by Anne H
And then Clara would sometimes play the recorder late at night, sitting on the grass beside the river. She would go through her entire repertoire, and when she ran out of pieces to play, she would improvise strange, strident music that would rend the air around her.
Aurélien would put his hands to his ears then and beg for mercy. He wanted nothing so much as for ordinary life to resume its course, calm and monotonous, both inside his own house and over all his sandy, rocky land. Above all else, he liked evenings without music, when Clara would prepare food and drink and set it on the table before him, with no useless words or gestures.
As she was then during the childhood that wears out and worsens, Clara would remain the salt of Aurélien’s life.
✦✦✦
For two years now, war was being fought in the old countries on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean. And at this moment, signs of that war could be discerned even in the countryside around Sainte-Clotilde, on the opposite bank of the river, where a military camp was going up at Valcour not far from the house of Aurélien Laroche.
Whenever Clara happened to be travelling around the countryside on her father’s old bicycle, she had to give wide berth to the soldiers scattered along the road and to the trucks with their right-hand drive.
They would materialize here and there, in twos or in small groups. They spoke English or French. Called her “darling” or “chérie.” They would invite her to go to bed with them. But Clara merely greeted them, very softly, without moving her lips. “Hello, hello all you men who are watching for me along the road like cats watching for a mouse, let me by, I’m not for you, not for you handsome gentlemen in your khaki shorts, raised in a military camp amidst all sorts of murderous weapons that could mortally wound any girl in the countryside around Sainte-Clotilde who found herself in your way.”
Then Clara would pedal away on her bicycle as if she had an appointment to keep beyond the horizon, on the other side of the mountain stripped bare by firing exercises.
There are so many wild strawberries that summer, they don’t know what to do with them. Clara spends long hours crouched in the grass by the fields, close to the fragrant earth that exhales its warm breath onto her face. From morning to night, to say nothing of the noon-hour when the Angelus drops its clear notes onto the mountain brimming with fire, Clara picks the berries that are hidden under the leaves. Every evening, she brings home big buckets filled with carefully hulled fruit. Her red-stained hands seem not to belong to her.
“A dollar a bucket! A quarter a box!”
Clara sells strawberries to ladies from town who are on vacation in Sainte-Clotilde. Hunched over her bicycle, its baggage-carrier laden with boxes, she travels through the countryside riddled with sun, her nape roasted, and her arms and calves. That sweatiness in her hair.
She comes and goes from one house to the next. Her hoarse voice, half-swallowed, barely audible, tirelessly spouts her song: “A dollar a bucket! A quarter a box!”
No cool spot anywhere in the countryside. The dry shade spread along the road in broad deceptive patches hardly less blazing than the shimmering sun. Customers are increasingly rare, the houses farther and farther apart, nestled under the trees.
Here the road is so narrow that the trees’ shadows seem to touch above her head. A thin thread of unshaded light still persists on the sand in the middle of the road, where Clara has been pedalling ceaselessly since morning. Something stronger than the wind — though wind is absent from the heat-numbed countryside — urges her along on her clattering bicycle, forces her to go deeper into this unknown country.
It is no small thing to cross through the absolute newness of the air along a deserted road, to breathe great gusts of it, of this air that has never been breathed before, to sense its resistance with each turn of the wheel, to feel its warm breath over every inch of her skin.
It cannot continue like this, this midday with no point of reference, always advancing but arriving nowhere, pushed from behind and urged to cross the line of the horizon.
Fir trees and spruce, as far as the eye can see, choking each other, and here and there a solitary pine, nearly transparent tamaracks, a few birches on puddles of green moss. The vast murmur of July rises from all sides at once. Thousands of wild little voices accompany Clara, deafen her, merge with the giddiness of the sun.
✦✦✦
Trees with freshly lopped branches, their wounds white in the harsh light, are a sign that someone has only recently carved this path out of the forest. Clara did not see the mailbox at the edge of the ditch, half buried in the undergrowth, with a foreign name written there in capital letters. Now she is setting her foot on the ground, pulling her heavy bicycle like a horse by its bridle and entering the path where pebbles and tree roots are strewn on the surface of the earth.
Amid the chirping of crickets, the fragrance of resinous trees warmed by the sun, the odour of yellow and russet needles turned over beneath her feet, Clara continues making her way. Her bicycle tires leave sinuous traces on the sand behind her that are soon erased.
All at once, the desolation of the little log camp, blackened and rusty from inclement weather, is there before her, in the centre of a tiny glade that has been barely cleared. Clara realizes at once that the river is nearby and that reassures her, like a familiar presence.
Her vigilant blackbird’s gaze looks all around, peers at the rare trampled grass, the fresh stumps, the still unpeeled tree-trunks, the branches covered with dried and curled-up leaves, a cord of wood stacked carefully next to the little camp with its closed windows.
And now she turns on her heels and sees him, sees a man sleeping in a canvas chair. She takes her time to look at him while he cannot yet see her. He is stunned by the heat, with a book open on his lap, his unseeing face offered to the sun. She stares at him shamelessly, the part of her that is still a child urging her to study thoroughly and unblinkingly all the visible and invisible things in this world.
She sees him now as she will never be able to see him again, with the freedom of the first glance, all the while judging him severely. Tall, thin, bony, bare-chested, khaki shorts, this man who is dry like a flower pressed inside a missal resembles those soldiers hungry for girls and alcohol who travel around at the heart of the day, fair weather and foul, along the narrow roads from Valcour to Sainte-Clotilde.
No doubt she should not let her footsteps decide for her and bring her so close to the sleeping man; this has nothing to do with her, or so it appears. Now she examines him as if through a lens. This man’s solitude, as he lies here abandoned to sleep, is exposed to the devouring sunlight. His ribs, visible beneath the suntanned skin, rise slowly, the heartbeat of his life laid bare, and Clara is unable to move, caught as she is in a kind of distraction that will never leave her again. From now on, without thought or reflection, she will be reduced to the movement of the earth’s blood within her and around her in the countryside.
What the sleeper sees inside the darkness of his night, under his closed eyelids, will never be revealed to Clara during the brief acquaintanceship they will subsequently share. Only barely does she become aware of the invasion of fear on the foreign face that undergoes a change as he dreams in her presence. Presently he trembles so hard that she will have no peace until she makes him emerge from his night. Very softly she calls to him:
“Monsieur! Monsieur! You’re dreaming!”
He wakes with a start, shrinks back towards his house until he can feel the poorly squared treetrunks against his thin back. He says “My God” in his language and his gaze measures the narrow space that separates him from this little girl, who is staring at him like some strange animal.
She does not move, she is rooted to the spot. Her eyes like lustrous coals. Her faded calico dress, long in the back, short in front, reveals her knees.
“My-God-my-Lord-goddamn,” says the
Lieutenant in one breath, in a single devastating word.
And he moves towards Clara. His long dry body folds like a breaking tree, leans up against her. The heat of the sun on the Lieutenant’s skin envelops her in a deadly and powerful smell. She sees from very close the long hands covered with blisters.
Caught in the act of dreaming and dread, he apologizes with foreign words she does not understand.
“I apologize for the fear on my face and the shame of the fear on my damn body, it was only a nightmare, dear child.”
He says nightmare again and laughs a great thunderous laugh. He pulls on his shirt and picks up his dark glasses that have fallen in the grass.
From this moment, Clara will no longer see the Lieutenant’s pale eyes. Scarcely does she notice at times her own oddly shaped image reflected in his glasses as in a distorting mirror.
He takes a long look at the chalky sky through his dark glasses, one injured hand shielding his eyes. He says “Hush,” one finger to his lips. He seems to be waiting for something to shatter and break in the overly calm sky. He says in an overseas French, learned in the region of Tours, that one must never trust the gentleness of the sky and that the fire is hissing and spitting, every night that the good Lord brings us, in the sky over London. Then it turns so bright above the city gleaming with light that you could thread a needle with your eyes closed, as long as you do not tremble, of course. To tremble or not to tremble, that is the question.
In the sultry air all around them, like stagnant water which they swallow and breathe at the risk of losing their footing, the Lieutenant’s laughter bursts out again and then abruptly cracks.
She continues to stand motionless and mute before him, an entire line of ancestors rushing through her veins and forbidding her any fury or exultation, save for prayer or blasphemy.
“You’re not very talkative, my dear!”
The Lieutenant’s English voice is deep, as if it were emerging from his belly. Again he peers at the sky overhead.
“There’s a storm heading our way,” he says.
Clara raises her eyes towards the sky that has started turning white like a blister and shakes her head, No.
“Are you afraid of storms?”
Again she shakes her head, even though she feels as if she is lying, and suddenly she fears the storm more than anything else in the world.
The Lieutenant’s fine heavy voice deteriorates, resembles the drone of an insect shut up in a jar.
“How old are you?”
“In two months I’ll be fifteen.”
He tells her he likes that and laughs, half hidden behind his dark glasses. The only light in his dark face is the dazzle of his white teeth.
The Lieutenant abruptly stops laughing, as if he has been ordered to be silent in the stifling air.
Now she asks for something to drink.
He goes to fetch a glass of water and he waits until she has finished drinking. She clinks the ice, surprised at the mist on the glass, having never seen ice cubes in a glass. She takes pleasure in leaving the warm mark of her fingers on it.
Now the Lieutenant has only one thought in mind: that this little girl who is lingering here should disappear as quickly as possible. For it is the Lieutenant’s most fervent wish to be again as he was before her appearance, utterly alone and nonexistent, stretched out in his canvas chair like a dead man, delivered up to the sun here in this place, which under his closed eyelids could almost be fire set loose in the sky over London.
This time the Lieutenant’s voice is nothing more than a breath that she reads on his lips rather than hears:
“You should go home now, right away, or you’ll get a scolding.”
The Lieutenant gestures broadly with both arms. He points to Clara’s buckets and boxes, scattered over the grass.
“I’ll buy it all!”
She has gathered up her empty buckets and boxes and mounted her bicycle and now she is pedalling into the dying sun, the shadows all but imperceptible at the feet of the trees.
On the return trip as on the outward journey, she is surrounded by the rumour of July. Along both sides of the road, myriad voices form her retinue. Crickets and locusts drone, here and there the acid song of the cicada rises in the air, and on powerful wingbeats comes the call of an invisible bird.
And now these many familiar voices and the blazing vibration of the air withdraw all at once, like the ebbing tide, while the Lieutenant’s foreign voice fills the space, seems to well up from everywhere at once, along the ditches, on the grass of the embankments, and in the distance, behind the edge of the woods, deep inside the moss and underbrush.
His voice, nothing but the Lieutenant’s voice, its hoarse foreign sweetness lacking in sense, with no perceptible words, only the enchantment of his voice, accompanies Clara long after she has taken her leave of him.
Not until she has crossed the bridge over the river and passed through the village is the song of the earth around Clara reduced once more to a chirring of insects along the side of the road, into a confused murmur in the countryside.
✦✦✦
Wielding the axe until his strength was exhausted, he has carved into the countryside. Fifty feet long by fifty feet across. He has appropriated for himself the little abandoned log camp on the bank of the river. He has cleared the view onto the river. During all the time that he will pass among us he will not unpack his valise, which sits on the ground, wide open, between the camp cot and the deal chest of drawers. See him now on his knees on the floor, rummaging in the tangle of his clothes, searching for flasks and bandages. His hands are covered with resin, with gum, and with the blisters he has just burst that now are oozing. He wraps his hands like Jesus and waits until it is fully dark before lighting the gas lamp that sits on the table.
Someone who is invisible in the shadows, mingled with the indistinct breath of the shadows, murmurs that this child is really too self-indulgent, and that this must change.
Sitting there into the night, on a kitchen chair in the middle of his one room, any voices or whispers having retreated to the four corners of the shadows, little by little John Christopher Simmons is filled with the silent night, filled to the brim, passive as a bucket plunged into black water.
Soon it will be possible for him, here in this silence, to feel the forest that is coming closer to the little camp, slowly encircling it; one day it will take back the land that has been cleared all around it, like its own sovereign possession, ravaged by the violence of the axe and of the furious man who held it.
He had not known that he possessed such fury and resentment against the trees.
One day the grown-ups rose in a tall forest at the heart of a noble dwelling in the West End. Their horrified faces could be seen hoisted to the summits of enormous tree trunks. Amid the foliage of the ceiling their dark faces were uncovered, bent over a scrawny little boy only to reproach or to show wrath. Nurses and governesses, tutors and chambermaids, cooks, butlers, chauffeurs formed an endless hedge in the Lieutenant’s memory, standing there to welcome solemnly the parents of the little boy who were moving forward now, overflowing with fierce energy and equine odours.
All must be felled, must be prevented from growing back, the pines, the firs, the spruce, and the birch, all around the log cabin, to ensure the space he needs for his ruminations, here in this land of exile. So thinks the Lieutenant as he lies on his narrow bed, an army blanket drawn up over his face. While set loose forever in his veins, despite space and time, a British child tries to hide his frightened face beneath the authorities’ reproachful gazes.
“That child is afraid of his own shadow, we’ll never make a man of him.”
Born into fear, brought up under the shame of fear as beneath a she-wolf who might have nourished him, now he lies on a camp cot in a god-forsaken cabin, on Canadian soil, thinking
he is safe in the dark, breathing the cabin’s musty air, sensing the field mice nibbling under the floor.
“If the lad falls off his horse we shall put him back in the saddle at once, despite his cries and his tears, so he will learn that fear, like hunger and thirst, heat and cold, can be controlled and ordered at will.”
Wherever he goes, whatever he does, the Lieutenant is always being put on trial. From beyond the ocean he has crossed, from the very end of the British Isles now left behind forever, come to him voices of majesty and authority telling him over and over that he is a coward.
Already he has twice gone to the window and pulled the cretonne curtain over the pane, as if recreating the blackout, as strictly as possible. It would take only a hole in the curtain, an infinitesimal tear, and the blitz would be visible again, released into the darkness. Horror and folly. This night is flawless, utterly black, calm, warm, and soft. He may as well get used to the goodness of the world and roll himself up in it as if it were a blanket.
The Lieutenant climbs back into his bed only inches off the floor, where he can hear close at hand the mice that squeak and nibble more vigorously than ever, as if their days were numbered.
An ancient and tiny terror. Now the Lieutenant is moving his bed so he won’t hear the mice.
English courage has no example in the world but English courage, that’s well known; the Lieutenant snickers, his head in his pillow, while the whole family council assembles in his head, to judge him and condemn him.
“Lieutenant, miraculously or inadvertently this lad has been lost to England’s honour. Anyone who has seen him in a local shelter during a bombing raid can testify to that. Tears and fits of hysterics. We shall send him away to regain his health, out of this world of sound and fury. The Commonwealth is great. Surely we’ll be able to find a peaceful part of it where he can pursue his military service in perfect tranquillity.”
