The Crowded Grave

by Martin Walker

  6

  Bruno recognized the image on the giant screen, the deep pit he had seen that morning at Horst’s dig, the flat stone with the strange cup-shaped depressions and the smoothness of bone. A small ruler, in red and white with gradations for each ten centimeters, lay alongside what Bruno could now identify as a human femur. The red spot of Horst’s laser pointer picked out the details he chose to highlight on the enlarged photograph as he spoke.

  “A new prehistoric burial site in this region is always a remarkable discovery and this one with its two adults and child may be very special indeed,” Horst was saying from the podium.

  The auditorium at the new National Museum was filled, with some of Horst’s students standing at the back and more listening to his lecture through a loudspeaker in the hall. Bruno counted well over a hundred seats, another score or so against the walls and with the overflow there must have been two hundred people in attendance, the largest audience Bruno could remember. Nor did he recall ever seeing TV cameras at the back of the hall before, and for once Philippe Delaron from the local Sud Ouest newspaper was not the only reporter present. Bruno sat between Pamela and Fabiola, with his tennis partner, the baron, next in the row and the new magistrate beside him. Annette had changed into jeans and a white silk shirt that looked expensive. Pamela was wearing a light green sweater that Bruno guessed was cashmere. It set off the hints of red in her bronze hair.

  The skeletons, Horst was saying, were around thirty-three thousand years old. That meant they came from the pivotal period when the Neanderthals were being replaced by the Cro-Magnons, modern mankind. Horst paused, then stepped out from behind the podium toward the front of the stage, his face suddenly illuminated by the light from the projector. His shadow fell thick and long on the screen behind him. It was a deliberately theatrical move. His eyes must have been blinded by the projector light, but he swiveled his head slowly as if to look at each part of the audience before he spoke again.

  “This is the great mystery of modern man. How did our ancestors live and prevail while the Neanderthals disappeared? Was it war or disease that wiped them out?” Horst paused again, and raised his arms and slowly let them fall, as if in bafflement. “Or perhaps it was simply evolution, or maybe the inability of the dwindling Neanderthal gene pool to adjust to rapid and repeated changes in climate. Perhaps they could not compete for limited food supplies. Each of these theories has been proposed.”

  Horst paused again, his delivery given gravity by the way the light of the projector, playing on his white beard and casting stark shadows on his cheekbones, gave him something of the look of an Old Testament prophet. He stroked his beard thoughtfully before lowering his voice to speak in almost conversational tones.

  “But we do know that almost every creation myth in human culture keeps alive the terrible and haunting possibility that our ancestors prevailed though deliberate violence, that they destroyed their competitors. It is indeed possible that modern humankind was born through an act of genocide. Some scholars have suggested this might be the real original sin.”

  Bruno found himself sitting forward, almost on the edge of his chair, unexpectedly captivated by Horst’s narrative. This was not like the other talks by Horst that Bruno had attended, one on cave art and the other on the diet of the people who had produced it. They had been interesting but somehow passionless, as if Horst were playing the role of scholar. Now, however restrained his delivery, Horst seemed to be afire.

  Behind Horst on the screen the images of two early humans appeared side by side. One was squat and hairy, with a thrusting forehead, a barrel chest and long arms. This was the image of the Neanderthal, of the brutal caveman that Bruno recalled from schoolbooks. The other was taller, slimmer, with a narrow skull and features that were somehow more familiar as human, despite the clothes of fur. Bruno felt a sudden chill, thinking of other contrasting images he recalled from his schooldays, the way Nazi propaganda had depicted Jews as alien and thuggish creatures to make the contrast with the Aryan as some human ideal. Was it so easy to indoctrinate through images, he wondered, or was Horst right to suggest some human archetype at work from thousands of years ago?

  “Almost wherever we look in the human past, we find the two great narratives of our origins, of a gigantic flood, and of a fratricidal killing or a civil war,” Horst went on. “Amid all the mystery that still shrouds the birth of humanity, those two myths stand out in the folk memory of people after people, tribe after tribe, culture after culture. But now, we have a scientific revolution. We have forensic genetics and the ability to read DNA from bones.”

  Horst explained the latest genetic evidence that the Neanderthals did not disappear entirely. Some Neanderthals shared the type O blood group of so many modern humans and all shared the FOXP2 gene, which is what gives us speech and language. So there must have been inbreeding. He spoke of the collection of Neanderthal DNA from the El Sidrón cave in Spain where eleven Neanderthals died some forty-nine thousand years ago. Cut marks on their bones suggested they had been butchered with stone tools.

  Horst paused, clicked his remote and the photograph of the dig that Bruno had seen that morning reappeared on the screen.

  “And some of what we are about to learn will come from these three bodies at the burial site outside St. Denis that I am describing in public for the first time this evening,” Horst said. “And it is at this point that we enter the field of speculation, and probably of controversy.”

  Bruno narrowed his eyes to concentrate as Horst explained the orthodox theory that Neanderthals and modern humans shared a common ancestor some four hundred thousand years ago, after one of the great migrations from Africa. A minority of experts thought there may also have been some limited interbreeding about a hundred thousand years ago. There was an alternative theory, called hybridization, that Neanderthals and their successors lived together and interbred and shared their skills and their culture as recently as thirty thousand years ago.

  There were three kinds of evidence for this, Horst explained. The first was fossil evidence, at sites such as Arcy-sur-Cure, where Neanderthal bones were found alongside tools and cultural signifiers and personal ornaments usually associated with their successors. That suggested trade and interaction between the two groups. The second evidence was genetic, from the FOXP2 gene, which should have produced far more mutations had it come from a common ancestor as distant as four hundred thousand years ago. Finally there was archaeological evidence from the Lagar Velho cave in Portugal, which contained the bones of a four-year-old child, the first complete Paleolithic skeleton ever unearthed in Iberia. Horst cited leading scientists who judged that the child’s anatomy could only have resulted from a mixed ancestry of Neanderthal and early modern human.

  “But more evidence is required to turn this hypothesis into something closer to historical fact,” Horst said. “We may now have further important evidence of this kind from St. Denis.” Horst clicked his remote to display a photograph of the pit that Bruno recognized but this time with the covering flat stone removed from the three bodies. Suddenly revealed, the two adult skeletons lay side by side, each body bent in almost fetal position. They were tucked into one another like three spoons, Bruno thought. The largest adult, presumably the father, lay to the right, and then his mate and then the bones of the child.

  “Preliminary anatomical studies,” Horst said, raising his voice above the gasps that came from the audience, “and now confirmed by leading scientists here in France, in Germany and in the United States, suggest that St. Denis may have preserved for us through the millennia something extraordinary. We may have here the first modern family, a Neanderthal male, his Cro-Magnon mate and their child.”

  His words were drowned out by bursts of applause and cheers from the back of the hall, where Horst’s students gathered. As the implications of Horst’s remarks began to sink in, Bruno noticed Clothilde, seated to the side of the stage, rise to her feet and join the applause. Bruno rose from his chair, and wit
h profound thoughts of the origins of mankind mixing with prosaic assessments of the impact on the local tourist trade, he began to clap his hands. Thunderous applause came from Jan, a Dane who had settled nearby and become the local blacksmith, his big hands and massive shoulders producing a level of volume that drove everyone else to their feet. Bruno felt rather than saw Pamela and Fabiola rise beside him, and then it seemed everyone in the hall was standing to applaud, their eyes shining and fixed on Horst who stood now silent before them, his gaze fixed on some distant place or time. The entire hall felt energized, as if all present were aware that they were sharing a historic moment.

  “And to think I nearly didn’t come this evening,” Pamela was saying as the applause died away and people began to sit down again. “What a remarkable discovery.”

  “It makes you wonder what else is lying out there under the earth, waiting to be found,” Bruno replied, musing on the irony of the new corpse at this ancient site. It made for a crowded grave.

  “Spoken like a true policeman,” said Pamela, amusement in her voice.

  “Perhaps, but I was thinking more of the price we might pay for ignorance if some things are never found. I was trying to remember what I was taught in school about the Neanderthals, savage brutes, speaking in grunts like apes. Did you have lessons like that?”

  “I think we all did. But I also remember seeing a photo of a flint tool that was shaped like a perfect leaf in some textbook, and how it struck me as beautiful. I made a drawing of it and kept it in my purse for years. I think I still have it somewhere. For a while, I wanted to be an archaeologist, and I have that same feeling again now.”

  She glanced at him, and their eyes met. Bruno felt a surge of affection for her, seeing suddenly in her enthusiasm the little girl who found beauty in a flint that had been shaped and made many millennia ago. He reached down and squeezed her hand as Horst spoke again.

  “Let me end with a warning. These are preliminary and hesitant conclusions, or rather suggestions,” Horst said. “There is more research to be done, and however well we think we understand the differences in bone structure, we can still be mistaken in our identifications. And like all scientists, I am human and can be carried away by emotion, by the yearning to see something that may not truly be there. So I leave you with this image of a family, a long-dead man and woman and their child. We do not know how they died, or who buried them, or who made the ornaments of shells that we think we have found around the woman’s neck. We know only that at one time they lived, that perhaps they loved, and that some other humans cared enough about them to bury this family with respect and ritual. And that, if nothing else, connects us to them across the generations as human beings. I know that I speak for all my colleagues on this dig when I say that we all felt respect for these people, along with a deep gratitude for what they can tell us from this grave they have shared for so long.”

  He bowed and walked off to the side of stage, where Clothilde embraced him before he was swallowed in a knot of journalists and students and flashes of cameras. Bruno could see Teddy’s head towering above the rest of the admirers. Jan, one of Horst’s closest friends, used his great strength to keep some space for him in the throng. Having seen Jan take on and defeat all comers at arm wrestling in the annual St. Denis fair, to raise money for the local infants’ school where his wife used to teach, Bruno was glad to be out of his reach. As the hall lights came back up, people began to rise from their seats and shuffle along their rows, some animated and talking among themselves about the lecture, others deep in private thought. From the far side of the hall his hunting partner Stéphane, his head bowed as he listened to his daughter Dominique chattering into his ear, waved a salute. Bruno waved back, surprised to see the big farmer at such an event. Dominique must have brought him along, proud to show off the fruits of her time at the dig.

  In the front row, the mayor, Gérard Mangin, was beaming in delight as he chatted with his counterpart from Les Eyzies, home to the museum. Bruno could imagine the mental calculations that the mayor would be making about tourism and tax revenues, the need for a parking lot and visitors’ center and the prospect of new jobs. Bruno had already checked the cadastre, the map that showed every property in the commune of St. Denis, and knew that the site of the dig was part of an abandoned farm on which no taxes had been paid for years, which meant that ownership had reverted to the commune.

  “That’s the place where Bruno took me today,” he heard Annette telling Pamela and the baron. “The place where the much-newer body was found.” She turned to Bruno. “I wish you’d told me. We could at least have peeked in and had an advance look at the skeletons.”

  “I had to trek out there to see the body and Bruno didn’t tell me either,” said Fabiola.

  “I didn’t know myself,” Bruno protested. “Horst and Clothilde were very cagey about it when I looked into the pit this morning, and all I could see were bones. They dropped some hints that it was a big discovery, but that was all. I think they wanted to make an impact with the lecture.”

  “They certainly achieved that,” said the baron. “You saw the TV camera?” He looked at his watch. “But it’s time for dinner. Bruno, you were making some arrangements?”

  “I booked us a table at the Moulin,” Bruno said. “We have to stay in Les Eyzies because Horst and Clothilde will be joining us for coffee, after they go off for a celebration pizza with their students. And Horst asked us to save an extra seat for his friend Jan, that Danish guy who’s the blacksmith in St. Chamassy.”

  “He’s sweet,” said Pamela, turning to Fabiola as they all waited in the crowd at the exit. “He made those candlesticks you admired, the ones in the dining room.”

  “I’m so glad I came,” he heard Annette telling the others as they emerged into the expanse of the entrance hall with its timelines on the wall of the stages of human development from six hundred thousand years ago to the present.

  “I wonder if Horst takes any volunteers on his digs,” Pamela said. “I’d love to be more involved in this, but I suppose he only wants archaeology students who have some training.”

  “Well, you can ask Horst when he turns up after his pizza. You’ll never find him in a better mood.”

  “I’m in a good mood too,” she said, turning her head to kiss his cheek and then nestling into his shoulder, their steps keeping time. “So I hope we don’t stay too long here tonight. I want to get you home.”

  “It must be spring,” said Bruno, smiling.

  “Play your cards right and you’ll think it’s Christmas,” she whispered, and then he felt her lips brush tantalizingly against his.

  7

  As the chestnut woods began to thin and the early morning sun suddenly appeared over the far slope, Pamela tapped her horse’s sides with her heels. The stately trot became a canter, and she whooped aloud with the joy of it. Bruno grinned widely as flecks of mud spattered him from her horse’s hooves, and he felt the smooth stretching of his own horse as they kept pace and broke into the open field. A startled hare bounded back for the cover of the woods, rabbits took to their burrows and a great cloud of birds rose from their morning feast of worms and took, complaining noisily, to the sky.

  They cantered on up the slope to the sunlit ridge. As they topped the rise, the wide plateau lying magnificent and green before them, Bruno saw Pamela lean forward over Bess’s neck, urging her into a gallop. Bruno felt the tautening of great equine muscles beneath him as Victoria gathered her strength to follow. His mare moved easily into the new rhythm, her neck reaching out and her nostrils wide, as if eager to butt aside the clods of earth that were being kicked up by the horse ahead. Bruno sat forward, giving her free rein. He lowered his own body to urge her on and felt the rush of wind in his ears and the tattoo of hoofbeats. Movement by car or bike or any machine was slow and lifeless compared with this.

  Pamela reined in and slowed Bess to a trot and then a walk as the plateau began to fall away into the valley of the River Vézère below
them, the distant red rooftops and the church spire of St. Denis nestling into the great bend of the stream. Victoria slowed of her own accord, whinnied softly and then edged up to stand beside Bess. Bruno gazed down on the gentle valley and the town below. The sun’s rays gleamed gold on the cockerel atop the war memorial. They breathed warmth into the honey-colored stone of the buildings. The eddies of the river danced in the sunlight as they rippled beneath the arches of the bridge that dated from Napoléon’s rule.

  He could never leave this place, Bruno thought. St. Denis owned him now, the only place he had ever thought of as home after his years of travels with the army. Seeing it now from horseback had opened fresh perspectives and a new sense of the terrain that he had previously known only in his car and on foot as a hunter. He felt a rush of gratitude to Pamela for teaching him to ride, knowing him well enough to be sure that he’d take to it and enjoy the strange, beguiling intimacy across species that connects a horse and rider. She was a fine woman, he mused, handsome and spirited and sure of herself and the life she wanted to lead.

  Pamela had made it clear that she wanted neither husband nor children, nor even a lover who would share her home. He was her friend for life, she had said one night soon after their affair had begun, but he should know that she saw him as a guest in her home and in her bed. The invitation was hers to bestow. And while Bruno was as jealous as she of his own privacy and equally devoted to the familiar comforts of his own home, he felt puzzled by Pamela. His previous love affairs had been consuming and overwhelming, like diving into a rushing river and being carried headlong with little thought for course or destination. With Pamela, he felt that he took his place amid her horses and her gîtes and her morning ritual with the BBC World Service and her English magazines and all the other furniture of her life. It was all very pleasant and sometimes marvelous, but not what he thought of as love.