The Bear and the Paving Stone

by Toshiyuki Horie

  We went back to his truck, taking care now to look both ways before crossing the road. We set off again, heading off the main road on to a narrow lane that undulated gently. The hillsides were dense with the pastureland known as bocage—fields surrounded with low hedges that acted as windbreaks. In front of each house we passed were rectangular stones, not particularly big, stuck into the ground at regular intervals with trees planted in the gaps between them. Their roots would wrap themselves around the stones, Yann said, making the trees better able to withstand the wind.

  Whenever we drove through a village, we were sure to find a stone church with a graveyard behind it; life and death coexisting snugly next to each other. One of these villages was on a bit of a hill, and Yann stopped in the square in front of the church, saying we should take a break. It seemed he’d been to this village before, and he led me to one corner of the square, drawing my attention to a sign that claimed this was the furthest point from which the spire of Mont Saint-Michel could be seen. Next to the sign were some stone stairs that led up to the kind of bog-standard observation deck you’d expect to find in a hilltop village like this. On a clear day, it supposedly offered a view of the majestic Gothic monastery, but today was not clear and I couldn’t make anything out. I was surprised to realize that Yann’s house was even further north than this village, with its view of Mont Saint-Michel. Until then I’d had the idea he lived in the hills, surrounded by orchards or fields full of livestock.

  “Your father only told me your phone number, and then we arranged to meet in Caen, so I just never really thought about it, but I guess your house must be quite close to the sea?”

  “Not really. It’s just outside a little village, quite a way inland. You can see the sea from Avranches, though, and that’s only a thirty-minute drive.”

  “Hold on, did you say Avranches? The Avranches where Littré’s family came from?”

  “Littré? The dictionary guy? Yeah, come to think of it, that’s right. His family did come from there.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me? I’d have come to your house right away if I knew it was near Avranches. I’ll explain in a second.”

  We went back to the truck, where I took the book out of my rucksack and handed it to Yann. The cover was a copper-plate engraving of a man’s portrait, and the book was a biography of Émile Maximilien Paul Littré, the man responsible for producing the many bulky volumes of the Dictionnaire de la langue française in the second half of the nineteenth century. It was the book I was reading and translating a part of. I’d thought it’d be convenient to have it along while on the move. Unlike a novel, which demands to be read in one sitting, a critical biography like this, divided into many sections, was something I could work through bit by bit. Avranches was a place name that had always had some kind of resonance for me (it sounded like avouer—to confess—and blanchir—to launder money—and it made me think of something slippery, like abura, the Japanese word for oil), but if I hadn’t come across it in the introduction to the book I was working on, I’d never have connected it to Littré or Normandy.

  “There’s a high school in Avranches named after him, so I guess he’s a kind of famous local person. I’ve actually got some of the Littré on the shelf at home—not a complete set, mind you. It was left there by the person who rented the place before me. In fact, some of the guys I met while working round here went to the Lycée Émile Littré. The school used to have a portrait of Littré in the assembly hall that was so ugly the students complained and the school eventually got rid of it. Pretty funny, eh?”

  Littré may have been one of the giants of the nineteenth century, a man of knowledge and curiosity, but I couldn’t blame those high school kids for wanting to get rid of the great man’s portrait. His hair was always smoothed down over his narrow forehead, and he wore small, oval silver-framed spectacles, but he also had a massive lower lip which stuck out like a bullfrog’s, and this was his most distinctive feature. Whenever there was a caricature of him, there was that big lower lip. There’s probably no greater indignity than to have your entire existence rejected on account of your ugly face—especially by a bunch of students who still rely on your work. For me, though, the thought of spending some time near Avranches with a biography of Littré in hand had got me quite excited. I was long past the age when I enjoyed changing my plans suddenly, impetuously, without even a change of clothes, but being with Yann now, I was reminded of when I was clueless and new to France and he would take me to all sorts of different places to try and cheer me up.

  Back then, Yann had also just started living by himself, so he was probably filled with a kind of eagerness or enthusiasm for life. But there’s no doubt that what bonded us was mutual nervousness. Why else would Yann have asked me, out of the blue, to go for a meal with him in the Jewish quarter, insisting that he wanted me to eat a sandwich that was at least minimally Jewish? The way he spoke, it was as though he were persuading me to join a cult, and his invitation was half coercion, but at the time I didn’t know that Yann was Jewish, and I had no idea where the Jewish quarter was or why he’d want to show me that neighbourhood. We set off in the evening, taking the metro to Saint-Paul, and went to a deli on the Rue des Rosiers that sold smoked meats and pickles, rye bread and Israeli red wine. The shop had once been targeted by Palestinian terrorists, who’d planted a bomb that left several casualties. Photos of the tragedy had been enlarged and printed on panels placed in the shop window, alongside photos of famous people. This gave me a real feeling for the shop’s staying power, its determination to do business no matter what. The unconventional advertising seemed to be working too, as the shop had plenty of customers. There was a long line at the till that wasn’t moving much, so to shorten our wait I started queuing while Yann grabbed what we needed. When it was finally our turn, Yann announced that this was his treat, and he insisted on paying for everything. Standing behind him, I could see that he was surreptitiously holding a can of something under his arm. Once we were outside, Yann gave a proud little laugh, thrusting his nose into the cool evening air.

  “I stole it, obviously,” he explained.

  “But you paid for everything else? You just stole this?”

  “The stuff I paid for was cheap. This, I couldn’t afford.”

  What he’d stolen was a can of grape leaves stuffed with rice, marinated in spices and olive oil. Even though I saw the label, I was so shocked that he hadn’t paid for it that I couldn’t remember what they were called. In those days, I felt very vulnerable in my status as a foreigner living in France, and I was supremely sensitive to the fact that I needed to avoid getting into any trouble with the authorities. I started thinking how bad it would be if Yann was caught and what my culpability in it all was. I felt angry, for selfish reasons, and struggled to control my anger. Then I relaxed. This was brazen shoplifting, but we were out of the shop and I couldn’t have done anything to stop it.

  We crossed the Seine to the Île de la Cité, and sat down on a bench. Yann took out butter, Gruyère and mineral water from his rucksack, and lined them up in front of us. He poured the wine into paper cups, and opened his shoplifted loot with a tin opener he’d brought with him—he’d clearly been meaning to steal the can all along. The stuffed grape leaves were delicious. The olive oil and the saltiness fit perfectly, and there was some vinegar in the marinade as well, which added a nice touch. Yann had warned me that there were people who couldn’t eat the grape leaves, so I shouldn’t force myself if I didn’t like them. But once I’d had a couple, I knew that they were just the kind of thing I loved. We made sandwiches with the meats and pickles and chunks of black bread. There was a bit of an acrid taste, but it went really well with the dry, slightly sandy red wine. As we worked our way through our little feast, Yann told me that when he was a little boy his grandmother would sometimes take him shopping to the Rue des Rosiers. His grandmother on his mother’s side was Polish, and his grandfather was Russian.

  “Did you have a reason for taking me the
re?” I asked.

  “I don’t really know. It’s not because you’re a foreigner or anything. I can’t really put it into words… but there’s something about you, I knew you wouldn’t take it the wrong way. I know you don’t do judo or anything, but you know how to take a knock or two.”

  I wasn’t sure, but I thought I understood when he said there was “something about me”. That “something”, whenever I met someone new, gave me a clue whether or not we’d be able to get to know each other. Usually, if don’t I feel a connection with someone, I’ll conclude that they’re probably not someone I need in my life, and I’ll stay away. But when I do connect with someone, the connection lasts, and it’s a bit like the shell fire in that Kenji Miyazawa children’s story. You don’t fiddle with the flame. The flame has nothing to do with nationality, age, gender, status. When it’s lit it’s lit, and when it goes out it goes out, though its warmth might remain for a while. This “something about me”, however, lent itself to other things. With Yann, I was his blank slate, someone in whom he had no stake, no self-interest to protect. So he could let his guard down. And I also got the sense that his deciding to tell me about his family was somehow related to his shoplifting performance. I think, looking back, that was the moment when I realized I trusted Yann. There were probably other customers who’d realized that Yann had hidden the can under his arm, but I was the person standing behind him, he was showing me what he was doing, and I didn’t say anything, which meant I shared in the act—and the guilt. The feeling I now had, several years later, after “something about me” had led Yann to bring me to this corner of Normandy, was very similar to what I felt on that day.

  In the square in front of the church there was a cafe, which also served as a news-stand and tobacco shop. We sat at one of the gloomy tables and ordered sandwiches. The old shopkeeper had used up all his baguettes at lunch, and so, after asking if we minded, cut some thick-crusted pain de campagne. He spread on fresh local butter and added slices of ham. We couldn’t have asked for anything better.

  After passing through a town—famous for its sausages, according to Yann—we drove along a winding road that meandered its way up and down hills and didn’t offer much of a view of the surroundings. Eventually we emerged into a valley, a small river on our right. The landscape seemed noticeably drier, with less greenery and more white stone. Yann took this as his cue to tell me that the reason cider was produced in this area was because the water quality was so bad—people were better off drinking alcohol.

  Soon we pulled up to the granite factory, which was alongside the river. As expected, no one was working because it was the weekend, and the gate was locked.

  “Well, that’s that. If you want to see what it’s like inside, you’ll have to make do with the photos at my place,” Yann said, as he continued driving, not bothering to stop. He took a narrow country road that was surfaced with granite chippings, and we kept going on for another long while.

  “I thought you told me it was ninety minutes from your place to Caen,” I said, “but we’ve being going for a couple of hours.”

  “I didn’t take this route on the way there,” he replied. “It’s not so far if you’re on a proper road and you speed a little.” Laughing, he continued on through a series of small bends, and eventually I could see dense forest up ahead.

  Before long, Yann announced, “We’re here!”

  A pair of almost cubic stones, like gateposts, marked the entrance to his property. We drove past a wooden shed, which he said contained straw and firewood, and eventually a gabled dull brick building came into view.

  “Welcome to chez Yann,” Yann said, spreading his arms wide, then guiding me into a single room of about twenty-five square metres. In the right corner was a staircase leading to the loft, and directly in front of me was an imposing grandfather clock which the previous tenants had left behind and which seemed to have stopped working. A sofa and assorted pieces of furniture were carelessly placed around the room, all of which had apparently been scavenged. The fireplace on the left had a thick metal plate behind it that reflected heat back into the room, and a set of bellows lay in front of it. Both the metal plate and the bellows had been picked up from a demolition site, Yann said, as though this would be entirely obvious. Above the fireplace was a shield, awarded to finalists at the Île-de-France pétanque tournament. It looked like a mineral specimen, plonked unceremoniously on a shelf.

  “The only thing in here I bought was the Marshall valve amp,” Yann said.

  I put down my stuff, and Yann took me out for a tour of the surroundings. It was quiet. The nearest neighbours, whose house was three hundred metres from the road, kept cows and chickens, but I couldn’t hear nor see them. All I could hear was birdsong and the rustling of leaves, the murmuring of a brook and the crunching of gravel under our feet. In the apple and pear orchard, the previous tenants, an old couple who’d left the grandfather clock behind, had built a hut where they baked bread. The oven no longer worked, so it was useless, but according to Yann, it wasn’t uncommon for people here to have a hut for baking the kind of crusty bread we’d eaten in the cafe. Pain de campagne might dry out, but when that happened you just cut it into pieces and put it in soup and it becomes a whole meal. At the end of the back garden, the boundary with the neighbours was marked with white objects that looked like broken pieces of china, but with cylindrical blue cores protruding out of them. They seemed most odd until Yann explained they were lumps of rock salt that the cows would sometimes come and lick. As he talked, he pulled a nearby branch that was laden with blackcurrants towards him, plucked some off and handed them to me. They were more acidic than the currants they sold at the market in Paris, but were refreshing and had no unpleasant aftertaste. I picked as many currants as I could hold in my handkerchief, and made some throwaway remark about having them with yogurt later.

  Yann looked a bit embarrassed at this. “We should have stopped and got some supplies when we were passing through town. Since I’m leaving tomorrow, I was planning on eating out tonight. There’s almost no food in the house.”

  He was right. Back in the kitchen, I saw that the fridge really was almost empty. Just some pickles and a jar of strawberry jam. On the shelf were several types of pasta, age unknown, and a bottle of bourbon someone had given him. Yann put a pot of water on the stove, then rummaged around in the drawer of the plywood dining table and pulled out two teabags. He popped them into a stained teapot, then added water once it had boiled. Elbowing the stuff on the table out of the way, he laid down two cracked yellow bowls.

  “You’ve given up on jam jars, then?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “You used to drink tea out of jam jars all the time, even though everyone thought that was weird.”

  “Ha. Well, I don’t do dumb stuff like that any more. Besides, we both did dumb stuff when we were young.”

  I wasn’t sure that it was all down to being young. Yann didn’t get along with his parents very well back then, and was always in a bad mood. Maybe that’s why he’d consciously do things that would grab people’s attention. He used to carry around a folding penknife, as if he were some pre-war woodsman, and when we went to restaurants, he’d bring it out to cut his meat and fish. He used to burn incense, so that his room would always have a sickly sweet smell. And he used to call me in the middle of the night to go and play pétanque by street light. (In fact, that’s how I first met him, at a pétanque tournament organized by some elderly people in the parish.) He wanted to buy an old van and travel all over France, so he handed out flyers to his friends asking them to provide funding. On other occasions, a thought would occur to him and he’d shut himself in his room for days, reading. Everyone knew about his thing with jam jars. Whenever he drank tea or café au lait, it’d be in a Bonne Maman jar—that was the most common brand—and he would refuse to drink out of anything else. His reason: one Bonne Maman jarful was just the right amount—any more and he wouldn’t be able to sleep, any le
ss and he’d still be thirsty. No one knew what to think of that. His grandmother would make marmalade and jam—apricot and quince—in used jars and seal them with wax. Yann always had several of these jars in his room, and the friends who hoped to be given one learned to stop mentioning Yann’s habit of drinking out of them. Once, on a whim, I tried drinking tea out of a jar myself. It was too hot to hold, and the grooves for screwing on the cap made it not the easiest vessel to drink from.

  We talked for a while, discussing things as they occurred to us, things that may or may not have actually happened. Yann knew the limits of my language ability, speaking more slowly and choosing his words more carefully than he might have done otherwise. A detail that could have been shared in seconds went on much longer, as though an older child were explaining something to a younger child. A lot of time passed without my noticing it. I went back over what I’d written in my letters. Yann hadn’t got a regular job since we’d last met, nor had I. I’d made ends meet by doing piecemeal business-related translation work and part-time teaching jobs. Yann listened, and then, in his own entertaining way, told the story of how he ended up settling in the village.