The Lovers

by Catherine Rey

  Is it too early to ask what charges have been laid against him? Yes, the sitting-room… We’d better have a seat? Really? What do you want to tell me? Surely it can’t be true… Charged with assault and the attempted murder of Lucie Bruyère? My God, murder… Did he admit to it? Oh no, oh no! And with his grandfather’s rifle? Those two gunshots… That was Ernest?

  Oh no, not Annette! He admitted to battery and assault on Annette Serani? All those years ago? Oh, Ernest, what have you done? Officer Lawson, I can’t help my tears. Ernest is like a brother to me. I’ve tried my best to help him in life… But really, I have failed, haven’t I? I always thought Ernest could transform his rage into art…

  Yes, I did hear about the second skull found in the lake. I actually heard about it when I was in Watooga this morning. I stopped there to buy cigarettes and the whole place was talking about that second skull. There was even a report on the front page of the local paper about the “macabre discovery in Longland”. They say it’s a child’s skull, could be related to a hunting accident that goes back to 1901. The case has never been solved. According to the newspaper a mother and her eight-year-old daughter were shot dead. Am I right?

  Do you mind if I ask what happened exactly? It wasn’t a hunting accident but a double murder? Killed with an axe? Good God! No one was ever convicted… Are we talking about the same people who built Longland? The Germans? And do you know who killed them, the poor woman and her daughter? The father… no! The father killed them both with an axe… what a tragedy! May I ask the name of the little girl who was murdered? Sarah? On the night of the party, June Letourneau, Nicole’s daughter, called out that name… Yes, she called out “Sarah” when we were outside… She said she’d seen a little girl on the lake whose name was Sarah… June is also eight-years-old, you know…

  Do you remember Lucie’s brooch, Lawson? The two skulls, the two heads in a shroud. Magritte’s The Lovers, remember?

  I’ve got to tell you, the most unusual thing happened to me when I stopped in Watooga this morning. A very strange thing… Well, a woman, in her nineties, who seemed half-blind, was seated on a fold-up chair outside the supermarket. She was selling tickets for a raffle. I could see she was talking to herself. I didn’t pay much attention to her mumbling, but then I picked up on something familiar. I hadn’t heard Polish since my father died twenty years ago, but I immediately recognised my native language, the only tongue we spoke at home. I stopped and bought a ticket. And I understood that her mumbling was really a prayer for the dead. Yes, she was mourning the mother and the daughter whose remains were found in the lake.

  While I stood listening to the old woman, details of the party came back to me… Peculiar visions… Remember, I told you when we last met about the presences I had felt around the lake, how Lucie had been pulled away in the most unexpected way. Yes, it almost looked as if she had been forcefully dragged away… I’m sure Lucie had no intention of swimming across the lake… Of course not… It was freezing cold… But for some reason, she couldn’t resist… And I remember being drawn towards the marshes myself, struggling to return to firmer ground… And when Nicole, Rosy and I were searching the caretaker’s house, they too heard the voices calling from around the lake.

  As I started walking back to my car, I was stopped in my tracks by the old woman’s singing of the Kaddish. My eyes welled up with tears… I chanted along… Yisgadal v’yiskadash shmay rabba… B’alma divra chirusei… v’yamlich malchusei v’yamlich malchusei… That would translate, Officer Lawson, into something like… May His great Name grow exalted and sanctified… in the world that He created as He willed…

  When she heard me, the old woman slowly lifted her face and smiled. My father taught me these prayers. I sing the Kaddish when I visit my father’s grave, on the anniversary of his death… He died in springtime… The peach tree in the garden was in bloom… My parents left Poland before it was too late… I was born in Moscow… Anyway, standing there this morning, I watched people walk past, lost as I was in thought, before I got into my car and drove to Longland…

  And so, your men took Ernest away. And I went back inside the house, curious to inspect Ernest’s more recent paintings. That being said, I was apprehensive as to what I might find. I walked through the house… Down the long and dark corridor, the same mouldy smell… This is a terribly gloomy house. And when I pushed open the door to his studio, the shock! Everything, yes, everything had been splashed with red paint, dripping wet with it. Ernest must have emptied several drums of scarlet acrylic. His canvasses, the walls, the floor, the old books from his father’s library, were soaked red… Everything there was ruined. The Origin of the World? Annihilated! The painting had been torn to pieces with a carving knife, still lying on the floor in a pool of red paint… I couldn’t rescue a thing. Not a thing! All his paintings, wasted. I’ll never know what his last works looked like…

  I stepped back, locked the door, the brand-new door. I wandered around and went to the terrace. I looked out to the lake. I thought of the mother and daughter, shot dead, I should say murdered, of my grandparents and my cousins, also murdered, at Treblinka… I thought of the Dharawal people who used to live in this forest not so long ago… You’ve got to wonder what sort of terrible things happened when the settlers took the land and drove the Aborigines out. God only knows how much blood has been spilled around Longland… And so I started humming the Kaddish for all of them…

  Yes, it dawned on me that I had an important task ahead, a work to be continued, and henceforth my duty would be to stay here, in Longland. To help the dead, to help Ernest, to wait for his return, to look after his place as I had been asked to do, try to accept him despite his illness, despite his wrong deeds, try to understand why pain prevents us from loving.

  I’m not trying to make allowances for Ernest’s behaviour, Officer Lawson. What he’s done is unforgivable, still, believe me, I know his entire story. I know where he comes from, and it’s sinister… His father was a cruel man, a vicious monster. I’ve seen the scars from that time, the deep scars… There’s one on his right shoulder, as though a piece of flesh had been gouged out. One day, his father tied him up to a post in the woodshed and lay into him with a length of rubber hose. Ernest was only thirteen. He was left unconscious.

  His mother, well, she didn’t want to know about the beatings. She kept silent when it came to shame and conflict. It didn’t stop her from attending mass on Sundays… She always turned a blind eye to the old man’s cruelty, rejecting her poor sod of a son, thinking he was queer but never trying to understand what he was really about. No, we didn’t talk about those things, gosh, no queers in the family, for God’s sake. But Ernest wasn’t queer… Ernest is not a homosexual… I have shared an apartment with him for several years, I know…

  I’ll recount a poignant confession Ernest made to me once. One night he was very drunk… He could only open up when he was drunk… He told me that something in him had been broken. He remembered the sorts of emotions, those of joy and pleasure, he had felt before the beatings started. He remembered watching the eels in the brook, the dragonflies, the lyrebirds, drawing up an intensity of feeling from his contemplation. One day, drunkenly weeping, he told me about an occasion when he’d been most viciously hit and humiliated and his father had said to him, you poofter bastard, you’re not worth cleaning the muck from my shoes. You see, he never forgot these very words. Neither did I. And from that day, when he returned to the brook and looked at the eels, the dragonflies, the lyrebirds, no emotion stirred in him. Nothing, no pleasure, no pain, no desire, nothing. He killed small animals, he said to me sobbing, and felt no sorrow. He kept at it, disturbed by what was happening to him, but his heart had hardened, dried up. His empathy for the world around him had been annihilated.

  For many years he has worked at restoring that connection, the mysterious thread, because he knows that without that link, he’ll never be able to move upwards, heavenwards, as he says. Ernest is a thirsty ghost looking for a s
pring in a desert, desperately looking, but as he gets closer, the spring turns into a mirage. Somehow Ernest has never stopped being that boy of thirteen tied to a post in the woodshed.

  Yet the most astonishing and miraculous thing is that Ernest’s painting is moving, it’s heart-wrenching, inspiring and poignant… I was deeply moved when I first set eyes on his work, and I’m not the only one. Many worship his art… This is a mystery…

  Sometimes you stand in awe before a beautiful painting, then you discover its creator is an appalling piece of humanity. I am an art dealer… I’ve experienced this many times. I’ve come to the conclusion that there are two selves within the artist’s soul that grow at different speeds: the transcendent self, brought to life through art and only visible in the work itself, and the ordinary self. The transcendent self, partially awoken and inspired, is walking ahead, while the gross self trundles along to catch up. But they don’t always meet…

  Yes, today was a dreadful day, but an important one… I’ve made the decision to close my gallery a while and wait for Ernest’s return. You look surprised… Yes, well, the gallery, honestly, I’m tired of it… I’m tired of selling art to people who don’t even look at what they buy. They enter my gallery, flash their Amex Platinum, only think in terms of market value and profit, and quite frankly, I’ve had enough, I’m fed up with it… This is not what I dreamt of when I started my career in art. Today, I’ve been pondering and I now know I have better and bigger things to do.

  First of all, I’ll clean Ernest’s studio, just like I did years ago. Our old apartment was repainted so many times. It’s no big deal for me. Yes, I’m going to clean the studio before the red paint dries. That way, everything will be back in its place when Ernest returns. Because Ernest has to paint. If I don’t help him, who else will?

  Yes, today was an important day. I’ve made up my mind. I’m going to stay here a while. I will sleep in the front bedroom, as Ernest suggested, the one facing out onto the lake. It used to be Raphaël’s bedroom… I will stay here, carry on with unfinished business and pray for the innocents, pray for the dead, pray for Ernest… And help him to find a good lawyer. Someone who’ll get it right.

  Jean Lucien

  Faubourg Saint-Honoré

  Paris

  France

  Gentlemen, I had a phone call yesterday evening just after seven… I was overcome… Oh… Even now, telling you about it makes my head spin… Excuse me while I take a seat. Ahem… She called me… Yes, it was yesterday, just after seven, when the phone rang. It’s unusual for me to get a call so late… I wondered who it was… It was Mademoiselle Bruyère… Good heavens! She told me that she was in good health, that she’d been caught up in difficult matters… I didn’t wish to pry, I had a good idea of the matters she was referring to…

  Oh yes, I know… I know… Inspecteur Agnelli called me last week. That was considerate of him. He gave me an update of what had been happening in Australia… How that man, that Renfield, had aimed a rifle at Lucie… A hunting gun… The poor child must have been terrified… She managed to escape unscathed, ran through the dark forest and found her way to the road… walked several kilometres to the nearest township… Watooga, I believe, then caught the first train to Sydney and ended up roaming the city streets, destitute, for almost a month. Can you imagine, gentlemen? She had to beg to feed herself. She slept out in the open… A police patrol found her, penniless, gaunt, dirty… She was in such poor physical and emotional state they had her hospitalised immediately… Despite her ordeal, Lucie sounded joyful on the phone… Joyful and truly alive… Thank God!

  Where is she now? Well, she’s in a women’s shelter on Sydney’s North Shore. She said she was being well looked after. I was so delighted to hear that as soon as she’s able, she would resume her work on the biography.

  She said she would start with a chapter about Stalag VIII-A, where I was held captive. See gentlemen, I was caught by German soldiers in June 1940… on 20 June… I was then deported in a cattle truck all the way to the eastern border of Germany… to Görlitz, in Silesia, where there were thirty thousand prisoners, mostly French… There I met my friend Olivier Messiaen. But I think I’ve already shared some of that story with you…

  Lucie was well acquainted with Messiaen’s work when she and I first met, though my name was unknown to her. She was fascinated by his Quartet for the End of Time, and as she and I talked about my friendship with him, she grew captivated by his personality. She felt she had something in common with him.

  Prisoners of war were not doomed to be exterminated… I remember life in Stalag VIII-A as if it were yesterday… In any case, Messiaen arrived in Görlitz in May ’40 and between May and January ’41, he wrote his famous Quartet… Yes… As you are a musician, the German camp commander told him, I will put you in the washhouse with a piece of bread and some manuscript paper and you will write music. Messiaen wasn’t subjected to daily chores, as we were. Thus, he had time to compose… We were forbidden from disturbing him.

  Still, Messiaen’s life was harsh. He would not be repatriated until spring ’41. We had very little to eat. A bowl of soup a day. Messiaen was so hungry that he hallucinated, saw colours and heard sounds, coloured sounds, as he put it. He saw rainbows, aurora borealis, and he turned these colours into sounds… The German camp commander will be remembered for that gesture… And the cellist Jules Malter and the clarinettist André Tanaker… prisoners at Stalag VIII-A too… When Messiaen realised he had three professional musicians, it spurred him on to write a large piece of music. As for the instruments, André and I still had our violin and clarinet. Jules was taken to Görlitz by armed guards to find a cello, something less than the sixty marks he had collected from his fellow inmates. Later we were given a worse-for-wear piano, such a bad instrument that some keys wouldn’t lift back. Messiaen was the pianist, a most virtuosic one…

  We gave a concert every Saturday afternoon… We drew strength from it… Our first performance of the Quartet was on 15 January 1941. It was freezing cold. The Stalag was buried under snow. In Silesia, the temperature can drop to minus thirty-two… We had an audience of five thousand people, all prisoners like us… priests, doctors, labourers, shopkeepers, farmers, servicemen… We could see an ocean of men, haggard, shivering from the cold… André, Jules and I, in our rags and wooden clogs. Messiaen wore a tattered bottle-green outfit that had belonged to a Czech soldier…

  Most of the audience had never attended a concert in their lives and to the listener Messiaen’s music can be hard work. Among the few miniature scores Messiaen had with him was Berg’s Lyric Suite. It gave us, musicians, an idea of what he was inspired by and seeking to create… Messiaen’s music is atonal… it was new for that epoch… difficult to play… To our amazement, the audience listened in devout silence.

  After the performance, Messiaen said to us that never before had his music been listened to with such rapt attention and deep understanding. Yes, that’s what he told us. Our fellow prisoners had been transported, overwhelmed by the beauty of Messiaen’s music… music of the soul… as if all suffering had stopped… Not everyone I’ve met and told my story to has fully grasped why at the Stalag we turned so solemnly to music for moral and spiritual comfort… Lucie did, she understood.

  Messiaen gave us much more than music during his captivity… How can I explain? He had an indefectible faith. Love, understanding, compassion, hope were his credo. He was known around the camp for his kindness… He enabled others to turn to music for solace. In this time of great destitution, he turned to what was essential to him: faith and music. Men would knock at Messiaen’s door and ask for advice, comfort, encouragement… They were desperate, they missed their home, their wives, their children, their parents, they wondered if they would ever leave the camp, if they would survive… We had no idea how long the war would last, what was in store for us, whether it would be illness, a forced march, death… We didn’t know. We were physical wrecks, and mentally exhausted. Messiaen was a
n example to us all. A source of strength. He would patiently dispense words of hope, restore fortitude, without proselytising, without pushing his Christianity down our throats. Every day, he woke up at five “to keep watch”, as he said. And he did. He kept watch. Over himself. Over us.

  At dawn, he listened to the birds, the angels’ voices, as he called them… They found their way into his scores. Birdsongs became a new musical language. Lucie knew that Messiaen had travelled the world to record hundreds and hundreds of bird songs. Yes… Yes… With his wife Yvonne… America, New Caledonia, Australia, New Zealand… Lucie too had recorded some of the Australian birds… At dawn, she taped their songs and took photos of them… She doesn’t know yet what she’ll do with that material… It helps her think, she said, provides joy…

  Messiaen has been an inspiration for me, for his fellow prisoners, and I believe he can still be an inspiration for us all… See, there was no anger in him. He absolutely abhorred war, hatred, wickedness. He was a true pacifist.

  Lucie knows through experience that art is our most faithful friend. She plays music, did you know? She plays the piano, yes. One day, towards the end of our three weeks of interviews, as we were getting to know each other, she told me art was what she clung on to when everything around her fell apart. We, too, survived in the Stalag through art. Music, poetry, literature became our daily bread… And they accompanied us in death too. See, when our fellow prisoners were dying, those who could not find a prayer would still find a way to lessen their pain by reciting a poem. Dante, Mallarmé, Rimbaud… We whispered to our comrades the verses we could remember from school… For those who had no religion, like me, poetry was the consolation. I’m fond of Baudelaire and knew many of his poems by heart…

  It’s time, old Captain, left anchor, sink!

  The Land rots, we shall sail into the night;

  If now the sky and the sea are black as ink,