nearly as old as Marshal Pétain.”

  The door slammed shut.

  Bertille and the abbess crossed the first courtyard and headed back along the cloister before skirting the potato field.

  “Open the gates, Sister.”

  Sister Bertille did as she was told. The Cat appeared, and Mother Elisabeth kissed her on the forehead.

  “Come with me, my daughter. Given the hour, we’ll have to go this way.”

  The nun led the new arrival beyond the enclosure, and the Cat offered her arm. Bertille watched them heading off, flanking the exterior wall, in the direction of the sea.

  “Those aviators you sent us last time were charming. My sisters would have liked to keep them forever. But they didn’t have a calling for our way of life.”

  The Cat smiled.

  “I hope you’ll find us some French Canadians. With the English, I can’t speak their language. But I managed to convince the swarthy handsome one with a head wound to repaint the chapel. He wasn’t allowed to be outside in the sun, so at least he wasn’t wasting his time.”

  They had reached the woods and were strolling beneath the green oak trees. It was ten o’clock in the morning, and a cold pure light slid beneath the trees without illuminating them.

  “Did you know that I found a bicycle? There are no more inner tubes for a hundred kilometers around, but we put hay in the tires. It works very well. Are there inner tubes in Paris?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “If you find any, would you mind sending them to us? I’ll pay you in eggs.”

  Mother Elisabeth had extraordinary energy. As she strode along, she beat the undergrowth with her stick. The Cat was holding her left arm.

  “And what about eggs? Do you have eggs in Paris?”

  “No.”

  The nun’s face lit up.

  “I was just thinking last night that if I sent two of the sisters to Paris with a hundred eggs every Sunday, to sell them in the parishes, we’d be as rich as Rockefeller. That way, I could afford to put fifty French Canadian airmen in the refectory and machine guns in the bell tower, and the Boche wouldn’t last long!”

  They emerged from the woods to find the sea opposite them. The Cat took off her socks.

  “My daughter, tell me first of all whether Saint John is bathing,” pleaded Mother Elisabeth, covering her eyes.

  The Cat scoured the beach.

  “No.”

  “Too bad.”

  The twinkle in the abbess’s eye reappeared from behind her hands. She was staring at the horizon.

  “Do you have a fiancé?”

  “I think so.”

  “That’s good. Wait for our Saint John here. He’ll be back. And remember to pass by the kitchen before you leave. Ask for some brioche. We hear they’re so hungry in Paris that people eat their own cats.”

  “Thank you very much, Mother,” said the Cat, sitting down in the sand. “You won’t get lost on the way back to the abbey?”

  “Unfortunately not,” called out Elisabeth as she headed off. “Take good care of yourself, my daughter. And if you ever decide to become a nun . . . We’re full up here until the end of time. But for you, I’d make an exception.”

  And with that, she vanished. The Cat was very much in her thrall: she would have taken the veil just for the pleasure of hearing Mother Elisabeth solving the world’s problems every morning.

  For a few minutes, she had forgotten about her parents’ fate. And now it was the sound of the sea that kept her outside of time. She was thinking of Andrei.

  The Cat hadn’t really lied to Elisabeth about having a fiancé. She had seen Andrei reappear one morning in the summer of 1937, in the same student boardinghouse on the rue du Val-de-Grâce, in Paris. He clearly wasn’t in hiding, and she had followed him for a while through the city.

  One day, he had met a man on the terrace of a café on the Grands Boulevards.

  “The Bird is dead,” the man had announced.

  “The Bird?”

  “Back there, that’s how they refer to the boy.”

  “Which boy? Vango?”

  “Be quiet.”

  Andrei appeared stunned.

  “What about my father?”

  “You came to your senses just in time. If you hadn’t finally led us to the Bird, your father would be dead. But he is free, and he has been reunited with your family.”

  “I want to join them too.”

  “Do what you like,” said the other man, standing up. “You’ve fulfilled your mission. I’ve told Vlad to leave you alone.”

  “I’m going back to Moscow.”

  The man walked away, but Andrei stayed on. The Cat was sitting at the next table and, just as on that first day when she had approached him years earlier, she was having an ice cream. The Cat didn’t dare pick up her spoon because her hand was trembling so much. Andrei left the terrace. Luckily, he forgot his violin.

  The next day, she had glued a note to his window.

  I’ve got your violin.

  She had spent the night staring at the violin, its case open in front of her. She knew that for as long as she had the violin, he wouldn’t leave. She dropped off another note the following week.

  I might return it to you.

  When she tried to leave a third note, there was a response from Andrei already on the window.

  I don’t want it anymore. Keep it.

  This message worried the Cat. The next day, she returned via the gutter to deliver the several pages she had written. But the room was empty. He had fled, leaving an address in Moscow.

  She hid the violin and mailed her letter.

  A reply arrived two months later.

  For two years, they had corresponded via these enigmatic letters. It took him four letters to grasp that the violin thief was a girl. And three more for her to write that the thief in question had been in love with him for four years.

  When the war started, her letters no longer received a reply. But the Cat kept on writing, adapting her tone according to her understanding of relations between France and Moscow. The first letters began with Dear Enemy, and the later ones with My Fine Ally.

  And in his last letter to her, Andrei had addressed her as if she were his fiancée, telling her that he was enrolled in the army and that he was setting off for combat. Farewell, my Emilie.

  For a few months now, the Cat had been hearing about the battles taking place in Stalingrad. The Soviet army was putting up an indefatigable resistance against the German assaults. The Cat horrified herself by imagining her fine ally fighting in the bloodstained snow.

  In the middle of this daydream, in which Andrei’s features became those of a messenger from the steppes, with his fur hat and frosty horse, the Cat, staring blankly at the sand, heard the seagulls cry and a voice next to her saying, “Emilie.”

  She opened her eyes. Vango was the only person, apart from Andrei, who was allowed to call her by that name.

  “Saint John!” she called out.

  She hadn’t yet mastered the right body language to accompany such an exclamation. But she stood up and walked toward him with a cautious smile. The birds flew up.

  “Hello, Saint John.” She smiled, stopping a few paces away. He was carrying a wooden fishing pot and a large cork float.

  Vango had come to the island of Noirmoutier in the immediate aftermath of Zefiro’s death. Barefoot and with tousled hair, he resembled his seven-year-old self, even though he was almost four times that age. In the old days, the padre had often talked to him about La Blanche, where he had spent two decades. Zefiro’s refuge at the beginning of the century had now become a refuge for Vango as well. Here he was known as Saint John the Evangelist. It was Mother Elisabeth who had given him this name, inspired by his full name: Evangelisto.

  “I’m glad to see you, Emilie.”

  And he really was, because these days he had no other links with his past. She alone knew that he was alive.
As far as the rest of the world was concerned, he had perished when the Hindenburg had gone up in flames. At last Vango had achieved what he had always craved: to erase all trace of himself, shaking off his pursuers in the burned grass at Lakehurst. He lived almost freely. He had renounced solving the mystery of his own life.

  Farther along, in the shadow of the oak trees, were the graves of Zefiro and the unknown young man who had died alongside the padre in the Hindenburg explosion, and whom Vango had passed off as himself. The nuns had arranged the transfer of their remains.

  On stormy days, the sea rose as high as these sandy graves, and Vango defended them with his spade, building walls, digging ditches, like a child entrenched in his sand castle.

  A yawning noise could be heard coming from inside the wooden crate, which Vango had put down on the sand.

  “It’s for Christmas,” he explained. “Will you be here?” He went over to the crate, and the Cat saw that it was teeming with greenish pincers and articulated bodies. She tried to poke a finger between the wooden bars, but Vango pulled her away sharply.

  “Lobsters.”

  She followed him as they headed back through the trees.

  The Cat had appeared at the beginning of the war, to ask for his help. Over time, Vango had agreed to become a correspondent for the Paradise Network. As far as Caesar, Mouchet, Sylvain, and their colleagues were concerned, Saint John was no ordinary agent. None of them had ever seen his face. He imposed certain conditions: Saint John would have nothing to do with any acts of violence, and he never left his refuge. This was the promise he had made to Zefiro.

  One day, early on, he had been given a suitcase to hide, without any warning about its contents. On discovering that it was full of dynamite, he had refused to hand it back: he wanted to teach the other members of the Paradise Network a lesson, so that they never forgot his terms again. The explosive suitcase and its timer were still stashed away in the nuns’ henhouse. Vango hadn’t left this island since the summer of 1937.

  When he and the Cat were close to the walls of La Blanche, at the edge of the forest, they climbed an enormous green oak tree and crept between its leaves. The gulls lost sight of them. Vango had tied the crate to his back. Then they made their way down a long branch that straddled the wall.