by Mary Byrne
So I told the story, again and again.
It was evening. I’d made the soup, tasted and seasoned it, added the cream. I’d put it under the big chimney in the corner, to the side of the big fire we’d only started lighting the day before. It was my only luxury, the fire, with its huge logs. The comte burns his own forests, of course. I had my own favorite armchair, and liked nothing better than to sip a bowl of hot chocolate there in the late afternoon, looking for faces in the flames.
I’d got used to the smell; we all had, over the previous days. It was unpleasant, but was thought to be a malfunction of the septic tank (in those days it was too near the house, the comte was waiting for European money—or money from anywhere—to move it, which he eventually did. There’s now a spanking field of reeds that people come far and wide to see, as an example of How To Do It). The pompe à merde was whistled up like a shot by the comte. This spread another smell far and wide that masked the other one. ‘Nothing wrong with that tank,’ muttered Guérin when he’d done emptying it, ‘there was a toad playing around the opening.’ Guérin, with his conspiratorial air, is close to the earth. He also grows spuds and sells them from the back of his van. Indeed he looks a little like a spud man with a little red spud nose. ‘I presume that fellow lacks any sense of smell,’ the comte once said.
When that wider odor dissipated, the more sinister one just came back again. While all this was going on, I was up to my neck in work at the chateau, twenty-four hours non-stop with all their demands and hot water bottles against the chill because they were back from frolicking in warm water in foreign parts.
Then my brother killed himself in his car, late at night. Suddenly I was also milking his goats and feeding his hens as well.
No one knew—least of all me—where he was going when he crashed, so late at night, and with a packed valise in the car boot.
I only got suspicious when the police started sniffing around, asking too many questions. I didn’t give them the benefit of my opinions—we might have sat on the same primary school benches, but they’d gone further. Let them work it out, if they were that smart.
I buried my brother. Even the priest was reluctant to show up, on the grounds that he was too busy, with seventeen parishes to cater for. So I changed the day, upped the money, and forced the priest to bury him. And may the devil punish all of his ilk.
My brother was no good, but I had to give him a good send-off.
The church was so packed that day there were people standing in the aisle. And when they filed up to bless the coffin and leave a coin, we even got a laugh. A tourist, mistaking the long holy water thing the undertaker proffered for something else (same shape—I always thought—as hospital pisspots for men), inserted his coin into it. The coin disappeared with a glug, and people around her tried to keep from exploding.
Back to the foot.
The soup was the comte’s required velouté, the quail were within minutes, when there was a rustling in the chimney. It became a rush and suddenly something fell with a plop into my soup. It fell shoe first with the bone sticking up, so that at first I thought this the stable boys’ idea of a joke.
Then I realized what it was and—well, I screamed.
Hours later the chateau was still full of gendarmes and people like spacemen in lab suits. They’d called the roofer and managed to extricate the rest of the body from the chimney, but it took them hours of yelling up and down and in and out. The quail dried up, my soup went to a lab in Caen, and while waiting for the police, the comte and his family ate packet soup surreptitiously in their separate kitchens, as they do when they’re fighting (it happens). A cat got into the bedrooms with muddy paws, guaranteeing work for me and the Miele for weeks. ‘And were you shocked, and frightened?’ (thus Langlois). I didn’t tell her I ate hazel nuts from the store I’d collected in the fields and ditches, once I got my appetite back.
It took weeks for the police to inform even the comte, who eventually informed me that the dead man was from an hour away in another county, a known burglar and part of a team that specialized in chateaux burglaries. He’d obviously got stuck in the chimney and taken days to die. The period in question corresponded with the time the comte and his family went abroad and I was free of the kitchen for a while.
What the police couldn’t work out was the identity of his accomplice, becauseonce safely inside, he was obviously meant to open doors and let someone else in to help load the stuff.
It was here that I made Langlois work. I never drew her attention to the main coincidence, but she got to it eventually: my brother’s accident coincided with the time the comte was abroad. When she finally did get to it, I defended him roundly and acted offended. There was no proof anywhere. But I knew my brother had to be rushing for help when he got killed. Otherwise he’d have told me, wouldn’t he? Got me to help?
All I can think of now is the state of mind of the poor devil in the chimney: first thinking my brother was going to save him; then thinking he’d chickened out; finally believing he’d been betrayed.
My hair was white already, so it couldn’t go white again.
Last week the count died, and it rained and rained. The comtesse stuck notices to the door of every church in the county to say that he was lying in state in the chateau chapel and wouldn’t be interred for a week. It poured rain the day of the actual interment, and when the Mass was over the comtesse handed out photos of our Lord and Master as a memento. Politicians and local figures were inside the small chapel and dry, us plebs stayed out in the damp on the lawn under a specially-erected tent that the comtesse referred to as a marquise, among official cars bearing little red-white-and-blue flags and lorry-loads of wreaths. It was all a far cry from my brother’s funeral.
I’ve kept the comte’s photo. I have time to reflect on memory, and on coincidence. I think of all those who once respected the Comte of Stone and those few remaining who still do. I think of the Poles: they must surely fit in well here, late as they are of a society based on discipline and obedience, and Catholic to boot. I see little of them, but when I do I notice their cheap tracksuits and meek, obsequious, eager-to-learn look, with something like cunning at the back of it. I look at the new arrivals to the village, young and rich or young and penniless, at the increasing numbers of Brits in their new playground. And I wonder how we will all cope with this new, comte-less autonomy, this new world where Me comes first…
I think Langlois’ book is an effort to cope with at least some of that.
They installed a pacemaker recently under my skin, a hard thing, big as a matchbox. They have told me not to use a mobile phone or, if I have to, not on that side. They have told me not to travel by plane. As I told them, I have no use for planes or mobiles. I often imagine the next storm may carry me off, and dread the advance sensations it will bring.
Last night I dreamed that my brother was here, so lifelike I could swear I got a whiff of his smelly hunting dogs. I asked and he told me about life on the other side. ‘There’s nothing,’ he threw his hands wide, ‘just nothing.’ I made him say it again and again. Would it not depend on your belief? I wanted to ask timidly. But before I could do so, he vanished.
Frank Stands His Ground, in Belleville
Die Wüste wächst: weh Dem, der Wüsten birgt!
- Nietzsche: Also Sprach Zarathustra
Frank struggled from sleep. The lights were on. Bea was pulling at his shoulder.
He struggled to understand. It was still dark. It was August. It was holidays. They had been out late with friends. Had she gone mad?
‘Get up, quick!’ she hissed. ‘There’s a fire in the café!’
On the ground floor of their building, the café was a comfortably shabby place with a corner bar, over which two fat North African ladies presided. Neighbors often complained about the noise from the jukebox—mostly North African or ‘60s & ‘70s music—but Frank loved it, and the crowd tha
t went with it.
He went through his inventory again. He could hear nothing, except the open-windowed summer night’s calm, when everyone finally sleeps.
‘Get up!’ Bea ordered again, more urgently this time.
He was about to argue when he heard it, from the street below:
‘Au feu! Au feu!’ Then again: ‘Le gaz, levez-vous!’
As he struggled to drag on trousers against his own sleepy awkwardness, he said, ‘But there’s no smell, not like last time.’
‘I’ve already been down,’ Bea said. ‘There’s smoke coming from the kitchen.’
This was as good as a shot of caffeine to him. He scrambled into shorts and a tee-shirt.
Last time there had been a fire in the street they’d smelled it first and called the fire brigade. ‘Are the flames coming out the window yet?’ the fireman had asked calmly. Flames must be a criterion of some kind, he reassured himself as he headed down the stairs.
Since then the quarter was looking up: parking had been banished and footpaths widened. Some buildings had been done up. Trendy new cafes abounded. But the overall impression still was of a shabby islet in a tremendously rich city.
Down on the street people had begun to gather. There was discussion about how to contact the owner. Someone went off to get a mobile phone number.
Suddenly a fire engine nudged into the narrow street, and all hell broke loose.
One of the firemen approached Frank’s door and stairs: ‘You live here? Come with me,’ he was told.
They met Bea on the way down. The fireman told her to go down and stay down.
They started at the top of the building. Windows were open on the stairs to catch any breath of summer wind. There was a whiff of urine from the communal toilets. The fireman questioned Frank about the number of inmates in each apartment before banging loudly on each door, checking numbers and ordering the occupants downstairs on the double. He didn’t bother to ring or knock, just hammered with all his might. Nor did he allow any questions, just repeated firmly to surprised and sometimes angry occupants—reassured by Frank’s presence—to get out, there was a fire in the building and that this was orders. Frank remembered that firemen were part of the army, and felt a chill.
On the second floor, there was no reply from one of the doors. The place was supposed to be for sale, friends of Frank and Bea wanted to buy, but the owner refused even to let them visit. Frank reckoned this was a cover for something.
Next to it, the Tunisians nodded obediently and prepared to exit the building. Whenever he heard the rattle of their backgammon, Frank was always reminded of a Raymond Chandler private eye and the seedy hotels he frequented, where music and fights leaked out over transoms. But Chandler had never seen anything quite so rundown as this.
Frank wavered between amusement and utter despair at the broken panes that opened onto a stinking light-well. Everything stank. Residents making their way up the stairs came eye-level, twice, with the toilets whose cleaning depended on their users. Both remained ajar, and disgusting. Only yesterday as he made his way down, a small cat crept out from an abandoned mattress and skipped through the Tunisians’ door. ‘What the hell is that?’ a voice from within asked, in Arabic. ‘A bloody cat!’ said another. ‘Salop’rie!’ both voices cried together. Frank knocked and stood back discreetly, the way they do in North Africa. The Tunisians invited him in, to explain recent building management bills. Two sets of bunk beds sat on either side of some ten square meters. In one corner a sink was surrounded by washed crockery. To one side of it, on a one-fire gas burner, simmered a pot emitting sensational aromas. The two men wore stained djellabahs. The third, the son of one of them, lay on a top bunk where he was recovering from a leg injury received on a building site where he had been working illegally, as a change from not working at all down in Tunisia.
Frank often wondered where they washed themselves, let alone their clothes, and felt a pang of sorrow for their lives, their wives, their children, and even for their short and boring retirement which would be mostly spent on a bench up the street in Belleville. One of them already spent Saturdays sitting on a stone outside the yard door.
They drank tea and eventually Frank brought up the subject of their families ‘là-bas.’ Down home. They dutifully showed him the photos, the richly-decorated salons, the new village water-pump and mosque paid for with emigrant contributions. Frank asked if they missed it all. They fell about laughing. ‘No way! We have enough trouble dealing with them by phone! They only contact us to ask for money. Oh no—we’re nice and quiet here.’
Frank had remounted the stairs thoughtfully that day, thinking that the world was full of surprises.
When he and the fireman had roused all the occupants, the fireman ordered Frank outside as well.
‘But I need to close up, collect a few essentials,’ he stuttered. Passport, money, access to money ran through his head.
The fireman blocked his way, hands out. ‘Downstairs with the others. Now. This is not a game, monsieur.’
Frank was furious. He had thought he was helping, now he realized he was being used.
Bea was standing with a crowd of scantily clad neighbors from their own and other buildings, watching the firemen rush about. There was still only a rope of smoke in the café itself, emanating from the minuscule kitchen in the back. No one had yet been able to contact the owners or get a key. It started to drizzle. Frank remembered the black and white photos of post-war stars of stage and screen adorning the café that had been bought years back from a gruff provincial who also sold coal and sticks. It had changed hands and habits overnight without as much as a lick of paint.
There was a ripple at the edge of the quiet crowd as the older of the two Algerian women in bright clothes finally turned up. A loud altercation ensued between her and the firemen, with help from onlookers, in Arabic—or was it Berber? —and French. She had been sleeping in a neighboring building. It turned out she was not the owner, merely the minder of the café/bar, and didn’t have the key. The owner, it emerged, was the rough-looking Serb who served early coffees in the mornings. Frank had taken him for just another taciturn waiter. Now it turned out he also came late at night to take the cash and close up for the night. Frank marveled at how little he really knew of the workings of the quarter.
With maddening slowness, the firemen began to hack at the door of the café with what looked like large hatchets. The noise woke more and more people in other buildings, bringing them down onto the street. Gradually the café filled with black smoke.
Bea was building herself into a state of nervous tension. ‘The windows,’ she wailed, ‘all the windows are open! I don’t even have a pullover!’
‘Why the hell don’t they go through the broken window to the side?’ someone said. A sheet of glass was cracked from a bar fight a month or two earlier.
‘This is France,’ said another, ‘rules probably say you have to go through the door.’
‘My lovely apartment!’ cried Bea.
Frank shivered. They’d only just finished painting it. Bea hadn’t always thought it lovely when they’d moved from a bigger, flashier one. But this way he could continue painting and they could pay the bills. Bea could play around in her workshop, creating designer garments for the young, trendy and not-so-rich of the 10th arrondissement.
He began to think of the consequences if they didn’t control the fire. What if the whole building went up? Stranger things had happened. They might have been lucky to get away with their lives. Sometimes the occupants of an entire Paris building inhaled smoke and died in their beds. Occasionally gas exploded and a whole tenement collapsed. Everything they had was up there. He thought of the trouble there would be to replace paperwork and residence permits.
The rain got heavier. Friends from other buildings went for umbrellas and jackets. One sheltered Bea and gave her his last Lucky Strike. Greater love t
han this, Frank thought, and vowed to keep an eye on that one in the future.
‘Always wondered what you do when I’m gone home for the night!’ a voice said laughingly in his ear.
It was Djilali, a café regular, who lived at the top of the street. Frank always reckoned Djilali never slept anyway. Of indeterminate age, oriental origins, possessing the smoothness and money of a rich man, his life was a mystery to Frank. He had a young (second) wife, whom he watched like a hawk, berating young men on the street if they ‘lacked respect’ for her, as he put it. He also had a beautiful daughter reaching puberty for whom he had purchased a mobile phone, ‘To keep track of her. World ain’t what it used to be.’ Frank thought Djilali would know plenty about the world.
The two men shook hands. They had always maintained a steady but distant friendship, but only in the café, as Bea didn’t like him.
Djilali observed the firemen at work. ‘Anti-vandal glass,’ he said. ‘That’ll take a while.’
Frank thought it odd that a lousy café such as this should go to the trouble of installing special reinforced glass doors. While he sometimes wondered if Djilali was into something really odd, he still reckoned he could count on him if he ever were in trouble. Frank did know where Djilali came from, because Djilali had once said, after an absence, ‘Went to Ghardaia by plane from Oran, but they wouldn’t allow me visit—sent me back to the hotel with the bus driver. And I’m Algerian, like them! They let the tourists in, and even two French grandfathers. But not me. They’re that close down there.’
The fire engine ladder was extended, and hoses prepared to get water from the canal. A second and third fire engine nosed up the street.
