#title Into Their Labours Trilogy
#subtitle ‘Pig Earth’, ‘Once in Europa’ and ‘Lilac and Flag’
#author John Berger
#lang en
#pubdate 2026-07-18T12:20:34.747Z
#date 1991
#publisher Pantheon Books (New York)
#isbn 0307794229, 9780307794222
#topics fiction, historical fiction, country life, peasants, villages
#source <[[https://archive.org/details/intotheirlabours00berg][www.archive.org/details/intotheirlabours00berg]]>
#notes ‘Pig Earth’ was published in 1979, ‘Once in Europa’ in 1983 & ‘Lilac and Flag’ in 1990.
#cover j-b-john-berger-into-their-labours-trilogy-11.jpg

*** Synopsis | ~~

<quote>
“One of the great works of fiction in this century.” —*Booklist*
</quote>

With the publication of each new volume of this remarkable trilogy—first Pig *Earth* in 1979, then *Once in Europa* in 1987, and, finally, *Lilac and Flag* in 1990—John Berger’s unique novel has gained growing recognition as one of the towering works of the literary imagination of our time. Though each novel stands on its own, their publication in one volume now reveals the epic reach of Berger’s plan, both in its daring design, the urgency of its concerns, and the haunting beauty of its prose. Singlehandedly and against the mainstream of literary fashion, Berger has created a new kind of fiction with which to confront one of the great historical themes of this century: the near-total elimination in our lifetime of peasant village life, and with it the ruthless destruction of an ancient culture of survival by the brutal tide of modernity.

Berger the storyteller accomplishes his purpose by the sheer magic of his stories. They are extraordinary tales about ordinary people that have prompted critics to look for comparisons in the masterworks of Flaubert and Joyce. Set in a small peasant village in the French Alps, *Pig Earth* re-creates the texture of a living world ruled by the harsh realities of weather, crops, animals, and incessant hard work. This world is beginning to come apart in Once _in Europa, as the young who leave home seek a new shelter from the anguish of banishment in each other’s arms to find comfort in love. *Lilac and Flag* completes the odyssey from village to metropolis; the two lovers are children of migrants in the vast anonymous city of Troy, engaged in a desperate struggle to stay alive and human amid crime, crack, and death. Berger brings his world alive with heartbreaking beauty. Out of passion, pity, lust, and tenderness, Berger creates scenes as sensual as they are profoundly human, in which the physical and lyrical become one, transforming the dynamics of history into enthralling and unforgettable human drama.

In Berger, the poet, philosopher, historian, and political theorist become fused with the storyteller, who has found access to the secrets and subtleties of the human soul with a compassionate insight rarely matched by writers of our time.

*** About the Author | ~~

John Berger was born in London in 1926. He is well known for his novels and stories as well as for his works of nonfiction, including several volumes of art criticism. His first novel, *A Painter of Our Time*, was published in 1958, and since then his books have included the novel *G.*, which won the Booker Prize in 1972.

With *Lilac and Flag* (1990), Berger completed his peasant trilogy *Into Their Labours*, which also includes *Pig Earth* (1979) and *Once in Europa* (1987). His volumes of essays include *Keeping a Rendezvous* (1991), *The Sense of Sight* (1985), *Ways of Seeing* (1972), and *Selected Essays* (2001).

In 1962 Berger left Britain permanently, and he now lives in a small village in the French Alps.

*** By the Same Author

**Fiction**<br> The Foot of Clive<br> Corker’s Freedom<br> A Fortunate Man<br> Seventh Man<br> The Trilogy: Into Their Labours (Pig Earth, Once in Europa, Lilac and Flag)<br> And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos<br> Photocopies<br> To the Wedding<br> King<br> Here is Where We Meet<br> From A to X

**Poetry**<br> Pages of the Wound

**Non-Fiction**<br> A Painter of Our Time<br> Permanent Red<br> Art and Revolution<br> The Moment of Cubism and Other Essays<br> The Look of Things: Selected Essays and Articles<br> Ways of Seeing<br> Another Way of Telling<br> The Success and Failure of Picasso<br> About Looking<br> The Sense of Sight<br> Keeping a Rendezvous<br> The Shape of a Pocket<br> Titian: Nymph and Shepherd <em>(with Katya Berger)</em><br> Selected Essays of John Berger <em>(ed. Geoff Dyer)</em><br> Bento’s Sketchbook

** Acknowledgements

The trilogy *Into Their Labours* has occupied me during the last fifteen years. During this period, Tom Engelhardt has edited my books. Dear Tom, you have encouraged, corrected, and upheld me. Thank you.

Perhaps I would never have had the courage to begin the project if I had not received, before a page was written and until today, the support of the Transnational Institute in Amsterdam. To everyone in Paulus Potterstraat and Connecticut Avenue and to Saul Landau, thank you.

*** Epigraph | ~~

“Others have laboured and ye are entered

into their labours.”

ST JOHN 4–38

* Pig-Earth

*** Dedication | ~~

This book is dedicated to five friends who have taught us:

*Théophile Jorat<br> Angeline Coudurier<br> André Coudurier<br> Théophile Gay<br> Marie Raymond*

to the friends who have helped us learn:

Raymond Berthier, Luc and Marie-<br> Thérese Bertrand, Gervais and Mélina<br> Besson, Jean-Paul Besson, Denis Besson,<br> Michel Besson, Gérard Besson, Christian<br> Besson, Marius Chavanne, Roger and<br> Noelle Coudurier, Michel Coudurier, La<br> Doxie, Régis Duret, Gaston Forrestier,<br> Marguerite Gay, Noel and Hélène Gay,<br> Marcelle Gay, Jeanne Jorat, Armand<br> Jorat, Daniel and Yvette Jorat, Norbert<br> Jorat, Maurice and Claire Jorat, François<br> and Germaine Malgrand, Francis and<br> Joelle Malgrand. Marcel Nicoud, André<br> Perret, Yves and Babette Peter,<br> Jean-Marie and Josephine Pittet, Roger<br> and Rolande Pittet, Bernadette Pittet,<br> François Ramel, Francois and Léonie<br> Raymond, Basil Raymond, Guy and<br> Anne-Marie Roux, Le Violon, Walter

and to Beverly with whom I learn.

** Introduction

<quote>
“The earth shows up those of value and those who are good for nothing.” A peasant judgement quoted by Jean Pierre Vernant in *Mythe et Pensée Chez les Grecs*. (Vol. 2. Paris 1971)

“The peasantry consists of small agricultural producers who with the help of simple equipment and the labour of their families produce mainly for their own consumption and for the fulfillment of obligations to the holders of political and economic power.” Theodor Shanin. *Peasants and Peasant Societies*. (London 1976)
</quote>

PEASANT LIFE is a life committed completely to survival. Perhaps this is the only characteristic fully shared by peasants everywhere. Their implements, their crops, their earth, their masters may be different, but whether they labour within a capitalist society, a feudal one or others which cannot be so easily defined, whether they grow rice in Java, wheat in Scandinavia or maize in South America, whatever the differences of climate, religion and social history, the peasantry everywhere can be defined as a class of survivors. For a century and a half now the tenacious ability of peasants to survive has confounded administrators and theorists. Today it can still be said that the majority in the world are peasants. Yet this fact masks a more significant one. For the first time ever it is possible that the class of survivors may not survive. Within a century there may be no more peasants. In Western Europe, if the plans work out as the economic planners have foreseen, there will be no more peasants within twenty-five years.

Until recently, the peasant economy was always an economy within an economy. This is what has enabled it to survive global transformations of the larger economy—feudal, capitalist, even socialist. With these transformations the peasant’s mode of struggle for survival often altered but the decisive changes were wrought in the methods used for extracting a surplus from him: compulsory labour services, tithes, rents, taxes, sharecropping, interests on loans, production norms, etc.

Unlike any other working and exploited class, the peasantry has always supported itself and this made it, to some degree, a class apart. In so far as it produced the necessary surplus, it was integrated into the historical economic-cultural system. In so far as it supported itself, it was on the frontier of that system. And I think one can say this, even where and when peasants make up the majority of the population.

If one thinks of the hierarchical structure of feudal or Asian societies as being roughly pyramidal, the peasantry were on the base frontier of the triangle. This meant, as with all frontier populations, that the political and social system offered them the minimum of protection. For this they had to look to themselves—within the village community and the extended family. They maintained or developed their own unwritten laws and codes of behaviour, their own rituals and beliefs, their own orally transmitted body of wisdom and knowledge, their own medicine, their own techniques and sometimes their own language. It would be wrong to suppose that all this constituted an independent culture, unaffected by the dominant one and by its economic, social or technical developments. Peasant life did not stay exactly the same throughout the centuries, but the priorities and values of peasants (their strategy for survival) were embedded in a tradition which outlasted any tradition in the rest of society. The undeclared relation of this peasant tradition, at any given moment, to the dominant class culture was often heretical and subversive. “Don’t run away from anything,” says the Russian peasant proverb, “but don’t do anything.” The peasant’s universal reputation for cunning is a recognition of this secretive and subversive tendency.

No class has been or is more economically conscious than the peasantry. Economics consciously determines or influences every ordinary decision which a peasant takes. But his economics are not those of the merchant, nor those of bourgeois or Marxist political economy. The man who wrote with most understanding about lived peasant economics was the Russian agronomist Chayanov. Anyone who wishes to understand the peasant should, among other things, go back to Chayanov.

The peasant did not conceive of what was extracted from him as a surplus. One might argue that the politically unconscious proletarian is equally unaware of the surplus value he creates for his employer, yet the comparison is misleading—for the worker, working for wages in a money economy, can be easily deceived about the value of what he produces, whereas the peasant’s *economic* relation to the rest of society was always transparent. His family produced or tried to produce what they needed to live on, and he saw part of this produce, the result of his family’s labour, being appropriated by those who had not laboured. The peasant was perfectly aware of what was being extracted from him, yet he did not think of this as a surplus for two reasons, the first material and the second epistemological. 1) It was not a surplus because his family needs had not already been assured. 2) A surplus is an end product, the result of a long-completed process of working and of meeting requirements. To the peasant, however, his enforced social obligations assumed the form of a *preliminary obstacle*. The obstacle was often insurmountable. But it was on the other side of it that the other half of the peasant economy operated, whereby his family worked the land to assure its own needs.

A peasant might think of his imposed obligations as a natural duty, or as some inevitable injustice, but in either case they were something which had to be endured *before* the struggle for survival opened. He had first to work for his masters, later for himself. Even if he were sharecropping, the master’s share came *before* the basic needs of his family. If the work were not too light in the face of the almost unimaginable burden of labour placed on the peasant, one might say that his enforced obligations assumed the form of a permanent handicap. It was *despite this* that the family had to open the already uneven struggle with nature to gain by their own work their own subsistence.

Thus the peasant had to survive the permanent handicap of having a “surplus” taken from him; he had to survive, in the subsistence half of his economy, all the hazards of agriculture—bad seasons, storms, droughts, floods, pests, accidents, impoverished soil, animal and plant diseases, crop failures; and furthermore, at the base frontier, with the minimum of protection, he had to survive social, political and natural catastrophes—wars, plagues, brigands, fire, pillaging, etc.

The word *survivor* has two meanings. It denotes somebody who has survived an ordeal. And it also denotes a person who has continued to live when others disappeared or perished. It is in this second sense that I am using the word in relation to the peasantry. Peasants were those who remained working, as distinct from the many who died young, emigrated or became paupers. At certain periods those who survived were certainly a *minority*. Demographic statistics give some idea of the dimensions of the disasters. The population of France in 1320 was seventeen million. A little over a century later it was eight million. By 1550 it had climbed to twenty million. Forty years later it fell to eighteen million.

In 1789 the population was twenty-seven million, of whom twenty-two million were rural. The revolution and the scientific progress of the nineteenth century offered the peasant land and physical protection such as he had not known before; at the same time they exposed him to capital and the market economy; by 1848 the great peasant exodus to the cities had begun and by 1900 there were only eight million French peasants. The deserted village has probably almost always been—and certainly is again today—a feature of the countryside: it represents a site of no survivors.

A comparison with the proletariat in the early stages of the industrial revolution may clarify what I mean by a class of survivors. The working and living conditions of the early proletariat condemned millions to early death or disabling illness. Yet the class as a whole, its numbers, its capacity, its power, was growing. It was a class engaged in, and submitting to, a process of continual transformation and increase. It was not the victims of its ordeals who determined its essential class character, as in a class of survivors, but rather its demands and those who fought for them.

From the eighteenth century onwards populations all over the world mounted, at first slowly and later dramatically. Yet for the peasantry this general experience of a new security of life could not overlay its class memory of earlier centuries, because the new conditions, including those brought about by improved agricultural techniques, entailed new threats: the large-scale commercialisation and colonialisation of agriculture, the inadequacy of ever smaller plots of land to support entire families, hence large-scale emigration to the cities where the sons and daughters of peasants were absorbed into another class.

The nineteenth-century peasantry was still a class of survivors, with the difference that those who disappeared were no longer those who ran away or who died as a result of famine and disease, but those who were forced to abandon the village and become wage earners. One should add that under these new conditions a few peasants became rich, but in doing so they also ceased, within a generation or two, to be peasants.

To say that peasants are a class of survivors may seem to confirm what the cities with their habitual arrogance have always said about peasants—that they are backward, a relic of the past. Peasants themselves, however, do not share the view of time implicit in such a judgement.

Inexhaustibly committed to wresting a life from the earth, bound to the present of endless work, the peasant nevertheless sees life as an interlude. This is confirmed by his daily familiarity with the cycle of birth, life and death. Such a view may predispose him to religion, yet religion is not at the origin of his attitude and, anyway, the religion of peasants has never fully corresponded with the religion of rulers and priests.

The peasant sees life as an interlude because of the dual contrary movement through time of his thoughts and feelings which in turn derives from the dual nature of the peasant economy. His dream is to return to a life that is not handicapped. His determination is to hand on the means of survival (if possible made more secure, compared to what he inherited) to his children. His ideals are located in the past; his obligations are to the future, which he himself will not live to see. After his death he will not be transported into the future—his notion of immortality is different: he will return to the past.

These two movements, towards the past and the future, are not as contrary as they might first appear because basically the peasant has a cyclic view of time. The two movements are different ways of going round a circle. He accepts the sequence of centuries without making that sequence absolute. Those who have a unilinear view of time cannot come to terms with the idea of cyclic time: it creates a moral vertigo since all their morality is based on cause and effect. Those who have a cyclic view of time are easily able to accept the convention of historic time, which is simply the trace of the turning wheel.

The peasant imagines an unhandicapped life, a life in which he is not first forced to produce a surplus before feeding himself and his family, as a primal state of being which existed before the advent of injustice. Food is man’s first need. Peasants work on the land to produce food to feed themselves. Yet they are forced to feed others first, often at the price of going hungry themselves. They see the grain in the fields which they have worked and harvested—on their own land or on the landowner’s—being taken away to feed others, or to be sold for the profit of others. However much a bad harvest is considered an act of God, however much the master/landowner is considered a natural master, whatever ideological explanations are given, the basic fact is clear: they who can feed themselves are instead being forced to feed others. Such an injustice, the peasant reasons, cannot always have existed, so he assumes a just world at the beginning. At the beginning a primary state of justice towards the primary work of satisfying man’s primary need. All spontaneous peasant revolts have had the aim of resurrecting a just and egalitarian peasant society.

This dream is not the usual version of the dream of paradise. Paradise, as we now understand it, was surely the invention of a relatively leisured class. In the peasant’s dream, work is still necessary. Work is the condition for equality. Both the bourgeois and Marxist ideals of equality presume a world of plenty; they demand equal rights for all before a cornucopia, a cornucopia to be constructed by science and the advancement of knowledge. What the two understand by equal rights is of course very different. The peasant ideal of equality recognises a world of scarcity, and its promise is for mutual fraternal aid in struggling against this scarcity and a just sharing of what the work produces. Closely connected with the peasant’s recognition, as a survivor, of scarcity is his recognition of man’s relative ignorance. He may admire knowledge and the fruits of knowledge but he never supposes that the advance of knowledge reduces the extent of the unknown. This non-antagonistic relation between the unknown and knowing explains why some of his knowledge is accommodated in what, from the outside, is defined as superstition and magic. Nothing in his experience encourages him to believe in final causes, precisely because his experience is so wide. The unknown can only be eliminated within the limits of a laboratory experiment. Those limits seem to him to be naïve.

Opposing the movement of the peasant’s thoughts and feelings about a justice in the past are other thoughts and feelings directed towards the survival of his children in the future. Most of the time the latter are stronger and more conscious. The two movements balance each other only in so far as together they convince him that the interlude of the present cannot be judged in its own terms; morally it is judged in relation to the past, materially it is judged in relation to the future. Strictly speaking, nobody is less opportunist (taking the immediate opportunity regardless) than the peasant.

How do peasants think or feel about the future? Because their work involves intervening in or aiding an organic process most of their actions are future-oriented. The planting of a tree is an obvious example, but so, equally, is the milking of a cow: the milk is for cheese or butter. Everything they do is anticipatory—and therefore never finished. They envisage this future, to which they are forced to pledge their actions, as a series of ambushes. Ambushes of risks and dangers. The most likely future risk, until recently, was hunger. The fundamental contradiction of the peasant’s situation, the result of the dual nature of the peasant economy, was that they who produced the food were the most likely to starve. A class of survivors cannot afford to believe in an arrival point of assured security or well-being. The only, but great, future hope is survival. This is why the dead do better to return to the past where they are no longer subject to risk.

The future path through future ambushes is a continuation of the old path by which the survivors from the past have come. The image of a path is apt because it is by following a path, created and maintained by generations of walking feet, that some of the dangers of the surrounding forests or mountains or marshes may be avoided. The path is tradition handed down by instructions, example and commentary. To a peasant the future is this future narrow path across an indeterminate expanse of known and unknown risks. When peasants cooperate to fight an outside force, and the impulse to do this is always defensive, they adopt a guerrilla strategy—which is precisely a network of narrow paths across an indeterminate hostile environment.

The peasant view of human destiny, such as I am outlining, was not, until the advent of modern history, essentially different from the view of other classes. One has only to think of the poems of Chaucer, Villon, Dante; in all of them Death, whom nobody can escape, is the surrogate for a generalized sense of uncertainty and menace in face of the future.

Modern history begins—at different moments in different places—with the principle of progress as both the aim and motor of history. This principle was born with the bourgeoisie as an ascendant class, and has been taken over by all modern theories of revolution. The twentieth-century struggle between capitalism and socialism is, at an ideological level, a fight about the content of progress. Today within the developed world the initiative of this struggle lies, at least temporarily, in the hands of capitalism which argues that socialism produces backwardness. In the underdeveloped world the “progress” of capitalism is discredited.

Cultures of progress envisage future expansion. They are forward-looking because the future offers ever larger hopes. At their most heroic these hopes dwarf Death (*La Rivoluzione o la Morte!*). At their most trivial they ignore it (consumerism). The future is envisaged as the opposite of what classical perspective does to a road. Instead of appearing to become ever narrower as it recedes into the distance, it becomes ever wider.

[[j-b-john-berger-into-their-labours-trilogy-3.jpg]]

A culture of survival envisages the future as a sequence of repeated acts for survival. Each act pushes a thread through the eye of a needle and the thread is tradition. No overall increase is envisaged.

[[j-b-john-berger-into-their-labours-trilogy-4.jpg]]

If now, comparing the two types of culture, we consider their view of the past as well as the future, we see that they are mirror opposites of one another.

[[j-b-john-berger-into-their-labours-trilogy-5.jpg]]

This may help to explain why an experience within a culture of survival can have the opposite *significance* to the comparable experience within a culture of progress. Let us take, as a key example, the much proclaimed conservatism of the peasantry, their resistance to change; the whole complex of attitudes and reactions which often (not invariably) allows a peasantry to be counted as a force for the right wing.

First, we must note that the counting is done by the cities, according to an historical scenario opposing left to right, which belongs to a culture of progress. The peasant refuses that scenario, and he is not stupid to do so, for the scenario, whether the left or right win, envisages his disappearance. His conditions of living, the degree of his exploitation and his suffering may be desperate, but he cannot contemplate the disappearance of what gives meaning to everything he knows, which is, precisely, his will to survive. No worker is ever in that position, for what gives meaning to his life is either the revolutionary hope of transforming it, or money, which is received in exchange against his life as a wage earner, to be spent in his “true life” as a consumer.

Any transformation of which the peasant dreams involves his re-becoming “the peasant” he once was. The worker’s political dream is to transform everything which up to now has condemned him to be a worker. This is one reason why an alliance between workers and peasants can only be maintained if it is for a specific aim (the defeat of a foreign enemy, the expropriation of large landowners) to which both parties are agreed. No general alliance is normally possible.

To understand the significance of peasant conservatism related to the sum of peasant experience, we need to examine the idea of change with a different optic. It is an historical commonplace that change, questioning, experiment, flourished in the cities and emanated outwards from them. What is often overlooked is the character of everyday urban life which allowed for such an interest in research. The city offered to its citizens comparative security, continuity, permanence. The degree offered depended upon the class of the citizen, but compared to life in a village, all citizens benefited from a certain protection.

There was heating to counteract changes of temperature, lighting to lessen the difference between night and day, transport to reduce distances, relative comfort to compensate for fatigue; there were walls and other defences against attack, there was effective law, there were almshouses and charities for the sick and aged, there were libraries of permanent written knowledge, there was a wide range of services—from bakers and butchers through mechanics and builders to doctors and surgeons—to be called upon whenever a need threatened to disrupt the customary flow of life, there were conventions of social behaviour which strangers were obliged to accept (when in Rome … ), there were buildings designed as promises of, and monuments to, continuity.

During the last two centuries, as urban theories and doctrines of change have become more and more vehement, the degree and efficacy of such everyday protection has correspondingly increased. Recently the insulation of the citizen has become so total that it has become suffocating. He lives alone in a serviced limbo—hence his newly-awakened, but necessarily naïve, interest in the countryside.

By contrast the peasant is unprotected. Each day a peasant experiences more change more closely than any other class. Some of these changes, like those of the seasons or like the process of ageing and failing energy, are foreseeable; many—like the weather from one day to the next, like a cow choking to death on a potato, like lightning, like rains which come too early or too late, like fog that kills the blossom, like the continually evolving demands of those who extract the surplus, like an epidemic, like locusts—are unpredictable.

In fact the peasant’s experience of change is more intense than any list, however long and comprehensive, could ever suggest. For two reasons. First, his capacity for observation. Scarcely anything changes in a peasant’s entourage, from the clouds to the tail feathers of a cock, without his noticing and interpreting it in terms of the future. His active observation never ceases and so he is continually recording and reflecting upon changes. Secondly, his economic situation. This is usually such that even a slight change for the worse—a harvest which yields twenty-five per cent less than the previous year, a fall in the market price of the harvest produce, an unexpected expense—can have disastrous or near-disastrous consequences. His observation does not allow the slightest sign of change to pass unnoticed, and his debt magnifies the real or imagined threat of a great part of what he observes.

Peasants live with change hourly, daily, yearly, from generation to generation. There is scarcely a constant given to their lives except the constant necessity of work. Around this work and its seasons they themselves create rituals, routines and habits in order to wrest some meaning and continuity from a cycle of remorseless change: a cycle which is in part natural and in part the result of the ceaseless turning of the millstone of the economy within which they live.

The very great variety of these routines and rituals which attach themselves to work and to the different phases of a working life (birth, marriage, death) are the peasant’s own protection against a state of continual flux. Work routines are traditional and cyclic—they repeat themselves each year, and sometimes each day. Their tradition is retained because it appears to assure the best chance of the work’s success, but also because, in repeating the same routine, in doing the same thing in the same way as his father or his neighbour’s father, the peasant assumes a continuity for himself and thus consciously experiences his own survival.

The repetition, however, is essentially and only formal. A work routine for a peasant is very different from most urban work routines. Each time a peasant does the same job there are elements in it which have changed. The peasant is continually improvising. His faithfulness to tradition is never more than approximate. The traditional routine determines the ritual of the job: its content, like everything else he knows, is subject to change.

When a peasant resists the introduction of a new technique or method of working, it is not because he cannot see its possible advantages—his conservatism is neither blind nor lazy—but because he believes that these advantages cannot, by the nature of things, be guaranteed, and that, should they fail, he will then be cut off alone and isolated from the routine of survival. (Those working with peasants for improved production should take this into account. A peasant’s ingenuity makes him open to change, his imagination demands continuity. Urban appeals for change are usually made on the opposite basis: ignoring ingenuity, which tends to disappear with the extreme division of labour, they promise the imagination a new life.)

Peasant conservatism, within the context of peasant experience, has nothing in common with the conservatism of a privileged ruling class or the conservatism of a sycophantic petty-bourgeoisie. The first is an attempt, however vain, to make their privileges absolute; the second is a way of siding with the powerful in exchange for a little delegated power over other classes. Peasant conservatism scarcely defends any privilege. Which is one reason why, much to the surprise of urban political and social theorists, small peasants have so often rallied to the defence of richer peasants. It is a conservatism not of power but of meaning. It represents a depository (a granary) of meaning preserved from lives and generations threatened by continual and inexorable change.

Many other peasant attitudes are frequently misunderstood or understood in an exactly opposite sense—as the diagram of the mirror-image has already suggested. For example, peasants are thought to be money-minded whereas, in fact, the behaviour which gives rise to this idea derives from a profound suspicion of money. For example, peasants are said to be unforgiving, yet this trait, in so far as it is true, is the result of the belief that life without justice becomes meaningless. It is rare for any peasant to die unforgiven.

We must now ask this question: What is the contemporary relation between peasants and the world economic system of which they form part? Or, to put this question in terms of our consideration of peasant experience: What significance can this experience have today in a global context?

Agriculture does not necessarily require peasants. The British peasantry was destroyed (except in certain areas of Ireland and Scotland) well over a century ago. In the USA there have been no peasants in modern history because the rate of economic development based on monetary exchange was too rapid and too total. In France 150,000 peasants now leave the land every year. The economic planners of the EEC envisage the systematic elimination of the peasant by the end of the century. For short-term political reasons, they do not use the word *elimination* but the word *modernisation*. Modernisation entails the disappearance of the small peasants (the majority) and the transformation of the remaining minority into totally different social and economic beings. The capital outlay for intensive mechanisation and chemicalisation, the necessary size of the farm exclusively producing for the market, the specialisation of produce by area, all mean that the peasant family ceases to be a productive and consuming unit, and that, instead, the peasant becomes the dependent of the interests which both finance him and buy from him. The economic pressure on which such a plan depends is supplied by the falling market value of agricultural produce. In France today the buying power of the price of one sack of wheat is three times less than it was fifty years ago. The ideological persuasion is supplied by all the promises of consumerism. An intact peasantry was the only class with an inbuilt resistance to consumerism. When a peasantry is dispersed, markets are enlarged.

In much of the Third World the systems of land tenure (in large parts of Latin America one per cent of landowners own sixty per cent of the farm land, and one hundred per cent of the best land), the imposition of monocultures for the benefit of corporate capitalism, the marginalisation of subsistence farming, and, only because of these other factors, the mounting population, cause more and more peasants to be reduced to such a degree of absolute poverty that, without land or seed or hope, they lose all previous social identity. Many of these ex-peasants make for the cities where they form a millionfold mass such as has never existed before, a mass of static vagrants, a mass of unemployed attendants: attendants in the sense that they wait in the shanty towns, cut off from the past, excluded from the benefits of progress, abandoned by tradition, serving nothing.

Engels and most early-twentieth-century Marxists foresaw the disappearance of the peasant in face of the greater profitability of capitalist agriculture. The capitalist mode of production would do away with small peasant production “as a steam engine smashes a wheelbarrow.” Such prophecies underestimated the resilience of the peasant economy and overestimated the attraction of agriculture for capital. On the one hand, the peasant family could survive without profitability (cost accounting was inapplicable to the peasant economy); and on the other hand, for capital, land, unlike other commodities, is not infinitely reproduceable, and investment in agricultural production finally meets a constraint and yields decreasing returns.

The peasant has survived far longer than was predicted. But within the last forty years monopoly capital, through its multinational corporations, has created the new highly profitable structure of agribusiness whereby it controls, not necessarily the production, but the market for agricultural inputs and outputs and the processing, packaging and selling of every kind of foodstuff. The penetration of this market into all corners of the globe is eliminating the peasant. In the developed countries by more or less planned conversion; in the underdeveloped countries catastrophically. Previously cities were dependent on the countryside for their food, peasants being forced, in one way or another, to part with their so-called surplus. Soon the world countryside may be dependent on the cities even for the food its own rural population requires. When and if this happens, peasants will have ceased to exist.

During the same period of the last forty years, in other parts of the Third World—China, Cuba, Vietnam, Cambodia, Algeria—revolutions have been made by peasants, and in their name. It is too soon to know what kind of transformation of the peasant experience these revolutions will achieve, and how far their governments can or cannot maintain a different set of priorities to those imposed by the world market of capitalism.

It must follow from what I have already said that nobody can reasonably argue for the preservation and maintenance of the traditional peasant way of life. To do so is to argue that peasants should continue to be exploited, and that they should lead lives in which the burden of physical work is often devastating and always oppressive. As soon as one accepts that peasants are a class of survivors—in the sense in which I have defined the term—any idealisation of their way of life becomes impossible. In a just world such a class would no longer exist.

Yet to dismiss peasant experience as belonging only to the past, as having no relevance to modern life, to imagine that the thousands of years of peasant culture leave no heritage for the future—simply because it was seldom embodied in lasting objects—to continue to maintain, as has been maintained for centuries, that peasant experience is marginal to civilisation, is to deny the value of too much history and too many lives. No line of exclusion can be drawn across history in that manner, as if it were a line across a closed account.

The point can be made more precisely. The remarkable continuity of peasant experience and the peasant view of the world acquires, as it is threatened with extinction, an unprecedented and unexpected urgency. It is not only the future of peasants which is now involved in this continuity. The forces which in most parts of the world are today eliminating or destroying the peasantry represent the contradiction of most of the hopes once contained in the principle of historical progress. Productivity is not reducing scarcity. The dissemination of knowledge is not leading unequivocally to greater democracy. The advent of leisure—in the industrialised societies—has not brought personal fulfilment but greater mass manipulation. The economic and military unification of the world has not brought peace but genocide. The peasant suspicion of “progress,” as it has finally been imposed by the global history of corporate capitalism and by the power of this history even over those seeking an alternative to it, is not altogether misplaced or groundless.

If one looks at the likely future course of world history, envisaging either the further extension and consolidation of corporate capitalism in all its brutalism, or a prolonged, uneven struggle waged against it, a struggle whose victory is not certain, the peasant experience of survival may well be better adapted to this long and harsh perspective than the continually reformed, disappointed, impatient progressive hope of an ultimate victory.

Finally there is the historic role of capitalism itself, a role unforeseen by Adam Smith or Marx: its historic role is to destroy history, to sever every link with the past and to orientate all effort and imagination to that which is about to occur. Capital can only exist as such if it continually reproduces itself; its present reality is dependent upon its future fulfilment. This is the metaphysic of capital: the word *credit*, instead of referring to a past achievement, refers only to a future expectation. Such a metaphysic has come to inform a world system and has been translated into the practice of consumerism. The same metaphysic has lent its logic to the categorization of all those who are being impoverished by the system as *backward* (i.e., as bearing the stigma and shame of the past). This trilogy has been written in a spirit of solidarity with the so-called “backward,” whether they live in villages or have been forced to emigrate to a metropolis. Solidarity, because it is such women and men who have taught me the little I know.

** A Question of Place



OVER THE COW’S brow the son places a black leather mask and ties it to the horns. The leather has become black through usage. The cow can see nothing. For the first time a sudden night has been fitted to her eyes. It will be removed in less than a minute when the cow is dead. During one year the leather mask provides, for the walk of ten paces between fasting-stable and slaughter-house, twenty hours of night.

The slaughter-house is run by an old man, his wife, who is fifteen years younger, and their son, who is twenty-eight.

Seeing nothing, the cow is hesitant to move, but the son pulls the rope round her horns and the mother follows holding the cow’s tail.

“If I had kept her,” the peasant says to himself, “another two months until she calved. We could not have milked her any more. And after the birth she would have lost weight. Now is the best moment.”

At the door to the slaughter-house the cow hesitates again. Then allows herself to be pulled in.

Inside, high up near the roof, is a rail network. Wheels run on the rails and from each wheel a bar hangs down with a hook on the end of it. Attached to this hook a horse’s carcass of four hundred kilos can be pushed or pulled by a fourteen-year-old.

The son places the springed bolt against the cow’s head. A mask at an execution renders the victim more passive, and protects the executioner from the last look of the victim’s eyes. Here the mask ensures that the cow does not turn her head away from the bolt which stuns her.

Her legs fold and her body collapses instantaneously. When a viaduct breaks, its masonry—seen from a distance—appears to fall slowly into the valley below. The same with the wall of a building, following an explosion. But the cow came down as fast as lightning. It was not cement which held her body together, but energy.

“Why didn’t they slaughter her yesterday?” says the peasant to himself.

The son pushes a spring through the hole in the skull into the cow’s brain. It goes in nearly twenty centimetres. He agitates it to be sure that all the animal’s muscles will relax, and pulls it out. The mother holds the uppermost foreleg by the fetlock in her two hands. The son cuts by the throat and the blood floods out on to the floor. For a moment it takes the form of an enormous velvet skirt, whose tiny waist band is the lip of the wound. Then it flows on and resembles nothing.

Life is liquid. The Chinese were wrong to believe that the essential was breath. Perhaps the soul is breath. The cow’s pink nostrils are still quivering. Her eye is staring unseeing, and her tongue is falling out of the side of her mouth.

When the tongue is cut out, it will be hung beside the head and the liver. All the heads, tongues and livers are hanging in a row together. The jaws gape open, tongueless, and each circular set of teeth is smeared with a little blood, as though the drama had begun with an animal, which was not carnivorous, eating flesh. Underneath the livers on the concrete floor are spots of bright vermilion blood, the colour of poppies when they first blossom, before they deepen and become crimson.

In protest against the double abandonment by blood and brain, the cow’s body twists violently and its hind legs lunge into the air. It is surprising that a large animal dies as quickly as a small one.

The mother lets go of the foreleg—as if the pulse was now too weak to count—and it falls limply against the body. The son begins to cut the hide away around the horns. The son learnt his speed from his father, but now the old man’s actions are slow. Ponderously at the back of the slaughter-house the father is splitting a horse in two.

Between mother and son there is a complicity. They time their work together without a word. Occasionally they glance at each other, without smiling but with comprehension. She fetches a four-wheeled trolley, like an elongated, very large open-work pram. He slits each hind leg with a single stroke of his tiny knife and inserts the hooks. She presses the button to start the electric hoist. The cow’s carcass is lifted above them both and then lowered on its back into the pram. Together they push the pram forward.

They work like tailors. Beneath the hide, the skin is white. They open the hide from neck to tail so that it becomes an unbuttoned coat.

The peasant to whom the cow belongs comes over to the pram to point out why she had to be slaughtered; two of her teats were decomposing and she was almost impossible to milk. He picks up a teat in his hand. It is as warm as in the stable when he milked her. The mother and son listen to him, nod, but do not reply and do not stop working.

The son severs and twists off the four hooves and throws them into a wheelbarrow. The mother removes the udder. Then, through the cut hide, the son axes the breast bone. This is similar to the last axing of a tree before it falls, for from that moment onwards, the cow, no longer an animal, is transformed into meat, just as the tree is transformed into timber.

The father leaves his horse and shuffles across the abattoir to go outside and pee. This he does three or four times each morning. When he walks for some other purpose, he walks more briskly. Yet it is hard to say whether he shuffles now because of the pressure on his bladder, or to remind his much younger wife that, whilst his old age may be pathetic, his authority is remorseless.

Expressionless the wife watches him until he reaches the door. Then she turns solemnly back to the meat and starts to wash it down and then to dab it dry with a cloth. The carcass surrounds her but almost all tension has gone. She might be arranging a larder. Except that the fibres of meat are still quivering from the shock of the slaughter, exactly as the skin of a cow’s neck does in summer to dislodge the flies.

The son splits the two sides of beef with perfect symmetry. They are now sides of meat such as the hungry have dreamt of for hundreds of thousands of years. The mother pushes them along the rail system to the scales. They weigh together two hundred and fifty-seven kilograms.

The peasant checks the reading on the meter. He has agreed to nine francs a kilo. He gets nothing for the tongue, the liver, the hooves, the head, the offal. The parts which are sold to the urban poor, the rural poor receive no payment for. Nor does he get paid for the hide.

At home, in the stable, the place which the slaughtered cow occupied is empty. He puts one of the young heifers there. By next summer she will have come to remember it, so that each evening and morning, when she is fetched in from the fields for milking, she will know which place in the stable is hers.

** Death of La Nan M.



<quote>
When she could no longer<br> prepare mash for the chickens<br> or peel potatoes<br> for the soup<br> she lost her appetite<br> even for bread<br> and scarcely ate

He was painting himself<br> black on the branches<br> to watch the crows<br> who no longer flew high<br> but kept to the earth

Smaller than the stove<br> she sat by the window<br> where outside the leeks grow

By the wood stack<br> — the hillsides of brushwood<br> she had carried on her back—<br> he crouched and became<br> the chopping block

Her daughter-in-law<br> fed the chickens<br> put wood in the stove

At night he reclined on each side<br> of the black fire<br> burning her bed<br> What she asked him was his opposite?<br> Milk he answered with appetite

Lining the kitchen<br> family and neighbours followed<br> her fight for breath

High up the mountain<br> he pissed on<br> snow and ice<br> to melt the stream

She found it easier if<br> she laid her head<br> on the arm of the chair

His urine was the shape<br> of an icicle<br> and as colourless

In her hand<br> she held a handkerchief<br> to dab her mouth<br> when it needed wiping

On his black mirror<br> there was never breath

The guests as they left<br> kissed the crown of her head<br> and she knew them<br> by their voices

He trundled out a barrow<br> overturned it<br> on the frozen dungheap<br> its two legs still warm

The seventy-third anniversary<br> of her marriage night<br> she spent<br> huddled in the kitchen<br> from time to time calling her son<br> she called him by his surname<br> who rocked on his slippered feet<br> like a bear

One mistake you made<br> Death did not joke like a drunk<br> You should not have grown old

I was not a thief she replied

Dead she looked as tall<br> laid out on her bed<br> in dress and boots<br> as when a bride<br> but her right shoulder<br> was lower than the left<br> on account of all<br> she had carried

At her funeral<br> the village saw the soft snow<br> bury her<br> before the gravedigger
</quote>

** A Calf Remembered



HUBERT LED THE CALF into the lorry and unbuckled her collar. Later he would hang it on a nail in the hayloft, ready for the next calf. He was a large man, but very meticulous. The travelling buyer from the plant asked him his price. When Hubert did not wish to talk about something, he had the habit of making speech-like noises which in fact did not form words, but were convincing and sounded like another patois. If Marie asked him where he had been working, and his thoughts were still far away, he would answer in this polite unintelligible language. He did this now to force the buyer to name his price for the calf. The price did not, as it does for most livestock, go by weight but by look. Folding the bank notes, Hubert made a little square packet of them, and thrust it into the depths of his trouser pocket. Then both men went up to the kitchen to drink a glass of gnôle.

Whenever Hubert had passed the calf in the stable, she backed away abruptly and clumsily. She was attached close to the wall by a chain and a collar. The largest movement she could make was to lunge with her head at the bottom of the wall and kick her hind legs in the air. The lower part of the wall was brown from the shit of the other calves who had been attached to the same ring in the wall.

She did not have a name, because Marie did not give names to calves they were not going to keep. When the calf was ten days old, she had been timid. This was at the end of February. The streams from the rockface were as idle and transparent as icicles. The calf slept on the wood put down on the stone floor to keep her warm. She stood waiting to be fed. She learnt to kick. She came to recognise the pressure of the collar round her neck when she moved a certain distance away from the wall. She distinguished between near and far. An approach towards her from far to near became a threat.

When she was five days old, Hubert tied a child’s plastic bucket round her muzzle to prevent her trying to eat the straw of her bedding. Only a little daylight entered the stable. Perhaps the half-light encourages the great winter patience of the cows. For six months they face the same beams, the same wooden struts of the same manger. Between their four stomachs, they fill their time with eating, munching, re-munching, licking, slowly lowering and raising their heads. They never—not even during the night—relapse into the non-being of the reptile or sleeping bat. If they did, they would produce no milk.

Some calves drink straight away, some have to learn. She would push with her nose against the side of the bucket without opening her mouth. She was two days old and her tongue had not found a way out of her mouth. Hubert stuck his finger into the milk and put it into her mouth. She sucked it. The third time he did it, her tongue came out to lick.

At dawn the cold intensifies. The apple trees had been black in the white mist. There was no colour anywhere, and beyond the yard no sounds. The north-east wind was blowing. It penetrates the thickest clothing and blows in one’s very bones a reminder of death. It causes the cows to give less milk. It makes the earth hard as rock. “There is nothing sadder than a death,” said Marie, “and nothing forgotten more quickly.”

The wind could not penetrate the stable directly. The stable had the banked, three-month-old heat of one large horse, eleven cows, five calves and a dozen rabbits. But Hubert took no unnecessary risks: he tied a large piece of sackcloth over Moselle, the cow who had just calved, and gave her hot cider with sugar.

Before that, he had given her salt. Powerfully, with her enormous tongue, Moselle licked the coarse brown salt from his hand. Cows’ heads are the size they are to contain their tongues. With their tongues they harvest, fork, bale and deliver to their stomachs.

There is a story about a distant ice-age and a cow who was called Audumla. She licked an iceberg in which a man was imprisoned. She licked it like a pillar of salt, until the man was free. And then she offered him four streams of milk.

The calf’s first taste in life had been salt. Hubert rubbed some against her muzzle. Then he covered her with straw and she fell asleep.

Mucus is a protection, a kind of love. The calf lay there exhausted, like a leaf when it first comes out. Her hair was matted with mucus. Faintly she had the smell which once preceded—for all of us—the first smell of air. Hubert rubbed the calf down as if he were a second in a ring. His happiness was without excitement; it was a drawn-out pleasurable response to something occasional but familiar; a response to an event which gave itself to the stillness which now followed it, like the last note of a fanfare still hanging in silence, the trumpeter’s arm still raised. His happiness took the form of a small drawn-out feeling of pride which lasted all day.

Before rubbing the calf down, he had separated its hind legs to discover its sex. Female. Perhaps some of the rabbits were bucks, otherwise all twenty animals in the stable were female.

Marie had turned Moselle’s head round towards the tail, towards the birth. With one hand she held a horn and with the other she pressed with fingers and thumb in the animal’s huge nostrils. “There Moselle,” she repeated, “there Moselle!” Holding the head like this made it impossible for the cow to get up on to her feet. Moselle was lying on her left side. Two of the calf’s hooves were already visible. Hubert made slip-knots at either end of his rope and passed them over the hooves on to the forelegs. Then, with his boots wedged against the gutter, he lay back on the rope and pulled. He saw the calf’s head, an eye with its long lashes still closed, come out. He pulled harder on the rope until he was almost parallel with the floor. The vagina yawned, and the entire calf emerged like a sound, accompanied by two little rivulets of blood.

Hubert had called Marie half an hour before. Moselle had been kneeling on her forelegs, searching low down with her mouth and pointing her rump at the sky. She licked the air beyond her mouth, and her mouth itself was drawn back in pain. Her lower flanks shrank and expanded irregularly; waves of uncontrollable energy filled and emptied them; most of the waves broke in her chest before they reached the uterus. A calf’s hoof, brown and white, smeared with a little blood as if it were being eaten, pointed out of her vagina and was sucked back in again.

It was dark. Hubert lay on a bale of straw which he had brought down in preparation for the birth. Muguet pissed. Marquise, next to her, waited and then pissed too. It went like that for four cows down the line. The cocks were not yet awake. Hubert got up to piss in the same gutter. He was anxious. The year before, when Moselle calved, she had a twisted uterus and he was obliged to call the vet which cost money.

On all four legs Moselle moved backwards, arching her back and raising her tail. She did not lift it straight up as she did when pissing; it was curled so that it made a kind of tail halo above the swollen distended vagina. The way she moved backwards was not as if she yet needed to push something out of her, but because, vaguely, she sought something behind in the dark air to push into herself, to rid her of discomfort. Hubert had not turned on the light because he believed calves were born quicker in the dark. Through the window at the end of the stable he could see the moonlight. The mist which would thicken at dawn was not yet thick enough to hide the moon. He felt his way into her with his hand. She spread as easily as a haversack. He felt the head between the two forelegs in the opening where it should be. This was the first time the calf had been touched.

Marie had stayed in bed. It was 2.00 a.m. Crossing the yard his boots had struck the ice as if it were metal. Perhaps somewhere in another valley a neighbour was also getting up for a calf. But in the colourless night there was no sign of it. A dribble of viscous uterine water hung from her vagina.

He sat on a milking stool in the dark. With his head in his hands, his breathing was indistinguishable from that of the cows. The stable itself was like the inside of an animal. Breath, water, cud were entering it; wind, piss, shit were leaving.

Often he dozed off. He thought of how each week now a little more light entered the hayloft above, as the great stacks of hay diminished and the sun shone a little brighter through the cracks in the planks. In three months’ time he would let the cows out into the fields which would be green, sprinkled with white and blue flowers and dandelions. The cows can smell the green grass even in the stable. And their shit would become green. Sometimes he lurched, almost falling off his stool.

The unborn calf already had the capacity to see, and this developed capacity, along with others, predicted an end. The calf’s capacity to see was waiting for the darkness to be broken.

Hubert had slept, his head fallen forward, his chin on his chest.

In the darkness, which precedes sight or place or name, man and calf waited.

** Ladle



<quote>
Pewter pock-marked<br> moon of the ladle<br> rising above the mountain<br> going down into the saucepan<br> serving generations<br> steaming<br> dredging what has grown from seed<br> in the garden<br> thickened with potato<br> outliving us all<br> on the wooden sky<br> of the kitchen wall

Serving mother<br> of the steaming pewter breast<br> veined by the salts<br> fed to her children<br> hungry as boars<br> with the evening earth<br> engrained around their nails<br> and bread the brother<br> serving mother

Ladle<br> pour the sky steaming<br> with the carrot sun<br> <br> the stars of salt<br> and the grease of the pig earth<br> pour the sky steaming<br> ladle<br> pour soup for our days<br> pour sleep for the night<br> pour years for my children
</quote>

** The Great Whiteness



ALL THE DEAD are remembered at La Toussaint. Some say it is the day when the dead judge the living, and that the flowers placed in the cemetery are to make their judgement less harsh.

A week after La Toussaint Hélène came down to the cemetery to remove two pots of chrysanthemums, one from the grave of her husband and the other from her father’s grave. For the last two nights the sky had been exceptionally clear, the stars as hard as nails, and the frost had nipped all the life out of the flowers. If she took them now, before the frost entered the roots, she could plant them out next spring, and in the late summer they would flower again to appease the dead.

At the foot of her husband’s grave, she said, “Only two or three bones are left.” Then she made the sign of the cross, not against her black coat, but over the ground into which he had been lowered.

At the foot of her father’s grave, which had no masonry but only a wooden cross, she said: “Ah my father, if you could see your daughter now.”

She did not hesitate to speak her thoughts out loud.

The cemetery, like everything else, was on a slope, and so she left by the top gate so that her climb home would be shorter. She carried a pot in each arm, the tousled blossoms, the tips of whose petals had gone brown with the frost, were level with her head on each side. She was a woman of seventy-five.

In the house she took off her black overcoat and put on an apron, a cardigan and a grey shawl over her head. “There’s still time!” she said to one of her goats, leading it out of the stable.

The goat ambled lightly along the path beside her in the forest. As Hélène walked her boots made a scuffing noise in the leaves, which in places were covered with frost like grey salt. She led the goat with a short rope, and in her other hand she carried a stick. After half an hour, she stopped under an oak tree and filled the large pocket of her apron with acorns.

“Jésus Marie!” she said to the goat. “Aren’t you ashamed? An old woman collecting acorns for you.”

The goat looked at her through the black oblong centres of its eyes. A few specks of snow, no larger than sawdust, fell between the trees.

“The great whiteness will soon cover us,” she said and tugged the rope.

“Sometimes I try to pray, but things come into my head and distract me. It’s my nature. My poor father told me the same thing. You’re always wanting to be in the oven and the flour mill at the same time, he said, and so you can’t keep your mind on anything. I’ll tell you what you are like, he said, you are like the man whose friend says to him, ‘I’ll give you my horse if you can say the Lord’s Prayer without thinking about anything else.’ And the man says, ‘Done.’ And he begins, ‘Our Father which art …’ ”

The old woman and the goat could hear the roar of the stream ahead. The stream was so full that its water frothed like milk.

“… and when the man gets half-way through the Lord’s Prayer he stops and says, ‘Can you give me the bridle for the horse too?’ ”

Everything was grey except for the rushing water and the white flecks of snow on the goat’s neck. The path left the forest and climbed between fields. The goat started walking faster, pulling the old woman along. She was the stronger of the two, but instead of checking the goat, she trotted behind. In one place the path was entirely covered with ice.

Cows place their feet with a certain delicacy as if wearing high-heeled shoes; goats, however, are like skaters. The goat danced on the ice and Hélène, letting go of the rope, gingerly felt her way round the edge, holding on to the grass bank. When she was on the other side of the ice, the goat refused to come towards her. She threatened and raised her stick. “It’s snowing,” she muttered, “it’s nearly night. As if all my losses aren’t enough, shit, shit, shit, you are playing me up.”

On some occasions anger made her cunning. When she let out her chickens and they began to pull up the flowers in her garden, she pretended she had grain in her hand for feeding them, and she clucked sweetly to attract them, until she could lay her hands on one: then she would shake it with both hands and its feathers would fall out and she would hurl it above her head as high as she could against the sky. And the chickens were so stupid they came one by one to get their punishment.

The goat, who was not stupid, stared at her as she waved her stick. “You good-for-nothing carcass of a goat!”

After a while the goat stepped off the ice and the pair of them continued on their way. The very desolation of the scene made them look like accomplices. The rockface rose up above them, sheer as a wall for three hundred and fifty metres. The massive pine trees at the top were just visible in the falling dusk, as small as sprigs of herbs.

Hélène led the goat towards the wall, at the same time calling. Her call was not unlike the noise she made to attract the chickens when she fed them. But it was a shriller and shorter call, punctuated with silence.

After several calls there was an answering one which no voice could have imitated. Perhaps an instrument like a bagpipe would come nearest to reproducing it. The lament of breath issuing from a skin bag. The Greeks called the cry of the he-goat *tragos*, from which they derived the word tragedy.

He was darker than the surrounding dusk and his four horns were entwined with each other, as can sometimes happen with the branches of a tree when the trunk has divided into two. His gait was unhurried.

Hélène hid her left hand in her right armpit to keep it warm. With her right hand she held the rope. The goat stood there waiting. The specks of snow were turning into large flakes. Since she was a child she had done the same thing when the first real flakes fell. She stuck out her tongue. The first snowflake prickled like sherbet on her seventy-five-year-old tongue.

The goat lifted her tail and began to wag it. It made a circular movement like a spoon stirring quickly. The he-goat licked beneath it. Then he straightened his neck and the corners of his lips curled back baring his mouth to the taste. His thin, red-tipped penis emerged from its tuft of hair. He stood as motionless as a boulder. And after a moment his penis retracted. Perhaps the occasion was too inauspicious even for him.

“Jésus, Marie and Joseph!” muttered Hélène. “Hurry, will you! My hands are getting frozen. It’s night.”

He sniffed and let the goat’s tail brush between his eyebrows.

If the snow fell all night, she would be unable to bring the goat again, and she would have one or two kids fewer to sell in the spring.

The he-goat stood there as if waiting for something to pass. In her impatience Hélène squatted down on her heels, the snow settling on her shawl, to look under his body to see whether all hope had gone. There was still a tip of red.

“If I turned my anger into power,” she muttered, “it would blow up that wall of rock. Hurry! Will you?”

The he-goat tapped the flank of the goat with one of his forelegs. Several times. Then he tapped her with his other leg on the other side. When she was in position, he mounted and entered her.

Nothing else anywhere under the wall of rockface was visibly moving except the snowflakes and his haunches. His movements were as rapid as the falling flakes were slow. After thirty thrusts, his entire body shook. Then his forelegs slid off her back.

Hélène pressed with all her weight on the centre of the goat’s back. This was to encourage the retention of the sperm. The pair set off down towards the village. They took a longer but wider path down, past the house where Arthaud lived.

Lloyse, Arthaud’s wife, was killed by a boulder which fell from the top of the rockface. They were both asleep in their bed. Where the boulder first hit the earth, it made a hole big enough to bury a horse in. Nevertheless the boulder continued to roll down the slope. Slowly. When it reached the house, it didn’t crash right through it. It just broke through one wall and crushed half the bed. Lloyse was killed outright and Arthaud woke up, unhurt, beside the boulder. This was twenty years ago. The boulder was too heavy to move. So, clearing the wood and rubble away, Arthaud built another room on the other side of the house and in this room he now slept.

When Hélène and the goat passed, there was a light in the window of this room and one side of the boulder was already glistening with snow.

Hélène placed her hand, whose joints were swollen so that she could never fully straighten her fingers, on the animal’s back. “Goat,” she said, “lazy good-for-nothing carcass of a goat, don’t lose it!”

The spermatozoa who had survived the beginning of their long journey were swimming inwards in anti-clockwise spirals.

The wind was blowing the snow in whorls and she walked holding the goat’s collar in case she slipped.

** Easter



<quote>
By night the icicles<br> grow longer<br> teeth of transparent rodents<br> by day they dribble<br> from food of snow

The white sheet removed<br> is folded in streams<br> my orchard<br> a morgue of branches<br> severed from the apple trees

Water furtively<br> unbolts the slopes<br> the prisoner grass is freed<br> pallid harrowed<br> too weak to make a sign

The cock’s footprint<br> arrow of soil<br> brown as the dungheap<br> wide as the sky<br> is about to cover the hen of the world
</quote>

** An Independent Woman



CATHERINE SEIZED EACH MAN to embrace him. Her long arms pulled him towards her tall body. First Nicolas her brother, then Jean-François the neighbour. She kissed them on both cheeks, near the mouth. At seventy-four, she was just the eldest of the three.

“It’s buried one metre deep,” said Catherine, “I can hear Mathieu telling me that. One metre deep.”

“Where does it cross the field?” shouted Nicolas.

She shrugged her shoulders. “Fifty years is a long time, but I remember him saying it was one metre deep.”

Two months ago, when she was helping her brother bring in his second hay, she had told him that the water to the *bassin* beside her house was no longer flowing. After that, she had refused to mention the subject again. She was going to be dependent on nobody. Yet now the expression in her eyes was excited as though she had willed the two men to come.

“The spring must be at the top,” said Jean-François and he began to climb the field, disappearing into the fog.

“Jean-François,” she cried out, “come back before I lose sight of you.”

Born into another house Catherine would surely have married, but each year of her life more men had left the valley, and she herself had inherited too little to propose to any of them that they remain.

She seized hold of Jean-François by the arm. “You shouldn’t have come to give up a whole day.”

“We dig one metre deep, at right angles to the line. Begin at the top and come down to the bottom. That way we’re bound to arrive at the pipe.”

“And the pipe will lead us to the spring! Jésus, Marie and Joseph! We’ll have it by midday.”

They began digging. Underneath the snow, the ground was still unfrozen.

When Catherine came from the house, carrying in a canvas bag glasses, a jug of hot wine and some bread and cheese, she heard the men before she could see them. At a distance of twenty metres the white fog merged into the white snow on the ground. Each time Jean-François bent his back to strike the pick into the earth, he grunted. And she heard Nicolas scraping his spade so the earth should not stick to it.

She had worked once as a waitress in a café near the Gare de Lyon in Paris. She and her brother Mathieu, the one who had laid the pipe and the one who was killed by the Germans during the Occupation, were the first members of the family ever to earn wages. And to do this they both went to Paris. He was a porter. She was a waitress. Her lasting impression of the capital was one of money continually changing hands. There, without money, you could literally do nothing. Not even drink water. With money you could do anything. He who could buy courage was brave, even if he was a coward.

The two men had dug the trench exactly one metre deep. From time to time they had measured it. It was straight and impeccably cut and cleaned out. On one side was stacked the turf; on the other, the earth. All the stones lifted out were piled in a heap together.

Nicolas scrambled out of the trench and Jean-François plunged his spade into the loose soil, as if in the hope that it would disappear into the centre of the earth. Living by himself in the corner under the mountain, he had the habit of making violent movements; in his solitude such violence was a kind of company. Catherine poured out the hot wine. The men kept the glasses up to their faces between sips, their noses in the steam which smelt of cloves and cinnamon.

“In God’s name it must be here,” Nicolas grumbled.

“I tell you if it’s not in this field, there’s no fire in hell.”

During the second half of the day Nicolas continued the long trench already begun. Jean-François dug another higher up. And Catherine started digging a third near the pair of apple trees. When she had cut the turf, she kicked the snow off before lifting the pieces up. She disliked having cold hands or feet. At night she took three hot bricks to bed with her, one for each foot and one for the small of her back. As she swung the pick the breath came out of her with a whistle, quite unlike Jean-François’ grunt.

After working in the restaurant by the Gare de Lyon she became a maid in a doctor’s house. The doctor worked at the hospital of St Antonine and lived a few streets away in the rue Charles V. Her principal jobs were cleaning grates, washing floors and laundering. The first time she laundered, she had asked the cook where the wood ash was kept. “Wood ash!” repeated the cook, incredulous. “To clean the sheets,” explained Catherine. The cook told her to go back to her goat shit. It was the first time Catherine heard the word *peasant* used as an insult.

They dug until the fog absorbed the dusk.

Jean-François looked down at his trench which was now a good fifteen metres long.

“Not quite wide enough for a coffin.”

“We are all of us thin,” said Catherine.

“Three graves, one for each of us.”

“A grave for each of us!” roared Nicolas.

When she returned from Paris, Catherine had found her sister-in-law dying of puerperal fever. During the next fifteen years she brought up her two nieces like daughters.

Jean-François abruptly picked up a stone and threw it up the field into the dark.

Catherine began hustling the two men towards the house. Outside the kitchen door she placed a bowl of heated water for them to wash in. She took hold of Jean-François’ wrists and placed his hands in the water. Then she draped a towel round his neck.

The last time the three of them had sat round the table in the kitchen was when she believed she might die. The doctor said it was pleurisy. She refused to go to hospital. If she was going to die, she wanted death to pass by the things she knew. Her two rooms were bare, there was neither armchair nor carpets nor curtains. But there were certain objects which were intimate to her: her yellow coffee-pot, the stove which she kept as shiny as a groomed black horse, her high bed, the picture of the Madonna above it, her work-basket. Death must run the gauntlet of these. Each night she laid out her linen and stockings before climbing into the bed, so that Nicolas should know exactly how to dress her for the coffin.

One night when he came to the house, Nicolas noticed the linen laid out.

“What’s that for?”

“To dress me in the morning if I shut my umbrella in the night.” She spoke in a hoarse whisper.

At that moment there was a scuffling noise against the door and a voice had intoned, like a lament:

“Four wild boar! I’ve seen them with my own eyes, charging down the hill!”

Jean-François had stumbled in, clutching a rifle. Drunk, he came up to the bed.

“Catherine, what will we do without you? They tell me you are very sick.”

“Is the gun loaded?” she whispered.

He handed it to her and she took out the cartridges.

When she was working at the doctor’s house, she had received the letter from Mathieu saying that his wife was ill and that she must return immediately. By leaving so abruptly she lost two months’ wages. She protested to the doctor’s wife that nobody could foresee illness. For illness there are hospitals, was the reply. Catherine picked up one of the pokers she had polished every morning. The doctor’s wife screamed for help. The cook came running to the rescue. She found the mistress of the house clutching the curtains as if she had been surprised naked. And the mad Savoyard maid was standing with a poker in her hand looking at the fire.

“Tomorrow,” Jean-François said, “we’ll come and cup you. Eh, Nicolas?”

“I might be better off on the other side,” she said.

“Seigneur!” screamed her brother. “Stop talking like that. We’re coming tomorrow.”

When they came, the two men stuffed the stove with wood. She stripped naked to the waist and sat on a chair. “It’s not the first time you’ve seen a woman,” she said to Jean-François.

“What difference does that make?” demanded Nicolas. “We’re going to cure you.”

On the table was a set of glasses with a candle. Jean-François lit the candle, wiped a glass, tore a shred of newspaper, put it in the candle flame and when it was burning, placed it in the glass. Nicolas pressed the rim of the glass hard against his sister’s back. Almost immediately the flame went out. The skin beneath her shoulder-blade was white and soft, not very different from when she was a young woman. Tentatively, Nicolas’ large hand abandoned the glass to see whether the vacuum would hold it against the flesh. Glass and flesh stayed firm.

Jean-François prepared the fire in a second glass.

“Put it,” he said, “where there’s plenty of meat.”

“Never on the vertebral column,” proclaimed Nicolas.

“I said where there’s meat!”

They applied five glasses. Her skin rose up inside them like pies in an oven. She held the table with her arms to steady herself against the hurt.

“I don’t want you to hear me cry out.”

“I’ll sing,” offered Nicolas.

He sang:

<verse>
La vie est une rose
La rose piquera …
</verse>

When it came to removing the glasses, Jean-François did it because Nicolas’ nails were too broken. He ran his finger-nail round the rim of the glass, making a tiny trench in the flesh, to let the air in.

“Ah,” she sighed, as each glass came off. “Thank you, my friend!” Two days later she was cured.

Now together in the same kitchen the three of them were dispirited by the day’s work which had yielded nothing.

“They have a machine,” mused Jean-François, “for detecting water underground, like a water diviner’s stick, only it’s electronic. And it finds where water is to twenty centimetres.”

“Where?” asked Catherine, on the edge of her chair.

“It costs seventy thousand francs to hire.”

“Merde de merde!” said Catherine.

Next morning the three of them surveyed the three trenches. During the night, as if encouraged by their digging, moles had thrown up their own earthworks over most of the field. This made all the digging look less systematic.

“In this earth,” roared Nicolas—and between each phrase he struck with his pick—“in this damned earth of this damned field in this damned fog I have a rendez-vous with the Devil!”

By the afternoon they had still not found any sign of any pipe. Occasionally in the kitchen Catherine heard one of their raised voices. She could not distinguish the words but the tone of the shouting was enough to tell her how discouraged they must be. “If they don’t find it today, they won’t come back tomorrow.”

She put more wood on the stove, took her slippers out of the oven and shut the oven door. “I have wasted two of their days,” she muttered. She set about preparing some pastry. When it was rolled out, she made small pastry purses, each large enough to hold a five-franc piece. Into the purses she put purée of apples. She made twenty-five.

She packed the pastries with the coffee-pot, *gnôle* and cups into her canvas bag, and strode across the orchard. Before the men became visible through the fog she stopped and adjusted the scarf tied round her head. She held out the bowl of sugar so that each man could sugar his coffee to his taste. She herself poured the eau-de-vie plentifully into their cups. The men held them with both hands and gazed around them into the fog.

“Mathieu!” muttered Nicolas. “Mathieu was cunning. He could have laid this pipe at a depth of eighty centimetres and it would still have been safe from the hardest frost. But no! Not Mathieu. He had to lay it at a metre!”

“The moles have eaten the pipe.”

“The pipe has gone to La Roche, I tell you!”

Corner by corner, she unfolded the napkin wrapped round the pastries. Baked a light brown, they steamed in the air. The smell made the two men glance at each other and smile with complicity.

“We used to eat them after midnight mass at Christmas,” said Nicolas quietly.

“The blood’s coming back,” said Jean-François.

Between mouthfuls of coffee, they ate them one by one.

When they were finished, Catherine issued her command: “No more work today.”

The two men put on their coats and, by an accord of common tact, nobody mentioned tomorrow.

She woke up when it was still dark. She did not expect the men to return for a third day’s work. After she had fed the goats and cleaned the stable, the sky was as blue and large as it only is over the mountains. In the valley, through the transparent early-morning mist were church, dairy, cemetery, two cafés, post office: the village. The worst about real fog is that it hangs square like a curtain. Vertical and horizontal. The best about it lifting is that all the slopes are revealed and everything is precipitous.

She went to fetch her water, downhill, across two fields. She had done this ever since the water had dried up. All her father’s life and grandfather’s life the sound of water had marked the place below where it was easy to fill buckets.

What she feared was the ice. The ice would soon be back. The pine trees, only one hundred metres higher up towards La Roche, were white with hoar-frost, not a needle, not a spider’s web had escaped its white load. She feared that when the slope was frozen with ice, she might slip as she carried the buckets, and break a leg, and lie there all day without being found.

“On the other side I’d have no goats to look after, no potatoes to lift, no chickens to feed. I would have all the time in the world, and I could make all the visits I don’t make now. Yet I don’t want to die out of the house. I want to see death come past the things I’ve lived with. Then I can concentrate and not be distracted.”

In the clear air which no longer muffled sounds, she heard Jean-François’ voice, high up, in the field by the orchard.

“I tell you where it is! Here! Here is where I am betting it is! You’ll see. I thought about it in the night. This is where it is. Within half a metre of here!”

Leaving the two buckets, she clambered up, shouting, “I don’t believe it!”

They did not begin digging where Jean-François had driven in his spade to mark his bet. They systematically extended the long trench which would eventually come to the point he had indicated.

After two hours, Nicolas said: “The earth has been worked here. Fifty years ago maybe, but the earth has been worked here.”

The only sign of his impatience was that he wielded the pick with shorter pauses.

“I told you so!”

He pointed, at the bottom of the trench, to a reddish mark in the earth, the size of a small flower.

“Rust!”

“Rust!”

“Catherine!”

The three of them looked down at the pipe at the bottom of the trench.

“It’s in perfect condition.”

“It’s a well-turned pipe.”

Jean-François jumped down and scratched at it with his knife.

“The metal is shiny underneath.”

“I knew it when we saw the rust.”

“It was there all the time,” shouted Nicolas.

“The pipe under the field was there all the time.”

“Exactly one metre down. Measure it.”

Jean-François measured it.

“Exactly one metre.”

“All we do now is to follow it.”

“The spring should be here.”

They stood looking down at the coarse grass.

“We’d have found it yesterday if we’d gone on,” Nicolas shouted. He surveyed everything: the snow peaks, the rockfaces, the white forest, the ledges of land, the valley. “You’d have found it, Catherine, if you’d dug another two metres by the apple trees.” He gazed up at the spaceless blue sky. “I’d have found it if I’d dug upwards instead of downwards! And Jean-François found it where he said he would!”

Impatiently Catherine started cutting the turf. The two men ambled away, opened their trousers and pissed.

They unearthed the reservoir after half an hour’s further digging.

“It’s a huge stone,” announced Jean-François, “it must be two metres wide, the lid.”

Nicolas peered at the flat stone being uncovered. “Where could he have found a stone like that. From La Roche!”

“We’ll need crowbars to prise it off.”

“Is it all one stone?”

“He placed it well, he knew how to place it, did Mathieu. I told you he was cunning.”

“It’s going to weigh a ton!”

“How did he get it here?”

“It’s huge.”

“As huge as a tomb.”

“It’s Jésus’ tomb!”

“Jésus’ tomb,” repeated Catherine.

Jean-François scraped at the stone, his unshaven face almost touching it.

“We’ve got to roll it away.”

Catherine went to fetch what bars she could find in the stable. They forced in two to steady it, and they used one to prise with. The flat stone did not shift. All three strained to use all their weight.

“Jésus’ … tomb!”

“We’re opening it.”

“Op—en—ing!”

“Up!”

“Up!”

“What’s inside?”

Jean-François peered through the narrow space under the prised-up flat stone.

“Shit!”

“He says Jésus’ tomb is full of shit!”

“Fifty years of shit!” said Catherine.

“Slide it now.”

“Gently.”

“There!”

In the great current of their triple laughter, words they had already used surfaced, turned and eddied, disappeared, reappeared and were carried on, submerged by the laughter.

—Jésus, Marie and Joseph!—

—Mathieu knew what he was doing!—

—It was easy for him.—

—It’s big enough to dip a sheep in.—

—The tomb of Jésus, that’s what it is.—

They plunged in their arms up to their armpits, to find where the outlet pipe was. Their arms came out black. With a bucket they began emptying out the sediment, until the water no longer overspilled.

“Run to the *bassin*, Catherine, and see if it’s coming.”

“It’s coming,” she screamed. “It’s coming out brown like coffee.”

The sun had set before they stopped dredging.

The men carried the tools to the house. Close against the wall, in the shelter of the eaves, water gushed out of the mouth of the pipe. As it fell, it became tangled and silver.

Inside the kitchen it was warm. Catherine strode around the room, particularly between stove and table, serving.

“Sit down, woman!”

“I never expected you to come today,” she said.

“Tonight it’s going to freeze.”

“The water from the spring will never freeze,” she said.

“Today is the last day we could have dug.”

“This morning I never said you’d both come.”

“Catherine, you have always expected too little,” Jean-François announced.

“Listen a moment!” roared Nicolas.

The three of them placed their knives on the table and through the window they listened to the frivolous sound of the running water.

** Ladder



<quote>
The uprights are pine<br> the rungs are ash<br> between each rung<br> the grass of months is pressed<br> hard as a saddle

At the foot of the ladder<br> on her back<br> belly distended<br> like a grey risen loaf<br> a dead ewe<br> legs in the air<br> thin as the legs<br> of a kitchen chair<br> she strayed yesterday<br> ate too much lucerne<br> which fermenting<br> burst her stomach<br> the first snow<br> falls on her grey wool<br> a vole in the dark<br> systematically<br> eats the ear on the ground<br> at daybreak two crows<br> haphazardly peck<br> the gums of the teeth<br> her frosted eyes are open<br> <br> Every ladder<br> is lightheaded<br> on the topmost rung<br> the seeds have flowered<br> into the colours of the world<br> and two butterflies white<br> like the notes of an accordion<br> pursuing<br> touching<br> parting<br> climb the blue sky

Far above the ladder’s head<br> instantaneously<br> their white wings change into blue<br> and they disappear<br> like the dead

Descending<br> and ascending<br> this ladder<br> I live
</quote>

** The Wind Howls Too



SOMETIMES WHEN I listen to the wind howling at night, I remember. There was very little money in the village. During eight months we worked on the land to produce the minimum of what we needed to feed and clothe and warm us for the whole year. But in the winter nature went dead, and it was then that our lack of money became critical. Not so much because we required money to buy things, but because there was so little to work with. This, and not the cold or the snow or the short days or the sitting round the wood stove, is why in winter we lived in a kind of limbo.

Many of the men went from the village to Paris to earn wages as stokers and porters and chimney-sweeps. Before the men left they made sure that there was enough hay and wood and potatoes to last until after Easter. Those who stayed behind were the women, the old and the young. During the winter the fact that I had no father was scarcely remarkable; half the children of my year were temporarily without fathers.

That winter my grandfather was making a bed for me, so that I shouldn’t have to sleep any more with my sister who was soon to be married. My mother was making a mattress of *crin. Crin* was the hair of the mare’s mane and cows’ tails. Every morning, when it snowed in the night, my mother announced the news in the same way. “He has served us some more!” she said. She spoke about the snow as if it were uneatable food.

After the cows had been milked, my grandfather and I cleared the snow from the courtyard. This done, he went to his carpenter’s bench and I, before going down to school, made sure that no snow was covering the stone sabot. If it was, I brushed it off.

The stone sabot was in the courtyard near the wall, beside the door to the vaulted cellar where the potatoes and turnips and a few pumpkins were kept. When we cleared the courtyard we did not always clear right to the edges, and so there was a risk that the stone sabot might disappear under the snow. Winter was the season of disappearances. The men went away. The cows were hidden in the stables. Snow covered the slopes, the gardens, the dung-heaps, the trees. And the roofs of the houses, covered by the same snow, became barely distinguishable from the slopes. Not since I first found the stone sabot had I let it disappear.

[[j-b-john-berger-into-their-labours-trilogy-6.jpg]]

It looked like this. Its stone was whitish, marked with blue. It was a man’s size. It was too large for me if I put my foot on it. The first time I saw it, I tried to pick it up to compare it with the pair of sabots, made from walnut wood, which were at the bottom of the wardrobe. The man who made the wardrobe took a winter making it and my great-grandfather paid him by cutting stones for his new house. The man’s initials were *A.B*. and my great-grandfather carved these above the door to his house. I had seen them. When he was young, A.B. cracked many jokes. Later he was much given to thought, and finally he killed himself in the new house with his initials above the door. When I tried to pick up the sabot, I could not move it.

“Pépé, why is there a stone sabot in the courtyard?” I asked my grandfather. He was my authority about everything which was mysterious. It was several months before he answered my question.

One evening, he told me, his father, my great-grandfather, came through the door from the stable into the kitchen—the same kitchen in which we lived—and announced: “Néra has put my eye out.” “Aiee!” screamed his wife, but when she looked at him she said, “No, your eye is not out.” He had very blue eyes. “She butted me,” he insisted, “as I was feeding her.”

Pépé looked into his father’s face. Miserably and terribly during the next five minutes one of his blue eyes turned entirely red, blood red, and he never saw out of it again. Nor did he ever recover from the shock of losing this eye. He believed himself repulsively disfigured.

Glass eyes were not easy to find. One day a friend drove by cart to A … and there in a barber’s shop he found a whole bottle of them. “Give me the bluest you have,” said the friend. Pépé’s father would not wear it. Instead, Pépé, who was the youngest of three sons and his father’s favourite, had to walk in front of him whenever he went out, to warn those they met not to look into his father’s eyes.

One year later Pépé announced to the family that he was leaving. He was going to Paris. The family could not live off four cows. His brothers did not argue with him, for it was either him or one of them who had to go. He was fifteen at the time. His father ordered him to stay at home.

As he was packing his bundle, he found a pair of his father’s boots. They were the newest and strongest boots in the house, and he put them on. His father was working in a circle of rocks above the house. He climbed the slope to embrace him. Then he pointed to the boots on his feet, and, as he was running down, he shouted: “The good ones are going! The bad ones are staying!”

In Paris he worked for several years without returning. The last job he had was on the building site of Le Grand Palais, which was to house the world exhibition to celebrate the opening of the century.

Whilst he was absent, his father, peering out of one eye, cut the stone cross and headstone for his own grave. On it he carved his name and added the date of his birth, 1840, the year that Napoleon’s body was transferred from St Helena to the Invalides. Then he carved the supposed date of his death. The latter proved correct, for he died before the year was out. I passed the grave in the cemetery. And the date of Napoleon’s home-coming I learnt at school.

When Pépé came back from Paris he found the stone sabot in the courtyard. He said his dead father had put it there as a sign that he had forgiven him for taking the boots.

That was all.

“How do you know your father forgave you?” I asked him after a long while.

“Nobody can take the stone sabot,” he explained. “It’s fixed to the rock. It’ll outlast the house. And *that* is what is important. The boots I took were unimportant. He wanted me to know that.”

The way Pépé told me this story made me think he had never told it to anybody else. His telling me was a privilege. I kept the stone sabot clear of snow because I recognised this. Whenever he saw me bent over the sabot, he smiled.

The Sundays passed. We became vague about the date. In limbo one loses a sense of time. My mother kept on repeating, “He has served us some more!” Repeatedly we cleared the courtyard. The pile of snow in the corner grew and became as high as a room. Every day two pairs of crows perched on top of the same apple trees. My grandmother hated them because they tried to eat the grain she gave her chickens. Pépé claimed that one of the crows was older than he: “I’d give a lot,” he mumbled, “to see all that he has seen—the fights, the legal battles, the zouaves, the inventions, the couples in the forest …”

One evening in January my grandfather took the decision. “Tomorrow,” he said, “we are going to kill the pig.” On the day we killed the pig everybody had a job to do. And from that day onwards we knew that, however distant it still was, the spring was approaching. The mornings would get lighter. Not regularly, but when there were no clouds in the sky.

I went with my grandfather to look at the pig.

“He’s as long as a pew,” said Pépé with pride.

“He’s bigger than last year’s,” I said, wanting to share in the pride.

“He’s the biggest I remember. It’s all those potatoes Mémé feeds him. She’d feed him her own dinner if she had to.”

He ran his hand along the length of the pig’s back, as if celebrating the virtues of my grandmother.

Mémé had found it difficult to make up her mind whether to marry Pépé or not. There was a photograph of the wedding in their bedroom. With the money he had saved whilst working in Paris, he had bought out his brothers, and the family farm became his. In the wedding photograph their two faces were unlined and round like apples. Even in the wedding photograph Pépé looked cunning. He had the eyes of a fox, watchful, canny, with a fire in their darkness. Perhaps it was the look in his eyes which made her hesitate.

Pépé confided to his friend Marius that Mémé couldn’t make up her mind whether or not to marry him. After the story of the stone sabot, he told me many stories of his life. The two friends planned a practical joke. Exactly that. A joke that would prove useful.

On the Sunday before Easter, Pépé suggested to his sweetheart that they take a walk together through the forest. By that time the violets and white wood anemones are out. One day it may be warm enough to undress; the next it can snow. The afternoon of their walk it was cold. He led her to a disused chapel where, inside, they were protected from the wind. He kissed her and put his hand on her breast. “The chapel was not consecrated,” he said to me gravely. She started to undo her blouse. He didn’t say this to me. He said: “I began to caress her.” I pictured the breasts to myself when he told me the story.

Suddenly they heard a key turn in the door and the bell above the roof began to ring a tocsin: the peal used to warn people against fire, or to keep lightning away in a storm. The couple were trapped there in the chapel. Pépé pretended to look for a way out. My grandmother adjusted her chemise, pushed him towards the door and clung to his back. She was convinced that they had been caught by robbers, and could scarcely hear what he said for the noise of the bell.

The neighbours came running through the forest and saw Marius astride the roof of the chapel ringing the bell like a madman. They shouted to him but he couldn’t hear. All they could see was that he was either crying or laughing. When he climbed down he solemnly put his finger to his lips and opened the chapel door. When the couple came out, he said: “There are two things nobody can hide—a cough and love!” Next Sunday the banns for their marriage were announced.

Pépé began to talk with the pig in the stable. To each kind of animal Pépé spoke in a different voice, making different sounds. With the mare he spoke softly and evenly, and when he repeated himself, it was as if he was speaking to a companion who had become deaf. To the pig his language was full of abrupt, high-pitched sounds, interspersed with exhaling grunts. Pépé sounded like a turkey when he spoke to the pig.

“Ahir ola ahira Jésus!”

Whilst he made this noise, he fitted a noose round the pig’s snout, being careful not to let it tighten. The pig followed him obediently, past the five cows and the mare, through the stable door and into the sudden harsh light of the snow. There the pig hesitated.

All his life the pig had complied. Mémé had fed him as if he were a member of the family. He, for his part, had put on his kilo per day. One hundred and forty kilos. One hundred and forty-one. One hundred and forty-two. Now, for the first time, he hesitated.

He saw four men standing before him, their hands, not in their pockets to protect them from the cold, but held out in front. He saw my grandmother waiting in the kitchen doorway without a bucket of food. Perhaps he saw my mother staring with anticipation through the kitchen window.

In any case, he put his head down and with his four small feet beneath their gigantic hams, he stepped one step back. Pépé pulled the rope and as the noose tightened, the pig screamed and tried to back away. For an instant Pépé held the pig by himself. Nothing could drag him against his will. The next instant the neighbours were there pulling on the rope too.

Pépé’s friend Marius and I pushed from behind. Every feature of the pig, except his mouth, is small. His arsehole is no larger than a buttonhole in a shirt. I held him by his tail.

After five minutes of dragging and heaving, we had him across the yard, alongside the large wooden sledge. This was the sledge that killed my father.

Pépé and my grandmother had waited four years for a child. “The weather and the cunt,” Pépé said, “do what they want.” My father was their first-born. Two years later came my aunt. They had no other children. And so, as soon as he was old enough, Pépé needed my father to work. The sledge killed him when he was thirty and I was two. He was bringing down hay from the alpage. The path was steep and about three kilometres long. In places it was cut through the rock, in places it was muddy, in places it was paved with rough stones around sharp, heavily banked corners. We used this path to take the cows up to the alpage in June and bring them down at the end of September. When I helped Pépé drive them up, he never stopped at the place where his son was killed. There was an overhanging grey rock there, which bulged outwards like the side of a whale. Not on the way up, on the way down, in the autumn, we always stopped under this rock and Pépé said: “This is where your father lost the heart to go on.”

We needed to get the pig up on to the sledge, lying on his right side. During the struggle across the yard, he had planted his feet as hard as he could against the ground in order to resist being pulled by the rope and being pushed from behind. When he felt himself being toppled, his four legs lunged and searched for the ground with desperate speed and force and at the same time he yelled louder. Never before had he discovered his strength as he was discovering it now.

The men threw themselves on him. For a moment he was invisible beneath the heap of men, and he lay still. I could see one of his eyes. The pig has intelligent eyes, and his fear was now intelligent. Suddenly, lunging and kicking, he fought like a man, a man fighting off robbers.

During the next twelve months he was going to give body to our soup, flavour our potatoes, stuff our cabbages, fill our sausages. His hams and rolled breast, salted and dried, were going to lie on the rack, suspended from the ceiling above Pépé and Mémé’s bed.

Grunting and using our knees and fists we got him still. Pépé roped three of his feet to the side bars of the sledge. As soon as a foot was tied, the pig struggled with all his strength to tug it from the knot. I climbed up to sit on his haunches. The men were swearing and laughing. As Mémé crossed the courtyard, I waved to her.

The day my father was killed, he had already brought down three loads of hay. It was in November, just before the snow. The hay is piled high on the sledge and tied down. At the top of the path, before the descent, you get between the shafts, tug once, and then brake the sledge as its runners slide down over the stones and the leaves and the dust for three kilometres. You brake it by digging in your heels and leaning backwards against the load. If, at the top, you reckon the load is too heavy, you tie logs to the back of the sledge and let these trail on the path, to act as an additional brake.

Nobody knows what happened when my father brought down his fourth load. He was found dead under the sledge. People said he ought to have been able to push the sledge off his chest. Perhaps that November afternoon, before the winter, his exhaustion or sadness was so great that he could not summon the will. Or perhaps the sledge stunned him.

My grandmother shouted at me: “You be careful he doesn’t kick you!” Then she gave Pépé the knife, a small one, no longer than the ones used at table, and she knelt on the ground with her basin.

Low down, Pépé made a very short cut, from which the blood gushed out, as if it had always been waiting to do just that. The pig struggled knowing it was too late. The five of us were too heavy for him. His screams became deep breaths. His death was like a basin emptying.

The other basin was filling up. My grandmother, squatting on her haunches, was stirring and agitating his blood, to prevent it curdling. Every so often she took out and threw away the white fibres forming in it.

His eyes were shut. The space in him, left by the blood, was being filled by a kind of sleep, for he was not yet dead. Above the sledge Marius was gently pumping the left foreleg up and down so as to empty the heart. Pépé looked at me. I thought I knew what he was thinking: one day when I am too old, you will kill the pig!

We fetched the pétrin. It was long enough for a man to lie down in. Before we rolled him into it, we arranged a chain like a belt for him, so that when he was wet we could still turn him round by pulling on his belt. To fill the pétrin like a bath took two milk churns of hot water. He lay there almost entirely covered. Scraping his skin with the sides of tablespoons we shaved him, and the more closely we shaved him, the more his skin looked like that of a man. In the hot water his hair came off easily. He did not look like a man from the village, for he was too fat and too untanned, but like a man of leisure. The most difficult parts to shave were his knees, where the skin was calloused.

“He prayed more than a monk,” said Marius. “Day and night he prayed to his trough.”

When he was perfectly naked, with even the cuticles removed from his toes, Pépé put a hook through his snout and we hauled on the pulley to hoist him up. The pulley was attached to a wooden balcony where I often played as a small child. The only way onto the balcony was through a door from the hayloft; there were no stairs, so my mother knew that when I was there, playing and crawling on all fours above the courtyard, I was out of harm’s way. The pig was larger than any of us. The men threw buckets of water over him, and to celebrate, they drank their first glass of *gnôle*.

Once Pépé spoke to me about death. “Last night,” he said, “I was dragging some wood down with the mare, when I felt death was behind me. So I turned round. There was the path we’d come down, there was the walnut tree, there were the juniper bushes, there were the boulders with moss on them, a few clouds in the sky, the waterfall in the corner. Death was hiding behind one of them. He hid as soon as I turned round.”

The pig’s hind legs were ten centimetres off the ground.

“Head from body in ONE!” Pépé shouted and severed the head in one long cut with his small knife.

The body fell.

“The head for you!” he nodded towards me. I knew what I had to do. I took it, and ran up the pile of snow in the courtyard so fast that my feet made footholds and I reached the top. And there on the white summit I placed the pig’s head.

The men were drinking their second glass of gnôle.

Into each hind leg, between the two bones, Pépé inserted a small hook. This time we hoisted up the carcass, neck down. The crows were too frightened by the men in the courtyard to approach the head on the pile of snow.

Delicately, from anus to neck, down the centre of the stomach, making an insertion with his knife, Pépé folded back the skin and fat. “Andre!” He said my name between his teeth because he was concentrating so hard.

He had made visible all that makes a pig a living, growing animal. All except the brain and head which were on the snow pile. The arrangement of the warm, steaming organs was the same as inside a rabbit. It was their size which was so impressive. When his belly was opened, it was like the mouth of a cave.

Pépé once admitted to me that he had dug for gold. During one summer he and a friend had got up two hours earlier every morning to go and dig there. They found nothing; but he showed me the shaft, should I ever wish to continue working it. It was hidden in a moraine on a steep wooded slope, where the boulders, the tree roots and the soil itself were all covered with a thick green moss. Whatever you touched there was like the fur of an animal.

I held one side of the zinc pan and Marius held the other, waiting for the guts and stomach to tumble out. Using only the point of his knife, as a woman does when unpicking stitches with the tip of her scissors, Pépé detached them. The grey guts overflowed the pan and we had to hold them in with our hands. They were warm and from them came the smell of killing.

The pig’s liver, the pig’s lungs, whitish-pink like two sprays of pear blossom, the pig’s heart, Pépé removed separately.

I ran to the top of the snow pile again and turned the head round so that it faced its empty carcass. Underneath the head the blood had thawed a little snow, making a red cave. Standing on top of the snow pile, my head was level with the balustrade of the wooden balcony, where I had played when I could first walk. The men down below were throwing buckets of water over the carcass and rubbing it down, inside and out, with a cloth. Then they went in to eat.

Down the centre of the table were loaves of fresh bread and large bottles of cider. There were two kinds of cider, the sweet cider which we had pressed only two months before, and last year’s, which was stronger. The older one was easy to distinguish because it was cloudier. Most of the women drank the new cider.

From a large black cast-iron pot on the stove, my mother filled the soup tureen to put on the table. To celebrate the killing of the new pig, we were going to eat what remained of the old.

In the soup, made with parts of the salted backbone, were carrots, parsnips, leeks, turnips. The loaves were passed round and held against each chest in turn, as a slice was cut off. Then, spoons in hand, we entered the meal.

Some of the men started to talk about the war. The body of another German soldier had been discovered a few weeks before in a crevice high up in the forest. This was the winter of 1950.

“If he’d stayed at home, he’d be sleeping today with his wife in his bed.”

I was drinking the strong cider and listening to each conversation.

Every year, when the pig was killed, all the neighbours and Monsieur le Curé and the schoolmaster were invited to eat. The schoolmaster was sitting near Pépé at the head of the table. I was anxious in case he told Pépé about the hedgehog. The hedgehog was discovered in the schoolroom cupboard where the schoolmaster kept his coat. We called *him* The Hedgehog because his hair stood up at the back. He had very small hands too. And he wore glasses. Standing before the class, he invited whoever had put the hedgehog in the cupboard to remove it. Nobody got up. Nobody dared look at me. Then he asked: “Who knows why hedgehogs smell?” Like a fool, I put up my hand and said they made a smell when they were frightened.

“Then since you know more about him than any of the others, please remove him.” The others began to laugh and some shouted Bravo! in such a way that he realised he had picked the culprit. As a punishment, he made me learn and recite out loud a page about hedgehogs. He brought the book himself next day, and I had to sit in the schoolroom until I had learnt it. I still remember how it began: “The fox knows many little things and the hedgehog knows one big thing.” I wondered whether he had read the text himself, because a few lines further down it explained that, because of their spines, hedgehogs could not mate like other animals, but had to do so standing up, and face to face like men and women.

I was reassured, for the schoolmaster was making Pépé laugh. Opposite me La Fine, who lived below our fields and could take away the pain of burns, was telling a story about Joseph, her brother-in-law. He went to C … on a day when there was a fête and a band. He came back late at night convinced that in one of the cafés he had pissed into a golden lavatory! It turned out he had pissed into a bandsman’s bassoon!

My mother never sat down. She went round the table serving. When she brought the stuffed cabbages on, we all cheered. “Wait till you taste them!” she cried, full of confidence. They had been cooking since early morning in a net in a deep pot. First she put a plate into the bottom of the net, then on the plate a layer of cabbage leaves, then a layer of stuffing of minced pork and eggs and shallots and marjoram, then a layer of leaves, then a layer of stuffing, until the net was as full and heavy as a goose. When I was younger I had watched her do it. Now I was drinking last year’s cider like a man.

“I would like to know what life was like ten thousand years ago,” Pépé was saying. “I think of it often. Nature would have been the same. The same trees, the same earth, the same clouds, the same snow falling in the same way on the grass and thawing in the spring. People exaggerate the changes in nature so as to make nature seem lighter.” He was talking to a neighbour’s son who was on leave from the army. “Nature resists change. If something changes, nature waits to see whether the change can continue, and, if it can’t, it crushes it with all its weight! Ten thousand years ago the trout in the stream would have been exactly the same as today.”

“The pigs wouldn’t have been!”

“That’s why I would like to go back! To see how the things we know today were first learnt. Take a chevreton. It’s simple. Milk the goat, heat the milk, separate it and press the curds. Well, we saw it all being done before we could walk. But how did they once discover that the best way of separating the milk was to take a kid’s stomach, blow it up like a balloon, dry it, soak it in acid, powder it and drop a few grains of this powder into the heated milk? I would like to know how the women discovered that!”

At the other end of the table the guests were listening to Mémé who was telling a story. There were two cousins in a nearby village who lived side by side because they inherited the same property …

“That is what I would like to know if I was a crow on a tree watching!” Pépé was saying. “All the mistakes which had to be made! And step by step, slowly, the progress!”

The two cousins fall out and start a fight. One of them bites a piece out of the other’s nose. Both are too frightened to continue fighting. A few days later the bitten one is digging in his garden, with a cloth over his nose. He sees his cousin coming out of the house on the other side of the fence. “Well, well!” he shouts. “Are you feeling hungry today? Why not come over and finish off the rest of the nose?”

Whenever a plate was empty, my mother piled more stuffed cabbage on to it.

“The thread of knowledge which nature doesn’t crush, like a thread of gold in the rock,” Pépé was saying.

The faces shone in the heat, and the table became more and more untidy. My mother brought on an apple tart the size of a small cart-wheel.

“And then I would like to go several thousand years into the future.”

“There’ll be no more peasants.”

“Not so sure! I didn’t say forty thousand, I said several thousand! I’d look down at them like the old crow looks at us!”

Unless I concentrated on stopping them revolving, the walls of the kitchen would not stay still. On the table with the apple tart were cups of coffee and bottles of gnôle. I gulped down some coffee.

“All farms will be on flat plains,” pronounced the schoolmaster.

The cold air of the courtyard cleared my head. At the end of the meal the guests left, saying, “Till the next time.”

I wanted an excuse not to go down to school. The chances were not good, for the only possible excuse was that I was needed for work, and there was not enough work for me to do. I held the pig’s forelegs whilst Pépé sawed the carcass into two from the back.

He put his shoulder under one of the sides, I unhooked it, he adjusted its weight, and he carried it across the courtyard, past the stone sabot, and up the outside wooden stairway to the room above the vaulted cellar. The side of the pig was longer than he was tall. He walked slowly, and on the stairway he stopped once. When he carried the second side, he stopped three times.

The next day he would cut the meat and lay it out neatly, like a flowerbed of pink delphiniums, on the trestle table. Every year he arranged it like this.

[[j-b-john-berger-into-their-labours-trilogy-7.jpg]]

Then my mother would salt the meat in the wooden *saloir* and in six weeks Pépé and I would go looking for juniper branches for smoking the hams and the bacon.

The kitchen had been restored to its working tidiness. On the scrubbed table the women were cleaning the pig’s guts and preparing to make boudin from his blood. Reluctantly I went down the steep path to school.

When I came out I had to screw up my eyes against the falling snow. Mémé did not warn me about bringing snow on my boots into the kitchen, because she was crying. She and my mother had laid Pépé on his bed.

He had collapsed in the courtyard. Tomorrow the same neighbours who had eaten lunch with us would be returning to pay their last respects to him.

No mountain in the world was as still and as cold as his face. I waited for his face to move. I told myself I would wait all night. But its stillness outdid me.

I went out and crossed the courtyard to look at the stone sabot. There was enough moonlight for me to see it.

I heard Pépé saying again: “That is what I’d like to know if I was a crow on a tree watching …”

During the night more snow fell, and in the morning, on top of the pile in the courtyard, I saw an unexpected shape, draped in white. I had forgotten the pig’s head. Once more I ran full tilt up the side to the top. I brushed off the snow. The eyes were shut and the skin was as cold as ice. It was then that I started to howl. I do not know for how long I sat there, on top of the snow pile, howling.

** Village Maternity



<quote>
The mother puts<br> the newborn day<br> to her breast

turnips<br> like skulls<br> are heaped<br> house high

before the blood has been washed<br> from the legs of the sky
</quote>

** Addressed to Survivors



ROUSA BELONGED TO the breed which is called Abondance, after one of three sister rivers which flow through deep gorges with many waterfalls to the lake. She was reddish-brown and white, the white patches mostly occurring on the inside of her legs, her underside and her dewlap, so that she gave the impression of being a reddish-brown cow who had just waded across a river of milk. She had had four calves. Four times a perfectly formed animal with reddish-brown and white fur, the stumps of horns, hooves, eyelashes, teeth, ears, sexual organs, had grown in the matrix between her wide haunches and been expelled. Four times the birth had released a flow of milk into her immense udder which was like a full moon coming up behind a hill.

Martine owned six cows, and of the six, Rousa gave the best milk. After she had calved she gave as much as twenty litres a day.

“Cows are like distilleries,” said Martine. “To have good milk, you need good pastures.”

Her chalet in the alpage was high up the mountain. And the butter she made there was considered to be the best in the village.

Martine was in her mid-fifties. Her husband worked in one of the saw-mills of the valley. In the alpage her companion was an old man whom everybody called Joseph, although his real name was Jean-Louis.

Joseph had no family and came from another part of the mountains. He claimed to have been a shepherd all his life, which was probably true, but nobody gave great credence to his claims because he usually made them when he was drinking. He lodged with Martine and her husband, and in exchange for his keep he worked for them. If somebody in conversation asked: which Joseph? he was always identified as Joseph, The Servant of Martine.

“Rousa has turned mad,” Joseph announced to her one evening.

“Why do you say that?”

“She’s had three inseminations and not one has taken.”

“We’ll try a fourth time.”

“She’ll be on heat twice a month and turn mad. You should have sold her before,” he muttered. “I said it when we were below.”

“She is the best cow we have.”

Martine had a light, lilting voice.

“I’ve been looking after cows for fifty years,” he grumbled, “fifty years.”

“You have no more wine, I think.”

She said this, getting up from the table. She did not allow him access to the few litres of wine she kept for herself or for the occasional visitor. And he, for his part, never laid in a large stock. He preferred to go down to the village on the occasion of taking down their cheeses or fetching some bread, and to come back with four or five bottles in his haversack.

He ignored the remark about his wine.

“Women!” he continued. “When I was alone in the mountains, I kept the jobs to be done on one side, and the finished jobs on the other, and it was simple. When a woman is around, nothing is simple.”

“Poor Joseph!”

“And now Rousa has turned mad!”

The chalet had one small dark wooden room like a sailing ship’s cabin. At the end furthest from the door was a wooden platform which served as a bed.

He shuffled to the door without a further word. His moods could change very rapidly. When he was happy he pretended to dance through the door. When he was despondent he left the room as if leaving the world to its own damnation.

The room ran parallel to the stable and was only separated from it by wooden planks. From her bed Martine could hear a goat piss. But if the wall had been a hundred times thicker, she would have heard the blow that woke her that night. It reverberated as if the whole chalet had been struck.

They both got to the stable at the same time.

“What happened?” Martine asked.

The old man had excited eyes and looked cheerful again.

Rousa was on her feet staring at the torch light. The other five cows were lying peacefully on the wooden floor. The goats stared with their usual contradictory expression of surprise and mockery.

“It wasn’t thunder,” said Joseph. “The sky is …”

“What sort of noise was it?” interrupted Martine. “Did you hear it?”

“Yes I heard it.”

“Were you asleep?”

“No.”

“Then what sort of noise was it?”

“A noise like somebody trying to break through the floorboards. I thought it was you. I couldn’t hear your voice. Something’s happened to the Patronne, I said to myself. She needs me. I’m going down to her.”

“See what you can see outside.”

He walked out briskly, no longer shuffling, a man with a purpose.

“It’s as calm as a lake,” he announced when he came back. He had the habit of using turns of phrase quite inappropriate to the place or occasion, as if referring to something in his own past.

“It’s a mystery,” she said.

“I can tell you it was Rousa.”

“I was dreaming of Rousa when the crash woke me up,” said Martine.

The old man stepped closer. His brows, his temples, the bridge of his nose were wrinkled like the skin of baked milk. For a moment she hesitated, as if she were going to ask him something. Then apparently she decided against it. His past remained a secret not because he refused to answer questions—he always answered—but because the questions were bound to be wrong.

“Yes, I was dreaming. We weren’t in the chalet here, we were down below. I’d gone to bed in the kitchen. This was in my dream. But earlier I’d asked you to help me push the bed, it was the big bed in our bedroom, the bed in which the Patron was born, to push it at an angle to the window. We pushed it together. This was to stop Rousa jumping out. The placing of the bed was a kind of barrier. Yet when I woke up I knew that Rousa had gone.”

“Most dreams are foolish,” he said.

Next morning, whilst he was taking the cows up to graze, she examined the stable to see if she could find any sign of what had woken them in the night.

Joseph’s complaint that women always complicate work was unjustified. After ten summers in the alpage, the two of them did not have to discuss what needed to be done each day. He went out with the cows and goats; he brought them in; he cleaned the stable; he cut the wood; he looked after the horse. He treated the horse as if it belonged to him and not to the Patron. Perhaps this was by virtue of age, for the horse was thirty and he was seventy-six. “By the time of horses,” he said, “he is older than me.” Martine milked, churned the butter, made the cheeses, cooked for them both.

Now she examined the walls of the stable, the doors at either end, the wooden gully down which he shovelled the cow shit through a hole in the wall, the beams which were so low that he had to bend his head and she could just walk under, the manger and the chains for fastening the cows, and she found no clue to what it was that had woken them.

She went up to the loft. Nothing had fallen. The hole in the hay where he slept was deep. His few clothes were hung over a beam. As she was about to leave, she noticed the broken neck of a wine bottle just within reach of the hay. She knelt down to look for the rest of the bottle but found nothing. On her knees she could see between the floorboards.

She returned to the stable, lifted up her skirt and stood astride the wooden gutter into which the cows piss. Whilst relieving herself, she looked up. The floorboards over Rousa’s place were gashed and one was completely split.

When he came back, she showed him the gashes in the wood.

“That’s just below where I sleep,” he said, “I tell you she has turned mad.”

“How could she butt if she was chained?”

“When a cow turns mad, you’d be surprised what she can do. She can leave her skin and go right back into it again.”

“Perhaps the gashes in the wood were there before.”

“They could have been.”

“Then what made the noise?”

“Rousa!” He screwed up his whole face because she would not see what was clear.

A few days later the cow tried to mount him.

“I saw her coming from behind. I was lucky enough to turn round and see her coming. She was charging down the hill and her forelegs were leaving the ground! She could have broken my back, five hundred kilos landing on it like that. Seventy-six years my back has kept me on these legs and they are not bad legs.”

“What did you do?” Martine asked.

“They are the legs of a man.”

“So what did you do?”

“I ran to the side and lay down.”

“Lay down?”

“On the ground. So as not to give her a target. Not even a cow, turned mad, can mount a shadow on the ground.”

She slapped her lap in amusement. They were sitting at the table finishing their soup.

“You are as thin as a shadow anyway.”

His shoulders were large, but the rest of his body always looked hidden within the folds of his clothes.

“I knew I was safer on the ground.”

“She might have trampled on you.”

“If she’d mounted me, she’d have broken my back.”

“God forbid!”

“I’m old, I’m nearer the big hole than the little hole through which I came into the world.”

“But the little one still interests you!”

“Tomorrow I’ll go down,” he said, admitting no complicity and drinking the water out of his glass, “tomorrow afternoon.”

“You can take the cheeses,” she said.

He was quite content to sit in the darkness, smoking a cigarette and occasionally going to the door to spit. But the darkness irritated her unless she was in bed. If she was sitting up, she wanted to read. The books she liked best were about other parts of the world: China, Paris, Tahiti. Joseph’s face was now barely discernible in the darkness. The lines and pouches on the faces of the other old people in the village could be allotted to events and experiences which were dated and recountable in detail; his remained mysterious, unrelated to any story, like the lines on the bark of a tree.

“I was thinking,” he said, “she may have smelt me where I was sleeping above her.”

Martine nodded. In the silent stable the cows were lying down. Outside, the mountains were reeling under the stars. That night Joseph went out of the room with one of his dance steps.

She took off most of her clothes. The two of them shared one broken piece of mirror, the size of a playing-card, which hung on the wall outside the door. In the mornings she did her hair in front of it, and once a week he shaved before it. Nobody in the alpage knows what they look like. She was standing in her bare feet when he came back.

“I tell you she has turned mad,” he said.

“Never mind, Joseph, if you’re right, we’ll sell her in the autumn.”

She climbed on to the wooden platform and bent double because of the low ceiling. From where he was standing he saw her white shape, vague but full like a cumulus cloud, trailing white legs.

“I’m not going to sleep in the same corner,” he said, “it provokes her.”

“You must do what you think.”

“It might be best for me to sleep outside. She can smell me.”

“Come, Joseph, you’re not a bull.”

“An old one, a very old one.”

She laughed lightly from the depth of the wooden room.

Before he went down the following afternoon, he mumbled to her that she should keep an eye on the cows. Perhaps one of the reasons why the old are so rarely obeyed is that they insist so little on the truth of their observations, and this is because they see all such particular truths as small, compared to the immense single truth about which they can never talk.

When he returned with three loaves and five bottles of wine his eyes had a wide tearful look. This meant that he had drunk a bottle during the two-hour climb up. He went to fetch the cows and staggered once or twice against the slope, as if falling into the open arms of a new friend. Yet when he came back with only five cows, a quarter of an hour later, he was quite sober.

“Rousa has gone,” he announced gravely.

“She must have wandered higher up.”

“I went to look, there’s no sign of her and I couldn’t hear her.”

“You don’t hear well,” she said. “I’ll go.”

“You can be deaf,” he replied, “or you can be very sharp of hearing, but if there’s nothing to hear, it doesn’t make any difference.”

“She has never gone off before.”

“She never turned mad before. Yesterday she tried to mount me. And did I tell you what I did? I saw her coming and I lay down. Today she smelt a bull in the wind.”

After the other cows were milked, the two of them set out to look for Rousa. The grasshoppers, with their back legs raised, kept hissing like snakes. It was possible to see for twenty, thirty kilometres. She strode faster than Joseph did, perhaps because she was more surprised by what had happened. The bells of the herds lower down sounded exactly the same as every evening. Yet Rousa was not to be found.

In winter it is impossible to remember exactly what cowbells sound like. One forgets, for instance, how at night they sound like stars clinking. In the same way it is impossible to recall, when once they have passed, how long the evenings are in June, when both light and mountains look equally permanent. In this horizontal endless light, towards ten o’clock, Joseph found Rousa lying in the grass, a hundred metres from the chalet. The sight of her, so reposeful and so near, startled him.

“Jésus!” he whispered. “How long have you been here?”

For an hour or so around midday the cows lay down to ruminate. When they got up that afternoon Rousa had strayed away from the others and climbed to the crest above the chalet. In her straying away there was already an unknown aim. From the crest she made her way down the other side, where rhododendra grow and where, in places, the slope is as steep as thirty degrees. A cow from the plains would have killed herself. But Rousa had spent six summers on the mountain. She even knew how to open the stable door if there was nobody there; she opened the door and the other cows followed her in. Rousa crossed the forest at the bottom of the next valley, picking her way carefully, because the creviced rocks and the roots of the spruces are like natural traps into which a heavy animal can fall and break a leg. Having crossed the forest, she climbed another crest so that she overlooked a third valley.

In this valley was a herd of eighty cows and two bulls. The bulls were white and belonged to the race of Charolais. Rousa mooed. She did not have to do this more than twice before one of the bulls recognised that the cow on the skyline was on heat. He climbed earnestly towards her. The second bull followed.

Did Rousa try to pull away from the great second white bull? Was she facing down the slope instead of up? Did her madness double so that she awaited a third bull or the return of the first? After receiving the first bull, was her appetite a little assuaged so that her back was able to bear less weight? The bulls weigh nearly a thousand kilos each. The questions will never be answered. The two bulls wandered down to join their herd and Rousa started her journey home.

When she was in sight of the door which she could open, fatigue overcame her and she lay down. Perhaps at this moment of her triumph, she was still unharmed. After resting, she knelt on her forelegs in order to get to her feet and reach the stable. But instead of being able to raise her hindquarters, those quarters whose insistent demand had forced her across a mountain, they toppled downwards, and her whole body followed. She was rolling down the slope. Each time her bent legs followed the arc of the sky and struck the ground again, she tried to dig them into the earth, and each time the momentum of her massive body was too much for her and she rolled another turn and with each turn she gained speed.

Joseph paced it out and found she had rolled a hundred metres. How she finally stopped herself was another mystery. He shrugged his shoulders. Yet she had stopped just in time. A few metres below, the slope increased to nearly forty-five degrees, and then nothing could have saved her. She would have hit the boulders at the bottom, a mass of unsellable broken meat and bone.

“Rousa’s come back!” he shouted.

Martine came running, and stopped short to see the cow unexpectedly on the ground.

“Has she broken a leg?”

Joseph shook his head.

Together they pushed and pulled to get the cow on to her feet. She would not budge.

“We can’t move her, the two of us by ourselves.”

“In the morning I’ll go down to get help,” he said.

“I’m not leaving her alone all night,” Martine insisted.

“A cow is an animal,” he said.

“I’m staying with her. She could roll down there on to the rocks.”

He walked away with his despondent walk.

“Twenty-seven years, and this is the first time I’ve had an accident with a cow.” She said this quietly as she felt the cow’s horns and ears. “A stupid accident. A stupid cow accident!”

With her complacent eyes Rousa followed the woman’s movements. Her horns were unhealthily cold.

Joseph came back with some blankets draped over his shoulders. Something had mollified him.

“I will stay with her,” he said.

“I won’t sleep anyway,” said Martine.

They spread the blankets over Rousa, and then over themselves.

“She knows what’s happening,” said Martine.

Cows rarely make any sound when in pain. At the most they blow heavily through their immense nostrils.

From under the blankets the two of them looked down at the far lights in the valley. The sky was clear, the Milky Way like a vast misty white goose pecking at the lip of a jug.

“If only she’d move,” whispered Martine, “I could milk her.”

She lay by the cow’s head, the halter rope coiled round her wrist. He lay between the cow’s four legs.

“The lights stay on all night in the villages,” he said. “One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, but none of them is my village.”

From out of his pocket he took a mouth-organ. He had had this mouth-organ for fifty years, since he was a conscript in the army. At that time, when he was young, he used to pretend to play an invisible trumpet, using only his lips and hands. If asked, he would entertain the whole barrack room by playing this trumpet which did not exist. One evening a friendly sergeant said: “You play well enough to have something to play on. Here, I’ve got two. Take this.” And so he acquired a mouth-organ.

As he played now, he tapped his foot on the mountainside and looked at the tiny clusters of lights below—no larger than grains of sugar, fallen from a spoon.

He played a polka, a quadrille, a waltz, “The Nightingale of the Sweet Wood,” a rigadoon. Neither she nor he could have said afterwards for how long he played. The night turned colder. As his foot beat time on the mountainside, his hands in the moonlight smoothed and ruffled each tune as if it were a bird miraculously perched on the instrument. All music is about survival, addressed to survivors. Once Rousa stirred, but she could not move her numb hindquarters.

When he stopped playing, Martine spoke very gently as if talking about a child being born. “I remember you used to play your mouth-organ when you first came to us.”

“Twelve years ago.”

“The Patron asked you”—she was laughing now—“if you could play The Charming Rosalie!”

“Twelve years and two months.”

“You remember the month!”

“Yes it was April. There was snow. I knocked on the door and asked if I could sleep in the barn. You said Yes. The next day it thawed, and the day after I helped plant the potatoes. If it hadn’t thawed that day, I wouldn’t be here now.”

“We had only daughters,” she said, by way of explanation.

The two of them listened to Rousa’s difficult breathing.

“The Patron is as cunning as a fox, isn’t he? He used to leave money on the table. Did you know that? He used to leave it there at night to see if I was honest. One day I said to him, ‘You needn’t worry! I eat my own money but I’m not going to eat yours or the Patronne’s!’ ”

The thought of this riposte of ten years ago made him burst into song:

<verse>
“Bon Soir! Bon Soir.
You gave me the moon!”
</verse>

When he could remember no more words, he continued on the mouth-organ. He serenaded her. He addressed her across Rousa’s head, which rested on the ground. Every so often, out of tact, he looked away from her and across to the peak opposite. He played to the mountain and the woman. To the dead and the unborn.

Then, laughing, he broke into words again:

<verse>
“Bon Soir! Bon Soir.
You give me the moon …”
</verse>

On the last note his voice creaked like a pine tree in a storm. On the slope there was not a breath of wind. Then he pulled his beret over his ear and laid his head down to sleep.

Five minutes later Martine said: “If we can get her on to her feet in the stable tomorrow she has a chance. She wants to get up, I can feel it, Joseph.”

He was already asleep with his knees drawn up. His open hand, palm uppermost, had fallen across the cow’s udder. Beside it was an empty winebottle which he must have brought with him under the blankets.

Next morning eight neighbours came to pull Rousa, with ropes attached to each of her legs, across the grass and into the stable. They talked of using a pulley and rope to hoist her to her legs, but the stable ceiling was too low. After they had gone, Martine continued to puzzle on how she could save the cow.

She pushed planks under her in the hope of levering her up. She asked Joseph to stand on the far end of a plank. He jumped up and down with all his weight until he had to stop to pull up his trousers. But nothing moved the cow. The complacency of her look was turning into indifference. Her white patches were muddied with shit and with the soil she had been pulled across.

Between carrying out Martine’s instructions, Joseph kept shaking his head.

Now she had the idea that they should nail blocks of wood to the floor by her hind feet, so that if she tried to get up by herself, she would have something to push against. Joseph cut the blocks of wood and nailed them to the floor.

The day the butcher’s lorry came, Rousa was dragged through the door and up the ramp into the lorry. She made no sound. All she did was to roll her eyes, rolling them upwards, until only the blue-grey of the underneath of her eyeballs was visible.

In the lorry she tried for the last time to shift the dead weight of the body, muscles, tissue, organs, passages and vessels which had turned her mad for a bull, and had made her a cow with a yield of twenty-five litres of milk. But she couldn’t. The cold from the mountainside was creeping up her back.

Martine stepped into the lorry and stuffed an armful of straw between Rousa’s flank and the sharp metal housing round the back wheel. The road down was full of pot-holes, and she did not want the animal, who could not move, to suffer by her skin being chafed against the metal.

“She’s a cow,” one of the men said, when the back doors of the lorry were shut.

“A poor beast,” said another.

Joseph stared after the lorry and remained standing in the middle of the rutted road long after it was out of sight.

“Hey, Joseph,” a neighbour shouted.

He turned round, waved and made three dance steps.

“Come and have a drink!”

He disappeared into the stable where he looked at the horse who was older than him.

** Sunset



<quote>
Like a trout<br> our mountain basks<br> in the setting sun

as the light drains<br> the trout dies<br> its mouth open

the night<br> with its wings of spruce<br> flies the mountain

to the dead
</quote>

** The Value of Money



HIS FACE WAS THIN and his body was stocky. Sixty-three years old, his hair was still black. When he rode Gui-Gui, his work horse, there was a distinct resemblance between them: both were compact, like a loosely clenched fist. He sat high up by her collar, and he sat there firmly, as she, with her thick short legs, breasted the steep slopes.

He was the only man in the village who planted new apple trees. After the cider was pressed, he took an armful of *marc* and carefully buried it in the corner of his garden. The following year there were several shoots. He separated them out and mulched them, and in three years’ time they were large and sturdy enough to plant out in the orchard. Later he grafted on to them.

The other men reasoned that the old trees—some of them were perhaps two hundred years old—would last their lifetime and that afterwards the orchards would be abandoned.

When I’ve gone, nobody is going to work my farm, one of them said.

We’ll be in the orchard of the Dead! another shouted loudly, the very loudness affirming that they were not in that orchard yet.

Marcel, however, was a philosopher. In the evening he tried to explain to himself what had happened during the day, and thereafter to act according to his explanations.

This is how he explained planting the new apple trees.

My sons won’t work on the farm. They want to have free weekends and holidays and fixed hours. They like to have money in their pockets so as to be able to spend it. They have gone to earn money, and are mad about it. Michel has gone to work in a factory. Edouard has gone into commerce. (He used the term commerce because he did not wish to be harsh towards his youngest son.) I believe they are mistaken. Selling things all day, or working forty-five hours a week in a factory is no life for a man—jobs like that lead to ignorance. It is unlikely that they will ever work this farm. The farm will end with Nicole and me. Why work with such effort and care for something which is doomed? And to that I reply: Working is a way of preserving the knowledge my sons are losing. I dig the holes, wait for the tender moon and plant out these saplings to give an example to my sons if they are interested, and, if not, to show my father and his father that the knowledge they handed down has not yet been abandoned. Without that knowledge, I am nothing.

Nobody ever expected to see Marcel in prison. Often when a man’s destiny suddenly changes as the result of his own actions, it is difficult to know how far back the story really began. I will only go back as far as the previous spring.

He was carting the winter’s manure to the fields, distributing it in small piles about two metres apart. Later he would fork these piles evenly over the grass and earth. He carted the manure in a tipcart drawn by Gui-Gui. The similarity of build between horse and man had its usefulness. When the cart was full with a load of four hundred kilos, the young mare started hauling it up the slope as fast as she could, so as to gain momentum for the climb. Marcel, holding the bridle by her head, strode with her, and her forelegs and his legs kept perfect time. Fast time. Frequently they were forced to stop and regain their breath, before starting up again. Whilst they worked together, he talked to her, using a language of very abbreviated sounds to save his breath. These sounds had once derived from curt instructions or oaths; now they had left their meaning behind, and were just an accompaniment to the movement of their climbing legs. Sometimes he made these sounds in his cell in the prison at B.…

From the poultry house Nicole saw an unfamiliar tractor coming down the road. She waited to see where it would turn off. In the middle of the road, where no wheels went, the spring grass was already beginning to grow. At the side, on the banks, were clumps of violets.

Jésus! What is Marcel going to say? asked Nicole, as the tractor approached the farm.

She waved at her son Edouard on the driving seat. He drove past what remained of the manure heap and turned into the yard. There he climbed down and left the engine running. The tractor was blue.

I got it cheap, he shouted to his mother. It’s twelve years old!

Nicole smiled encouragingly. She forgot anxieties as soon as they were over, and was reluctant to foresee the ones approaching.

He’ll only be against it because he can’t drive! Edouard said.

The father led the mare and empty cart into the yard. When he saw the tractor he stopped, and folded his arms on his chest.

What is it? he asked as if he had never seen a tractor before.

I’ve bought it! shouted Edouard against the noise of the engine.

The son stood with his elbow resting on the vibrating bonnet as if it were the shoulder of a girl, and his foot on the small front wheel. He was dressed in the clothes he wore to go to market: a pink shirt, blue jeans and ex-army suede boots.

The father would not approach nearer, and at such a distance the noise of the engine made everything inaudible.

What have you bought it for?

Nineteen sixty-three! bawled Edouard. Twelve years old.

It’s only four months ago that I bought the new mare. Marcel seemed unaware that nobody could hear his words. When the horse butcher took the last Gui-Gui away, I came into the kitchen and I held up the empty bridle, the bridle she had worked with for fifteen years and I said to you: Do you know what this means? And you replied: It means a tractor! And I said: No, it means Gui-Gui has gone! It does not mean a tractor in God’s name!

It’ll pull twenty tons!

The motor hesitated and stopped.

What do you say? demanded Edouard.

I say it’s no use to us! said Marcel, unharnessing Gui-Gui the Second, and leading her into the stable.

In the evenings Marcel became sleepy. The lids came down over his slate-coloured eyes and his lower lip protruded a little. It was then that he looked his age.

You were ungrateful, Nicole told him. He bought it out of his savings.

He bought it because he can’t help buying, Marcel replied, yawning.

She nudged him, not angrily but brusquely, and handed him a brochure. He gave me this, to show you.

He turned the pages carefully as if turning them was the last job of the day. The backs of his hands were smooth, they might have been the hands of a baker; their palms were calloused and engrained like the wood of the tipcart.

[[j-b-john-berger-into-their-labours-trilogy-8.jpg]]

They are beautiful, how could they not be beautiful? he said. Men have dreamt of machines like this for centuries. Who would believe that my mother carted earth in a wheel-barrow from the bottom to the top of her field for ten days on end? With a tractor it would have taken half an afternoon.

[[j-b-john-berger-into-their-labours-trilogy-9.jpg]]

If we had that machine, we’d get the hay in in eight days!

*** Liberator<br>avec encore plus de confort

They promise everything. Look at their colours—yellow, blue, red, bright green: they promise the world!

He walked to the door. False promises! He shouted the two words out very loud.

A few minutes later he came back, buttoning his fly.

Do you know what those machines are for?

They plough, they turn hay, they spread dung, they milk—it depends, answered Nicole.

There’s one job they all do.

He looked into her eyes with the utmost seriousness. For all their experience, Nicole’s eyes were innocent. They had seen illness, they had seen farms on fire, they had seen people work themselves to the grave, they had seen women agonising in labour, but they had never seen men poring over a map and drawing up a plan.

Their job is to wipe us out.

All Edouard did was to save enough money to buy a secondhand tractor, said Nicole.

Marcel took off his beret and his leather jacket and started unbuttoning his shirt. She looked straight at him.

You can’t always expect things to stay the same, Marcel.

There are only two machines worth having here—

Nicole interrupted him.

Do you know what I think?

She was taking the pins out of her hair. Unpinned, it came down to her waist.

I think you’re furious about the tractor because you can’t drive!

If I wanted to, I could learn! Marcel answered.

This made her laugh. The flesh of her arms, immense after forty years of milking, moved as if she were dancing when she laughed.

Why not? he demanded.

Oh la! la! she sighed between bursts of laughter. What did I pick out of the lottery?

In the prison at B …, Marcel answered her question: she married a bandit without knowing it.

The day after Edouard bought the tractor, Marcel continued distributing the winter manure. The leaf-buds on the apple trees were opening, the tiny leaves so young that they were almost colourless, and wrinkled from being folded, like all new-born skin. His body felt old and its joints were stiff from the winter. Each forkload of dung had to be lifted into the cart. After filling three carts and stepping out each time with the mare as she tugged the cart to the top field, a hundred and fifty metres higher than the house, his spine pained him, and with every forkload lifted, two bars of ache twisted inwards at the bottom of his stomach making his balls hurt. That day the noises he made to Gui-Gui were sometimes the complaints of his own body.

The day before he had taken up twelve cartloads. His right elbow was sore and bleeding a little from where the striding beside the mare had knocked his arm against a harness hook on the horse’s collar. One cart made four heaps, three dragged out with a hoe and the last one tipped.

He stood, looking down at the farm, the valley, the village, the cemetery, the road that led away. Whilst he stood there he didn’t move any part of his body, so that all parts should rest. He knew exactly where he would lie in the cemetery. Looking down from there at the cemetery, he explained the machines to himself.

On the flat plains the poor have no choice but to work for the rich. By themselves the poor, working only for money, would have neither the energy nor the heart to produce enough to create wealth. This is where machines came in, long ago. Machines make monkey-work productive, and the wealth they create goes to those who own the machines. On the plains I would not have this hernia of an ache because a machine would be lifting dung onto another machine which would transport it and scatter it.

[[j-b-john-berger-into-their-labours-trilogy-10.jpg]]

When he was reloading the cart in the yard he stopped to straighten his back. He could see the piles of dung arranged in three straight lines with geometrically regular intervals in the top field by the forest. At that distance they looked scarcely larger than the beads of a rosary. Seventy-two Hail Marys.

On the plains there will be no more peasants.

By the evening he had shifted his thirteen cartloads.

They had four children. Michel, their eldest son, and their two daughters, Marie-Rose and Danièle, were married. Edouard, who still lived at home, was the youngest. When he left the local school, Edouard had gone to the technical school at A … and there obtained his trade certificate as a garage mechanic. No jobs existing in the local garages, he went into a factory. After a few months at the factory he made friends with some forains and left the factory to begin working with them in the local markets. From an early age Edouard had the reputation of being lazy. He himself said: I’m willing to work as hard as the next person, but I’m not a fool and I’m not going to work for nothing.

Perhaps the attraction of the forains for Edouard was the pride they took in never being taken for fools.

First he sold biscuits and boiled sweets, later mirrors and painted trays. Once he brought home a tray for his mother. It had a stag painted on it. His father was enthusiastic. Look at him, he mused, in the forest! It’s too good to use as a tray!

The tractor was a different matter. His father refused to acknowledge its existence. Two months passed.

One day in June, when the whole family came to help with the haymaking, the four grown-up children agreed amongst themselves to ignore the old man’s opposition.

He’s boneheaded! said Danièle. If we’ve got a tractor, why not use it?

When Marcel’s back was turned, they tethered the mare in the shade of an apple tree, unbolted the shafts, and attached the blue tractor to the hay wagon. Everyone was waiting for the old man to protest and order them to put the horse back. They were going to refuse. To their surprise, Marcel said nothing. As usual he took his place on top of the wagon to build the load. At first he stood, and finally, when the load was three or more metres high, he knelt. Around the cart on the slope the women were raking. The men forked the hay up to him. He directed each fork where to place the hay, he folded the swaths in upon themselves, he constructed the corners and he keyed the corners into the centre. He built like a celestial mattress-maker, apparently oblivious or indifferent as to how the wagon would be drawn across the earth.

In the loft the heat and smell of the new hay was already like the breath of an animal. Marcel climbed one of the ladders to fetch a fork which had been left on top. The last hay had not yet lain down. Stalks of it waved slowly in the dim light under the roof timbers. Some of the wall planks had holes in them where their knots had once been. Through these holes came beams of sunlight, narrow as branches. When a stalk crossed a beam, it caught the light for an instant and lit up like a spark.

On top of the hay, he again explained the machines to himself. They make sure we know the machines exist. From then onwards working without one is harder. Not having the machine makes the father look old-fashioned to the son, makes the husband look mean to his wife, makes one neighbour look poor to the next. After he has lived a while with not having the machines, they offer him a loan to buy a tractor. A good cow gives 2,500 litres of milk a year. Ten cows give 25,000 litres a year. The price he receives for all that milk during the whole year is the price of a tractor. This is why he needs a loan. When he has bought the tractor, they say: Now to use the tractor fully you need the machines to go with it, we can lend you the money to buy the machines, and you can pay us back month by month. Without these machines, you are not making proper use of your tractor! And so he buys a machine, and then another, and he falls deeper and deeper into debt. Eventually he is forced to sell out. Which is what they planned in Paris (he pronounced the name of the capital with contempt and recognition—in that order) from the very beginning! Everywhere in the world men go hungry, yet a peasant who works without a tractor is unworthy of his country’s agriculture!

In July the heifer Marquise mounted on Marcel’s back, as if he were a cow and she the bull. Marquise was not yet fully grown. Her teats were no larger than the fingers of a woman’s glove. Marcel fell forward onto his knees. For a week his left leg hurt and, after putting it off several times, he decided to go and see the bone-setter in A.…

It was market day and the bus was crowded. Marcel calculated that it was eight years since he had taken the bus. After half an hour, he could no longer name a single farm or hamlet which they passed.

The bone-setter grasped the old man’s knee in his cool hands. The very white leg had no fat on it at all. The bone-setter rotated the knee and applied some ointment. Marcel paid the fee of three thousand francs and added a pot of honey. The bone-setter protested at the honey.

The honey is from our own bees, said Marcel.

The bus back was not until the afternoon, and so he wandered through the market. The tomatoes on the stalls were more advanced than Nicole’s. Leaving the fruit and vegetables behind, he strolled between hanging carpets which were for sale. The sight of them and their thick pile made him thirsty. In a café he drank two glasses of cold white wine. When he came out, he saw a circle of people, mostly women, looking at somebody he couldn’t see. The ones at the back were standing on tiptoe. From the centre of the circle he heard a man’s voice, like a voice on the radio when the volume is turned up. Idly Marcel looked from woman to woman to decide which one pleased him most. She had wide hips and was wearing a dress with flowers like peonies printed on it, and was holding the hand of a small child. The voice of the invisible speaker continued:

Ladies, do I look like a crook? Did I hear one of you say Yes! Ah well! I know women are suspicious. And if I had to deal with men, like you do, I’d be suspicious!

Suddenly Marcel recognised the voice. The man in the centre of the circle was his own son. Cautiously he approached. He wanted to see without being seen. Edouard was wearing an apron over a bare torso. His shoulders and back were brown from the haymaking. In front of him stood a small folding table with some bottles and tins on it. He picked up a bottle and poured what looked like red ink from it, down the front of his white apron. The stain it made was the shape of a rabbit hanging by its hind legs, except that one front paw was longer than the other. Marcel’s legs were trembling. His son took another bottle and poured a green liquid from it which ran down the overall like a stream and crossed the rabbit. The voice never stopped.

If you have children they spill things over themselves, if you have a husband—no, Madame, I’m not married—he starts looking into the engine of his car without changing his shirt, when you are going out for the evening, he tells you to hurry and you get nervous, you spill nail varnish over your new dress …

With two fingers, Edouard, his son, smeared silver varnish horizontally across the red rabbit on the apron over his stomach. Marcel regretted drinking the white wine because now, in the crowd and heat, he could not stop his legs trembling.

I take a brush, water and ordinary soap …

Edouard scrubbed down his stomach. His face was glistening with sweat, and when he paused between words, he kept his mouth open in a smile.

Soap, as you see, won’t remove these stains …

At the ends of his long brown arms his fingers were coloured red, green, silver. Women in the front row were goggling at his shoulders, not at the monkey-work on his apron.

Now I’m going to rub with this unique cleaning tablet which removes grease, ink, coffee, wine, gravy—which removes everything except dried oil paint, and nothing can remove dried oil paint, it’s like sin …

Marcel’s mother, Edouard’s grandmother, used to say, when she was in the yard at the washing trough: Water washes out everything except sin.

I take my cleaning tablet and gently rub. Up and down …

Jésus! said Marcel loudly.

Edouard spread his arms upwards like a Christ, and the apron, hanging from his neck, was white.

I’m not asking twenty francs. I’m not even asking fifteen. I’d be giving it away at ten. But because of that beautiful young lady wearing the dress with peonies on it, yes, Madame, you’ve melted my heart, I‘M OFFERING IT TO YOU AT ONLY EIGHT FRANCS A TABLET. TWO FOR FIFTEEN. THREE FOR TWENTY!

It was not until several days later that Marcel confronted his son.

I saw you in A … the other day, said the father.

I heard you were there.

You were selling soap.

I’ve packed that in now. It was only a stop-gap.

Both men were standing in the kitchen, Marcel at the end where the floor was plain boards, Edouard by the sink where there was linoleum. Both of them were looking at the floor. Marcel raised his head.

You were robbing people. It was an authoritative accusation.

It took out a lot of stains, Edouard smiled.

Monkey-work! Why don’t you practise your trade?

I like the outdoor life, I guess. He paused and then he shouted at the top of his voice, I must have got that from you! You wouldn’t last a day in a factory!

The father shifted his legs, placing them wide apart, as if expecting to be jumped upon.

What you were doing in the market was fraud!

No, it was selling.

It was fraud!

It was selling!

In October Marcel and Nicole lifted the last potatoes. By November the small apples on the trees had turned red. Marcel climbed up to shake them down whilst the cows were still grazing in the orchard. Nicole waited in the cropped grass and the apples fell onto the sheet she had spread out. Each evening Marcel took the mare and tipcart and brought another ten sacks of apples up to the house. Altogether there were sixty sacks: fifty filled with apples and ten with pears.

As the afternoons became shorter, Marcel pressed the cider. The whole yard smelt of apples. He crossed it many times carrying buckets of apple juice to pour into the barrels in the cellar, and sacks of *marc* on his shoulder to empty into the vat. The vat was as tall as he and a good metre and a half in diameter.

One day, when the snow was not far away, Edouard came into the outhouse where the press was. Marcel scooped up a glass of apple juice and held it out to Edouard, who shook his head.

It gives me diarrhoea.

You can undo the press.

Edouard took off his belted raincoat and hung it on a nail.

You know, you could sell this thing as an antique, said Edouard, a wooden press with 1802 carved on it!

It’s oak.

There’s a dealer in A … who’d give half a million for it.

What would *he* do with it?

He’d sell it to a bank or hotel.

What?

As décor.

The world has left the earth behind it, said the father.

And what was on the earth? demanded the son angrily. Half the men here had to emigrate because there wasn’t enough to eat! Half the children died before they grew up! Why don’t you admit it?

Life has always been a struggle. Do you think it can ever be anything else?

You were dirt poor!

Marcel removed the fastening bolt without saying a word and the sides of the press opened. They were ribbed like a corset. Edouard lifted out the cake of *marc* which was as large as a cart-wheel, propped it on a bench by the window, and started to cut the *marc* into pieces with an axe. It was the consistency of damp bran and it smelt of all that had happened in the orchard since the spring.

It would be quicker to put it through the grinder, Edouard said.

It would be quicker but less good.

Why not use the grinder since you have it? Edouard insisted.

It makes better *gnôle* if you break it up by hand.

Why?

Marcel shrugged his shoulders. It’s the nature of *gnôle*. I don’t know why.

Edouard slashed violently with the axe at what remained of the wheel.

My father’s a maniac, he hissed, a maniac!

When the vat was full Marcel covered the *marc*. The first layer of the covering was newspaper. The paper which came regularly each week into the house was the local one, full of reports of local councils, mayors’ speeches, deaths, market prices, weddings and declarations from the Ministry of Agriculture. Over these news items he spread walnut leaves. And over the leaves he put earth. As the *marc* fermented each day and reduced its volume, he carefully pressed the covering a little further down.

The vat gave him pleasure, like the hay in the hayloft, or the smoked sausages, made from the pig, which hung from the ceiling above his high double bed. They were achievements which made him feel, as the snow obliterated everything on the ground, that the farm was prepared for the winter. The winter came.

Every pine needle was covered with hoar-frost. The fox stood there, surprised, as though at this season he did not expect to have to hide.

In God’s name he can see I haven’t brought my gun! whispered Marcel.

He had no means to kill the fox and the fox knew it. It was the same fox who had come down and taken nine of Nicole’s chickens before the haymaking, when the grass was high enough to offer him cover. Now he was thin, his coat more grey than brown. Neither man nor animal moved. Faintly from a distant farm, both of them heard a cock crow.

What makes him shake his head like that? Jésus and Marie! He’s cunning, cunning, more cunning than all the rest put together!

The fox, certain of his rights, walked unhurriedly up the slope between the juniper bushes and disappeared under the rocks and pine trees.

There I stood, explained Marcel, empty-handed, and I said to myself: Tomorrow I’ll take the marc. It was the fox who made me decide.

He broke the seal and the initial smell of the marc gave off a kind of warmth in the cold air. He shovelled it into sacks and arranged the sacks in the tipcart. On the way down to the village he rode on the sacks. When he reached the cemetery he got down because there the road climbs.

It began to snow and he swore. As he looked up towards the sky he could see in the distance two electric light bulbs, strung from the tin roof of the engine. They were alight. When he arrived, Mathieu, the distiller, was wiping the sweat off his face despite the cold. Under the engine was a steaming heap of muck, the colour of bile, and every minute the snow falling on the heap made the muck less yellow.

How is the Patronne? Mathieu asked Marcel. She who was the most beautiful bride of her year, the most beautiful mother and now the most beautiful grandmother! The distiller bowed from the waist.

When Mathieu toured with the distilling engines he was expansive and gallant. The pace of the work and the cheating of the state out of some of its taxes inspired him. The rest of the year, working in a furniture factory, he was taciturn and hesitant.

Beechwood, good beef, and a beautiful wife—keep them whoever can! said Marcel.

His voice was gruff in the cold, and the snowflakes on his eyebrows were unmelted. He was still smiling with pride when he shook hands with the five or six men waiting by the engine.

The engine consists of a boiler, three vases and a condenser, mounted on an old chassis. The vases are insulated with planks of wood. The copper pipes which conduct the steam from the boiler to the vases and from these to the condenser are the thickness of a bull’s horns. And they curve like horns too. At the bottom of the condenser was the outlet pipe and under it a small copper pail, filling up with *gnôle*. That the produce of this gigantic, shaking, copper-horned bull should come, drop by drop, out of a duct no larger than the open beak of a small bird, is a sign of its secret. Its secret is to transform work into spirit. What is emptied into the vases is work; what comes out of the beak is imagination.

Mathieu pulled a tragic face, waved his arms and bawled:

Shut off!

One of his assistants shut off the boiler, and the other climbed up to loosen the holding nuts which clamped the lids to the vases. Scalding steam hissed out from under the loosened lids and immediately turned as thick and white as smoke. From the tin roof a tarpaulin hung down to the ground to protect the waiting men from the weather. Between the engine and this tarpaulin, the white steam now made it impossible for the men to see their own arms.

They’ve come! said one of them, invisibly.

Who in God’s name?

The steam turned wet on their faces.

The inspectors!

In the white cloud they all laughed at this joke for the inspectors had made their inspection only two days before.

When the steam dispersed they saw Mathieu holding up, with the handle of his hammer, a string of glistening black sausages.

Hand me a plate! he shouted.

Emile, who was born in 1897, stepped forward with a plate, and untied the tape which held the fur flaps of his cap over his ears, preparatory to eating.

Sausages, the colour of black cherries, cooked in *gnôle*, warm the heart because they are hot, arouse because they are salty, comfort because they taste of wood smoke, confer strength because they are meat, and release dreams because they are saturated with alcohol. Sheltered between the tarpaulin and engine the men ate. As they ate, the collars of their coats touching their cheeks, and the juice running out of the corners of their mouths, they grunted with pleasure.

Amen! said Emile.

Half-way through the morning, it was Marcel’s turn to empty his sacks of marc into the vases. He had twelve sacks, enough to fill the three vases twice. Once more the bull engine started its work of transformation.

He had already filled three demijohns with gnôle when an old woman flung open a window in the nearest house and began to yell and wave her arms.

It’s Marie, muttered Emile, she never lets me stay.

Reluctantly Emile left the engine and walked with his stick across the snow to his house. No sooner had he entered than he was out again waving his stick.

The men by the engine waved back at him, laughing, and continued to listen to the sounds of the copper bull. Soon they would say *Amen* again.

Mathieu! Mathieu! shouted Emile. Only when he had reached the engine did anybody take any notice of what the old man was trying to say.

The inspectors are coming! he gasped.

How do you know?

The baker telephoned. He said they drove past half an hour ago. The line was not working. Only just got through.

Everybody turned to Marcel.

How many litres have I got, a hundred? he asked.

I’m afraid so! said Mathieu.

Afraid so! My trees have never given so much as this year. Three thousand litres of cider! It’s the best year I can remember. Last year there were so few apples, it wasn’t worth pressing them. And you say, you are afraid so!

Marcel, don’t play the fool! There’s no way of fixing the papers if it’s still in the vases.

The buggers even come in a snowstorm, whispered Emile.

We hide nothing, commanded Marcel.

Mathieu looked at him pityingly.

They came the day before yesterday, said the youngest assistant.

A car stopped on the bridge.

The buggers have come back again!

Two men got out, wearing city overcoats, spotless green Wellington boots and, on their heads, tartan berets with woollen pompoms.

Good morning!

The chief inspector knew better than to hold out his hand. The younger one did so and nobody took it.

Gentlemen, boomed Emile, what have they always taxed? They tax whatever gives pleasure to the poor. Salt, tobacco, gnôle! the poor have no right to pleasures. If they had, it would discourage the rich!

The chief inspector deliberately ignored the old man. I don’t suppose you expected us back so soon, he said to Mathieu.

There were thirty distilling engines in the region, and if the two inspectors did their rounds regularly, one could count on a month between visits.

It was the little question of the emergency tap which brought us back so soon.

The chief inspector spoke as if he were explaining to children, then, removing his gloves, he examined the tap of the serpentine condenser, put a finger to it and smelt the tip of his finger.

Old goat shit! muttered Emile.

The inspectors were like actors in a sinister theatre, sinister because everything they did was addressed to an authority who was not present.

You’ve drawn some off, said the inspector folding his arms across his chest.

What’s been drawn off, said Marcel, nodding at his demijohns, is there!

Are they yours?

They are mine.

And the paper form?

The paper form is yours.

Have you filled it in?

How could I? I don’t know how many litres my marc will yield yet.

Are all three vases yours?

Yes, they are mine.

They are going to make a little more than the statutory twenty litres, aren’t they? The chief inspector smiled at the absent authority.

Mathieu pretended to study the dials of the boiler.

A good year for apples, said the young inspector, hoping to be affable.

The chief took a pen out of his pocket.

Do you know what this means? Marcel addressed the question as if to the snow. His gnôle was running out of the beak into the copper bucket which he had just emptied.

It means I’m going to have to pay, pay money for my own produce!

He spoke as solemnly and slowly as a priest saying a prayer over an open grave.

Marcel’s marc yielded one hundred and sixty litres of eau-de-vie at fifty per cent, which meant that he had to pay on eighty-six litres the sum of two hundred and six thousand, four hundred francs: half the price of a four-year-old mare.

On his way home snow was blowing into Marcel’s and Gui-Gui’s eyes. He said afterwards that, as he rode in the cart, all explanations escaped him. All he could see was his next action drawing closer and becoming larger.

He unharnessed Gui-Gui and led her into the stable. The horse’s stall, the large table in the kitchen, the ceiling-high cupboard where the gnôle bottle was kept, the cellar door—because the bottle was empty and he had to go and fill it from the demijohn—the wardrobe in the bedroom from which he took his shotgun, the bed on which he sat to change his boots, these wooden things, so solid to the touch, worn and polished, protected from the snow, placed in the house before he was born, built with wood that came from the forest which, through the window, was now no more than a darkness behind the falling snow, reminded him with a force, such as he had never experienced before, of all the dead who were his family and who had lived and worked in the same farm. He poured out a glass of gnôle for himself. The feeling came back into his feet. His ancestors were in the house with him.

At midday he was standing on the side of the road which led down from the hamlet where the distillers were still working. He had changed his leather jacket and wore an overcoat and cap. He waited for half an hour. For the Prosecution this half hour was to be proof that his action was premeditated.

At last a car came slowly round the corner. Standing in the middle of the road, Marcel waved his arms, the shotgun hidden under his overcoat. The car stopped.

The chief inspector wound down his snow-covered window.

What is it? he asked.

Marcel uncovered the barrels of his shotgun.

A good year for apples! he said.

The windscreen wipers stopped. There was only the sound of the engine ticking over.

Give me the ignition key. Thank you. Now ask your colleague to get out and stand by the headlights. Tell him to shut the door. Good. Wait a moment, let’s see. He and I will get into the back of the car. And you will drive where I tell you.

This hold-up in the snow, said the chief inspector under cross-examination by the Prosecution, was as terrifying as an encounter with the Yeti.

The judge asked what a Yeti was. The Yeti is an anthropoid monster who lives in the Himalayas.

After a few minutes Marcel told the inspector to stop the car. The pine trees were weighed down with snow, and on the left of the road was a steep escarpment.

From here we walk, he said. Give me the key. Wait a moment, let’s see. Yes, open the driver’s door.

They took a path which led down the escarpment. Only Marcel knew where the path led. His two prisoners fell, lost their gloves and floundered in the waist-high snow. To tell the truth, testified the younger one, the prospect of falling over the edge did not disturb me much because I was convinced anyway that we were being taken to our place of execution.

At the bottom of the escarpment there had once been a farm. It had burnt down and only the wooden grenier, the size of a horse’s stall, remained.

Marcel handed the chief inspector a large key, as long as a hammer.

Open the bottom door.

The door was no taller than their chests. The inspectors had to stoop to enter. There were no windows. The floor was stone, and the wooden walls were as thick as the door. Greniers were built like strong-rooms.

What are you going to do? asked the chief inspector.

Now at last he did not speak for the benefit of the absent authority. He was addressing directly the man who held the gun and sat in the doorway.

I’m going to shut the door and lock it from the outside!

You can’t do that. We’ll freeze to death.

Marcel shook his head.

Our clothes are wet.

They’ll dry.

There’s no window. We’ll die of suffocation.

The silhouette in the door again shook his head.

There’s no light.

No, there’s no light.

There’ll be a search party out for us!

Not yet.

I tell you, if you leave us here, we’ll die of exposure.

I’m leaving you a bottle of gnôle. Marcel stood the bottle on the floor.

How long? asked the chief.

Without answering Marcel got to his feet, went out into the snow and locked the door with the key. The inspectors, who belonged to the Special Section for the Investigation of Fraud of the Ministry of Finance, were thumping with their fists against the ceiling.

When Marcel reached the car on the road above, he hesitated. He tried to push it to the edge of the escarpment. His boots slipped in the snow. He knew enough about driving to drive ten metres. He had been right that it wouldn’t have taken him long to learn to drive a tractor. Cautiously he got out of the driver’s seat. This time he scarcely had to push. The car crept forward, and plunged down the shale slope. When it hit a pine tree it turned over and rolled further down. Finally it came to rest on its side and the snow started to cover it.

Is their car still there? he once asked Nicole when she came to visit him in the prison at B.…

Before nightfall he returned to the grenier. It stank of gnôle. The prisoners said they had knocked over the bottle in the dark. He suspected that they had drunk most of it, and then broken the bottle deliberately with the idea of using it as a cutting tool or a weapon. There was blood on the younger one’s hand.

We use gnôle as an antiseptic, Marcel said. We also use it for preserving fruit and herbs so that we have something special to offer guests when they visit.

Our families will have notified the police, warned the chief inspector.

We use it too, continued Marcel, for dulling the pain of animals.

The chief had taken off his tartan cap and was using it as a kind of muff for his hands as he paced backwards and forwards. He could only take two very short strides in each direction.

To kidnap two state officials, said the chief inspector as he turned in circles, in pursuit of their official duty is an act of treason. You will be tried and sentenced. Make no mistake about it. They are already out looking for us!

Marcel sat in the doorway, the gun across his knees, studying his prisoners.

You have no hope of escape, said the chief inspector. The weight he was giving to each word, before his voice fell over it to proceed to the next, suggested that he was drunk.

Marcel stared at him, wondering.

Suddenly the chief inspector stopped turning in circles and knelt on the floor.

Listen, my friend, listen carefully to what I’m going to say now. Release us. Take us back to our car. I shall have to report the matter but we’ll say it was a practical joke. Nothing more serious than a practical joke. We’ll call it a joke! shall we call it a joke now?

The chief inspector held out his hand to clinch the deal.

I’ve brought you bread, water, two blankets, matches and a candle, said Marcel. The candle won’t burn all night so you had better economise with it.

The chief inspector was on his feet, pacing in circles again. For the last time, he screamed at the top of his voice, we’re offering to consider you a joker!

Marcel left them and hid the shotgun in the upper part of the grenier to save taking it home. It was freezing hard and his boots squeaked in the snow as he followed his own tracks and planned what to do next.

The same evening he visited his neighbour Jean-François. All the village knew by now that Marcel had had the bad luck to be booked by the inspectors. Jean-François commiserated with him. What has happened has happened, said Marcel. Nobody yet knew that the inspectors had disappeared. Marcel came quickly to the point of his visit.

I want to borrow six sheep.

In God’s name what do you want them for?

For a practical joke.

On who?

I can’t tell you.

On me?

No.

Jean-François started to laugh. If it’s not on me, what are you going to do with the sheep? You’re going to put them somewhere unlikely, aren’t you? Somewhere where you never think of a sheep. In the Chapel? Seigneur! What an idea. You’re going to take them to the Chapel!

I can’t tell you!

How long do you want them for?

A few days.

A few days. It’s a joke that goes on then?

It’s a lesson—

A lesson! I see it now. You’re going to take them to the school! You want them for several lessons. Why do you need six? Wouldn’t one be enough?

I need six.

The following day Marcel fetched the sheep in his cart. A bluish frost settled on the curls of their grey wool, and they buried their muzzles in each other’s flanks. When he turned round to look into the cart he saw only one anxiously raised head. The others were huddled together, heads down.

To cross the field to the grenier he had to carry the sheep on his shoulders one at a time. In the upper room of greniers were stored bottled fruit, honey, the bed linen, the wool, the wedding dress, the coverlet for the cradle; in the bottom room were stored sacks of flour and grain, purified butter, the bacon and the demijohns of *gnôle*. Greniers were always built a certain distance from their farm so that if the house caught fire, the basic victuals and a few family treasures would be saved.

Marcel opened the bottom door. It smelt of urine. The two men hunched up against the far wall put their hands to their faces to protect their eyes against the sudden light.

You are moving upstairs, Marcel told them.

My colleague needs a doctor, said the young inspector. He has acute pains in his stomach.

He’ll be more comfortable upstairs. Put your hands on your heads, both of you. Come on out! Let me see. Yes, go up the stairway on the left.

The two prisoners, having stooped to pass through the small door, did not bother to straighten their backs on the staircase, and climbed up on all fours. The younger one pushed open the upper door, and found himself staring into a ewe’s eyes.

There’s no room, he muttered, it’s full of sheep.

They won’t hurt you.

It’s impossible! said the chief.

Marcel swore and jabbed his gun at him.

Bent double, the men entered and the sheep bleated.

There’s a bale of straw in the corner, said Marcel.

His two prisoners sat on the bale. The sitting position made them less animal-like.

We can’t survive another night here, said the chief inspector gravely. This is a form of torture to which you are subjecting us, you realise that, don’t you?

That’s why I brought the sheep. My grandmother used to say: It saves wood to sleep in the stable. She came from the other side of the mountains where there is no forest and wood is scarce.

We shivered all night, the young one said.

Tonight the sheep will warm you.

My colleague needs a doctor. He suffers from an ulcer, and has acute pains in his stomach.

There’s bread and milk for you.

What are you going to do with us?

When you’re ready to listen I’m going to talk.

Talk?

About justice.

Justice! yelled the chief inspector. The sheep turned their heads and looked at him with startled eyes. *You* are going to talk about justice! You’ll soon be fleeing from justice!

The sheep kept turning in circles looking for a way out, and finding only the walls and the legs of the two seated prisoners. One of the sheep raised her tail to piss. Marcel, standing on the outside staircase, straightened his back so that his head was no longer visible from the inside of the room. It was as if the two men had already been left alone with the sheep and the fact that they were herded so closely together with these animals made their isolation sharper.

You are right, said the older inspector. Why not talk?

Marcel heard the remark but did not put his head back through the door.

Tell me, the inspector went on, how much are you asking for us? You may be asking an unrealistic sum—in which case we could help you.

Marcel bent his knees and looked again at his prisoners.

If you are asking a billion, it’s too much. They won’t pay that for us. Are you in touch with our families or the Ministry?

Marcel gave no sign of having heard the question.

We have a right to know. How much are you asking? Is it more than fifty million? I’d say fifty million is the maximum one could expect them to pay for men like us.

Despair, irreversible as the sound of an avalanche, suddenly engulfed Marcel.

If I’m asking too much, he spoke with his mouth almost shut, why do you care?

We are both married men with children. We are worried for our families.

Once again Marcel appeared not to have heard.

How much are you asking? insisted the chief inspector. You must understand that we have more experience than you of the value of money.

Marcel thrust his fists into the fleece of the nearest sheep and spoke as though to the animal. The value of money! he cried. The value of money!

The other three sheep raised their heads towards the wailing figure in the doorway and started to bleat. The value of money! The value of money! He grasped at the wool.

Slowly his fists relaxed. The sheep quietened. He looked at his two prisoners and spoke.

You are worried, he said. I regret to have to tell you that there is a tax to pay on worry! There’s also a tax to pay on pain and a tax on shivering. A thousand francs a shiver! You say you both shivered all night? If only one of you had stayed warm, it would have saved you money! Still, tonight the sheep will save you hundreds of thousands. Last night, though, you are obliged to pay for! Have you filled in the form for your pain? You spoke of an ulcer, that’s a sharp pain, and the sharper the pain, the higher the tax!

He has gone mad! The younger inspector took hold of the chief inspector’s shoulders and began to shake him. Do something quick, he’s gone out of his mind.

The chief inspector drew out his wallet and threw it over the backs of the sheep towards the peasant.

The wallet lay on the top step. Marcel put his boot on it, and turning his foot, pressed it, as if killing a salamander. Then he left without uttering a word.

He did not ride in the cart. He walked beside Gui-Gui. Walking is a form of thinking. After ten minutes he said to the horse:

It ends in defeat because you can only take revenge on those who are your own. Those two up there belong to another time. They are our prisoners and yet no revenge is possible. They would never know what we were avenging.

Next morning after he and Nicole had milked the cows, he stayed alone in the stable, as he did every morning, to brush and groom the animals until their haunches shone like polished walnut wood. Then he harnessed Gui-Gui to the cart and returned to the grenier.

The prisoners made no attempt to leave when he picked up a sheep and, leaving the door open, carried her away on his shoulders.

Why don’t you go?

You have a gun.

I’m releasing you.

Why? asked the chief inspector suspiciously.

You do not have to know that too.

Backs bent to pass through the tiny door, the two men stepped outside and shielded their eyes with their hands from the sunshine coming off the snow. Their clothes were filthy. Their faces were creased and unshaven. They stood there, uncertain what to do next.

When the police handcuffed Marcel that afternoon the sky was blue and cloudless, the blue extending far beyond the furthest mountain. The snow on the peaks looked as innocent of the past as a baby after sleep.

He was charged with rebellion against officers of the state, armed robbery and the wilful destruction of public property. He served two months’ preventive detention and, at his trial, was sentenced to two years’ imprisonment.

In the prison at B … he looked at his hands which lay idle and heavy in his lap. What has been taken away from me, he said, is the habit of working. I will never again be able to load thirteen tipcarts and take Gui-Gui to the top field.

** Hay



<quote>
The flowers in her hair<br> wet in the morning<br> are dry by ten

Her apron clings<br> stones like hands<br> press in her pocket

Tomorrow<br> the scythes will gasp<br> as her clothes fall down

On this slope she’ll lie<br> hands on its shoulder<br> feet on the road below

Gathered in lines<br> her cocks will crouch<br> like couples in the moonlight

Next day in the sun<br> she’ll walk on her hands<br> to get as dry as fire

Combed by the women<br> lifted by men<br> she’ll ride the carts

Front wheels locked<br> with a pole through their spokes<br> I’ll take her down

And when I pack her<br> second wife under my roof<br> my sweat will blind me.
</quote>

** The Three Lives of Lucie Cabrol



THE COCADRILLE WAS BORN in 1900 in the month of September. White cloud, like smoke, was blowing through the open door of the stable. Marius Cabrol was milking. His wife, Mélanie, was in bed, on the other side of the stable wall, attended by her sister and a neighbour. Their first child had been a boy, christened Emile. Marius, the father, hoped that the second would also be a son. He would be named Henri after his grandfather.

The Cabrol farm is on a slope above the village which is called Brine. On the south side of the house the ground flattens out and there are plum trees and a quince. Beside the house is a stream which Henri, the grandfather, channelled to drive a saw. If a log started to roll from up there, it wouldn’t stop till it reached the church. I like to think of the logs I have rolled from high up! If the log is not straight, it leaps like an animal. You watch it from above and it is like an animal galloping. Gradually as the slope levels out, it slows down. When you expect it to lie still, it leaps again. It takes a long time for the flat ground to kill a rolling log.

On the bed Mélanie gripped the headboard. The water was already boiling on the stove in the kitchen. The baby was born very quickly. When I think of her being born, my mind wanders and I see her fishing. She was fourteen and I was three years older. She walked upstream, watching both banks. When she prodded with a stick under a stone, two dark shadows slipped across the river to the other bank. From that moment onwards she never shifted her gaze. She tucked her skirt into its own waist-band and without looking down for an instant she waded across. There she stood absolutely still. The water flowing round her thighs made the same noise as it does flowing round two small stationary rocks. One of the trout left the overhanging bank and darted under a boulder. Was it because she was so small that she was so quick? Or was it because, being blind to warnings, she could read signs which are lost on others? Frisking under the boulder, she trapped the fish and pressed upwards with all the force of her small hand against the stone. The fish was fixed there like a long tongue. And, like a tongue, it tried to retract itself, reaching back down the throat of the water. It tried to thrust forward out of the throat. It tried to turn on its side. Slowly, never letting up the pressure of her palm, she inserted a tiny finger between tongue and stone and two more fingers between tongue and palm. All this with one hand. The instant he went still, she had him out of the water wedged between her three fingers, two with their backs to him.

It’s a girl! cried the neighbour.

La Mélanie looked tenderly, and with surprise, at the tiny body, the colour of a radish, held upside down.

Give her to me.

On the forehead of the baby’s puckered face was a dark, red mark.

Jésus! Forgive me! La Mélanie screamed. She is marked with the mark of the craving.

When a woman is pregnant, she sometimes craves for something special to eat or drink or touch. It is the right of the mother, by a kind of decree of nature, to have what she wants. Yet often it is not possible, and it is then that she must be careful. For if one of her cravings is denied, the next time she touches her body, the touch may be printed in the same place on the embryo in her womb. And so it is better when one of her cravings has been unsatisfied, for her to touch deliberately her foot or her bottom: otherwise, without thinking, she may touch her cheek or her ear and this will be printed as a disfiguring mark on the child.

Jésus! cried La Mélanie again. I have marked her face with the mark of the craving.

Mélanie, be calm. It is not the mark of the craving. I’ve seen it often. It is where her face rubbed as she came out, said her sister.

The neighbour took the baby to press the top of her head so that it should be as round as possible.

It was when I wanted to eat freshwater fish! La Mélanie insisted.

Her sister was proved right, for in a few days the red mark disappeared, and only much later did La Mélanie ask herself whether her daughter had not, after all, been marked by the mark of another kind of craving. As a young child, two things were unusual about her. She remained very small. And as soon as she could crawl, and later walk, she had a habit of disappearing.

You lose her as easily as you lose a button, La Mélanie said.

I think of Lucie—for that is how she was christened—as a baby in her cradle. What is the difference between a baby and a small animal? An animal goes straight along its own path. A baby vacillates, rolling first to one side and then to the other. Either she’s all smiles and gurgles, or a face all puckered up and bawling.

When she was six, Lucie was missing for a whole day. If I go out of the door now and take a few steps up the hillside to where the cows are grazing, I can see the track she took.

It leads to the skyline where the moon rises. In August when the cows are grazing up there, they are silhouetted as if against a great circular lantern. From there the path leads along the crest to a pass where there are some marmots, through a moraine of boulders the size of houses, along the edge of an escarpment, and finally down to the forest below.

In the evening Lucie came back with her hat full of mushrooms. Yet by that time, Marius à Brine had organised a search-party. I remember the men filling their lamps with paraffin.

When there wasn’t any work to be done at home, Lucie went to school. The village teacher was called Masson. He used to read from the *Life of Voltaire* and the curé preached against this book in church. One thing impressed me about the *Life of Voltaire*. When there was famine, he distributed sacks of grain among the peasants at Ferney. Otherwise, the *Life of Voltaire* belonged to that collection of books which we knew existed and which entailed a way of life we could not imagine. At what time of day did people read? we asked ourselves.

Masson was killed at Verdun. His name is on the war memorial. Each morning, before the first lesson began, he wrote on the blackboard the day of the week, the date of the month and the year of the century. On the war memorial there is only the month and the year of his death: March 1916. After the date each morning, he wrote a saying on the blackboard which we children copied into our books:

<verse>
<em>Insults should be written on sand</em>
<em>Compliments should be inscribed on marble.</em>
</verse>

It was in her last year at school that Lucie was given the nickname of the Cocadrille. A *cocadrille* comes from a cock’s egg hatched in a dung heap. As soon as it comes out of its egg, it makes its way to the most unlikely place. If it is seen by somebody it has not seen, it dies. Otherwise, it can defend itself and can kill anything it chooses, except the weasel. The poison, with which it kills, comes from its eyes and travels along its gaze.

Soon after Lucie was born, La Mélanie had another son who was christened Henri. By the time he was two, he was larger than his sister who could by then sit on the horse, fetch wood for the stove and feed the chickens. It could be that her tiny size was a kind of provocation to jealousy. Small children normally accord rights according to size. Whatever the reason, Henri hated his sister. It was he who, forty years later, said to the Mayor: This sister has never brought anything but shame to our family.

One day Mélanie found three of her chickens dead. The killer was not a fox or a weasel, for the chickens were untouched.

Lucie killed them! shouted Henri, she looked at them and they died.

I never touched them!

She’s a Cocadrille!

I’m not! I’m not!

The Cocadrille! The Cocadrille! shouted Henri.

Stop your bickering, the mother grumbled.

That time the nickname did not stick. The next time it did.

It was between Easter and Whitsun. Later, when I was in the Argentine, I used to tell myself that I could not die until I had seen another month of May, here in the mountains. The grass grows knee-high in the meadows and down the centre of the roads between the wheel ruts. If you are with a friend, you walk down the road with the grass between you. In the forest the late beech leaves come out, the greenest leaves in the world. The cows are let out of the stable for the first time. They leap, kick with their hind legs, turn in circles, jump like goats. The month itself is like a home-coming.

Her brother Emile had left in the autumn to work in Paris as a stoker for the central heating of the new department store of Samaritaine. La Mélanie could not read the postcard which had come, so she gave it to Lucie.

Emile’s coming home!

When?

Sunday.

On the Friday Marius chose the largest of his black rabbits, and, holding it up by its ears, he felt its flesh through the fur.

Yes, you big crook, Emile is coming home!

He stroked it again and then knocked it unconscious with one blow. Delicately, he cut out its two eyes. Their lashes remained unhurt round the two holes through which the blood flowed when he hung it up by its hind legs to bleed. On Sunday morning Mélanie skinned it and cooked it in cider.

Emile’s present for Lucie was a silver-painted model of the Eiffel Tower.

Did you see it? she asked in excitement.

You see it everywhere. It’s three hundred metres high.

At the end of the meal La Mélanie collected up in her hands the neat piles of bones laid on the table beside each plate. The rabbit bones were so clean they looked as if they were made from horn or ivory on which there had never been meat. She was happy. Her son who had come home was already asleep in his room.

Each evening Henri and Lucie took the milk down to the dairy. Lucie’s size never affected her strength. She was as tough as a mountain goat. The same as Henri, she carried twenty litres on her back, the can strapped on like a school satchel. That evening, after he had slept, Emile said he would go with them.

Give me the milk, Lucie.

She refused. Her head was scarcely higher than Emile’s waist.

Could you find me a job in Paris? she asked.

You could work in a baker’s.

Do you live in the same place as you work?

I catch the Métro. The Métro is a train, an electric train that goes underground …

What time do the trains start in the morning? asked Henri.

Early, but the Parisians can’t get out of bed. So they’re always in a hurry. You should see them running along the tunnels to catch the trains.

The trains don’t stop? asked the Cocadrille.

The path down to the village followed a stream and near the bottom was a lilac tree. When the lilac was in flower, you could smell the tree thirty metres away.

Tell me more about Paris.

People sleep in the streets, said Emile.

Why?

If they asked for shelter, the Parisians would never let them come in.

Why don’t they build sheds?

There is no wood to build with.

No trees?

It’s forbidden.

Do you know what Grandfather Revuz did? Lucie asked. The Mayor told him he couldn’t cut down an acacia. And he cut it down. After he cut it down, he said the leaves on that bush were too small for him to wipe his arse on! And if they were that small, he said, it couldn’t have been an acacia.

Grandfather Revuz may think he’s clever but he’d be lost in Paris, said Emile. Do you know how many horses there are there?

Fifty thousand! guessed Henri.

Two million, said Emile with pride.

Will you take me with you next time? Lucie asked.

They would lock you up! said Henri.

When they went into the dairy, the cheesemaker straightened his back, extended a hand and shouted:

So ’Mile is back from Paris!

For the summer.

How old are you now?

Sixteen, Emile replied.

Never too young!

The cheesemaker, whose wife cuckolded him regularly, winked.

Henri and Lucie unstrapped their cans. In the middle of the dairy a cauldron hung from its wooden gallows. The dairy was well-placed because it was cool even in summer. The cheesemaker’s wife complained that her husband’s feet were perpetually like ice.

Did you climb to the top? Lucie asked Emile.

What top?

The top of the Eiffel Tower!

You go up by a lift, Emile said.

Lift?

Yes, lift.

What’s a lift? she asked.

The Cocadrille knows nothing, roared Henri, laughing. The proper place for her is her dung heap.

None of them was looking at her. She removed the lid of her milk can. She picked it up and, as you throw water out of a bucket, she hurled litres of milk into Henri’s face. Whilst the milk was dripping from his hair, she screamed:

If you weren’t a weasel I’d kill you!

The cheesemaker, swearing, tried to hit her, but she escaped, ran round the cauldron and vanished out of the door.

The story soon reached the ears of Marius à Brine. He found his daughter by the washing trough and he started to beat her, shouting:

Milk is not water! Milk is not water!

After a few blows he stopped. She was staring at him with her bright blue eyes. She had eyes the colour of forget-me-nots. Her look forced him to gather her into his arms and to press her face against his stomach.

Ah! My Cocadrille. You came out like that, didn’t you? You can’t help it. You just came out like that.

She stepped with her small feet onto his boots and then he carried her on his feet across the yard, repeating and laughing: The Cocadrille! The Cocadrille!

And so the name Cocadrille, born of both hatred and love, replaced the name Lucie. When she was thirteen, a circus came to the village and put up its tent in the square. The circus consisted of one family, a goat which could stand on the smallest milking-stool we ever saw, and two ponies. The father was ringmaster, the mother was acrobat and their son was the clown. During the afternoon the son went round the cafés of the village and blew a trumpet to announce the evening performance. The men smiled at the trumpet but they did not invite him to drink, lest he make fun of them.

The circus also had an elephant. The elephant was a piece of grey cloth with a trunk sewn onto it. When the ringmaster turned to the benches where the kids were sitting and asked for volunteers, I rushed forward. I was the front of the elephant, and Joset, who was killed in an avalanche, was the back. Together we danced to an accordion which the clown was playing.

And now for a cow elephant! shouted the ringmaster, holding up a second piece of grey cloth. Two pretty girls please! The second piece of cloth had a pearl necklace painted on it, and from the huge folds of its ears hung a pair of earrings painted gold. The rings had been taken from a horse’s bit.

The girls were all too shy. Not one put up her hand. I lifted up the cloth of the elephant’s head and, facing the girls, cried out:

The Cocadrille! The Cocadrille! The Cocadrille!

And she came! Everyone in the tent clapped and laughed at the tiny figure who was going to be part of an elephant.

I heard the ringmaster whisper to his son:

She’s a dwarf. Find out her age.

For a moment the Cocadrille stood there alone, eyes alight. Finally another girl climbed over the benches and joined her. Beside the Cocadrille, the other girl looked like a giant. The clown began to play music—a violin this time. The only way the Cocadrille could manage was to be the back of the elephant, and instead of bending forward at the waist, she stayed upright and pulled hard at the grey cloth so that it didn’t sag in the middle of the animal’s back. There we were, two elephants, a bull and a cow, with the violin playing.

There were pictures of elephants in our schoolbooks, because, from Hannibal to Napoleon, foreign generals had the idea of using elephants to cross the mountains. The four of us danced in the middle of the arena, and every time we stopped, the ringmaster cracked his whip over us, and the crowd shouted: Again! Again! Sometimes I caught sight of the Cocadrille’s bare feet—she had kicked off her sabots—dancing jerkily at the back of the grey cow elephant.

Eventually they let us go. The clown son whispered something to the Cocadrille and then shook his head at his father, who shrugged his shoulders.

When I saw her next at school I asked her what she had thought of the circus. She didn’t mention the dance of the elephants. What she liked, she said, was the clown on stilts. Could I make her a pair? I said I would.

I never made them. More than fifty years later she said to me—her eyes were stone-coloured by then—If I had a pair of stilts, I could cross the valley in ten strides. This was at the time when she was walking a hundred kilometres a week. Ten strides! she repeated.

The Cabrol farm at Brine is on the *advet*, the slope facing south. Opposite on the *ubac*, facing north, is a hamlet called Lapraz. There is a song about the cocks in each hamlet. The one at Lapraz, where there is less sun, calls out:

I sing when I can.

The cock at Brine crows:

I sing when I want!

To this the *ubac* cock replies:

Then be content!

It was on the slope facing Lapraz in August 1914 that the Cabrol family were scything their patch of oats when they heard the church bell ringing in the valley below.

The war has started, said Marius.

The massacre of the world has begun, said La Mélanie.

Women usually know better than men the extent of catastrophe. The Mayor delivered the mobilisation papers. Most of those called up were in high spirits. Never again, not once, were the cafés in the village to be so full as on the evening before the mobilised men left. Marius, older than most of the others—he was thirty-eight—was apprehensive. He avoided the cafés and spent the evening at home, giving instructions to Emile about what had to be done before the snow came, by which time he would be back, and the war would be over.

The band played as the men marched out of the village along the road which followed the river to the plain. The band was smaller than usual, for half its players were among the soldiers who were leaving. I had joined the band the previous autumn and I was the youngest drummer.

Marius did not come back before the snow came, nor before the New Year, nor before the spring. The endless time of war began. The seasons changed, the years passed and all our lives, except those of the youngest children, who remembered nothing else, were in abeyance. Early in 1916 Emile and I were called up. Between young boys and old men there was nobody left. There were no full male voices to be heard. The horses became accustomed to the commands of women.

La Mélanie, the Cocadrille and Henri ran the farm. There was so much to be done that the younger brother could not afford to quarrel openly with his sister. If Henri made the Cocadrille angry, she would disappear for the rest of the day, and he realised that they could not do without her labour even for a few hours.

Despite her size, she was tireless. She was like the small humming-bird who, when the time comes to migrate, can fly a thousand miles across the Bay of Mexico. She was not the second woman of the house, she was more like a hired hand—a man. A midget man with a difficult and unpredictable character. She drove the mare, she fetched wood, she led the horse when Henri ploughed, she fed the cows, she dug the garden, she made the cider, she preserved the fruit, she mended the harnesses. She never washed clothes nor sewed. In a *pailler* on top of her head she could carry eighty kilos of hay. If you saw her from behind, it looked like magic: the linen tent, full of hay, completely hid her and so it appeared to be moving down the slope, alone, on its lowermost corner. Both La Mélanie and Henri were somewhat frightened of her when she sat with them in the kitchen. They never knew how she could take what was said.

At the beginning of 1918 the family at Brine received a telegram informing them that Emile had been gravely wounded near Compiègne. Each evening the Cocadrille asked the milk, frothing in the wooden bucket, to keep her brother Emile alive.

He stayed alive and after months in hospital came home. When at last Marius too returned, Mélanie saw that her son now looked older than his father. Nobody in the village spoke of victory, they only spoke of the war being ended.

A year after his demobilisation Marius announced to Emile that La Mélanie was expecting another baby.

At her age! said Emile.

Marius nodded: It will be our last.

It will have to be!

The more scandalised the son’s expression, the more the father smiled.

All the war I promised myself that.

And Mother?

I survived.

So we’ll be four, concluded Emile.

He meant that the family inheritance would be divided into four.

Yes, if you count the Cocadrille.

Have you told the Cocadrille?

Not yet.

I wonder how she will take it.

It’s for Mother to tell her.

It’ll change the Cocadrille.

How is that?

It will change her. Me and the Cocadrille, we might be married now with our own children. Yet who is going to marry the Cocadrille? And I’m too sick to marry. It ought to be our turn and, instead, you’ve made another baby.

Call it an old man’s last sin! Marius, however penitent, could not stop smiling.

In December 1919 La Mélanie’s last baby was born and was christened Edmond. I stayed in the army an extra year to learn mechanics. I came back to the village at the beginning of 1920.

The following June, four men took the steep path, up to the alpage. They were young and they climbed quickly. With them they carried an accordion, eight loaves of bread and a sack of coarse salt for the cattle. They had worked all day and it was beginning to become dusk.

At one point where the cumin grows profusely either side of the path, the one who was leading stopped and all four looked down at the village, seven hundred metres below.

You can see André’s sheep, Robert said.

They could also see the road out of the village which followed the river and led to the plain.

He’s slow, is André.

He slowed down ever since the death of Honorine.

He should marry again.

Who?

Philomène!

They laughed and looked down on the village, with the assurance of youth: an assurance which comes from the conviction that, because the young see clearly, they will avoid the mistakes of the old.

Philomène has driven stronger men than André out of the house!

Out of their minds!

When they arrived at the top, the pastures were full of small birds flying just above the grass. The flight of these birds is like a line of stitches, they beat their wings as fast as butterflies and with this they gain height; then they glide and lose height till they beat their wings again and begin another stitch. As they fly they chirp making a noise like castanets.

These birds, flying at the level of their hands, made the men think of the eyes and names of the girls they had come to visit. Very soon the birds would stop flying and night fall.

From time to time a visiting archprêtre would preach a sermon against the immorality of leaving young women alone in the alpage. Our own curé knew that there was no alternative. It was the unmarried daughter, capable of looking after the cows and making the cheese, who had the pair of hands most easily spared from the work below. Old women still talk of their summers in the alpage.

Before making their visits that night, the four young men planned to sing. There is a place surrounded on three sides by a rock which resounds like the choir of a church. There they were going to sing to announce their arrival to the young women whom they had already, in imagination, chosen. Yet for their singing to be a surprise, they had to skirt the main group of chalets and reach the horseshoe of rocks unseen. This detour involved passing only one chalet, which was unimportant, because it was the Cocadrille’s.

As the four approached, the Cocadrille came to her doorway. What emphasised her smallness was the fact that, although she wore the clothes of a woman, she had neither hips nor bust. She had the figure of the ideal servant, tiny but active, without age or sex. That summer she was twenty.

You have an accordion, she said.

Yes, we have.

I can dance, she replied.

Not in those sabots, you can’t!

She kicked them off, just as she had kicked them off when she was dancing at the back of the elephant. Her feet were black with dirt. Without waiting for the music, she began to lift up her knees and to step ferociously on the earth around the entrance to the stable where the coming and going of the cows had already worn away the grass. Just by dancing she forced Robert to play a few chords.

Stop! I shouted. The music will tell the others we’re here.

The music of the accordion died down. The Cocadrille looked straight at me, unblinking, and slipped her feet back into her clogs. What was disconcerting about her look was its fixity. It was as if her head and neck became suddenly paralysed.

We must be on our way.

Can one of you help me move a barrel? she asked. Robert stepped forward.

Not you, she said, better the one who has just come back from the army.

I shrugged my shoulders and asked my three companions to wait.

Let them go, she said.

Guffawing and making signs with their hands, they left.

Tell La Nan I’m coming to visit her! I shouted after them.

The barrel had oil for the lamp in it. After I had shifted it, the Cocadrille offered me coffee. At first I could hardly see inside the chalet. I stood there, holding the cup in my hands, and she poured gnôle into it without asking. To pour gnôle into my cup she had to raise her arm higher than her shoulder.

You’d be small enough for a chimney-sweep, I said, not knowing what else to say.

I’m a woman, she replied, and I’d shit down their chimneys.

In the very dim light which made her almost invisible, her voice sounded like a woman’s.

Are you going away to work in Paris this autumn? she asked.

Yes.

I’ll catch a marmot for you to take with you.

How?

That’s my secret.

You dig them up when they’re asleep?

Will you go up the Eiffel Tower? she asked, ignoring my remark.

The others will be waiting, I said. Thank you for the coffee.

They’re singing, she told me. Can’t you hear?

No.

She opened the door. They were singing “Mon père a cinq cent moutons.”

I’ll fetch you some butter, she said.

We don’t need any.

You have so much at home that you can refuse butter?

She left me and went through the door into the stable. By now the moon was up, and a little of its light came through the dusty window, no larger than an open book, and down the wooden chimney. There was a pool of moonlight around the dead ashes.

When the Cocadrille came back, I gasped. She had taken off her blouse and chemise. I could see her breasts, each scarcely larger than the bowl of a wooden spoon. She came and stood right in front of me, and I saw that the dark nipples of her breasts were dripping with milk.

It was not until next morning that I reasoned that she must have poured cow’s milk over her breasts when she went into the stable. At the time I thought of nothing beyond the thin warm arms she put round me.

We went to lie on the bed, a wooden shelf at the far end of the room. As I caressed her, lying on the bed, I had the impression that she grew larger. She grew as large as the earth upon which I had to throw myself.

How you stir me! she cried, you stir my milk!

The only other time I had been to bed with a woman was in a brothel in the garrison town of L …, and there the lights were pink and the prostitute was as white and plump as a pig. Was that, I asked myself later, why the Cocadrille had asked for the one who had been in the army?

At two in the morning she dressed and reminded me not to forget the butter. As I left, she reached up and pulled the hair at the back of my head, digging her nails into my scalp. I knew the path down by heart.

Suddenly a cloud obscured the moon so that I could see nothing. A noise in the undergrowth made me stop. On every side the low bushes were being trampled. For the third or fourth time that night my heart raced wildly, yet this time, unlike the others, my whole body felt icy. I took to my heels. I ran for ten minutes without stopping, as if I were running from damnation itself.

Later when I reasoned that the Cocadrille must have poured cow’s milk over her breasts, I also reasoned that on my way home I had disturbed some sleeping goats.

What was it that made me go back the following evening? Why did I deliberately go up alone, avoiding my companions? She gave no sign of surprise at my arrival.

So you’ve finished the butter! she said.

Can you give me some more?

Yes, Jean. She pronounced my name solemnly in her deep voice. It was as if she had invented the name herself. Nobody else had ever said my name like that. It disturbed me because it separated me from all other men called Jean or Théophile or François.

She made some coffee. I asked her what she had done and she recounted her day to me. She asked me nothing about myself, but sometimes she looked at me, as if to make sure that I corresponded with the name she had pronounced. We sat across the table, facing each other in the darkness. It was now as dark outside as in. There would be lights in the windows of the other chalets. I knew why she had not lit the lamp: any visitor would conclude that she was already asleep. When a cow moved her head in the stable the note of the bell filled the room, and it was like a reminder of what we were about to do. By now neither of us spoke. I could even hear the breath of the cows. It crossed my mind to leave then and there. Yet it was already too late. Everything outside was already distant, like a coastline seen from the stern of a ship.

She had placed a candle by the bed. Without a word, she lit it. The blanket was white and smelt of sunlight. In the morning, after the cows had grazed, she must have washed the blood from the blanket. I lay there and watched her undress. She threw her clothes onto the table and strode onto the bed.

Stir me! She said this standing over me.

I began to shout at her. I called her obscene names. I referred to parts of her with the words we used for animal parts. All she did was to smile and then, squatting, she sat on me as if I were a horse. I tried to make her fall off and she held onto my shoulders and laughed. Her laughing made me laugh. My shouting stopped. I made a noise like a horse neighing. I neighed and she gripped the hair above my ears as if it were a mane. Later I asked myself how she made me do such things.

We played and made love on the wooden stage of the bed as though we possessed the strength of the whole village. Perhaps that is an old man’s boast. I could literally pick her up with one arm, yet every time I tried to put my feet on the floor, she succeeded in pulling me back. It was difficult to believe she was the same woman whom I had passed so often, during the first years of the war, working alone in a field, cursing and already bent with a kind of weariness. I made her laugh by measuring her limb by limb, part by part, against myself. Today I have made a mark on the doorpost of the kitchen to help me recall her real height, before, like all of us, she shrank in old age. One metre, twenty-five centimetres is what I’ve marked. None of the rest is measurable.

At last we were exhausted and I got up to breathe a little in the fresh air. On the slope behind the Cabrol chalet there is a fold in the earth like a furrow, down which a trickle of water runs. The water makes the flowers grow profusely there, and on both sides of the fold, there are millions of ranunculi, the small, white five-petalled flowers which cows will not eat. I sat down amongst these flowers and the Cocadrille, wearing a man’s hat, came out to join me. The other chalets were silent. The crickets had long since stopped. Below were the roofs of the village, no larger than dice.

She lay back among the grasses and ranunculi and looked up at the sky where the stars were the same shape as the flowers, and lying on her back she began to talk. She spoke about herself, about her brother Emile, about the land she would one day inherit, about the cows, about what she thought of the curé, about how she would never marry. At first I listened to what she was saying without much attention. Then gradually it occurred to me that she was saying all this because it might turn out to be otherwise. I became convinced that she was plotting one thing whilst talking about its opposite. It wasn’t true that she would never marry. She was plotting to make me her husband. She believed she was now pregnant and so I would be forced to marry her.

Lucie! I interrupted her as we sat there in the firmament of flowers. I do not know why I used her real name.

Yes?

I’m not going to come up again.

I didn’t expect you to, Jean.

Her reply confirmed my worst suspicions. It meant that I was already trapped.

Here’s the butter, she said, and the way she looked so fixedly at me scared me, making me feel alone and separate, as I had felt when I first arrived and she had used my name in such a strange way.

The next night, asleep in the bed with my brother, I dreamt of her. The Cocadrille came to the house, fearless, eyes blazing. Only one man can be the father of my child, she said in my dream, and Jean is that man! Is it true? asked my own father, turning to me. I couldn’t answer. With the Cocadrille! he shouted. No, I don’t believe it, he roared. I can prove it, she said. Then prove it! ordered my father. I counted the moles on the small of his back, said the Cocadrille. How many are there? my mother asked. The Cocadrille said a number, and I was forced to take down my trousers in front of the three of them whilst my father counted the moles. You’ve ruined your life, said my father. Ruined it for nothing! The number was correct. I woke up frightened and sweating.

Many times that summer I was tempted in the evenings to climb up to the alpage to discover whether or not she was pregnant. Each time I told myself it was better not. And so I stayed below in suspense. Finally, late in August, I saw her outside the church at a wedding and, to my great relief, she did not single me out in any way.

After I had been in Paris for two winters, Marius à Brine fell sick. It was the month of July and I was back in the village. La Mélanie sat by her husband’s bed, lending him what courage she could, and the Cocadrille climbed up to the alpage to fetch ice to lay on his burning stomach. There is a cave there, near the horseshoe of rocks where the four of us were going to sing, into which the sun never penetrates. She filled a can with this broken ice, covered it with a shawl, and ran back all the way down to Brine. It was the same path I ran down that first night when I fled from the goats. By the time she arrived, more than half the ice had melted and there were only rounded slivers left to put on his pain-clenched stomach. She made three such journeys up to the cave, and when she came back the third time, in the mid-afternoon, Marius was dead.

I went to pay my last respects to him. He was laid out in his black suit and boots. At the foot of the bed the Cabrol family kept vigil. The Cocadrille was wearing a widow’s dress like her mother and her face was inclined and invisible. I made the sign of the cross with the sprig of boxwood over his still heart and his head with its closed eyes. Edmond, his youngest son, was only three years old.

Food and drink were laid out for the visitors. The Cocadrille left the room of the dead and came out to offer me some apple rissoles. As I ate, she looked up at me. In her drawn, tearstained face, framed in black, her blue eyes were even more intense than I recollected. In April the first forget-me-nots appear in the grass, like flakes fallen from the sky. Dug up with their roots and brought inside the house they bring fine weather with them. Her eyes were the same blue.

So you are leaving us again? she said.

Yes. Not just for Paris, I’m going to South America.

Come back before you die, she said in her deep voice.

Her saying this angered me. I offered my condolences once more and left. After her father’s death the Cocadrille continued to work on the farm.

In 1936 Emile died as the final consequence of his war wounds. Two years later La Mélanie followed her husband and her eldest son into the grave. Henri married Marie, a woman from the next village. The Cocadrille milked the cows, looked after the stable, grew the vegetables, collected wood, grazed the cattle. Marie, her sister-in-law, complained about her:

She’s as dirty as a chicken house. And she never lifts a finger in the kitchen. What sort of woman is that?

The years passed. The Second War broke out.

One morning the Cocadrille was scything between the apple trees with her own scythe which she would never allow anyone else to touch. Over the years its blade had been worn down by whetting and beating until it was scarcely wider than a thumbnail. If you gave me the money, I could never buy another like this, she said. Only the work of twenty summers can make a scythe as light as this. For twenty summers I’ve cherished this scythe like a son. She was by now known for her original way of talking.

The air was still cooler than the earth under the grass. Far above the orchard, the forest was not yet in the full light of day. Looking up, the Cocadrille saw two men beckoning her from the edge of the trees. Her brothers noticed that she had stopped working and followed her gaze. The two strangers at the edge of the forest must have seen what they took to be a child and two peasants in a hayfield pointing towards them. This was in 1944.

Shit! said Henri.

They’re maquisards, said Edmond, who was now as large as a man and already had a knowing expression.

What else could they be? grumbled Henri.

Jésus! don’t let anyone else see them.

The Cocadrille pretended to have noticed nothing. It was always Edmond who spoke and Henri who waited, and then it was Henri who prided himself on his cunning.

Marie can give them food and they can go, said Henri after a long pause.

One of the two unknown men started down the slope. Half-way, he emerged from the shadow of the mountain and entered the early morning sunshine. He was short and burly and walked like a peasant.

The two brothers stood absolutely still lest any movement be interpreted by the stranger as a welcome. When he was a few metres away, the stranger said, Good morning.

In the fields deliberate silence is a powerful weapon. Henri said nothing, and withdrew his head back into his shoulders like a dog guarding a doorway. Edmond stood with his hands on his hips, staring insolently.

Two of us need shelter for twenty-four hours, announced the stranger, after allowing the silence to continue long enough to show that he had recognised it.

Who told you to come to our farm?

Nobody. We know who not to go to.

In God’s name! muttered Henri. He took out his scythe stone and began sharpening the blade. The noise of the stone on the metal, like the previous silence, was intended to indicate a further refusal to answer.

The stranger strolled over towards the small figure who was still scything between the apple trees.

Good morning, little girl, he said to the Cocadrille.

She turned towards him and he saw that she was a middle-aged woman with a lined face, old enough to be his mother.

I didn’t see … he excused himself.

This is also my farm, she said.

The stranger made a sign to his companion up by the forest. The second man was limping and carried a gun in each hand.

The two brothers, anxious to prevent the Cocadrille talking to the maquisard, came over to the apple trees.

Where are you from? Edmond asked.

I’m from the Dranse. The SS burnt down my father’s farm there.

So you have nothing to lose? remarked Edmond.

Nothing.

The single word contained a threat. This time the silence was filled only with the gasp of the Cocadrille’s scythe as it cut the grass.

We’ll give you food and after that you must go, announced Henri.

No, we need to stay till tomorrow.

The man who limped and carried the guns joined them. He was young and his unshaven face looked worn and pain-filled.

The best way to hide, said Henri slyly, is to work with us. We need to get the hay in.

The comrade here has a wound that needs dressing, said the peasant from the Dranse.

We are not a hospital!

The Cocadrille leant on her scythe and looked across at the young man. Where is your wound? she asked.

The right thigh, he said.

I will dress it for you.

And if the Germans come? Henri yelled. He can’t be in the house.

You are right, interrupted the peasant from the Dranse. It’s better if we stay up here.

You mean the Germans *are* looking for you? said Edmond quickly.

Probably.

You came here with a wounded man and with the Germans on your heels and you expect us to risk our lives saving you!

They could hide in the chicken house.

No, we are safer, like you said, working with you. We are your cousins come to help with the hay. Is there anyone down there in the house?

My wife.

So you are four.

With the Cocadrille here, yes.

Can you, Madame, fetch hot water and bandages? Meanwhile we’ll hide the weapons.

When she returned from the farm with some strips of linen sheet, she led the wounded man to a flat step of ground by the side of the stream which her grandfather had used to drive the saw. The wound near the top of his thigh was like a wound of any generation.

She knelt in her black dress by his hips and bent over the wound whilst she bathed it with hot water. It took her a long time to get the old dressing completely off. The wound was as red as beef. She diluted some *gnôle* and dabbed it on the wound. When it hurt him, his hand, lying on the grass, found her calf and gripped it through her dress.

Thank you, he said when at last she had bound the wound up again. You have very gentle hands.

Laid out on the grass, his body looked long and his bare legs as thin as those of the body on the cross.

Gentle! she said. They’ve worked too hard to be gentle. They’ve been in too much shit.

He shut his eyes.

How old are you? she asked.

Nineteen.

Is your mother alive?

I believe so.

And your father?

He is a judge.

You have such regular teeth. You don’t come from here.

No, from Paris.

Have you ever turned hay?

I will do as you do.

She helped him to his feet. After a while, he stopped to wipe his face with the corner of his shirt.

She held out a bottle to him. However much you drink when haymaking, she said, you never piss!

At midday a car drew up at the farmhouse.

Take no notice, ordered the peasant from the Dranse, go on working.

Two men in uniform got out of the car.

They’re not the Milice, said Edmond, they’re Germans.

The Cocadrille, who was standing beside the young man from Paris, suddenly reached up and slapped the side of his neck with her open hand.

What! he shouted.

A horsefly had been about to bite him.

Soon they could hear the heavy breathing of the Germans whom the slope still hid from view. The first to appear was an officer with a tight belt and straight high cap, pulled down over his eyes. Following him came a sergeant holding a submachine-gun.

Everyone here! shouted the officer. He surveyed the five haymakers: four peasants and one dwarf woman.

We are looking for six assassins. We know who they are. Who has come by here this morning?

I’ll tell you, said the Cocadrille. The brain needs renewing. It wanders. If I had the money to buy a new one and if they sold them, I’d change it tomorrow. She buttoned her dress where it was undone. I did see a car go by this morning—or was it yesterday morning? An army could go by and I wouldn’t be sure. When I saw this car I said to myself, that’s strange. There was an officer driving it, with a cap like yours, sir—she pointed the prongs of her wooden fork at the officer’s face: the sergeant pushed her back. I said to myself, he looks like a man wearing a disguise. Perhaps he was one of the men you are looking for, sir, one of the assassins. His cap came right down over his face like yours, sir, as if he was trying to hide his face. Was it this morning or yesterday morning I saw this car? He could have stolen the car, you see, sir. Was it yesterday? I wish I knew. She put a finger in her ear. You’ll do better, believe me, sir, asking my two cousins here. She pointed her fork at the maquisards.

Nobody’s passed this way, said the peasant from the Dranse. Not since before it was light. We were up at five. Nobody has come by, unless they stuck to the forest and we didn’t see them.

The peasant from the Dranse stared vacantly at the distant snow-covered mountain, white like a pillow propped against the blue sky, and farted.

The officer approached Edmond and gently touched his face so that he could look into the boy’s eyes.

They couldn’t come here, said Edmond ingratiatingly, they know too well where our sympathies lie.

No, the officer said, you all hate us!

And you? demanded the sergeant, pointing his gun at the young Parisian.

The hay is dry now. He spoke slowly and stupidly as if he were the dwarf woman’s son.

What have you seen this morning?

Flies and horseflies.

Has anyone come down from the forest?

Flies and horseflies.

His idiocy provoked the sergeant to jab the muzzle of his gun hard into his stomach. The dwarf woman raised her fork in protest. The officer scowled at the prospect of a brawl on the steep slope which the hay made slippery.

We are wasting our time, he said curtly to the sergeant. To the peasants he said: If you are lying, I can promise you we’ll be back, just as we came back to T …

The previous winter the Germans had come one night to the village of T … with two armoured lorries, an officer’s car and a searchlight mounted on a sidecar. With their searchlight trained on the doors, they went from house to house. The women they chased into the forest. The men they lined up and shot. Whilst the stables and animals were burning, the German troops sang.

The sergeant left first. The officer, as he went down, dug his heels in so as not to slip, and the dust from the hay coated the backs of his polished boots.

After the car had driven away, there was nowhere any sign of what had happened or of what might happen.

The Aunt here made a fine speech! said the peasant from the Dranse. She scowled in case he was taking her for a fool. During her first life the Cocadrille was never indifferent to what people thought of her.

It’s safe now. They won’t come back until they’ve questioned everybody, she said to the one she had bandaged. You can go and rest in the hayloft.

He must work, Henri contradicted, that was the understanding from the beginning. If they come back and find him …

His leg needs rest.

Jésus! It’s not your farm they’ll burn down.

You can lie in the hayloft, and if they come back you can be working on top of the hay, the Cocadrille said.

And if he’s asleep?

I’ll stay with him.

Stay with him! In God’s name! We have this hay to get in.

The Aunt is right, said the peasant from the Dranse, you should listen to her.

Half the hayloft was empty; in the other half the new hay was stacked almost as high as the roof beams. When she shut the door it was like twilight. She told the wounded man, who was young enough to be her son, on no account to hide in the hay, for the previous year a maquisard hiding in another farm had buried himself in the hay and the Italian soldiers had searched the loft, sticking in pitchforks. One of the prongs had wounded him in the neck. He dared not cry out. The Italian soldiers dawdled in the barn, joking with the peasant’s wife. And the wounded man bled to death in the blood-red hay.

They know they are defeated now. Couldn’t you see it in the officer’s eyes? said the young man.

The Cocadrille shrugged her shoulders.

What will you do when the war stops?

I will continue my studies, he said.

And one day become a judge like your father?

No, it is another kind of justice that I believe in, a popular justice, a justice for peasants like you and for workers, a justice which gives factories to those who work in them, and the land to those who cultivate it. As he said this, he smiled shyly, as if confessing something intimate.

Is your father rich? she asked.

Fairly.

Won’t you inherit some of his money?

All of it when he dies.

There’s the difference between us.

She had a habit of kicking off one sabot and rubbing the bare foot against her other leg.

I shall use that money to start a paper. By then we shall have a free press. A free press is a prerequisite for the full mobilisation of the masses.

Are your feet hot too? she asked.

The hay is dusty, he said. He gravely gave everything he said equal thought.

Meanwhile you are in danger, she commented.

Not more than you.

That is true, today we are equal.

Do your brothers think like you?

I don’t think.

I didn’t trust them, he said.

They are as straight as a goat’s hind leg. You must rest now. Later I will dress your wound again. What is your first name?

They call me Saint-Just.

I have never heard that name. Rest now, Saint-Just.

He slept without stirring. In the evening whilst the others were eating, she took him bread and a plate of soup.

I feel stronger, he announced.

I can dress your wound again.

No, just sit beside me.

When she sat beside him, he laid his head in her lap and she combed his hair with her fingers.

You have very gentle hands, he said for the second time.

It’s like raking hay, she said laughing.

She broke off the story there. I do not know whether they made love. Perhaps it is only my own memories which make me ask the question. Yet there was something in the way the Cocadrille recounted her meetings with men which always left you speculating.

The two maquisards departed next day. Within forty-eight hours the village heard that a group of maquisards had been surprised in their camp by the Milice, taken prisoner, transported to A … and shot in a field there. There were six in the group and they included the peasant from the Dranse and Saint-Just. It was said that the Milice could never have found the camp, unless they had been tipped off by an informer.

The Cocadrille shrieked when she heard the news. At supper that night she was still crying with bloodshot eyes.

In God’s name stop it, woman! Henri’s wife exclaimed. In any case a woman of your age should be ashamed!

Those who sleep with dogs, wake up with fleas, said Edmond.

That’s good! shouted Henri. That’s good! Those who sleep with dogs, wake up with fleas!

She never forgave the insult. She began, as she had done when she was a child, to disappear. Without telling her brothers, she would be absent for a whole day, sometimes two days and a night. It became impossible to confide any regular job to her. She gradually withdrew her labour, as job after job appeared to her shameful. Not shameful in itself, but shameful for her to perform for two men whom she could not forgive.

Soon she was no longer on speaking terms with anybody in the house. She slept in the stable. She ate by herself. To save the bother of eating more than once a day, she rolled herself cigarettes. Her brothers were in constant dread that deliberately or accidentally she would set fire to the farm. They threatened to beat her if they found her smoking in the stable. In revenge she put an unlit cigarette in her mouth whenever she saw one of them approaching.

It was Henri who first spoke in the village of the Cocadrille’s stealing. She stole, he said, eggs from his wife’s chicken house. Since she doesn’t work, he added, she has no right to them, and she sells them for money.

Some believed him and sympathised; others argued that she was, after all, his sister and he owed her her share of the inheritance. Gradually it became apparent that she was stealing from other gardens. A few lettuces, some plums, a marrow or two. Nobody, except Henri and Edmond, took these small thefts very seriously. They were humiliated by them.

The end came with the fire. The Cabrol grenier burnt down one autumn morning. The two brothers accused the Cocadrille of having deliberately set light to it.

They went to see the Mayor and they told him that they could no longer take responsibility for the actions of their sister, whose unleashed madness was Stealing and Arson. The Mayor was reluctant to refer the matter to any outside authority. It was his wife who thought of the solution which he finally proposed to Henri and Edmond. They accepted it enthusiastically. And with this proposal the first life of the Cocadrille came to an end.

** The Second Life of Lucie Cabrol



HOW LONG DISTANCES seem to a peasant may depend on how he cultivates his land. If he grows melons between cherry trees, five hundred metres is a considerable distance. If he grazes cows on a mountain pasture, five kilometres is not far. To the Cocadrille, who could cultivate nothing, because she now had no land, twenty kilometres became a short distance. She walked fast. When she was an old woman, people still commented on how quickly she disappeared. One moment they saw her on a path: the next moment hillside and skyline were empty. She usually carried a sack and, sometimes, tied across her back, a large blue umbrella.

One September morning in 1967 she set out early. The place she was making for was a high forested plateau, about eight kilometres away from where she now lived. When a pine tree falls in that forest, struck by lightning, or its roots are torn out of the earth by a gale, it lies where it fell until its wood turns grey, stifled by snow in winter and burnt by the sun in summer. There are no paths there. You can see on the fallen tree trunks hundreds of systematically dismantled pine-cones, which the squirrels have eaten, undisturbed since the thaw in the spring. Everywhere, climbing over roots and boulders, wild raspberries grow.

The canes were taller than she. As she picked them she crooned. This was to frighten the snakes. With her left hand she bent the canes back so that their under-sides, clustered with fruit, were uppermost: then, between the finger and thumb of her right hand she picked, going from cluster to cluster, until she was so far stretched over the cane that she risked falling forward on to her face. Any fruit that failed to come away easily from their white cores she left. Those she picked she put in the palm of her left hand. The berries were warm and granular like nipples. She held them in her calloused dirt-lined palm without squashing them. When she could hold no more she turned round and emptied the handful into a frail made of thin wood. As she moved forward through the forest, she left behind her thousands of white cores from which she had taken the fruit.

I was watching her. I had climbed up to the forest the same morning to look for bolets which grow along its upper edge, where the pines stop. To my surprise I saw a very small old woman in black among the trees. Since my return I had only heard about the Cocadrille from others.

After I arrived in Buenos Aires I seldom gave her a thought. If she came to mind at all, I congratulated myself on my luck in escaping her guile. I remained convinced that she had tried to trap me into marriage. Fortunately she had failed—probably because she was sterile. Contrary to what one might expect, as time passed, I thought of her more often. I took for granted my luck in not having become entangled with her. And in the hot airless nights of the city, not far from one of the vilest shanty towns, I used to picture to myself an alpine summer. One of the things I recalled was the long grass beneath the stars beside the Cabrol chalet. And then even her plotting seemed to me to belong to a life that was carefree and innocent.

Among the trees in the forest, she straightened her back from time to time and ate some of the fruit. I hid so she would not see me. I wanted to watch her unawares.

After twenty-five years in the Argentine, I went north to Montreal where, for a while, I was rich. I had my own bar there. Sometimes I would tell my story about the goats in the moonlight and the Cocadrille. Once a client asked me: Was this woman a dwarf? And I had to explain. No, she was not a dwarf, she was tiny, she was underdeveloped, she was ignorant, she was like a dwarf, but she wasn’t. If she was physically like a dwarf, the client reasoned, she surely was a dwarf. No, I said.

When I next looked towards the forest, she had disappeared. Not a branch moved. The red cones hung motionless, they were especially, obscenely red that year. I have never seen them so red—as red as the arseholes of baboons. There was no sign of her. I told myself I had imagined seeing her. Yet, when I walked over to where I thought she had been, the raspberry canes were stripped and you could see everywhere the white cores of the fruit she had taken.

A few days previously I had overheard some children coming out of school talking about her.

It makes you frightened just to meet her on the road.

Why does she live up there, so far away, next to the precipice?

Mother says she catches marmots and skins them.

My father says she has a fortune hidden up there.

Why doesn’t she have a dog at least to keep her company?

Witches don’t have dogs, they have cats.

If she looks at you, you have to open your mouth—have you noticed that—you can’t keep it shut!

I was walking with my head down looking for mushrooms. With age I have become somewhat deaf. Something made me look to the side. The woman in the black dress, not more than ten metres away, was squatting at the foot of a tree, holding her dress up over her scratched knees.

The passer-by, she cawed, should always raise his hat to the one who is shitting!

I took off my beret and she cawed with laughter.

I think she didn’t recognise me for when she got to her feet and took a few steps towards me, pulling down her skirt, she stopped and exclaimed.

It’s Jean!

I nodded.

Do you recognise me?

You’re the Cocadrille.

No! she said and her laughter stopped dead.

Why are you following me? she asked.

I came up here to look for bolets.

You found some?

What?

Did you find some? she insisted.

I opened my haversack. Her hair was white, the lines to the corners of her mouth were very deep, and down the sides of her face I could see tracks of sweat. Around her lips were spots and traces of dark red from the fruit she had eaten. This, with her lined face and white hair, gave her the macabre air of a prematurely aged child. Or of an old person become childish.

Give them to me. Her eyes were fixed on the bolets I had found.

What for?

They are mine! she claimed.

She believed that whatever grew and had not been planted by man, within a radius of ten kilometres of where she lived, was incontestably hers.

I closed my haversack. She shook her head and turned away, cursing quietly to herself.

So you’ve come back, she said after a minute.

Yes, I’ve come back.

You were away too long. She stared at me with the intense gaze of her blue eyes, which were no more like flowers but like a stone called kyanite.

I remembered the way up here, I said.

You came up here to spy on me.

Spy?

Spy on me!

Why should I want to spy on you?

Give me the bolets then.

No.

Why did I refuse? I had found the mushrooms, therefore they were mine. It was an elementary point of justice. Yet I knew that justice had little to do with my life or hers. I refused out of habit.

She took an empty frail from her sack and began picking. I wondered how she arranged the frails in her sack when they were full so that the fruit would not be damaged.

Whilst you were away, everything changed, she said to me over her shoulder.

A lot must have changed when you left the farm.

I didn’t leave it. They disinherited me.

She moved on, following the fruit, away from me. Soon she appeared to forget that I was there. She bent back a stem on which the berries must have been especially closely clustered.

Thank you, little sow, she cawed. Thank you!

Did you marry out there? she shouted.

Yes.

I forced my way through the brambles so as to hear her better. She wore boots with no stockings and her scratched legs were as lean as the forelegs of a cow.

Why did you come back alone then?

My wife died.

You’re a widower.

I am a widower.

Do you have children?

Two sons. They are both working in the United States.

Money can change everything, she said. She held up her left hand, full of raspberries, pretending that it was full of coins. He who hasn’t got money is like a wolf without teeth. She looked around at the whole forest as if it were the world. And for he who has money, money can do anything. Money can eat and dance. Money can make the dirty clean, the despised respected. Money can even make the dwarf big.

Her using the word *dwarf* shocked me.

I have two million! she cawed.

I hope you keep them in a bank.

Fuck off! she swore. Fuck off and get away!

She pointed as if pointing at a door and ordering me out of a room rather than a forest. Everyone in the village said that she was fearless. I don’t think this was true. What she counted on was inspiring fear in others. She knew that people were frightened of her. Now she was angry because she had told me about her savings; she had probably intended to keep this a secret. If I went obediently she might assume that I was not interested. If I insisted upon staying it would be tantamount to admitting my curiosity. So I left.

It is said that large mushrooms are large from the moment they first appear. One morning there is nothing, and the next morning the mushroom is there as large as it will ever be. A small mushroom is not a young large one. It will stay small, as the Cocadrille stayed small.

Occasionally, as I went on looking for my mushrooms, I saw her faded blue sunshade in the distance. Its blue was like the colour of her eyes. They had lost none of their colour with age. They had simply become dry, like stone.

Towards midday I found the largest bolet I have ever seen. I looked at it for several minutes before I saw it. Then suddenly it stood out from its surroundings of fern, moss, dead wood, grey pine needles and earth—exactly as if it had grown from nothing before my eyes. It was thirty centimetres in diameter and thick like a round loaf of bread. Sometimes I dream of finding mushrooms and even in my dream I say to myself: Don’t pick them straight away, admire them first. This one weighed two kilos and was still fresh.

I walked to another part of the forest where the pines are not spruce but larches, and where the earth is covered with a carpet of turf as soft as an animal’s stomach. There I planned to eat my lunch and afterwards, as has become my habit, to sleep a little. I put my beret over my face to keep the sun out of my eyes. And as I lay there, before I fell asleep, I thought, I must look like an old man who never left his country. This thought along with the mushrooms I had found, the little wine I had drunk, the softness of the turf, was a consolation. I sat up to look once more at the giant bolet in my haversack. It too was a confirmation that I had come home.

God in heaven!

If she hadn’t sworn, she wouldn’t have woken me. A platoon could march on the turf there without making a sound. She was holding the bolet which was as large as a loaf and staring at it. The strap of my haversack was already over her shoulder. She saw me sit up. This in no way deterred her. With her exaggeratedly long strides she was making off towards the other part of the forest. Why didn’t I protest? To lose all the mushrooms I had gathered during the morning, to lose the largest bolet I had ever seen, and to lose a haversack into the bargain was a shouting matter. I could have run after her, picked her up and shaken her. I stayed there on the ground. All the stories I had heard about her were true. She was shameless. She was a thief. I had no doubt she would sell my mushrooms. Why had she not asked me for them once more? I might have given her some. The idea came to me that this time, and this time only, I would let her have what she had taken.

I need my haversack, I shouted.

You know where I live!

She bawled this as if it were a complete justification of what she had done.

A few days later I went to retrieve my haversack. Half an hour’s walk along the road which climbs east out of the village brings you to a stone column on top of which is a small statue of the Madonna. She stands there arms relaxed, palms of her hands facing the road as if waiting to welcome the traveller. Either side of the Madonna are railings because, behind her, there is a sheer drop to the gravel of the river Jalent, sixty, seventy metres below.

Around the next bend of the road is the house in which the Cocadrille lived her second life. Beside the house there is a rock, as tall as the roof, with an ash tree growing on top of it. You have the impression that the house is jutting out into the road, edging away from the precipice behind its back. It was originally built before the First World War for a roadmender. He lodged there with his horse during the few weeks of the year when he was working on that isolated stretch of the pass. With the advent of lorries, the house no longer served any purpose and so was locked up and the key kept in the Mayor’s office. The Mayor’s wife’s proposal had been that the Cocadrille should live in the roadmender’s house rent-free. There, she would be far enough away from the village to cause trouble to nobody, and the law would not have to be invoked against her.

If you approach the roadmender’s house from the opposite direction, you don’t see it until you are beside it, for it is completely hidden by the rock with the tree on top of it. The rock is like a second house that has been filled with stone. From the direction I was approaching I could see a window, which had no curtains, in the house which was lived in.

I knocked on the door.

Who is it?

Jean.

You’re too late.

It’s not half past eight.

The door opened a fraction.

What do you want?

I have come to fetch my haversack.

At this hour!

I won’t come in.

Now she opened the door fully.

I’ll pay you a coffee.

The room was full of sacks and cardboard boxes, there were two piles of wood and so far as I could see, only one chair at a table, on which there was a pile of old newspapers, a heap of hazel-nuts and some knitting. The blue umbrella stood in a corner. The ceiling was smoked dark brown like the hide of a ham. The room was the size of a small lorry.

She continued doing what she must have been doing before I knocked. She gathered the hazel-nuts into a basket and hung them on a pair of scales, the traditional kind made of iron, which, on the banknotes of some countries, the figure of Justice holds up in front of her bosom.

Shit and shit! she grumbled. I can’t see in this light.

I put on my glasses and looked over her shoulder to read the markings on the iron bar.

Six kilos, three hundred, I said.

She smelt of the floor of a forest into which the sun never penetrates, she smelt of boar.

After they were weighed she put the nuts into a cardboard box.

I haven’t had a visit for three years. I had to strain my ears to hear her. She was speaking as if to herself. The last visitor I had was Monsieur le Curé in July 1964. They put me here to get me out of the way. Why don’t you take your glasses off? They make you look like a curé.

If you can’t read, you should wear glasses yourself.

Read! she cawed. Read!

From the pocket of her apron she took out a packet of tobacco and slowly rolled herself a cigarette. On the stove she moved a saucepan of milk to get a light from the burning wood.

If I turn my back you spill over, she said to the milk.

A cock came through the door from the adjoining stable. It stood there, one claw poised in the air.

Sit on the chair! she said. It was the last curé, not this one. He was always in bad health. He’d climbed up here on foot on his way somewhere. I offered to pay him a glass of water. Ah, he said, as soon as he came in: You are a child of the earth, Lucie. Without land, I said. You must not harbour resentment, he told me, you have things to be grateful for. I knew what he meant. Like this house you mean—everybody whispers that I don’t pay rent for it and what a shack it is! It was built for one man and a horse—she lifted the milk off the fire—and when the horse died it wasn’t lived in any more. I’m the only woman who ever slept in this house. I asked the curé to name one other woman in the village who would live here alone. None of them is a child of the earth, he repeated. I will show you one day what I am, I said, I’m going to surprise you all! It is dangerous—I remember how solemn his voice was—to hope too much; you cannot please the world and there is no reason to envy it. She shooed the cock away into the stable. Father, I said, I believe in happiness! And do you know what happened then? His face went white and he grasped my arm. Lucie, is there a little more water? he whispered. I gave him some *gnôle* and he drank it like water. He started to speak as if he were reading the Bible in church. It is written, sadness has killed many, and there is no profit in it. You are right, my daughter, to believe in happiness. Lie down, Father, I told him, and rest a moment. Where? he asked, I see no bed. I got him to the table. He lay down, closed his eyes and smiled. The angels, he murmured, who descended and ascended on Jacob’s ladder, they had wings, yet they did not fly and they trod the gradual rungs of the ladder. I held the glass for him and undid the buttons where his clothes were too tight. He never opened his eyes. He will be ashamed when he wakes up, I said. He heard me say this because he spoke: I’m ashamed now but I feel better. Slowly, Father, I said, let your strength come back slowly. That was the last visitor I had. She poured out some coffee.

Haven’t Henri or Edmond ever visited you?

It was then that she told me the story of her brothers and the maquisards. She told it squatting on a sack beside the stove. The kitchen grew darker and darker. I could see nothing except the orange of the fire in the stove and her white hair which gave off a glimmer of light. Outside there was a hard moon. They are traitors, she added, when she had finished the story.

Traitors?

It was they who informed the Milice.

Have you any proof?

I don’t need proof. I know them too well.

Why should they have done that? The war was nearly over. Everyone saw the Germans were losing.

What kind of patriot were you? she hissed. A thousand kilometres away.

Ten thousand, I said.

She spat and rubbed the spittle with her foot on the floorboards.

The only time my brothers came here was when they brought my furniture. They made excuses all day saying they had to finish planting the potatoes. It was in April 1949. Only after they had eaten their soup did they load the cart. Then we set out under cover of darkness. Do you know why? In the daylight they were ashamed to be seen moving their sister out. When we arrived here, it was as dark as it is now. My own brothers, fed on the same mother’s milk, sperm of the same father’s sperm, left me here in the dark one night. I didn’t even have a lamp. Each month they were meant to pay me. Pay my arse! I saw the last of them that same night through the window there.

I watched the cart go, she continued, and when I knew it was far away, I followed it. I went as far as the Madonna. She walked to the dark window in the room and stood looking out through the glass.

There was a long white cloud in the shape of a fish, she went on, I have never seen it again. Where the fish’s eye should have been was the moon. I waited there at the foot of the Madonna’s column and I spoke to Maman and Papa. You should have known your sons better, I told them. You always thought of them as they were when they were in the cradle. Shit! You didn’t know where their evil came from, did you? You died, Papa, didn’t you, not knowing that to make a child you need a woman, a man and the Devil. That’s why it’s so tempting! I saw what Papa was doing at that very moment when I was standing at the Madonna’s feet. He was rutting into Maman. And Maman was pulling him down! When you were alive, you didn’t do it enough, did you, you were always too tired and your back felt too broken. Go on. I give you my blessing. Go on, I told them. You have nothing left here. Your sons will give nothing back to you. If you speak out loud, they won’t listen. If you stopped and saw me, you’d suffer. I’m not going to let you suffer, Papa, I’m not going to let you suffer, Maman, because I’m going to survive. You carcasses with your backs to everything! I’m not going to let you suffer. I swear it. I’m going to survive.

In the darkness the room smelt of sacks and earth. A car came up the road and its headlights shone straight through the window at which she stood, lighting up the entire room. In this light, the room looked more than ever like a store shed. In the corner, on the far side of the stove, was a ladder and above it an open trapdoor. When the car had passed, the darkness by contrast was total. The noise of the engine died away. In the silence and darkness, the two of us could as well have been in our coffins.

Do you want to eat some soup with me?

I have a bottle of wine.

So you thought you’d stay!

No, I bought it for myself at home.

After forty years’ absence, what have you got to show? One litre of wine!

A little more.

What?

Enough to live on till I move to the Boulevard of the Laid Out.

So you’ve come back to die.

We’re not young any more.

I’m not ready to die yet, she proclaimed.

Death doesn’t ask if you are ready.

Are you going to live well? she asked.

I’m not rich. I didn’t make the fortune I dreamt of. I was unlucky. Do you always sit in the dark?

What did you find in South America—electricity? I go to bed when I can’t see. You’re going to keep your mother’s house in the village?

I bought it from my brothers.

When did you do that?

This interrogation, during which we were both invisible to the other, reminded me of kneeling before the confession box. I sent them money when I had it.

She must have read my thoughts, for the next question she asked was: Were you faithful to your wife?

What a man does with his own skin, I said, is his own business.

For twenty years I haven’t spoken to anyone after nightfall except my chickens and the goat, when I still had one.

Give me my haversack and I’ll be going.

No, wait! I’ll light the lamp.

She struck a match and made her way over to the cupboard, in which she found a candle.

Are you hot now? she asked the soup, lifting the lid of the saucepan with as much caution as she had first opened the door to me. I can’t grow a single potato for you, they’ve taken every one. Can you lift the lamp down? Otherwise I have to stand on a chair.

The lamp was on the mantelpiece. I lit it. She climbed up the ladder to the loft and came down with a second chair. From the nail in the wall behind the stove she took a pewter ladle and rubbed it against the side of her black dress.

At last we sat down on either side of the table. The soup was steaming in the plates. It must have been past midnight.

So you have brought nothing back with you! She looked into my face.

Not a great fortune.

That’s obvious.

She held out her glass for me to fill with wine.

I swore to survive and become rich, and rich I’ve become, she said. There’s no man on earth who has the right to a single glass of vin blanc paid for out of my money! From now on I’m going to drink wine in the evenings.

What time do you get up in the mornings? I asked. I must be going.

In time to milk.

You have no cows.

I get up in time to milk. Every morning for the twenty years since I’ve been here.

At five?

She nodded.

You have an alarm clock?

In here. She pointed at her white hair.

And tomorrow? I asked.

Tonight is an exception, she said, holding out her glass for me to refill. Tonight I’m going to tell you about the twenty years.

What have they to do with me?

You have come back a pauper yet at least you have seen the world.

When she swore at the feet of the Madonna to survive, she had no clear idea of how to become rich. She knew less than I did when I took the boat to Buenos Aires. All she knew was that she could not become rich in the village.

I have renamed the village, she said. I have renamed it *Chez Cocadrille*! She shook with laughter and licked her colourless lips with her pink tongue.

Fifty kilometres away, just over the frontier, was the city of B.… Marius à Brine had spoken of its wealth, just as his father had done. Marius also said that those who lived in B … gave nothing away; they were so mean that they melted the snow to give what was left as alms to the poor! The Cocadrille concluded as she watched her two lost parents embracing that the place where money truly existed was B.… Such money as reached the village was vagrant money. She had to go to its home, where money bred.

What could she take to sell in B …? It was the moment for killing kids and she had no goats. It was the time when last summer’s cheeses were ready to eat, and she had no cows. It was the laying season for chickens and she had not yet built her chicken-run. The solution, obvious as it was, did not come to her immediately. She walked back along the moonlit road from the Madonna’s column.

I slept down here the first night, she said. It took me a year to move up to the loft. I missed the animals in the stable, and the idea of sleeping half-way up the sky, in the cold, didn’t appeal to me. I prefer to sleep on the ground, don’t you?

For a while I lived on the eighteenth storey.

What did it bring you?

She rubbed index finger against thumb in the banknote gesture which signifies money. Then she touched the back of my hand with her fingers.

During the first night in the roadmender’s house, she dreamt of the Madonna. The Madonna spoke to her in her dream and told her that everything which people go out to pick, she must pick first and take to the city. This is why the Madonna’s hands were open and pointing to the grass on the verge of the road.

Next day she took the path up to the highest fields of the village. The altitude there is nine hundred metres, and the grass was only just beginning to grow. She picked dandelions for salad, their leaves still very small, their stalks white. She didn’t come down until she had picked two kilos. Then she set out for the fields and orchards five hundred metres below, and there, where the dandelions were already flowering and the grass as high as her shins, she hunted for morels. Her fingers led her to them, under the pear trees, among nettles, between the stones of walls.

I still know where a mushroom is waiting, like a bitch on heat for a dog.

By the end of the day she had filled a basket.

At dusk she went out once again to collect violets and primroses at the edge of the forest. The violets she arranged in tiny bouquets with a damp cloth around them, and the primroses she cut out of the earth with their roots and soil attached. When it was fully night, she walked along the road to the Madonna’s column and, in the grass at its base, she planted some of the primroses.

A train went to the frontier town which adjoins B.… There was even a song about this train which La Mélanie used to sing. The train in the song left the town at noon, and travelled so slowly and stopped so often by the river, the smoke from the engine going straight up into the sky, that it never reached the village till it was dark, a fact which delighted lovers because they could caress each other undisturbed in the warm upholstered carriages. La Mélanie used to mime their embraces whilst she sang. The Cocadrille took this train. It was going in the opposite direction to the train in the song and went much faster. The journey lasted less than two hours. What frightened her was its smoothness. She was used to lurches and bumps against which, without thinking, she tensed herself so as not to be bruised against the wood of the cart drawn by the horse. The smoothness of the train made her feel sick: it was as if the earth no longer existed.

When the train arrived at the end of the line, she followed everyone out of the station. She saw no one she knew to ask where the frontier was. She resolved to walk in the same direction as most of the men. It was still early in the morning and she knew that many men went to work for the day in B.…

At the frontier the douanier asked her whether she had anything to declare. She looked blank. What have you got with you? he asked. Some morels, she said. I’ll sell them to you, if you offer me a good price!

After two hours’ searching, she found the market. She walked through it to see whether others were selling the same goods as she had brought. There were no other violets, and she thought she had misread the price of the dandelion leaves. They cost two hundred for a hundred grams. Two thousand a kilo! She understood better the wealth of the city of B.… The morels were selling at five thousand a kilo! She chose a corner in the shade, put her baskets down either side of her feet and waited for customers to come and buy. She stood waiting all morning. At midday she saw all the other traders packing up their stalls. She had sold nothing. She had not opened her mouth.

On her way back to the frontier she went into a café to ask for a glass of water. Nowhere in the streets had she seen a pump or a fountain. The proprietor peered into her basket of morels. He picked one up without a word, turned it in his fingers.

I’ll give you a thousand for the basketful.

There are two kilo there. You can weigh them.

I don’t need to.

They’re selling for five thousand a kilo in the market, she said, scandalised.

He shrugged his shoulders and turned away. She stared at him, her chin level with the top of his zinc bar. Looking over his shoulder, he opened his silent mouth and guffawed with laughter.

How much do you weigh yourself! he asked. You could throw yourself in for good measure! I’ll give you twelve hundred.

She saw that she had to accept the price, it was her last chance.

It took her a year to find her way about B.… In Buenos Aires I saw peasants newly arrived in the city, and all of them had the same air of confusion and extreme timidity. Many of them never got over it. I and the Cocadrille did. Of the two of us, she was the quicker. At home, in the village, it is you who do everything, and the way you do it gives you a certain authority. There are accidents and many things are beyond your control, but it is you who have to deal with the consequences even of these. When you arrive in the city, where so much is happening and so much is being done and shifted, you realise with astonishment that nothing is in your control. It is like being a bee against a window pane. You see the events, the colours, the lights, yet something, which you can’t see, separates you. With the peasant it is the forced suspension of his habit of handling and doing. That’s why his hands dangle out of his cuffs so stupidly.

Month by month the Cocadrille learnt where she could sell each item in the city, each item which, according to the season, she scavenged from the mountains: wild cherries, lilies of the valley, snails, mushrooms, blueberries, raspberries, wild strawberries, blackberries, *trolles*, juniper berries, cumin, wild rhododendra, mistletoe.

You have to understand that everything you watch in the city is as unimportant as a game. Everything which impresses you about the city is an illusion. It is not easy. To be impressed and unimpressed at the same time! What really happens in a city is hidden. If you want to achieve anything it must be arranged in secret.

She went to cafés, never missing a wink or a nod, never failing to remember a quickly suggested address. She bought a map of the city and on it she marked, with the flowing capital letters which André Masson taught us all, the addresses of her customers.

You’d have to pay to see that map! she cawed.

I poured out the last of the wine.

Do you remember where the cumin grows on the path to the alpage? I bring down a pailler full on my back and I let it dry there in the stable. I put newspapers underneath for the seeds to fall on to. I can sell a hundred grams of cumin seed for one thousand, five hundred!

As she named the price, she tapped with all the fingers of one hand on the edge of the table, and the spoon rattled in her plate. She discovered that there was no need to pay for a ticket to travel to B.… She could stop lorries and cars on the road and they would take her. She went to the city twice a week. All the other days of the year, when there wasn’t snow, she scavenged from dawn to dusk.

Drivers came to know me. She touched the back of my hand again. Sometimes they tried to take liberties but they never tried twice.

Réné, the electrician, picked her up one day.

As far as the frontier? she asked.

Réné nodded and she got in the back. He saw her in the driving mirror. It was a new car he had just bought and she sat in the very centre of the shining back seat, bolt upright with her sack on the floor. Réné nudged the apprentice sitting beside him.

Have you heard the story of the he-goat who went mad?

No.

He belonged to a farm where, years before, a cock laid an egg.

How’s that?

The peasant’s wife was certain because one morning she went into the chicken house and there was the cock on one of the hens’ boxes, making laying noises. She shooed him off and there was an egg! Saying nothing to her husband, she took the egg and buried it in the dung heap. Four weeks later …

He was interrupted by the noise of something crackling. He turned around. The Cocadrille was lying back with her legs and boots in the air. On the seat beside her, several egg yolks were running down the upholstery. The scraps of newspaper from which she had unwrapped the eggs were still on her lap.

Finish your story, she said. What did the Cocadrille do to the billy-goat?

Réné drove on in silence. When the douanier at the frontier asked whether they had anything to declare, the Cocadrille leant forward and said:

The two men here have a dozen broken eggs to declare.

Réné shook his head and winked at the douanier.

You can count them there on the floor, she insisted, twelve, and they haven’t paid me for them yet. A car like this, and they pretend they can’t pay an old woman for a dozen eggs!

How did they break? asked the douanier, laughing.

A billy-goat rolled on them … she explained, and, without a thank-you or a good-bye, the Cocadrille got down from the car and followed the tram-lines.

She learnt that money did not have the same value on both sides of the frontier. For everything bought, there was a cheap side and an expensive side. She learnt that it was foolish to bring money back; less foolish to bring back what she could sell expensively on her side.

We are surrounded by natural frontiers: snow, mountains, rock walls, rivers, ravines. For centuries we have also lived near an invisible political frontier. Where exactly it runs, changes according to the force of foreign governments and armies. This frontier divides the rich from the poor, and it is the easiest of all to cross. The threat of being flogged, of exile, of execution, of being sent to the galleys, has never deterred men or women from crossing it and smuggling. Many smuggled alone; some formed bands like small armies. The names of the leaders of these bands she knew by heart: Le Grand Joseph, Le Dragon, La Danse à l’Ombre, the great Louis Mandrin who was executed at V.…

What have you got to declare today, Grandma?

Down to there, nothing, she pointed to the pit of her stomach, underneath there is a present for any young man who wants it!

Besides the map which she would not show me, she kept an almanac. In it, each year, she wrote down the date of the month when a crop in a given place was ready for picking. Five days a week, for she was also out scavenging on Sundays, she combed the countryside. Like a crow, she noticed everything.

She knew not only paths but countless clearings, assemblies of rocks, streams, fallen trees, protected hollows, fissures, crests, slopes. It was only for the city of B … that she needed a map. She knew exactly where to crawl along the border of the forest to find wild strawberries. She knew under which pine trees the cyclamen grow, the tiny cyclamen which are called *pain de porceau* because wild boar eat their roots. She knew on which distant precipitous slope the first rhododendra flower. She knew by which walls whole settlements of snails come out of hiding. She knew where the yellow gentians with the largest roots grow on the mountainside where the soil is least rocky so that digging them is a little easier. She worked and scavenged alone.

I talk to my shadow when the sun is out, and together we calculate the price our loot is likely to fetch. We have become experts, the two of us. And we commiserate together—about the weight of the sack, about the thorns in our hands, about how long we work. Sometimes, like you, we sleep at midday.

Abruptly she pushed back her chair, and went over to the cupboard.

Do you still drink gnôle?

It’s very late, I complained.

The contempt of her laughter filled the room. She poured from the bottle into the glasses.

I sell a bottle of this for nine thousand!

It was the first gentian which I had tasted since my return. It has a very strong taste. The gentian roots taste of the earth and the earth tastes of the mountain.

She knew where every accessible wild cherry tree was. She carried a small ladder with her, no taller than herself, and this enabled her to get up into the tree. When she was well placed, her back against a branch, her boots on another, surrounded by cherries, and the basket hung from its hook at the right level, she could pick without looking. She could stand in the tree with her eyes shut like an owl, and her fingers would find the stalks, instantly move down them and break them off at the hode four or five at a time. With her eyes half shut she scarcely touched the fruit.

She sold her goods to restaurants, herbalist shops, florists, hotel manageresses.

I’ll give you three thousand for the silver thistles, said the manageress, are you deaf, can you hear me? She held out a five-thousand note.

I have no change, said the Cocadrille.

If you never have change, how do you get here every week? demanded the manageress angrily.

By private car!

The manageress was forced to go and change the note. May she rot! added the Cocadrille.

One afternoon there was a cloudburst and she found herself propelled into a crowd of women, who surged through the glass doors of a department store and came to a stop before a glass counter where young women were selling stockings and lace underwear. No sooner had she begun to marvel at the black lace, than she was again pushed from behind, and this time found herself surrounded by other women in a lift. When it went up, she crossed herself and whispered:

Emile, if only you could see me now!

The lift operator, a man of her own age, dressed in a bandsman’s uniform, said to her: Coffee, tea, chocolate, pâtisseries, Madame. The lift doors slid back and the two carpeted ground levels once more coincided.

For the next ten years, every week, after she had sold her goods, she visited this upper floor tea-room. On her way to the tea-room she went to a tobacconist.

What can I do for you today, Madame?

Give me eight hundred Marlboro.

The tobacconist slipped the four large packets into a gold-coloured plastic bag. Carrying the gold-coloured bag, she entered the department store, crossed to the lift and waited for the liftman to address her: Coffee, tea, chocolate, pâtisseries, Madame?

On the fourth floor she went to the ladies’ room. There she locked herself in the lavatory and pulled up her long black serge skirt. Underneath, at the level of her hips, she wore a cloth band. This bandoleer she had made out of one of La Mélanie’s linen chemises. Its pockets were larger than the usual ones for cartridges. Before sewing them she had measured very carefully. Into the double line of pockets she fitted thirty-nine packets of Marlboro.

With these red-and-white packets of what she considered to be tasteless tobacco, she was able to double her income. American cigarettes sold for twice as much on her side of the frontier. After she had arranged her skirt and pulled down her loose cardigan she flushed the toilet and emerged, hat in hand. She arranged her hair in the mirror above the wash-basin.

She had the appearance of a pauper and at the same time she looked wilful. Such a combination in a city suggests madness.

The drinking of the chocolate she ordered in the tea-room was a ritual, and was accompanied by her smoking one or two cigarettes from the single packet she had kept out. She preferred the cigarettes she rolled herself. It was her sense of occasion which made her realise it would have been inappropriate to smoke them in such a setting.

This was the only moment of the week when she sat in company, although she spoke to no one except the waitress. Sitting there on one of the gilded wicker chairs, such as she had never seen until her second life began, sipping her chocolate with grated nutmeg sprinkled on its frothy cream, smoking a perfectly cylindrical cigarette with a long filter-tip, checking from time to time with her stiffened fingers that her bandoleer was in place, she allowed herself to dream of the fulfillment of her plans. She studied the other customers, nearly all of whom were women out shopping. She noticed their hands, their made-up faces, their jewelry, their shoes with high heels. She had no wish to speak to them and she did not envy them, yet the sight of them gave her pleasure. They were a weekly proof of the extent of what money can do. Each month she saved at least half the money which she received for the cigarettes smuggled across the frontier. Never for an instant did she forget what the total of her savings amounted to. Every week this figure encouraged her. It was like a father. It got her out of bed when it was dark. When she set out, before the sun was up, on her walk of twenty kilometres, and her skirt was drenched by the dew which dripped down her legs into her socks, it reminded her that her dress might dry within an hour, if it didn’t rain. When she was hungry, it told her not to complain, for she would eat later. When her back ached and her shoulders were sore and, coming down from the mountain, her knees were knotted and cracked with so much pain that it made her cry out, it reminded her how one day she would buy a new bed. When she talked with her shadow, it promised her that eventually they would move back into the village.

Whilst drinking her chocolate, the total of her savings—she always added on what she was about to receive that day—was as consoling as the music which came out of the loudspeakers high up near the decorated ceiling. Every week, every year, every decade, the amount increased.

When you have enough money, you can stand on your head stark naked!

She said this to a man, accompanied by a woman in a fur coat, who was waiting in the tobacconist’s shop. The woman gave a little scream and the man, thinking that she was begging, dug into his trouser pocket for a small coin. The Cocadrille refused it. I have enough! she hissed at him. I have enough, she repeated to me across the table.

She sipped the gnôle and rolled herself another cigarette.

Soon it will be winter, she went on. Then I’m alone. And the snow forces me indoors. At Christmas I take mistletoe into B.… I get a thousand for a good bunch. The rest of the time, I knit. I can do nothing else. I never learnt to spin like Maman. Anyway I have no sheep. I knit pullovers and ski caps for a shop in B.…

She gulped back the rest of the gnôle.

Next door to the wool shop there is an antique shop. There’s a wooden cradle in the window at the moment. If I had mine, I would sell it. Once I went in there and asked the price of a milking stool. Can you guess how much it cost? If it costs that much, I told them, what would I cost? You could sell me piece by piece. You could ask one hundred thousand for a milking hand. You could ask fifty thousand for a milking arm. How much would you get, I asked them, for a real peasant woman’s arsehole?

She drew on her cigarette.

All winter I knit. There’s nothing here, day after day, except the two needles and me. When a car passes and doesn’t stop—and they never stop—I think of shooting the driver. Why not?

Why do you tell me all this?

So that you should know what I’m saying.

Only the corners of the room were still dark. The flame in the lamp looked yellow and daylight was coming through the smeared, dusty windows. She took the lamp and I thought she was going to blow it out. Instead, she walked over to the chimney in the corner and held the lamp above her head.

Look! she ordered.

On the mantlepiece were several porcelain plates decorated with cherries and flowers, a statuette of a chamois standing on a rock with his head high in the air, and a white bust in porcelain of St François de Sales. Unlike everything else in the room, these objects were dusted, carefully arranged and shining.

Have you really saved two million? I asked.

She cocked her head on one side, like a blackbird when it is about to smash a snail against a stone.

I have been listening all night, I said. It’s not as if you’re hiding things from me!

She blew out the lamp, turned her back, and refused to utter another word.

Three days later, on returning home in the evening, I found a note rolled and put into the keyhole of my door. The Cocadrille must have passed through the village and found the door locked. The note, written in her large flowery hand, simply said: *If you want to hear more, I have more to tell you*. It was useless to visit her in the daytime for she might be anywhere in her vast territory, and so the following evening I took the road past the Madonna’s column. When I turned the corner I saw to my surprise that there was already a light in the window of the roadmender’s house. I knocked at the door.

Who is it?

Jean! I replied. Are you alone?

She undid the lock.

I wasn’t expecting you.

I found your note.

What note?

The note you left in my door yesterday.

I wasn’t in the village yesterday.

Who else could it have been?

Was it signed?

She demanded this mischievously as though she already knew or had guessed the answer.

No, it wasn’t.

The store-room was unchanged, except that there were several bulging sacks in the corner under the ladder, and from their smell I knew they were full of gentian roots. Like roots, her own hands were caked with earth.

What have you done? she asked.

I was at the fair at La Roche.

I was by Le Forêt du Cercle.

In my head I tried to work out who, if not the Cocadrille, might have written the note. Whoever it was intended that I should believe it was written by the Cocadrille; it must have been written by somebody who knew that I had already visited her.

Why have you lit the lamp so early? I asked.

I was going to write.

Another note to me?

To somebody else.

It then occurred to me that, contrary to what she said, the Cocadrille was in the habit of receiving other visitors. And they were men, I felt sure of that. She used her jokes and stories as a bait to attract some company for a little while, to drink across the table—this is why she had commented on my bringing only one bottle of wine—and perhaps also out of a kind of malice, to make a little mischief with the men’s wives. It was a previous visitor who must have written me the note.

Sit down, she said, I’ll heat the soup.

I can’t stay long.

You have so much to do!

She knelt down to blow into the fire and whisper into it: there is something I want to ask you. It was not clear whether she said this to the fire or to me.

She went out to the stable and I heard her washing her hands in a bucket of water.

What can I pay you? she asked when she came back.

A little red.

I carry everything up here on my back!

Is the white wine lighter?

She laughed at that, and glanced at me conspiratorially.

Wait! she ordered and climbed up the ladder.

The wood cracked as it caught fire in the stove. I went over to smell the soup—with age I have become greedy: not that I eat so much and not that, living alone, I cook special dishes for myself, it is simply that I think more about food, thoughts about food pester me like cats that have not been fed. I glanced up at the mantelpiece and the shining porcelain plates decorated with cherry-tree branches. I rubbed my finger on the shelf to check whether it had collected dust and I thought: How unpredictable the Cocadrille is!

Outside, the sun had set behind the Roc d’Enfer, I could tell because the distant rockface, where the cumin grows, had turned pink, the colour of pale coral. Usually it is as grey as wood ash. I went out of the door onto the ledge. I could hear the Jalent below. They said in the village that the Cocadrille seldom washed her clothes; when a garment was rotten with dirt she simply threw it over the edge.

On the other side of the river were orchards and meadows with cows in them. They looked like a picture engraved on a wooden mould for butter. La Mélanie had had just such a mould showing a river at the bottom, two cows in the middle, and some apple trees in the distance. This was the mould the Cocadrille used in the alpage fifty years before.

I looked behind the chicken hutch, I walked right round the rock house with the tree on top of it, I went down the road as far as the corner, I surveyed the mountain above. Nobody was there. Whoever had written the note was going to play no practical joke tonight. I was slightly disappointed for had he come, we could have talked there on the road about the Cocadrille’s stratagems. The air was turning cold, and I returned indoors.

The saucepan was steaming on the stove.

So you’ve seen the ledge I live on!

I looked up. She was standing half-way down the ladder. She had changed her clothes. She was wearing shoes, not sabots, some kind of silk stockings instead of woollen ones, a black heavy silk skirt, a white blouse, a jacket to match the skirt, and around her head and shoulders, a white tulle veil. She was dressed in the clothes in which women go to church to be married.

In God’s name, what do you think you are doing! I shouted.

Her eyes were so intense that they forced you to share in their madness. I remember thinking: For the first time I understand why you are called the Cocadrille. Her eyes made both our long lives seem no more than a moment.

My poor Jean! You’re shitting in your pants!

She came down the ladder, went over to the stove and dipped the ladle into the saucepan. Years before, her entry from the stable had so surprised me that I did not fully understand what she had done until the next day; it was only then that I realised how she must have sprinkled cow’s milk on her breasts. This time I was more percipient. Clearly she had spent several evenings sewing the black silk costume. Even if, as was likely, she had inherited it from Mélanie, it would have been too large for the Cocadrille and would have required drastic alteration. She must have prepared this scene. It was part of a plan.

You certainly have a taste for theatre! I muttered.

There is no theatre in what I do.

Why do you dress up then?

The last time I undressed! She put her hands on her ribs as though to quieten the cackling of her own laughter.

We broke the bread and put it in the soup. Neither of us spoke and the silence was filled with the sound of her sucking from her spoon. She had fewer than half her teeth left. When she had finished, she pushed her plate away, got up, and came back with a bottle of gnôle. Of all the stories I had heard about her, none hinted that she was normally in the habit of drinking. Her shoes were brand new—as indeed they must have been, for nobody else’s would have fitted her.

Do you dress up like this every time you invite a man up from the village?

Abruptly she drank back the *gnôle* in her glass. She drank it back like a chicken drinks, with a quick stupid toss of its head.

If I didn’t have enough, she cried, I could go on for another ten years. I do have enough. I have scavenged for twenty years. I want to enjoy the rest of my life. I want to move back into the village. You have a house in the village and you haven’t much else. I’m prepared to buy now a share of your house until I’m dead, and I will pay you straight away. The rest of my savings I’m keeping for myself. Does that interest you?

The house is too small.

I know.

The way you live—I looked deliberately round the kitchen—is not the way I could live. At my age I’m not going to change.

I can change. That’s why I showed you the plates and the chamois.

I shook my head. Why don’t you rent a whole house to yourself? There are none. And it would be a waste of too much money.

Have you asked anyone else to take you in?

Only *you* know me! She whispered this as though we were not alone in the lonely house on the deserted road which led over the empty pass.

Was it you who wrote the note?

She nodded. I was writing to you again tonight.

What you really want, I shouted, is for me to marry you! That’s what you have always wanted!

Yes, she said. In church, with this veil.

You are out of your mind.

There’s no one to stop you this time. You are alone, she said.

God protect me.

I will pay you separately for the marriage, I’ll give you a dowry. You can’t be that rich!

We can talk about money as soon as we agree in principle. She laid her hand on the back of mine.

I can’t marry you.

Jean!

Again she said my name as she had said it forty years before and again it separated me, marked me out from all other men. In the mountains the past is never behind, it’s always to the side. You come down from the forest at dusk and a dog is barking in a hamlet. A century ago in the same spot at the same time of day, a dog, when it heard a man coming down through the forest, was barking, and the interval between the two occasions is no more than a pause in the barking.

In the pause between her twice saying my name in the same way, I saw myself as the young boy I had once been, encouraged by Masson to believe that I was more than usually intelligent, I saw myself as a young man without prospects, because I was the youngest, but with great ambitions, my first departure for Paris which so impressed me as the centre, the capital of the globe, that I was determined to take one of the roads from l’Etoile across the world, the last good-byes to my family, my mother imploring me not to go all the time that I harnessed the horse and my father put my bag in the cart. It is the Land of the Dead, she said. The voyage by the boat on which each day I dreamt of how I would return to the village, honoured and rich with presents for my mother, I saw myself on the quayside where I did not understand a single word of what was being said, and the great boulevards and the obelisk, the grandeur of the packing plants which I tried to describe in a letter to my father, for whom the selling of one cow for meat was the subject of a month’s discussion, the news of my father’s death, the noise of the trains through the window of the room where I lodged for five years, Carmen’s tantrums and her plans to open a bar of her own, her black hair the colour of the coal I shovelled, the epidemic in the shanty town, the land of straight railways so flat and going on forever; I saw myself in the train going south to Río Gallegos in Patagonia, sheep-shearing and a wind that, like my home-sickness, never stopped, I saw my wedding in Mar del Plata with all seventy-three members of Ursula’s family, the birth of Gabriel six months later, the birth of Basil eighteen months afterwards and my fight with her family to christen him Basil, Ursula’s dressmaking, her mother’s debts, my friendship with Gilles and the pleasure of speaking my own language again, I saw Gilles’ death, Ursula refusing to go to his funeral or to let the boys go, the flight to Montreal, the boys learning English which I could never speak, the news of my mother’s death, the news of Ursula’s death, the fire in the bar, the police investigations, I saw myself working as a night-watchman, my Sundays in the forest, the buying of my ticket home, I saw forty whole years compressed within the pause.

What separated me this time from all other men called Jean or Théophile or François was not desire, which is stronger than words, it was a sense of loss, an anguish deeper than any understanding. When she said my name the first time in the chalet in the alpage, she offered another life to the one I was about to live. Looking back I saw, now, the hope in the other life she offered and the hopelessness of the one I chose. Saying my name the second time, it was as if she had only paused a moment and then repeated the offer; yet the hope had gone. Our lives had dissolved it. I hated her. I would gladly have killed her. She made me see my life as wasted. She stood there and everything I saw—her wrinkled cider-apple of a face, her stiff swollen hands which grabbed and rooted the region like a boar’s tusks, placed now with their palms to her breast as if in supplication, the frail veil, the morsel of cigarette-paper stuck to her lip, were all proof of the dissolution of the offer. Yet I was forced—for the first and last time in this life—to speak to her tenderly.

Give me time to think, Lucie!

My using her proper name caused her to smile and brought tears to her eyes. For a moment their extraordinary sharpness was clouded and the thousands of lines around them were doubled as she screwed them up.

Come and tell me when you want to, Jean.

Before I gave her my considered answer, she was dead.

Her body was discovered by the postman who noticed that the window onto the road was broken and swinging on its hinges. The second morning he knocked and went in. She had been felled with an axe. The blade had split her skull. The signs were that she had put up a fight and had thrown a bottle through the window. Despite extensive searches, her fortune was never found. The most likely explanation was that the murderer came to steal her savings, had been surprised by her when he was leaving, and had killed her. The axe was her own which he had taken from the stable. The police cross-questioned almost everybody in the village, including myself, yet they made no arrest and the murderer was not identified.

She was buried a month before La Toussaint. There were fewer than a hundred people at her funeral; her death was a kind of disgrace for the village. She had been killed for her fortune and only somebody from the village was likely to have known about it. There were many flowers placed on her coffin, and the large unsigned wreath I ordered was not immediately remarkable.

** The Third Life of Lucie Cabrol



ONE MORNING WHEN I was six my father said to me: When you let out the cows, keep Fougère behind, she’s going to the abattoir today. I undid the chains of the other cows—I could just reach the locking links with my arms above my head—and the dog chased them out. Later I would take the cows to the slopes by the place which we called Nîmes. Left alone in the stable, Fougère looked anxiously around her, her ears full out like wings. By this afternoon, I said, you will be dead. She started to eat the hay in the manger. After pulling out several mouthfuls, each with a toss of her head, she looked around again and lowed. The other cows were already grazing outside. I could hear their bells. The sunlight coming through the holes in the planks of the stable walls made beams in the dust which I raised as I swept. My father unbuckled the wide leather collar Fougère was wearing. Attached to this collar was her bell which weighed five kilos. Before he turned away to hang the collar and the bell on the wall, he looked at the beast and said: My poor cuckoo, you’ll never again go to Nîmes.

Whilst the funeral service was being performed inside the church, most of us men stood outside. This group of standing figures, solemn and still, always looks dwarfed by the mountains. We spoke in low voices, about the murder. Everyone was agreed that the police would never discover who the assassin was. Each said this as if he himself had a clear idea of the truth. She was fearless, they said, this had been the Cocadrille’s trouble.

When the coffin came out of the church, the crowd followed it in procession through the cemetery. Nobody spoke now. The coffin was so small that it made you think of a child’s funeral. It was in the cemetery that I first heard her voice. I had no difficulty in hearing what she said, although she was whispering.

Do you want me to say who it is? He’s among you, he’s here in the cemetery, the thief.

The murderer, I muttered.

It’s the thief whom I cannot forgive!

Her voice made me frightened. I realised that the others could not hear it. My fear was that she would shout, and it would become obvious by my reactions that I could hear something.

What would you do if I shouted his name? she said, realising my thoughts.

They won’t hear.

You will hear me, Jean, you can hear me if I say Jean, can’t you.

Yes, I said, and made the sign of the cross over her coffin.

When once the coffin was passed, the procession shuffled forward more quickly.

It wasn’t me.

You thought of killing me.

Outside the cemetery gate her brothers Edmond and Henri stood by the wall traditionally reserved after funerals for the closest of kin. If stones could feel, the stones there would be blood-red from the pain felt by many of those who have leant against them.

My brothers look solemn and hopeful, don’t they? Solemn and hopeful!

The crowd dispersed and the men went to drink in the cafés. I declined several invitations and hurried away in order to lead her voice back home, where we would be unobserved.

In the house, the same house in which she had planned that we should live after we had married, I spoke to her. She did not reply. Indeed I had the impression she had not accompanied me. Perhaps she had gone to the cafés.

I awoke early next morning and went to look out of the window. The valley below was filled with opaque white mist; where it ended, little trails of transparent cloud blew off like steam into the sky. The valley was like a laundry, the endless laundry of the damned, steaming, soaping, billowing, working against the bath of the rockfaces in total silence. The lichen on the rocks were the voices of the damned.

Did you decide not to marry me?

I hadn’t decided.

Then I’ll leave you till you’ve made up your mind.

At La Toussaint the cemetery was full of flowers, and many people stood at the feet of the graves of their loved ones trying to listen to the dead. That night I heard her voice again. It was as close as if it were on the pillow beside mine.

I’ve learnt something, Jean. All over the world the dead drink at La Toussaint. Everyone drinks, no one refuses. Every year it is the same, they drink until they’re drunk. They know that they have to visit the living. And so they get drunk!

On what?

On eau-de-vie! She spluttered with laughter and I felt her spit in my ear.

When she had got her breath back, she continued: And so they never know whether the living are as bone-headed as they seem, or whether the dead only have that impression because the dead are so drunk!

You sound drunk now.

Why did you think of killing me?

You know it wasn’t I who stole your savings?

What did you want to kill me for?

You are drunk.

I tell you, nobody comes today if they are sober.

Has La Mélanie come?

She’s making some coffee.

That will sober you up!

Not the black coffee of the dead won’t. She cackled with laughter once more.

So you’re drunk, every time you talk to me.

No, the dead forget the living, I haven’t forgotten yet.

How long does it take to forget?

I know why you thought of killing me.

Why do you ask then?

I want to hear you say it.

Are you alone, Lucie?

You can see.

I can see nothing in the dark.

Admit the truth to me and you’ll see.

Yes, I thought of killing you the night you dressed up.

I heard her get out of the bed and the floorboards creaked under her feet.

Have you been to see the man who did kill you?

It doesn’t interest me.

You said you could never forgive the thief.

I’ve changed my mind. I don’t need my savings now. Why did you think of killing me?

You were going to force me to marry you.

Force you! Force you! What with?

Then she went.

The room smelt of boar. Otherwise there was no sign that she had been there.

The thirteenth of December was her name day, *Sainte Lucie*. According to the old calendar—I read this in an almanac—Saint Lucie’s day used to be the twenty-third, just after the winter solstice.

<verse>
<em>From the day of Saint Lucie</em>
<em>the days lengthen by a flea’s width.</em>
</verse>

On neither the thirteenth nor on the twenty-third of December did she come back. The days grew longer.

At last the weather turned warm. My circulation improved. The old man’s blood responding a little to the sun. The apple trees blossomed, the potatoes were planted, the cows were put out in the pastures. The hay was cut. One evening when the valley, full of clouds and torn mists, had its look of being the laundry of the damned, I told myself: on the next fine day I will climb up to Nîmes and pick some blueberries.

The sky was clear, and its peacefulness extended further than the furthest range of snow-capped mountains. The blueberries grow above the tree line, usually on slopes facing east or west. The southern slopes have too much sun. My mother used to dry whole sprigs of blueberries with their leaves to give to the cows when they had diarrhoea.

From the slope where I began picking, I could see the Cabrol chalet, a little to the right and below. The chalet will scarcely outlast me, I said to myself. It must be years since Henri or Edmond have done anything to it. Instead of bringing their cows up, they rent extra pasture below. There are holes in the roof and many of the shingles need replacing. The snow will be driven in, the beams will rot and one day one end of the timberwork will fall. The following winter it will look like a shipwreck; the wind, the snow, the slope, the summer sun, which burns the wood black, wear away the timber just as the sea and waves do.

The Cocadrille used a comb to pick her blueberries. When we were young, the comb didn’t exist. It is like a bear’s paw, made of wood and nails. It scoops up berries between each claw, and working with it is ten times as fast as picking each berry separately between finger and thumb. It collects indiscriminately: anything that passes between its nails, it keeps in its wooden paw. As well as ripe berries, you find green ones, leaves, the ends of twigs, tiny white snails and the pods of flowers. Later, to separate them, you set up a plank at an angle to the ground, wet the plank with water, take a handful of fruit from the bucket and pour them so that they roll down the wet plank; the ripe fruit roll to the bottom into the pan, and most of the leaves and the twigs and the grass and the snails stick to the wood.

The Cocadrille set up her plank on the ledge of ground behind the roadmender’s house. It is a tedious operation if you are alone. You need one person to roll the fruit, and another to check in the pan below and take out the green ones which didn’t stick to the wood. She must have rolled a few handfuls and then gone to squat by the pan on the ground, then rolled a few more, then gone to squat by the pan and so on.

Bent forward towards the slope, my face close to the ground, I could see the grasshoppers. There were a couple mating. Their bodies are bright green with streaks of white yellow. They are about three centimetres long, and the noise they make consists of three soft chuffs and then a long drawn-out hiss like a snake.

Tchee tchee hissssss.

When she rolled the blueberries down the wet plank, she must have heard the roar of the Jalent at the bottom of the ravine and the tinkle of the blueberries as they fell into the pan.

When blueberries are wet they darken to the colour of ink. Warm and dry in the sun they almost have a bloom like grapes. As you comb, you notice others a little higher up or a little to the side, and so you move towards them to comb them too with the bear’s paw, and they in turn lead you to others and the others to others. Picking blueberries is like grazing.

As she sorted the fruit she must sometimes have gazed at the orchards and fields on the other side of the ravine, a reminder of all she had lost in her second life.

My bucket was half full. I had climbed out of sight of the place where I had begun.

Jean!

I wasn’t convinced that I had heard her.

How many have you picked?

Half a bucket.

As slow as ever! she mocked.

I have calluses under my chin, I shouted, because all my life I have rested it on the handle of a shovel.

I thought this made her laugh. I could not be sure because there was a jackdaw flying overhead. And the laugh I heard might have been his cry: Drru krrie kriee! Drru krrie kriee!

Shall I help you pick?

If you wish.

I went on picking, and I heard no more, only the grasshoppers, the jackdaw, and occasionally very distantly, when the wind blew, the sound of cowbells.

I learnt what the cowbells said as a boy:

It’s mine! It’s mine! Can it go on? Can it go on? It can’t! It can’t!

I combed with the bear’s paw, following the trail of the berries, grazing higher and higher. The next time I emptied the paw into the bucket, I had the impression that the level of the fruit had mounted twice as fast as before.

I straightened my back and, for the first time since her death, I saw her. She was combing, leaning against the green slope, with her head above the skyline, silhouetted against the blue sky. A scarf was tied round her head. As I watched, she climbed and went over the skyline.

She’s as easy to lose as a button, La Mélanie said.

I left my bucket and climbed up to the crest. She lay there on the other side as if dead. She lay there on the soft turf between the rhododendron bushes whose flowers were finished, and she wore a scarf round her head, a crumpled black dress, socks and boots. Her shins were bare and scratched. Her eyes were shut and her arms were crossed exactly as if she were dead. It is strange I thought that, for I knew she was dead. I had seen her coffin lowered into the earth. Now there was no coffin lid, no earth, nothing but the blue sky above her.

Without thinking I took off my beret and stood there holding it in my clasped hands as I gazed down at her. Her face was grey like the outcrops of limestone. She was as motionless as a boulder. I know that it is easy in the mountains to see things that others cannot see. And then I noticed the fingers of her hands. They were stained an inky blue-black. They were like any of our fingers in André Masson’s class. This was proof that she had indeed been picking blueberries this morning. In September when she was murdered there were no blueberries.

Can you see me now? I heard her say this, although her lips didn’t move.

Without answering, I lay down beside her and gazed up into the sky. The sky was benign and the jackdaws were still circling in wide circles above us.

How old am I? she asked.

You were in the class of 1920. That makes you sixty-eight. No, sixty-seven.

I was born in the morning. My father was milking in the stable. White cloud like smoke was blowing through the door. My mother had her sister and a neighbour with her. I was born very quickly. The neighbour held me up feet first and cried, It’s a girl. Give her to me, my mother said and then she screamed, Jesus forgive me, she screamed, she is marked with the mark of the craving, Jesus! I have marked her with the mark of the craving. Mélanie, said the neighbour, be calm. It is not the mark of the craving.

You know everything about your life now, I said.

If I told you all that I know it would take sixty-seven years.

I turned my head towards her, she was smiling at me, her blue eyes open, dirt smudged on her cheek, a few black hairs escaping from her scarf; she had the face of the Cocadrille at twenty. I moved my arm away from my body to find her hand. When I touched it, I remembered.

She led me by the hand towards the side of the mountain. Crossing an outcrop of rock she stopped, and pointed with the toe of her boot.

Cherry stones in the bird shit! She laughed. They fly with them all the way up here.

I did not recognise the path we took. At first I blamed my memory. Forty-six years is a long time. Soon I doubted whether it was a path at all. The going became steeper and steeper, and we had to push our way through pine trees which grew so close together that no sunlight ever reached the ground. There were centuries of pine needles and my boots sunk into them up to the ankles. I could feel them working their way through the wool of my socks. The needles were either ashen grey or black, they had no more colour than the lower branches of the trees. To prevent ourselves slipping we held on to the branches like ropes.

She led the way and I followed. At one point the slope was so steep that it was like climbing down the trunk of the tree itself. I suddenly remembered the porcelain chamois on her mantelpiece. I wondered whether it was still there. At least three men had fallen to their deaths whilst hunting chamois on this mountain. I hoped that she knew exactly where we were going. I doubted whether I would be capable of climbing up again. My legs were already shaking out of weakness. When I was twelve, Sylvestre, an old man, was trapped on the mountainside. He could neither climb up nor continue down. The alarm was given just before nightfall. Twenty of us with lamps set out to try to find him. If the Cocadrille disappeared, I would be like Sylvestre.

When the Devil grows old, she shouted back at me, he becomes a hermit!

Sylvestre was dead when we found him.

Fortunately she knew the path as she knew all paths. There was not a slope or crag or stream on this mountainside that she did not know. We emerged from the trees into the sunlight. We were at the top of a long bank of grass on which the paths the cows had traced over generations were like steps for us to walk down. A man in Montreal who worked for the radio once sent me a postcard of an ancient Roman theatre. The steps down the grass were like the seats of that theatre. At the bottom was a large pasture bordered by a forest. In front of the forest I could see men working.

Descending the grass steps I suddenly felt as carefree as I did before I was fully grown. Opposite Saint Lucie beside the shortest day, there is Saint Audrey beside the longest. You put on a clean shirt, newly ironed by your mother—it touches your shoulders like the face of a flat iron gone cold—you comb your hair and look at yourself in the mirror, what you see is a sixteen-year-old to whom anything may happen this Sunday. You join friends walking down to the village. You wait in the square. Everything which occurs is part of a preparation. You drink in the café. You read the signs of the future—so many of them are jokes—and yet you remain ignorant. This ignorance makes the time easy and long. You walk to the next village. There is a fight. You notice the consequences of your smallest actions and these consequences never reinforce each other. You walk back by moonlight. The girls flounce their skirts. Almost everything talked about has not yet happened. Father is asleep, beneath the smoked sausages hanging from the ceiling. You fold your trousers with care, scratch your balls and fall asleep. Sunday follows Sunday, season follows season and you go from tree to tree: there is as yet no forest. Then a day comes when there is only a forest and you have to live in it for ever: then all the days, both summer or winter, are short. I never expected to emerge from that forest, yet there I was, walking down the grass steps as if my life lay before me.

I first singled you out at school, said the Cocadrille, you made less noise than the other boys and you were methodical. You always carried a knife in your hands, always carving a stick. Once you cut yourself, and I saw you peeing over your cut to disinfect it.

Amongst the flowers in the grass there were red campions. Their pink is like the pink of paper flags all over the world when there is a fiesta.

Where are we?

This is where I am going to build.

Who does it belong to?

Me.

You!

The dead own everything, she said.

So you have land now.

Land but no seasons.

How do you plant?

We don’t, we have no reason to, we have access to all the granaries in the world, they are all full.

And when they are empty?

They are full for ever.

Why don’t you give potatoes to the hungry then?

We can’t.

You could smuggle some across.

I chose a smoked ham for you last winter, it weighed seven kilos and was beautifully dry, I stood by when it was being smoked for two days, I was there when Emile cut the juniper bushes and when he threw water on the burning branches to make more smoke, six weeks earlier I led the pig to have her throat cut, I put my hands over her eyes so she became calm when the life flowed out of her, I gave her to the sow to suckle the day she was born, and I carried the ham to your house and I hung it in the cellar, wrapped in muslin, and when you found it two days later it was a bone, even the string had rotted and you found it in the earth in which you bury your white beet so they stay white on the cellar floor.

That bone! I muttered.

And you said: It could be the ham of a pig we killed when I was a child. I heard you say that and I knew then I could give you nothing.

You are lying.

You didn’t say that and you didn’t throw it over the wall?

Yes I did.

She shrugged her shoulders.

The figures I had seen from afar were working on timber, hammering nails into the joints of three vast frames which lay flat on the ground and which, when raised, would hold the walls and roof of a chalet. Each frame had five vertical columns, each column as thick as a sixty-year-old tree and twelve metres high.

They felled the trees last September, the Cocadrille said, on the day I was killed with the axe. The sap was rising.

The frames laid out on the ground were the colour of stripped radiant pine. One of the men who was hammering straightened his back. It was Marius Cabrol. I had seen him last on his deathbed. I had made the sign of the cross with a sprig of boxwood dipped in holy water over his heart. It was his daughter who had laid him out and dressed him. The way he now greeted us disconcerted me for he gave no sign that he remembered or recognised any of this. He grinned as if we had just drunk a glass together.

Fifteen spruces for the columns, he said, a dozen for the purlins, forty twenty-year-old trees for the rafters, I forget how many for the planks. We cut them all down when the axe entered her head. She told us afterwards she heard us sawing in the forest.

The first thing I did, wasn’t it, was to bring you all cider and cheese and bread. I knew exactly where you were.

We were getting hungry, said Marius, smiling.

She took my hand and we stepped over the columns of the nearest frame. She was a young woman leading an old man. The men sat astride the frame as they hammered, the nails were big and they launched them into the wood with blows from the shoulder.

All right, Lucie? The hammerer who shouted this with virile impertinence was Armand who had been carried away by the Jalent and drowned. Next to him hammered Gustave who had fallen from the mountain. Georges, who hanged himself because he knew that he would become a pauper, was sewing paper flowers to the branches of a tiny spruce; the flowers were white like silver and yellow like gold. Adelin, who was killed by a tree in the forest, was tying a rope. Mathieu who was struck dead by lightning was measuring with a yellow ruler. Then I recognised Michel who died of internal bleeding after being kicked by a horse, and I saw Joset who was lost in an avalanche.

Why are they all here? I demanded.

They have come to help us, each of them brought food and drink for the meal tonight, they are good neighbours.

Why only—

Only what, Jean?

The ones who died violently.

They are the first you see.

And those who died peacefully?

There are not so many who die in their beds. It’s a poor country.

Why first—? My fears that I had been led into a trap were increased.

Bend down.

She kissed me on the cheek and my fears became ridiculous. Her mouth was full of white teeth and she smelt of grass. Was it really she who fifty years ago nobody in their right mind would have thought of marrying?

They all say your trouble was that you were fearless.

I knew what I wanted.

She laughed. Between the buttons of her shirt I could make out the slight, barely noticeable rise of her breasts. Like two leaves on the earth.

Do you know, it took me no longer to learn my way around here among the dead than it took me to learn my way around the city of B.…

As she said this, her voice aged and became hoarser. I glanced at her. She was an old woman with a sack on her back and she looked mad.

Who is going to live in the chalet?

Somebody from behind pushed my beret over my eyes. It was Marius, her father. Once again he was grinning.

You are warmer in bed with a wife. The whole war I thought of nothing else, I thought only of caressing Mélanie in bed. The way Marius spoke had the unctuousness of a caress. There were some who had intercourse with donkeys, it never interested me, a beast isn’t soft enough, when at last I came home I took her to bed and we had our fourth child. Even when I was old and lost my warmth, I thought of going to bed when I was working alone in the fields, sometimes thinking about it made me warm. There are those who call me lazy. It was my idea of happiness, you’ll see for yourself, if you don’t see now—it’s better than sleeping alone.

The Cocadrille walked away, across her back was tied the blue umbrella and over her shoulder she carried a sack.

Aren’t you forgetting that your daughter has been a spinster all her life? I asked.

Ah! my poor Jean, my poor future son-in-law, it’s now that she’s at the marrying age. Why else would I be building a chalet for her?

You were never a carpenter, I pointed out, and sixty-eight is no marrying age!

We can become anything. That is why injustice is impossible here. There may be the accident of birth, there is no accident of death. Nothing forces us to remain what we were. The Cocadrille could be seventeen, tall, with wide hips and with breasts you couldn’t take your eyes off—only then you wouldn’t know her, would you?

Once more I had the feeling of not yet having entered the forest, of all my life being in front of me.

All the men you see working here, whispered Marius—I remembered the milk running off her breasts—have married her!

Not Georges! I exclaimed.

Georges was the first. He married her the day after her funeral. The bridesmaids took the flowers from the grave. Those who die violently fall into each other’s arms.

Am I to die violently? I asked.

Do you want to marry her? His smile had now become a leer.

Everything’s ready! a man shouted.

The frame lay on the ground, constructed, finished, waiting to be lifted up into the air. To lift such a frame, thirty-five or forty men are needed. They came from every direction. All those whom I recognised were among the dead. Some carried ladders. Some were speaking and joking to one another and I could not hear their words. All of them greeted Marius à Brine who stood beside the sablière, which is the horizontal timber on the ground into which the frame, when vertical, has to be fitted. He who was no carpenter had become the master builder.

The wood of the frame smelt strongly of pine resin. Mixed with wax, this resin makes a good poultice for the cure of sciatica, a complaint from which many of us suffer as a result of carrying heavy loads on the slopes. We bent down together to lift the frame with our hands.

Marius was shouting so that everyone lifted at the same moment.

Tchee! Tchee! Lift!

And again. Tchee! Tchee! Hissssss!

The dead got their forearms under the frame. Bent double over the ground, they cradled the wood as you cradle a baby.

Tchee! Tchee! Hissssss!

Wood is to us what iron has been to others for two thousand years. We even made gearwheels out of wood.

With each heave we raised the frame a little higher. We could just rest our forearms on our thighs. The dead who were lifting the king-post, the vertical beam which holds the point of the roof, were now able to slip their shoulders under it, bundling together like bearers carrying a coffin.

When the frame was too high for us to lift with our hands, we thrust with poles. There was a pole tied to each column. Half a dozen or so men gathered around each pole, thrusting it up, their grasping hands overlapping. Ten hands, fifty fingers, they were indistinguishable one from the other except where there was a scarred severed finger. How many of our fingers have been cut off by saws! Yet better a finger than a life, the living had a habit of saying.

With each thrust we grunted. The grunts came from the pit of the stomach. Sometimes a dead man farted with the effort. The Cocadrille had come back and was standing by my side, the same scarf round her head, white hairs straggling out of it.

Why do you want a hayloft, you have no land? I gasped.

Tchee! Tchee! Hissssss!

The gigantic frame which was going to span three rooms, a stable and a hayloft—a hayloft such as a hundred haycarts, pulled across the wooden floor by the mares, would scarcely fill—shook with each heave. Or, rather, it was we who shook.

To store our hay, she said.

You have no cows.

To have thirty-five litres of milk a day for butter and cheese.

Tchee! Tchee! Hissssss!

You don’t need to eat, I said.

To support ourselves and to have something to hand on to our children! She smiled, as she had when she handed me the butter fifty years before.

The faces of the dead were red with the effort of grasping, heaving and holding, their mouths were strained, their eyes bulged, the muscles and veins on their necks stood out like ropes and cords beneath the skin.

I was always told the dead rest after a lifetime’s work, I muttered.

When they remember their past, they work, she said. What else should they remember?

The shoulders of those who had taken off their shirts glistened with sweat, yet the frame was still below the angle of forty-five degrees.

Again! Tchee! Tchee! Lift!

The gigantic naked frame scarcely stirred. It was as if another forty men were pushing it down against us.

We need more help, go and fetch some others, round up the neighbours!

Jésus, Marie and Joseph!

A ménage à trois!

Be quick about it!

The Cocadrille ran towards the forest. It was not possible to lay the frame down on the ground. It is easier to raise such a weight than to lower it, and in lowering it there is the risk of somebody being trapped beneath it. Pierre, who was on the next pole, had been trapped under a frame, with both his legs broken, and had died two years later.

No man should suffer the same thing twice.

We were able to prop several poles against the ground. We wedged in several ladders. Most of the weight was taken off us, yet nobody took their hands off the poles. The great frame pointed into the sky, not into the dark blue sky above us, it pointed towards the pale sky beyond the distant mountains. A jackdaw—I cannot say whether he was the same one—was circling above the frame. At one moment I thought he was going to alight on it. Everything was still, none of the dead was moving.

When the Cocadrille came back from the forest, she was young; several men followed her. As so many years before, I was astounded by how fast she ran.

Yes, I should have married her! I said it out loud. The dead were lost in their own thoughts. Nobody responded.

The newcomers joined the groups round each pole.

Tchee! Tchee! Hissssss!

The frame shifted up five or six degrees. Together we were going to master it. As soon as it passed the half-way mark of forty-five degrees it would become easier.

As a precautionary measure some men were already holding the ropes in case the almost vertical frame should incline too far and fall inwards. When the frame was vertical its tusk tenons had to be slotted into the mortices of the *sablière*. Human geometry had to replace the original strength of the trees. The tusks entered the mouths of the *sablière*, all five at almost the same moment.

I will marry you, I said, turning towards her.

To my horror ’Mile à Lapraz was standing beside her. He was flushed and looked as if he had been drinking. I had seen him only a week before in the village. It occurred to me then that all the men she had brought back running with her were among the living.

You will be a witness, she said to ’Mile.

Where are we? I mumbled. Aren’t we far from the village?

We are outside the church, Jean, where the men stand at funerals and the newly married are photographed.

My face must have shown my consternation.

He’s so careful, slurred ’Mile à Lapraz, nodding in my direction, he wipes his arse before he has shat!

You should talk, the Cocadrille snapped back at him. You’ve lived alone all your life, you get drunk alone, your bed smells like a distillery. Jean has been to the other side of the world, he married, he had children, he came back, he picks blueberries very slowly, all right he pretends to be deaf, he wanted to kill me, he has taken his time, but now at the last moment, the very last moment, he has agreed to marry me, you would never have the spunk to do that, ’Mile.

Now that the first frame was in place, she went from man to man with a bottle and a glass offering them to drink.

After we had rested, Marius à Brine called us to start raising the second frame. Encouraged by the sight of the first, upright, its columns as thick as trees, its white wood framing triangles of deep blue sky, we lifted the second frame, call by call:

Tchee! Tchee! Hissssss!

We lifted it without stopping, and the tusks of its columns entered the mouths of the *sablière*. We raised the third frame even quicker than the second. Some said this was because the wood was less green and so lighter.

Fifty men stood looking up at the three frames which indicated the full dimensions of the chalet; it was an outline drawing in white on the green pasture, the dark forest, and the blue sky.

No one will kill themselves in this chalet, she said.

The men whom the Cocadrille had brought from the village announced that, if they were no longer needed, they would return. Marius à Brine did his best to persuade them to stay for the feast they would have as soon as the work was over. They said they must go.

Come back later, insisted Marius, come back with your women for the feast!

The villagers were noncommittal.

Several of the dead came over to thank them. At least let us pay you another glass, they said.

No need to thank us, answered the living, you’d do the same for us.

That goes without saying, whenever a house is built some of us are there.

I watched the villagers walk away into the forest. Gradually they formed a single file, each one walking by himself. Their going disturbed me: I was alone again with the dead. At the same time I was relieved by their going; I would have no questions to answer. What language do they speak in Buenos Aires? How long have you been a widower? Are you really thinking of remarrying? How did she persuade you?

The work which remained to be done was now more divided and less anxious. We had to lift the purlins, the beams which run the length of the roof, into their positions, fit their joints and nail them. Every purlin was numbered with a numeral, written as André Masson had taught us all at school, and every joint was indicated twice on each piece of wood, with a capital letter. Some of the dead were on ladders and some worked on the ground. They made more comments than before and more jokes. Those on the ground fixed temporary bars at an angle to the future walls, like buttresses. Along these they pushed and pulled the purlins up with ropes.

The first to be fixed in place was the lowest, the timber bordering the overhanging roof. Against the wall beneath this overhanging roof, the wood for the stove would be stacked, sheltered from the snow and the rain. Against the southern wall protected by the roof she’d plant lettuces and parsley, and, along the edge of the same bed, multi-coloured pansies, which have the colours of most of the precious stones in the world. Under the roof behind the first purlin, sparrows would nest and on the posts of the fence, for which the stakes have not yet been cut or pointed, a pair of crows would sit, waiting for her to come out to feed the chickens. I heard her calling them.

She took my hand in her stiff, calloused, grabbing, picking, old woman’s hand. It was no longer possible for me to think of her as young.

There is no need for you to work, she said, they have enough help, we can sit in the sun.

And the food? I asked. Is everything prepared?

Everything.

I don’t see any tables or benches.

They are in the church, it’ll only take a minute to bring them out.

At her funeral when people were still filing out of the cemetery, the Mayor told the local veterinary surgeon: And so we gave her the roadmender’s house, it was the best we could think of. You have to reckon with the fact that if she’d lived in a city, she would certainly have been put in an institution many years ago …

Look! she said, tapping my shoulder, they will soon be finished.

We were sitting there side by side, watching the mountains, and the men working. We were the eldest, all the working dead were younger than us. The Cocadrille’s features and the backs of my own hands were a reminder of our age. The Cocadrille was sixty-seven when she was murdered, and I was three years older.

So, my contraband, I’ve smuggled you here, she said. An unlit cigarette was stuck to her lower lip which protruded and was blueish from the blueberries she had eaten.

The feeling of endless promise such as I hadn’t experienced since I was young bore me up, cradled me. I saw my father making rabbit hutches, and myself handing him the nails. I must have been eleven the year when, under my mother’s careful supervision, I bled and skinned my first rabbit. At the catechism class the Cocadrille knew by heart the answers I could not remember.

What is avarice?

Avarice is an excessive longing for the good things of life and particularly money.

Is love of the good things of life ever justified?

Yes, there is a justified love of the good things of life and this love inspires foresight and thrift.

On feast days in the Argentine the peones killed and ate turkeys: emigration offered me no new promises. The promise of the Place d’Etoile and the promise of the Arenne Corrientes in Buenos Aires were simply revivals of what I had already hoped in the village. I couldn’t have imagined those places from the village, yet I did imagine my pleasure, the same pleasure they promised and didn’t give me.

Pleasure is always your own, and it varies as much and no more than pain does. I had become accustomed to pain, and now to my surprise the hope of pleasure, the hope I had known when I was eleven, was coming from the old woman with the unlit cigarette who called me her contraband. Where had my life gone? I asked myself.

The dead were nailing the rafters. By the time all forty were in place, the sun was low and the bars of the roof cast a shadow on the grass beside the chalet which looked like a dark cage. The bars were the shadows.

Do you want to nail the bouquet? shouted Marius à Brine.

She waited for me to answer. I could feel her gaze through her half-shut eyes. The force of my reply surprised me.

From the corner of each of her puckered, squeezed eyes a tear came like juice. She crossed her arms to grasp her flat chest with her stiff hands. Her mouth stretched in a smile. Her tears ran down the deep lines to the corners of her mouth and she licked her upper lip.

Go, she said to me.

Marius handed me the hammer and the nails and I walked over to the foot of the first ladder. There was Georges, who hanged himself because he knew he was to become a pauper and would be sent in the winter to the old people’s hostel where half the inmates were incoherent. The money to build this hostel had been donated by a rich engineer from the region who had built many bridges for roads and railways far away. Georges planned his suicide as carefully as the engineer planned his bridges, he fixed a hooked wire to a tall wooden pole, ran the wire down it and with the help of this pole touched a high-tension wire, near the centre of the village, in a place where he would disturb no one. At the instant he died, all the lights in the village went out. Now Georges handed me the spruce to which he had attached the yellow and white paper flowers shaped like roses. With this bouquet across my shoulder, like a sweep’s brush, I climbed the ladder, which Georges held for me.

At the top a man I did not know was sitting on a cross beam. He put out his hand to steady me as I stepped off the ladder. I shook my head. It was a long time since I’d been on a roof and I needed no help. Like all of us I was born to it. Why were so many of us obliged to go to Paris as chimney sweeps? We lived on a roof; almost the first steps we take are on slopes as steep as our roofs. As long as I can climb up a ladder and lift one foot above the next, I need no help.

Who are you? I asked, you’re not from here.

Lucie knew me as Saint-Just, he replied.

You were in the Maquis!

We were ordered to dig our graves and we were shot.

I will tell you something, I said. There were Nazis who escaped after the Liberation and came to the Argentine, they changed their names and they lived off the fat of the pampas.

They only escaped for a moment.

You can’t be so sure, can you?

Justice will be done.

When?

When the living know what the dead suffered.

He said this without a trace of bitterness in his voice, as if he had more than all the patience in the world.

I climbed a second ladder with the tree across my shoulder, and sat astride the roof. There was a slight breeze; I felt it on my forearms. I could see the trees in the forest. In the east the snow on the mountains was turning a very diluted rose, no redder than the water of a stream when an animal has been killed. I looked down through the open roof into the upturned faces of the dead who had assembled to watch what I was going to do.

It was then that I noticed the band. They were standing at the end of the chalet, by the first frame. They were like the band I had joined as a drummer when I was fourteen. The band that played the soldiers out of the village. The sun was by now too low in the sky for the brass and silver instruments to dazzle. Their metals shone only dully like water in a mountain lake.

I began to make my way—not without some difficulty—along the ridge of the roof. When I reached the end, I looked down on the upturned faces; they were grinning like skulls. I lifted the tree off my shoulder and held it upright. What I had to do now was to nail it to the king-post. Suddenly from behind two thin arms clasped me round the ribs.

Hold the tree, I said.

She couldn’t reach it.

I’ll sit on your shoulders, she said.

The onlookers below started to cheer. All the remembered dead of the village were there, women and children as well as men. She held the tree and I drove in four nails.

The little tree pointed up into the sky. She sat behind me, her arms relaxed. We were like a couple riding on their horse going to work in the fields. Her hands lay in my lap.

The bandsmen raised the instruments to their mouths, the drummers lifted their sticks. For a moment they remained transfixed and still, then they started to play.

The sign of the tree nailed to the roof was in honour of a work completed. All that remained to be done was to cover the roof with *bûchilles* cut from the beams, to lay the floors, nail boards on the walls, make and fit the doors and windows, construct the chimney, build the cupboards, make the shelf for the bed. It was the work of months. Yet the whole weight-bearing frame which promised shelter was there.

How can I tell you what the band played. I could hum the melody and you would not hear it. The bandsmen were dead and they played the music of silence. On Ascension Day the village band goes out into the country across the slopes, between the orchards, and, wherever there are two or three farms, it stops to play. Three summers I went out with them as drummer before I had to leave to find work. The music drowns the noise of the water in the *bassin*, it drowns the streams, it drowns the cuckoo. At each farm they gave us cider or *gnôle* to drink. The saxophonist, who played like a bird, always got drunk. Sweating under our peaked caps and in our brass-buttoned jackets we played as well and as loudly as we knew how, and the louder we played, the more still became the mountains and the trees of the forest. Only the deaf butterflies continued to flutter and climb, close and open their wings. On Ascension Day we played to the dead, and the dead, behind the motionless mountains and the still trees, listened to us. Now everything was the other way round, it was the dead who played at the foot of the chalet, and I, astride the roof, who was listening.

The village began to dance to the music, on the grass under the roof timbers. The Cocadrille beat her hands on my thighs to the rhythm of the music. I saw that my blood had not turned as cold with age as I thought it had. When the music stopped she kept her hands there.

The band started up again.

Wait for me, she whispered.

Climbing to her feet, she walked along the ridge of the roof like a chamois. As she went down I prided myself on having learnt from experience. Her return would be startling and unexpected. Still aroused, I tried to foresee how she would come back: perhaps she would come back aged twenty and naked as though she had been bathing in a river.

It was impossible to make out the uniforms of the bandsmen. Occasionally an instrument glinted like an ember when you blow on it. They knew the dances they were playing by heart, for it was too dark to read the notes on the music cards clipped to their instruments. The dancers, as the light disappeared, packed closer and closer together into the chalet.

I peered down, looking for the Cocadrille. The darkness was not so total that the whiteness of her body would not give off a certain light, like the white flowers sewn on to the tree did.

I felt my way down the first ladder. The dancers were now packed together in the area which would be the stable, where we would milk the cows. The cows were there. One was licking the head of her neighbour. Her tongue was so strong that when she licked round the eye, it pulled it open, revealing the eyeball, as you must do if you are looking for something which has entered the eye and is hurting it.

Seeing that eye, I saw the truth. The Cocadrille was not going to come back. Or if she came back, she would come back as nothing.

Lucie! Lucie!

Beyond the timbers of the roof the stars were shining. They shine over some oceans like they shine over the alpage. They are very bright and the similarity isn’t in their brightness; it is simply that their distance isn’t confusing. The Milky Way was folded into the sky like the ranunculi bordering the stream are folded into the hill beside the abandoned Cabrol chalet.

I missed my footing, rolled, like a log, down a precipitous slope. What saved me were some rhododendron bushes at which I instinctively, unthinkingly, grasped. I never lost consciousness. Ten metres further down was a sheer drop of a hundred metres. I had a broken arm and shoulder. When it was light, I somehow made my way down the path where the cumin grows, my arm hanging loose like the tongue of a bell.

Ten days later I met ’Mile à Lapraz in the village.

Where were you, ’Mile, ten days ago?

At home.

Where exactly, doing what?

The Friday, you mean?

Yes, the Friday.

Wait, Friday. I remember, I was ill in bed. I had terrible pains in the stomach. A white weasel was eating it. I swear to you I thought it was the end. As it turned out, he didn’t want me, and so here I am. I’ll pay you a drink.

Standing by the counter of the café, he clinked glasses and said conspiratorially: To the two of us they didn’t take!

Later when my arm was still in plaster, I walked up to the roadmender’s house. The weight of the plaster round my arm was as heavy as iron. I climbed slowly, letting one leg follow the other: the body becomes accustomed to a rhythm not unlike that of a cradle being slowly rocked from side to side. After an hour or two of such climbing you promise yourself a pleasure: the pleasure at night of lying absolutely still.

The hospital had discovered nothing with X-rays, yet I was convinced that at least one of my ribs was fractured. With each breath it stabbed me on the left-hand side, near the heart. I stopped once and looked down at the valley and the road that led away. I remembered the Cocadrille’s story of the curé climbing up to the house and being taken ill. What was it that he muttered when she loosened his clothes on the table?

I had not been to the Cocadrille’s house since the night when she came down from the loft wearing her wedding veil. The chicken hutches had been taken away from the ledge, and the door was ajar. I knocked. I could hear only the Jalent below. I pushed the door open. The table and chair were still there. There was nothing on the mantelpiece. Who had taken the plates? I opened the stove. It was stuffed with the recent remains of a picnic. On the wall by the cupboard some initials had been scratched, neither hers nor mine, and beside them was a drawn heart, the shape of an owl’s face, with an arrow through it.

In the stable I found some sacks and the bear’s paw. There was no sign of the blue umbrella. I climbed up the ladder to the loft. She dreamt about that ladder. She was in her bed in the loft and a young man climbed up and started to undress to get into bed with her. She could see that he was beautiful. He slipped between the blankets beside her and just as she felt his warmth, she woke up. The bed too had gone.

Before I was six, before I looked after the cows, perhaps I was only two or three, I used to watch my father in the kitchen on winter mornings, when it was still as dark as night. He knelt by an iron beast, feeding it. If I came near, he shouted at me. He knelt down at one side of the animal, between its iron legs and, breathing deeply, he whispered to it. I saw my father praying in church. In the kitchen he prayed in long breaths, blowing and sighing. I never saw the iron animal’s face, which was inside its stomach. After a while I could feel the warmth filling the kitchen, and my father would sit beside the animal, warming his feet between its legs, before putting his boots on and going to feed the other animals. Now when I light the stove in the morning, I say to myself: I and the fire are the only living things in this house; my father, mother, brothers, the horse, cows, rabbits, chickens, all have gone. And the Cocadrille is dead.

I say that, and I do not altogether believe it. Sometimes it seems to me that I am nearing the edge of the forest. I will never again be sixteen; if I am to leave the forest, it will be on the far side. Do I feel this because I am old and tired? I doubt it. The old animal when he feels his strength disappearing hides himself in the very centre of the forest, he does not dream of leaving it. Is it a longing for death such as an animal never feels? Is it only death that will at last deliver me from the forest? There are moments when I see something different, moments when a blue sky reminds me of Lucie Cabrol. At these moments I see again the roof which we raised, built with the trees, and then I am convinced that it is with the love of the Cocadrille that I shall leave the forest.

** Potatoes



<quote>
The cock crows<br> the soil its black feather spread<br> claws its stone<br> and lays its eggs

Don’t lift them too soon<br> they give light off<br> through their moon skin<br> to the dead

During the snow<br> heaped in cellars<br> they gravely offer<br> body to the soup

When they fail<br> the plough has no meat<br> and men starve like the great bear<br> in the winter night
</quote>

* II. Once in Europa

** Dedication | ~~

FOR NELLA

** The Leather of Love

Weathered as gate posts

by departures

and the white ghosts

of the gone,

wrapped in tarpaulins,

we talk of passion.

Our passion’s the saline

in which hides are hung

to make from a hinge of skin

the leather of love.

** The Accordion Player

Will you play at my wedding? Philippe the cheesemaker asked him. Philippe was thirty-four. People had been saying he would never get married.

When is it?

Saturday next.

Why didn’t you ask me before?

I didn’t dare. Will you?

Where does the bride come from?

Yvonne comes from the Jura. Drop into the Republican Lyre tonight and she’ll be there—her parents have come and some friends from Besançon.

The same evening the accordionist, a man in his fifties, found himself sitting in the café, drinking champagne offered by the bride’s father, next to a plump woman who laughed a lot and wore dangling earrings. The accordionist had been looking hard at the young bride and he was sure she was pregnant.

You will play for us? Philippe asked, filling up the glasses.

Yes, I’ll play for you and the Yvonne, he said.

On the floor at his feet lay a dog, its coat turned grey with age. From time to time he caressed its head.

What’s your dog’s name? asked the woman with earrings.

Mick, he said, he’s a clown without a circus.

He’s old to be a clown.

Fifteen Mick is, fifteen.

You have a farm?

At the top of the village—a place we call Lapraz.

Is it a big farm?

Depends who’s asking the question, he answered with a little laugh.

Delphine is asking you the question.

He wondered if she was often drunk.

Well, is it a big farm? she asked again.

One winter the Mayor asked my father: Have you got a lot of snow up at Lapraz? And do you know what Father replied? Less than you, Mr. Mayor, he said, because I own less land!

That’s beautiful! Delphine said, knocking over a glass as she put a hand on his shoulder. No fool, your father.

Have you come for the wedding? he asked her.

I’ve come to dress the bride!

Dress her?

It was me who made the wedding dress and there are always finishing touches to make on the Great Day!

Are you a dressmaker? he asked.

No! No! I work in a factory … I just pin things up for myself and friends.

That must save you money, he said.

It does, but I do it because it amuses me, like you play the accordion, they tell me …

You like music?

She disentangled her arms and held them wide apart as though she were measuring a metre and a half of cloth. With music, she sighed, you can say everything! Do you play regularly?

Every Saturday night in the café, weddings excepted.

This café?

No, the one at home.

Don’t you live here?

Lapraz is three kilometres away.

Are you married? she asked, looking him straight in the eye. Her own eyes were grey-green like the jacket she was wearing.

Unmarried, Delphine, he replied. I play at other men’s weddings.

I lost my husband four years ago, she said.

He must have been young.

In a car accident …

So quick! He pronounced the two words with such finality that she was silenced. She fingered the stem of her glass, then lifted it to her lips and emptied it.

You like playing the accordion, Félix?

I know where music comes from, he said.

That it was going to be a bad year had been evident to Félix from the moment in the spring when the snow thawed. All around the village there were pastures which looked as though they had been ploughed up the previous autumn and they hadn’t been. In the orchards the fruit trees were growing out of mud instead of grass. The earth everywhere was like an animal whose fur was falling out. All this was due to the invasion of the moles. Some maintained that the moles had multiplied so catastrophically because the foxes had died or been shot the year before. A fox eats thirty or forty moles a day. The foxes had died because of the rabies which had been brought to our region from the distant Carpathians.

He was standing motionless in the garden in front of his house. Across his body he was holding a spade. He had been like that for ten minutes. He was looking at the earth just ahead of his boots. Not a grain of soil stirred. Towards the mountain, a buzzard was circling, otherwise nothing in sight was moving. The leaves of the cabbages and cauliflowers in the garden were wilted and yellow. With one hand he could have lifted any one of these plants off the earth, as you lift a candlestick off a table. All their roots had been severed.

When he saw the soil stir, he raised his spade and struck, grunting as the spade entered the earth. He kicked the soil away. There were the disclosed tunnels and the dead culprit mole.

One less! he said, grinning.

Albertine, Félix’s mother, was watching her forty-year-old son through the kitchen window when he killed the mole with the spade. She shouted to him to come in because the meal was on the table.

With today’s sun, she said whilst they were eating, the potatoes shouldn’t be dirty.

They shouldn’t be, he replied.

The pup under the table looked up, hoping for a bone or some cheese-rind. He was large and black with blond marks shaped like almonds over each eye which made him look comic.

Ah, Mick! said Félix, our Mick’s a clown without a circus, isn’t he?

If you like, said Albertine, I’ll make potato fritters tonight.

With cabbage salad! He took off his cap and smeared his sleeve across his hot forehead. Why not?

Years before, when Albertine had been strong enough to work in the fields, they used to lift the potatoes together. Whilst working they would recite all the ways in which potatoes could be eaten: potatoes in their jackets, potatoes with cheese in the oven, potato salad, potatoes with pork fat, mashed potatoes with milk, potatoes cooked without water in the black iron saucepan, potatoes with leeks in the soup—and, best of all, potato fritters with cabbage salad.

The potatoes, unearthed that same morning, had dried well in the sun on the topsoil of the field. As Félix gathered them by hand into buckets, he sorted them. The small ones for the animals and poultry, the large ones for the table. Sometimes he moved forward stooping, sometimes he knelt between the rows and went forward on his knees, like a penitent. Mick, panting in the heat, lay on the ground and each time Félix moved forward, he accompanied him. When the buckets were full the man emptied the potatoes into sacks along the side of the field. The sacks were of strong white plastic and had contained fertiliser. When they were full, they looked liked praying drunks in white shirts.

Suddenly the dog became alert, his head down, nose in the broken earth. Breathing out heavily, he started to scrabble with his front paws and to scatter the soil behind him.

Fetch him! Mick, fetch him! Félix sat back on his heels to watch the young dog. He was happy to be diverted and to rest his back, which ached. The dog continued to dig excitedly.

You want him, Mick, don’t you?

At last the dog deposited a mole on the earth.

You have him, don’t let him go!

The dog tossed the mole into the air. For an instant the little animal in its grey fur coat, measuring fifteen centimetres in length and weighing a hundred and fifty grammes, with paws like hands, with very weak eyesight and acute hearing, renowned for his testicles and the exceptional amount of seminal fluid they produced, for an instant the little animal was hapless and alone in the sky.

Quick, Mick!

Fallen back onto the soil, the mole, no longer capable of flight, began to squeal.

Have him!

The dog ate the mole.

Alone in the house, Albertine asked herself for the hundredth time the same question: when she was gone, what would Félix do? Men, she considered, were strong-backed, reckless and weak, each man combining these essential qualities in his own way. Félix needed a woman who would not take advantage of his weakness. If the woman were ambitious or greedy, she would exploit him and use his strong back and his recklessness to ride him where she wanted. Yet now he was forty and the woman had not been found.

There had been Yvette. Yvette would have cuckolded him, just as she was now cuckolding the poor Robert whom she married. There had been Suzanne. One Sunday morning, just before Félix did his military service, she had seen him caressing Suzanne on the floor beneath the blackboard in the schoolroom—the same schoolroom where he had learnt as a boy! She had crept away from the window without disturbing them, but she repeatedly reminded her son, when she wrote to him in the army, that school-teachers can’t sit on milking stools. Suzanne had left the village and married a shopkeeper.

Was it going to be worse for her son to be alone than to have married the wrong woman? This question made Albertine feel as helpless as she had sometimes felt as a child.

In the evening Félix emptied the sacks full of potatoes into a wooden stall in the cellar under the house. Potatoes just lifted from the earth give off a strange warmth and in the darkness of the cellar they glow like children’s shoulders after a day in the sun. He looked at the heap critically: there were going to be far less than last year.

Did you finish? asked Albertine when he entered the kitchen.

Four more rows to do, Maman.

I’ve just made the coffee … Get under the table! You’re not firm enough with that pup, Félix.

He caught five moles this afternoon.

Are you going out tonight?

Yes, there’s a meeting of the Dairy Committee.

Félix drank the coffee from the bowl his mother handed him and began reading the Communist Party paper for peasants and agricultural workers.

Do you know where the biggest bell in the world is, Maman?

Not round the neck of one of our cows!

It’s called the Tsar Kolokol, it weighs 196 tons and was cast in Moscow in 1735.

That’s a bell I’ll never hear, she said.

When he went into the stable to start milking, she took out his suit from the wardrobe which her husband had made one winter when they were first married, and brushed the trousers with the same energy as she had once groomed their mare. Then, having laid the suit on the high double bed beneath her husband’s portrait, she did something she had never done before in her life. She took off her boots and lay, fully clothed, on top of the bed.

She heard Félix come back into the kitchen, she listened to him washing by the sink. She heard him taking off his trousers and washing between his legs. When he had finished, he came into the bedroom.

Where are you? he asked.

I’m taking a rest, she said from the bed.

What’s the matter?

A rest, my son.

Are you ill, Maman?

I feel better now.

She watched him dress. He stepped into the trousers with the creases which she had ironed. He put on the white cotton shirt buttoned at the cuffs, which showed off his handsome shoulders. He slipped into the jacket—he was putting on weight, no question about that. Nevertheless he was still handsome. He ought to be able to find a wife.

Why don’t you go to a dentist? she asked. He glanced at her, puzzled.

He could arrange your teeth.

I haven’t a toothache.

He could make you more handsome.

He could also make us poorer!

Let me see you in your cap.

He put it on.

You’re even more handsome than your father was, she said.

<br>When Félix returned to the farm that night, he was surprised to see a car, its lights on, parked outside the house. He entered hurriedly. The doctor from the next village was in the kitchen washing his hands in the sink. The door to the Middle Room was shut.

If there’s no improvement by the morning, your mother will have to go to the hospital, the doctor said.

Félix looked through the kitchen window at the mountain opposite, which, in the moonlight, was the colour of a grey mole, but he could not see around what had happened.

What happened? he asked.

She telephoned your neighbours.

She won’t want to go to the hospital.

I have no choice, said the doctor.

You’re right, said Félix, suddenly furious, it is her choice which counts!

You can’t look after her properly here.

She has lived here for fifty years.

If you’re not careful, she may die here.

The doctor wore glasses and this was the first thing you noticed about him. He looked at everything as if it were a page to read. He had come straight to the village from medical school full of idealism. Now, after ten years, he was disillusioned. Mountain people did not listen to reason, he complained, mountain people drank too much, mountain people went on repeating what they thought they had once heard as children, mountain people never recognised a rational process, mountain people behaved as if they thought life itself was mad.

Have a drink before you go, Doctor.

Does your mother have a supplementary insurance?

Which do you prefer, pears or plums?

Neither, thank you.

A little gentian? Gentian cures all, Doctor.

No alcohol, thank you.

How much do I owe you?

Twenty thousand, said the doctor, adjusting his glasses.

Félix took out his purse. She has worked every day of the year for fifty years, he thought, and tonight this shortsighted quack asks for twenty thousand. He extracted two folded bank notes and placed them on the table.

The doctor left and Félix went into the Middle Room. She was so thin that, under the eiderdown, her body was invisible. It was as if her head, decapitated, had been placed on the pillow.

An expression of irritation, like that on a dog’s muzzle when it sniffs alcohol, ruffled her face whilst her eyes remained closed. When the spasm was over, her face resumed its calm, but was older. She was ageing hour by hour.

Noticing the dog lying on the floor at the foot of the bed, Félix hesitated. She would have insisted on the dog being put out.

Not a sound, Mick!

He climbed onto the bed beside his mother so that he would be reassured by her breathing throughout the night. She stirred and, turning on the pillow, asked for some water. When he gave her the glass, she could not raise her head. He had to hold her head up with his hand, and her head seemed to weigh nothing, to be no heavier than a lettuce.

They both lay there, awake and without saying a word.

You’ll get the rest of the potatoes in tomorrow? she eventually asked.

Yes.

Next spring there’ll be fewer moles, she said. There won’t be enough for them all to eat to survive the winter.

They breed quickly, Maman.

In the long run such troubles correct themselves, she insisted, if not by next year, by the year after. Yet you, you, my son, you will always remember the Year of the Thousand Moles.

No, Maman, you’re going to get better.

<br>The next day whilst he was cutting wood on the circular saw, Félix stopped every hour to go into the house and reassure himself. Each time, lying on the large bed, her arms straight by her side, she opened her eyes and smiled at him.

Everything was ready and prepared, she knew, in the second drawer of the wardrobe. Her black dress with the mother-of-pearl buttons, the black kerchief with blue gentian flowers printed on it, the dark grey stockings, and the shoes with laces which would be easier to put on than boots. How many times had Marie-Louise promised to come and dress her if it was she, Albertine, who was the first to go?

That night after Félix had come to lie down beside her, she said: It’s years, my boy, since you played your accordion.

I don’t even know where it is.

It’s in the grenier, she said, you used to play so well, I don’t know why you stopped.

It was when I came out of the army.

You let it drop.

Father was dead, there was too much to do.

He glanced at the portrait hanging above the bed. His father had a thick moustache, tiny comic eyes and a strong neck. He used to tap his neck, as if it were a barrel, when he was thirsty.

Would you play me something? Albertine asked.

On the accordion?

Yes.

After all this time I won’t get a breath out of it.

Try.

He shrugged his shoulders, took the electric torch off its hook on the wall, and went out. When he came back he extracted the accordion from its case, arranged one strap round his shoulder and, slipping his wrist under the other, started to pump. It worked.

What tune do you want?

“Dans tes Montagnes.”

The two voices of the accordion, tender and full-blown, filled the room. All her attention was fixed on him. His body was rolling slowly to the music. He has never been able to make up his mind, she reflected, it’s as if he doesn’t realise this is his only life. I ought to know since it was I who gave birth to him. And then, carried away by the music, she saw their cows in the alpage and Félix learning to walk.

When Félix stopped playing, Albertine was asleep.

<br>Neighbours came to visit the house, bringing with them pears, walnut wine, an apple tart. Albertine repeatedly declared she had no need of anything except water. She stopped eating. She would take whatever messages they wanted, she would pray with them for what they thought they needed, she would bless them, but she would accept no pity and no competition. She was the next to leave.

To the old man, Anselme, she whispered: Try to find him a wife.

It’s not like our time, he said, shaking his head. Nobody wants to marry a peasant today.

I’m glad you say that, she said.

I’m not saying Félix couldn’t get married, answered Anselme pedantically. I’m simply saying women of his generation married men from the towns.

It’s the idea of his being left alone.

I’ve been alone for twenty years! It’s twenty years now since Claire died and I can recommend it. He chuckled.

Abruptly Albertine lowered her head to indicate that it was his duty to kiss her whilst she prayed. Obediently Anselme kissed the crown of her head.

<br>She was now so weak and thin that Félix was frightened of smothering her when he slept. One night he woke up from a dream. He listened for her breathing. Her breath was as weak as an intermittent breeze in grass waiting to be scythed. Through the lace curtains he could see the plum trees his father had grafted. The light of the moon going down in the west was reflected in the mirror behind the wash bowl.

In the dream he had again been a conscript in the army. He was walking along a road, playing an accordion. Behind him was a man carrying a sheep. It was he, Félix, who had stolen the sheep, or, rather, a young woman had given the sheep to him on condition that … and he had taken the sheep knowing full well …

The dream became vaguer and vaguer as, awake, he saw something else. He saw Death approaching the farm. Or, rather, he saw Death’s lamp, bobbing up and down, as Death strode leisurely past the edge of the forest where the beech trees in October were the colour of flames, down the slope of the big pasture which drained badly at the bottom, under the linden tree full of wasps in August, over the ruts of the old road to St. Denis, between the cherry trees against which, every July, she asked him to lean the long ladder, past the water trough where the source never froze, beside the dungheap where he threw the afterbirths, through the stable into the kitchen. When Death entered the Middle Room—where the smoked sausages were hanging from the ceiling above the bed—he saw that what he had taken to be a lamp was in fact a white feather of hoarfrost. The feather floated down onto the bed.

Abruptly Albertine sat up and said: Fetch me my dress, it is time to go!

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The day after the funeral, when Félix delivered his milk to the dairy, he surprised everyone there by his cheerfulness.

Have you ever worked as a butcher? he asked Philippe, the cheesemaker. No? Well, you’d better take a correspondence course—with diagrams! Next year there’s going to be no hay, no cows, no milk, no bonus for cream, no penalty for dirt … We’re all going to be in the mole-skin business! That’s what we are going to be doing …

<br>The absence of the mourned is as precise as their presence once was. Albertine’s absence was thin with arthritic hands and long grey hair gathered up in a chignon. The eyes of her absence needed glasses for reading. During her lifetime many cows had stepped on her feet. Each of her toes had been stepped on by a cow on a different occasion, and the growth of its nail consequently deformed. The toenails of her absence were the yellow of horn and irregularly shaped. The legs of her absence were as soft to touch as a young woman’s.

Every evening he ate the soup he had prepared, he sliced the bread, he read the Communist Party paper for peasants and agricultural workers, and he lit a cigarette. He performed these acts whilst hugging her absence. As the night drew on and the cows in the stable lay down on their bedding of straw and beech leaves, the warmth of his own body penetrated her absence so that it became his own pain.

On All Souls’ Day he bought some chrysanthemums, white ones the colour of goose feathers, and placed the pot of flowers, not by the tombstone in the churchyard, but on the marble-top commode in the Middle Room beside the large empty bed.

A week later the snow came. The children ran screaming out of school, impatient to build snowmen and igloos. When Félix delivered his milk to the dairy, he repeated the remark that Albertine had made every year when the first snow fell:

Let it snow a lot tonight, let the snow get so high our hens can peck the stars!

Through the kitchen window he stared at the white mountain. Mick was licking a plate on the floor.

The winter’s long, it would be better if we could sleep.

The dog looked up.

Who do you think is going to win the elections? The same gang as before, eh?

The dog started wagging his tail.

Do you know what you like and what they manufacture in Béthune? Do you know, Mick?

Félix strode across the kitchen towards the massive dresser. To take something off its top shelf it was necessary to stand on a chair. Its doors, with their square panes of glass and their bevelled window frames, were big enough for a cow to go through.

So you don’t know, Mick, what they manufacture in Béthune? From the bottom shelf he picked up a packet of sugar.

Sugar, Mick, sugar is what they manufacture in Béthune!

Brusquely he threw two lumps towards the dog. Three more. Six. Then he emptied the whole packet. Fifty lumps of sugar fell onto the floorboards in a cloud of dust.

Sugar in Béthune! Milk here! He shouted the words so violently the dog hid under the table.

<br>One day in January he noticed that the floorboards, instead of being bread-coloured, were now grey like slates. He put the dog out, he stoked up the stove with wood, he took off his boots and trousers and began scrubbing on his knees. He had left it too long, the dirt was engrained. He ground his teeth, he refilled and refilled the bucket with water from the giant saucepan on the stove. The planks slowly changed colour.

The more he scrubbed, the more he saw the countless washings the floor had undergone as but a single instant in an eternity of dust and neglect. He straightened his back and looked up at the dresser. On the top shelf was their best china, decorated with sprays and garlands of flowers: violets, forget-me-nots, honey-suckle. The way the flowers were painted around the rims of the plates, in the hearts of the dishes, on the flanks of the bowls, made him think of ears, mouths, eyes, breasts.

He put on his trousers and boots, laid down sheets of newspaper and stepping from one sheet to another reached the door. Outside it was snowing grey snow. He teetered like a drunk into the stable and there, his forehead resting on one of his cows’ haunches, he vomited till there was nothing left in his stomach.

<br>A few days later he beat the cow Myrtille. Myrtille had the bad habit of butting the cow next to her. If he showed Myrtille a stick, this was usually enough to deter her. She glowered at him with her insolently tranquil eyes, and he brandished the stick in the air and said: The bow of the violin, eh! Is that enough or do you want some music!

On the evening in question he forgot the stick and Myrtille knocked him off his stool whilst he was preparing her neighbour’s teats before plugging the milking machine onto her. Seizing a rake, he beat Myrtille across the haunches with the handle. She put her head down and he beat her harder. He was beating her now because she had reduced him to beating her. She lay down on the floor and he beat her out of the fury of his knowledge that he could not stop beating her.

In the name of God! he spat out the words as if they were his own broken teeth. Nothing! Nobody!

The shock of each blow was transmitted to his shoulders. Then the handle of the rake broke.

It seemed to him that the animal never forgave him.

<br>Towards the end of March the giant bedspread of packed snow began to slide down the roof of the house a few centimetres each day. After a while, a border of packed snow overhanging the roof would crack and fall to the ground in a thousand pieces. In the cellar, despite the darkness and the thickness of the walls, the potatoes were putting out pink-violet shoots. The force of these shoots is so strong that they can pierce canvas or denim as if they were thin air.

A week earlier the doctor had asked him: Are you still vomiting? Do you want some more pills?

Félix had replied: No, Doctor … what I need is an extra pair of hands. Can you give me a prescription for that? Preferably a woman’s hands, but I’ll accept a man’s or even a boy’s.

Thus he confirmed one of the doctor’s favourite dinner-table dissertations: namely, that the dearth of women in the valley—the best men having left with the women following them—was pushing the idiots who remained towards homosexuality and even bestiality.

In twenty-four hours a well-fed cow shits a wheelbarrow of dung. The winter had lasted a hundred and fifty days and Félix had seventeen cows. He recalled the time, before they bought a tractor, when all the winter’s dung had to be forked into a tip-cart, hauled by the horse and unloaded in heaps, to be spread out again with a fork over the fields. Now he had a mechanical shovel and a spreader. And now he was alone.

Albertine had been right: there were fewer mole hills. Many moles must have died, the strongest eating the weakest. In the morning when he started up the tractor it was freezing. By midday on the hillside with the spreader, he was sweating. This year he refused to take off his sheepskin jacket. If he caught cold and fell ill, there would be nobody else to milk the cows. His solitude had strange ramifications. His trousers caked with cowshit went on stinking until he himself put them in the washing machine. Sometimes the solitude of the house smelt acrid like cowshit.

Every evening, sitting at the table beneath the clock that was always half an hour fast so that he would not deliver the milk too late at the dairy, he decided what to do the following day. Shit till Sunday, Mick, or shall we do the wood?

During the winter it had been a question of killing time. Now time was resurrected. He forgot obvious things. He fed the chickens and forgot the eggs. He hadn’t collected eggs from the hen house since he was seven when his father went away for the second time. The first time his father went away was for his military service, the second time was when he went to Paris to earn the money to re-cover the roof of the house with tiles; it took him four winters to earn enough.

How often had he heard his father tell the story of his time in the army. Soldier Berthier! Why did you not obey the order given to you? Replied his father: One of you tells me to do this, another of you tells me to do that, another of you tells me to do something else, so what am I to do? Just tell me clearly what you want and I’ll do it! Soldier Berthier! Clean out this room! One of you tells me to do this, another one tells me to do that … To every order, his father replied in the same way. Soldier Berthier, one month’s detention! He was put in a cell. Prisoner Berthier, are you a good shot? You tell me clearly what you want, and I’ll do it. The Company needs a good marksman, Berthier! He was taken out and given a rifle and five bullets. He scored five bull’s-eyes. For the rest of his military service he had no duties and no fatigues. All he had to do was go occasionally and shoot in the regimental competitions on the rifle range. When his father finished the story, he always added: On this earth, Felo, you need to be clever.

<br>In April he planted his potatoes. It was as hot that year in April as it usually is in June. Walking slowly along the drill, he dropped a potato between his legs every twenty centimetres. Sometimes the potato fell badly and he was forced to bend down to place it properly.

There are some who know where to go, Mick, and some that have to be put in their place!

Each time he chose with his eyes the exact place between the clods where he hoped the potato would fall. If he did not do this, it fell badly.

The last potato planted, he climbed towards the house. It was almost noon. Suddenly he stopped in his steps. High above the roof a swarm of bees was flying away from the sun towards the north.

Rushing into the kitchen, he came out with a large saucepan and a metal soup ladle. He ran through the orchard rattling the ladle in the saucepan. Mick was barking at his heels. When he was ahead of the swarm, he drummed harder than ever, and held the saucepan so that it glinted in the sun and flashed like a mirror. The swarm, subject to a single will, made straight for the nearest plum tree and settled on one of its branches.

Now he could take his time. He found an empty hive and rubbed its inside with plum leaves. He strolled over to the outhouse to fetch a saw. He sawed off the branch on which the bees were settled and carried it over to the hive. There he tapped the branch smartly with a plank and the swarm fell off like a wig.

If the Queen is there, they’ll stay. If not, they’ll leave tomorrow.

It was then that he heard his mother’s voice calling him by name. The sound the bees were making gave birth to her voice, and at the same time muffled it. The voice went on repeating his name as if the solitude of his days were now in the name itself.

<br>Each season loads up men as if they were wheelbarrows and then wheels them forward to do its tasks. Félix ploughed the field for the alfalfa. One day, when he was twelve, in the field he was now ploughing, his father had said to him:

Do you want to come hunting with me?

They climbed, both of them, to the forest below Peniel.

We’ll wait here, Felo, and do nothing. Shut your mouth and keep your eyes skinned.

His father cut some branches from a beech tree and arranged them like a light screen in front of them. The beech leaves, just unfurled, were as fresh-looking as lettuces. They waited behind the screen for what seemed to Félix an eternity. The bones in his body began to ache one by one because he didn’t dare move a limb. His father sat there as patient as if he were listening to music, his gun between his knees. From behind a spruce twenty metres away, a wild boar appeared, hesitated, and then walked, like a confident habitué, across their vision. The father fired. The boar keeled over and lay down as if inexplicably overcome by sleep.

Do you know what’s important in this life, Felo?

No, Papa.

Good health. And what does good health give you? It gives you a steady hand.

The father prodded the animal with his boot.

Guard him! he said and disappeared down the path to the village. Félix sat on his heels beside the dead boar, whose small eyes were open. When his father returned with a sledge across his back, he was panting hard but grinning. Together they tied the carcass—it weighed a good hundred and fifty kilos—onto the light sledge. Then they started the difficult journey down.

Father Berthier put himself between the two wooden arms in the position of a two-legged horse. Like this he could pull when the runners of the sledge met an obstacle or when the slope wasn’t steep enough, and like this, if they were running too fast over the mud or the new slippery grass, he could brake by digging in his heels and lifting up the front of the sledge so that its weight leant backwards and the back of the sledge was forced into the ground. Félix followed, holding on to a rope to brake the speed, but in fact being pulled along ever faster. One false step on his father’s part and the charging boar and sledge would knock him onto his face and ride over him.

His last run home, Felo!

Not so fast, Papa!

The boy had his father’s gun across his back.

When they were down on the road which passes the café, they stopped to give their legs a rest.

It’s the knees, isn’t it, which feel it?

My legs aren’t tired, lied the boy.

There’s a man for you!

Along the grass bank by the side of the road the sledge slid gently and easily. The boy let go of the rope and put the gun under his arm, carrying it like a hunter.

They met Louis, who could argue a politician under the table.

The month of May, the season for hunting? asked Louis.

It’s no gazelle! said his father.

I’d hide him quick if I were you, said Louis. How many shots?

One shot, only one shot. Felo here is going to be a hunter. His hand’s as steady as a rock.

And Félix, although he knew why his father, cunning as ever, had invented this story, was filled with pride.

When they got home and the boar had been hidden in the cellar, his father said: It’s time you learnt to use a gun, I’ll find you one. What do you say to that?

I’d rather have an accordion, replied Félix.

An accordion! Ah! you want to seduce the girls, eh?

One night, a few months later, Félix was in bed and he heard his father come into the kitchen, shouting in the sing-song voice which meant he had been drinking. There were some other men with him who were laughing. Then there was a silence, and, suddenly, the strains of an accordion being clumsily played. I got it for Felo, he heard his father shout, got it off Valentine. She was glad to be rid of it, now Emile’s dead, what could she do with an accordion? Poor Emile! said another voice. She never liked him playing, said a third man, she’d walk out of the room as soon as Emile picked the thing up. How’s that? She was jealous was our Valentine and Emile encouraged her to be so. He liked to make her jealous! Do you know what he named his accordion? What did he call it? He called his accordion Caroline! Come and sit on my knees, Caroline, he’d say, come and have a cuddle! All you men are the same! Félix heard his mother protest. Come and sit on my knees, Albertine! his father roared, come here and I’ll give you a squeeze! He pressed on the bass buttons and the instrument lowed like a bull. You’ll wake up Félix, you will! his mother said.

It was a diatonic accordion with twelve bass keys for the left hand, made by F. Dedents in the 1920s. The keys had pearly heads, its sides were blue decorated with yellow flowers, and the reeds were made of metal and leather. He learnt to play it seated, resting the right-hand keyboard on his left thigh and opening the accordion like a cascade falling towards the floor to the left of the chair. A cascade of sound.

<br>Late in the month of May, the grass grows before your eyes. One day it is like a carpet, the next it is halfway up your knees. Get it scythed, Albertine would say, or it’ll be tickling the cunt.

The cows in Félix’s stable could smell the new grass. They followed with their insolently patient eyes the two swallows who were building a nest on the cross beam above the horse’s stall, empty since the purchase of the tractor. They stared at the squares of sunlight on the north wall which had been in shadow all winter long. They became restless. They lowed for Félix before it was milking time. They wouldn’t eat their croquettes quietly whilst being milked. When they licked each other with their large tongues, they did so with a kind of frenzy, as if the salt they were tasting had to be a substitute for all the green grass outside.

They want to be out, don’t they? They don’t need a calendar to tell them, and they don’t give a fuck what year it is. Tomorrow we’ll put ’em out, tomorrow when the grass is dry.

Late the following morning Félix undid each cow’s chain and opened the large door of the stable.

Myrtille turned towards the sudden light and felt her neck free. Then she tottered, like a convalescent, to the door. Once outside, she raised her head, bellowed and trotted in the direction of the green grass she could see in the meadow. With each step she found her strength again.

Hold her back, Mick!

The dog bounded after the cow and barked at her forelegs so that she stopped, her neck stretched out taut and straight, her ears up like a second pair of horns, and her imperturbable eyes staring through the sunshine at the meadow. Immobile, her muzzle, her neck, her haunches and her tail in one straight line, she was like the first statue ever made of a cow. The other cows were pushing through the stable door three at a time.

Calm, for Christ’s sake! There’s enough for you all. Get back, Princesse!

They trundled their way down the slope towards Myrtille. Mick saw the whole herd charging at him. His mouth open without a bark, without a whine, he slunk to the side of the road as they thundered past and triumphantly swept Myrtille into the field. As soon as they felt their feet in the grass, their stampede ended. Some threw their hind legs up into the air. One pair locked their horns and shoved against each other with all their weight. Some turned slowly in circles, listening. The streams from the mountains above the village, white with froth because so much ice had melted, were babbling like madmen. The cuckoo was singing. Entire fields were suddenly changing their colour from green to butter-yellow, because the dandelions, shut at night, were opening their petals.

Princesse mounted Mireille—when a cow is in heat, she often plays the bull.

Get her off her!

Mireille, with Princesse on her back, stood gazing at the mountains. The sunshine penetrated to the very marrow of their bones. When the dog approached, Princesse slid gently off Mireille’s back, and the wind from the northwest, from beyond the mountains, ruffled the hair between both their horns.

Félix arranged the wire across the opening to the field, switched on the current, and, plucking a stalk of hemlock, held it against the live wire. After a second his hand shot up like a startled bird. He returned slowly to the house, stopping twice to look back at the happiness of the cows.

He phoned the Inseminator to ask him to pass by for Princesse and gave him the code number of her previous insemination.

<br>In making hay there’s always a wager. The quicker the hay is in, the better it is. Yet the hay must be dry, otherwise it ferments. At the worst, tradition had it, damp hay could eventually set a house on fire. If you don’t take any risks you’ll never get your hay in early. At the best, you’ll be left with hay like straw. So, impatient, you bet on the sun lasting and the storm holding off. It’s not us making hay, repeated Albertine every year, it’s sun that makes the hay.

This lottery made haymaking something of a fête. Each time they won they had cheated the sky. Sometimes they won by minutes, the first drops of rain falling as the horse pulled into the barn the last cart of the hay cut two days before. The hurry, the women and children in the fields, the sweat washed away with spring water, the thirst quenched with coffee and cider, being able to jump from a height of fifteen feet in the barn to land deliciously unharmed in the hay, the hay which he knew how to untangle and comb, the barn as tall as a church slowly filling up until, on top of the hay, his head was touching the roof, the supper in the crowded kitchen afterwards, this had all made haymaking a fête during the first half of his life.

Today he was alone, alone to decide the risks, to cut the hay, to ted it, to turn it, to windrow it, to load it, to transport it, to unload it, to pack it, to level it, to quench his thirst, to prepare his own supper. With the new machines he did not have to work harder than in the first half of his life; the difference now was that he was finally alone.

He had cut half the grass in what his father always called Grandma’s Field. It was on the slope above the linden tree. The hay had been turned but still needed a good hour’s sunshine. It was hot and heavy, the weather for horseflies. He studied the sky as if it were a clock to tell him how many hours away the storm might be. Then he bent down to pick up another handful of hay, assessing its dryness with his fingers. There were four trailer-loads to bring in. He decided to give it half an hour before windrowing. He switched off the tractor engine and walked over to the edge of the field where there was a strip of shade from a little ash grove. There he lay down and pulled the cap over his eyes. He tried to remember the cold of winter but couldn’t. He thought he heard thunder in the distance and jumped to his feet.

Get it in now, Felo.

He walked back towards the tractor along the edge of the un-mown half of the field where the grass was green and the flowers still coloured. The compagnon rouge, pink like lipstick. The tiny vetch scattered like stars of creamy milk. The bellflower, mauve, head bowed. The deep blue mountain cornflower, which cures conjunctivitis, its calyx crisscrossed with black lace like the stockings of dancers. As he noticed them he picked them. Herb bennett, yellow like a scarf. Crepide fausse blathaire, vigorous cropped blond. Fragrant orchid, red like a pig’s penis. He began to pick quickly and indiscriminately in order to make a bouquet, the first since he left school.

Get it in now, Felo.

He drove the tractor back to the house, unhooked the tedder and attached the windrower. The flowers he stuck into a jam jar which he filled with water from the kitchen tap.

The storm broke as he was bringing the last load in.

Saved by the skin of our teeth, Mick!

In the barn he was stripped to the waist. His stomach and back, so rarely exposed to the air, were as pale as a baby’s. When you looked at him you thought of a father as seen by his child. Perhaps this was because his own flesh looked both manly and childish.

When he had unloaded the trailer it was time to begin the milking. He walked out into the rain. He could feel it cooling his blood. It ran down his back into the inside of his trousers. Then he put on his vest and his tartan shirt, threw the blue cap onto his wet hair, switched on the motor for the milking machine and went into the stable. He left the door open, for there was little light inside and his eyes still smarted from the hay dust.

The milking finished, he entered the kitchen. He had closed the shutters as Albertine had always insisted upon doing in the summer to keep the room cool. Light from the sunset filtered between their slats. On the window sill was the bunch of flowers he had picked. On seeing them he stopped in midstride. He stared at them as if they were a ghost. In the stable a cow pissed; in the kitchen the stillness and silence were total.

He pulled a chair from under the table, he sat down and he wept. As he wept his head slowly fell forward until his forehead touched the oilcloth. Odd how sounds of distress are recognised by animals. The dog approached the man’s back and, getting up on its hind legs, rested its front paws on his shoulder blades.

He wept for all that would no longer happen. He wept for his mother making potato fritters. He wept for her pruning the roses in the garden. He wept for his father shouting. He wept for the bobsled he had as a boy. He wept for the triangle of hair between the legs of Suzanne the schoolmistress. He wept for the smell of a woman ironing sheets. He wept for jam bubbling in a saucepan on the stove. He wept for never being able to leave the farm for a single day. He wept for the farm where there were no children. He wept for the sound of rain on the rhubarb leaves and his father roaring: Listen to that! That’s what you miss when you go away to work for months, and when you come back in the spring and hear that sound you say, Thank God in Heaven I’m home! He wept for the hay, still to be brought in. He wept for the forty-two years that had gone by, and he wept for himself.

In July the evenings seem endless. When Félix, his boots full of hayseed and his face tear-stained, took his two churns of milk to the dairy, he could see for miles across the valley towards the mountains. Most of the fields were mown. Because he was alone, he would always be the last to finish his hay. The heat gone, the shaved ground lay there in a kind of trance waiting for hares or lovers. He drove faster than usual, cutting the corners. His tyres screeched as he braked. There were already five other cars there. He kicked open the door as if he wanted to break it down. The cheesemaker and the other peasants who had delivered their milk looked at him quizzically. He poured his churn into the tub on the scales without glancing at the reading. And when he emptied the tub into the vat he did so with a ferocity that wiped the smile off the others’ faces. The milk splashed the wooden ceiling. His second churn he emptied the same way.

Everything all right at home, Félix?

Nothing, nobody to complain about.

Have a glass of rouge? Albert, the old man, lifted a bottle off a shelf above the sink. Félix declined and left.

For God’s sake! muttered one of them shaking his head.

In a year or two, said Albert, he’ll start drinking. Men aren’t made to live alone. Women are stronger, they merge with the weather, I don’t know how.

Find him a wife!

He’ll never marry.

Why do you say that?

Too late.

It’s never too late.

To set up house with a woman, yes, it’s too late.

He’d make a good husband.

It’s a question of trust, insisted Albert.

Whose trust?

After forty a man doesn’t trust a woman enough.

Depends on the woman.

Any woman.

In God’s name!

Suppose he finds an old maid—he’ll say to himself: there must be something the matter with her, nobody else wanted her. Suppose he finds a woman who’s divorced—he’ll say: she did wrong by one man, she may do the same to me. Suppose he finds a widow—he’ll say: she’s been a wife once, it’s my farm she’s after! With age we all become a little meaner.

And what if he finds a young woman who’s unmarried?

Ah! my poor Hervé, said Albert, you say that because you’re still young yourself. If Félix finds a virgin—

Virgin!

No matter! Suppose he finds a young woman, he’ll say to himself—and who knows? he might be right—he’ll say to himself: in a year or so she’s going to cuckold me as sure as day follows night …

The men laughed, Albert handed out a glass of wine, and they watched, idly, the white liquid heating in the copper vat, the white liquid that only starts flowing after a birth. Outside the sky was darkening faintly and the first stars were like sleep in its eyes.

Félix, already back in the kitchen, was reading the Communist Party paper for peasants and agricultural workers.

Do you know where the biggest bell in the world is, Maman?

Not round the neck of one of our cows!

It’s called the Tsar Kolokol, it weighs 196 tons and was cast in Moscow in 1735.

That’s a bell I’ll never hear, she said.

Suddenly he got up from the table and walked across the bare floorboards into the Middle Room. From under the large bed he pulled out the accordion case and came back with the instrument in his arms. There was no longer enough light to read by, yet he did not switch on the light. Instead, he opened the door to the stable and entered its darkness. He felt with his foot for the milking stool that he kept by the water tap and he sat down on it. Myrtille eyed him, another cow mooed. And in the stable, a yard from the gutter full of the cows’ greenish shit, he began to play. The air, hot with the heat of the animals who had spent the day in the sun, smelt strongly of garlic, for wild garlic grows in the field by the old road to St. Denis where they had been grazing. The instrument breathed in this air and its two voices smelt of it. He played a gavotte in quadruple time. Gavotte, which comes from gavot, meaning mountain dweller, meaning goitre, meaning throat, meaning cry.

Most of the cows were bedded down. At first they turned their heads to where the music was coming from and the ears of those who were nearest went up, querying, yet very soon they discovered that the music represented nothing more than itself, and their ears relaxed and they put their heads again on their own flanks or on a neighbour’s shoulder. One of the swallows flew around like a bat, less easily reassured than the cows. As he played, Félix looked towards the small window beside the door. The stars were no longer like sleep in the corner of its eye, but like rivets. His head was rigid, only his body moved with the music.

Now he was playing “Le Jeune Marchois,” a plaintive wedding march he’d learnt in the army from a friend who came from Limoges. Two fingers of his left hand, their nails broken, their knuckles engrained with dirt, the chapped tip of one cracked by the cold of winters, played a staccato beat which was as high and raucous as the cry of a corncrake. His right hand, raised level with his shoulder, was playing the melody which rose and fell like a chain of hills, a chain of gentle hills, of hillocks, of young breasts. His head was now nodding to the tune, his boot on the cobblestones tapping to the beat. The wedding procession approached and the undulating hills gave way to a hedgerow behind which appeared, disappeared and reappeared women with glistening stoles thrown over their shoulders. The calls of the corncrake too were transformed. No longer the cries of a bird, they were the whistle of air emitted from a leather bag punctured by the point of a knife. His two fingers hit the keys like rivet chargers. The procession had risen in the east by his right shoulder, now it was midday and was before his eyes. Each woman had removed her stole, and the white linen undulating in the wind caressed the bare shoulders of the woman behind her. The women could see the procession of men approaching. The whistles of air were gasps of breath. Appearing and disappearing behind the branches of the hedgerow, the women were undoing their hair. Yet already they were passing to the west. The gasps of breath became again the cry of a corncrake, more and more distant, disturbed, fleeting. The road behind the hedge was deserted. A mist covered the hills.

A cow shat when he ceased playing. A pungent smell of wild garlic was wafted towards him. He remembered the waltz of “Rosalie de Bon Matin.” He played it as loud as he could.

<br>It was due to Louis, who can still argue a politician under the table, that Félix began to play regularly every week in the café at Lapraz. One evening the following winter Louis went to try to sell Félix a ticket for a lottery which was being organised to raise money to pay for the transport of the village children to the nearest swimming pool. Everyone born in the mountains should learn how to swim! was the motto of the campaign.

There I was, explained Louis afterwards in the café, climbing up through the orchard to Felo’s house. It was already dark and I was glad I had a pocket lamp. At the top of the hill I thought I heard music. It must be the radio, I told myself. My hearing’s not as good as it used to be. From the big pear tree beside the yard a white owl flew up. There’s not many come up this way at night, I said. The music was clearer now, and it was an accordion. No radio sounds like that. The crafty boy, he’s got company, I said. Nearer the house, I couldn’t believe my ears. The music was coming from the stable! There was a light in the window and the music was coming from the stable! Perhaps he’s dancing with the gypsies, perhaps he likes to dance with gypsies and is frightened to let them into the house, thieving good-for-nothings that they are. Who would have believed Felo would dance with gypsies if he wasn’t his father’s son? I peered through the filthy little window and inside I could make out the dancing figures. No use knocking here, Lulu, I said. So I tried the door. It was locked. To hell with the lottery ticket, I simply wanted to see what was going on. All the doors were locked and he was with the gypsies in the stable. Then I had an idea. Ten to one, Félix didn’t lock the barn door above the house. Up the ramp in five seconds and I was right, it was open. By each trap he’d prepared the hay to fork down to each cow in the morning. Not everyone does that, he’s farsighted, Félix. The music was coming up through the floorboards louder and wilder than ever—a mazurka. I lifted up one of the traps and, lying on my stomach on the little pile of hay, I peered through. There was the cow bedded down, and there was Félix seated on a stool, beneath the one dim electric light bulb, an accordion between his arms. For the rest I couldn’t believe my eyes. Lulu, you’re seeing things, I told myself. Félix was alone! Not another soul in the stable, playing to the fucking cows! He can play though, Félix can. You should get him to bring his music down here sometime.

On the night of Philippe’s wedding, when the sky was already getting light from the dawn, long after Philippe had taken Yvonne to bed, and the parents and the parents-in-law had gone home, a few of us, including the dressmaker with dangling earrings who liked laughing and who worked in a factory that produced wooden handles for house painters’ brushes, a few of us were still dancing and Félix sat playing on his usual chair, his cap on the back of his bald head, his heavy working-boots tapping the floor as he played. We might have stopped dancing before, yet one tune had led to the next, and Félix had fitted them together like one pipe into another till the chimney was so high it was lost in the sky. A chimney of tunes, and the women’s feet so tired they had taken off their shoes to dance barefoot.

Music demands obedience. It even demands obedience of the imagination when a melody comes to mind. You can think of nothing else. It’s a kind of tyrant. In exchange it offers its own freedom. All bodies can boast about themselves with music. The old can dance as well as the young. Time is forgotten. And that night, from behind the silence of the last stars, we thought we heard the affirmation of a Yes.

“La Belle Jacqueline” once more! the dressmaker shouted at Félix. I love music! With music you can say everything!

You can’t talk to a lawyer with music, Félix replied.

Perhaps they are right, those who pretend there are harps in heaven. Maybe flutes and violins too. But I’m sure there are no accordions, just as I’m sure there’s no green cowshit that smells of wild garlic. The accordion was made for life on this earth, the left hand marking the bass and the heartbeats, the arms and shoulders labouring to make breath, and the right hand fingering for hopes!

Finally we stopped dancing.

Come on, Caroline, come on, Félix muttered as he made his way alone to the door. It’s time to go.

** Boris Is Buying Horses

Sometimes to refute a single sentence it is necessary to tell a life story.

In our village, as in many villages in the world at that time, there was a souvenir shop. The shop was in a converted farmhouse which had been built four or five generations earlier, on the road up to the mountain. You could buy there skiers in bottles, mountain flowers under glass, plates decorated with gentians, miniature cowbells, plastic spinning wheels, carved spoons, chamois leather, sheepskins, clockwork marmots, goat horns, cassettes, maps of Europe, knives with wooden handles, gloves, T-shirts, films, key rings, sunglasses, imitation butter-churns, my books.

The woman who owned the shop served in it. She was by then in her early forties. Blond, smiling but with pleading eyes, pleading for God-knows-what, she was buxom, with small feet and slender ankles. The young in the village nicknamed her the Goose—for reasons that are not part of this story. Her real name was Marie-Jeanne. Earlier, before Marie-Jeanne and her husband came to the village, the house belonged to Boris. It was from him that they inherited it.

Now I come to the sentence that I want to refute.

Boris died, said Marc, leaning one Sunday morning against the wall that twists like the last letter of the alphabet through our hamlet, Boris died like one of his own sheep, neglected and starving. What he did to his cattle finally happened to him: he died like one of his own animals.

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Boris was the third of four brothers. The eldest was killed in the War, the second by an avalanche, and the youngest emigrated. Even as a child Boris was distinguished by his brute strength. The other children at school feared him a little and at the same time teased him. They had spotted his weakness. To challenge most boys you bet that they couldn’t lift a sack of seventy kilos. Boris could lift seventy kilos with ease. To challenge Boris you bet him that he couldn’t make a whistle out of a branch of an ash tree.

During the summer, after the cuckoos had fallen silent, all the boys had ash whistles, some even had flutes with eight holes. Having found and cut down the little branch of wood, straight and of the right diameter, you put it in your mouth to moisten it with your tongue, then tapped on it, all round, briskly but not too hard with the wooden handle of your pocket knife. This tapping separated the bark from the wood so that you could pull the white wood out, like an arm from a sleeve. Finally you carved the mouthpiece and reinserted it into the bark. The whole process took a quarter of an hour.

Boris put the little branch into his mouth as if he were going to devour the tree of life itself. And his difficulty was that he had invariably struck too hard with his knife handle, so that he had damaged the bark. His whole body went tense. He would try again. He would cut another branch and when it came to tapping it, either he would hit too hard, or, with the concentrated effort of holding himself back, his arm wouldn’t move at all.

Come on, Boris, play us some music! they teased him.

When he was fully grown, his hands were unusually big and his blue eyes were set in sockets which looked as though they were meant for eyes as large as those of a calf. It was as if, at the moment of his conception, every one of his cells had been instructed to grow large; but his spine, femur, tibia, fibula had played truant. As a result, he was of average height but his features and extremities were like those of a giant.

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One morning in the alpage, years ago, I woke up to find all the pastures white. One cannot really talk of the first snow of the year at an altitude of 1,600 metres, because often it snows every month, but this was the first snow which was not going to disappear until the following year, and it was falling in large flakes.

Towards midday there was a knock on the door. I opened it. Beyond, almost indistinguishable from the snow, were thirty sheep, silent, snow on their necks. In the doorway stood Boris.

He came in and went over to the stove to thaw out. It was one of those tall stoves for wood, standing free in the centre of the room like a post of warmth. The jacket over his gigantic shoulders was white as a mountain.

For a quarter of an hour he stood there silent, drinking from the glass of gnôle, holding his huge hands over the stove. The damp patch on the floorboards around him was growing larger.

At last he spoke in his rasping voice. His voice, whatever the words, spoke of a kind of neglect. Its hinges were off, its windows broken, and yet, there was a defiance in it, as if, like a prospector living in a broken-down shack, it knew where there was gold.

In the night, he said, I saw it was snowing. And I knew my sheep were up by the peak. The less there is to eat, the higher they climb. I drove up here before it was light and I set out. It was crazy to climb by myself. Yet who would come with me? I couldn’t see the path for the snow. If I’d lost my foothold, there was nothing, nothing at all, to stop me till I reached the churchyard below. For five hours since daybreak I have been playing against death.

His eyes in their deep sockets interrogated me to check whether I had understood what he was saying. Not his words, but what lay behind them. Boris liked to remain mysterious. He believed that the unsaid favoured him. And yet, despite himself, he dreamed of being understood.

Standing there with the puddle of melted snow at his feet, he was not in the least like the good shepherd who had just risked his life for his flock. St. John the Baptist, who crowned the Lamb with flowers, was the very opposite of Boris. Boris neglected his sheep. Each year he sheared them too late and they suffered from the heat. Each summer he omitted to pare their hooves and they went lame. They looked like a flock of beggars in grey wool, Boris’s sheep. If he had risked his life that day on the mountain, it wasn’t for their sake, but for the sake of their market price.

His parents had been poor, and from the age of twenty Boris boasted of the money he was going to make one day. He was going to make *big* money—according to the instructions received at his conception and inscribed in every cell of his body.

At market he bought cattle that nobody else would buy, and he bought at the end of the day, offering a price which twelve hours earlier would have appeared derisory. I see him, taciturn beside the big-boned animals, pinching their flesh with one of his immense thumbs, dressed in khaki and wearing an American army cap.

He believed that time would bring him nothing, and that his cunning must bring him everything. When he was selling he never named his price. You can’t insult me, he said, just tell me what you want to offer. Then he waited, his blue, deep-set eyes already on the brink of the derision with which he was going to greet the price named.

He is looking at me now, with the same expression. I told you once, he says, that I had enough poems in my head to fill a book, do you remember? Now you are writing the story of my life. You can do that because it’s finished. When I was still alive, what did you do? Once you brought me a packet of cigarettes whilst I was grazing the sheep above the factory.

I say nothing. I go on writing.

The uncle of all cattle dealers once told me: A ram like Boris is best eaten as meat.

Boris’s plan was simple: to buy thin and sell fat. What he sometimes underestimated was the work and time necessary between the two. He willed the thin cattle to become fat, but their flesh, unlike his own, was not always obedient to his will. And their bodies, at the moment of conception, had not received the same instructions.

He grazed his sheep on every scrap of common land and often on land which wasn’t common. In the winter he was obliged to buy extra hay, and he promised to pay for it with lambs in the spring. He never paid. Yet he survived. And his herd grew bigger: in his heyday he owned a hundred and fifty sheep. He drove a Land Rover which he had recuperated from a ravine. He had a shepherd whom he had recuperated from an alcoholics’ clinic. Nobody trusted Boris, nobody resisted him.

The story of his advancement spread. So too did the stories of his negligence—his unpaid debts, his sheep eating off land which belonged to other people. They were considered a scourge, Boris’s sheep, as if they were a troop of wild boar. And often, like the Devil’s own, his flock left and arrived by night.

In the Republican Lyre, the café opposite the church, there was sometimes something of the Devil about Boris too. He stood at the bar—he never sat down—surrounded by the young from several villages: the young who foresaw initiatives beyond the comprehension of their cautious yet wily parents, the young who dreamed of leisure and foreign women.

You should go to Canada, Boris was saying, that’s where the future belongs. Here, as soon as you do something of your own, you’re mistrusted. Canada is big, and when you have something big, you have something generous!

He paid for his round of drinks with a fifty-thousand note, which he placed on the counter with his wooden-handled knife on top of it, so that it wouldn’t blow away.

Here, he continued, nothing is ever forgiven! Not this side of death. And, as for the other side, they leave it to the curé. Have you ever seen anyone laughing for pleasure here?

And at that moment, as though he, the Devil, had ordered it, the door of the café opened and a couple came in, the woman roaring with laughter. They were strangers, both of them. The man wore a weekend suit and pointed shoes, and the woman, who, like her companion, was about thirty, had blond hair and wore a fur coat. One of the young men looked out through the window and saw their car parked opposite. It had Lyons license plates. Boris stared at them. The man said something and the woman laughed again. Her laughter was like a promise. Of what? you may ask. Of something big, of the unknown, of a kind of Canada.

Do you know them?

Boris shook his head.

Shortly afterwards he pocketed his knife, proffered the fifty-thousand note, insisted upon paying for the two coffees the couple from Lyons were drinking, and left, without so much as another glance in their or anybody else’s direction.

When the strangers got up to pay, the Patronne simply said: It’s already been settled.

Who by?

By the man who left five minutes ago.

The one in khaki? asked the blond. The Patronne nodded.

We are looking for a house to rent, furnished if possible, said the man. Do you happen to know of any in the village?

For a week or a month?

No, for the whole year round.

You want to settle here? asked one of the youths, incredulous.

My husband has a job in A_____, the blond explained. He’s a driving instructor.

<br>The couple found a house. And one Tuesday morning, just before Easter, Boris drew up in his Land Rover and hammered on the door. It was opened by the blond, still wearing her dressing gown.

I’ve a present for you both, he said.

My husband, unfortunately, has just gone to work.

I know. I watched him leave. Wait!

He opened the back of the Land Rover and returned with a lamb in his arms.

This is the present.

Is it asleep?

No, slaughtered.

The blond threw her head back and laughed. What should we do with a slaughtered lamb? she sighed, wiping her mouth with her sleeve.

Roast it!

It still has its wool on. We don’t know how to do such things and Gérard hates the sight of blood.

I’ll prepare it for you.

It was you who bought us the coffee, wasn’t it?

Boris shrugged his shoulders. He was holding the lamb by its hind legs, its muzzle a few inches from the ground. The blond was wearing mules of artificial leopard skin.

Come in then, she said.

All this was observed by the neighbours.

The hind legs of the lamb were tied together and he hung it like a jacket on the back of the kitchen door. When he arrived, the blond had been drinking a bowl of coffee which was still on the table. In the kitchen there was the smell of coffee, of soap powder and of her. She had the smell of a buxom, plump body without a trace of the smell of work. Work has the smell of vinegar. He put out a hand to touch her hips as she passed between the table and the stove. Once again she laughed, this time quietly. Later he was to recall this first morning that he found himself in her kitchen, as if it were something he had swallowed, as if his tongue had never forgotten the taste of her mouth when she first bent down to kiss him.

<br>Every time he visited her, he brought her a present; the lamb was only the first. Once he came with his tractor and trailer and on the trailer was a sideboard. He never disguised his visits. He made them in full daylight before the eyes of his neighbours, who noticed that each time, after about half an hour, the blond closed the shutters of the bedroom window.

And if one day her husband should come back unexpectedly? asked one of the neighbours.

God forbid! Boris would be capable of picking him up and throwing him over the roof.

Yet he must have his suspicions?

Who?

The husband.

It’s clear you’ve never lived in a big town.

Why do you say that?

The husband knows. If you’d lived in a big town, you’d know that the husband knows.

Then why doesn’t he put his foot down? He can’t be that cowardly.

One day the husband will come back, at a time agreed upon with his wife, and Boris will still be there, and the husband will say: What will you have as an aperitif, a pastis?

And he’ll put poison in it?

No, black pepper! To excite him further.

<br>Boris had been married at the age of twenty-five. His wife left him after one month. They were later divorced. His wife, who was not from the valley, never accused him of anything. She simply said, quietly, that she couldn’t live with him. And once she added: perhaps another woman could.

The blond gave Boris the nickname of Little Humpback.

My back is as straight as yours.

I didn’t say it wasn’t.

Then why—

It’s what I like to call you.

Little Humpback, she said one day, do you ski?

When could I have learned?

You buy the skis and I’ll teach you.

I’m too old to start, he said.

You’re a champion in bed, you could be a champion on the ski slopes!

He pulled her towards him and covered her face and mouth with his huge hand.

This too he was to remember later when he thought about their two lives and the differences between them.

<br>One day he arrived at the house carrying a washing machine on his shoulders. Another day he came with a wall-hanging as large as a rug, on which were depicted, in bright velvet colours, two horses on a mountainside.

At that time Boris owned two horses. He’d bought them on the spur of the moment because he liked the look of them and he’d beaten down their price. In the spring I had to deliver a third horse to him. It was early morning and the snow had melted the week before. He was asleep in his bed and I woke him. Above his bed was a Madonna and a photograph of the blond. We took a bale of hay and went out to the field. There I let the horse go. After a long winter confined to the stable, she leapt and galloped between the trees. Boris was staring at her with his huge hands open and his eyes fixed. Ah Freedom! he said. He said it in neither a whisper nor a shout. He simply pronounced it as if it were the name of the horse.

<br>The blond hung the tapestry on the wall in the bedroom. One Sunday afternoon, when Gérard was lying on the bed watching television, he nodded at the tapestry where the horses’ manes were combed by the wind as if by a hairdresser and the horses’ coats gleamed like polished shoes and the snow between the pine trees was as white as a wedding dress, and he said:

It’s the only one of his presents I could do without.

I like horses, she said.

Horses! He made a whinnying noise.

Your trouble is that horses scare you!

Horses! The only thing to be said about a picture—and that’s a picture even if it is made out of cotton—

Velvet!

—same thing, the only thing to be said about that picture there—is that in a picture horses don’t shit.

In your mind everything’s shit, she said.

Have you talked to him about the house yet? Gérard asked.

I’ll talk to him when I choose.

Calling him Little Humpback’s not bad!

She turned off the TV.

I call him, Gérard, whatever I love to call him. He’s my business.

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How difficult it is to prevent certain stories becoming a simple moral demonstration! As if there were never any hesitations, as if life didn’t wrap itself like a rag round the sharpest blade!

One midday, the following June, Boris arrived at the blond’s house, covered in sweat. His face, with his hawk-nose and his cheekbones like pebbles, looked as if he had just plunged it into a water trough. He entered the kitchen and kissed her as he usually did, but this time without a word. Then he went to the sink and put his head under the tap. She offered him a towel, which he refused. The water from his hair was running down his neck to the inside of the shirt. She asked him whether he wanted to eat; he nodded. He followed her with his eyes wherever she went, not sentimentally like a dog, nor suspiciously, but as though from a great distance.

Are you ill? she asked him abruptly as she put his plate on the table.

I have never been ill.

Then what is the matter?

By way of reply he pulled her towards him and thrust his head, still wet, against her breast. The pain she felt was not in her chest but in her spine. Yet she did not struggle and she placed her plump white hand on the hard head. For how long did she stand there in front of his chair? For how long was his face fitted into her breast like a gun into its case lined with velvet? On the night when Boris died alone, stretched out on the floor with his three black dogs, it seemed to him that his face had been fitted into her breast ever since he first set eyes on her.

Afterwards he did not want to eat what was on his plate.

Come on, Humpback, take your boots off and we’ll go to bed.

He shook his head.

What’s the matter with you? You sit there, you say nothing, you eat nothing, you do nothing, you’re good for nothing!

He got to his feet and walked towards the door. For the first time she noticed he was limping.

What’s the matter with your foot?

He did not reply.

For Christ’s sake, have you hurt your foot?

It’s broken.

How?

I overturned the tractor on the slope above the house. I was flung off and the fender crushed my foot.

Did you call the doctor?

I came here.

Where’s the jeep?

Can’t drive, can’t move the ankle.

She started to untie the boots. She began with the unhurt foot. He said nothing. The second boot was a different matter. His whole body went rigid when she began to unlace it. His sock was drenched in blood and the foot was too swollen for her to remove the boot.

She bit her lip and tried to open the boot further.

You walked here! she exclaimed.

He nodded.

Seated on the kitchen floor at his feet, her hands limp by her side, she began to sob.

His foot had eleven fractures. The doctor refused to believe that he had walked the four kilometres from his farm to the blond’s. He said it was categorically impossible. The blond had driven Boris down to the clinic, and, according to the doctor, she had been at Boris’s house all morning but for some reason didn’t want to admit it. This is why, according to the doctor, the two of them had invented the implausible story of his walking four kilometres. The doctor, however, was wrong. Of all the many times that Boris visited her, this was the only one which she never once mentioned to Gérard. And when, later, she heard the news of Boris’s death, she abruptly and surprisingly asked whether he was wearing boots when they found him.

No, was the reply, he was barefoot.

<br>Boris, when young, had inherited three houses, but all of them, by the standards of the town, were in a pitiable condition. In the house with the largest barn he himself lived. There was electricity but no water. The house was below the road and the passerby could look down its chimney. It was in this house that the three black dogs howled all night when he died.

The second house, the one he always referred to as the Mother’s house, was the best situated of the three and he had long-term plans for selling it to a Parisian—when the day and the Parisian arrived.

In the third house, which was no more than a cabin at the foot of the mountain, Edmond, the shepherd, slept when he could. Edmond was a thin man with the eyes of a hermit. His experience had led him to believe that nearly all those who walked on two legs belonged to a species named Misunderstanding. He received from Boris no regular salary but occasional presents and his keep.

One spring evening, Boris went up to the house under the mountain, taking with him a cheese and a smoked side of bacon.

You’re not often at home now! was how Edmond greeted him.

Why do you say that?

I have eyes. I notice when the Land Rover passes.

And you know where I go?

Edmond deemed the question unworthy of a reply, he simply fixed his unavailing eyes on Boris.

I’d like to marry her, said Boris.

But you can’t.

She would be willing.

Are you sure?

Boris answered by smashing his right fist into his left palm. Edmond said nothing.

How many lambs? asked Boris.

Thirty-three. She is from the city, isn’t she?

Her father is a butcher in Lyons.

Why hasn’t she any children?

Not every ram has balls, you should know that. She’ll have a child of mine.

How long have you been going with her?

Eighteen months.

Edmond raised his eyebrows. City women are not the same, he said, and I ought to know. I’ve seen enough. They’re not built the same way. They don’t have the same shit and they don’t have the same blood. They don’t smell the same either. They don’t smell of stables and chicken mash, they smell of something else. And that something else is dangerous. They have perfect eyelashes, they have unscratched legs without varicose veins, they have shoes with soles as thin as pancakes, they have hands white and smooth as peeled potatoes and when you smell their smell, it fills you with a godforsaken longing. You want to breathe them to their dregs, you want to squeeze them like lemons until there is not a drop or a pip left. And shall I tell you what they smell of? Their smell is the smell of money. They calculate everything for money. They are not built like our mothers, these women.

You can leave my mother out of it.

Be careful, said Edmond, your blond will strip you of everything. Then she’ll throw you aside like a plucked chicken.

With a slow blow to the face Boris knocked the shepherd over. He lay spread-eagled on the ground.

Nothing stirred. The dog licked Edmond’s forehead.

Only somebody who has seen a battlefield can imagine the full indifference of the stars above the shepherd, spread-eagled on the ground. It is in the face of this indifference that we seek love.

Tomorrow I will buy her a shawl, whispered Boris, and without a glance behind him, took the road back to the village.

Next morning the police came to warn him that his sheep were a public danger, for they were encumbering the highway. Edmond the shepherd had disappeared and he was not seen again until after Boris’s death.

<br>The month of August was the month of Boris’s triumph. Or is glory a better term? For he was too happy, too self-absorbed, to see himself as a victor who had triumphed over others. It had become clear to him that the instructions inscribed at the moment of his conception had involved more than the size of his bones, the thickness of his skull or the power of his will. He was destined, at the age of forty, to be recognized.

The hay had been brought in, his barn was full, his sheep were grazing high in the mountains—without a shepherd but God would preserve them—and every evening he sat on the terrace of the Republican Lyre overlooking the village square, with the blond in a summer dress, her shoulders bare, her feet in high-heeled silver sandals, and until nightfall the pair of them were the colour-television picture of the village.

Offer drinks to every table, he said, leaning back in his chair, and if they ask what’s happened, tell them that Boris is buying horses!

Humpback, not every night, you can’t afford it!

Every night! My balls are swollen.

He placed one of his immense hands on the bosom of her red-polka-dot dress.

It’s true about the horses, he said, I’m going to breed horses—for you! Breed riding horses that we’ll sell to the idiots who come for weekends.

What should I do with horses? she asked, I can’t ride.

If you have a child of mine—

Yes, Humpback.

I’ll teach the child to ride, he said. A child of ours will have your looks and my pride.

The last word he had never before uttered concerning himself.

If we have a child, she whispered, the house where we live now is too small. We’d need at least another room.

And how many months have we got to sort out the question of a house? asked Boris with his cattle dealer’s canniness.

I don’t know, Humpback, perhaps eight.

A bottle of champagne, Boris shouted, pour out glasses for everybody.

Are you still buying horses? asked Marc, who, with his pipe and blue overalls, is the sceptic of the Republican Lyre, the perennial instructor about the idiocy of the world.

That’s none of your business, retorted Boris. I’m buying you a drink.

I’ll be tipsy, said the blond.

I’ll get you some nuts.

On the counter of the Republican Lyre is a machine where you put in a franc and a child’s handful of peanuts comes out. Boris fed coin after coin into the machine and asked for a soup plate.

When the men standing at the bar raised their glasses of champagne and nodded towards Boris, they were each toasting the blond: and each was picturing himself in Boris’s place, some with envy, and all with that odd nostalgia which everyone feels for what they know they will never live.

Beside Marc stood Jean, who had once been a long-distance lorry driver. Now he kept rabbits with his wife and was seventy. Jean was in the middle of a story:

Guy was pissed out of his mind, Jean was saying, Guy slumped down onto the floor and lay there flat out, as if he were dead. Jean paused and looked at the faces around the bar to emphasize the impasse. What should we do with him? It was then that Patrick had his idea. Bring him round to my place, said Patrick. They got Guy into the car and they drove him up to Patrick’s. Bring him in here, lay him on the workbench, said Patrick. Now slip off his trousers.

The blond put some nuts into Boris’s mouth.

You’re not going to harm him? Slip off his trousers, I tell you. Now his socks. There he lay on the workbench, as naked as we’ll all be when the Great Holiday starts. What now? He’s broken his leg, announced Patrick. Don’t be daft. We’re going to make him believe he broke his leg, Patrick explained. Why should he believe it? Wait and see. Patrick mixed up a bathful of plaster and, as professionally as you’d expect from Patrick, he plastered Guy’s leg from the ankle to halfway up the thigh. Jean paused to look round at his listeners. On the way home in the car Guy came round. Don’t worry, mate, said Patrick, you broke your leg, but it’s not bad, we took you to the hospital and they’ve set it in plaster and they said you could have it off in a week, it’s not a bad fracture. Guy looked down at his leg and the tears ran down his cheeks. What a cunt I am! he kept repeating. What a cunt I am!

What happened afterwards? Marc asked.

He was a week off work, watching TV, with his leg up on a chair!

The blond began to laugh and Boris put the back of his hand against her throat—for fear that the palm was too calloused—and there he could feel the laughter, which began between her hips, gushing up to her mouth. Systematically he moved the back of his immense hand up and down the blond’s throat.

Jean, the lorry driver who now kept rabbits, watched this action, fascinated, as if it were more improbable than the story he had just told.

I couldn’t believe it, he recounted to the habitués of the Republican Lyre later that night: there was Boris, over there, bone-headed Boris caressing the blond like she was a sitting squirrel, and feeding her nuts from a soup plate. And what do you think he does when the husband comes in? He stands up, holds out his hand to the husband and announces: What do you want to drink? A white wine with cassis? I’m taking her to the ball tonight, Boris says. We shan’t be back till morning.

The ball was in the next village. All night it seemed to Boris that the earth was moving past the plough of its own volition.

Once they stopped dancing to drink. He beer, and she lemonade.

I will give you the Mother’s house, he said.

Why do you call it that?

My mother inherited it from her father.

And if one day you want to sell it?

How can I sell it if I’ve given it to you?

Gérard will never believe it.

About our child?

No. About the house, he won’t agree to move in, unless it’s certain.

Leave Gérard! Come and live with me.

No, Humpback, I’m not made for preparing mash for chickens.

Once again, by way of reply, Boris thrust his massive head against her breast. His face fitted into her breast like a gun into its case lined with velvet. For how long was his face buried there? When he raised it he said: I’ll give you the house formally, I’ll see the notary, it’ll be yours, yours not his, and then it’ll go to our child. Do you want to dance again?

Yes, my love.

They danced until the white dress with red polka dots was stained with both their sweats, until there was no music left, until her blond hair smelled of his cows.

Years later, people asked: how was it possible that Boris, who never gave anything away in his life, Boris, who would cheat his own grandmother, Boris, who never kept his word, how was it that he gave the house to the blond? And the answer, which was an admission of the mystery, was always the same: a passion is a passion.

Women did not ask the same question. It was obvious to them that, given the right moment and circumstances, any man can be led. There was no mystery. And perhaps it was for this reason that the women felt a little more pity than the men for Boris.

As for Boris, he never asked himself: Why did I give her the house? He never regretted this decision, although—and here all the commentators are right—it was unlike any other he had ever taken. He regretted nothing. Regrets force one to relive the past, and, until the end, he was waiting.

<br>The flowers which grew in the mountains had brighter, more intense colours than the same flowers growing on the plain; a similar principle applied to thunderstorms. Lightning in the mountains did not just fork, it danced in circles; the thunder did not just clap, it echoed. And sometimes the echoes were still echoing when the next clap came, so that the bellowing became continuous. All this was due to the metal deposits in the rocks. During a storm, the hardiest shepherd asked himself: What in God’s name am I doing here? And next morning, when it was light, he might find signs of the visitations of which, fortunately, he had been largely ignorant the night before: holes in the earth, burned grass, smoking trees, dead cattle. At the end of the month of August there was such a thunderstorm.

Some of Boris’s sheep were grazing just below the Rock of St. Antoine on the far slopes facing east. When sheep are frightened they climb, looking to heaven to save them; and so Boris’s sheep moved up to the scree by the rock, and there they huddled together under the rain. Sixty sheep, each one resting his drenched head on the oily drenched rump or shoulders of his neighbour. When the lightning lit up the mountain—and everything appeared so clear and so close that the moment seemed endless—the sixty animals looked like a single giant sheepskin coat. There were even two sleeves, each consisting of half a dozen sheep, who were hemmed in along two narrow corridors of grass between the rising rocks. From this giant coat, during each lightning flash, a hundred or more eyes, glistening like brown coal, peered out in fear. They were right to be frightened. The storm centre was approaching. The next forked lightning struck the heart of the coat and the entire flock was killed. Most of them had their jaws and forelegs broken by the shock of the electrical discharge, received in the head and earthed through their thin bony legs.

In the space of one night Boris lost three million.

It was I, thirty-six hours later, who first noticed the crows circling in the sky. Something was dead there, but I didn’t know what. Somebody told Boris, and the next day he went up to the Rock of St. Antoine. There he found the giant sheepskin coat, discarded, cold, covered with flies. The carcasses were too far from any road. The only thing he could do was burn them where they lay.

He fetched petrol and diesel oil and started to make a pyre, dragging the carcasses down the two sleeves and throwing them one on top of another. He started the fire with an old tyre. Thick smoke rose above the peak, and with it the smell of burned animal flesh. It takes very little to turn a mountain into a corner of hell. From time to time Boris consoled himself by thinking of the blond. Later he would laugh with her. Later, his face pressed against her, he would forget the shame of this scene. But more than these promises which he made to himself, it was the simple fact of her existence which encouraged him.

By now everybody in the village knew what had happened to Boris’s sheep. No one blamed Boris outright—how could they? Yet there were those who hinted that a man couldn’t lose so many animals at one go unless, in some way, he deserved it. Boris neglected his animals. Boris did not pay his debts. Boris was having it off with a married woman. Providence was delivering him a warning.

<br>They say Boris is burning his sheep, said the blond, you can see the smoke over the mountain.

Why don’t we go and watch? suggested Gérard.

She made the excuse of a headache.

Come on, he said, it’s a Saturday afternoon and the mountain air will clear your head. I’ve never seen a man burning sixty sheep.

I don’t want to go.

What’s the matter?

I’m worried.

You think he could change his mind about the house now? He’ll certainly be short of money.

A flock of sheep’s not going to make him change his mind about the house.

We shouldn’t count our chickens—

Only one thing could make him go back on his word about the house.

If you stopped seeing him?

Not exactly.

What then?

Nothing.

Has he mentioned the house recently?

Do you know what he calls it? He calls it the Mother’s house.

Why?

She shrugged her shoulders.

Come on, said Gérard.

Gérard and his wife drove up the mountain to where the road stopped. From there, having locked the car, they continued on foot. Suddenly she screamed as a grouse flew up from under her feet.

I thought it was a baby! she cried.

You must have drunk too much. How can a baby fly?

That’s what I thought, I’m telling you.

Can you see the smoke? Gérard asked.

What is it that’s hissing?

His sheep cooking! said Gérard.

Don’t be funny.

Grasshoppers.

Can you smell anything?

No.

Imagine being up here in a storm! she said.

I’ve better things to do.

It’s all very well for you to talk, you’ve never lifted a shovel in your life, she said.

That’s because I’m not stupid.

No. Nobody could call you that. And he’s stupid, Boris is stupid, stupid, stupid!

He was encouraging the fire with fuel, whose blue flames chased the slower yellow ones. He picked up a sheep by its legs, and swung it back and forth, before flinging it high into the air so that it landed on top of the pyre, where, for a few minutes longer, it was still recognizable as an animal. The tearstains on his cheek were from tears provoked by the heat and, when the wind turned, by the acrid smoke. Every few minutes he picked up another carcass, swung it to gain momentum, and hurled it into the air. The boy who had never been able to tap the ash-bark gently enough had become the man who could burn his own herd single-handed.

Gérard and the blond stopped within fifty yards of the blaze. The heat, the stench and something unknown prevented them approaching further. This unknown united the two of them: wordlessly they were agreed about it. They raised their hands to protect their eyes. Fires and gigantic waterfalls have one thing in common. There is spray torn off the cascade by the wind, there are the flames: there is the rockface dripping and visibly eroding, there is the breaking up of what is being burned: there is the roar of the water, there is the terrible chatter of the fire. Yet at the centre of both fire and waterfall there is a persistent calm. And it is this calm which is catastrophic.

Look at him, whispered Gérard.

Three million he’s lost, poor sod! murmured the blond.

Why are you so sure he isn’t insured?

I know, she hissed, that’s why. I know.

Boris, his back to the fire, was bent over his haversack drinking from a bottle of water. Having drunk, he poured water onto his face and his black arms. Its freshness made him think of how he would strip in the kitchen this evening and wash before going to visit the blond.

When Boris turned back towards the fire he saw them. Immediately a gust of smoke hid them from view. Not for a moment, however, did he ask himself whether he had been mistaken. He would recognise her instantly whatever she was doing, anywhere. He would recognise her in any country in the world in any decade of her life.

The wind veered and he saw them again. She stood there, Gérard’s arm draped over her shoulders. It was impossible that they had not seen him and yet she made no sign. They were only fifty yards away. They were staring straight at him. And yet she made no sign.

If he walked into the fire would she cry out? Still holding the bottle, he walked upright, straight—like a soldier going to receive a medal—towards the fire. The wind changed again and they disappeared.

The next time the smoke cleared the couple were nowhere to be seen.

Contrary to what he had told himself earlier, Boris did not come down that night. He stayed by the fire. The flames had abated, his sheep were ashes, yet the rocks were still oven-hot and the embers, like his rage, changed colour in the wind.

Huddled under the rock, the Milky Way trailing its veil towards the south, he considered his position. Debts were warnings of the ultimate truth, they were signs, not yet insistent, of the final inhospitality of life on this earth. After midnight the wind dropped, and the rancid smell, clinging to the scree, was no longer wafted away; it filled the silence, as does the smell of cordite when the sound of the last shot has died away. On this inhospitable earth he had found, at the age of forty-one, a shelter. The blond was like a place: one where the law of inhospitality did not apply. He could take this place anywhere, and it was enough for him to think of her, for him to approach it. How then was it possible that she had come up the mountain on the day of his loss and not said a word? How was it possible that on this rock, far above the village, where even the church bells were inaudible, she should have come as close as fifty yards and not made a sign to him? He stirred the embers with his boot. He knew the answer to the question and it was elementary. He pissed into the fire and on the stones his urine turned into steam. It was elementary. She had come to watch him out of curiosity.

Before he saw her, he was telling himself that, after all, he had only lost half his sheep. As soon as he saw her with his own eyes, and she made no sign to him, his rage joined that of the fire: he and the fire, they would burn the whole world together, everything, sheep, livestock, houses, furniture, forests, cities. She had come out of curiosity to watch his humiliation.

All night he hated her. Just after sunrise, when it was coldest, his hatred reached its zenith. And so, four days later he was asking himself: could she have had another reason for coming up to the Rock of St. Antoine?

<br>Boris decided to remain in the mountains. If he went down to the village, everyone would stare at him to see how he had taken his loss. They would ask him if he was insured, just in order to hear him say no. This would give them pleasure. If he went down he might start breaking things, the windows of the Mayor’s office, the glasses on the counter of the Republican Lyre, Gérard’s face, the nose of the first man to put an arm round the blond’s waist. The rest of his sheep were near Peniel, where there was a chalet he could sleep in. Until the snow came, he would stay there with his remaining sheep. Like that, he would be on the spot to bring them down for the winter. If she had really come to see him for another reason, she would come again.

A week passed. He had little to do. In the afternoons he lay on the grass, gazed up at the sky, occasionally gave an order to one of the dogs to turn some sheep, idly watched the valleys below. Each day the valleys appeared further away. At night he was obliged to light a fire in the chalet; there was no chimney but there was a hole in the roof. His physical energy was undiminished, but he stopped plotting and stopped desiring. On the mountainside opposite the chalet was a colony of marmots. He heard the marmot on guard whistle whenever one of his dogs approached the colony. In the early morning he saw them preparing for the winter and their long sleep. They lifted clumps of grass with roots attached, and carried them, as if they were flowers, to their underground hide-out. Like widows, he told himself, like widows.

One night, when the stars were as bright as in the spring, his anger returned to galvanize him. So they think Boris is finished, he muttered to the dogs, but they are fucking well wrong. Boris is only at the beginning. He slept with his fist in his mouth, and that night he dreamed.

The following afternoon he was lying on his back looking up at the sky, when suddenly he rolled over onto his stomach in order to look down the track which led through the forest to the tarred road. His hearing had become almost as acute as that of his dogs. He saw her walking towards him. She was wearing a white dress and blue sandals, around her neck a string of beads like pearls.

How are you, Humpback?

So you’ve come at last!

You disappeared! You disappeared! She opened her arms to embrace him. You disappeared and so I said to myself: I’ll go and find Humpback, and here I am.

She stepped back to look at him. He had a beard, his hair was tangled, his skin was dirty and his blue eyes, staring, were focused a little too far away.

How did you get here? he asked.

I left the car at the chalet below.

Where the old lady is?

There’s nobody there now, and the windows are boarded up.

They must have taken the cows down, he said. What date is it?

September 30<sup>th</sup>.

What did you come for, when I was burning the sheep?

How do you mean?

You came up to the Rock of St. Antoine with your husband.

No.

The day I was burning the sheep, I saw you.

It must have been somebody else.

I’d never mistake another woman for you.

I was very sorry to hear about what happened to your sheep, Boris.

Grandma used to say that dreams turned the truth upside down. Last night I dreamed we had a daughter, so in life it’ll be a son.

Humpback, I’m not pregnant.

Is that true?

I don’t want to lie to you.

Why did you come to spy on me? If you’re telling the truth, tell it.

I didn’t want to.

Why didn’t you come over and speak to me?

I was frightened.

Of me?

No, Humpback, of what you were doing.

I was doing what had to be done. Then I was going to come and visit you.

I was waiting for you, she said.

No, you weren’t. You had seen what you wanted to see.

I’ve come now.

If he’s conceived today, he’ll be born in June.

After these words, he roughly took her arm and led her towards the crooked chalet whose wood had been blackened by the sun. He pushed open the door with his foot. The room was large enough for four or five goats. On the earth floor were blankets. The window, no larger than a small transistor radio, was grey and opaque with dust. There was a cylinder of gas and a gas-ring, on which he placed a black saucepan with coffee in it.

I’ll give you whatever you want, he said.

He stood there in the half light, his immense hands open. Behind him on the floor was a heap of old clothes, among which she recognised his American army cap and a red shirt which she had once ironed for him. In the far corner something scuffled and a lame lamb hobbled towards the door where a dog lay. The floor of beaten earth smelled of dust, animals and coffee grounds. Taking the saucepan off the gas, he turned down the flame, and its hissing stopped. The silence which followed was unlike any in the valley below.

If it’s a boy, I’ll buy him a horse—

Ignoring the bowl of coffee he was holding out to her, without waiting for the end of his sentence, she fled. He went to the door and watched her running, stumbling downhill. Occasionally she looked over her shoulder as if she thought she were being pursued. He did not stir from the doorway and she did not stop running.

In the evening it began to snow, tentatively and softly. Having brought all three dogs into the chalet, Boris bolted the door, as he never did, lay down beside the animals and tried to sleep, his fist in his mouth. The next morning, beneath the white pine trees and through the frozen brambles and puddles of water, he drove his flock of miserable grey sheep towards the road that led down to the village.

<br>When Corneille the cattle dealer drew up in his lorry before Boris’s house and walked with the slow strides of the fat man he was through the snow to tap on the kitchen window, Boris was not surprised; he knew why Corneille had come. He swore at his dogs, who were barking, threatened them with being salted and smoked if they were not quieter, and opened the door. Corneille, his hat tilted towards the back of his head, sat down on a chair.

It’s a long time since we’ve seen you, said Corneille. You weren’t even at the Fair of the Cold. How are things?

Quiet, replied Boris.

Do you know they are closing the abattoir at Saint-Denis? Everything has to be taken to A____ now.

I hadn’t heard.

More and more inspections, more and more government officials. There’s no room for skill anymore.

Skill! That’s one way of naming it!

You’ve never been short of that sort of skill yourself, said Corneille. There I take my hat off to you!

In fact he kept his hat on and turned up the collar of his overcoat. The kitchen was cold and bare, as if it had shed its leaves like the beech trees outside, its leaves of small comfort.

I’ll say this much, continued Corneille, nobody can teach me a new trick, I know them all, but there’s not one I could teach you either. All right, you’ve suffered bad luck, and not only last month up on the mountain—The poor bugger Boris, we said, how’s he going to get out of this one?—you’ve suffered bad luck, and you’ve never had enough liquid cash.

From his right-hand overcoat pocket he drew out a wad of fifty-thousand notes and placed them on the edge of the table. One of the dogs sniffed his hand. Fuck off! said Corneille, pushing the dog with one of his immense thighs, the overcoat draped over it so that it advanced like a wall.

I’m telling you, Boris, you could buy the hind legs off a goat and sell them to a horse! And I mean that as a compliment.

What do you want?

Aren’t you going to offer me a glass? It’s not very warm in your kitchen.

Gnôle or red wine?

A little gnôle then. It has less effect on Old King Cole.

So they say.

I hear you swept her off her feet, said Corneille, and the husband under the carpet!

Boris said nothing but poured from the bottle.

Not everyone could do that, said Corneille, that takes some Old King Cole!

Do you think so? What are you showing me your money for?

To do a deal, Boris. A straight deal, for once, because I know I can’t trim you.

Do you know how you count, Corneille? You count one, two, three, six, nine, twenty.

The two men laughed. The cold rose up like mist from the stone floor. They emptied the little glasses in one go.

The winter’s going to be long, said Corneille, the snow has come to stay. A good five months of snow in store for us. That’s my prediction and your uncle Corneille knows his winters.

Boris refilled the glasses.

The price of hay is going to be three hundred a bale before Lent. How was your hay this year?

Happy!

Not your woman, my friend, your hay.

Happy, Boris repeated.

I see your horses are still out, said Corneille.

You have sharp eyes.

I’m getting old. Old King Cole is no longer the colt he once was. They tell me she’s beautiful, with real class.

What do you want?

I’ve come to buy.

Do you know, said Boris, what the trees say when the axe comes into the forest?

Corneille tossed back his glass, without replying.

When the axe comes into the forest, the trees say: Look! The handle is one of us!

That’s why I know I can’t trim you, said Corneille.

How do you know I want to sell? Boris asked.

Any man in your position would want to sell. Everything depends upon the offer, and I’m going to mention a figure that will astound you.

Astound me!

Three million!

What are you buying for that? Hay?

Your happy hay! said Corneille, taking off his hat and putting it further back on his head. No. I’m willing to buy everything you have on four legs.

Did you say ten million, Corneille?

Boris stared indifferently through the window at the snow.

Irrespective of their condition, my friend. I’m buying blind. Four million.

I’ve no interest in selling.

So be it, said Corneille. He leaned forward, his elbows on the table, like a cow getting up from the stable floor, rump first, forelegs second. Finally he was upright. He placed his hand over the pile of banknotes, as if they were a screaming mouth.

I heard of your troubles, he said very softly in the voice that people use in a sickroom. I have a soft spot for you, and so I said to myself, this is a time when he needs his friends and I can help him out. Five million.

You can have the horses for that.

Corneille stood with his hand gagging the pile of money.

If you take my offer, if you have no animals during the winter, my friend, you can sell your hay, you can repair the roof of your barn, and when the spring comes, you’ll have more than enough to buy a new flock. Five million.

Take everything, said Boris. As you say, it’s going to be a long winter. Take everything and leave the money on the table. Six million.

I don’t even know how many sheep I’m buying, muttered Corneille.

On this earth, Corneille, we never know what we’re buying. Perhaps there’s another planet where all deals are straight. All I know is that here the earth is peopled by those whom God threw out as flawed.

Five and a half, said Corneille.

Six.

Corneille lifted his hand from the pile and shook Boris’s hand.

Six it is. Count it.

Boris counted the notes.

If you want a tip from a very old King Cole, Corneille spoke evenly and slowly, if you want a tip, don’t spend it all on her.

For that you’ll have to wait and see, Corneille, just as I am going to do.

There followed the correspondence between Boris and the blond. This consisted of two letters. The first, with the postmark of October 30<sup>th</sup>, was from him:

My darling,

I have the money for our fares to Canada. I am waiting

for you—

always your Boris.

The second, dated November 1<sup>st</sup>, was from her:

<quote>
Dearest Humpback,

In another life I might come—in this one forgive

Marie-Jeanne.
</quote>

There were no longer any sheep to feed. The horses had gone from the snow-covered orchard. When the lorry had come to fetch them, there was half a bale of hay lying on the snow and Boris had thrown it into the lorry after his horses. On one small point Marc was right when he said that Boris died like one of his own beasts. Not having to feed his animals gave him the idea of not feeding himself.

In the icy trough in the yard he hid a bottle of champagne, ready to serve cold. The water detached the label and after a week it floated to the surface. When the police opened the kitchen cupboard, they found a large jar of cherries in eau-de-vie with a ribbon round it, and a box of After Eight chocolates, open but untouched. Most curious of all, on the kitchen floor beneath the curtainless windows, they found a confectioner’s cardboard box with golden edges, and inside it were rose-pink sugared almonds such as are sometimes distributed to guests and friends after a baptism. On the floor too were blankets, dogshit and wet newspapers. But the dogs had not touched the sugared nuts.

In the house during the unceasing period of waiting he did not listen to the sounds which came from outside. His hearing was as unimpaired as is mine now, registering the noise of my pen on the paper—a noise which resembles that of a mouse at night earnestly eating what its little pointed muzzle has discovered between its paws. His hearing was unimpaired, but his indifference was such that the crow of a neighbour’s cock, the sound of a car climbing the road from which one looks down onto the chimney of his house, the shouts of children, the drill of a chain-saw cutting in the forest beyond the river, the klaxon of the postman’s van—all these sounds became nameless, containing no message, emptier, far emptier than silence.

If he was waiting and if he never lost for one moment, either awake or asleep, the image of what he was waiting for—the breast into which his face at last fitted—he no longer knew where it would come from. There was no path along which he could look. His heart was still under his left ribs, he still broke the bread into pieces for the dogs with his right hand, holding the loaf in his left, the sun in the late afternoon still went down behind the same mountain, but there were no longer any directions. The dogs knew how he was lost.

This is why he slept on the floor, why he never changed a garment, why he stopped talking to the dogs and only pulled them towards him or pushed them away with his fist.

In the barn when he climbed a ladder, he forgot the rope, and, looking down at the hay, he saw horses foaling. Yet considering his hunger, he had very few hallucinations. When he took off his boots to walk in the snow, he knew what he was doing.

One sunny day towards the end of December, he walked barefoot through the snow of the orchard in the direction of the stream which marks the boundary of the village. It was there that he first saw the trees which had no snow on them.

The trees form a copse which I would be able to see now from the window, if it were not night. It is roughly triangular, with a linden tree at its apex. There is also a large oak. The other trees are ash, beech, sycamore. From where Boris was standing the sycamore was on the left. Despite the December afternoon sunlight, the interior of the copse looked dark and impenetrable. The fact that none of the trees were covered in snow appeared to him to be improbable but welcome.

He stood surveying the trees as he might have surveyed his sheep. It was there that he would find what he awaited. And his discovery of the place of arrival was itself a promise that his waiting would be rewarded. He walked slowly back to the house but the copse was still before his eyes. Night fell but he could still see the trees. In his sleep he approached them.

The next day he walked again through the orchard towards the stream. And, arms folded across his chest, he studied the copse. There was a clearing. It was less dark between the trees. In that clearing she would appear.

She had lost her name—as the champagne bottle which he was keeping for her arrival had lost its label. Her name was forgotten, but everything else about her his passion had preserved.

During the last days of the year, the clearing in the copse grew larger and larger. There was space and light around every tree. The more he suffered from pains in his body, the more certain he was that the moment of her arrival was approaching. On the second of January in the evening he entered the copse.

During the night of the second, Boris’s neighbours heard his three dogs howling. Early next morning they tried the kitchen door, which was locked on the inside. Through the window they saw Boris’s body on the floor, his head flung back, his mouth open. Nobody dared break in through the window for fear of the dogs, savagely bewailing the life that had ended.

<br>So I have told the story. The wind is driving the powdered snow into deep drifts. Everything is being covered in white, even the air. If you walk across this wind, out in the fields away from the shelter of the village, it will line your cheeks with ice in one minute and the pain in your skull, if you stay there, will grow like a concussion after a blow.

Anyone who believes that evil does not exist and that the world was made good should go out tonight into the fields.

On a night like this a game of cards is like a bed dragged into the middle of the room. Four of us huddle together to play belote. The electricity has been cut. The two candles give just enough light to see the cards in our hands. La Patronne puts on her glasses. Sometimes she takes a torch out of her pocket to distinguish between a heart and a diamond.

** The Time of the Cosmonauts

If every event which occurred could be given a name, there would be no need for stories. As things are here, life outstrips our vocabulary. A word is missing and so the story has to be told. What, for instance, was the relation between the old shepherd Marius and the baby in Danielle’s womb when she left the village? Was he the child’s godfather? Hardly.

The story began and ended in the summer of 1982, high up in the alpage which we call Peniel. Some say that they know the name Peniel comes from the bible. Genesis. Chapter 32. But if you read that, it won’t really tell you what happened between Marius and Danielle.

Peniel is a plateau at an altitude of 1,600 metres. One edge of the plateau dominates, from a colossal rockface, the village below. From there, when there’s a rainstorm and it’s sunny, you can look down onto the top of a rainbow—as if it were the arch of a bridge at your feet. The rockface is mostly limestone, occasionally mixed with flysch. The other edges of the plateau are lost in the mountains beyond.

Once there was a forest on this plateau and some gigantic tree trunks are still preserved beneath a layer of clay, under the topsoil on which the pastures grow. Where this clay and the ancient forest are nearest to the surface, the earth is oily and damp, and on the rocks a dark green moss grows, which, if you touch it or lie down on it, feels like fur. This is how the rocks become like animals.

A number of years ago when the Russian, Gagarin, the first man in space, was circling the earth, every one of the twenty scattered chalets at Peniel housed, each summer, cattle and women and men. So many cattle that there was only just enough grass to go round. By common accord grazing time was limited. You got up at three to milk and you took the cows out to pasture as soon as it was light. At ten, when the sun was beginning to climb high in the sky, you brought them home and made your cheese. In the stable you gave them grass which you’d scythed at midday. After lunch you took a siesta. At four you milked again, and only then did you take the cows out a second time to pasture, and there you stayed with them until you could no longer see the trees but only the forest. You brought the cows back in and when they were bedded down on their straw, you could go outside and peer up into the night, where the Milky Way looked like gauze, and try to spot Gagarin in his circling Sputnik. All this was twenty-five years ago. During the summer in question—the summer of 1982—only two of the twenty chalets were inhabited, one by Marius and the other by Danielle, and there was so much grass they could let their animals graze night and day.

The two chalets are separated by a pass flanked by two peaks, the St. Pair and the Tête de Duet. It took Danielle half an hour to walk across the pass to Marius’s chalet.

Why do he-goats smell so strongly? Marius asked her when she arrived the first time. After a winter of ice and snow you go into the stable and you know that last year there was a he-goat here! Rams don’t smell like that, bulls don’t smell like that, stallions don’t smell like that, why do he-goats? The only other smell as strong as the smell of the he-goat, Marius continued, is the smell of a tannery. When I came back to the village, it took me six months to get that stench out of my skin. When I came back to the village, you could pluck a hair out of any part of my body—he fixed Danielle with his shrewd unflinching eyes so that what he meant should not escape her—any part of my body, sniff it, and say: this man has worked in a tannery.

What do you want a he-goat to be? replied Danielle, all he-goats have a strong smell, don’t they?

Another thing—apart from the stench of the tannery—which Marius brought back with him to the village was his way of wearing a hat. He wore his hat pulled rakishly down over one eye. Like a boss. Not the boss of a factory but of a gang. And he was never without a hat. He slept with a hat on. When he brought in his cows after a storm—if the downpour is violent they refuse to budge, they put down their heads, they arrange their backs like roofs so the rain runs off either side, and they wait—when Marius brought in his herd after a storm and his hat was so drenched that even indoors it went on raining, he took it off and straightaway put on another.

Putting on a hat was for him a gesture of authority, and from the age of thirty to the age of seventy, the authority of the gesture had not changed. He wore his hat now as if he were expecting total obedience from thirty cows and one dog.

That’s Violette there, he muttered to Danielle, pointing with his stick to a large brown cow with black eyes and horns. Always the last to come when called, always wandering off by herself, she has her own system, Violette, and I shall get rid of her in the autumn!

He had lost his father at the age of fourteen. His father, who married twice, had a passion for cards. Every evening in the winter he would say: *Sauva la graisse!* Wipe the grease off the table, we are going to play cards. And so he became known as Emilien à Sauva, and his son as Marius à Sauva.

Emilien, the father, left little behind except debts. The family house was sold, and Marius, who was the eldest son, had to leave to look for work in Paris. As he climbed for the first time in his life into a train, he swore that he would come back with enough money to pay off the family debts and that eventually he would have the largest herd of cows in the village.

So you’re going to sweep their chimneys? asked the ticket collector.

I’ll eat their shit, said Marius the boy, if they pay me more for it.

He achieved what he swore he would. He worked in a tannery in Aubervilliers, a little to the north of the Arc de Triomphe. By the time he was thirty he had paid off the family debts. By the time he was fifty he had the largest herd in the village.

They are calm today, Danielle, he went on, calm and agreeable, and they stay together. Not like yesterday—yesterday they could feel the storm, and there were flying ants. They ran with their tails straight out. They were as disagreeable as you can imagine yesterday. And today they are honey-sweet. As sweet as honey, Danielle.

It was the beginning of the summer and the grass was full of flowers, vanilla orchids, arnica, red campion, globeflowers, and blue centaurea that people say are the souls of poets.

Danielle was twenty-three. Her mother was dead and she lived with her elderly father, who had five cows and some goats. She had a job in the warehouse of a furniture factory. But in the spring of ’82 the factory went bankrupt, and so she proposed to take her father’s animals to the mountains—to the chalet where she had spent several summers as a child with her mother.

How does she have the courage to stay up there alone? people in the village asked. Yet the truth was she didn’t need courage. It suited her—the silence, the sun, the slow daily routine. Like many people who are sure of themselves, Danielle was a little intimidating. At village dances the boys didn’t fall over themselves to partner her—though she danced well and had wide hips and tiny feet. They weren’t sure she would laugh at their jokes. So they called her *slow*. In reality, this so-called slowness of hers was a kind of imperturbability. She had a wide face—a little like that of a Red Indian squaw—with dark eyes, large shoulders, small wrists and plump capable hands. It was easy to imagine Danielle as the mother of several children—except that she seemed to be in no hurry to find a man to be their father.

Grandad! she teased Marius, when she paid him a second visit a few days later. You dye it, don’t you?

Dye what?

Seventy and not a single white hair!

It’s in the breeding.

Danielle looked away as if she had suddenly forgotten her joke. The few white clouds above the peaks were the only sign that the world was still going on.

My father had the same head of hair, Marius continued, thick and black as a lamb when they nailed him in his coffin. Go fetch Lorraine, Johnny! he called to the dog, Find Lorraine!

The dog bounded away to fetch a cow who was straying along the slope to the west. Over the seasons the cows at Peniel have made, with their own feet, narrow paths like terraces along the slopes. You can wander along one of those paths without really noticing that on one side the drop below is getting steeper and steeper.

Go fetch Lorraine!

Marius had his own way of calling. His calls sounded like an order and an appeal at the same time. Everyone discovers how to make their voice carry in the mountains, and everyone knows that animals respond to sounds which are like songs. Yet his shouts were not musical, they were a kind of convulsive cry and each phrase ended with the sound OVER! Johnny bring over! Take over! Over there Johnny over! Somebody suddenly awaking from sleep might cry out like Marius calling to his dog.

Fetch Lorraine over!

Dangerous, he said. Lilac fell there two years ago and broke a leg. To save the meat I had to hack the carcass with an axe and take the quarters back to the chalet on a sledge. Alone. No one to help and no one to see.

The next time Danielle paid him a visit was in the evening. It had been very hot all day, the goats were as languid as she was. When she had finished milking, she climbed up to the pass. There she could hear the bells of Marius’s herd, and at the same time, behind her and much louder, the bells of her own five. She had an electric torch with her in case she needed it for the walk back.

Marius was sitting on a stool in his stable, empty except for one cow. He looked up from under his hat, his black eyes fixed intently upon Danielle.

I was doing my best to make you come, he growled, may need your help when it comes to pulling. I know my Comtesse.

Comtesse, the cow before them, had her tail in the air and glistening loops of mucus trailed from her distended vulva. Danielle approached her head and felt the temperature of her horns.

What she needs, she said, is some dew on her nose.

She wanted to joke because she saw that Marius’s hands were trembling. How many calves had he delivered during his lifetime? And now he owned not one but thirty cows. Why should he be nervous? The last sunlight was shining between the slats of the west wall. When Comtesse moved her head the bell around her neck tolled like an animal in pain. It was stifling as though all the wood of the floor and walls and roof, all the wood of the stable, were feverish; Danielle knew why he was nervous. To be nervous like that he had to be a man and he had to be old: it wasn’t the danger of losing the calf or the cow which worried him, it was a question of pride. As if he were being put to a test, as if he were on trial. No woman, young or old, would suffer like that.

The head’s twisted, muttered Marius, pushing his hat further back on his head, that’s why the bugger doesn’t come.

For the third or fourth time he rolled back his sleeve to the shoulder and plunged his right arm into the cow. The Comtesse was now so weak she was swaying like a drunk.

For Christ’s sake hold her up, he shouted, do you want to break my arm? Hold her up! God almighty, it’s not possible! Hold her up, do you hear me? Your father may be my worst enemy but you keep her on her feet, do you hear me?

Whilst he was shouting at Danielle he was quietly, systematically, searching with his open hand, fingers separated like probes, to find the calf’s shoulders and then its haunches and then with a single hand to turn them so that the calf could engage the passage. He was sweating profusely, so were Danielle and the Comtesse. Mucus, wood impregnated with a century’s smell of cows, sweat, and somewhere the iodine tang of birth.

It’s done, he grunted. He withdrew his arm and almost immediately two front hooves appeared, forlorn-looking as drowned kittens. Danielle was fingering the rope, impatient to slip it round the hooves and pull, and so finish with a labour that had already gone on too long, yet she hesitated because Marius was standing there, his face a few inches from the cow’s cunt, his eyes screwed up as if he were praying.

He’s coming to us! He’s coming. The calf slipped out limply, wearily, into Marius’s arms. He poured eau-de-vie over his fingers and forced them into the calf’s mouth so that it could suck. It looked more dead than alive. He carried it to the Comtesse, who licked its face and lowed. The sound she made was high and penetrating—a mad sound, thought Danielle. The calf stirred. She went to fetch some straw.

When all was arranged, Marius sat there on his stool, his right hand, with which he had turned the calf, still held open and extended, still making in the air of the stable the same gestures it had made in the womb. The difference was that it was no longer trembling.

You certainly know what you’re doing, Grandad!

Not always, not always.

A sweet breeze was blowing through the open door. The light was fading in the stable.

I couldn’t have done it without you, he said.

I did nothing.

He laughed and began to turn down the sleeves of his shirt. You were there! he cried, you were there! You kept her on her feet.

On her way home she was glad to have the torch, because the pass crosses from north to south, and with the moon still low in the east, the way between the crags was in dark shadow. She stopped to look up at the stars, which from there, where it was dark, seemed ten times brighter.

<br>I often watched him. Toward midday I left my goats and climbed up the pass where there was a breeze, and there I ate my lunch. To be honest, I spied on him, for I was careful to remain hidden.

According to his children, who had left home, he was a tyrant. And what tyrannized them, apart from his orders, was his indefatigability.

Go fetch them over! Go take them over!

Every afternoon he had a different plan for where and how his herd should eat. He never left them in peace.

There were always jackdaws around the pass. When the sun was out and they were flying close to the rockface of St. Pair, their flying shadows were cast on the rock, and this seemed to double the number of birds in flight. Then, at a given moment, the leader of the flock would veer toward the sun, the others turning to follow, and their shadows would immediately vanish, so that it looked as if half the birds in flight had suddenly disappeared into thin air. Sometimes I lay there watching the birds appear and disappear until I lost all count of time. I would look down and notice Marius and his herd by the stream below where the cows drank at midday, and the next moment they were five kilometres away.

<br>A week later Danielle visited Marius again. He was with his herd near the forest where two generations before some shepherds had mined for gold and found none.

Marius greeted her by saying: One day you’ll be an old woman! Even you, Danielle! I had a fall last night.

So?

Everyone ages.

How did you fall?

By way of an answer, he started to undo his belt. His trousers, caked in mud and cowshit, drenched and dried in the sun a thousand times, were, as usual, unbuttoned in front. Now they fell to the ground around his ankles. He turned so that she could see the back of his thigh, where just under the buttock something sharp had jaggedly torn the flesh. His legs were as white as they must have been in the cradle.

Is it deep? he asked.

It needs cleaning.

It bled like a pig.

What did you put on it?

Some brandy and some arnica.

It needs washing and bandaging, she said.

What is it like?

It’s about ten centimetres long and it’s red like a wound.

Is it ugly? It’s just where I can’t see it.

It’ll heal so long as you keep it clean.

Everything heals unless you die from it!

There were flies all round the brim of his hat.

Let’s go to the chalet, she said.

The bowl from which he had drunk his coffee and eaten his bread was still on the kitchen table.

Living by myself, I don’t have to change the plates, he said.

Where did you fall?

Out there where the woodpile is. Every night I cut the kindling wood to start the fire next morning. I must have tripped, I don’t know how.

You do too much, Grandad.

Who else is going to do it? Do you know how many cheeses I make a week?

She shook her head.

Thirty.

You’ve got a son down below.

He’s only interested in becoming Mayor.

He’ll never get elected.

I’ll make you some coffee. He plugged in an electric coffee grinder. I couldn’t manage without electricity, he said, electricity can replace a wife! He winked. A grotesque, undisguised wink.

She sipped the coffee. A few drops of rain began to fall. Within a minute the rain was beating on the roof like a drunk, and there were claps of thunder.

You’re not frightened, Danielle?

She repeated what she’d often heard said: there are three sorts of lightning—the lightning of rain, the lightning of stone, and the lightning of fire—and there’s nothing you can do about any of them.

The cows won’t move in rain like this, he said.

When the thunder was further away, she said: If you lie down, I’ll clean your leg.

The chalet, apart from the hayloft and stable, consisted of two rooms, one without a window for storing the cheeses, and one with a window for everything else. The bed, in the opposite corner from the stove, was made of wood and was screwed to the wall. He climbed up onto it, handed her a bottle of eau-de-vie, turned his back and lowered his trousers. Pinned to the planks of the wall beside the bed was a colour photo, torn from a magazine, of a large political demonstration by the Arc de Triomphe. She poured some eau-de-vie onto a cloth and began cleaning around the wound.

Crowds there that day, she said, looking at the photo.

I cut it out because I knew the Arc de Triomphe, he replied, I knew it well.

As a young man, she thought as she took hold of his leg, which was as pale as a baby’s, he must have been unusually handsome, with his dark eyes, his thick eyebrows, and his jet-black moustache. In Paris he couldn’t have lacked offers from women. Yet if he was to remain faithful to his oath, he could not afford to marry—whatever else he may have done—a seamstress or a florist. He had to find a wife who could milk the cows he was going to buy.

He clenched one fist.

Am I hurting you?

Hurting me? Do you know what happened to Jesus? Jesus was nailed to the cross, with nails through his hands and through his feet, right into the wood. That is how he was hurt. And he wasn’t a sinner like me!

He didn’t marry until he came back to the village. Elaine, his wife, died young and the day after her funeral he bought a milking machine.

Danielle poured a little eau-de-vie into the wound, and then she took the new cheesecloth that he had given her and began to bandage the thigh. In order to do so she had to bend over him and pass her hand several times between his legs near his scrotum, and each time she did this she shut her eyes out of respect.

I would like to go to Paris, she said whilst bandaging him. Up to now I’ve never had the chance.

Just wait a little longer, Danielle, you’re still a young woman and one day you’ll go to Paris and Rome and New York, I daresay. People fly everywhere now. You’ll see everything.

He swung his legs off the bed and winced a little.

Is it too tight?

Perfect.

He pulled up his trousers from his ankles and fastened his belt. He had kept his hat and boots on throughout the operation.

The storm was over and everything was washed and dust-free. Even the air. The valleys below, leading to the snow-capped mountains in the east, looked as if they had been painted by a miniaturist thousands of years before. By contrast, the rocks with moss, the grass and pine trees at Peniel looked new, as if just created. Marius’s mood had changed with the atmospheric pressure and his eyes were full of laughter.

Come and help me bring the herd in! he said. No, don’t protest, you can leave us at Nîmes and cut across by the arolle tree to the pass.

They walked with the dog along the edge of the pine forest. At one moment Danielle left the old man to make a detour to a hollow where you can find mushrooms called the Wolf’s Balls. They are only good to eat when young. When old they turn to dust.

As she rejoined him, Marius said: You are as fearless as a ghost, Danielle.

A pity, she replied, ghosts aren’t happy.

Happiness! He spoke the word as if it were the name of another of his disagreeable cows, like Violette. Happiness!

Fetch them over! Bring Marquise over!

Nobody is happy, he announced. There are only happy moments. Like this one now with you.

The herd was easy to assemble that evening and the two of them had no more to do than follow the cows, who were going home fast, their necks moving up and down like pump handles and their bells ringing wildly. It must have been the massed bells which put the idea of glory into Marius’s head. Glory doesn’t last! he shouted. But he shouted it laughing, waving his stick to the music. Glory never lasts!

On her way home, Danielle turned around. Marius had put his hat on his stick and was waving it above his head in wide circles. She waved back and continued waving until she disappeared behind the last boulder.

<center>
<verbatim>* * *</verbatim>
</center>

In the afternoon when the cows were chewing the cud, Marius would lie down on the grass, take a newspaper from his pocket, read it for ten minutes, and then fall asleep. I had noticed this several times when I was spying on him from the pass at St. Pair. One day I visited him whilst he was sleeping. As I approached I made a bet with myself that I would take the newspaper out of his hand without waking him. The difficulty was going to be the dog. I would have to deal with Johnny.

The two of them were side by side, sheltered from the sun by sweetbriar bushes. The dog was wagging his tail, and I beckoned him to come. The old man was still asleep. He was on his side, his knees slightly drawn up, his hat over his ear. His head rested on a stone covered with moss. In his throat Johnny was moaning a little with pleasure. I gave him my sleeve to bite on. One of his hands lay, palm uppermost, on the grass—he had unexpectedly long fingernails. The newspaper was against his stomach where his belt held up his gaping trousers.

All the cows were lying down. There was no chorus of bells for they were too still. Just one bell rang, as one cow slowly turned her head, followed, after a pause, by another. It was as if everything had slowed down like the old man’s pulse whilst he slept. I bent down and took his newspaper. It was easy. I had won my bet. Now why should I wake him? So I left the paper on the grass and very lightly I touched his open hand because I did not want to leave furtively. I touched his palm with my fingers, as lightly as if with a feather.

<br>Why don’t you get a husband? Marius asked Danielle the next time she visited him.

I’m in no hurry.

You won’t marry a boy from the village.

Why shouldn’t I?

Because you are too independent.

Is that a fault?

Not if you have enough money!

I shan’t get rich looking after Papa’s goats.

That’s not your job in life.

Are you saying I’m lazy?

No. I have a considerable admiration for you. The old man spoke formally as if making a speech. A considerable admiration for you, Danielle. You are clever and you are thoughtful—you let sleeping men lie!

It was then that she knew he had been feigning sleep. He must have felt it when she touched his hand. And he knew that she knew, but they did not speak of it.

So the weeks passed and so they learnt more about each other.

One night at the end of July a little before dawn when it was still dark, a car drove uphill, over the grass, towards the Tête de Duet and stopped a hundred metres away from Danielle’s chalet. The car was a 1960 Mercedes Berlin-18, and it had been painted silver grey with a brush, not a spray gun. Six men got out of the car, each with a sack. They were careful not to slam the doors. The eldest, who wore a beret and a leather waistcoat, placed a huge hand around the neck of the youngest, who was yawning.

All the best things in life before you, boy!

Cut it out!

Do you see that peak? No, not that one. The one with snow on it, that’s where we’re felling today.

Christ! It’s a good ten kilometres away.

The other five burst out laughing. Once again the boy had been taken in. Because it was early and the air was cold, laughing made some of them cough.

And it was this coughing which woke up Danielle. By the time she got out of bed and pulled on a skirt, all she could see from the door in the first light was an Indian file of men with sacks over their shoulders climbing towards the forest at St. Pair, and, before the chalet where her goats grazed, the shadowy silhouette of a car.

Later she tried each of the car’s four doors. They were locked. Through the windows, which looked bullet-proof, she admired the leather upholstery and the wooden dashboard of teak, with its dials like those on instruments made specially for doctors.

Afternoons she let the rabbits out of their cage. That day, after they had eaten, they hopped under the Mercedes, happy to find shade there. When she half-shut her eyes the rising heat waves along the ridges of the mountains opposite formed a blue halo. All day she heard the drone of the woodcutters’ chain saws.

In the evening, through the little window of the chalet, she watched the same six men with sacks over their shoulders coming down from St. Pair. The light was already fading. They were walking slowly, as if they were blind and were forced with each step to feel their way forward with their feet. They had a dog with them whose antics they were too tired to notice. Slowly they approached the chalet, each walking at his own speed, exhausted and alone.

When they saw her in the doorway, they became a little jauntier. The first sight of a woman—with the prospect of nine hours’ respite from their backbreaking work—was a reminder of the other sweet side of the world.

I heard your saws.

Forty heads, miss.

Father’s the one who counts, said a thickset one with sawdust in his hair. They all laughed and then fell shy.

You think it’ll rain? one of them asked.

No, the birds are flying high.

Not tomorrow.

Forty!

Forty of ’em, shining like fish!

We strip ’em as we fell ’em.

It’s steep, your Pair.

Pair? That’s how you call it? asked the thickset one with sawdust in his hair.

St. Pair, she said.

Everywhere, on their arms, faces, vests, shoulders, they were smeared with a grey dust stuck to sweat and resin. This covering was so thick that in the half-light it looked as if their faces were covered with fur.

Steep and hot, said the boy.

In the trough there’s running water, she said.

The men turned to look where she was pointing. A little distance from the chalet was a massive, scooped-out tree trunk, placed horizontally on some stones. In front of it waddled four geese, phosphorescent in the half-light, and above the trough was a water pipe which came directly out of the grassy mountainside behind.

It’s a spring … if you want to wash.

We’ll be home in twenty minutes, said the one they called Father, who wore a beret and a leather waistcoat.

Home?

The geese came towards the house in single file, breasts stuck out.

We’re sleeping in the Chalet Blanc, explained Father.

There’s no spring there, she said, only rainwater.

We’ve got jerry-cans.

Wash there, it’s a spring, she said, a spring that never stops. You got soap?

Sure—and pyjamas! said a tall one.

In that case, I’ll get you some.

She went inside. When she came out she handed a large cube of soap to Father. The men left their sacks on the ground and went over to the trough, which was long enough for them to stand side by side.

In the early night breeze she could smell the smell of their washing: a mixture of soap, stale shirts, petrol, smoke, pine resin, sweat. She observed them, stripped to the waist. The backs of the younger ones were suntanned. The elder ones always wore vests and their backs, in contrast to their arms and shoulders, were white. The Father had taken off his beret. They were throwing the soap to one another and laughing. They found the two brushes she kept there for scrubbing the churn. A woman, she thought, washes herself quite differently from a man; a man washes his body like he washes down a wheelbarrow; it’s not by washing himself that a man learns to caress.

By the time they had put on their shirts it was dark. Under the eyes of Father each of them solemnly shook Danielle’s hand, thanked her, and pronounced his name. The name she remembered was that of the thickset one with sawdust in his hair. When he arrived he was the dirtiest, and she sensed that this was because he worked the most ferociously. Pasquale was his name.

They dumped their sacks in the trunk of the Mercedes. Four got in behind. Father sat in the front, and Pasquale was the driver. He sat behind the wheel, hunched up, concentrated and impossible to distract.

Every night on their way home the woodcutters stopped to wash themselves in the trough by Danielle’s chalet. She prepared coffee. They drank it outside sitting on their sacks. Virginio, who was tall and wore glasses, left a razor behind so that he could shave if he wanted. Danielle found a piece of broken mirror which she hung on a wire by the trough. She learnt that five of them came from the same village on the other side of the Alps, near Bergamo. Alberto came from Sicily. Every winter they returned home. She learnt that they were paid by the cubic metre of wood felled: the harder they worked, the quicker they earned. Father did the cooking. The Mercedes belonged to Pasquale.

Sometimes, when they passed in the very early morning they left a present for her: a tin of peaches, a bottle of vermouth. Once they left a scarf with a design of roses printed on it.

<br>The first time I saw Pasquale out of his work clothes was when he knocked on the door whilst I was drinking coffee one morning.

I don’t work on Sunday, he said.

You deserve a day of rest.

To do what?

There was a long silence.

Once we worked on a Sunday and I had an accident.

What happened? I asked.

The trees were falling badly, one after the other. We weren’t working fast enough. That’s why we decided to work on Sunday.

Would you like some cider?

He shook his head.

Some eau-de-vie?

I’m not thirsty.

I’ll whip you some cream, I said.

His thick lips smiled and he opened his enormous hands in a gesture of submission.

Tell me what happened while I whip the cream.

A long silence.

About the Sunday you worked? I prompted him.

The very first tree I had to strip had fallen badly. Where we were working was very steep, like here. Rocks everywhere. Crevices. Gulleys. I told myself I’d work toward the head, so as not to have to walk back along where I’d already stripped. They’re as slippery as fish when you strip them. Sometimes the resin splashes your face when you are axing the bark off.

The cream was thickening, leaving the side of the bowl. I watched Pasquale talking. There was a sadness in his face. He had stopped his story. Silence.

Do you have a brother or sister? I asked.

Not one. My mother died when I was born.

And your father?

He went to America and we never heard from him. He disappeared into America like a tear into a well, my aunt says.

Again silence—only the noise of my fork in the bowl.

Go on, I said, go on.

I started stripping her from the top and she began to roll from the head. Nothing stops a rolling tree except another tree or a rock. I hesitated because I was worried about the machine. It was a new one we had just bought. If you hesitate, you’re lost. I jumped too late, holding the machine above my head. In the gulley I began to slide, it was as steep as the side of a pyramid. I slid over onto some dry rocks below and they broke a leg.

Could you get up?

The machine wasn’t hurt!

No machine is worth a broken leg.

A machine like that costs half a million.

A long silence.

You couldn’t get up?

They carried me home to the hut and laid me on the bed. Father said: Pasquale, can you wait till tomorrow? At first I didn’t understand. Wait for what? Before we take you to hospital. That’s twenty-four hours, I said. I’ll sit with you, he replied, pain gets worse when you’re alone. No, go back and work, I told him. Next day, Monday, they took me to hospital. I handed him the bowl and he began to eat the cream. His huge hands rested on the table. To eat he lowered his head to the spoon. When he had finished he screwed up his face and smiled.

I’ve never tasted cream as good as that, he said.

Why didn’t they take you to hospital immediately?

Because it was Sunday.

Well?

On Sundays we are not insured. What we do on Sundays is at our own risk. He looked at me very seriously. Like what we do today, he said.

There was another long silence and we did nothing.

If you come next Sunday with your friends, I said, I’ll make a tart to go with the cream.

<br>A few days later Danielle had the idea of passing by the arolle tree to get to the ridge above Nîmes—blueberries abound there—and then climbing down the scree to surprise Marius, whom she had neglected to visit for a week or two. She filled her bucket with berries and her fingers were stained blue as they used to be when she wrote in ink at school.

She approached the edge to look down on Peniel. The sky was cloudless. There was a strongish north wind which would fall when the sun went down. The sun was low in the sky so that the cows had long shadows like camels. Marius was there with his dog beside him. Yet there was something wrong. She sensed it without knowing why. The old man was shouting, his arms outstretched before him towards the crags. Why didn’t the dog move? She couldn’t hear what he was shouting because she was upwind. Then, abruptly, the wind dropped.

Sounds, like distances, are deceptive in the mountains. Sometimes you can recognise a voice, but not the words the voice is saying. Sometimes you hear a cow growl like a dog, and a whole flock of sheep singing like women. What Danielle thought she heard was:

Marius à Sauva! Marius à Sauva!

The sun was so low that it was lighting only one side of each mountain, one side of each forest, one side of each little hillock in the pastures; the other side of everything was in dark shadow, as if the sun had already set or not yet risen.

Perhaps he was telling the dog to go and save one of the cows, she argued to herself, that could sound like *à Sauva*. Yet why didn’t the dog move?

Marius à Sauva!

She could no longer be sure, the wind had got up again. She picked her way carefully down the scree. Occasionally she dislodged a stone or a pebble which, clattering down, dislodged others, and they in their turn others. Yet despite the noise of her descent, Marius never once glanced up. It was as if at Nîmes, that evening, all sounds were playing tricks.

The dog ran to greet her. She waited for Marius to kiss her on her cheek as he always did. He kissed her and began talking as if they had been stopped in the middle of a conversation.

You see Guste over there—he pointed at a thickset Charolais with curly hair like wool—he’s charming, Guste, the gentlest bull I’ve had, and already he’s too old. I shall sell him for meat this autumn. He’s two and a half. Next year his calves will be too small.

You must have thought I’d disappeared, Danielle said.

He lifted his hat and put it lower on his brow.

No, no, he said, gently. I hear their chain saws all day. And there are six of them, aren’t there? Bring the Comtesse over! Gently, in God’s name! Over!

He stopped in his tracks and leant against the side of a large boulder covered with moss. He was rubbing the back of his hand against the moss. And our summer at Peniel, he said, you’ll remember it, won’t you, Danielle?

The following Sunday the woodcutters came after supper to eat the blueberry tart Danielle had made. With them they brought two bottles of Italian sparkling wine. They were dressed as if they were going to town. Thin pointed shoes instead of boots, white shirts, natty belts. It was only their scarred hands they could do nothing about. Virginio was the most transformed by his change of clothes: tall and with glasses, he almost had the air of a schoolmaster. Father looked older, and Pasquale younger.

The days were drawing in and the end of the summer approaching. The pastures now were not green but lion-coloured, there were no flowers left, every day the buzzards circled lower, and by eight o’clock in the evening it was almost dark.

The men lay on the grass and looked up at the sky, where the first stars were appearing. They could feel the warmth of the earth through their shirts.

Would you like some more tart?

It was so good.

I made two, replied Danielle proudly and went indoors to fetch the second.

Next week the helicopter, said Virginio.

I’ve never seen a helicopter getting out the wood, said the boy.

Lifts pines like matches.

You look up and you feel as small as a frog, said Alberto the Sicilian.

Do you know how much it costs them to hire a helicopter for an hour?

No idea.

Two hundred thousand. In an hour it uses two hundred litres of petrol.

Here, Pasquale, take your tart, said Danielle. The other men were scarcely visible but she recognised their voices.

Helicopter pilot killed himself near Boege last year.

They were passing round a wine bottle.

Forgot his cables, didn’t look down.

They’re forbidden by law to do more than four hours’ flying a day, said Father. In four hours they can get eighty trees off a mountain.

If one of his cables gets entangled, said Alberto, miming with his hands, it pulls him out of the sky. Plouff!

Next century we’ll do everything in the sky, said the boy.

Nobody’ll work like us, next century.

Pasquale’s packing it in next year, isn’t that right?

I haven’t decided yet, said Pasquale.

You won’t make it. You can’t take on the supermarkets single-handed, said Virginio.

With fruit and vegetables you can, insisted Pasquale.

No, said Father, you can’t compete with their prices or their publicity.

I’m going to make my own publicity!

The other men laughed. A jet airliner crossed the sky, they could see its lights.

I’m going to get a bird, a Blue Rock Thrush.

He’s out of his mind, our Pasquale!

You can teach a Blue Rock Thrush to talk.

So?

Every time a customer comes into the shop the bird’ll talk. Pasquale recited a saleman’s patter which, under the stars, sounded more like a prayer:

<verse>
Guarda quanto è bella ’sta mela
quanto è bellissima e cotta!
</verse>

Turning to Danielle, he translated the words for her: Look at the lovely apples, ripe and lovely apples!

The boy giggled. A good idea, said Father, but you need to give it a twist, make it unforgettable. Teach your bird to insult your customers. *Stronzo*! for the husband! *Fica* for the wife. They’ll adore it, they’ll adore it in Bergamo.

Are you sure?

I’ll train the bird for you, said the Sicilian.

The moon was rising to the right of St. Pair. They watched a pink halo slowly changing into a white mist and then, suddenly, the bone-white incandescence of the first segment of the moon. Danielle sat down on the grass beside Pasquale.

When are you going to pack it in, Father?

Next year, sometime, never, sometime … I’ve no choice, I don’t want to drop dead.

The head of the moon was now free in the sky, enormous and close-up like everything newborn.

Do you know who dropped dead last Tuesday? asked Virginio. Our friend Bergamelli—had his throat cut in prison.

Who did it?

The Brigade Rouge.

Bastards!

Bergamelli? Danielle whispered.

A gangster from Marseille … Virginio knew him when he was in prison, said Pasquale.

In the moonlight which became brighter as the moon grew smaller, Danielle could see Virginio’s face, pillowed on his arms, gazing into the firmament.

He reminded me of my father, Virginio went on, Bergamelli had the same truculence, the same dark look when he was crossed, the same smile when something pleased him … He was killed when I was twelve, fell off a roof, my father.

Virginio took off his glasses and stared at the moon.

He was a mason, your father?

He built chimneys … The day they carried him home, I opened the veins on my wrists … they found me too soon. They carted me off to hospital, him down to the cemetery.

Shit! muttered Alberto.

From that day on I knew something, said Virginio; in this god-forsaken life everyone is abandoned sooner or later. Father did everything with me. He taught me to cook, he showed me how to catch frogs, hundreds a night, he saw to it I knew how to pick locks, he was my music teacher, he told me about women, when he got drunk in the café by the big fountain he stood me on the table and I danced whilst he sang—and then one Wednesday morning, dry weather, sober week, clean shirt, good boots, one godforsaken Wednesday morning—pfft! like that, he fell off a roof. I used to go and look at the mark on the pavement where he landed.

From the stable came the muffled sound of goat bells. Sometimes at night their bells sound oleaginous, like the light on the surface of water in a deep well.

I can see him up there. He can’t see us. If we all shouted together he wouldn’t hear us. The dead are deaf to all the dynamite of the world.

A long silence followed, as if each one of them were thinking about the deafness of the dead.

It’s hard to lose a father, said the Sicilian.

Harder than losing a mother?

When you lose your father you know there’ll be no more miracles.

I never knew any miracles, said Pasquale beside Danielle on the grass. My father disappeared like a stone into a well before I knew him … so I never knew that loss.

The galaxies were visible at Peniel, as they never are on the plain. More than alcohol their silence makes people talk.

Is your father alive, Danielle? asked the boy.

He’s alive … I don’t know him like Virginio knew his father. He doesn’t talk to me much. All he says to me is: You’ll never make a wife, Danielle, like your mother was, you’re not modest enough to make a man happy, my girl.

Perhaps your Papa doesn’t see you as you are, said Pasquale, as if each of his words were a button he was pushing through a buttonhole.

Pasquale should know, declared Virginio, suddenly jubilant, for our Pasquale has eyes only for you!

The men, except Pasquale, laughed and the boy chanted:

<verse>
Guarda quanto è bella ’sta mela
quanto è bellissima e cotta!
</verse>

A few days later I climbed up to the pass with the idea of paying Marius a visit. I looked down and saw his herd grazing by the stream. Then I heard his voice.

Marius à Sauva!

This time there was no doubt. Each syllable was distinct and each syllable could be heard twice as it echoed off the Tête de Duet. I crouched down on the ground and protected my head with my arms as you do when lightning is near. Let no more words be said, I prayed. Let him be quiet.

Marius à Sauva!

I crept forward on my stomach. He was standing by the first boulder below. His arms were outstretched.

For your slope I have legs! he shouted.

The words still sounded like an order. What did he expect to happen? What did he hope to see change among the crags?

For your slope I have my old legs!

The first time he had said nothing about his age. Now he was shouting about being old.

For your peak I have eyes!

He covered his eyes with his hands as if weeping.

The echo of each word made the silence which followed more terrible.

For your trees I have arms!

It would have been like a reply if something had moved. Everything remained motionless. Even I was holding my breath.

For your trees, my faithful arms!

Johnny was standing a little distance away from Marius, his tail between his legs.

For your load I have a back!

Not even the shape of a cloud changed. The old man was on his knees, looking up at the rockface.

For braking your sledge I have heels!

He was banging his feet on the earth and leaning his weight backwards as if bringing a charged sledge down a slope.

For braking your sledge I have heels and buttocks!

The cows were grazing peacefully behind him.

He climbed up on a boulder and stood on top of it, a good two metres above the ground. The sight of his tiny figure on the boulder dwarfed by the vast slopes of Peniel made me understand something. Marius was speaking of his achievement. Marius set no great store on the opinion of others. What Marius had done all his life he had done for its own sake. His achievement wasn’t only his herd of thirty cows. It was also his will. Every day now, old and alone, he found an answer to the question Why go on? Nobody ever replied for him. Every day of the summer he had found the answer himself. And now, alone, he was boasting of it. That is what I told myself.

He thrust his hands into his trousers.

For your grot I have balls! For your grot my balls!

In the grass were autumn crocuses, their yellow and violet petals open like the beaks of baby birds. I smashed them with my fist. I smashed every one I could see.

<br>When the woodcutters came to wash that evening, Danielle took Pasquale aside and said: I must talk to you.

Next Sunday, he said.

No! she insisted. Now! I can’t stay another day if I don’t talk to someone.

Pasquale went over to the trough and conferred with Father. She heard them speaking in Italian. Within five minutes Father was chivying the others to get a move on. The ritual of combing their hair one by one before the broken bit of mirror was renounced. They picked up their sacks, said good-bye, and with the slow list of their habitual fatigue, made their way to the car. Alberto the Sicilian got into the driver’s seat.

Pasquale stayed behind and started shaving in front of the broken mirror.

You can’t see a thing, Danielle said. Why do you have to shave now?

It’s the first time you’ve asked me to supper.

Supper, it’s only soup!

She began to sob silently. At first, peering into the mirror in which he could see nothing, Pasquale did not notice. It was her immobility which finally made him look up in her direction. He saw her shoulders trembling.

Shhh, he said, ssshhh. He walked her towards the chalet. A goose followed them. The door was open. Inside he stopped because it was pitch-dark and he could see nothing. She led him by the hand to a chair pulled up by the table, then she sat down herself on the chair opposite. She thought neither of lighting the lamp nor of heating the soup.

Something happened this afternoon, she said.

What?

In the pitch darkness, her hands placed on the table, she told him, quietly and slowly. She even told him about the crocuses. When she had finished there was silence. They heard a cow pissing in the stable, separated from the kitchen by a wall of pine boards.

Why should an old man talk to the mountains like that? she whispered.

Danielle, said Pasquale, speaking very slowly and weighing each word, it was not to the mountains the old man was shouting, it was not to the mountains he was offering himself part by part, it was to you and you know that, you know that, don’t you?

She began to sob again and the sobs became howls. She stood up to take in breath and to howl louder. Pasquale felt his way round the table and took her in his arms. She pressed her face as hard as she could against his chest. She bit his shirt which tasted of resin and sweat. She bit a hole in it.

<br>On his wrist Pasquale had a watch with an alarm. It woke him at four-thirty. He did not want the others to pass by the chalet to fetch him, for he knew she would not yet understand their laughter. He kissed her repeatedly, he felt for his boots and clothes on the floor, and he slipped out to dress on the grass where they always left the Mercedes.

If today you pass through Bergamo and take the road north towards Zogno, you will find at the edge of the town where the sidewalk is no longer paved and the telegraph poles border the road, opposite an AGIP garage, next to a yard where men repair tyres, a shop with a sign that says VERDURA E ALIMENTARI. If it’s winter you will find Pasquale inside serving. He weighs the vegetables on the scales with the scrupulousness and precision of Saint Peter. He looks preoccupied and proud.

Danielle’s baby was a girl whom they christened Barbara. In the waste-land behind the shop, Pasquale has fixed a swing on a plane tree and Barbara sometimes plays there with her friends. The men in the tyre yard call Barbara their *Uccellina*, their tiny bird.

If it’s summer you will not see Pasquale, for having spent all his savings on the shop, he’s obliged once again to work as a woodcutter in the mountains on the other side of the frontier. When he’s away he writes to Danielle most Sundays, telling her how many trees they’ve felled and what the weather is like. Danielle speaks Italian to her customers in the shop but with a noticeable French accent. She is more smartly dressed than many of them and wears large gold-coloured rings in her ears. She is expecting another baby.

Hanging on a wall near the door is a cage. The bird in it is blackish, a Blue Rock Thrush with a yellow beak and eyes like sequins. Whenever a customer comes into the shop the Blue Rock Thrush croaks out one of the insults Pasquale taught him. He is able to distinguish between men and women so that the insult fits. The customers would miss him by now if he weren’t there. Sometimes a customer speaks back to the bird as if to a fellow sufferer, cursing men or women or the government or priests or lawyers or the tax office or the weather or the world. And sometimes when no one is paying him any attention or feeding him any nuts, he blinks his sequin eyes and slowly repeats a phrase which has the accent and cadence of another language, of the voice of another teacher.

Marius à Sauva! Marius à Sauva …

In the little grocery shop there’s no question of sounds deceiving.

** Once In Europa

Before the poppy flowers, its green calyx is hard like the outer shell of an almond. One day this shell is split open. Three green shards fall to the earth. It is not an axe that splits it open, simply a screwed-up ball of membrane-thin folded petals like rags. As the rags unfold, their colour changes from neonate pink to the most brazen scarlet to be found in the fields. It is as if the force that split the calyx were the need of this red to become visible and to be seen.

The first sounds I remember are the factory siren and the noise of the river. The siren was very rare and probably that’s why I remember it: they only sounded it in case of an accident. It was always followed by shouts and the sound of men running. The noise of the river I remember because it was present all the while. It was louder in the spring, it was quieter in August, but it never stopped. During the summer with the windows open you could hear it in the house; in the winter, after Father had put up the double windows, you couldn’t hear it indoors, but you heard it as soon as you went outside to have a shit or to fetch some wood for the stove. When I went to school I walked beside the sound of the river.

At school we learnt to draw a map of the valley with the river coloured in blue. It was never blue. Sometimes the Giffre was the colour of bran, sometimes it was grey like a mole, sometimes it was milky, and occasionally but very rarely, as rare as the siren for accidents, it was transparent, and you could see every stone on its bed.

Here there’s only the sound of the wind in the sheet flapping above us.

Once my mother told me to look after my baby cousin, Claire. She left us alone in the garden. I started hunting for snails and I forgot Claire as I followed the track down to the river behind the furnaces. When my mother came back she found my baby cousin alone in the cradle under the plum trees.

The eagle could have come! she screamed, and pecked her poor eyes out!

She ordered me to pick some nettles, and stood over me whilst I did so. I remember I tried to protect my fingers by pulling down the sleeves of my pullover to cover my hands. The bunch of nettles I’d picked lay on the bench beside the water tap outside the door, waiting for my father to return.

You have to punish Odile, my mother said to him when he arrived and she handed him a cloth to hold the nettles with. She pulled up my pinafore. I was wearing nothing underneath.

Father stood there, still as a post. Then, picking up the nettles, he held them under the tap and turned on the water.

Like this it’ll hurt less, he said. Leave her to me.

My mother went indoors and my father flicked the water from the nettles onto my backside. Not a single nettle touched me. He saw to that.

I thought I would be frightened and I am not. Since he was a small boy he was a son I could trust. Christian never did crazy things like the others and he was always reassuring. He inherited a lot from his father. I’ll never forget, for as long as I live, the time when he grew his first moustache. I couldn’t help crying out, he looked so much like his father. Perhaps the craziest thing Christian has ever done, at least amongst the things I know about, is to bring me up here. You’re sure you’re ready, Mother? Yes, my boy, I answered. And he screwed up his face as if he were in pain. Perhaps he was laughing.

Three thousand metres above the earth—he said he could climb to five thousand, I don’t know whether he was boasting—with nothing but air between us and what we can see below and I’m not frightened! The moment our feet left the ground, the wind was there. The wind is holding us up and I feel safe, I feel—I feel like a word in the breath of a voice.

There was a riddle I liked as a child: four point to the sky, four walk in the dew and four have food in them; all twelve make one—what is it?

A cow, answered Régis, my elder brother, sighing loudly to show he had already heard the riddle many times before.

Odile, how is it a cow? asked poor Emile, my younger brother. People would take advantage of Emile all his life. His laziness was not so much a sin as a sickness. Each time I was pleased that Emile couldn’t remember the riddle; it offered me the chance of explaining.

A cow has two horns, two ears pointing up, four legs for walking on, and four teats!

Six teats! cried Régis.

Four with milk in them!

Mother encouraged Régis to work with the furnaces because she was worried about Emile; it was going to be difficult for Emile to find a job anywhere, and so it made more sense if Emile was the one to stay at home with Father.

Father was against any son of his working in the factory. Régis would do better to go to Paris like men had done as long as anyone could remember. Long before the Eiffel Tower, long before the Arc de Triomphe, long before factories, they had gone to Paris to stoke fires and to sweep chimneys, and in the spring they had come back, money in their wallets, proud of themselves! Nobody could be proud of working—there. Father pointed with his thumb out of the window.

Times change, Achille, you forget that.

Forget! First, they try to take our land, then they want our children. What for? To produce their manganese. What use is manganese to us?

When Father was out in the fields, Régis said: He doesn’t know what a stupid old man he looks, Papa, leading his four miserable cows through a factory yard four times a day!

We’re over the factory. When we veer to the north I can smell the fumes in its smoke.

One night I went out to lock up the chickens and I found Father by the pear tree staring up at the sky and the flames flicking out of the top of the tallest chimney stack, almost half as tall as the cliff face behind it.

Look, Odile, he whispered, look! It’s like a black viper standing on its tail—can you see its tongue?

I can see the flames, Papa, some nights they’re blue.

Venom! he said. Venom!

Whenever I went near the factory, I saw the dust. It was the colour of cow’s liver, except that, instead of being wet and shiny, it was a dry kind of sand: it was like dried liver, pulverised into dust. The big shop was taller than any pine tree and when one of the furnaces was opened, the hot air as it rose would make a draught so that high up, by the topmost girders, a breeze would blow the dust off all the ledges and you’d see a trailing cloud like a red veil hiding the roofing. This dust astonished and fascinated me. It turned the hair of all the men who didn’t wear hats slightly auburn.

The men who worked in the factory smelt of sweat, some of them of wine or garlic, and all of them of something dusty and metallic. Like the smell of the lead in a pencil when it’s sharpened. For my work at school I had a pencil sharpener in the form of a globe, it was so small you couldn’t tell the countries, only the difference between land and sea.

White the page of the world below. Like the traces of tiny animals in the snow, the scribbles of what I knew as a child. Nobody else could read them here. I can see the roof, the pear tree by the shit-house, the byre we stored wood in with hives on the balcony—the basin where I washed sheets for Mother is filled with snow, for there’s no trace of it—the garden beneath the windows, the little orchard, and surrounding all, as a floor surrounds a cat’s saucer, the factory grounds. Every year a man came to the school to explain to us children why the factory was built where it was and why it was the pride of the region. Men had come from New York, he said, to visit it! Then he drew on the blackboard the course of the river. His was white on black and the one below is black on white. The river goes through the factory. The factory squats on the river like a woman peeing. He didn’t say that.

Around the beginning of the century, he told the schoolchildren, men everywhere in the world were dreaming of a new power which was the power of electricity! This new power was hidden in our mountains, in their white waterfalls. They called the waterfalls White Coal! He made it look simple on the blackboard. Engineers canalised the water in cast-iron pipes which were two metres in diameter. They let the water, once captured, fall vertically until it acquired a pressure of 100 kilos per square centimetre, and with this pressure the water of our waterfalls turned giant wheels in turbines, which, turning, produced nine million kilowatts of electricity per hour. The beginning of electrometallurgy in Europe! he cried. *Vive la République!*

Its work done, the river rejoined its course and made its way to the sea. Do the fish go through the turbines? a child asked. No, no, dear, answered the man. Why not? We have filters.

Our house had three rooms. The kitchen where everything happened and I did my homework. The Pele where my two brothers slept. And the Third Room where my parents and I slept. In the summer, after we’d brought the hay in, my brothers sometimes liked to sleep in the barn. Then I’d move into the Pele and sleep there alone. Opposite the bed hung a mirror with a black-spotted glass. When I couldn’t sleep I lay there and talked to myself. I talked to my little finger. What was in the Beginning? I asked. Silence. Before God created the world and there was no earth, no manganese, and no mountains, what was there? The finger wagged. If you see a spider on a table and you brush him off, the table’s still there, if you take the table outside, there’s still the floorboards, if you take up the floorboards there’s still the earth, if you cart the earth away there’s still a sky with stars on the other side of the world, so what was there at the beginning? The finger didn’t reply and I bit it.

Seen from the height I’m now at, Father’s refusal to sell his farm to the factory looks absurd. We were surrounded. Every year Father was obliged to lead his four cows through an ever larger factory yard over more railway lines. Every year the slag mountains were growing higher, hiding the house and its little plot more effectively from the road and from its own pastures on the other side of the river. The owners first doubled, then trebled, the price they were prepared to pay him. His reply remained the same. My patrimony is not for sale. Later they tried to force him out by law. He said he would dynamite their offices. Now the snow covers all.

My job was to feed the rabbits. In the early spring it was dandelions. Father said there was no other valley in the world with as many dandelions as ours. Dandelion millionaires, he called us. Rabbits eat with such impatience, as if they are eating their way towards life! Their jaws munching the dandelion leaves was the fastest thing I’d ever seen and their muzzles quivered as fast as their jaws munched.

There was a black buck rabbit I hated. He had something evil in his eye. He was always waiting for his evil moment to come and he nipped me with his teeth more than once. Mother stunned the rabbits and strung them up by their hind legs and gouged out their eyes with a knife and they bled to death. When she did this it was always on a Friday, because a rabbit, roasted in the oven with mustard, was a feast to be eaten on Sunday, when the men could stay at the table drinking gnôle after lunch and not go to work.

You can drink two litres of cider and never piss a drop—it all comes out in sweat, Achille my boy, on the furnaces.

I tried to persuade Mother to kill the black rabbit. He’s our only big buck, she said. Eventually she cooked him. And to my surprise, I couldn’t eat anything. She must be coming down with something, Father said. I couldn’t eat because I couldn’t stop thinking of how much I hated him.

The moment the snow disappeared, Mother started to nag Father. They’re digging their gardens up at Pessy, she’d cry. It’s too soon to plant, he’d say, without looking up from his newspaper, the earth’s not warm enough. We’re always the last! she complained. And our cauliflowers last year? My cauliflowers were as big as buckets, he boasted.

It took Papa three days to turn the earth of the garden and to dig in the manure. I helped him by forking the manure out of the wheelbarrow. The lilac trees were in flower and a cuckoo was singing in the forest above the factory. It was as hot as in June. Father had his shirt-sleeves rolled up, and when he was too hot, he removed his cap and he wiped his bald head, but he refused to take off his black corduroy waistcoat. Every spring he said the same thing: Do the opposite of the walnut tree! I knew the answer to his riddle: the walnut is the first to shed its leaves and the last to come out in leaf.

The garden was almost dug. Its brown earth was raked and drying in the sun. The first green shoots would soon be appearing in straight rows without a fault, because, just as at school we drew lines in pencil in our exercise books to write our words on, so Mother made a line on the earth with a string when she planted her rows of seed.

My fork had three metal prongs like any other pitchfork, but its wooden shaft was shorter so it was easier for me to handle. Father had made it for me. All the year it leant against the wall by the tap in the stable, ready for when I helped him clean out the stable after the evening milking, my homework done.

Often he complained about my handwriting, and it’s true it was not as good as his. He wrote with loops and curlicues as if the whole word were a single piece of string.

The rain does better on the window pane, Odile, write it again!

In the garden he straightened his back, looked at me slyly and said: When you marry, Odile, don’t marry a man who drinks.

There isn’t a man who doesn’t drink! I said.

Fetch me a glass of cider from the cellar, he ordered me, from the barrel on the right.

He drank the cider slowly, looking at the mountains with snow still on them.

I’d give a lot, Odile, to see the man you’re going to marry.

You’ll see him all right, Papa.

He shook his head and gave me back the glass. No, Odile, I’ll never see the man you marry.

He said it smiling, but I couldn’t bear him saying it. I couldn’t bear the silence of what it meant. I said the first thing that came into my head: I won’t marry a man unless I love him, and if I love him, he’ll love me, and if we love each other … if we love each other, we’ll have children, and I’ll be too busy to notice if he drinks, Papa, and if he drinks too much too often I’ll fetch him cider from the cellar, so many glasses he’ll go to sleep in the kitchen and I’ll put him to bed as soon as the cows are fed.

The Barracks below are scarcely visible in the snow. I can spot them because of blue smoke coming from a chimney. A woman is crossing the footbridge over the river. The Barracks were three minutes’ walk from the factory—the same as our house in the opposite direction. From our house to the footbridge was five minutes’ walk. Three if I ran. Mother often sent me to the shop by the Barracks to buy mustard or salt or something she’d forgotten. I walked to the bridge and then ran. At whatever time of day, the men who lived there would cry out and wave. They worked on shifts, and of those not working or sleeping some would be washing their clothes on the grass, some preparing a meal by an open window, some tinkering with an old car they hoped to put on the road. In the winter they lit bonfires outside and they brewed tea and roasted chestnuts. They were forbidden to fish in the river.

If I stopped running they held up their arms and grinned and tried to pat my head. I was always relieved to cross the bridge back to our side. Father said the Company had built the Barracks to house a hundred men as soon as the factory was finished. The Company knew they wouldn’t find more than two or three hundred local workers and so they foresaw from the beginning that they would need foreigners. Every man who lodged in the Barracks had his own secrets. Three, four, perhaps more. Impenetrable and unnameable. They turned over these secrets in their hands, wrapped them in paper, threw them in the river, burnt them, whittled them away with their knives when they had nothing else to do. Hundreds of secrets. We in the village on our side of the river had only four. Who killed Lucie Cabrol for her money? Where above Peniel is the entrance to the disused gold mine? What happens at the bridegroom’s funeral before they put him in his coffin? Who betrayed the Marmot, who was Michel’s uncle, after the factory-gate meeting? Only four secrets. Across the river they in their sheds kept hundreds.

From here, river, house, sheds, factory, bridge, all look like toys. So it was in childhood, Odile Blanc.

One blazing July day in 1950, Mademoiselle Vincent, the schoolmistress, came to the house. I hid in the stable. She wore a hat whose brim was as wide as her shoulders; it was silver-grey in colour and around it was tied a pink satin ribbon.

Merde! said Father. It’s the schoolteacher. Look, Louise!

I’ll be slipping out, Achille, said Mother.

I have come to talk to you about your daughter, Monsieur Blanc.

Not doing well at school? Do sit down, Mademoiselle Vincent.

On the contrary, I’ve come to tell you she—she scratched her hot freckled shoulder—on the contrary, I’ve come to tell you how well your Odile is doing.

Kind of you to come all this way to tell us that. A little coffee?

Father poured coffee into a cup, took off his cap and adjusted it further back on his head.

She’s never been difficult, has our Odile, he said.

Her intelligence—

I don’t know how you see it, Mademoiselle Vincent, but to my way of seeing, intelligence is not—

She is a pupil of great promise.

Wait a year or two, she’s only thirteen, said Father. In a year or two her promise—do you take sugar?

It’s just because she’s thirteen that we have to decide things now, Monsieur Blanc.

Even in my day, Father said, nobody married before sixteen!

I want to propose to you, Monsieur Blanc, that we send Odile to Cluses.

You said she’s causing no trouble, Mademoiselle. At least that’s what I understood, what sort of trouble?

Mademoiselle Vincent took off her hat and laid it on her lap. Her greying hair, a little damp, was pressed against her scalp.

No trouble, she said slowly, I want her to go to Cluses for her sake.

How for her sake?

If she stays here, Mademoiselle Vincent went on, she’ll leave school next year. If she goes to Cluses she can continue until she gets her CAP. Let her go to Cluses. She was fanning herself with a little notebook taken from her handbag.

She’d have to be a boarder? asked Father.

Yes.

Have you mentioned it to her?

Not before talking to you, Monsieur Blanc.

He shrugged his shoulders, looked at the barometer, said nothing.

Mademoiselle Vincent got to her feet, holding her hat.

I knew you’d see reason, she said, offering him her hand like a present.

I was watching through the stable door.

Nothing to do with reason! shouted Father. In God’s name! Nothing to do with reason. He paused, gave a little laugh, and leered at Mademoiselle Vincent. She was an old man’s last sin—I wonder if you can understand that, Mademoiselle—his last sin.

It will mean a lot of work, she said.

Don’t push her too hard, said Father, it won’t change anything. You’ll see I was right one day. Odile will be married before she’s eighteen. At seventeen she’ll be married.

We can’t know, Monsieur Blanc. I hope she goes on to take her Baccalaureate.

Back of my arse! You see Odile as a schoolteacher?

She might be, said Mademoiselle Vincent.

No, no. She’s too untidy. To be a teacher you have to be very tidy.

I’m not very tidy, said Mademoiselle Vincent, take me, I’m not very tidy.

You have a fine voice, Mademoiselle, when you sing, you make people happy. That makes up for a lot.

You’re a flatterer, Monsieur Blanc.

She’ll never be a teacher, Odile, she’s too … he hesitated. She’s too—too close to the ground.

Funny to think of those words now in the sky.

Twice in my life I’ve been homesick and both times it was in Cluses. The first time was the worst, for then I hadn’t yet lived anything worse than homesickness. It’s to do with life, homesickness, not death. In Cluses the first time I didn’t yet know this difference.

The school was a building of five storeys. I wasn’t used to staircases. I missed the smell of the cows, Papa raking out the fire, Maman emptying her piss-pot, everyone in the family doing something different and everybody knowing where everybody else was, Emile playing with the radio and my screaming at him, I missed the wardrobe with my dresses all mixed up with Maman’s, and the goat tapping with her horns against the door.

Ever since I could remember, everyone had always known who I was. They called me Odile or Blanc’s Daughter or Achille’s Last. If somebody did not know who I was, a single answer to a single question was enough for them to place me. Ah yes! Then you must be Régis’s sister! In Cluses I was a stranger to everyone. My name was Blanc, which began with a B, and so I was near the top of the alphabetical list. I was always among the first ten that had to stand up, or to file out.

In the school there I learnt how to look at words like something written on a blackboard. When a man swears, the words come out of his body like shit. As kids we talked like that all the time—except when we made traps with words. Adam and Eve and Pinchme went down to the river to bathe, Adam and Eve were drowned, who do you think was saved? At Cluses I learnt that words belonged to writing. We used them; yet they were never entirely ours.

One evening after the last lesson I went back into the classroom to fetch a book I’d forgotten. The French mistress was sitting at her table, her head buried in her hands, and she was crying. I didn’t dare approach her. On the blackboard behind her, I remember it so well, was the conjugation of the verb *fuir*.

If somebody had asked me in 1952: What place makes you think of men most? I wouldn’t have said the factory, I wouldn’t have said the café opposite the church when there was a funeral, I wouldn’t have said the autumn cattle market, I’d have said: the edge of a wood! Take all the edges of all the forests and copses in the valley and put them end to end like a screen, and there’d be a frieze of men! Some with guns, some with dogs, others with chain saws, a few with girls. I heard their voices from the road below. I looked at them, the slimness of the young ones, the way their checkered shirts hung loose, their boots, the way they wore their trousers, the bulges just below where their belts were fastened. I didn’t notice their faces, I didn’t bother to name them. If one of them noticed me, I’d be off. I didn’t want to say a word and I didn’t want to approach them. Watching was quite enough, and watching them, I knew how the world was made.

Take this loaf to Régis, said Mother. When it’s freezing so hard the cold penetrates to your very bones and a man needs his food in such weather.

She handed me the bread. I ran as fast as I could towards the factory; there was ice everywhere and I had to pick my way. All was frozen—railway points, locks, window frames, ruts, the cliff face behind the factory was hung with icicles, only the river still moved. At the entrance I called to the first man I could see, he had bloodshot eyes and spoke with a strong Spanish accent.

Régis! Big man of honour! he shouted and jerked his thumb upwards. I waited there on the threshold for several minutes, stamping my feet to keep them warm. When Régis arrived he was with Michel. They were of the same class: ’51. They had done their military service together.

You know Michel? asked Régis.

I knew Michel. Michel Labourier, nephew of the Marmot.

For God’s sake come in and get warm, hissed Régis between his teeth as I handed him the loaf.

Father—

It’s not the same if you’re with me. Give me your hand. Jesus! you’re cold! We’ve just tapped her.

They led me away from the big furnaces and the massive cranes overhead, which moved on rails in heaven, to another much smaller workshop.

You’re going to school at Cluses? Michel asked me.

I nodded.

Do you like it?

I miss being at home.

At least you’ll learn something there.

It’s another world, I said.

Nonsense! It’s the same bloody world. The difference is the kids who go to Cluses don’t stay poor and dumb.

We’re not dumb, I said.

He looked at me hard. Here, he said, take this to keep your brains warm. He gave me his woolen cap, red and black. I protested and he pulled the cap down on my head, laughing.

He’s a communist, said Régis later.

At that time I didn’t know what the word meant. We sat against a wall on a pile of sand. I let a handful of it run through my frozen fingers. I could feel its warmth through my stockings, touching my calves. Régis rummaged in a tin, took out his knife, and began cutting a sausage. There were some other men at the end of the shop.

So here’s your sister come to see us! shouted one of them.

Odile’s her name.

There’s a Saint Odile, did you know that?

Yes, I shouted, her fête is the thirteenth of December.

She was born blind in Alsace, the man shouted back. He was at least fifty and thin as a goat’s leg.

Was she?

She saw with her eyes for the first time when she was grown up. Then she founded a monastery.

The thin old man, who wasn’t from the valley and who knew all about Saint Odile, was pulling on the chains of a pulley which worked a machine for grasping and lifting massive weights.

Now he’s going to take the hat off the bread, said Régis.

I’ve just given you the bread, I said, understanding nothing.

See over there what’s sizzling?

In the sand?

That’s the bread with its hat on. Now watch!

Several men began to prod at the bread with long bars. To every blow the thing responded by spitting out fire. I was eating sausage. The old man’s machine came down and lifted the top off the bread as if it were a cap. Under the cap everything was incandescent. I could feel the onrush of heat, although I was at the other end of the shop. The edges of the white-hot underneath were dribbling like a ripe cheese. When a dribble fell off and hit the ground it made a brittle noise like glass and turned black. All the men were holding up shields in front of their faces.

Each bread weighs a ton, said Régis. He drank from a bottle of wine and some of the wine ran down his neck. A ton, he continued, and ferromolybdenum is worth six thousand a kilo—work it out for yourself, you’re still in school—one bread is sold for how much?

Six million.

Correct.

The bread, one and a half metres in diameter, was now phosphorescent in the sand. Régis wasn’t looking any longer. I couldn’t take my eyes off it.

Do you know the story of the Two Hunters? Régis asked.

Which story?

The story of the Two Hunters in the Forest.

The bread was changing colour. Its whiteness was turning violet. The violet of a child with croup.

I don’t think I know the story of the Two Hunters.

Once there were two hunters in the forest up at Peniel: Jean-Paul and Jean-Marc.

Water from a pipe in the roof, with hundreds of holes in it, was falling like rain onto the bread. It was scarlet now.

Jean-Paul stops and says: Look over there, Jean-Marc! I can’t see anything, replies Jean-Marc. Jean-Paul, still pointing, says: You must be blind, over there by the spruce, the one that’s been uprooted. I can see the root and the earth and the stones, Jean-Paul, I can’t see more.

The rain falling on the bread was making steam and it was hissing like a cricket.

The two hunters go deeper into the forest. Can you see her now? shouts Jean-Paul. Where? By the snow under the roots, Jean-Marc. In God’s name, yes! screams Jean-Marc. Both men stop in their tracks, then they start making their way towards the tree. The snow is up to their waists. After a while they stop to get their breath back.

The bread was getting darker and darker in colour and I could scarcely see it anymore because of the clouds of steam coming off it.

Alive? asks Jean-Marc. Jean-Paul pushes his way forward. I can feel it from here! he cries. Be careful, Jean-Paul! Careful, Jean-Paul! Jean-Paul disappears. After a moment Jean-Marc hears his friend laughing, then his laugh changes into a sigh. The happiest sigh in the world, my friend. Jean-Marc knows what is happening so he looks at the tree tops. Whilst he looks at the tree tops, he counts. When he’s counted to five thousand, he looks down, towards the spruce. No sign of Jean-Paul. Now it’s Jean-Marc’s turn.

The rain on the bread had stopped.

Jean-Marc too can feel it. He can hear the dripping. Like Jean-Paul, he falls forward onto his face and starts to laugh. His laugh too becomes a sigh.

The bread was black now, with colours in it like oil.

Do you know what they were doing, Jean-Paul and Jean-Marc?

I shook my head.

You don’t know, Odile, what the two hunters were doing?

No.

They were doing the lying-down waltz!

I looked at Régis and I thought: My kid brother—he was nine years older than I—you’re drinking too much.

The sheet sail and everything hanging from it is turning south, towards the sun in a sky of the deepest winter blue, like the blue we had to wash clothes with.

On the day when Christ ascended to heaven, the Brass Band went from hamlet to hamlet in the village playing music. Their uniforms were newly pressed, their instruments were glittering in the sun, and the leaves of the beech trees were fresh as lettuces. They played so loud they made the windows rattle and tiles fall off the roof. And after each concert in each hamlet the public offered them gnôle and cakes, so that by the end of the afternoon on Ascension Day, after a number of little concerts, the first and second saxophones were drunk as well as several trombones and a drum or two. On Ascension night, Father came home with his trumpet a little bit the worse for wear. With Father, though, nobody could tell till the evening. He never let it influence his fingers when playing.

He died on February the ninth, 1953. The next Ascension Day the band came to play in our orchard in his honour. They played a march from Verdi’s *Aïda* and a tune called “Amazing Grace.” Men from the factory lined the fence of the orchard listening to the music. Mother stood by the stable doors, arms folded across her bosom, looking up at the sky. And suddenly Papa’s house with its three rooms, its hayloft, its little wooden balcony, its chopped wood, dwarfed the factory which was the size of six cathedrals.

“Amazing Grace” begins sad and gradually the sadness becomes a chorus and so is no longer sad but defiant. For a while I believed he was there. Later the music listens to itself and discovers that something has fallen silent. Irretrievably. He had left.

Whilst I was listening to “Amazing Grace” on that afternoon in May 1953, I touched something which I wouldn’t be able to name until twenty years later. I touched the truth that the virility which women look for in men is often sly, slippery, impudent. It’s not grand, what they’re looking for. It’s cautious and cunning, just like Father was.

The men on the other side of the fence started to clap and Michel waved at me. I turned away, saying to myself that only a communist would wave at a moment like that!

Michel’s motorbike was red and was made in Czechoslovakia. The spare parts for it were cheaper than for any other bike, Michel said, because Czechoslovakia was communist and the communists didn’t put profit before everything else. On several Sundays he asked me if I’d like to go for a spin with him and each time I refused. He was too sure of himself, he thought he knew better than anybody else in the valley. He had called my father a Chopping Block. Not to me. I heard about it from a friend. Achille Blanc has been a chopping block for others all his life! Those were his words. So I said no to him.

The sixth time he asked me was in August. We were both on holiday. The hay was in the barn. Régis had bought an old third-hand Peugeot and was painting it in the orchard. Emile was there in the house when Michel came. He drives well, Odile, said Emile, you’ve nothing to be frightened about. On Wednesday morning early, Michel announced, I’ll pick you up at five. At five! I protested. Five’s not too early if we’re going to Italy! Italy! I screamed. Yet, however loud I screamed it, the word was having its effect. If we were really going to drive to Italy, everything was beyond my control. I said nothing more. And on Tuesday night I prepared my trousers, my boots, and a haversack with a picnic for us both.

We went over the Grand St. Bernard a little to the east of the Mont Blanc where the wind now is blowing the snow like my chiffon scarf against the blue sky. Neither of us knew what life had in store. Nothing happened. Michel had brought a thermos of coffee which we drank from for the first time near Chamonix. We passed a factory which, Michel said, was like a copy of ours. It took up less space. On the bike we climbed higher and higher. We ate our picnic above the tree line. I never breathed so much air in my life. Mouth, nose, ears and eyes all took in air. At the summit we threw snowballs at each other and saw the dogs. They were as big as ponies. There was a lake. A lake at that height was as surprising as tears at a victory. When the wind was too cold I put my head down against his leather jacket. I tucked my knees under his legs and held on with one hand to his leather belt. Around the hairpins I lay down with the bike like grass blown by the wind.

She overheated a bit on the last stretch, he said. You probably smelt the burnt oil?

Motor oil, I said, I don’t know what it smells like.

On the red 3 50CC two-stroke twin motorbike made in Czechoslovakia we came down into Italy, on the other side of the mountain. The cows looked poorer, the goats thinner, there was less wood and more rocks, yet the air was like a kiss. In such air women didn’t have to be like we were on our side of the mountain. Where we have wild raspberries in ruined pine forests, I told myself, they have grapes on vines which grow between apple trees! For the first time in my life I was envious.

Did you notice the Saumua coming down to Aosta? he asked.

No.

It’s the biggest truck since the war. Takes a load of thirty tons.

We arrived back before it was dark. I was in time to shut up the chickens and take the milk on my back to the dairy. My behind was sore, my hands were grimy, my hair was tangled. It took me hours to untangle it before I went to sleep. But I was proud of myself. I’d been to Italy.

We’ll do another trip, Michel proposed.

School begins next week.

You’re a funny one, Odile, there’s no school on Sunday.

No, I said, thanks for this time.

You’re a good passenger, I’ll say that for you.

Are there bad ones?

Plenty. They don’t trust the driver astride the machine. You can’t ride a bike if you don’t let go. I’m willing to bet you weren’t frightened for a moment, Odile. You had confidence, didn’t you? You weren’t frightened for a moment, were you?

Maybe yes and maybe no. His sureness made me want to tease him.

A weekend, two months later, I was coming home from Cluses and the bus driver said:

Have you heard what happened to Michel?

Michel who?

Michel Labourier. You didn’t hear about his accident?

On his motorbike?

No, in the factory.

What happened?

Lost both his legs.

Where is he?

Lyons. It’s the best hospital in the country for burns. A military hospital. They used to fight wars with lead, now they fight them with flames. Both legs gone.

I stared through the bus window and I saw nothing, not even the factory when we passed it. The next day I went to see his mother.

Perhaps it would have been better, she said, if it had killed him outright.

No, I said, no, Madame Labourier.

He’s not allowed visitors, she said, he’s in a glass cage.

I’m sure you’ll be able to visit him soon.

It’s too far. Too far for anyone to go.

Is he still in danger?

For his life, no.

Don’t cry, Madame Labourier, don’t cry.

I cried when I thought about it every evening for a week in Cluses. For a man to lose both legs. I thought too about what the boys call their third leg. When you’re young and both your legs are supple your third leg goes stiff … when you’re old and your legs are stiff, your third leg goes limp. And this silly joke made me cry more.

New Year’s Eve, 1953, I spent at home. Father’s chair was empty. After supper Régis and Emile got up to go to the dance in the village. Come on, Odile, said Emile. I’ll stay with Mother. You like dancing! insisted Emile. There’s no boy in the village good enough for our Odile now, said Régis. They left. Mother sewed and went to bed early. I heard the bells pealing at midnight on the radio and the crowds cheering. I wasn’t sleepy and so I let myself out and walked once round the orchard. The grass was as hard as iron. The bise had been blowing for several days and the sky was clear. Looking up at the stars, I thought of Father. Nobody can look up at the stars when they are so hard and bright and not think that they don’t have something to say. Then I thought of Michel without his legs and the Red Star he wore on his leather jacket. In their silence I missed his jokes and his cough. I went to check that the chicken house was well shut. When it was minus fifteen for a week on end, the foxes would cross the factory yard looking for food. A month earlier the night shift had killed a wild boar behind the turbine house. Suddenly the wind changed and to my amazement I heard dance music. A tune from a band wafting towards me. It seemed to come in waves, just as the stars seemed to twinkle. Distance and cold can do strange things. I made up my mind. I returned to the house, put my hair in a scarf, and found an old army coat. I would go and see what was happening at the Ram’s Run.

Every New Year’s Eve the Company imported a band to the factory and the men who were lodged in the Barracks had their own dance. The villagers didn’t participate, the Company didn’t encourage them to, and it was for this reason that it was called the Ram’s Run. I crossed the railway line. The music was louder. The furnaces were throbbing as usual. The smoke from the chimney stacks was white in the starlight. Otherwise everything was still and frozen. Not a soul to be seen outside. The ground-floor rooms adjoining the office block were lit up. There were no curtains and the windows were misted over.

I crept up to one and scraped like a mouse with my fingernail. I couldn’t believe my eyes, there was a man who was dancing sitting down on the floor! He had his hands on his hips and he threw out his feet in front of him and his feet came back as fast as they went out, like balls bouncing off a wall. I was so amazed I didn’t notice the approach of the stranger who was now at my side looking down at me.

Good evening, he said. Why don’t you come into the warm?

I shook my head.

You must be hot-blooded, not to mind the cold on a night like this!

It’s only minus fifteen, I said.

Those were the first words I spoke to him. After them there was a silence. The two of us stood there by the light of the window, our breaths steamy and entwining like puffs from the nostrils of the same horse.

What’s your name?

Odile.

Your name in full?

Mademoiselle Odile Blanc.

He stood to attention like a soldier and bowed his head. He must have been two metres tall. His hair was cropped short and he had enormous thumbs, his hands pressed against his thighs, his thumbs were as big as sparrows.

My name is Stepan Pirogov.

Where were you born?

Far away.

In a valley?

Somewhere which is flat, flat, flat.

No rivers?

There’s a river there called the Pripiat.

Ours is called the Giffre.

Blanc? Blanc means white like milk?

Not always—not when you order vin blanc!

White like snow, no?

Not the white of an egg! I shouted.

Give me one more joke, he said and opened the door.

I was standing in the vestibule of the Ram’s ballroom. After the glacial air outside, it felt very warm. There was the noise of men talking—like the sound of the fermentation of fruit in a barrel. There was a strong smell of sour wine, scent, and the red dust that in the end powders every ledge and every flat surface facing upwards in the factory. Along one wall of the vestibule—which was really an anteroom to the offices, where the clerical staff took off their coats and put on their aprons—there was a long table where women whom I’d never seen before were serving drinks to a group of men who had obviously been drinking for a longer time than was good for them. My brother said that the women for the Ram’s Run were hired by the company and brought from far away, somewhere near Lyons, in a bus.

I wanted to get out into the air and I wanted him not to forget me immediately. So I told him a story about my grandmother. It wasn’t strictly my grandmother. It was the woman my grandfather lived with after his wife was dead. When he died, Céline—she was called—Céline continued to live in Grandfather’s house alone. She was old by then. You can’t explain all that to a stranger whom you’ve just met a few minutes before and who has taken you into a bar full of men with the windows steamed up and the floorboards muddy and wet with melted ice. So I told him it was my grandmother.

Grandma always had a billygoat, so the neighbours had the habit of bringing their goats to her when they were in heat. She used to charge a thousand a visit, and if the goat didn’t take they had another visit for nothing. One year, every single neighbour who had come with a goat in heat demanded a second visit. Something was wrong. Grandmother talked about it to Nestor the gravedigger who was married to her niece and bred rabbits whose skins were sold as otter. It’s simple, he said to her, he’s too cold, in your stable all alone, the he-goat must be freezing. Build him a stall where he’ll keep warm! Grandma went home and thought about Nestor’s advice and decided it was too much trouble. Instead, she’d bring the beast into the kitchen—except when the sun was out. The he-goat recovered and all the neighbours’ goats were going to have kids at Eastertime. When Grandma next saw Nestor the gravedigger, she thanked him for his advice. So you built him a stall? he said. Too much trouble, she replied, I brought him into the kitchen. Nestor looked surprised. And the smell? he asked. Grandma shrugged her shoulders. What do you expect with a he-goat, she said, he soon got used to it!

I was glad when he laughed. Then I caught sight of myself in a mirror above a sink. What was I doing here? Quickly I turned away from the mirror. He stood there, towering above me, protective like a tree. And hesitating. Perhaps under the neon light I was a surprise to him. Perhaps outside he had thought I was older. Perhaps he hadn’t seen how ridiculous my clothes were. Despite myself I glanced at the mirror again.

Your feet must be cold, he said.

I looked down at my thick, artificial-fur-lined boots and shook my head.

If we dance, they’ll warm up! And at that moment the band, whom I couldn’t see, started to play. A polka. This man, to whom I’d told the story about the goat, took my arm and delicately guided me towards the Ram’s Run. The band were installed on planks laid on scaffolding. All the other women wore high-heeled shoes. The music sounded strange, for the room, which was normally a storeroom, had no ceiling. Far up, high above, were the iron girders of the same roof which covered the topmost furnace. Most of the women were wearing low-cut dresses and some wore golden bracelets. There were also men dancing with each other. And one woman dancing alone with a gigantic feather.

What’s so surprising about music is that it comes from the outside. It feels as if it comes from the inside. The man who had clicked his heels and announced his name as Stepan Pirogov was dancing with Odile Blanc. Yet inside the music, which was inside me, Odile and Stepan were the same thing. If he had touched me whilst we were dancing like men touch women, I’d have slapped his face. Behind the band there was a heap of shovels, if he had touched me, I would have taken a shovel to him. He knew better. He didn’t interfere with what the music was doing. He tossed back his head at each beat, chin flung up, neck taut, mouth smiling. When the band stopped, he lifted his hand off my shoulder and stared at the players as if surprised that there was no more music, then he nodded and the band started up again. It looked as though he ordered the music with a nod of his head.

For a long while, I don’t know how long, before we had exchanged anything except a silly story about a goat, before anything had been decided between us, when I knew nothing of Stepan Pirogov, the two of us let the music fill us like a single cart drawn uphill by a cantering horse.

Are you thirsty? he eventually asked.

We returned to the vestibule with its neon lights, where he bought me a lemonade. This time I avoided looking in the mirror. His accent was very foreign.

Where is it you live, Odile?

In the house after the shunting line stops.

Where the cows are? My father kept a cow.

Just one?

Just one, outside Stockholm.

Were you born in Stockholm?

I don’t know where I was born.

Your mother could tell you.

I never knew my mother.

She’s dead?

No.

In the heat and the smell of sour wine and the din of the men’s laughter in the Ram’s Run, I suddenly felt a kind of pity for him. Or was it a pity for both of us? I gazed at the lemonade in the bottom of my glass. I could feel him looking down at me—like a tree at a rabbit. I raised my head. My sudden fear had gone.

I’ve been here three months, he said.

And before?

Before I was on a ship.

A sailor?

If you like.

You won’t stay here long if you’re a sailor!

I’d stay long for you, he said.

You know nothing about me!

I’ve known you since I was first conceived in the womb of a mother I never knew. He pronounced this extraordinary sentence in a strange singsong voice.

I have to go, I said.

Spend a little more of the year with me, Odile.

Is that how you talk in your language? I asked.

In my language I’d call you Dilenka.

It was different dancing with him the second time. I’m dancing with a sailor, I kept telling myself. If Mother knew I was dancing with a sailor.

I’ve never seen the sea in my life. When the dance was over, I went to fetch my coat.

I have to work tomorrow, I told him.

Can I see you on Saturday afternoon?

I may have to work, I don’t know.

I’ll be waiting for you by the footbridge, he said.

What time? I could have bitten off my tongue for saying that.

I’ll be there the whole afternoon, listening to the river till you come. He said this in the same singsong voice.

My mother was washing out a bucket in the stable and I was milking before taking the bus to Cluses, it was still dark—and she screamed at me:

You would never have dared do that, if your father was still alive!

Do what?

Go to the Ram’s Run!

There was no harm in it, Mother.

And to come back at four in the morning!

Three!

No one goes to the Ram’s Run!

They’re not beasts.

What did I do—what in God’s name did I do—to deserve a daughter like you?

You did with Papa—may he rest in peace—what most wives do, Mother.

Listen to her! my mother was screaming. She talks like that to her own mother.

She hurled the bucketful of water at me. It was so cold it took my breath away and the shock of it made me fall off the stool. Lilac calmly turned her head to see what had happened. Cows are the calmest cows in the world, was one of Stepan’s jokes. He would say it in a mournful voice.

I kept him waiting the whole afternoon by the footbridge. When at last I arrived, he didn’t complain. He stood there listening and whilst I talked, he fingered the fringe of the scarf I had round my neck. It was so cold, the sound of the river was as shrill as the train’s whistle. A train came once a fortnight to take away the molybdenum and manganese. Always at night. And since my earliest childhood the train woke me up. We walked across the lines to the big furnace shop.

Do you know each furnace has a name? he asked. The big one there is called Peter. The other one is called Tito … Why does it make you smile?

They weren’t called those names when I was young.

Now he was smiling.

There’s another called Napoleon. Why does it make you smile?

A little smile, I said.

Not so little now! he said.

Smaller than yours!

Do you know how to measure a smile?

Yes, I said.

He bent down and picked me up so my mouth was level with his, and he kissed me. On the nose.

I know so little about him, yet with the years of thinking I have learnt a great deal more from the same few facts. Perhaps there are never many facts when you first love somebody. The facts are what destiny has in store for you. His foster parents were Ukrainians and left Russia in the early twenties to settle in Sweden. One day a Russian who knew his foster mother when she was in Kiev arrived with a swaddled bundle. In it was a two-month-old baby. The couple gave the baby their family name of Pirogov. They had no children of their own. The “father” was a chairmaker and the “mother” took in washing. They had had to leave their country because in 1918 the man had joined the wrong army—the green not the red one. His “father” joined the army of a man whom Stepan called Batko Makhno. Batko, he said, meant Father. I didn’t understand much.

The winter passed slowly. One Saturday we went for a walk in the snow. He was wearing blue wool mittens. As we walked, his arm round my neck and one of his huge blue woolen hands on my shoulder, he told me a story.

Once there were two bears asleep under a rock. Their fur was all white with hoarfrost. The smaller of the two opened her eyes.

Mischka! she growled.

Mouchenka! growled the other.

We can speak! Say something. Say a word.

Honey, he growled.

Snow, she said.

Spring, he said.

Death, she said.

Why death? asked Mischka.

As soon as we speak, we know death.

God! said Mischka and pushed his muzzle into her neck.

Why does God have so little power? asked Mouchenka, and placed a paw on his back.

How should I know?

Everything that exists hides him, she said.

He’s in his lair, he said.

He could come out, couldn’t he? complained Mouchenka. Mouchenka moved her head from the shelter of the rock and the snow fell on her large black muzzle. Mischka, why does he have so little power?

Because he created the world, growled the bear.

So he spent all his power doing that and has been exhausted ever since! She blew the snow off her mouth.

No, said Mischka.

What do you mean, No?

He could have created everything differently so it did exactly what he wanted.

That would have been better?

Yes.

For a long while the two bears said nothing. At last the she-bear said: If it did exactly what he wanted, no one would recognise him! Don’t you see? There’d be no need to recognise him. There’d be nothing else but him!

Mouchenka! You were simpler when you couldn’t speak.

As things are, she went on, he hopes to be recognised all the while. Keeps sending reminders. Look at the snow falling, Mischka, it’s falling on every pine needle.

He’s clever, growled the he-bear, he’s made it all so he stays hidden! He scratched the fur on her hip with his paw. He’s made it all so he can be left in peace!

No, no, said Mouchenka, God made the world as it is, so he should be needed. It’s what he wanted.

At that very moment two shots rang out, and a hunter shouted: Bagged the two of them!

The blood of the two bears stained first their fur and later the snow.

Christian is pointing at something below. He is wearing the woolen gloves which I knitted for him. I can’t make out what he’s pointing at.

The next weekend I suggested Stepan should come to the house. I told him about my brothers. I was hoping that if Mother saw him she might relent a little. Since the morning when she had thrown the water in the stable, she hadn’t addressed a single word to me.

Not yet, Dilenka, not yet. You take a man home for the first time and everyone looks at him and starts wondering about the future, they try him on—like a pair of trousers—to see how he fits. If I were your age, but I’m a fully grown man, a foreigner, I don’t have anything here, and they’ll need a lot of reassuring—it’s too soon, I don’t know yet where to take you. Let’s wait a little.

One Saturday Stepan came to Cluses by the midday bus. He wanted to see the room in the widow Besson’s house, where I lodged. This time it was I who was against the visit. The room was too small and the bed took up half the space. Instead, I had a present for him. I’d wrapped it up in a scarf of mine, a white chiffon scarf.

What can it be? he asked.

It was a hip flask for gnôle with leather round it. I saved up for a month to buy it. Stepan had complained about the cold when he was working on the night shift.

Charge Peter with shovels, six tons, *schest*! Stay near and his heat dries up the sweat so it burns you. Step back and you freeze in the night air. Minus twenty-eight. *Minus dvadtzat vossiem*.

He taught me to count in Russian, and I learnt like boys learn to imitate birds.

May a mouthful of gnôle on your night shift keep you company between the hot and the cold! I wrote that sentence on an envelope and I stuck the envelope to the flask before I gave it to him.

When he read the message on the envelope, he threw the flask up in the air and caught it in one hand. We were standing in front of the bus station in Cluses. Then he kissed me. On the mouth. Each time it was for longer.

Father’s friend, César the water-diviner, used to hold a pendulum over a local map and wherever there was buried water in the earth, it began to turn in circles like a duckling. Am I circling over the Mole because on a Sunday in May Stepan and I climbed there to pick globeflowers? A woman I could shout to on the path below is wearing a dress I never had. How much we will be forgotten!

Whilst we climbed, Stepan told me about his childhood. I was brought up, he said, to the smell of fish glue—the smell of the ocean bed. And I don’t know if you’ll believe me but it’s true: I could hold nails between my teeth as soon as I was eating solid food. I made my first chair when I was fifteen, and Father maintained—like a true disciple of Makhno—he maintained it was better than any throne in the world!

The sun was hot and it was the time of May when the grass goes mad with growth. As a child I believed I could see it growing. The tin roofs of the chalets when we reached the alpage were crackling in the heat. Stepan didn’t know where the noise came from. Somebody’s throwing stones! he said. There was nobody. Just the two of us.

My father and I disagreed about one thing, he went on, only one thing and what a thing! Stepan had never seen globeflowers before. I picked some for him. They’re like brass buttons, he said, who cleans them? I laughed. We disagreed about one thing, he went on. I thought of Russia as my country and I wanted to go back and my father, who was really my stepfather, was against it. When I was eighteen, after the victory over the Germans, I filled in the forms for repatriation. Repatriation! he screamed at me in Russian. You weren’t even born there! You don’t know anything! You have to be Russian to be so stupid!

Stepan held five golden flowers to my shoulder and said in his singsong voice: Five Stars! The rest is ashes. You’re a General. Generalissimo Odile Achilovich!

Did you get your passport? I asked him.

No, they refused me. No homeland.

I put our bunch of flowers in a little spring so they could drink, and we lay on our backs looking up at the sky, just as now I’m on my stomach looking down on the earth. Stepan put his hand on me and started to caress me. Today I won’t stop him, I said to myself. He was talking about cities, asking me which one I’d like to go to—to London, to Milan, to Rotterdam, to Oslo, to Glasgow? It had never occurred to me before that somebody could choose where to live. It seemed unnatural. No, said Stepan, it’s simple with these—he held up both huge hands over my face—I can work anywhere in the world. Where, where will we go, Odile? Instead of answering him, I scrambled to my feet and ran like a wild thing down the hill towards the pine trees. When he came after me I shouted at him: You’re a Bohemian! A Bohemian, that’s what you are. I never want to see you again! I left him at the bus station. I wouldn’t let him walk me to the widow Besson’s house. I gave her the flowers and the old lady thanked me and touched my forehead. Haven’t you a little fever? You look all flushed. I shook my head to hide my tears from her. Go to bed, Odile, and I’ll make you some verveine tea, she said. Perhaps you had too much sun.

After the day of the globeflowers, Stepan posted me a letter. It was the only piece of writing I ever saw by him. I will look to see whether it’s still in the tilleul tin. He had written everything in capitals, as children do when they are first learning. The letter said: We need go nowhere, we’ll stay here, I’m arranging it, will be waiting for you by the bridge, Saturday. Mischka. I never heard him before or afterwards refer to himself as Mischka.

I was able to get home on that Friday night. Mother was still not talking to me. Emile grinned as he always grinned, and after the soup conspiratorially offered me one of his cigarettes. I was still smoking it when Régis came in. It was several weeks since I’d seen Régis. He was furious. It’s got to stop, Odile, do you hear me? He was shouting very loud. It can’t go on, do you hear me? You’ve got to put an end to it, do you hear me? If Father was alive, he’d have stopped you long ago, and you would have obeyed him, do you hear me? Father wouldn’t have shouted like you do, I said, and he wouldn’t have thought like you and Mother do. Don’t be stupid, Sister. Jesus, don’t be stupid! Father knew I’d be married by the age of seventeen. There was a silence. Emile was cleaning his nails with a pocketknife. Do you realise that your dolt from Sweden is married? It’s a lie, you’ve made it up! What do you expect, Odile, he’s nearly thirty. You don’t know anything about him! We’ve often worked on the same shift, we call him the Snow Shovel, he’s crap. Why do you say he’s married? Listen, Sister, to what I have to say, married or unmarried, if you persist in going out with that shit we plan to give him a lesson. Back to your field, Swede. He’s Russian! All the better, back behind his Iron Curtain!

Was he a married man? The priest later asked me when I confessed, and I had to confess further that I didn’t know, and that I’d never asked him. I went to meet him by the footbridge the day after the evening of Régis’s threats. I told him nothing because as soon as Stepan was there, palpable, before my eyes, I realised that, should it come to a fight, Régis didn’t stand a chance.

We crossed the river, left the Barracks behind us, and climbed to the forest. There we walked along its edge until the factory and the house were out of sight. By the old chapel with its broken windows and the wall behind its altar pocked with bullet marks, we turned in and crossed the forest to come out on the path that leads to Le Mont. There we owned a small barn for storing hay. Now it is in ruins. I’d been there as a child with my father in the days when he brought down hay on a sledge. In my pocket I had the key.

I’d never before seen a man naked like Stepan. I’d seen my father and my brothers at the sink washing all over, I’d seen everything, but I’d never seen a man naked like that. The sight of him brought back to me the night I’d first met him in the Ram’s Run, for I was filled with the same kind of pity—was it a pity for both of us?—and this pity was mixed with fear. Yet it wasn’t with fear that my heart was pounding. My heart was pounding with excitement at the news it received: its life would never be the same again, the body it pumped for would never be the same again.

Father was an expert grafter of fruit trees. He scarcely ever failed. Onto our wild apple trees he grafted pippins and russets, onto the wild pears, dolbos and williams. He knew at exactly which moment to graft, where to cut, how to bandage. It was as if the sap were in his thumbs. He’s grafting me! I said to myself with my arms round Stepan’s body. Along the new branches fruit will come like we’ve never known, neither he nor me. It wasn’t easy for Stepan. I wasn’t easy to break through. For a moment he was discouraged. I could feel it. Everything about men is so obvious that even I, at seventeen, could understand. And I shared his impatience, that’s what I shared with him. So I helped him, like I used to help Father when he was grafting. I’d hold the shoot at the angle needed—whilst Father bound with the cord.

The sunlight streamed through the knotholes of the wall planks and the hay smelt like burnt milk and I felt that everything good that could ever happen was being grafted into me. And next week, we were eating the fruit, weren’t we? If only you could have taken more! He gave us very little, dear God. Yet perhaps not. Sometimes when I tell myself the story of the two bears I say: perhaps the one thing he doesn’t understand is time! How long did we lie behind the grey wood with the sunbeams? You never seemed so small as then, Stepanuschka. I was going to be your wife and the mother of your children, and the ocean which I’ll never see of your ferry boat. The days were nearly at their longest. When we left, it was dark and there was a moon, we could see the path. On the way down I undid your belt. What I saw, dear God, is where? Where?

They started to build. I don’t know with what words Stepan persuaded or inspired them. They started to build a room. Each shed of the Barracks was designated with a letter. I think that when they were first built the letters of the sheds went regularly from A to H. Then some man lodging there had an idea to make a joke which consisted of changing the letters. From the time I could first read as a child the eight sheds were marked IN EUROPA. I could see where the original letters had been painted over. As for the joke, the man who thought it funny had long since left and nobody now could ask him to explain. The letters remained as he had painted them. The N of the IN was written the wrong way round, ᴎ. The Company scarcely ever intruded into the Barracks area. There was only one law in the factory that counted: that the ten furnaces be tapped the required number of times every twenty-four hours, and that the castings conform to standard when chemically analysed.

Stepan lived in shed A, which was the last one, on the edge of the factory grounds. Beyond was a plantation of pine trees. The men in shed A were building a room for Stepan. It took them a week of their free time. A partition of planks, a hole in the roof for a chimney and a new door. This room was to be separate from the rest of the dormitory, it was to be private. Stepan was making a bed, a large bed with a headboard made of oak and a carved rose at each corner. It was the first bed he’d made and it took much more time than the room. You want us to be married? he asked me. I would like to be your wife. I will marry you, he said, it’s a promise.

Shed A is still there, the furthest from the bridge. People said he took advantage of me. They knew nothing, those people. They didn’t see him carving the roses. If he didn’t marry me immediately it was because he couldn’t—perhaps because his papers weren’t in order. Because he was already married, people said. Perhaps, long before, he did have another wife in another country, in another century. All I know is that he didn’t deceive me.

One day you and I, when our grandchildren are off our hands, one day, he said, you and I will go and visit the Ukraine.

From the window of the little makeshift room at the end of shed A, I watched the swallows flying between the Barracks and the lines of spruce. It was ridiculous now for a woman living my life to still be at school, and so I left without taking any exams. As I walked away from the school for the last time through the tall wrought-iron gates, made for horsemen carrying flags, I felt Father very close. It was as if he came with me to ask for a job at the Components Factory, it was as if because of his presence they gave me a job straightaway.

My first was pressing holes in a tiny plate to fit in the back of radios. One thousand seven hundred plates a day. I wasn’t badly paid and the place had the advantage of being on the riverbank. When I was ahead of my quota I could go out, smoke a cigarette, and watch the river—we were seven in the factory, seven with the boss and his son. Listening to the water, I decided how I was going to show Stepan where he could catch trout without being interfered with.

The only bad thing was the oil, it splattered my hands and wrists, I couldn’t wear gloves for they slowed me down too much, and my skin was allergic to the oil. Little spots came up which itched. Stepan said that if the spots didn’t go away within a week, by July 17<sup>th</sup>—I remember the date of each day of that month of summer skies, endless days, swallows, and the unimaginable—he would categorically forbid me to work there!

I kept my room at the widow’s house and I spent every night IN EUROPA. On two Sundays when Stepan was working the day shift, I watched the swallows: on two Sundays when he wasn’t working we stayed in bed till nightfall. He talked a lot now. In his sleep he talked in Russian. We’ll stick it out another year, he said, then we’ll leave and I’ll find a job. You ought to make beds like this one! I told him. We’ll find a house by the sea, he said. Why not by a lake? I suggested.

Sometimes he talked of the factory. I asked him if he’d heard about Michel’s accident. I’d just arrived, he said, it was my first week and I was in his team. It was Peter we were tapping, and the wall broke. When that happens it’s like hell let loose. Hell itself, my little one. To pierce the wall you have a probe—do you know how long the tip lasts? Less than eight minutes. *Vossiem*. He was still conscious. May God help him. We got him clear and put the fireproof gown on him. He’s still in hospital, I commented. With two legs gone, said Stepan.

Towards evening he shaved. I liked watching him shave. We had a jug and basin on the table by the door and he went to fetch some hot water from the bathhouse, a stone building next to the shop. Naturally I never set foot inside there. Stepan would fetch water for me to wash, and for the calls of nature I went into the plantation. This time the water was for his shaving. How much I liked to watch him shave! Perhaps any man shaving? If I’d gone into the bathhouse I’d know. It’s the only moment men show their coquetry. The way they pull their skin and focus with their eyes, the noise of the blade against the stubble, the white soap on the rosy skin. After shaving, Stepan’s face was softer than mine, soft as a baby’s.

He was killed on July 31<sup>st</sup>. He didn’t take the leather-covered flask with him. He left it on the table beside his shaving brush. He was killed at four-thirty in the morning. Régis telephoned the news to the widow Besson’s house just before I was leaving for work. I spoke to him myself. Is it certain he’s dead? Certain? Certain? I asked six times. I went to work. The pieces I was pressing, tiny as earrings, were for electric irons. After work I went to the Barracks and into our room. There was a knock on the door. I opened it. Giuliano stood there. It was he who obtained the oak for our bed.

Where is he? I asked, I want to see him. *Niente*, Giuliano said. I want to see him, I said again very quietly. *Niente!* he shouted at the top of his voice. Over his shoulder I could see other men from shed A and sheds P, O, R, U, E, N standing at a discreet distance, looking towards me, caps in hand, shoulders hunched. Where is he? Giuliano’s eyes filled with tears as he shook his head. Not for a moment did he take his eyes off me. And suddenly I understood. He had disappeared. There was no body. Like it happens in an avalanche.

I did not cry, Holy Mary Mother of God, I did not cry. I said to Giuliano: Who’s got a motorbike in our shed? None of us. Who then? Jan in U has a motorbike. Ask him if he can take me to work tomorrow morning, I’m going to stay here.

I slept in our room. Every morning Jan took me to the Components Factory in Cluses. On the second day Emile came to the Barracks. We want you to come home, he said, and shyly, without a word, he deposited a goat’s cheese on the table. Later, I told him, tell Maman and Régis I’ll come home later, for the moment I must stay here.

I lay on the bed with the carved roses at each corner and stared at the planks of the roof. I found a suitcase under the bed and into it I packed his clothes, with no idea of what I was going to do with them. Perhaps his father or his wife would want them? I still did not cry. The nothingness into which he had disappeared filled me. Every hour was the same. Every minute was the same. To piss I went into the plantation just as I did when his boots weren’t open mouths screaming. Odile did not scream, she waited, IN EUROPA, shed A. I went on waiting. Every evening some of his comrades came to see me. They came in pairs. They brought me plates of food which I couldn’t eat. One brought me a newspaper in a language I couldn’t understand. They said I should go home. They said they would come and see me if I went home. One of them gave me a lace shawl in black. I folded it up. Each day which passed brought me more hope. Each night I slept in the shed. In the nothingness into which he had disappeared, in the nothingness in which he had left me, I was listening for him. And at last I heard. Now I could go home, now I could weep, now I could wear my black shawl.

I went to the factory manager’s office. His secretary asked me what my business was. I said it was private. Would you like to take a chair? I could hear the avalanche roar of the big furnaces. I knew that it never stopped, yet, as I sat there waiting, I thought it might. Impossible things happen. I believed that if the roar stopped I would hear his voice. On the walls were framed photographs of other factories. The frames were oak like the bed. I waited for an hour. He shouldn’t be much longer, said the secretary. Where is he? He’s on a long-distance call, she replied and continued her typing.

If I’d taken a back-of-the-arse, I could have done her job. Would you like some coffee? she asked. She knew me, everyone in the factory knew by now that I was Stepan Pirogov’s concubine. It wasn’t of course the word they used, but it was the legal term which I would have to use. Please, I said.

After another half-hour the manager saw me. His wife used to order fresh eggs from Mother. When Father was alive, Mother had to wait until he was in the fields before delivering her eggs. Food for the enemy! Father would have screamed.

He never looked at you when he was talking, the manager. It was as if he were trying to read the captions of the framed photographs on the wall. He had taken off his jacket and loosened his tie. It was hot everywhere with an August heat. I had put on a skirt and jacket so as to look more legal, and I was wearing the black shawl over my head. He motioned to the chair in front of him.

What can I do for you?

I’ve come about Monsieur Pirogov, Monsieur Norat.

I know. May I offer you, and the family, my sincere condolences.

I understand that if a worker is killed at work, the Company pays his wife a pension.

It is discretionary. We are not obliged to, and the pension terminates when and if the widow marries again.

Monsieur Pirogov was killed at work, I said.

The cause has not yet been ascertained.

Everyone knows he was asphyxiated by fumes. That’s why he fell.

We will see, Mademoiselle Blanc, when the investigation is finished. I wish I could tell you more.

I have come to apply for a pension.

How old are you?

Seventeen.

And the date of your marriage, Mademoiselle Blanc? He was obliged to look at me at that moment.

We are not married.

Then I don’t understand.

I lived as Monsieur Pirogov’s concubine.

May I ask where?

I knew he knew where.

In shed A, I told him.

That’s company property.

I want our bed too.

You want a company pension and a bed! If we gave pensions to all our workers’ concubines, Mademoiselle Blanc, we’d be bankrupt!

Are there so many killed in your factories, Monsieur Norat?

I understand your distress but I’m afraid I can do nothing.

I’m pregnant. In the name of his child which I’m carrying, I’m asking, Sir, for compensation.

Monsieur Norat was surprised. He left his chair and came to stand behind me.

Odile, if I may so call you, for you’re young enough to be my daughter, I believe you, but the Company can’t. From the Company’s point of view you’re not married, you had no fixed residence of concubinage, and you have no proof at all that Stepan Pirogov is the father of your child.

You were born, Christian, on April 10<sup>th</sup>. You weighed 3.4 kilos, you had blue eyes, hair softer than the thistledown of a dandelion, hands smaller than Stepan’s thumbs and legs like holy bread, with a zizi between them.

My mother hoped to keep you at home and put you on a bottle. I wanted to feed you myself. I had enough milk for twins. The boss at the Components Factory was obliging: so long as I did my quota, he wasn’t fussy about clocking in and out. I didn’t have to wait, like the others, till midday. When I felt my blouse wet on either side with milk, I left the machines thumping away and the metal shavings getting higher and higher on the shop floor. How you sucked! How you loved life! Then I had to get back early to sweep up the shavings and start again on tiny pieces for airplane hatches.

You were nearly a year old. You were taking your first steps on the earth, and after the fourth you’d fall back onto your bottom. Funny to think of this in the sky.

Emile was playing with you under the table. Régis had been out the night before and had drunk too much. It’s not the worst men who drink, the men who drink are the frightened ones, they don’t know of what, we’re all frightened, though at the age of eighteen I didn’t know any of this. Régis was arguing with Emile, who was under the table playing with you, about whether Corneille the cattle dealer’s Peugeot was dark blue or black. Emile was sure it was black. Régis was sure it was blue. They went on and on. Stop it! I cried out. You’re worse than children! Régis swung round so fast I thought he was going to hit me. You keep out of this! he said. You’ve got enough of your own business to mind, Odile! Better think what you’re going to do with your poor bastard of a kid! Shut your mouth! Emile seized Régis’s legs and he fell to the ground. At that moment Mother walked in and the three of us pretended nothing had happened. When Mother left, Régis, his head in his hands, a smear of blood under his nose, muttered: Blue, Corneille’s Peugeot is blue! I’m going for a walk, I said.

I walked along the rail track towards the Heaps. The last one was smoking. Soon they’ll be as high as the factory, I thought. Soon they’ll have covered our orchard, I thought. At home there are only three cows left. There’s nothing more dead in the world than this dirt left over after burning at two thousand centigrade. Twenty-two months down in the dirt is the bastard’s father. I had the courage to say those words to myself.

Every time I go over there to work, Giuliano the Sardinian told me after Stepan’s death, I’m not sure I’m going to come back.

Each wall, each opening, each ladder was like the bone of a sheep’s skull found in the mountain—fleshless, emptied, extinct. The furnaces throbbed, the river flowed, the smoke, sometimes white, sometimes grey, sometimes yellow, thrust upwards into the sky, men worked night and day for generations, sweating, retching, pissing, coughing, the Factory had not stopped once for seven years, it produced thirty thousand tons of ferromanganese a year, it made money, it tested new alloys, it made experiments, it made profits, and it was inert, barren, derelict. I went through the melting shop where the furnace for manganese oxide is in the sky, and Peter and Tito for the ferromanganese are well below it, yet still so high that when the coasting cranes teem their metal into the ladles, you squint up at the ladles like suns setting, and I knew how the womb in my belly was the opposite of all I could see and touch. Here’s a woman, I whispered, and the fruit of her womb. I knelt on my knees. Nobody saw me.

Horse leather is the best leather for gloves, Dilenka, it resists the heat.

I climbed up eight metal ladders, each one as high as hay in a barn, nobody stopped me, to the manganese-oxide furnace. This is where he fell. The fumes hurt my throat and I breathed deeply, yet nothing happened. I came down the eight ladders. I crossed the office space that had been the Ram’s Ballroom. I found the locker where he kept his horse-leather gloves and his blue shield. It had an Italian name on it now. I laughed. I surprised myself laughing. Our love was imperishable.

Across the footbridge we lived IN EUROPA. The river was low, for the thaw had not begun. On many days it was minus ten and the mountains were still imprisoned. There was no time, I was thinking as I watched the water of the Giffre, to show Stepan where to take the trout, only time for Stepan and Odile to meet and for Christian to be conceived. Upstream, between the rocks, something attracted my attention. I waited. It seemed to me that it turned its head. A lorry clattered along the road and it flew up, long legs dangling, to perch in a pine tree. It was a heron. A water bird that nests in the top of a tree, said Stepan. I’ve seen three herons in my life so far. One with Father when I was small enough for him to carry me, one with Stepan on a June evening, and one that Sunday in March ’56.

Stepan said the name of the heron was *tzaplia*, a creature from far away with a message. Waiting for its fish, it becomes as still as a stick. Which is why I wasn’t sure when I first spotted it. From the pine tree the heron surveyed the road, the factory grounds, the tall chimneys with their heads like the open beaks of gigantic fledgelings looking up for food, the manganese-oxide furnace, Peter, Tito, the turbine house, the cliff-face and that sky where I’m flying with my son. Of its message I was ignorant.

She was in a good mood, Mother. She gave us a kilo of honey, she said your blue eyes were going to break girls’ hearts, she changed your nappies. For once I wasn’t in a hurry to leave and we missed the bus back to Cluses and had to hitchhike. You made hitchhiking easy. With you in my arms, the very first car stopped. The driver leant back and opened the rear door. As we were climbing in, he spoke my name. He was wearing a cap over his eyes and he had a black beard. Yet something in the way he said my name was familiar, was old. Our eyes met and suddenly I recognised him.

Michel!

He leant his head back awkwardly for me to kiss his cheek. I guessed he couldn’t turn round, couldn’t move his legs, so I kissed him like that.

I was so sorry, Odile, when I heard about what happened, he said. I offer you my sympathy and all my condolences.

His voice had changed. Changed more than his face on account of his beard. Before, he had spoken like most people do, his voice close-up to what he was saying. Now his voice was far away, like a priest’s voice at the altar.

This is our son, Christian, I told him.

He touched your woolen bonnet with his hand and it was then I noticed the scars on it: they were violet—the same colour as molybdenum bread goes when it’s cooling. Where they were violet, there was less flesh.

You’re going where? he asked.

Cluses.

You live there?

I nodded. And you, Michel?

Lyons’s finished with me. The surgeons say I’m a masterpiece. Do you know how many operations I had? Thirty-seven!

He laughed and slapped his thigh so the sound should remind me it was made of metal. He was wearing well-pressed trousers, light-coloured socks, polished shoes.

You started to cry.

Developing his lungs! said Michel. He can’t run at his age, poor little mite, all he can do is to howl if he wants to fill his lungs. Here! Christian! Look!

He dangled a key-ring before your eyes and you leant your head against my breast and stopped crying.

And you, Michel?

I’m going to take on the tobacconist’s and newspaper shop at Pouilly.

How will you manage to—

Everything, Odile, everything. I can even climb a ladder! The trade union lawyers forced them to give me a pension. I don’t have to work too much.

Stupidly, helplessly and for no good reason, I began to snivel. Michel turned round and started the engine. He could drive the car, for it had been adapted and fitted out with hand-controls. His two feet in their polished shoes just rested on the floor. Like flatirons.

When there’s no choice, Michel said over his shoulder, it’s extraordinary what you can adapt to.

I know.

At first I was too drugged to realise, he said, then bit by bit the truth came home to me. When I woke up in the morning and remembered what I was, I wanted to scream. For a week I was in despair. Why me? I kept on asking. Why me?

I know, I said. You’d gone to sleep. We were driving along by the river. He controlled the speed with his scarred right hand. His two feet lay on the floor like flatirons. I was still sniffling.

The great thing in hospital is you aren’t alone. There are other people in the same state as you, he said, some are worse off than you. You’ve only got one life, they say, so better make the most of it. It’s not true, Odile.

I know, I said between tears.

We were all bad cases. Third-degree burns, with fifty, sixty, seventy percent disability. We’d have all been dead twenty years ago. There were people—we heard it—there were people who said we’d be better off dead. We had to learn to live a second life. The first one was over forever and ever. He’s sleeping now?

He’s asleep, yes, I whispered.

I had to learn how to live—and it wasn’t like learning for the second time, that’s what’s so strange, Odile, it was like learning for the first time. Now I’m beginning my second life.

Do you have much pain? I asked.

Not much.

Never?

Not much. Sometimes when it’s hot in the summer I’m uncomfortable. He touched the top of his thigh. Otherwise, no. For a long while I dreamt of pain in my legs. They weren’t amputated in my dreams. I’ll tell you something else, Odile. I’ve become a fire-cutter.

I started to laugh. As with my tears, I didn’t know why.

There was an old man in the hospital. He wasn’t a patient and he wasn’t a member of the staff… he was there every day. He went out to buy whatever we asked him—papers, fruit, tobacco, eau de cologne—and in return we gave him the change. He was eighty-two. When he was younger he’d been a railwayman. He was a fire-cutter. I saw him take the pain away once. A nurse scalded her hands with boiling water, and the old man put a stop to her suffering in two minutes. According to him he was getting too old, said the effort of cutting the fire took too much out of him. So, one day he announced he’d been watching us all very carefully and now he’d decided, now he’d chosen his successor. And it was to be me. He gave me his gift.

How?

Like that.

What did he do?

He just gave me his gift.

We were in Cluses and Michel drove us to the front door. You were already asleep in my arms. Despite my protests he insisted on getting out of the car. He moved his legs with his arms. He pulled himself up with his arms. His neck and shoulders were much thicker than they had been. He extracted himself like a man climbing out of a trench he’s dug. There he stood on the pavement, swaying slightly from his hips.

If you ever need me, you know where to find me now. I was so sorry, he repeated again, to hear what had happened.

Do you remember Stepan? I asked him.

I remember him. He was very tall, with blond hair. Didn’t he have blue eyes? We worked a couple of nights in the same gang, two or three nights I think—before I collected this packet. He slapped his hip.

I don’t even have a picture of him, I said.

You don’t need a photo, he said, fingering your woolen bonnet, you have his progeny.

Strange word, progeny!

You can’t have closer, he said. Good night.

The long years began, the long years of your boyhood. Do you remember the flat we lived in? You did your homework on the kitchen table. You were always wanting me to make potato pancakes for supper. You kept a soccer ball in a net hung from the ceiling over your bed. Your room smelt of glue because of the models you made. The same smell as my nail varnish. You could change washers on a tap before you were ten. In my room there was the oak bed with the carved roses, when you were ill you slept in it with me and sometimes on Sundays too. Remember when we painted the living room and you fell off the ladder? You were all I had in the world and I thought you were dead.

Why do I have the same name as you, Maman, why am I called Christian Blanc?

Because your father died before you were born.

What was he like?

Strong.

What did he look like?

Big.

Was he like me?

Yes.

Was he interested in aircraft?

Not particularly, I think.

You don’t know much about him, do you?

As much as anyone ever knows.

Guess what I really want to do, Maman. I want to build a glider. One that will fly. I saw a picture in a book at school. It’ll have to be big, as big as a car.

Big enough to fly us round the world?

Yes … I’ll need lots of glue.

The long years began. Where could we go to be at home? Régis got married to Marie-Jeanne. Her condition for marrying him was that he give up drinking, and for a while he did. Mother sold the last cow, keeping only the goats and chickens. The trees of the forest, up by the path to Le Mont, began to die. The hillside above the river became the grey rusty colour of dead wood. Emile got a job loading drums in a paint factory near the frontier and Mother lavished all her attention upon him. Every evening he came home to a hero’s welcome. His weaknesses inspired her determination to live to be a hundred. As she aged, Emile became the love of her life. She changed the hay of his mattress every week.

I bought an atlas to study how to go to Stockholm. I found the Ukraine and the river Pripiat. Yet what could we have done there? We’d have been further from home than ever.

Why are we going up so fast now?

The boss at the Components Factory pursued us for a while. You remember he bought you a Sputnik with a dog inside, and you lost the dog? I went to his house for supper several times. He took us to the lake and we ate a fish like a trout but stronger tasting. You said fish find their way in the ocean through their sense of smell. His wife had left him years before. He was nearly forty, you were nine.

Do you want to marry Gaston, Maman?

We are still climbing into the sky.

No, I don’t want to marry him.

I think he wants to marry you.

I don’t know.

He told me he’s going to buy a Citroën DS.

That’s what interests you, isn’t it?

If you didn’t have to work for him, Maman, I think I’d like him more.

Gaston is very kind. He and I don’t know the same things, that’s all. What he knows doesn’t interest me a lot and what I know would frighten him.

You couldn’t frighten me, Maman.

When we turn, Christian, it’s strange, for there I am looking not up but down at the blue sky.

Michel’s shop in Pouilly was unlike any other in the district. The newspapers were arranged in a special way, the left-wing ones always in front. When a customer asked for *Le Figaro*, Michel bent down and brought one up from under the counter with a look of disgust, as if the paper the man had demanded were wrapped round a rotten fish. He sold bottles of gnôle with a pear the size of my fist inside the bottle.

How did the pear get inside? you asked.

It grew from a pip! Michel said and you didn’t know whether to believe him or not.

He also sold toboggans and radios. He was mad about radios and could repair anything. On the back wall of the shop he pinned a large map of the world and on each country he stuck little labels like the ones they sell for jam pots, indicating the city, the wavelength, the hours of broadcasting. There were those who said that Michel with his politics and his radios could only be a spy for the Russians! His reputation as a fire-cutter spread. People from other valleys came to him to have the pain of their burns taken away. He categorically refused any payment. It’s a gift! he repeated.

Do you remember when I took you to him? You’d burnt the palm of your hand with a firecracker. It wasn’t serious but you were howling your head off. Michel came out from behind the counter with his stiff, swaying movement—like a skittle. Let’s go into the back room, he said. I made as if to accompany you but he shook his head and the two of you disappeared. He closed the door and within seconds you stopped howling. Not gradually but suddenly in mid-cry. There wasn’t a sound in the shop. Total silence. After what seemed an eternity I couldn’t bear it anymore and shouted your name. You came bounding through the door laughing. Michel lumbered after you. There were already grey hairs in his black head.

You don’t have to burn yourself in order to come and see me, he said when I thanked him and kissed him good-bye.

Later I asked you: What happened?

Nothing.

What did Michel do?

He showed me one of his burns.

Where?

Here—you pointed at your tummy.

And your hand stopped hurting?

No, it wasn’t hurting anymore. It stopped hurting before he showed me his burn.

Why did he show it to you then?

Because I asked him.

What are we doing here, Christian, on this earth, in this sky?

I’d been working in the Components Factory for ten years. On the wall beside my bench there were thirty postcards of the Mediterranean and palm trees and cows and cherry trees in flower and a village with a steeple—all of them sent to me over the years by friends on holiday. Gaston had understood the reality of our situation. When he stood behind me, pretending to oversee my work, I could sense his regret in my shoulder blades, because I could also sense my own. The racket of the machines month after month, year after year, wore away principles. The years were long. When I didn’t sleep the nights too were long.

The factory shut for the month of August. We never went away for a holiday like some of the others. I gave Mother a hand in the garden. I made jam and bottled the last of the runner beans. When I passed the factory I no longer thought of Stepan. There is nothing in the factory which can have a memory. I thought of him when I ironed your shirts and cut your hair. I thought of him too when I did my face in the mirror. I was ageing. I looked as though I’d been married for twenty years.

Do you know how to measure a smile? Stepan asked.

Yes, I said.

He bent down and picked me up so my mouth was level with his and he kissed me.

You had a friend called Sébastien, whose father was the caretaker of the holiday camp in Bakon, on the other side of the Roc d’Enfer. Some Thursdays when there was no school, you spent the day with him up there. I was glad because the mountain air did you good. Cluses is like a dungeon. When the holiday camp was full of kids from the cities in the north, you wanted to go and find out if there were any flying enthusiasts. Here, you said, people don’t have a clue. Already I couldn’t follow you talking about “aerofoils” and “wing loadings.” I’m not sure Sébastien understood much either. His passion was fiddling with television sets. He could come into Michel’s shop and talk like a schoolmaster for an hour about new transistor circuits. Sébastien was twelve and you were eleven when in August ’66 you went to spend a whole fortnight with him up in Bakon.

I didn’t have to go to work and I was by myself, alone as I hadn’t been for ten years. On the second day I did something I hadn’t done since Stepan’s death: I didn’t get dressed at all, I lay in bed, I listened to the radio, I took a shower when I was too hot, I remembered, I didn’t get up. Mother would have been deeply ashamed of me. Papa, examining the cruel crevices in his hands, would have looked up and said with a wink: Why not, if she can? My life already seemed inexplicably long. The next day I spent at the swimming pool sunbathing. From having to stand too much at work I was developing varicose veins. My hands weren’t like Papa’s but they were red and rough. I was never taught to swim. I made an appointment at the hairdresser’s. Mother had never once been to a hairdresser in her life.

Coming out of the hairdresser’s with a scarf over my head, I saw Michel on the other side of the road. He was walking on crutches. I waved and he didn’t see me. His head was down and it looked as though the going was painful. I waited for the traffic and then I ran across the street. When at last he saw me, his face, red and glistening with sweat, broke into a smile.

What a surprise! Always in his faraway voice.

I’ve just had my hair done.

Come and have a coffee.

We went to the brasserie by the post office. A waiter offered him a chair. Obstinately he took another.

Why don’t you take off your scarf?

Order me a café au lait and I’ll be back. I went to the toilet.

Ah! Odile! A beautiful head of hair you have there! All his words had to be hurled across the ravine of what had befallen him.

It’s too fine. It breaks too easily.

Too fine? I wouldn’t know what too fine was! He drank from his glass of white wine and lemonade. You remember the trip we made to Italy?

I nodded.

Thirteen years ago.

The only time I’ve ever been on a motorbike. Afterwards you told me I was a good passenger.

Your outfit has closed down for the whole month?

Like every year.

What about a trip to Paris?

Paris! It’s hundreds of kilometres away.

We take the car and we take four days, there and back. I have to go anyway to get a prosthesis adjusted. It’s not satisfactory … the left one here. If you came with me, it would be a holiday. What do you say?

It’s a long way.

Don’t put your scarf on again.

Are we, Christian, a mother and child flying in the sky?

At that moment I was twenty-nine; Michel was thirty-seven. If I’d been told as a child what the life of an adult is like, I wouldn’t have believed it. I’d never have believed it could be so unfinished. When young we lend so much authority and sureness to our elders. Michel and I had seen and lived a good deal, and yet, as we followed the Rhône along the gorge through the end of the Jura Mountains, we were like children. When I think of it now, I want to protect us.

It was a white Renault 4. He had covered the seats with a fabric, striped like a zebra skin. He liked putting on a strong eau de cologne which, mixed with sweat and the August heat, smelt like mule. I’d bought a pair of white net gloves for the trip. In my whole life I never dreamt of wearing gloves in the summer but I’d seen this pair in a shop in Cluses, a shop where the bosses’ wives bought their haberdashery, and I said to myself: What the hell, Odile, if you’re going to Paris, Paris of all places on this earth, and you’ve got a smart pair of white shoes, you may as well wear white net gloves in August. In addition, they were at half-price.

When I think of us on our way to Paris, I want us to come to no harm.

The white cat died last week. She was hit by a car. Michel was at the shop and I went out into the garden and I heard a meow. She was in the grass by the edge of the road. Her back was broken, so I put her to lie on a blanket by the stove in the kitchen. She lay there, her white mouth a little open and her tongue scarcely less white than her teeth. She turned—or her body turned her—onto her side with her four legs stretched out and her hind legs straight behind her, as if she were leaping. Slowly, with her two forelegs she wiped her face, moving her paws down from her ears over her eyes towards her mouth. She did this once only, rubbing the vision of life out of her eyes. When her paws reached her mouth she was dead.

Can there be any love without pity?

The Jura are not like our mountains. They are more morose, more resigned to their fate. They would never cover a car seat with zebra skin nor wear white gloves in August. We passed a lake which looked as though no boat had ever sailed upon it. Michel talked about General de Gaulle and I didn’t know whether he hated or admired him. Next he talked about the factory. It belonged now to a multinational with factories in twenty-one different countries. TPI. The multinationals, Michel said, are the new robber barons of our time. TPI made eight thousand five hundred million francs profit in ’66.

Michel keeps figures in his head like other people keep the words of songs.

<verse>
It’s raining kisses
and hailing caresses
till the flood of tenderness
takes the nest.
</verse>

A man on one of their furnaces, he said, breathes air that contains four hundred thousand dust particles per litre—that’s lethal.

May a mouthful of this on your night shift my darling keep you company between the hot and the cold …

Lethal. No man can stand it indefinitely, Michel said. The forest is dying. The five chimneys spew out one thousand two hundred tons of fluorine waste every year.

Papa had been right about the venom. He had been right too about my being married at seventeen. What he never knew, what he could never have imagined, was that I’d be a widow by eighteen.

A TPI factory in the Pyrenees, Michel went on, has destroyed four thousand hectares of forest in three years and poisoned seven hundred and fifty cows and sheep.

What I’ve lost is more than seven hundred and fifty cows and sheep! I said.

You have a child. It helps.

It helps, yes, but a son doesn’t make up for everything. One day he’ll go.

At least you have somebody to live for.

Sometimes, I shouted, you want to live for yourself!

We each have to live for ourselves, he said.

Sometimes I look at other women and I hate them because they’re, because they’re …

Not living with a ghost?

I’m getting out, let me get out.

You have nothing to be angry about.

Nobody has the right to call him a ghost. Do you hear me, Michel? Nobody. He’s here! I beat my hand on my breast.

And I’m here, Michel said banging his hands down on the steering wheel, I’m here and I have no child so I know what I’m saying when I tell you you’re lucky.

Lucky? Me lucky! I’m about as lucky as you, my dear Michel.

He said nothing more. We were driving between hills of grass which rose to outcrops of rock. The sky was thundery. The cows were clustered together, heads down, wherever there was a little shade. We were both sweating and hot.

If you see a river, I said, why don’t you stop? Then I remembered it would be hard for him to clamber down a riverbank and I regretted saying it. Can you still have children? I asked him after five minutes’ silence.

He nodded without a word.

Around the next corner was a café and we stopped. We were waiting for the sandwich we had ordered when we heard a screeching of brakes followed by a crash. I rushed to the café door. A Peugeot 304, coming too fast round the bend, had crashed into the back of our Renault. The driver, unhurt, was waving his arms and cursing everything he could see. In God’s name, it’s not possible! No warning for the bend! How is it possible to build such a fool road? And to park a car there you need the mind of a cunt! It’s not possible, Jesus, I’m telling you it’s not possible!

Michel walked over to his car and bent stiffly forward from the waist; he was like the conductor of a brass band after the end of a number, and he examined the damage. The other driver was pacing out the distance from the two cars to the corner and counting out loud in a shrill, mad voice. He had a way of looking at things, Michel—shafts, flanges, joints, cylinder heads, casings—which stopped them being intransigent, which made them obedient. As I watched him I thought of his gift of taking away the pain of burns. Was it a gift of attracting to himself and so dispersing a kind of shock? The shock suffered by burnt flesh or a chassis?

If we order the parts tonight, he shouted to me, it’s only one day’s work, we’ll be on the road the day after tomorrow.

Swaying like a ninepin, he moved across to the Peugeot. The owner screamed: It’s not possible! Less than twenty-eight metres from the corner, you can see my brake marks, can’t you? Jesus! I jammed them on as soon as I saw you. You’re a public danger. If you’re a gimp you should get yourself about in a wheelchair.

I reckon, said Michel very calmly, the packet there won’t cost you more than a hundred and fifty thousand—the price of a good bicycle! You’re fortunate, considering the speed you were going.

Crippled cunt! the man said.

The storm hadn’t broken and we had to wait for the café owner to drive us to the nearest hotel, five kilometres away.

Give us some cold beer, can you? Michel asked. The sweat lined the furrows of his brow and the pouches under his eyes. He sat on a table, his back to the wall, legs straight out, pointed polished shoes at an impossible angle, as if both ankles were broken.

On a day like this, he said to me, when you’re working on the furnaces, you’re working in a temperature of seventy degrees centigrade. Half-way between blood-heat and boiling point. Halfway to hell … He poured some beer down his throat.

I could never believe in hell, I told him. I couldn’t believe any father would invent hell as a punishment for his children.

Fathers shoot their sons dead, he said.

They shoot in anger. The way I learnt, hell has to do with justice, not anger.

I offered him a handkerchief to wipe his face. He held it up before his eyes because it had flowers printed on it, and he didn’t use it.

You really want to know about hell, he said smiling, it’s here.

Sounds odd coming from you, Michel, the one who’s always talking about change and progress …

I put the handkerchief carefully back in my bag.

Who says hell has to stay the same? Hell begins with hope. If we didn’t have any hopes we wouldn’t suffer. We’d be like those rocks against the sky.

I caught hold of the hand he was pointing with. He didn’t resist and I turned it over. On the back of his fingers he has black hairs; where the violet scar is, there is no hair. I sprayed some eau de cologne onto his wrist and he withdrew his hand to smell it.

Hell begins with the idea that things can be made better, he said. It’s refreshing—your scent. What’s the opposite of hell? Paradise, no?

Give me your other hand.

I sprayed the back of that hand and he didn’t withdraw it, it lay in my lap.

I could take you to your hotel now, announced the café owner.

The hotel backed onto a river whose bed was almost dry. The window of my room looked out onto the pebbles. It was the first time in my life I’d stayed in a hotel—which didn’t prevent my realising this one was unusual. The proprietor, who was working in the kitchen when we arrived, came out wiping his hands on a sack tied round his waist.

Two rooms, yes, he said, you’ll be eating here tonight? Tonight I’m cooking a dish I’ve never tried before!

The corridor leading to the bedrooms was stacked with wardrobes, there was scarcely space to get by. In my room, besides a bed and a washbasin there were two electric radiators and a deep freeze. I looked inside the freezer and it was full of meat. At last the rain began to fall, large drops the size of pearls. I washed and lay on the bed in my slip, with my feet bare.

I had the impression that we had lost our way: we were not going to arrive in Paris, Michel’s prosthesis was not going to be adjusted, we were in a land apart, which we had come across by accident, without meaning to, and without realising it, until now we had found ourselves in a hotel run by a madman. With this idea, and yet peacefully and to the sound of the rain, I fell asleep.

When I woke up the storm had passed. I put on another dress and a pair of white shoes—the pair which had prompted me to buy the summer gloves. I also put on a necklace of coloured beads that Christian had made for me at school. It was getting dark—the short days of August for all their heat—and I could just make out the white shapes of geese down by the river. I slipped past the wardrobes and found my way downstairs.

To my surprise there were three or four other guests in the dining room. Michel was sitting at a table by the window, where there was a large vase of orange gladioli. I can still see the flowers. He had changed his shirt and washed.

So too had the proprietor, who had discarded the sack and was now wearing a tie. He led me to the table. Michel insisted upon getting to his feet. We said good evening to each other like people do in films.

Would we like an aperitif? asked the proprietor. Two Suzes, said Michel. My sense of us having lost our way reminded me of the uncertainty children feel when they find themselves having to do something for the first time. Yet I’d never felt older.

Can we propose to you, sir, poularde en soutien-gorge?

What is it? asked Michel.

A skinned chicken roasted in pastry, sir. Unforgettable. And as an entrée perhaps truite au bleu?

It’s the chicken you’ve cooked this way for the first time? I asked.

Precisely, Madame, the first soutien-gorge I’ve ever fitted! he winked at Michel.

Four point to the sky, four walk in the dew, and four have food in them; all twelve make one—what is it? I asked the man.

He didn’t know and I wouldn’t tell him. We ate well, like at a baptism.

If you wanted, I could help you, Michel said.

What do I need help for?

To live.

I’ve managed not too badly up to now. It’s good, this white wine, isn’t it? Santé.

Do you know what people say about you?

I’ve never worried. It’s the one thing, Michel, I’ve never worried about.

There’s no talking with her, they say. When Odile’s made up her mind to do something, she does it. When she’s made up her mind not to, nothing can make her. There’s no approaching her. They respect your courage, they respect the way you’ve brought up the boy—but from a distance. You’re alone.

I don’t feel it.

In a few years it’ll be too late.

Too late for what?

Too late to change.

You want to change everything, Michel, the world, hell, people, politics, now me.

You think things can stay as they are?

I don’t know.

Happiness doesn’t say anything to you?

There’s more pain than happiness, I said.

Pain, yes.

Have I told you the story of the two bears? I asked.

Who’s been eating from my plate? The story of the three bears?

No, two. Two bears in the snow …

Fairy tales, Odile! We’re too old now for fairy tales. We need to face reality.

Like we both do all the time.

Then he said something that impressed me, for he said it so slowly and emphatically: Things can’t … go on … as they are. These words were more grunted than spoken and the gladioli I was gazing at in their vase blurred before my eyes.

They do go on, I replied, every day, every hour. People work, people go home to eat, feed the cat, watch TV, go to bed, make jam, mend radios, take baths, it all goes on all the while—till one day each of us dies.

And that’s what you’re waiting for! he said.

I’m not waiting for anything.

You know you talk like an old woman?

I’m a widow. I was a widow at eighteen.

You talk like an old woman and you’re not thirty.

In three months. Very soon. You believe age makes a difference?

It’s not age, it’s time running out. He dabbed at his forehead with his red handkerchief.

Say it again, Michel, I taunted him, according to you things can’t go on. But they do—you know it as well as I do. Things go on!

If we don’t fight, he said, we lose all.

Do you really think life’s only a battle?

At this he laughed, laughed till the tears came to his eyes. He filled up my glass, raised his, and we clinked them.

You of all people, Odile, not to know the answer to that question. Do you—you, Odile Blanc—really think life isn’t a battle?

He laughed shortly again but this time his tears were those of sadness.

When I went up to my room, with the freezer full of meat and a reproduction of the Angelus above the bed, I didn’t undress. I waited for half an hour and watched the river. Then I brushed my hair and, without putting my shoes on, I edged my way past the wardrobes in the corridor and found the door to Michel’s room, which I opened without knocking.

Our shadow is moving over the white snow, Christian, and looks like the twenty-seventh letter of the alphabet, something between a D and an L. In Cluses, where I learnt words off the blackboard in the school, which, after the factory, was the tallest building I’d ever seen, in Cluses words were strange to me. Now they are coming back into my head like pigeons into their pigeon loft.

From our union, Marie-Noelle was born on 4 August ’67. At birth she weighed 3.2 kilos, a little less than you. The milk came up into my breasts and I fed her for more than nine months. I didn’t want to stop. I was no longer working in the Components Factory, for the four of us lived together above the shop in Pouilly.

Madame Labourier knitted a pink blanket for the cradle. Odile Blanc was not exactly the daughter-in-law Madame Labourier would have chosen for her son, but facts were facts, and Marie-Noelle was her granddaughter.

When Michel was young, Madame Labourier informed me, you couldn’t count the number of girls he went out with. After the accident, during the years he was away in Lyons, they all got married. All things considered, it’s understandable, isn’t it? After all, *they* were young healthy girls.

Later she warned me about the future. As he ages, he’s going to change, he’s going to become more and more demanding. I saw it with Neighbour Henri who had polio, and my poor cousin Gervais who had diabetes. As they get older, cripples—particularly men cripples—become difficult and crotchety. You’ll have to be patient, my girl.

After you were born, Marie-Noelle, it was as if you gave him back his legs. He was so proud of you, his pride had feet. He hated being separated from you for more than an hour or two. When you were old enough to go to school, he refused to take the car, he walked with you a good half-kilometre, holding your hand.

The limbs he had lost were somehow returned to him in your small child’s body. It was he, not me, who taught you to walk. Now you are no longer a child and from the sky I can talk to you.

Women are beautiful when young, almost all women. Don’t listen to envious gossip, Marie-Noelle. Whatever the proportions of a face, whether a body is too skinny or too heavy, at some moment a woman possesses the power of beauty which is given to us as women. Often the moment is brief. Sometimes the moment may come and we not even know it. Yet traces of it remain. Even at my advanced age now there are traces.

Look in a mirror if you pass one this afternoon in the hearing aid shop in Annecy whilst you’re waiting for Papa, look at your hair which you washed last night and see how it invites being touched. Look at your shoulder when you wash at the sink and then look down at where your breast assembles itself, look at the part between shoulder and breast which slopes like an alpage—for thirty years still this slope is going to attract tears, teeth clenched in passion, feverish children, sleeping heads, work-rough hands. This beauty which hasn’t a name. Look at how gently your stomach falls at its centre into the navel, like a white begonia in full bloom. You can touch its beauty. Our hips move with an assurance that no man has; yet they promise a peace, our hips, like a cow’s tongue for—her calf. This frightens men, who knock us over and call us cunts. Do you know what our legs are like, seen from the back, Marie-Noelle, like lilies just before they open!

I will tell you which men deserve our respect. Men who give themselves to hard labour so that those close to them can eat. Men who are generous with everything they own. And men who spend their lives looking for God. The rest are pigshit.

Men aren’t beautiful. Nothing has to stay in them. Nothing has to be attracted by any peace they offer. So they’re not beautiful. Men have been given another power. They burn. They give off light and warmth. Sometimes they turn night into day. Often they destroy everything. Ashes are men’s stuff. Milk is ours.

Once you’ve learnt to judge for yourself and are no more fooled by their boasts, it’s not hard to tell the man who deserves respect and the man who is pigshit. Yet the power of a man to burn, we discover only by loving him. Does our love release the power? Not always. I loved Stepan for many weeks before we lived IN EUROPA. He was burning when I met him on the footbridge.

Michel I started to love when we returned to the village. We never got to Paris. I can die happily without seeing the capital. We stayed for three nights at the mad hotel with the white geese and his room opposite the wardrobes. Then we came home.

Once in the factory Stepan and Michel worked on the same shift for three days, yet it’s in me they still meet. Marie-Noelle, Christian—embrace each other tonight, whatever happens, do this tonight, and know your fathers are embracing each other.

It is getting late and the light is already turning. The snow on the Gruvaz, facing west, is turning pink, the colour of the best rhubarb when cooked. I imagined we would come down to earth before it’s dark, but Christian must know what he’s doing. He’s a national instructor, he came second in the European Championship of Hang-gliding and when I said to him, they’ve both gone to Annecy, they needn’t know anything, need they? they won’t be frightened, take me up this afternoon, the time’s come, he simply replied: Are you ready?

Strange how I’m not cold. I can feel each toe and each finger, they’re warm as they were when I was a baby—I suddenly remember.

You take a man right into you and you cannot compare him or measure him or make a story of him. Everything that has ever been is swelling with the lips of the mouth into which you take him and he fills you, where you know as little as you know about an unborn child in your womb.

You can tell yourself other things about him when he has left, yet all of it remains far away compared to the places within you to which you lead him. Hay in the barn cannot change back into grass. If he’s burning, the places to which you have led him are flooded with light. In your belly there are stars and of these stars you may be a victim. Poor Clotilde gave birth in the stable all alone, the door locked on the outside by her father.

It is painful for us to judge the man we have taken, for he’s ours, already like a son. How can you judge a body which has been where he has been, who has come from there? Beside his single name all else is dead coals. How reluctant we are to judge! If we have to, if we are forced to, if we are picked up by the ears like a rabbit, we judge him and suffer the pain, the violence done to the sky within us where the stars shone. Men, poor men, judge more easily.

I never judged the life Stepan led before the Ram’s Run. All that happened before the 31<sup>st</sup> of December 1953 was beyond judgement or comparison, for it had brought him to me in shed A, IN EUROPA. Since his disappearance, he has stayed with me where I first took him and hid him, beyond ashes. He has stayed with me as the seasons stay with the world.

The furnaces which robbed Stepan of his life took away from Michel his legs and now they are taking away his hearing. At night when he unfastens the prostheses he is legless. The two stumps are the colour of molybdenum bread when it’s cooling before the spray rains on it. Only their colour is like molybdenum. The specific gravity of molybdenum, Michel once told me, is 95.5—one of the heaviest metals, less heavy though than uranium, tungsten or lead. Legless, he weighs fifty-nine kilos. The colour alone of the stumps is like molybdenum, for they, unlike that monstrous metal, are alive. I know with my fingertips where their tissue is sensitive and the nerves murmur, and where the scarred flesh is numb, giving off warmth and taking in no sensation. On his back are light scars where they took skin to graft onto his face. Perhaps you are kissing my arse! he joked once when I was licking by his ear.

Without his artificial legs he hops like a bird on crutches. There are evenings when he lets me serve him like a king. Other times he is irritable and glowering and he pushes me away and, seizing his crutches, hops round the room like a plucked turkey. If he hears footsteps, when he’s doing this, he flings himself onto the bed and pulls the sheet up to his grey beard. He has never let his daughter see him unharnessed. Passionately he wants his daughter to have an unmutilated father.

The wind is ruffling the sheet and the sheet is slapping like the washing in the orchard of my childhood when the bise blew. It won’t blow away, Christian, are you sure?

Often the burnt come to the shop to have their pain taken away. Michel insists on being alone with them, I have never seen what he does. Sometimes somebody asks him to go down to an accident in the factory. Once or twice he has succeeded in taking the pain away by telephone. Four years ago, Louis’s son, Gérard, was pruning an apple tree with a chain saw, standing on a ladder. Somehow he slipped and the chain saw, still turning, touched his neck before clattering to the ground. Blood was pouring out of a jugular vein into his shirt. He came running into the shop, his face like a sheep’s. Michel stopped the bleeding within a minute without touching the wound. Then he sent Gérard down to the doctor, who couldn’t believe his medical eyes.

Each time he takes away the pain he is exhausted afterwards, and, when I’m there, I massage the back of his neck and shoulders to give him relief. One night when I was doing this to him, he said: Paradise is rest, isn’t it? Repose. You go to paradise after you’ve worked three shifts running, twenty-four hours without a break. You stop and there’s the pure pleasure of stopping, doing nothing, lying down. Paradise is doing fuck-all. You don’t know anything else exists. No relations in paradise, Odile, no children, no women, no men. Undistilled egotism, paradise! Isn’t that it, my love? I went on massaging him and I felt his cart-horse shoulders relaxing, accepting. After a while he turned towards me, his eyes piercing me, and he pronounced my name. Then he took me in his arms, and he carried me, yes, he carried me to the bed and murmured: It’s only in hell, my love, that we find each other!

And Michel found me there on the bed. He found Odile.

Look, look down there—can you see?—there’s a heron flying. *Tzaplia*, the last message before nightfall.

Tell them, Christian, tell them when we land on the earth that there’s nothing more to know.

** Play Me Something

What is it that men have and women don’t and which is hard and long?

On your left is the city of Verona, announced the bus driver over the loudspeaker. Verona was conquered by the Ostrogoths, later by the Barbarians, and still later by the Austrians. In the fourteenth century Verona was the setting of the love story between Romeo and Juliet.

What is it that men have and women don’t and which is hard and long?

Tell us! demanded the boys.

Military service!

The flatness of the surrounding countryside was unfamiliar, making it difficult to judge distances. The coach was traveling fast, yet it seemed that time passed and nothing changed.

You see their maize? They’re two months ahead of us.

Finally the coach crossed the motor causeway to the Queen of Cities. In the vaporetto the men stood up very straight, as if on parade. This was because they were reminded of the first time they had left the village as conscripts in the army. The women lounged on the deck seats, and the younger ones pulled up their skirts to bare their legs to the sun. The vaporetto swayed first to one side and then to the other, like a woman pedaling very slowly on a bicycle.

How would you like a white suit like the ship’s captain?

Look at those insects!

Where?

There!

She’s been drinking!

He must change it every day.

Look! Along the water line.

Good God, yes, thousands of them.

They come up for the sun.

They’re crabs.

I’ve never seen crabs that size.

You don’t know what to look at.

I tell you, it looks like a flood.

You couldn’t make cheese here!

They disembarked at the Piazza San Marco and climbed the circular staircase of the Campanile. Afterwards the men were thirsty and insisted upon having a drink in one of the cafés on the piazza, which Napoleon called the largest ballroom in Europe.

It costs more to piss here than to drink a whole case at home!

Inside the café he noticed a poster announcing a festival organised by *L’Unità*, the Communist daily newspaper. Why not?

They crossed the Bridge of Sighs and stopped beneath a statue of Eve in the courtyard of the Doge’s Palace.

It’s a wife like that you need!

Later the men climbed onto the terrace of the Cathedral of San Marco to look at the horses.

The festival was to be held on the island of Giudecca. From the Doge’s Palace he could see the coloured lights decorating the buildings across the water and from time to time he heard a strain of music.

If you’re not at the bus station by two, we’ll know they drowned you.

He’s more adventurous than the rest of you men!

He sat in the stern of the vaporetto with his instrument case on his knees.

You’re not from here.

These words were addressed to him by a young woman with magenta lipstick and white sandals.

How is that?

You look too quiet.

You know what I have in this box?

She shook her head. She had glasses and her black hair was drawn back in a chignon.

A trombone.

It’s not true, she cried. Play it! Please, play something.

Not here on the boat, he said. Are you going to the festival?

If you brought it with you, you must have had the idea of playing it.

We came from the mountains. I didn’t want to leave it in the bus.

Around her neck was a white necklace.

You, do you live down here?

In Mestri, across the bay, where the oil tanks are. And you—I’d say you work on a farm.

How do you know?

I can smell the cows.

If she had been a man, he would have hit her.

What do you think I smell of?

Scent.

Correct. I work in a chemist’s shop.

One look at your hands told me you didn’t work with them.

Do you know what my father calls that?

No.

Infantile proletarianism.

He said nothing. Perhaps it was a Venetian expression.

The vaporetto was approaching the island. Hung from the first-storey windows on the far side of the piazza were banderolas with slogans printed on them. He could make out the hammer and sickle. As he stepped ashore, he held his instrument case tightly under his arm. The festival, he reminded himself, was organised by the Communist Party, but this did not mean there were no thieves there. He could spot them already.

Do you like dancing? she asked.

I can’t dance carrying this.

Give it to me.

She disappeared with his instrument case into one of the nearby buildings.

And if it’s stolen? he said, when she came back empty-handed.

Comrade, she replied, this is a workers’ festival, and workers do not steal from one another.

Peasants do! he said.

What is your name?

Bruno. And yours?

Marietta.

He held up his arm for her to take his hand. He did not dance like a man from here, she thought. He was more single-minded, as if, when dancing, he put everything else out of his mind.

What is it like on your mountain?

There are rhodos and wild goats.

Rhodos?

Little bushes of flowers.

Pink?

Blood-red.

How do they vote in your village?

For the right.

And you?

I vote for anyone who promises to raise the price of milk.

That isn’t good for the workers.

Milk is all we have to sell.

They were dancing round a plane tree in a corner of the piazza. In the tree was a loudspeaker, perched like an owl on one of the branches.

You came here alone? she asked.

With the whole band.

A band of friends?

The brass band of the village.

The next time the owl fell silent he proposed that they should have a drink. She guided him to a table beneath a gigantic portrait, drawn on a sheet and hung from the top windows of a house. The painted face was so large that even the flanks of the nose had been drawn with a six-inch housepainter’s brush. They looked up at it together.

Do you live alone? she asked.

Yes, I’ve lived alone for eight years. A fifth of my life.

She liked the way he hesitated before speaking, it was very deliberate, as if each time he answered one of her questions, he came to the door of a house, opened it to a visitor, and then spoke.

How many mirrors do you have at home? She asked this as if it were a schoolgirl’s riddle.

He paused to count.

One over the sink, one over the drinking trough outside.

She laughed. He poured out more white wine.

That’s Karl Marx, isn’t it? He nodded up at the sheet.

Marx was a great prophet. What do you see in the future? she asked.

The rich getting richer.

I mean your future.

Mine? Everything depends upon my health.

You don’t look sick to me.

If you’re sent to hospital when you are sick, your dog doesn’t look after your cows. I live alone.

She raised her glass to his. I think I could find you work in Mestri.

He was looking at her small feet, thinking: everything between a man and a woman is a question of how much you give up of one thing to have another—an exchange.

You are bound to be influenced by the property relations of which you are a part. Her voice was tender, as if she were explaining something intimate. The Kulaks sided with the bourgeoisie, and the little peasants with the petit bourgeoisie. You are wrong to think only about the price of milk.

She comes, he told himself, from this place of water and islands where there is no earth at all.

The fact is peasants will disappear, she continued, the future lies elsewhere.

I’d like to have children, he said.

You have to find a wife.

He poured out more wine.

You’d find a wife if you moved here.

I’d cut off my right hand rather than work in a factory.

All the men dancing there, she said, they’re nearly all factory workers.

He had never seen so many men in white shirts. They wore their shirts tied round their waists to show off their stomachs. They were as cunning as weasels. Their cuffs were rolled back only halfway up their forearms, as if they had just got out of bed.

Do they caress well? he asked.

Who?

The weasels over there.

Caress?

What a man should do to a woman.

Let’s dance, she said.

The owl was hooting a tango.

Who’s milking the cows tonight? she whispered.

Who am I dancing with?

Marietta is dancing with Bruno, she said, as he pulled her hand up and looked along their arms—as if taking aim with a gun.

As the tempo increased they advanced and turned more and more quickly. People began to watch them. His shirt and his heavy shoes announced he was from the country. But he danced well, they made a couple. Some of the bystanders began to clap in time with the music. It was like watching a duel—a duel between the paving stones and their four feet. How long would they keep it up?

<br>Now they were walking down a narrow street, with old men on wicker chairs, and grandmothers playing with balloons to amuse their grandchildren. At the end of the street was suspended another gigantic portrait: a great domed head, like a beehive of thought, wearing glasses.

That’s Gramsci.

He put his arm round her shoulders so that she could lean her head against his damp flannel shirt.

Antonio Gramsci, she said. He taught us all.

You wouldn’t mistake him for a horse dealer! he said.

Past the portrait, they came to a cobbled quayside overlooking the lagoon toward Murano. In places grass had grown over the cobbles. He stared across the black water and she, carrying her sandals, wandered over to an abandoned gondola, moored by the corner of the Rio di Santa Eufemia. She sat down on the platform by the stern near the wooden oarlock. Sun and water had stripped the gondola of its paint, which was now wood grey. It must once have belonged to a wine merchant, for several demijohns lay on their sides in the prow.

Do you think they are empty? she asked him.

Instead of answering, he jumped into the gondola, which rocked violently. Making his way forward to the prow, he did his best to correct every lurch by leaning in the opposite direction, like someone dancing in a conga line.

Sit down, for God’s sake, sit down! she shouted.

She was crouching in the bottom of the boat. Its sides were smacking the water and splashing the air.

He picked up a demijohn and held it against the sky with one hand as if wringing the neck of a goose.

Empty! he boomed.

Sit! she shrieked. Sit!

This is how they found themselves lying on the rush mat in the bottom of the gondola. After a while the smacking of the water ceased and a quiet lapping took its place. Yet the calm did not last long. Soon the gondola was again lurching from side to side with water dripping from its gunwales and its staves thumping the lagoon.

If we capsize, can you swim? she whispered.

No.

Yes, Bruno, yes, yes, yes …

Afterwards they lay on their backs, panting.

Look at the stars. Don’t they make you feel small? she said.

The stars look down at us, she continued, and sometimes I think everything, everything except killing, everything takes so long because they are so far away.

His other hand was trailing in the water. Her teeth bit his ear.

The world changes so slowly.

His hand from the water grasped her breast.

One day there’ll be no more classes. I believe that, don’t you? she murmured and pulled his head down to her other breast.

There’s always been good and bad, he said.

We’re making progress, don’t you believe that?

All our ancestors asked the same thing, he said, you and I will never know in this life why it was made the way it is.

He entered her again. The gondola smacked the water and splashed the air.

When they crossed the narrow island to the pierhead, where the last vaporetto would stop, the music was over. Only a few drunks, immobile as statues, remained in the piazza. Marietta went to fetch his instrument case. He gazed across the lagoon. He could see the bell-tower they had climbed. The guide said it had toppled over at the beginning of the century. No roots. He remembered the date: 14<sup>th</sup> July 1902, the year of his father’s birth. To the right there were still lights in the Doge’s Palace. According to the guide, the Palace had been destroyed or partly destroyed by fire seven times. There had never been peace in that building. Too much power and no roots. One day it would be robbed and pillaged and after that it would be used as a hen house.

Marietta handed him his instrument case.

Play for me. Play me something.

He put the case down on the quayside. Out of his pocket he took a small mouth organ, and turning toward the Doge’s Palace, began to play. The music was speaking to him.

Before it is light<em>—</em>

She was staring at his back, relaxed and downcast like the back of a man peeing, except that his hands were to his mouth.

*—Before it is light … when you’ve dressed and gone into the stable—*

<br>With her fingers she was touching the nape of his neck.

*—the animals are lying there—*

She was pressing her hand between his shoulder blades and could feel his lungs and the music in the roof of his mouth.

*—lying there on beech leaves, and your tiredness like a child you have dragged from its sleep—*

Her hand felt under the belt of his trousers.

*—and through the window you see the span of the stars—*

She noticed that one of his bootlaces was undone. She knelt down to tie it for him.

*—the span of the stars into whose well we are thrown at birth like salt into water—*

Neither of them noticed the vaporetto approaching the pierhead.

Come to Mestri, she sighed, come to Mestri. I’ll find you work.

<br>The bus left at 3 A.M. Most of the band wanted to sleep. Some husbands put their heads on their wives’ shoulders, in other cases the wife leaned her head against her man. The lights were switched out one by one as the coach took the road for Verona. The young drummer sitting beside Bruno tried one last joke.

Do you know what hell is?

Do you?

Hell is where bottles have two holes and women have none.

[For Jacob]

** Their Railways

Keep tears

My heart

For prose.

Train

Flammes bleues

Fleurs jaunes.

In the ditches

I am water.

Between

Grow kingcups of your childhood.

Sunk in my eyes

Skies of the churchyard.

Through arteries

Of gravel

Whispering to my grasses

The blood of good-byes.

Flammes bleues

Fleurs jaunes

Their railways.

1985/86

* Lilac and Flag

** Dedication | ~~

FOR KATYA AND ORESTES

** Old Love Poem

The hay<br> smelt of how<br> the sky loved the earth.<br> You were the pain in my ribs<br> aching<br> from the carts unloaded.

The dead<br> were filling a doorway<br> with the view beyond.<br> You were the house<br> the candle under the plum tree<br> and my eternity.

** Birth

THREE BUTTERFLIES RISE from the field like white ash above a fire. Let my dead help me now. One of them reappears and, flying over the tall grass which I will soon have to scythe, alights on a blue flower and opens its wings. On each of her wings the same sign is printed in blackish grey—the grey of the first marks if you draw with a burnt stick on paper. I begin to think of Zsuzsa—or perhaps it is she who begins to think of me. A second butterfly comes down and covers the first; the second one is Sucus. The two of them, wings spread, quiver like four pages of a book open in the wind. Suddenly Sucus flies off. Let my dead help me now. Zsuzsa shuts her wings, slips off the scabious flower, and joins the other two butterflies to fly away over the tall grass which I will soon have to scythe. I have loved them all.

** Food

ZSUZSA LIVED IN a house on the hill behind the tanneries. They were tall, open buildings without walls and on each floor the hides were hung to dry in the salt wind that came off the sea. The hides, bulging a little in the wind, looked like giant bats suspended upside down and asleep. For years there had been talk of pulling down the old tanneries and building new ones elsewhere, further away from the coast. The plan had not been carried out because of a warning from the city health department. If the old sheds were destroyed, so the health department threatened, the million rats who lived and bred there would quit the hill and invade Troy. It was in these tanneries that Marius worked long ago, when many men still came back alive from the city.

On Rat Hill, Zsuzsa’s mother’s house was blue. Uncle Dima, who sometimes worked in the docks, had painted it with stolen paint, manufactured specially for swimming pools. A bright turquoise blue.

All we need now is the diving board! said Zsuzsa after he had finished painting the house.

A week later Uncle Dima was arrested when he and two of his friends tried to break the till of an all-night garage on the Trojan ring road.

Zsuzsa’s father had disappeared five years earlier, without a trace. On the roads between cities people often vanish. Here in the village men leave their wives and their children, but in the end there’s always news of them. Two years after Zsuzsa’s father had vanished without a trace, her mother came home one Sunday morning with Uncle Dima. Meet my fresh hide, she announced to her son, Naisi, and her two daughters.

The Blue House had two rooms. Compared to some of the neighbours’ shacks, it was a solid home. Its walls were made of concrete blocks, and its roof of tarpaulin, stolen from the American navy, was well tarred and held down by wooden batons.

Unlike her younger sister, Zsuzsa was skinny. Not just her wrists and ankles, but her shoulders, her chest, and hips.

She could slip between a door and its hinges, her mother complained.

People say bodies reveal character. They are wrong. Bodies are dealt out to us like cards. Character begins with how you play what you get. At nineteen Zsuzsa looked like a boy. Yet she was already more feminine than any wet nurse. This is what made her a law unto herself.

The first time she met Sucus was outside St. Joseph’s. St. Joseph’s was not a church but a prison, a large one which held two thousand prisoners. She had been to visit the uncle.

How do you feel, Uncle Dima?

How in God’s name do you think?

Bad?

Couldn’t be worse.

It’s sunny today.

Eleven fucking months. What have you brought me?

Meat pies, a pineapple, smoked cod’s liver.

Cod’s liver! God in heaven! Who but your mother would think of smoked cod’s liver?

Here are some cigarettes.

Zsuzsa, I want you to go and see Rico.

I hate that man, Uncle Dima.

Hate my friend?

Last time he tried to lay me.

Keep out of his reach, that’s all. I want you to go and see Rico and I want you to tell him: The truck’s ready.

Okay.

What’ll you tell him?

He can fetch the truck.

No! The truck’s ready.

Same thing.

Dear God, what did your mother do to deserve such an idiot of a daughter. The truck’s ready.

I’ll tell him, Uncle. Don’t worry. Someone has to fetch it, no?

Just tell him: The truck’s ready. He’ll understand.

I must be off.

Give me a kiss.

It’s not allowed here.

Give me your hand then.

Bye, Uncle.

Bye, Zsuzsa. Don’t forget.

The gatehouse to the prison, which was a hundred years old, was built in brick. Over the arch above the massive doors, which only opened for black vans bringing in and taking out prisoners, was a wooden panel on which the sign-writer had written STATE PENITENTIARY CORRECTIONAL CENTRE. Above these noble letters he had painted a pair of scales in gold. People on foot entered and left by a small door set, like a reprieve, within one of the large ones. Prison suppliers and undertakers used an electronic entrance to the modern wing, which was at another level, lower down the hill.

From the Champ-de-Mars, outside the main gate, you could see the docks, the district around the railway station known as Budapest, and the industrial area to the north, over which, during the dog days of summer when the sea was like a lake, there often hung a pall of yellowish smoke the colour of smoked haddock. On leaving the prison Zsuzsa came through the little door which was like a reprieve. Outside stood two soldiers.

Their heads turned with their eyes as Zsuzsa walked past. She was dressed in sandals, blue jeans, and a T-shirt with the words STANFORD UNIVERSITY written across it. They quizzed each letter of the unpronounceable words. The fingers of one drummed on the barrel of a submachine gun held in the crook of his arm.

Nice pair of lemons there!

I am an old woman, yet I still remember what it was like to pass by the gaze of men who wanted you—hatefully or beautifully. We give birth to monsters, to saints, and to everybody else who is neither one nor the other. To Jesus of Nazareth and to Herod. Every kind of good and evil comes out from between our legs, and when we are young, every kind of good and evil dreams of getting in there again.

The soldier knew Zsuzsa heard what he said by the change in the way she walked. Further off, some children were playing with a donkey. In the heavy heat the national flag hung limply from its flagstaff on the prison tower. A nice pair of little lemons!

The second soldier followed Zsuzsa. Suddenly there appeared, as if he had come from heaven to save her, a young man, standing by a low wall on which was placed a painted tray with glasses and a blue thermos.

Would you like a coffee?

How much?

Six hundred.

No.

Better a little lemon juice! said the soldier, leering.

The young man with the painted tray handed Zsuzsa a glass of coffee, and placed himself firmly between the soldier and her.

Drink it, he said. I’m making you a present.

What’s your name?

Sucus.

That’s a funny name for a boy!

They gave it to me when I was a kid because I sold sweets.

Sucus—a kind of sweet?

You’ve got it.

The soldier banged the butt of his gun with the palm of his hand and turned his back on them.

Now you sell coffee.

I pay five thousand for this plank.

Who to?

Sucus nodded towards the guards.

It’s a lot of money.

Men are willing to pay for coffee here.

Yes?

On their way out, not on their way in. A man who’s done his time in there needs a coffee when he comes out to make sure he’s not dreaming. He needs a coffee almost as badly as he needs a woman. Then there are the visitors—they need a coffee to prove to themselves they’re not like the man they’ve been talking to. Your one inside—who’s he?

My lover man, she lied.

How long’s he in for?

Ten years.

He’ll go mad.

A flock of starlings—like a thousand black chips of wood flying up from the blow of an axe—crossed the Champ-de-Mars and settled on the black tile rooves of the prison.

They don’t, said Zsuzsa. That’s the first thing that changes the other side of those gates. Your need to go mad slowly disappears, day by day it gets smaller and smaller, less pressing—she put the palms of her hands against her temples, she wore four rings and her nails were silver-varnished—until one day it goes away. It’s outside people go mad. More likely it’s me who’ll go mad first.

What’s his name?

She hesitated, glanced around, and following the flight of the last starlings, saw the national flag hanging limply from the prison tower in the afternoon heat.

Flag, she said.

Flag’s his name?

He’s called Flag, I tell you.

Strange name.

It came from how he was born. He was born in the street, on June 7<sup>th</sup>, the national holiday. There were flags everywhere, and he came a month before he was due, a whole month. It was evening and his mother was dancing in Alexanderplatz like everyone else that night …

Who told you this?

Suddenly there was lightning and a rumble of thunder over the hills! And her waters broke.

Sucus looked at her face. She had large eyes, too large. She closed them. He knew they were dark, but he couldn’t remember their colour. Were they grey or brown?

And there, before you could say Jack Knife, under a roller coaster, behind a rifle range where you could win a life-size doll or a bear cub if you were a good shot, she gave birth on the grass! They were firing all the time, she told me, and the problem was there was nothing to wrap him in, so they took a flag from a street lamp and wrapped him in that. And ever afterwards this was his name, he’s called Flag.

Why’s he inside, this Flag of yours?

He killed a man.

Deliberately?

Only women kill men deliberately.

Are you sure? I’m sure.

What did he do, this Flag?

The man was stabbed. Flag was jealous.

Because of you?

Zsuzsa closed her eyes again. Then she said, Yes, because of me.

And the man? Not Flag, the other one.

The other one never touched me. I never let him.

So this Flag was jealous for nothing.

Flag burnt with jealousy for me.

And the other man died?

Yes.

Zsuzsa had two lower teeth missing, he could see this when she smiled.

I don’t believe you.

The coffee was very good, said Zsuzsa.

I don’t believe you.

Yes, really, it was good, the best I’ve drunk for a week.

I don’t believe your story about Flag.

I’m not asking you to believe anything, she said.

More likely you went to visit little brother who got nicked for car radios. Where do you live, anyway?

Barbek.

On the hill?

Rat Hill.

I live across the river, he said, in Cachan.

Cachan—Zsuzsa exclaimed. That’s where my mother works every night.

There’s no end to Cachan.

She’s a cleaner. In the I.B.M. building. Her last job before daybreak is to change the roses in the sales director’s office. He has new roses every day, and the old ones she brings home. Roses I adore. You can give me a hundred. A hundred stolen roses and I’m yours.

Look, said Sucus, nodding towards the prison, there’s a man coming out.

The man was carrying a suitcase.

Watch now, the guards’ll needle him.

The man held his free arm a little away from his body as if he were walking on a narrow plank high above the ground and had to balance himself. His neck was stiff and he looked straight ahead.

There he goes! said one of the soldiers. The fucker thinks they’ll still remember him at home.

The man continued walking, little step by little step, as if along a plank from a boat to the quayside.

Fuckers like him don’t deserve a home!

His mother’s cunt smells of codfish, said the second soldier.

The man was now through the gate. He could see the whole Champ-de-Mars, the plane trees, the city of Troy below, the children playing with the donkey, Sucus with his painted tray, and the wine-dark sea. He was still walking as if along the plank.

You don’t know what his mother’s cunt smells of?

A glass of coffee, milord? proposed Zsuzsa.

The freed prisoner hesitated and pulled a handkerchief out of his pocket.

The first taste of freedom, Zsuzsa said.

Black without sugar, said the man.

He held the glass in both hands with the handkerchief wrapped round it, and sat on the low wall to drink slowly, savouring the coffee.

No arsenic in it?

Zsuzsa laughed and Sucus thought: When she laughs, we’re taller than anybody.

You haven’t heard? said the man. The chief of police was hospitalised last week. Arsenic poisoning. His wife confessed. There were four women in it together. They had the idea of putting arsenic in their husbands’ coffee. A small dose each day. All the husbands were in the law. Bogeys.

They wanted to kill them?

Not at all. They wanted to do a bad turn to Old King Cole.

Who’s he?

They wanted to put an end—this is how they said it—to their husbands’ infidelities. They’d heard that a little arsenic makes Old King Cole go limp. This way their men wouldn’t screw other women. One of the wives put arsenic in her husband’s custard too. You need sugar to hide the bad taste of arsenic. That’s why I don’t take sugar.

Zsuzsa laughed and Sucus thought again: When she laughs, we’re taller than anybody.

At first you’re frightened, the man said.

Now? she asked.

Of not knowing which way to go.

He opened his battered suitcase and took out a packet wrapped in newspaper.

You lose the habit of choosing, he said.

Inside the newspaper was a leather cap, new-looking and very flat, which he placed painstakingly on the very top of his head, feeling the sides of his shaved scalp with his blunt fingertips so as to measure how high up the cap was.

Zsuzsa handed him a mirror from her handbag. The freed prisoner looked into it and saw a man in his sixties with wild eyes.

It suits you, she said.

You think so? I don’t want to turn a corner and run slap into my old crap.

If you’re wearing that, no crap will recognise you, she said.

A cap against the crap! the man joked. His eyes were wild with loss.

Everything’s good today.

How much do I owe you for the coffee?

Twelve hundred, Zsuzsa said.

The man paid her, shut the suitcase, touched with his fingertips the cap on his head and walked down towards the city.

I didn’t believe it, said Sucus. I didn’t believe it when you charged him double.

Inside they hear about prices going up, said Zsuzsa, but they lose count of what things really cost outside. They’re like babies when they come out.

Thousands of people were strolling after work beneath the massive trees, through which the street lamps looked like moons. The shop windows, whose lights only went out at dawn, displayed silver shoes, leather boots, raincoats, handbags, necklaces, document cases, bottles of perfume, cars with convertible rooves, hair dryers, bridal suites, candelabra, VCRs, and real orange trees. Above the shop windows towered buildings with glass walls as high as glaciers. Through them you could see the floors of the offices, neither in darkness nor illuminated but filled with a diffuse grey light, like a television screen has when it’s switched on without a picture.

Do you know who goes to the café over there? asked Zsuzsa.

Who?

Coglioni.

Him. He could buy up the whole café.

He doesn’t pay a sou. They never charge him.

Like that they keep out of trouble, said Sucus. Let’s sit down and order something. When they bring the bill, we’ll say we’re friends of Coglioni.

His children, we’re his children! said Zsuzsa.

He had so many nobody can count them.

How old are you? asked Zsuzsa.

Same age as your Flag.

He led her to an empty table and pulled back a chair for her, as men in white suits do on television.

Whiskey for me; what about you?

I’ll have an ice cream—one of those large ones with different colours like a hat.

With a long silver spoon?

With a long silver spoon, she repeated, putting out her tongue at him.

At the next table sat two women, wearing white lace gloves. They stared at the couple who had just arrived.

Nowhere’s left, one of them whispered, her lipstick was as red as the handle of a hammer, there’s nowhere left these days where one feels safe.

What alarmed the two ladies was the fact that the man with his studded belt and the young woman, who had been walking barefoot, were too close. Far too close. They should have been in another part of the city, not at the next table.

Supposing we order something to eat at the same time? Zsuzsa suggested.

Risky, replied Sucus.

Would you like her portrait done?

All Sucus saw when he first looked up were two thin, hairy legs, then a pair of shorts, skimpy as a loin cloth, and finally a long, bearded face.

No, said Sucus, we don’t like portraits.

It’ll only take a few minutes.

The man was already pulling a chair towards the table.

You’re wasting your time.

Your friend has a face that cries out to be drawn. Behind his beard the man had bulbous lips that were almost blue.

Look, mister, I don’t know who you are, but I’ll tell you something: we can pull faster ones than you. Leave us alone. Get!

The man sat down and laid his portfolio on the table.

I want to draw your friend because she’s so beautiful.

This one isn’t for drawing.

I’ll make you a present of it when it’s done.

Like hell you will.

I won’t charge for the drawing. Just give me ten minutes.

How much do you charge usually?

It depends.

You’re talking to a systems man. How much do you charge?

Twenty-five thousand.

That’s class. Did you hear him, sweetheart? He can sell your mug for twenty-five ribs. Supposing you unbutton a bit? Give them their money’s worth for fifty ribs.

The man took a drawing pad out of his folio and opened an old cigarette tin.

What’s your name, three-letter man?

Raphaele. And yours?

Flag!

When Sucus said this, Zsuzsa wanted to jump in the air. Instead, she bit on one of her four rings and lowered her eyes.

The man took a pencil out of the tin and began to draw.

Not so fast, Mr. Raphaele! Nothing to stop you doing a second one as soon as we’ve gone. If you press hard enough with your pencil, you can trace it out again on the page underneath. I wasn’t born yesterday. You can make a hundred drawings out of one, and at twenty-five ribs each, that’s two and a half million!

Do you know why I’m drawing your friend?

You want to get a hard-on and make money out of it as well?

She has an extraordinary face.

A model has to be paid, just like everyone else, said Sucus.

Let him draw me, Flag.

After a while the waiter came. He suffered from varicose veins and had eyes that were tired of sorting out chits, glasses, coins, people. He noticed Sucus’s hands, Zsuzsa’s feet, the draughtsman’s wrist watch, his expensive Italian sandals. Because of the last two items, he would serve them.

A coffee, said Raphaele.

A whiskey, said Sucus, and an Arctic Glory.

Take no notice of me, said Raphaele to Zsuzsa, carry on as if I wasn’t here.

It’s not the same as a photo, she said.

Don’t look at me, look at Flag.

She looked at Sucus. He was built like a peasant, with sturdy legs and a way of holding his head so that there was space on either shoulder for carrying a sack. She wondered how long he had worn a moustache.

The waiter came back with their orders on a tray.

If I eat my ice you won’t be able to draw me, Zsuzsa said, the spoon already in her mouth.

The waiter handed the bill to the bearded man with the Italian sandals. The man paid without saying a word. Sucus winked at Zsuzsa and squeezed her knee.

Now, I don’t have to give you the drawing, said the man.

You only paid five thousand, said Sucus. She gives ten minutes for that, no more! You’ve already had nine. So scribble quick, mister, or order us another round.

Keep the spoon in your mouth a moment!

She studied Flag again. Nobody would ever be able to lay their hands on him, she thought. All his features were as alert as a dog’s ears.

The man held up the finished drawing. I don’t look like that! screamed Zsuzsa.

You’ve made her look like a whore! said Sucus.

You don’t like it?

I wouldn’t wipe my arse on it.

So there’s no point in giving it to you?

You owe her eight thousand for sitting there for you.

That’s impossible, twinkie.

You’re going to pay, man, either in money or in pain.

Sucus slipped a knife out of his pocket and slid it under his hand onto the table so the man could see it.

Kill me. I love you, said the tall man in shorts.

The grey cat is sitting on my lap, asleep. He’s a strange colour. I’ve never seen another like him. He looks as if he’s wearing threadbare greyish underwear through which you glimpse a pale white skin that’s never seen the sun. In fact, he has plenty of fur. Indeed, he has two furs, one grey and one white. But instead of the two colours making a pattern, with white patches here and grey patches there, they’ve grown together like clover and grass. He was born this way. Something wasn’t decided properly.

It was then that Zsuzsa noticed the waiter. He was hurrying towards their table with a bogey in plain clothes.

Let’s run, she whispered, and snatching the drawing, she pulled Sucus towards a row of little trees in painted white tubs at the edge of the terrace. From there she hopped like a magpie to the pavement below and waited for him.

They left the big avenues and took small roads that went steeply down through the Escorial. In the district of the Escorial there were trees everywhere: magnolias, viburnums, New Red cherries, forsythia, Persian lilacs, maples. Between the flowering branches were lawns, greener in the summer than anything else in Troy because they were watered for hours on end every day. The lawns surrounded swimming pools, painted the same blue as the walls of Zsuzsa’s house. Around the pools people gathered before dinner to drink aperitifs. After dinner, when they had drunk some more, they often dove into the water naked. The water was often lit up from underneath so that the pools glowed like precious stones. Many a marriage in Escorial was decided naked in a swimming pool at night.

I’ll explain to you how I see things, said Sucus, and your life will never be the same again. Everyone needs something, yes? Everyone needs some little thing to make them a bit happier or a bit less sad. They don’t talk about it. Usually they can’t get it themselves. To discover somebody’s real need, even a little one, requires talent.

I know what you’ve got tattooed on your biceps—three testicles!

Okay. Listen. When you’ve discovered the little need of twenty people, and when you know where to go to fetch them satisfaction, then you’ve got a living. Because however poor they are, they pay. If not in money, then in something. They come to depend on you. You’ve got to keep it secret, absolutely secret. If you start talking, another supplier will be there one day before you. And besides, people are ashamed of their needs.

And what do you supply?

Anything. Listen, out in Chicago the water’s turned off every night, right? Most people leave for work before it’s turned on. A friend of mine goes round to a hundred flats at midday flushing toilets full of morning shit. And in each flat they’ve left something for him on the kitchen table.

He could snitch whatever he wanted.

No, he couldn’t. One, he’s blind. And two, everyone knows where to find him. He lives on the estate.

What do you supply? Besides coffee.

I’m looking. Everyone needs something.

Everyone needs everything, Flag.

From behind a hedge of rhododendra they heard laughing. Along the edge of the road, beside each metal gate, the electronic bell and digital control panels were already lit up like spaceship candles.

You see those roses? asked Sucus.

They’re Snow Queens.

I’ll lift you up.

Ouch! You’re hurting.

I’ll kneel, said Sucus.

Give me a hand for my foot.

Hold on to my head.

She sat on his shoulders and he straighted his back. Then he held on to her heels, which were as warm as sand the sun had shone on all day.

Watch the thorns!

I’ve got two!

With the roses pinned to her T-shirt, they walked farther down the hill towards the sea. It was well and truly night. From the air Troy would have looked like jewelry laid out on black velvet.

When did you last eat? he asked.

You mean the Arctic Glory!

A meal, not an ice cream!

I got up late this morning. There was no special reason for getting up. I thought of washing my hair, then I remembered Mother had used the last of the shampoo. I had to visit Uncle but visits to that place are at four o’clock exact. I didn’t get out of bed till midday. When I got up I made myself a croque monsieur.

She was holding his hand as they walked and she brought it to her mouth with her two missing teeth and pretended to bite it.

A croque monsieur, she said laughing. And you?

Yesterday.

You must be starving!

I’ll tell you what I’d like to eat, said Sucus. I’d like to eat a plate of calamari to start with. Calamari, fried in fresh oil with parsley. Then I’ll take a steak because I haven’t seen a steak since Easter. No, I’ll tell you what I really like. It’s goose. I only ate it once in my life—at a wedding.

One day I’ll make you my dish of brown beans, said Zsuzsa, I learnt it from my grandmother. I cook the beans all night very slowly, very slowly. And when they’re cool in the morning I add crushed garlic and lemon juice and salt them and oil them and I pepper them and I give them to you with hardboiled eggs which I’ve cooked all night too, with onion skins and with oil on the water so it doesn’t turn into steam.

What’s it called, this night dish of yours?

Flag’s ful medames.

They were at the bottom of the Escorial hill, at the point where the army barracks hid the sea from the road.

How much cash have you got?

Two thousand, and you?

Your coffee money, she said, that’s all.

Under the next street light several cars were parked. Sucus tried their doors; they were all locked. It was then, as they went on walking, that an idea came to Zsuzsa. If they continued for a mile, they’d reach the docks. She knew the café where Rico hung out. She had been there a few times with her uncle. She’d deliver the message. Fetch the truck. No. The truck’s ready. If Rico, the man with ears like empty saddlebags, started in on his usual tricks, she knew how to get round him tonight. She’d make happen what she wanted to happen. Tonight she wanted to make food for Flag.

No! she said out loud.

She didn’t want to make food for Flag, what she wanted was to be food for Flag. She wanted calamari and oil and parsley to come out of her body. She might get a goose out of it too. A goose like her grandmother’s. A bird who gave white feathers for a pillow and brown flesh when cooked. She’d give Flag the tenderest morsel, the breast—where he was fingering her now through her T-shirt.

The road followed the railway lines that went to the Customs House, a building as large as twenty barns. On the other side of a wire grill were parked several jeeps with soldiers in them.

Give me an hour? said Zsuzsa.

What do you mean?

I have to go to a café over there. You wait here, and I’ll be back in an hour.

I can’t see any café. I’ll come with you.

It wouldn’t work with you.

Then do it tomorrow.

I want to do it now.

And I wait here like a post?

Lie on the grass. She nodded at a waste lot on the other side of the road. I’ll be back in an hour.

If you’re not, you won’t find me.

I promise. Here, keep the drawing for me. I’m going to give it to my children. And let me tell you something you don’t know yet, Flag. If Zsuzsa makes a promise, you can depend on it.

She walked away towards the quayside which started after the customs compound. Sucus crossed the road and clambered up a bank. From the top he could see distant white arc lights where they were loading a ship. It was very quiet. He could hear the soldiers across the road talking. He lay down on the grass and looked up at the stars.

In the sky he saw a boat. The varnished white wood of her deck glowed, the colour of resin and honey, and the boards fitted so tightly together, there was only a hairline between them. The ship’s deck was the flat stomach of the woman he’d met outside St. Joseph’s and the bowsprit was her crossed ankles.

If you are asking how an old woman like me can know what Sucus dreamt about, remember that dreams are among the oldest things in the world.

Would you be so kind as to help me move a tree off my roof? said a man’s voice in Sucus’s ear.

He woke up and opened his eyes: there was nobody to be seen.

It fell during the storm last night.

Sucus twisted onto his side and saw the talking head of a man in his fifties, going bald, with deep lines across his forehead. The head was in the grass. In front of it, like a lying dog’s paws, were a pair of arms. Each elbow was wearing a sort of sandal.

I fear, said the head, that if the wind gets up again, a branch may break a window. If you would care to accompany me?

The speaker had no legs and he advanced by moving his elbows. With each elbow step, his shoulders dragged his body over the grass.

The waste lot ended against a high wall and under this wall stood a large Cadillac without wheels. Its doors were open and, inside, two candles were burning.

On the car roof was a plum tree which had fallen from a terraced garden above.

My problem, said the man, is I can’t reach it. I can see it’s a plum tree. The wood by daylight is the colour of meat dried by winter wind, so it must be plum. It’s gone rotten, it’s been eaten, a neglected tree. My problem is, I can’t reach it, and even if I got myself onto the hood, I wouldn’t have the leverage to pull it off. That’s why when I saw you in the grass, so young and strong, I told myself I would take the liberty …

Sucus pulled the tree off the car roof. If you had an axe, I’d cut it for you, he said.

An axe I don’t have, said the man, but a saw, yes.

Whilst Sucus sawed the small tree into a few logs, the man squirmed about inside the vehicle. A vest was hanging to dry from the steering wheel. Where the passenger’s feet would have been was a basin of water. Onto the rearview mirror a picture of the Madonna had been stuck.

I’ll open a beer for you when you’ve finished. It will not, regrettably, be as cold, on such a summer night, as I would wish.

It cuts well, your saw.

Once I used to drive this car, said the man.

The soldiers by the jeeps below were playing with their searchlight. For a moment its beam picked out the derelict Cadillac. Sucus was leaning on the front wing, drinking from a beer can. The owner lay on his stomach on the back seat.

This is my bed now, he said, smoking a cigarette.

I must go, said Sucus.

I must go … That reminds me of my brother, said the man without legs, blowing a smoke ring towards the rear window curtain. My brother is a drinker. At that time he lived in the mountains, rented a house there with his wife. He became close friends with one of his neighbours. They used to shoot clay pigeons together.

I must be going now.

Wait for the end of the story. One evening at the neighbour’s house my brother was drinking wine and eating cheese. The neighbour saw how much he liked the cheese, so he left it on the table with another open bottle of wine and told him to enjoy himself to the full, for he, the neighbour, had to go to bed. My brother finished off the bottle, then staggered drunk out of the kitchen and made his way to the bedroom. The neighbour was already asleep. My brother took off his trousers and was about to slip into bed beside the wife. Piss off! she whispered and grabbed his trousers. And she wouldn’t give them up. My brother was obliged to go home in his shirt tails!

The storyteller on the back seat rolled over onto his side and started to laugh. He gestured with one hand to his missing legs and, choking with laughter, muttered: Could never explain to his wife where his fucking trousers had gone!

When Sucus got down to the road, a tiny figure beneath the lights on the quayside waved at him. It was Zsuzsa and she was running.

You smell of beer. Are you still hungry? she asked.

My head’s turning I’m so hungry.

We’re going to eat, she said.

Zsuzsa led Sucus along a narrow street with bright lights and through a door where there was the smell of cooking and the sound of voices, then down some steps into a cellar.

Here we can’t run for it, he said.

Don’t worry.

A waiter led them to a table.

Do you have calamari? she asked.

Yes, we do.

And goose rillettes?

Yes …

Their table was beside an aquarium. Air was being blown in bubbles into the water. The green weeds were waving like hair. Sucus pressed a dirty finger against the glass of the tank. When one of the fish approached, he slid his finger up the glass towards the surface where the bubbles were. The fish, mouth open, gills flickering, followed the finger and swam upwards. Then swiftly Sucus slid it sideways towards Zsuzsa, and the fish followed.

I don’t understand, he said.

Aren’t you hungry?

I’m starving.

You’re going to eat me, Flag, eat me for ever and ever!

** Water

IF I’M NOT mistaken, the third of June was Félix’s birthday. Félix had an accordion whom he called Caroline. He never married. When he was sixty-two, he fell ill with jaundice and was taken away to the hospital. So he had to sell his seventeen cows; there was nobody to look after them whilst he was in hospital. When he came home, he bought six more. He wouldn’t stop, Félix, neither with his cows nor with his music.

The third of June was hot in Troy. When the traffic lights turned red, the waiting drivers hung their arms limply out of their car windows. Only the long cars of the rich were shut tight, for they were air-conditioned. On the beaches girls rubbed in suntan lotion every half hour. In the little workshops of Swansea, an industrial zone of the city, the ceiling fans, set into the brick walls under the metal rooves, were turning at full tilt, but made the air no cooler. On the hill of the Escorial the petals, fallen from the magnolia trees, turned brown. Everywhere the city was grinding the heat into dust. Yet on Rat Hill Sucus could feel a slight breeze coming in from the sea.

Zsuzsa’s Blue House had two windows with white nylon curtains. Behind the left-hand curtain was the room where Zsuzsa’s mother—who worked all night—was asleep on a mattress on the floor. From behind the right-hand curtain, Zsuzsa’s younger sister, Julia, was spying on the man her sister had brought home. He was sitting on a box, his legs stretched straight out in front of him, his eyes shut, his head all white with lather. In the doorway of the same house, leaning against its frame, as if he were a cowboy, stood Zsuzsa’s brother, Naisi. Everyone noticed Naisi’s boots: calf-coloured, shining, turned over at the top, they had golden buckles. His smile was also exceptional. Its cunning was completely open. His was a cunning, the smile said, which you could depend upon.

Think it over, said Naisi from the doorway to Sucus on the wooden box, take your time. There’s no point doing a thing like this if you don’t feel comfortable.

Sucus, eyes shut because of the soap, nodded his head.

Zsuzsa came out of the house next door that was made out of the wood of packing cases with a black bottle in her hand.

What’s that? asked Naisi.

Vinegar.

Maybe you should start a hairdresser’s, her brother said.

Last week it was a tattooing parlour!

The two go together.

Go together?

Both imply trust, Sister!

Naisi pulled a black handkerchief out of his pocket, flourished it in the air and suspended it over the empty palm of his other hand. Then he began to make the noise of a laying hen. Sucus opened his eyes. Naisi lifted up the black handkerchief to disclose, lying in his palm, a small red packet, tied around a hundred times with white cotton. His hen went quiet.

Crack? asked Sucus.

Naisi laughed, stopped, laughed again, touched his nose and then slipped both packet and handkerchief back into his trouser pockets. Slowly he walked away down the hill towards the tanneries.

Not Naisi’s day! said Zsuzsa as she rubbed the soap into Sucus’s head. Look at the way he’s walking. When he walks like that, he’s had bad news.

He just made me a proposition, said Sucus.

Forget it, he’s wild when he’s skint.

She dug her nails deeper into his scalp and scratched. Sucus’s toes curled up with pleasure. She saw them, curled up and splayed out.

Can you do me tomorrow, Miss Crescent Moon? inquired a very old Chinese man with a sunshade who was carrying a bucket of seaweed to his house.

I’m skint too, said Sucus.

We’ll go to the Champ-de-Mars and coffee-job together. Later this afternoon, in time for the visits.

No go, said Sucus.

No go why? she asked laughing.

Somebody swiped my thermos this morning.

And the tray?

The tray was in my hands.

I thought you were a jumping cat.

There’s this guy who calls out for five glasses, over by the big gate where the soldiers are. He holds up his hand and shouts five. One for each digit, finger, from the Latin *digitus*. So I pour them, put them on the tray and take them across. My back’s turned for about thirty seconds. Then this guy pretends he wasn’t calling for coffee, he wants tea. I don’t have tea. When I get back to my wall I don’t have a thermos either! They must have used a kid to snatch it. If I see that guy again he won’t last—

We’ll get another thermos.

A five-litre thermos, triple insulation, needs a lot of lettuce, and it’s hard to find a shanked one.

Then we’ll do something else, we’ll invent something, Flag.

She scratched harder into his scalp with her silver nails and he moaned with pleasure. This prompted her to soap his neck too, for she wanted to touch the spot she had made the sound come from. Then she rubbed his head more gently till her hands made him drop off.

He was driving along a one-way street. Zsuzsa was the city centre to which the road signs all pointed. But his street was going away from the centre. At the next round-about he read a sign which said: Zsuzsa 638 km.

At this moment she scooped up a basinful of water and threw it over him. The water had been warmed all day by the sun. Sucus scarcely stirred. He just opened his eyes and smiled.

He’s very wet, whispered little Julia to herself. She was watching every move through the lace curtains. Her sister got astride the man’s legs and sat facing him. He put his hands under her sister’s shirt. Her sister was putting her rings back on her fingers; she had taken them off to do the washing.

You could grow me a beard! Zsuzsa whispered to him.

She had found with her fingers the baby in this sturdy man who could carry sacks of cement across his shoulders and whose moustache was like a black aerosol signature saying HOMBRE. Now she wanted to change the baby back into a roused man.

You could grow me a beard, she repeated.

I know a woman with a beard, he replied.

Not for me! For you!

A black beard and the face of a man. And you know what? She has two breasts as large as melons.

So, you’ve never seen tiny melons?

She keeps an ironmonger’s shop. I went there to buy a gas ring for Mother. She dropped the old one on the floor and it broke.

And the lady with the beard shows her tits to every customer?

At first I couldn’t believe my eyes. She was feeding her baby. She had a beard and a baby! That’s how I saw them.

Zsuzsa rested her chin on Flag’s wet hair. What makes some hairs straight and others curly? she asked.

In the afternoon heat behind the lace curtains Julia fell asleep. The basin, full of beans she’d been podding, was still on her lap. The flies on the backs of her hands did not wake her.

All the noises on Rat Hill that hot afternoon were drowsy. It was as if no sound had the energy to continue. A chicken cackled and then stopped. A baby cried and went to sleep. Somebody hammered and then the nail was in. A gang of children were playing a game that involved hiding and never being seen or heard. Every dog had found its shade to sleep in. The only continuous noise came from the bottling factory on the Swansea side, a kind of metallic coughing and snoring.

What floor do you live on? Zsuzsa asked.

Fourteenth.

Top storey? Scratch me there again.

No, no, there are twenty-seven floors.

Over Zsuzsa’s shoulder Sucus could see the hill opposite, on which the shacks were built so close they almost touched each other. Higher up, the yellowing grass of the hill was criss-crossed by dozens of dust paths so that it looked like an animal losing its fur.

They’ve got electricity over there?

They got their electricity on Tortoise Hill before we did, she said. We had to wait five years. They built the first houses there the night of the New Year, eighteen months ago. They haven’t got water yet. A truck brings it round. Scratch me more there.

You don’t need pipes for electricity, Sucus said.

Anyway, they got it before we did.

And here you’ve got water!

They get less snow in the winter over there than we do here. That’s beautiful …

So you want to move out?

Depends on you. How many hundred bricks can you lay your hands on? She kissed his eyes.

Millions!

Millions?

Half a dozen.

Holy God! We could build a palace with them. All we need now is a sack of cement.

Use bird-lime!

Wood?

Cut down a tree or two.

Make planks, she said.

Make a bed, he said.

With his fingertips he was playing with the rough hair under her arm, where it was like a nest.

Do we need window frames?

One window to start with, he said.

Take it from a train.

I know where to find a truck chassis, clean, Zsuzsa, not rusty. Five minutes from here. Roof, doors, floor, the lot.

He pressed his elbow into his stomach so he could touch her breasts.

<center>
<verbatim>* * *</verbatim>
</center>

Once, in the presbytery where Monsieur le Curé Besson lived—he was a man of quiet dignity who drank himself to death—I saw a book, almost as large as the Bible, open at a picture of a young woman offering her breast to an old beggar. The old man had taken the nipple in his toothless mouth and his face was creased in happiness. When Monsieur le Curé came back into the room, he abruptly closed the book like a shutter on a window. I’ve never forgotten the picture. If I could find in my blouse the bosom which was once there, two full breasts and their nipples, dear God, for the time it takes to be sucked dry by a child!

Are we going to have a chimney? asked Sucus.

I want mosaics, Flag, like in Santa Barbara.

Blue stones and black jet.

Set in pearl.

She chewed on his wet hair with her teeth.

And ZSUZSA written in gold.

That’s right, so the postman knows where to deliver the letters, she said.

Who’s going to write?

You, when you go away, you’re going to write!

Why do I go away?

To find something else, something you can’t find here. You steal a car.

I don’t take you in the car?

I wait for you. I cook ful medames all night. And I stay awake praying.

Praying for me to come back.

I’m expecting you back and I’m angry.

I don’t come.

I can’t believe it.

I have to be rich to come back.

I leave and I start looking for you.

You find me on the day I make twenty million.

So you buy me a panther dress.

And a sapphire ring.

Then we take a ship, Zsuzsa said.

A white ship.

We have a cabin to ourselves.

In the cabin I tear off your dress.

I tear off your shirt.

We’re locked in the cabin.

I’ve thrown the key away, Flag.

I know why deers fight to the death in the mating season and why they bellow with such a suffering noise. To be male at such a moment is to have a sword thrust between the loins, with its point and half its length protruding. Nothing to do with dreams, not something coiled within. This comes from outside, it skewers the body and it leads him, helpless. It is worse in man than in any other animal because it goes on for longer and it can begin without provocation—as if suddenly a finger in the sky pointed. The sword is pointed too, and double-edged, and along its length it carries its wound. The blade is all the time cutting the wound, and the wound is nothing else but the flesh of the man’s little zizi now unrecognisable, because so large and straight. All three of them—man, blade, and zizi—know the same things: that relief cannot come until the sword is plunged into the river it is seeking. Only that river at that moment can heal their wounds, dissolve the sword and make the finger in the sky vanish. We women, rivers of pain and relief.

So Sucus and Zsuzsa embraced, and Julia slept, until Naisi came back up the hill. He was walking slowly and as he walked he kicked at the earth of the path with the toes of his famous calf-coloured boots. The soil was dry and dusty. When it rained on Rat Hill, the earth was transformed into slides of mud and little rivulets of yellow water that poured down the hillside, like beer down a drenched man’s throat. Wet or dry, frozen or baked, the earth on Rat Hill contained fragments and splinters of everything: of glass, brick, china, polystyrene, rubber, earthenware, nails, tin foil, slate, lead, hair, porcelain, zinc, plaster, iron, burnt wood, cardboard, wire, cloth, horn, bone.

Naisi passed the window where his little sister was asleep with the bowl of beans in her lap, he passed the door through which he could see his mother sprawled on the mattress on the floor, and he observed the lovers outside who were kissing with their tongues in each other’s mouths.

He stood there alone, and with a voice like the starter of a car that won’t catch, hoarse and tired, he said: There’s nothing happening today, nothing, nothing, not a fucking thing.

** Fire

AT THE MOMENT Zsuzsa’s brother Naisi said nothing is happening, not a fucking thing, Clement, Sucus’s father, seated on the bed in the two-room flat on the fourteenth floor of the apartment block in Cachan, pressed the ON switch of his television set, which exploded into blue flames. The satin bedspread went up in flames. Clement hurled himself into the kitchen to fetch water, unaware of his burnt face and hands. Only when he picked up an enamel basin in the sink and dropped it as if it were red hot, did he realise he was hurt. His hands felt on fire. He heard Wislawa, his wife, screaming: Jesus! Branch, what have you done to yourself? Branch, what have you done?

White smoke was pouring from the bedroom window. Down below in the street nobody noticed until the first fire engine, hooting like a terrified water bird, rushed through the traffic lights; then people began to look around and eventually to point up at the fourteenth floor. By the time the firemen got their hoses out and extended their ladder, Clement and Wislawa had doused the fire with a bucket and a zinc bath. But Clement had to be taken to hospital in an ambulance. The firemen feared for his eyes.

As a boy he used to sing in the village choir. I loved Clement’s voice. When he sang in public he shut his eyes because he did not like being stared at. He stood there, arms at his side, stiff but full of expression. Like a figure carved out of wood. The same force-fulness, the same strength, and the same suffering. Clement left for Troy when he was seventeen. I remember it as if it were yesterday. His older brother, Albert, who was already working as a porter in one of the city’s auction rooms, had found him a job. Unfortunately, it did not last long. One day, a few minutes before a large sale was about to start, an auctioneer found Clement asleep on an eighteenth-century four-poster bed which, it was hoped, would realise fifteen million. Naturally, he was sacked on the spot. A few months later he got a job opening oysters and this is what he did for the rest of his life. During the winter he opened oysters and during the summer he loaded fish into refrigerated trucks and railway cars. Sometimes he sang whilst working.

<verse>
My sheep were grazing
The green mountainside
Tra la la, la la la, la la.
So as not to be sad
To myself I sang
And the echo replied:
Eh oh! eh! oh!
</verse>

When he was over thirty—and his parents had despaired of him ever getting married—he fell in love with a tally-clerk in a fish warehouse. Her name was Wislawa. She was plump, rosy-complexioned, and she wore thick glasses behind which her eyes were kind and sleepy. Clement was a good dancer. He danced her off her feet. He waltzed like somebody from another century. He also cooked fish for her. He had a way of cooking red garnards which made them taste like lobster. She watched him with his enormous red hands—always swollen because of the salt water, and painfully cracked because of the ice—preparing the fish on their bed of vegetables and she thought of a mother putting a child to bed, his gestures were so gentle. For her part, she changed his life with a book: a dictionary that explained the origins of words. Clement read it for the next thirty years, and never forgot a thing he learnt. It became a passion. He opened words, as he opened oysters, to find, within, their real meaning. Through words he listened to the past and to what he believed to be the truth. To migrate, from the Latin migrare, to change one’s abode.

Wislawa’s father, a primary-school teacher, was outraged when Wislawa told him who she wanted to marry. The fishmonger-son-of-a-peasant! he screamed. Do that, do just that, go on, do it, and ruin my life! And my life! she said very quietly and with great determination, for Wislawa, because of her poor health, knew exactly what she wanted. Clement, large, quiet, wooden, was to be the tree of her life: in him she would perch. And perch she did.

Clement brought Wislawa to the village for the wedding. I was there. During the next few years they sometimes came back on visits—particularly in July so they could help Clement’s parents, Casimir and Angeline, bring in the hay. Casimir was the brother of Marcel, the Marcel who went to prison for kidnapping the two government inspectors. Each time Clement and Wislawa arrived, Casimir made a point of tentatively placing his hand on her belly even before embracing his son. Yet the years passed and his daughter-in law was never pregnant.

Then one July he put his hand on her stomach and was as usual shaking his head, when she nodded. No? he said, incredulous. Yes! she said and laughed. Let me get my thingamebob, lie down on the table and close your eyes. Casimir came back with a tiny chain attached to a wedding ring. Holding the end of the chain between his finger and thumb, he let the ring hang suspended over her magnificent belly. Wislawa couldn’t stop laughing. Angeline held her hand to calm her. The ring started to move and then to swing out in ever-widening circles. It’s a boy! cried Casimir, a grandson!

The child was conceived at Easter, said Wislawa, at least I think so.

You mean in this house on your last visit! shouted Casimir triumphantly.

I think so.

We gave them our bed, Angeline, you remember?

So we did.

He was conceived in this house, cried Casimir, and in our bed! He belongs here! He’s our man … And he embraced his son and then his daughter-in-law.

Let us drink to HIM and his mother! In the cellar I have a bottle that I have kept for half a century, just for this occasion! Ah, my dear Clement, what a happiness a son is …

The thingamebob was right. Wislawa was carrying a boy. Sucus was born the following January, under the sign of Aquarius, the Water-Carrier.

From Troy they were always promising to come back to the village to show Casimir and Angeline their grandson, but, after the birth, Wislawa’s health got worse and Clement’s earnings became feebler and feebler as prices in Troy increased a hundredfold. So they put off coming and both grandparents died without ever having seen their grandson. The years passed and Clement taught Sucus all that he knew about the truth of words.

So you’ve come, my son, said Clement from the hospital bed.

Yes, Papa.

Come to see me for the last time, eh?

Why do you say last?

Do you know how long I’ve been here now? Eight days! You look better.

The lift’s too small to take coffins, they tell me. They’ll have to carry mine down the stairs. How’s your mother?

All right.

Stop staring at me.

You’ll get better, Papa.

They won’t let me see myself in a mirror. The man-over-there’s wife came to visit him, so I asked her if she had one in her handbag. When she held out the mirror to me, her hand was trembling.

Maybe it always trembles. Maybe it’s a disease that makes her hand tremble.

Shh! He may hear you. He’s not deaf.

Maybe there’s no cure for her trembling. Who knows?

You know everything, don’t you!

He wasn’t burnt like you? asked Sucus.

He’s badly concussed. Concussion.

Something fell on him?

Worse, son, it was an icon. He’s Russian and thinks it was a punishment sent by God. Retribution. From the Latin *retribuere*, to pay back, from *tribuere*, to pay, originally to share out among the *tribes*. You see what that means? In *retribution* there’s still the tribe, the clan, where we came from.

What did he do wrong?

He hasn’t told me.

The Russian in the next bed opened his eyes. There’s a Russian proverb, he said, When you cut down trees, the chips fly. He shut his eyes again and added, One of them fell on my head.

This silenced all three men. Further along the ward a man was calling for a nurse. His voice was broken; the self-respect gone.

Sucus couldn’t take his eyes off his father’s face. It was burnt all over, as brown as a chicken left too long in the oven. A brown crust had smoothed over the pouches of the face. More than this, it hid the lines and wrinkles, and disguised the dome of the forehead where his father was going bald. The marks of strain and effort, pain and tear, had been burnt away. The blue eyes, peering through the two narrow judas slits, and his pink tongue, were those of a young man.

I looked at the burnt-out TV, Sucus said.

It was faulty wiring.

You were lucky.

The truth about those machines, and it’s the same everywhere today, everywhere you turn you find monkey work. We called it monkey work, son, in the village.

So you’ve been telling me for twenty years. But assembling TV sets isn’t like opening oysters.

Shut your mouth.

His huge bandaged hands were lying on the bedspread and looked bigger than ever.

Insert the point of the knife! Crack! said Sucus. Cut round the frill. Sever the nerve. And there’s your oyster! One operation. What I don’t understand is why it suddenly went Phut! It wasn’t as if it was a new one.

Faulty wiring. And faulty wiring means monkey work. Incompetence. From *competere*, in Latin to compete, from *cum*, with, and *petere*, to go towards. To go somewhere together, son. There are so few places to go to now. Incompetence, to go nowhere, to be with nobody. To do monkey work.

After speaking, Clement laid his head back on the pillow. He was having some difficulty in breathing.

Your mother and I have tried to do our best for you, he said. Inculcate certain principles.

In-cul-cate, said Sucus, from the Latin *inculcare*, to tread upon.

Over the iron frame of the bed, above Clement’s head, was draped a scarf with blue gentians on a green ground. Wislawa had brought it for him on the first day. She had a whole collection of scarves. Many of them she pinned over the walls of the kitchen at home to hide the damp stains. This gave the tiny room on the fourteenth floor the look of a fortune teller’s caravan. Now, in the hospital ward, he rubbed the back of his bandaged hand against the gentians. After a moment he spoke again and opened his eyes.

When you’ve opened a million oysters, every oyster on this earth is the same. I started near the Opera, my boy. I worked for a man who said he’d been a sailor. In any case, he wore a sailor’s hat. He looked at my hands and said, They’re big enough, you’ll do.

Why should it suddenly go Phut?

Because my hour had come.

Phut! Phut!

You believe in nothing!

You’ll get better!

When your hour strikes, there’s nothing to be done.

Nothing to be done! One minute you’re accusing the women who assemble your TV of monkey work—

Women?

Sure, it’s all done by women.

The monkey work?

You didn’t know it was done by women, did you?

I never thought about it.

It’s their fingers.

I’ve lost the feeling in my hands. So they’re all put together by women?

Yes, put together by women. And the next moment you’re talking about fate and your fucking hour striking.

What do you mean by their fingers?

Nimble. Women have nimble fingers.

You’ve always been the same, Sucus.

Clement succeeded in doing what he wanted with the scarf. With his two bound hands he pulled it off the bars of the bed and held it against his cheek.

I stayed with the sailor by the Opera for a year. I learnt the trade. You weren’t even thought of. Then I started on my own. Now it’s all over.

Don’t talk like that.

I’ve always tried to be philosophical. *Philo*, love of, *sophos*, wisdom. Open the drawer. Clement indicated the locker beside the bed. I want you to have the knife.

Inside was an identity card, blue like the colour of the Trojan sky before the traffic begins on a summer morning, its corners dog-eared, its edges frayed, its code number of three letters and eight numerals too faint for anyone to read, a cigarette lighter, a key ring, a bottle opener, and a fisherman’s knife with a handle made of reindeer horn.

You know it, son, so take it.

Sucus took it out of the drawer and examined the handle.

Yes, I know it, he said obediently, and here’s the mark the knifemaker made because it was no ordinary reindeer.

Now you must pay me, said Clement, a knife can only be sold.

How much?

Ten.

Sucus laughed. They don’t exist any more, Papa, ten pieces! The smallest coin now is a hundred.

Then give me a hundred.

Sucus searched in the pockets of his jeans. I haven’t got a sou.

So pay me tomorrow, Sucus, and never use it against a man unless he threatens your life.

Sucus noticed that in the corners of his father’s mouth a little white foam was collecting.

I’ll sell it back to you when you’re better, he said, for five hundred!

One day your hour will strike too. Take the knife.

All this because a TV goes Phut!

My hour has struck.

I’ve brought you some gnôle.

Pass it here, son, under the cover. Have you found a job yet?

There are no jobs, said Sucus, except the ones we invent. No jobs. No jobs.

Clement couldn’t hold the bottle to his mouth with his hands, so Sucus held it for him.

It was the first time Sucus had been in a hospital. Nothing in the ward or in the ablutions or in the corridors, whether it was flesh or metal, remained unwashed for more than a few days; the ward smelt of soap and its powerlessness against the afflictions of age.

Take a mouthful, Sucus. Plum brandy. *Prunum*. Slivovitz. Go back to the village, that’s what I’d like to do.

It’s thousands of miles away.

See the mountains for the last time.

Are you serious?

I’ll never see the village again. I’ll never set eyes on it again. There are people, I’m sure, who drive through it, without even noticing it.

When you’re better—

Listen to the name of our village! It means lucky-horse-with-a-broken-leg.

It always sounded like nonsense to me.

To you it would, Sucus. There’s only you who makes sense, according to you. In this sad wide world there’s only you. The rest of us are fools who know nothing.

Tell me how you think it can be lucky to have a busted leg!

When I was fifteen I was looking after four hundred sheep.

How’s it lucky to have a broken leg?

If your horse breaks a leg, you have to stay where you are.

So?

That’s how our village was founded centuries ago.

And what was so good about that?

I’ve thought about it. I’ve given the matter some thought. They came from the south over the mountains.

Why not from the lake to the west?

It would have been summer, like now. They had some difficulty fording the river. They wanted to cross to the sunny side.

What you call the *adret—*

So you do remember some things! Yes, the *adret*. I think they would have tried to cross by Sous-Chataigne, where the old man Digue lived. He drank five litres a day and could carry a mare on his back. Yet when he grew old, like me now, he couldn’t move out of his chair, poor man, and when he spoke, people told him, Careful what you’re saying, Digue, and don’t exaggerate! They would have tried to cross by Sous-Chataigne; it’s the shallowest reach of the river. The chief was in the lead, picking his way, and his horse slipped on the boulders and broke a leg. Foreleg, I’d say, wouldn’t you?

Right foreleg, I’d say, Papa.

So the man gave the order: Pitch camp here tonight. And they stayed. They never struck camp again. They discovered the valley, the green valley they were dreaming of. They found it good. They built houses on the *adret*, where the church now is.

A nurse walked down the aisle between the beds of infirm and wounded men, half of whom were remembering their villages or their mothers. Sucus hid the bottle. The nurse changed Clement’s drip-feed. When she’d gone, Clement whispered to Sucus.

Give me another gulp … My old friend Dédé, he’s from the village and I was talking to him about you last month. He’s with a building firm these days, he said he might be able to help. They’ve opened a new site on Park Avenue. They need to hire men. He said you should ask for a man named Cato and say you came from Dédé. Promise me you’ll try.

It’ll be too late by now.

Who knows? I want you to promise.

And supposing the horse had broken its fucking leg in some other place?

Then we wouldn’t be here!

You don’t think somebody a bit like me, Papa, might have slipped out somehow?

Clement shut his eyes and his hands felt for the gentian scarf.

I wouldn’t be here, nor would you.

So here we are in this goddamned Troy without jobs. Here we are in the month of July. And you want me to stand up and say thank you for a horse’s broken leg a thousand years ago. Thanks to his leg—no, thanks to his broken leg we’re drinking gnôle!

That’s history, son. Clement didn’t open his eyes.

And what we live now is what? asked his son.

Don’t ask me. I don’t know. It’s not history. It’s a kind of waiting. His bandaged hands were clenching the scarf.

I know a man who works at Budapest Station, said Sucus. When you’re better maybe he could fit you into a freight car. How many days would it take to go back, Papa?

With you! Clement’s eyes were still shut: the judas slits were still closed. I want to show my village to you, my son. I want to show you the house where I was born, the church where your mother and I got married, the chapel where Jean seduced the Cocadrille, the factory where they make molybdenum, the pass of St. Pair where the ravens fly, the blueberries and the bolets … Promise me, Sucus?

What do you want me to promise?

Promise me!

I’m afraid you must leave now, said a nurse, visiting hours are over.

Promise me to go to Park Avenue, whispered his father, and bit his under lip.

Sucus walked down the aisle between the hundred beds and made for the door. The white bedspreads were all identical, and each one was pulled over a distinct pain. Sucus thought the helplessness of the men under the covers was worse than their pain. I don’t want to live to be more than forty, he told himself. By then Sucus will have done all he wants. When I’m forty, before Sucus gets to this, I’m going to see Sucus dies. Then he thought of Zsuzsa and her arse, and he thought of where his hand felt under and behind her, and where there was no end to her.

The thought made him hurry. He took the stairs three at a time and was out of the building before he knew it. Several beggars stood on the hospital steps, hands extended. He paused before one. May merciful Heaven bless you and give you what you need, the white-haired man mumbled. Sucus leapt down the remaining steps.

Pig’s Runt! the beggar spat after him.

On the pavement a woman was selling flowers and a man, pretzels. The flowers were red as blood and the pretzels smelt of kitchens. Without hesitating he stepped off the pavement and ran into the six lanes of traffic. Suddenly, between two coaches, he turned round and ran back, past the vendors on the pavement, up the steps, towards the hospital. There was a crush of people round the main entrance, so he made for a side door. There he found himself face to face with a lion.

The lion was waiting for him. Sucus put out his hand to touch the lion’s mane, and came to his senses. The life-size animal, carved from lion-coloured marble, was only a few centimetres thick and in low relief. The arch behind the lion, the vaulting, the passageway, the tiles along the floor, the door at the end, all were false; they had all been made to deceive and to please when the building was a palace.

Trembling, he pushed his way through the crush around the main entrance and rushed up the stairs to the ward where he had left his father.

Clement’s bed was surrounded by screens. Even from far off Sucus knew it was his father’s bed. There were some people behind the screens. He could see their feet. One man and two nurses in stockings.

What’s happening? he asked.

He’s gone, said the Russian.

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Clement is standing before me. He is wearing the coat of bees. It is as warm as bearskin and as thick. But like any swarm, it is alive. The bees, unlike the bear, are not dead. They are calm, sweet-tempered, rather quiet, but they are alive, moving, vibrating and concentrated on their queen. It is a perfect fit, in the form of a pilot’s jacket, tight round the neck and sleeves and waist, and full across the chest and shoulders. Black flecked with orange. From far away, you’d say an Irish tweed. Close up, the flickering of every bee is visible. Clement loosens the collar. Then, clenching lightly the fingers of his hand, he pulls an arm out of one of the sleeves. I step forward to help him. I hold the shoulders so he can withdraw his second arm. Not a single bee is crushed and, naturally, not a single bee flies away. The coat is murmuring too. This is the only thing that has changed. The murmur of the bees has grown louder. I hang the coat on the branch of a plum tree. Bees love the smell of its leaves. I smooth the hair round Clement’s big ears. So I’ve come, he says.

One of the nurses in the public ward of the hospital for the poor came out from behind the screen. She had the severe face of somebody who has given many years of her life to charity, who has struggled night after night, alone, with indifference.

Who are you? she asked Sucus.

I’m the son. He was my father.

I’m afraid I have to tell you, young man—

I know—he’s gone!

Behind her he could see the male porter in a white coat and the other nurse. They were lifting something up.

Would you like to come with me to the office?

He ran. Between the beds, down the stairs and out of the building. He ran faster than the first time. He did not stop to look at the beggars or the flower-seller. His one idea was to get to Cachan. He turned left out of the hospital. He took the Boulevard Cantor. He turned down Kibalchich Street. He crossed Lions. He went over the Hind Bridge. He passed by Swansea and he came into Cachan High Street by the Réaumur Monument. It was only in the lift, going up to the fourteenth floor, that he found the words with which he would break the news to Wislawa. The once blue walls of the lift were covered from floor to ceiling with drawings, initials, names, dates scratched into the paint. There was a drawing of a prick he’d done when he was ten. He took out his father’s knife and scratched in capital letters the word PHUT. And in order to finish it, he went up to the twentieth floor and came down again to the fourteenth.

When people die here they are all buried in the village cemetery. With time, their names, cut in marble, are effaced by the frost, the sun, and the rain; eventually they are forgotten, as the dead have been from the beginning. Yet, nameless, they are still remembered in the course a road follows, in the placing of a bridge over a river, in the way a wall runs, in the paths that lead over the mountains. In Troy it is different. There the names of the dead are forgotten more quickly. The only ones remembered are those with streets named after them. Otherwise, millions disappear without trace, leaving behind no landmark. In the city the bereaved alone carry their dead in their heads. The only memorials are private choices. Here we have so few choices. In Troy they need the dead to help them, because they face so many.

As Sucus was putting his key into the door, Wislawa opened it. Behind her was their kitchen, its walls covered in scarves.

He’s left us both, Mother. Father died.

She stared at him and time stopped for them both as they stood in the doorway. They did not want anything to continue, for each of them knew that the pain would only begin when they came back. So they let the echo of the words go on and on, till finally it disappeared into timelessness.

Then Sucus shut the door and Wislawa fell to her knees. Her jaw was thrust out in determination. It was as though the cruelty of the event had entered her and settled on her face. She bit down on her chin with her teeth. Still kneeling, she slumped forward so as to be able to crawl on all fours. Like this she went into the bedroom. Once, before the fire, there had been a wall-to-wall carpet on the floor, now it was bare cement. With her hand she plucked at the cement as if picking one flower after another from grass.

Oh, Branch, she whispered, how can we manage with what they’ve done to you, darling? Tell me! Tell me!

** Concrete

TODAY I WENT into the stable because I heard one of them kicking. They play me up these days, they piss in the hay that I give them, they jump into their mangers, they butt, just like goats do every year at Easter. And there she was, when I opened the stable door, there she was, my black one, as wide as she was long, flanks extended, her four feet placed together on one small spot, and she was pushing hard, neck outstretched, head down, and, at her other end, the snout of her belly rooting the air and gaping, with the cabri’s head already out. I pulled his front paws, warm and sticky with love, and he came into my hands as easily as a slipper comes off a foot. He weighed a good eight kilos and he was brown and white. In two minutes he was on his four feet, he stuck out his long ears sideways as if they were a pole that would help him balance, and he made his first leap. Cabris are born in the air. Meanwhile, the mother, who was about to push out the second kid, but in her own time, turned her good-for-nothing head and looked at me with her oblong black pupils which hide all expression except that of a distant and insolent curiosity. She looked at me long and hard. What will happen next, she asked, not to you and your broom and your shovel and your stool, but to me? Her udder was as full as a bell is with sounds. The stump of his horns, I told her, which I can feel with my fingers on his head, will grow, and he’ll walk on his hind legs trying to eat the moon.

It was early morning in Troy. A man was climbing up thin metal rungs inside a narrow tower scarcely wider than his shoulders. The tower was transparent, its walls made of air. The ladder was absolutely vertical. The man in his blue working clothes was almost invisible against the blue sky. He had a large black moustache which his daughter, Chrysanthe, liked to outline with her forefinger. It’s a crow flying! she would cry. The man’s name was Yannis. In the bag over his shoulder as he climbed up into the sky was some bread, a slice of lamb, and a carton of orange juice.

There is a moment early in the morning before much blood has been spilt, before the pitilessness of the strong has reached its apogee, when the night players are at last asleep and free of their sadness, there is a moment when the new day seems almost innocent.

To take food up to the crane was strictly forbidden, for it was thought to encourage the drinking of alcohol. Yannis, however, was a man who did what he wanted and ignored other people’s rules. If they could find a better operator than he, let them find one!

Below him, the cars driving along Park Avenue were moving slowly in both directions, and were so close together that the traffic lanes in the early morning sunshine looked like metal snake toys. On the flat roof of the police station on Cauchy Street, three policemen in track suits were doing exercises.

At the top of the tower Yannis stepped out onto the perforated platform before his cabin. He liked to eat his breakfast alone in the sky. It gave him the chance to question leisurely.

How was he to get rid of the cockroaches that had invaded his flat? They came out every night, and twice his two daughters had woken up screaming that the beasts had got into their hair.

A wind came off the sea, and white clouds were being blown northwards like cotton flowers. Gently, securely, the crane rocked.

The problem with the cockroaches was that Yannis could not stand the smell of ammonia. It gave him a migraine. Yet everyone swore ammonia was the only cure. Murat the Turk claimed there was a powder you could use against cockroaches, which had no smell. He must ask him the name.

Yannis was the operator of the father crane. Large construction sites in Troy used two jib cranes. The father was always ten or so metres taller than the mother, with a longer arm. Her arm could pass beneath his. Thus, when the two were delivering at the same time, they could feed the same area without their booms touching.

Eating his breakfast in the sky, Yannis wrote a postcard to his mother:

Happy Birthday, Maman. In a few weeks I’ll be sending an air ticket. You will fly across the wine-dark sea. I’ll be at the airport to meet you. You’ll live in our apartment. Chrysanthe and Daphine are longing to meet their grandmother. I’ll take you across the New Bridge—look on the other side of this card—to the great church of Santa Barbara. Sonia is expecting a child in November! Perhaps a grandson this time. I’m writing this in my crane.

Far below, in the direction of his left foot, a group of workers in yellow helmets were drinking coffee out of cardboard cups. One of them was Sucus. They were sitting in the shade of an archway, which, long before, had been the entrance to the city’s silver market. The day was not yet hot. Some of the men were wearing shorts, their legs brown as camels.

The Greek up there is smart, one of them told Sucus, he can get his motherfucking crane, which lifts forty tons, to pull a cork out of a bottle!

I wasn’t born yesterday, said Sucus.

Newborn wasn’t born yesterday! said a man with a red handkerchief round his neck.

So he doesn’t believe us! said another who had stuck onto his helmet a pin-up of a woman with naked breasts like cumulus clouds.

Hey, Newborn! How long can you hold a litre at arm’s length—like this?

As long as you.

How many minutes?

Seven, eight.

If you make it for five, we’ll pay your beer at lunch.

Give me the bottle.

If you don’t make it, you pay for our beer, said the man with the goddess helmet.

For all of you!

Yep. All of us.

It’s just water, ordinary water?

City water, man. One kilo plus the bottle.

Where’s the trick?

Newborn thinks there’s a trick. There’s nothing tricky here. You don’t stop, that’s all. You hold it up. For five minutes.

Which hand?

Any hand you like. Hold it straight.

Who’s got a watch?

Okay. Start.

Sucus, on his feet, held the bottle in his right hand, arm outstretched sideways, straight from the shoulder, like a crane.

One minute!

Sucus clutched the bottle a little harder.

Two!

Newborn says he’s going to keep it there for seven minutes.

He could feel the shape of the muscle in his shoulder, and its hardness, growing bigger like a stone in a fruit.

Three minutes.

Now it hurt. Not the weight. The weight was nothing. It was the stone in his shoulder insisting that it be moved. He twisted his head a little to squint along his arm.

He’s not going to make it.

On the spreader beam of the mother crane, hanging from its two cables, Sucus read over and over again the words: THINK SAFETY. THINK SAFETY. Everything he thought passed so quickly, leaving behind empty seconds which were wordless.

All the men were watching his puckered, red face.

A swallow flew into the roof of the archway above. For a split second Sucus glanced up to find it. He recognised a nest, the colour of cement.

Swallows, two wings carrying a soul, that’s why they fly so fast, his father used to say.

Four minutes!

The question of pain counted no more. It was a question of how to keep the arm in the air. Nothing was holding it up except a thought. The thought was one word, endlessly repeated: UP!

Newborn’s going to keel over!

He’ll break the bottle!

Look at him!

Five minutes! whispered the man with the goddess helmet, he’s won!

Sucus still kept the bottle up.

Five and a half minutes!

The men watched now without any expectation but more intently than before. The excitement of the wager over, curiosity remained and wanted nothing to stop. The exploit had become mildly surprising and they were happy to suck between their teeth the sweetness of this surprise.

Sucus didn’t know it, but he was saying UUPP out loud.

Six minutes, Newborn!

Murat the Turk, with whom Sucus worked on the concrete mixer, clambered to his feet, walked over to Sucus, and put the palm of his hand gently under the bottom of the bottle to take its weight.

Your victory! he said so softly the others didn’t hear him.

Sucus opened his eyes and stared at Murat. Murat wore his yellow helmet low over his brow. With his right hand he was eating an apple and on his left he still wore an industrial glove.

Back to work, cried the man with the goddess helmet, Cato’s out of his hotel!

Cato, the personnel manager on the site, ate his breakfast alone in a hut that had framed pictures on its walls. He drove to work in a Volvo. A short man, he was as bald as an egg when he took off his yellow helmet. The helmets were regulation issue to everybody and wearing them was compulsory. Those worn by the workers were mostly chipped and dented, those worn by visiting architects, or representatives of the Mond Bank, for whom the building was being built, were immaculate. Cato had deliberately chosen for himself the most battered helmet he could find. There was no yellow paint left on it. In his view his chosen helmet showed he was the toughest man around.

To operate his crane Yannis needed to move no more than I do embroidering a baby’s bib. In each hand he had a red keyboard with black buttons, and he sat on his throne like a judge. He looked down through the glass front of his cabin. Cato was giving orders and the men were going back to work so he turned eastwards, towards the morning sun and the concrete mixer. The jib rode the air like a cormorant.

The concrete mixer was the kitchen of the construction site. The cement was stored in two cannisters, each one as tall as a house. Cement needs to be kept as dry as flour. Beneath the cannisters was a mixing bin into which the cement ran according to the measure decided. Murat commanded the measures on an electronic control panel. The amounts depended upon the destination of the concrete. Murat had worked for three years on cement mixers. He knew them and their pitfalls as well as a priest knows the catechism.

From the bin beneath the cannisters the mix was conveyed on a belt into the drum. Inside this great rotating drum, water fell onto the dry mix and turned it into feed. The rotation was clockwise until the moment when Murat needed to fill a hopper. Then he reversed the motor and the great drum turned counterclockwise, so its metal tongues lolled sideways and the batch slipped out.

When Murat wanted to show Yannis in the sky that the hopper was full, he removed his yellow helmet and raised it above his head. Yannis immediately took up the weight and lifted the hopper a few centimetres off the earth. Then, pressing the black buttons, he nudged the hoist-crab, which ran on lines along the jib, he nudged it a few centimetres forward and abruptly a few centimetres backwards. The resulting jolt set the hopper and the cables swinging. When they swung away from the drum, he hauled the load up. Like this, the hopper as it left the ground never grazed the drum’s nose. When it was clear, Murat made a sign as if he were throwing a bird into the sky, and the hopper soared high into the air, dripping its grey rain.

Sucus was shovelling towards the grabs, which worked like a dredger taking the ballast to the bin for the mix. The evening before, a truck driver who was in despair because his son had died of meningitis, had dumped a load of gravel far away from the grabs and driven off without a glance, crying Jesus! Jesus!

Get this lot moved! Cato had told Sucus.

Might be quicker with a calfdozer.

Dozer, my arse!

Sucus straightened his back and watched the hopper in the sky as it circled the site. The sun was higher and the morning was getting hot. He took off his vest. His skin was paler than that of the other men because he was new to the work.

I remember the pale skin of peasants and soldiers on the rare occasions when they strip. Its whiteness is meant for the night not the day, for our beds not the fields.

Construction, from the Latin *struere*, to heap, *con struere*, to heap together. Sucus shovelled the gravel. When he straightened his back and paused he had a habit of touching his moustache with three fingers of his right hand. Murat strolled over to the heap, and the two men stood side by side, wordless, savouring their idleness, wiping the dust off their lips.

Like shifting a bloody mountain, Sucus eventually said.

If you do the bottle trick again, I’ll tell you the secret, said Murat. You have to imagine you’re walking. Shut your eyes, walk home to your house and remember everything you pass and everything you see when you arrive! It’s all in here. He tapped his yellow helmet. The whole world’s in here! Just imagine you’re walking home instead of standing still! Like that you can hold the weight for ten minutes.

Sucus spat on his palms and shovelled again. The task came to his aid. Tasks do this sometimes. They lift the shovel, loosen the earth, hold the nail straight, direct the axe, balance the load across the shoulders. Above all, they make themselves look small. They cease to be gigantic. They divide themselves up. Each time you straighten your back and take a breath, another small part of the task has been accomplished.

Finally the noon whistle sounded.

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When Zsuzsa approached the old arch to the silver market, the eating stopped. Barefoot, she was wearing a dress, pale blue with a long skirt and short tight sleeves. Cato peered through the window of his hut. She was an unauthorised person, but considering the twenty mesmerised men, he decided to say nothing for once.

Hi! sweetheart, shouted the man with the red handkerchief, his knife, with cheese on it, still in midair.

I’m looking for Flag. Does he work here?

Flag? We don’t know any Flag, do we? How long has he been here?

He’s been working here for a week now.

Ah. She means Newborn. I saw him a minute ago. Come and sit down. He’ll be back. Have some beer. Where are you from?

Not from here.

Not from here she says. Who’s from here? Do you know how elephants hide, beautiful?

Behind jokes like yours! said the man with the goddess helmet.

No. They put on glasses.

God help us!

Well, have you ever seen an elephant wearing glasses?

Let her sit down on the box there.

You haven’t, have you? Which only goes to show, doesn’t it, if they’re wearing glasses, elephants are invisible!

Zsuzsa sat on the box as if she were sitting in a train, idly looking out of the window.

Did Newborn know you were coming? asked Murat.

No, it’s a surprise.

If we all had a surprise like you! said the goddess man.

At this moment Sucus arrived, running.

You look daft in that helmet, Flag. Why do you all eat with your helmets on?

Safety regulations. Bet you have some too?

Several of the men laughed. Sucus took off his helmet and led her away from them.

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<verbatim>* * *</verbatim>
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Do you like my earrings? she asked.

They were gold-coloured and each one was large enough to pass a lemon through. When she moved, they tilted like dwarf cart wheels.

Not bad.

And my blue dress?

Yes.

I wanted to impress you.

You have! Who gave you the earrings?

So, it’s going to be twenty storeys high, your building!

She looked up at the cranes, and whilst her head was back, he kissed her throat.

Who did?

Did what?

Gave you the earrings?

My ears were pierced when I was three. My grandmother pierced them. So I have to wear earrings. It follows, doesn’t it?

Who was it?

You’re jealous, Flag! Jealous!

How did you get them?

You’d do better to think of your poor father.

He’s dead.

All of us are going to die one day, Flag. I wear jewelry so everybody can see we’re alive. Me and them. And I want you to make me a promise.

What?

When I die I want you to see I’m wearing earrings in my coffin! If I’m not wearing them, you must thread them on my ears. Promise me you’ll do that!

She looked again at the cranes.

Have you been up there in the sky? It must be great up there in the crane—like God.

Who gave them to you?

Perhaps I nicked them.

You did!

I didn’t. You want to hit me, do you, Flag?

Yes.

Go on then, hit!

No.

Hit me!

Fuck you!

I win! I’ve made you angry! Here take them.

Are they gold? asked Sucus, examining them.

Yes, they’re gold.

Was it a man who gave them to you?

You really want to know? Well, I nicked them.

You said you didn’t.

They’re gold. You haven’t given me anything made of gold, Flag!

She was jeering at him.

Aiee! Now you hit me! Give them to me.

Don’t say that again!

I want you to give them to me.

Sucus held out the earrings on the palm of his cement-coloured hand. They weighed nothing and yet he could feel their warmth.

Give me the earrings. Now it’s you who’s given them to me. And now because it’s you who’s given them to me, Flag, I’ll never take them off for anyone.

With one side of her face flushed where Sucus had slapped her, Zsuzsa started to dance, beside a stack twice as tall as her of rusty grills used for reinforcing the concrete.

I can’t remember when I first saw it, it was too long ago. It belongs to the high mountains which the snow never leaves. It happens at the height of the glaciers, often on them, but never at a lower altitude. It has always reminded me of heaven. The sunlight catches the snow and instead of making it blinding white, it makes it glisten. It’s a molten light and it comes and goes and changes place, measuring the sun as no instrument can. For this light to occur, snow crystals have to melt into moisture and then freeze again as hard as enamel, and then melt and be frozen again. In this light coming off the ice there is a warmth and a trace of sugar as in a mother’s milk. And when Zsuzsa danced beside the stack of rusty grills, the arms of her dress stained with sweat, and her mouth open because she was laughing, her teeth with their two gaps glistened with this light.

Suddenly she stopped and let her arms fall to her sides.

You must look after your mother, Flag. She needs you these days.

She started to dance again, this time slowly, throwing out one arm to one side and then the other to the other, like a man sowing seeds with two hands.

There was no way round her, Sucus thought, following her every movement. You could turn your back and walk away, but if you took one step forward, you had to go through her. Even if you went way out to the side, it would still be through her. Wherever you went she got there first. She must have been the same all her life, from the time she could first stand on her two legs. Everything she could see here—the cement dust, the crane, the rusty grills, the sky, Murat, the other men watching—everything she could see, everything that passed by, everything that rose and fell, was Zsuzsa, and was part of her, not of something else. This was why there was no way round her.

She stopped dancing and brushed the cement dust off her feet.

We’ll buy your mother some fish tonight, some fresh garnards, I’m sure she likes red garnards, doesn’t she?

The whistle sounded.

Five fucking minutes early, said the goddess helmet.

Cato sounds it when he wants!

Zsuzsa walked away along the edge of the road the trucks took to bring in the sand and gravel. The driver, who had lost his child the day before, did not notice whether she was a man or woman: she was simply another figure on the road to be avoided.

Yannis, going to his crane, tapped Sucus on the shoulder and told him:

At home when a young woman dances alone, we say she’s asking for a husband!

Far away, your home! said Sucus.

No, my friend, women don’t change. She was dancing for you.

The whistle sounded again.

Hose down her gutters! said Murat to Sucus, nodding at an empty hopper. The water that dripped from the nozzle of the hose made a blister on Sucus’s hand smart. The force of the jet he directed against the hopper knocked off the crumbs of drying concrete.

Yannis climbed up to his cabin in the sky. The first job of the afternoon was to deliver four shutterings, complete with scaffolding and bridges, to the south. When not being used, all the shutterings were kept in the north. Stacked together, grey with cement, they made a block like a bunker. Yet when hammered they rang out like metal. Yannis swung his crane beneath the mother’s arm, northwards, and whilst swinging he ran out the crab and lowered the cables. It took a little time to attach the chains and loop them to the cable hooks, so he let his eyes wander to the sea where the ships passed. Whenever he looked at the sea he dreamt of returning home.

A rigger, far below, raised his hands, joined as if in prayer, to heaven. This was the sign for Yannis to hoist. The giant metal shuttering, which would hold the concrete feed until it solidified into a wall, left the ground. Yannis turned the crane like the hour hand of an immense clock, over the sheds, the archway, the wasteland where Zsuzsa danced, the central blocks, to the southernmost point of its orbit. The top of the crane’s mast, as it carried the load, rocked, predictably, like a tree top. Only Yannis’s eyes were fixed.

With the tips of his fingers on the black buttons, he had to place twelve tons of metal as gently as Gabriel placed his words at the Annunciation. Slowly, he let the cables run out. He brought the crab back a bare twenty centimetres. Continued lowering. Then stopped to take off his sunglasses. He let the cables run again. The cabin tilted forward as if it too were anxious to see, and, far below, ten workers the size of bees manhandled the massive shuttering, still afloat on the summer air, into its exact position, exact enough for every bolt to drop into its hole.

Bull! shouted one of them and lowered his outstretched arms. Yannis let the cables go slack. The shuttering rested on its own weight. Twelve tons.

You, Newborn, ever think about justice? asked Murat.

I keep away from the law.

We’re not talking about their justice.

Whose then?

I’m talking about what happens to us.

You all say *us* when you start to get old. I talk about me. Who’s us?

Every day the law of the funnel spreads further and further, said Murat.

What’s the law of the funnel?

The funnel of wealth, Newborn, it’s broad for some and narrow for others.

A hopper came down to be filled. Sucus pushed it up against the drum.

Bull! shouted Murat and lowered his outstretched arms.

Nobody could any longer remember how the shouted word *bull* had come to mean *slacken, in place, home!* It was a kind of oath. The crane drivers could rarely hear it and they depended for their manoeuvres on manual signs and the evidence of their own eyes. The oath was simultaneously a curse and a mute plea.

The giant drum turned counterclockwise, its tongues lolled sideways, the feed came out.

Murat took off his helmet and lifted it into the air. The hopper with its grey rain rose higher than small birds fly.

You’ve never imagined the world different? asked Murat.

Yes, maybe they’ll blow it up.

And us with it.

So where’s your justice? demanded Sucus looking hard into Murat’s calm black eyes.

Take a baby’s hands, said Murat, wiping his forehead with the back of his glove, they’re so delicate, so well made. Their nails are like tiny rose petals, each finger able to move by itself. Perfectly made fists, the size of apricots! Why are baby’s hands like that?

I don’t know.

Made for what?

Wiping up crap.

No, for taking what belongs to us.

Nothing belongs to us.

One day it will.

Never.

Murat threw a tiny switch and another measure of cement fell into the mixing bin.

If we keep the idea of justice alive under our yellow helmets, Murat said, if we all keep it alive together, one day the world will belong to us.

You’re a dreamer like my dad was.

So why are baby’s hands so well made?

I don’t know.

Now Murat threw the switches for the gravel and sand.

What union was your father in?

He wasn’t.

You said he was a dreamer.

My father dreamt of the village he left, and you, you dream of the future. Meanwhile we’re here, you and I are here, mixing concrete here for the Mond Bank.

A shadow moved over the earth. They looked up. The next hopper was coming down from the sky. Sucus went to arrange the sand pile so the grabs could scoop up more. His feet in their canvas shoes were wet from the hosing. The hopper touched ground.

Bull! shouted Murat. Bull!

The cables slackened. The feed came out of the giant drum.

Murat took off his helmet and raised it above his head. A hundred metres above, Yannis nudged the cables so the hopper swung free of the nose of the drum and rose with its grey rain falling.

You should read history, said Murat.

The only book I read’s a dictionary.

In history things often happen when nothing seems to be happening.

Like some nights.

Yes, history has nights and days, said Murat.

And now it’s night?

Now it’s night, it’s been night for a long while.

Do you sleep? asked Sucus.

I’m impatient, and sometimes in the dark my impatience has a voice like an angel.

As he said this, Murat looked up at the clouds which in July often gathered in the late afternoon along the coastline like cattle coming in to drink.

What does she say, your angel?

She always says the same thing. If I am for myself, who are the others? she asks. If others are for themselves, who am I? If not now, when? If not here, where?

Where did she learn that?

They both looked up. Another hopper was coming down to be filled. When Yannis had hoisted it away, full, Sucus said:

Mine’s no angel. Do you know what she says to me?

No.

Give me the earrings, she says. It’s you who’s given them to me and now I’ll never take them off for anyone. Never.

Slowly the working day drew to its end. The last feed slid out of the giant drum and Sucus hosed its tongues so they should not be rough in the morning.

Yannis brought the crab home to his cabin and hoisted up the cables. One by one every engine on the site stopped. The very high clouds were turning green. Yannis slung his bag over his shoulder and came down to earth.

No doubt about it, my young friend, he said to Sucus in the hut where their lockers were, she was asking for a husband, your curly-haired one.

What sort of papers do you need to be a crane driver? Sucus asked.

Papers! It’s all here. Yannis thumped his chest.

No papers at all?

What you need is a head for geometry.

I know geometry, said Sucus.

You need eyes like a hawk.

I’ve got eyes like a falcon.

You need the concentration of an expresso, and a massive head for heights.

All right.

Go on, then. Shift up there and you’ll find out. Climb!

Cato? Sucus was suddenly hesitant.

Cato’s gone. You can fetch a postcard I forgot to bring down. I ought to post it. It’s in the rack for plans, on the left of the throne. Go and try.

It’s not locked?

We never lock up at home.

Sucus left the hut.

Don’t look up or down, Yannis shouted after him, just look ahead. Three hundred and eight rungs. Count them if you want.

Crane, from the Greek *geranos*, meaning the bird with high legs. The higher Sucus climbed the invisible tower, the more pity he felt in his chest for his father who was dead. Two hundred and ninety-seven. Ten more.

At last he stepped onto the perforated platform, leant on the rail and, for the first time, looked down. On the ground it was dusk. Only the heap of polyester insulation panels showed up because they were white and slightly iridescent like the moon.

On the flat roof of the police station on Cauchy Street a man was running with a stick held up in the air. Suddenly, the man lunged forwards and struck the roof at his feet with the stick, then he knelt down to look closer at where he had struck. It took Sucus some time before he understood: the man was catching butterflies in a net.

The sky was full of a radiance, which was the colour of the inside of a cantaloupe melon, and the jib of the crane stretched out like a metal reef into a lake of light. The neons in the city below were switched on and the windows in many buildings shone like ice.

Sucus entered the cabin, found the postcard exactly where Yannis said it would be, and sat on the driver’s throne. He read the address:

<quote>
KYRIA XENIA IOANNIDE<br> ODOS ARTEMIDOS<br> KASTRO, SAMOS.
</quote>

It was then he felt the crane swaying. Not in one direction but in two. Swaying on its feet like a man does after knocking back one glass of gnôle too many.

Now I’m alive, he told himself, now I can do anything!

** Crime

THE CREATURE WHOM the man in a track suit was trying to catch on the roof of the police station was a moth known as the Fiancée. She had brown fore wings the colour of bark, and yellow hind wings the colour of beaten eggs before you make an omelette. Her body was furry and sable coloured. About four centimetres in length, her favourite food is willow leaves. The man held the toe of the net in one hand and the wooden leg of the handle in the other. The Fiancée was flying very low and he came down on her from above. When she was well netted, he slipped in a pill box and she flew up into it because she thought she was flying towards the light. In a moment he would clap the lid on and bring the pill box out of the net.

The hunter was called Hector. When he smiled, his cheeks moved more than the corners of his mouth did. They moved upwards towards the lobes of his big ears. He was a heavy man. He made his way, smiling, past the transmitting aerial on the police station roof, to the door that gave onto the staircase.

The police station on Cauchy Street was nothing like the police station in the next village, where there are curtains in the windows, wives upstairs, and sometimes even the smell of cooking. Cauchy Street smelt of sweat and of slightly burnt glue—as if all the electrical equipment in the building were overheating. As for the sounds, they were of two kinds, depending upon the floor you got out at when the lift doors opened. On the ninth floor every sound was muffled. No sound carried. Everything was out of hearing. On other floors, because there were no carpets or curtains and the men wore boots and the doors were heavy and there were never any sleeping children, every sound was loud and every noise reverberated. Even a glass being filled with tap water sounded menacing. I have been on every floor.

In the toilet Hector took off his track suit and put on his dark blue uniform with gold epaulettes and a shirt with a buttoned-down collar. He was a Police Superintendent. He glanced into the mirror above the wash basin and adjusted his few strands of remaining hair. The thought of his retirement was troubling him, and every evening he tried to invent an excuse to stay late at the station. Off duty, he wandered around the offices, giving his opinion, asking questions, looking at old files. He was due to retire in three months. As Superintendent he allowed himself the eccentricity of wearing tennis shoes all day long. He pretended that at his age his feet suffered in leather. In truth, it was the silence of the tennis shoes that he liked. Now he walked stealthily down the corridor to his own room.

Behind his desk was a large cupboard of galvanised metal. He unlocked it. Such metal has no memory and is blind. From a pile of cassettes he selected one and, striding decisively across the floor, slid it into the VCR beneath the President’s portrait. Switching off the light over his desk so that the room was almost dark, he settled back in his swivel chair to watch the tape. It began with a crowd of people on a Métro platform. All the Métro stations in Troy, like the banks, were under video surveillance. The people on the platform were waiting for a train. Up above in the streets it was winter, the men and women were wearing overcoats and gloves. Some were reading newspapers, others were jiggling their legs to earphone rhythms. Most were looking blankly across the tracks at other people who had left work and who were waiting for a train to take them home in the opposite direction. It was the same every evening.

Their faces were sad. They hadn’t lost patience, but they’d lost heart. Perhaps heart comes back to them when they step out onto stations in distant suburbs and see the front windows of their houses, surrounded by trees, and lit up.

A little commotion begins. A man with a felt hat smashed onto the back of his head and a filthy overcoat too large for him goes to the edge of the platform. He has the determination of a man who believes too much in what he is doing. He is drunk. Under his arm he carries a carpet. Now he starts to point and shout at people. His gestures suggest he is insulting them. Yet his old man’s words are lost for ever, for the video is soundless.

Those he addresses pretend not to hear. Two women, when he pushes his way forward, walk away from him. He glances at them with a pained look and says something—as if now it is he who feels insulted. He rocks on his feet for consolation. Then he looks round for a distraction. He takes off his hat and waves at somebody, shouting again, this time with a smile. A man in a fur hat with a dispatch case looks up from his newspaper with disgust.

The Superintendent believed he was shouting a name—the name of the person he had just recognised on the opposite platform. During every viewing the Superintendent leant towards the video screen at this point, to try to lip-read the name. He believed it began with PON but he had never been able to decipher the last syllables.

There was a knock on the door. The Superintendent stopped the tape, switched on the light, leant back, placed his two hands on the armrests, and only then said:

Who is it?

Officer Albin reporting.

Come in.

The officer came in and saluted.

Well?

Washington Patrol have just picked up a runner.

Where is he?

In Reception.

How much did they find on him?

A hundred grammes.

Crack?

Crack, sir.

Is he talking?

No.

What name does he give?

Naisi.

Have we got tabs on him?

Not under that name.

Find out who he is and who feeds him.

Do you want to question him yourself, Superintendent?

Does he look cooperative?

Not yet.

Then I’ll see him later. Pass him over to Sergeant Pasqua and keep me informed.

Officer Albin was about to salute and leave the room when Hector raised one finger of his right hand to retain him. The gesture was both deliberate and nonchalant—what mattered was that it was received as a command. Officer Albin stood there waiting. Hector reflected upon how, in a few months’ time, no act of his would ever again be acknowledged as a command, and this thought brought a pain to his chest. Each day, as the date of his retirement approached, he felt more lost. He studied the wedding ring on his second finger. Officer Albin still waited.

Tell Sergeant Pasqua I won’t leave till he has something to tell me.

He flicked his finger almost invisibly, as a sign of dismissal.

Officer Albin saluted and turned. Hector listened to his footsteps receding along the stone corridor, then he extinguished the desk lamp and switched on the tape.

The people are still waiting for their train. A man wearing an overcoat with a black lamb’s wool collar and, around his neck, a white silk scarf, places his attaché case on the platform and squats down beside it. He opens the case and then stands upright, holding a shining butcher’s axe. His movements are decisive and calm. He jumps onto the tracks, crosses them, and leaps like an athlete up onto the platform beside the drunk old man with the carpet under his arm. The old man screws up his face like a baby. The man with the axe fells him with one terrible blow delivered to the back of the neck. The victim crumples and falls to the ground.

The assassin crosses the tracks again, puts the dripping weapon back in his attaché case, and walks slowly towards the exit at the end of the platform. The crowd separates to let him through.

No one makes a move or kneels down to help the old man. He lies sprawled on the platform in an empty circle. A train draws in. Then a second train. Their doors open. Passengers get on and off. The trains leave. On the deserted platform the corpse lies there, in its dark stain.

The victim’s name was Gilbert d’Ormesson. On the day following his murder, the police computer located his dossier in less than two minutes. D’Ormesson; born in Constantine, November 5, 1919; several arrests for drunken and disorderly behaviour; no fixed address; decorated with the Military Medal, 1945.

In the wallet found in his overcoat there was a photograph of a woman who looked like a cabaret artist, 1960s style. Clipped to this photo were three others of a black miniature poodle. On the back of one was written: Gilly, my love. After his death, no relative or acquaintance came forward.

Six months passed. Despite the hundreds of witnesses, the man with the butcher’s chopper was not identified. Hector toyed with the idea that the old man might have been involved in small-time blackmail. Yet when he listened to his lifelong experience, he knew now that the Métro murder would soon join the great majority of crimes: those which are unsolved.

Last night, down the road to the village, the frogs were returning to our lake by the rocks. Hundreds of thousands of them hopping towards the thawed green water. They converge on the lake from all sides, when the moon is waxing. In their haste to begin, the females hop with the males on their backs. Then they jump into the water together, and the couple stay attached for days, until the female lays her eggs, which the male, still on her back, still clutching her, fertilises as they drop into the water. They do this every year, unless there is a danger of their being too many. When this happens they stop mating. People wonder how frogs know. On summer nights in the lake they croak for hours on end, and the strength of their chorus tells them how many they are. When their croaking is too loud, they become chaste for a season.

If the Superintendent asked me, I could also explain to him the Métro murder. One morning, the killer placed a brand-new butcher’s chopper in his attaché case because he hoped to kill somebody. He did not yet know who. When he left home and kissed his wife goodbye, the extra weight in his attaché case upheld him. He walked jauntily to the station. It was not the first time he had left home with a chopper. In fact it was the seventh or eighth. He wanted to kill so his name would mean something for ever, so God would notice him. But he was not a man who could kill indiscriminately. On the other days, when he’d found no one to kill, he did his usual work in the office—he worked for an insurance company; he went to his usual café for lunch, and in the evening he came home on his usual train, as if carrying a butcher’s chopper wrapped in black satin in his attaché case was the most usual thing in the world. The black satin he’d found in his wife’s wardrobe. She had bought it eight years before to make into a nightdress, yet since their two children were born, she had given up making clothes for herself. The day he saw the old drunk on the Métro platform, his heart leapt with joy. His victim was there, he told himself. He knelt down on the platform to listen for a train. No, there was no train. This was the sign that God was willing. So he flew across the tracks. After he had killed the old man, he felt agreeably weak. As he climbed up from the lines onto the platform, he promised himself that he would take a taxi home. Which is what he did.

In the Interrogation Unit on the ninth floor, Sergeant Pasqua went to the sink and opened a can of beer. Naisi was seated on a bench against a wall, his arms behind his back, wrists handcuffed. He could feel the clots of blood with his tongue, like bleeding gooseberries. Yet he did not dare spit them out. If he spat, he’d be hit again.

Tell us, you fucker!

Tell you what?

You know, fucker.

Your football team won last week, didn’t they, Sarge?

Start telling.

What?

Who supplies?

I heard they played well.

Who gives you the news?

Hoo does.

Don’t get fresh with me, fucker.

Hoo pays too, and Hoo collects.

What’s his name?

Told you, Sergeant. Hoo. Chinese.

You got more? said the sergeant, throwing away the can of beer. Naisi knew that whatever he replied would not be heard. But he could not prevent one of the gooseberries dripping from the corner of his mouth.

Start telling.

When a man is handcuffed, he becomes like a bird who can’t fly. Crippled, he can only scurry like a mouse. Striking a prisoner who is handcuffed produces new words, new cries.

Ble!

Who do you get it from?

Ble!

I’ll make you nobody.

On my own.

Take that, bastard. Shit is. Shit is. Shit is what you deserve.

Pasqua knocked Naisi onto the floor and dragged him over to the toilet. I have known all kinds of violent men. There is no violence, however terrible, that I have not seen. Yet usually they were as helpless as their victims. Sergeant Pasqua was different. His violence was as routine as a dog scratching behind its ears.

Shit is. Shit is what you’re going to eat. Start telling.

Blu!

Who do you get it from?

Dug.

Dog what?

Dug.

Address?

Ble.

Pasqua kicked the prisoner in the stomach.

Start telling.

Morio.

Address?

Twenty-one twenty-five Tortoise Hill.

What’s Morio for a name?

It’s what he uses.

Where do you meet him?

City Aquarium, by the turtles.

Okay. If you’re lying, the next time you’re brought in here, you get them pulped, see? Pulped—no more fucky-fucky.

Hector arrived on the ninth floor by lift. He had put on his outdoor shoes and dark glasses. The shoes because he intended to go home afterwards without returning to his office, the glasses because he always wore them when he visited the Interrogation Unit. They prevented any appeal to the eyes.

The Superintendent opened the door and saw a man wearing calf-coloured boots with golden buckles smoking a cigarette. The man was no longer handcuffed. There was blood on his face but no signs of collapse. The Superintendent considered himself an expert in reading such signs, which often begin at the corner of the mouth or in the way fingers are held.

Where did it come from? he asked the prisoner.

Probably from Colombia, replied Naisi.

Everything comes from Colombia, doesn’t it?

Now you’re talking, Super.

Who handled it before you did?

One of your men here in the station.

At this point Sergeant Pasqua allowed each of his hundred kilos to give weight to the four words he now pronounced:

He has grassed, sir.

So, he’s grassed, has he? Like a heifer he’s grassed, you say, Sergeant!

Like a rhino, said Naisi, not a heifer.

What’s he given you, Sergeant?

The name of Morio.

Morio, Morio? Operating where?

Twenty-one twenty-five Tortoise Hill.

Brilliant, Sergeant. I think I should see to it that your rota gets changed.

Routine, sir.

Brilliant, Sergeant.

Thank you, sir.

Perhaps you’ve spent a little too much time up here. A few months at ground level might do you a world of good, Pasqua. Have you tried tracking down somebody on Tortoise Hill?

Never, sir. Tortoise Hill is recent, sir.

You can find nothing and nobody there. It’s worse than Rat. It’s worse than Tepito. They’ve got Uzis there. He’s made you a present of nothing.

He won’t do it a second time. Give me half an hour.

Like a rhino, Superintendent. I told you I grassed like a rhino, said Naisi.

Was the stuff planted on him? demanded Hector.

He’s had his hands on plenty, trust my nose, Superintendent.

Was it planted?

Let’s say it was found, Superintendent, a few minutes after they frisked me, said Naisi.

Turn him out.

Give me—

I’ve told you, Sergeant. Turn him out.

As the Superintendent passed through Reception, the two police officers on duty wished him good-night. Under his breath one of them muttered: Geriatric Ward! Then the two of them went on looking at the comic they had hidden under the counter.

In the story they were reading, a chauffeur was driving a large limousine. In the back of the car were David and George and a woman called Antoinette. She had her legs apart. Antoinette, you’re still full of spunk, said David. Of course, she replied, you came everywhere! Ah, Antoinette, said George. Why don’t you begin again? she suggested. You’ve knocked us both out, said David. Then I’ll have to find out what the chauffeur is made of, said the insatiable Antoinette. She leant forward and put her tongue in the chauffeur’s ear … The two police officers turned the page and read on, both imagining they were the chauffeur.

When he first left the village, age fourteen, Hector wept. I saw him wiping his eyes with his sleeve outside the door of the Republican Lyre. Then he ran down the steps to get into the bus and he shouted to his friends: You’d better lock up all your chicks and chickens when I get back!

He only came back twice.

Peasants make solid policemen, for they have the necessary energy, obstinacy, and toughness. But power isn’t the same thing as earth, and, as policemen, they seldom become wise.

After a number of years in the city, Hector married Susanna, the daughter of a disgraced army officer. She had auburn hair, a milky, delicate skin, and a profile like they engrave on coins. The first time he saw her she was wearing golden sandals. It was Hector’s assurance that attracted Susanna. He was capable and daring. He was not, like her father, ridden with doubt. Even his bragging she considered as a kind of froth bubbling around his capabilities. She told her friends there was nothing Hector couldn’t handle, and she nicknamed him Ram, the *bélier*. With her help he would become Chief Constable. And one day he would take her away, she dreamed, from sprawling Troy to a nobler city such as Tenochtitlán, where nobody would have to handle anything except chalices and anointing oils and flowers, flowers …

You’re home later than ever, she said to him.

Policemen aren’t librarians.

That’s new. Usually you say policemen aren’t train drivers.

Same thing.

And in a few months’ time, Hector, you won’t be a policeman.

Like you say, my dear, I won’t be a policeman.

It was suffocating this afternoon, I felt so weak I didn’t go to my gym class.

Why didn’t you put the fan on?

Fan! All our friends have air conditioning, they’ve had air conditioning for years, but not us, not poor us, because Hector couldn’t make it higher than a Superintendent, his resources were exhausted. He’s spent himself. He’s reached his limit, hasn’t he?

I’d say you’ve been drinking again, Susanna.

I most certainly have not—

The evidence suggests—

The evidence suggests … You’re not in the station any more. You’re at home. You’ve come home. And the one person in the world you can’t question, Hector, is me. And you can’t question me because I’m your own failure.

Pour me a coffee.

Then take off your gun.

With ice.

And your sunglasses. It was a great mistake, Hector, when you stopped drinking, you never relax now.

You know why I did.

To set me an example! But we had our laughs. It’s a good two years since I’ve seen you laugh.

Not many jokes come my way, Susanna.

I’ll tell you a joke.

Later.

Of course! Wait till he orders his joke! Then place it on a tray and serve it with salted almonds. How do you like your joke cooked, sir? Crude, medium or well-done?

Susanna, I’ve had a hard day and I’d like to eat. Perhaps it would be good for you to eat too.

The Superintendent would like to eat what his wife has spent the afternoon preparing. Well, his wife has prepared a very special menu tonight. She’s prepared a joke with a shallot sauce!

Shh!

Shallot sauce, yes.

Don’t drink any more now, Susanna.

He let himself out of the French window and walked across the lawn. In the house next door lived a young couple who were both dentists. Soon they would make enough money to move on to a bigger house and garden. How am I going to end my days here? he asked himself for the thousandth time. And for the thousandth time he heard a child’s voice say: I’d rather die.

The last time he had tried to persuade Susanna that when he retired they should build a house in his village, on the land he had inherited from his aunt above the Republican Lyre, Susanna had finished her glass, put her swanlike arms round his neck, and said: You must be out of your mind, darling, I’ve told you a hundred times I’m not going to end my days living with a nag-who-has-a-broken-leg! That’s how the *bled* is called, isn’t it?

Now he walked across the lawn towards two flowering azalea bushes. It came to him that the common names of moths and butterflies resembled some of the nicknames given to criminals and their companions: the Fiancée, Robert the Demon, the Big Tortoise, Morio, the Mourning Suit, Blue Eyes.

From where he stood between the azaleas, his head full of names, he could distinguish the sea he wanted to cross and the arc lights of the docks.

Ram, she called, come and listen to my joke …

** Sky

SUCUS WOKE UP early. Every morning the living room smelt of ironing. He could see two piles of ironed table cloths and napkins on the table. They were pale green and they came from a restaurant at the fashionable end of Cachan called Las Vegas. In the middle of each table cloth, when it was unfolded, there was printed a silhouette, wine red, of a dancer walking on tip-toe. Since Branch’s death, his mother took in ironing.

A southwest wind off the sea was blowing rain against the living room window on the fourteenth floor. The walls of the room were still covered with scarves to hide the damp stains. A chink of light appeared under the bedroom door. Behind it Wislawa was putting on her dressing gown, which, since her husband’s death, had become too big for her.

For men it is different, they don’t have the same habit of following as women do. Men mourn, of course. Marcel, who kidnapped the inspectors, placed flowers on the table by the empty side of his wedding bed every night after Nicole died. Men feel left behind, abandoned. Women grieve more than mourn, and they grieve for what has happened to their dead. This is why they follow them through the underworld.

Each morning when she came into the living room, Wislawa had the look of a widow who had been travelling throughout the night.

Here’s a clean pair of underpants and a vest for you, she said.

It’s raining, said Sucus.

It’s bound to rain from time to time.

It was raining yesterday too.

I’ll make the coffee. You get out of bed. You’d do well to take your oilskins today.

Can’t work in them. Are my shoes dry?

Wear your gum boots.

They fill up with water.

Then empty them from time to time.

From time to time! From time to time! You’ve no idea what it’s like on a building site. You’ve never worked on one, so you don’t know.

Your father did.

He didn’t.

Clement did every job under the sun.

He told me he opened oysters for forty years and nothing else.

At least your poor father has one worry less, now you’re earning.

Doesn’t he have better things to think about where he’s gone?

Not yet, not yet, it’s too soon.

You’re going to make the coffee?

Not till you’re out of bed.

Please!

If you work well, you could be a foreman one day.

A foreman! God forbid. You should see Cato … A crane driver, yes. But, you need a certificate of some sort.

You could go to evening classes and work for the certificate.

In the evening, Mother, I’ve got better things to do. Did Zsuzsa come round yesterday?

Out of bed! No, she didn’t.

What have you got against her? She brought you some fish and she cooked them.

She cooks well.

So then?

Nothing. Get out of bed.

She cooks well, so?

Clement should be here to see you like this! You’ll be late for work.

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All over Troy, the rain of the summer’s end was pouring down rooves: rooves of tile, concrete, slate, corrugated iron, tarpaulin, wood, schist, cardboard, glass, old sacking, cement, polyester. From some it ran off into shining galvanised gutters, into others it soaked, and some it destroyed. West of Cachan, in the direction of Swansea, in the district of San Isidro, Yannis lived on the third floor of an apartment block.

On the same wet morning, his mother came out of her bedroom in a dressing gown borrowed from Sonia, her daughter-in-law, which was too skimpy for her. At home, on the island, she put on a dress, not a dressing gown, as soon as she got out of bed. She had a face so weathered by the sea and the sun that she almost looked as if she had been smoked like a ham or a fish. But her eyes, despite her age, were clear and blue. Whatever she was doing—putting up her long white hair into a chignon, pouring hot water onto coffee, washing clothes, making tarama—she did with such assurance that it was impossible to help her, or even be beside her.

At first she had been delighted to see her granddaughters and had been reduced to silence by the sight of so many new things and people. Then, after about a week, she had started to make her comments. First she spoke to her daughter-in-law when the two women found themselves alone, after the girls had gone off to school. But when it became clear to her that Sonia only understood a few words of Greek—she was an Armenian—and, furthermore, pretended to be deaf, she muttered to herself for hours and became singleminded about seizing every opportunity of talking to her son whenever she could corner him. This was why she got up at half past five in the morning to make his coffee before he went to work.

You have a good job, Yannis, she said, you earn good money and you deserve it. There were five beautiful women on Samos who would have packed and arranged and unpacked their doweries every night, so eager would they have been to marry you, if you gave the word, you who work up there alone in the sky like a heavenly fisherman. So you married a foreigner here in the city and your daughters don’t speak Greek and your wife has not yet given you a son and you earn good money, this is what I want to tell you, but you do not husband it, you let it be wasted, the good money you earn in the sky, this money is spent on the first whim that enters her head. She spends as if she had no faith in the future, she’s bird-witted. Look in the bathroom, Yannis, I did not know there were so many different lotions on this earth for women.

Some are for me, said her son.

The Siren sisters did not have more and they lured men to their death. Open the wardrobe in the children’s room and it is like, it is like switching on a television set! Nothing, nothing in it will last, there’s not a rag there for your grandchildren, it is trash. Why are there cockroaches in your home? I will tell you, my son. They have come because there is no husbandry here, cockroaches are a sign of heedlessness.

I tell you every morning, Mother, we are not on Samos here. The cockroaches are in the whole building.

It’s Babylon!

We live here. I invited you here so you could see how we live.

The house is waiting for you, Yannis, it will always be waiting for you.

We’ve made a life here in the city.

Everyone grows old, my boy. And with age everyone’s eyesight fails a little. I don’t need to see more than I do in order to know. I know because I feel. You work in the sky like a god, and you are lost!

You see nothing!

Why do you shout at me?

I have to go now.

Have a good day, my son.

Yannis drove to the building site on Park Avenue. He had a small Renault. Already the streets were full, the cars fender to fender. It was raining in torrents and through the windshield the lights were tangled like yellow wool. Yannis, the crane driver, was thinking about his women …

It’s not Sonia’s fault if she’s a little scatterbrained. It’s not Mother’s fault if she’s never left Samos. But why can’t they leave me in peace? He was driving less smoothly than usual. Suddenly, he had to slam on his brakes to avoid a woman pushing a grown-up figure across the street in a gigantic pram. He frowned. The pram made him think of babies. After a month with four women in the flat, he would like to have a son … he would call him Alexander.

Underneath the rubber sheet of the pram the woman was pushing, sat a man, huddled up, his hands on his lap, his head lolling a little. The woman stopped on the pavement and adjusted the hat on the man’s head so that it sheltered him better from the rain. You mustn’t get cold, she said, if you catch cold I’ll have no end of trouble with you. I know you—when your nose is running, you stop eating, you refuse to eat, and your tummy goes hard. Let me tuck your foot under the sheet, they’re not waterproof these boots and you’ll get soaked. We don’t have to cross the road again, my love, till we get to Park Avenue. You like passing by there, don’t you? You like watching the big cranes.

On the building site all the men had taken shelter in the locker room. When Yannis arrived the goddess man was telling a joke. Sucus was reading in a newspaper a story about dolphins being trained to protect nuclear submarines. Cato flung open the door and stared at the men leaning against the walls.

What are you waiting for, you lazy buggers? Out! Get out on the job.

Murat took a step forward and bowed very slightly, as if about to award a public prize.

Can I say something, Mr. Cato? I would suggest we wait until it’s raining a little less.

Is that what you would suggest! Jesus!

Under these weather conditions, Mr. Cato, the safety of the workers on the site is at risk.

You talk like a fucking lawyer. You get your foreign mouth around big words! You’d better watch it or I’ll have you blacked. No work anywhere. See? Out! Get out there now!

Not a single builder moved.

It’s a mud swamp out there, Mr. Cato.

Mud or shit, it’s the same to me. We’re eight days behind schedule.

Men’ll be sliding in all directions. Quite apart from the hazard to health working all day in drenched clothes.

Hazard to health my arse! This isn’t a nursery school. Any man who needs a cape can go and get one from stores. I want the six casings set up yesterday poured. See? Now out!

Still nobody moved. Cato approached Murat with his fists up.

Drop your knife! Cato hissed.

I’m not moving, said the Turk.

Then you’re fired. Out, the rest of you! Are you deaf or what? I said outside. You want to be fired, the lot of you? Shit! What’s the matter with you?

The twenty men in the wooden hut, big-handed and sullen, refused to move. The air was muggy with their breath and damp clothes. No one spoke. The floor boards creaked under their heavy boots. They filled the little hut the way a single elephant would fill a railway wagon. Eventually the goddess man said: You put Murat back on the payroll or none of us work today.

Cato turned away to look out the window. He stuck his hands in his belt. The elephant shifted its weight. Finally Cato spoke:

Look, it’s raining less already. Get out there, the lot of you, Murat included! We’ve had our little yap, now get to work.

It was true that the falling rain was less heavy. Three builders moved towards the door. The others followed. Some of the men tied plastic sacks over their heads. Murat was the last to leave.

The first hopper was there to be filled. When Murat waved, Yannis hoisted a little clumsily and the load swung sideways on its cables so that grey cement slurped over to fall with the small rain onto the muddy earth.

The wind was coming in squalls. In the cabin Yannis glanced at the wind gauge to see whether the gusts were exceeding the statutory fifty kilometres per hour. Not yet. The rhythm of the long wiper blades as they swept backwards and forwards across the glass wall of the cabin reminded him of two oars from long ago, when his father used to row a boat. He must have been no more than six, for by the time he was seven his father had drowned. Another squall hit the crane like a wave.

On the ground, the sudden gusts whipped the men’s wet clothes against their bodies, and those who were able ducked their heads behind their shoulders to shelter their faces against the rain. Sucus was shifting sand towards the crabs of the cement mixer. The sand was twice as heavy as usual. With his feet wet and water trickling down his neck and his right shovelling shoulder a little stiff, he thought of Zsuzsa. He thought, as men have always done under rough conditions, of her warmth and softness, of how she was the opposite of shifting wet sand in squalls of rain.

The first time he’d seen her without a stitch of clothing on, the first time he’d seen her hidden hair, darker than he had imagined in any dream, he thought he was the luckiest man on earth. She was standing there before him and she was making everything else until the end fade into nothingness!

Bull! shouted Murat as the hopper came down.

The mixer spewed out its liquid concrete. Murat threw the switch and the feeding stopped, the drum rotating in the opposite direction, tongue lolling. Sucus, leaning on his shovel, watched.

It was then Murat noticed that one of the lifting chains looked out of place. He hesitated. They had just put in two tons of concrete. If two tons of concrete fell out of the sky as the crane took the load off … From where he was on the ground he couldn’t properly see the rings the chains were threaded through. He found a foothold and pulled himself up the hopper to look more closely.

Another squall hit the crane, seriously reducing visibility. The air became like sea. Yannis thought he saw Murat wave his helmet in the air. He pressed the appropriate black button.

The hopper started its ascension into the sky with Murat still clinging to it.

No! he shouted. Bull! Bull! The wind blew his words away. Only Sucus heard them and saw what was happening.

Let go! Let go! yelled Sucus.

It would have been simple for Murat to jump during these first few seconds, but there are situations in which the will to survive issues mad orders and a paralysis sets in. Once I saw a dog on river ice which was breaking up. The dog was standing on a slab that had broken loose and was carrying him downstream. It couldn’t decide whether to jump or stay put. Its forelegs wanted to do one thing, its hind legs the opposite. In the same way Murat’s hands refused to loosen their grip, as the hopper rose into the air above the cement mixer.

Frantic, Sucus scrambled up the mud bank so as to be directly under the hopper. There he fell onto his knees and looked up at the great ladle already four metres off the ground, and about to disappear into the sky. Murat was hanging by his arms, legs dangling. Jump! Murat! Jump! Sucus prayed and implored. The words carried. Murat heard them and this time, miraculously, his hands obeyed. They let go and he fell five metres down on to the earth, just beside Sucus.

Murat!

The Turk was face to the ground. For what seemed a year he didn’t stir. At last, he turned his head.

Newborn, don’t fret, he said, I think one of my legs is broken. It’s better I don’t move.

The squall had passed. There appeared the first brief sunshine of the day. Yet both men on the ground were shivering.

Yannis, in his cabin, realised that something unusual had occurred on the ground below. Why was the Turk lying face down in the mud? What was the young man who wanted to be a crane driver doing on his knees beside him? He hauled up and swung the jib to the west. Cato was running towards the cement plant waving his arms. The young man had gotten to his feet and was walking towards Cato. Both of them stopped abruptly, facing one another. Then the young man hit the foreman in the face and the foreman, taken by surprise, stepped backwards, slipped and fell. Now the young man returned to the Turk, who hadn’t moved and was still lying spread-eagled on the yellow mud. It was at this moment that Yannis became convinced there had been an accident.

He had to deliver the hopper to the pouring or the concrete would set. When this was done, he stopped the crane and came out of the cabin. Arching over the city towards the east there was a rainbow. He began to descend the ladder much more slowly than usual. His silhouette against the sky, as he descended, showed a man weighed down by doubt.

Sucus did not really decide in which direction to walk: he just walked. The rain had lessened to a slight drizzle. When taxis pulled up at the Metropole Hotel the hall porters no longer held scarlet umbrellas aloft. In the sky above the building site both cranes were working again, jibs turning. Cato had sacked Sucus on the spot. Murat had been taken away on a stretcher.

Sucus strode down Park Avenue towards Carouge. It was an area full of banks. The banks clustered together, discouraging any building where money might be exchanged for pleasure. In the banks nothing was hidden except money, every pore of these buildings was under surveillance, every one of their surfaces polished as if shaved for an operation. This was why to steal from them was almost as much a challenge as walking on the moon, and the popular heroes in the city were men like Nestor, or Margarlon, or Diomedes, robbers whose hauls had become legendary. As he passed the lunar banks, Sucus grasped the reindeer knife on his belt.

After ten minutes he came to Gentilly, the district of the cloth merchants, with shops, warehouses, wholesalers, and factories. In the narrow streets buyers, sellers, messengers, brokers, tea boys, jostled each other all day. Porters carried piles of garments as high as themselves, bound with string, garments women had finished at home now being returned to their contractors. Everybody Sucus passed or knocked against was busy on a small errand, urgent for somebody somewhere.

The last clouds had been blown away. The buildings on the distant hills looked white in the sunlight. The fishmongers sprinkled more broken ice on their fish, and Sucus on the jostling sidewalk remembered how his father had told him about a shepherd in the alpage. He didn’t remember the man’s name. All he recalled was that the man said something and the air was so still, the man so alone, that the mountain echoed his voice.

As if the sound came from the mountains, a cock crowed. Sucus stopped and looked round. An old woman, toothless, with a nose like a beak, was sitting on an upturned wooden box in a doorway. Between her legs was a basket holding several white chickens. Realising she had stopped in his tracks the young man covered in cement dust, the old woman crowed again and beckoned to him.

A plump young white chicken, she called, three thousand nine hundred!

For that price!… And Sucus laughed the bargaining laugh.

Come over here and I’ll tell you a story.

Sucus approached.

It happened to my neighbour. She and I live beyond the oil tanks, where the fields start. She has a husband, this neighbour, a husband who likes the booze. On Saturday evening he asks some of his cronies home and they start drinking in the kitchen, drinking and singing. His wife says she’s going to bed. A little later the husband falls asleep in his chair. Are you listening to me, boy? Or are you looking at the white chickens? I’m too blind to see. Listen. One of the husband’s cronies had an idea: Let’s play a joke on him, he said. It’s Easter, he said, they’re bound to have a chicken, look in the ice box. Sure enough, they found one. Cut off its head and give me the neck, said the joker. Okay. Now open his fly and let the little neck hang out as it should! That’s what the old men did in the kitchen. Then they went home. At about five in the morning the wife wakes up in her big bed, she can’t hear any voices, and her husband isn’t beside her. So she gets up. She opens the kitchen door, and what does she see? Do you know what she saw? She saw the cat eating her hubby’s zizi!…

I’ll give it to you, young man, because you laughed so much, for twenty-five hundred!

Sucus carried the live white chicken upside down by its legs along the Shepherd’s Bush Road. It was the chicken he was holding that told him where to go.

He passed a woman pushing a pram with a grown-up man in it. He stopped to watch. The woman bent down to speak to the man in the pram.

Are you too hot, my love? I don’t want you sweating, it always puts you in a bad mood. Is the sun in your eyes? We’ve got to get to Lions so we can pick up the music sheets, otherwise I won’t have enough. Bend your knee now. Be good and bend your knee. Then I can pull up your trouser bottom, my love. We have a lot of music to write …

The paths up Rat Hill were muddy and Sucus slipped several times. Once he fell on the chicken who started to cackle very loud, hoping that all the cocks in the world would come to her aid. Outside the Blue House there was nobody, but the door was open. Inside, Naisi was sitting on a chair by the window, wiping with an oily cloth a Zig submachine gun which lay across his knees.

What did you do, Brother-in-Law?

I hit the boss.

You shouldn’t have done that, he said.

It happened before I could stop it.

Never hit the boss unless you kill him. He can always hit harder. Besides, it’s too intimate.

I knocked him down.

And you got sacked, no? He got up off the ground and you got put down in the shit, no? You can read, I suppose?

Sucus nodded.

Zsuzsa can’t read.

And you, asked Sucus, you read?

Me? I’m the first reading member of the family. They kept me four years in their zaouia. They taught me how to read and they taught me about God. You can’t fiddle with him. That’s what I learnt about God … in one sentence. It was in this zaouia I first touched a piano. The piano was in a cellar where they made yoghurt, and the cook, he was black, he taught me the notes. He loved to play a number of his own called “Your Balls Are Hanging Out.” To this day I can’t play it without smelling damp cloth and heated milk. Then I got pregnant.

You’re joking.

I got found with Indian hemp.

Naisi smiled a smile as enigmatic as the Buddha’s. It was hard to know whether it was a smile of regret, of humor, or of courage before the worst possible news.

This is what I wanted to show you.

Naisi handed a folded newspaper to Sucus, who read the small headline: TORTOISE HILL DEFIES INTERPOL. ESCAPE NETWORK UNFOLLOWABLE SAYS IDENTITY MAN.

Whatever happens, Brother-in-Law, don’t forget, Zsuzsa can’t read.

Meaning what?

Always give her a second chance.

Naisi got up, opened his mother’s wardrobe, and placed the gun carefully on the top shelf behind the shoes.

What applies to them doesn’t apply to us, Brother-in-Law. Never forget it, otherwise you’ll get hurt.

He turned round from the wardrobe to face Sucus. A golden mask covered his face. The expression of the mask was sad, as if no other colour in the world was more used, more fatigued than gold. Through the slits Sucus could see the same lost blue eyes.

I wear it some nights when I play at the Alhambra, Naisi explained, without taking it off.

He sat down, sprawling, on the one chair. They look the same in the morgue as we do, Naisi said, they have the same blood groups as we do. But we and they have nothing in common.

My father said the same thing.

Did he?

He said there were peasants and there were those who fed off the peasants.

Peasants! I’m talking about the twenty-first century, I’m talking about today and tomorrow.

Sucus was still holding the chicken.

We’re outside the law and whatever we do, we break it, said Naisi. They’re born inside and whatever they do, they’re protected. If you need to hit without killing, hit those who love you, not them. What applies to them doesn’t apply to us. Take apples. They eat an apple for their health. We eat an apple because one of us stole it. Take cars. They drive because they’ve got a rendezvous. We drive to get away. Building a house! They build to invest their money and leave it to their children. We build to have a roof. Fucking! They fuck to get kicks! Naisi took off the mask and dropped it onto the floor. I fuck to die! And you?

Sucus knew before he turned round that Zsuzsa was standing behind him.

Your man just punched the foreman, said Naisi.

What the hell made him do that?

I didn’t think. I just hit.

Give her to me, said Zsuzsa.

She turned the chicken the right way up so it sat on her hand, against her breast.

It’s when they’ve abandoned all hope that chickens become calm. She stroked its back.

Cato deserved it, said Sucus.

Ah, my silky one, murmured Zsuzsa, rubbing her chin over the white wing feathers.

I got the sack, said Sucus. For my mother it’s going to be … I know.

It was stupid. For my mother it—

Don’t worry, Flag. I’ll tell you what we’re going to do. We’ll go into town. We’ll go and say goodbye to your fucking building site. And we’ll go and see your mother. Wait five minutes.

She slipped out, the chicken under her arm. The two men heard the last soft cluck being drawn from its throat.

The neighbours all bring their poultry for her to kill, said Naisi, she’s done it since she was ten. She never frightens them.

Must be the way she holds them, said Sucus.

When we were kids, not here but beyond Swansea, before they cleared us off with their bulldozers, we had a goat and it was always Zsuzsa who milked it. She learnt to milk goats before she learnt to count.

I’m going to disappear, said Zsuzsa, on their way down to the city.

She put herself behind Sucus and pressed her body hard against his.

Walk! she ordered.

She moved each of her legs with his, and clung very close to him. Anyone approaching would have seen the silhouette of a single figure.

She’s gone! she whispered.

Sucus was burning with desire.

As an old woman, I know. Burning is the word. His zizi felt as if it would spurt blood if it weren’t cooled. And his blood felt as if it were boiling. This was happening inside his body. Outside his body it was worse. At his age, time is very long and its length breeds a terrible impatience. He felt he would be swallowed up by time if he didn’t have her now.

Where can we go? he muttered over his shoulder.

Go on walking, big one, she’s gone!

Zsuzsa’s desire was different from his. Nothing threatened to swallow her up. She didn’t have to cross any open space to arrive where she wanted to be with Sucus. She didn’t have to leave her forest. The forest was her nature. She wandered about in it, she lay down in it, she looked up from it into the sky. She knew the calls of many of its animals, but not all. And she believed Sucus was in the forest. All she had to do was to find where he was hiding. He was never in the same spot. And he was never far. What she wanted most to do was to uncover him and cover him and uncover him again. Most berries are hidden by leaves, some are protected by thorns. Her desire was to find in her forest, close to the ground, the cluster of Sucus. Since she never had to leave the forest, it didn’t matter how long it took.

By now they were in Carouge, where Sucus had been that morning. It was getting dark. A jetliner, wing lights flashing, was crossing the sky.

I’ll tell you what I saw today, Flag, you won’t believe me! It was black and very low on the ground and it looked like an electric razor. Inside it was red leather. The steering wheel was white snake skin. Had a CD player and a special sound system. Easy to get out—I had a good look—four screws and only one flange to cut.

A Cormorant?

No, the hood wasn’t long enough. But listen—

I’m listening.

It’s there, parked in the street. Behind Budapest Station. Around Sankt Pauli. Along comes Mr. Director. He has bad teeth, I can tell you. The colour of mutton fat. In his pocket he’s got a zapper. He zaps and a light by each car door goes on. He zaps again: the four doors unlock and open a couple of inches. He’s still standing there in the building doorway. Zap! The doors shut. Zap! The engine starts. Zap. It backs up, and it’s ready to go! Beep beep! Mr. Director gets in and drives off! One day, Flag, we’re going to have a car like that!

Did you get his number?

No. But I got his zapper!

She threw what looked like a tiny pocket calculator into the air and caught it with both hands.

Let me see!

Not now, Flag, and she started laughing.

I know where we’ll go, said Sucus.

They were on the sidewalk beside the tall wooden fence that screened off the Mond Bank building site. Following the fence, he led her off Park Avenue and down a side street.

One day I’ll buy you a car with a zapper, she said.

They came to a small locked door in the fence. Just past the door he pushed a plank sideways. Then another.

We came through here every day to get beer from the vending machine in the Métro.

Once inside, he carefully placed the planks back against the fence.

At night, half finished, the building looked like the ruin from Roman times which was in our village Schoolbook. The same black holes where the doors and windows should be, the same uneven skyline, the same scale, as if it were the plaything of a giant for whom the sky was no bigger than a pillow.

We’re going up there! he said.

Up where, Flag?

The crane there.

Which one?

The father.

Father?

The tall one.

It’s so high, Flag.

There’s a ladder.

I can’t see it.

There’s a cabin.

It’ll be locked, Flag.

We never lock up at home. Quick. Before we’re spotted.

He took her hand and led her to the foot of the crane.

There are three hundred and eight rungs, he said, you can count them if you like. Don’t look up and don’t look down. Just count.

You go first, she said, I’ll follow.

They started climbing.

Below them were a myriad of lights. For each light there were at least ten people, each one with a name. These people were climbing stairs, crossing streets, sleeping, working, talking, touching one another, suffering, dying, eating, drinking themselves to death, making music, vomiting, planning, going under, surviving. Their numbers multiplied every week. And the weight of the deaths that occurred in Troy never suppressed the lightness of the births.

We’re here, said Sucus, look down.

Don’t break my fingers, said Zsuzsa.

It’s open.

Are you sure it’s open?

Take off your dress, Zsuzsa.

It seems to me Zsuzsa and Sucus were making love when the story began.

<center>
<verbatim>* * *</verbatim>
</center>

I’ve never been so tall, said Zsuzsa.

Can you feel it? Can you feel it swaying?

No one will ever make me as tall as this.

One day you’ll fly in a plane!

It’ll never go as high as we are now.

A Boeing 747 to Paris!

No, Flag, nobody in my life will bring me as high as you’ve done tonight.

** Marriage

ON THE RIGHT of the stove in my kitchen, there’s a little lever to operate a damper which increases or reduces the draught of air being sucked up into the chimney pipe. The mechanism is simple enough for an old woman to understand. Pushing the lever up or down turns a bar which is attached to a circle of thin metal which has the same dimensions as the pipe. When it’s upright it shuts off, and when it’s horizontal it lets the air go up. Last year, the buff broke off the bar and the fire roared all the time, so I went to César, the blacksmith, and asked him if he could repair it. It was an insult to ask him this, like asking a cobbler to sew on a button. But he looked at me and said, as if we were both fifty years younger: Since it’s for you, I’ll mend it! Two days later I passed by and there was the damper, repaired and waiting for me. César wasn’t at home, so I took it and left for him on his workbench a pot of my honey. Several months later he died. Now every time I move the lever up or down, I think of César, the dead blacksmith, and I thank him as I hear the breath in the chimney becoming weaker or stronger. César, I whisper, you are in my fire!

It was getting dark in Troy. Sucus was sprawled on his bed reading about a marriage between a famous millionaire and an Australian film star. The millionaire was reported to have said: This is my fifth and last marriage, for I’m old enough today to know what I want. He was sixty-two, the bride twenty-three. Sucus dropped his newspaper onto the floor beside the bed.

Do you remember the last time you went to the village, Maman?

Wislawa put down her iron and looked through the fourteenth-storey window as if she could see—not the lead ingots of other Trojan buildings, but a mountain.

The last time I was in the village, Sucus, I was pregnant with you.

Was it snowing?

She laughed. No, it was summer, the time of the haymaking. They wouldn’t let me fork up the hay. They said it was too risky with you. I just raked.

Wislawa was still looking at the mountain. The water in her iron, upright on the table, gurgled. Through the party wall came the simmering noise of the neighbour’s TV, a noise like voices talking in a saucepan.

I’m going to be earning very soon, Sucus said.

I’ll believe that, son, when it happens.

I only need twenty-five thousand. Twenty-five. So I can buy a sphygmomanometer! With a sphygmomanometer I’m away!

What on earth do you want a thing like that for?

You don’t know what it is, do you?

Wislawa was thinking about something else. Did this, this, this—she hesitated, searching for the word she wanted, and the lack of the single word made her heart howl for the loss of Branch—did this *vagabond* from Rat Hill love her son?

From the Greek, *sphygmo*, Maman, meaning pulse, the sign of life.

What, Sucus?

With this machine and a white coat like the quacks have at the hospital, you can make eight thousand a day on Alexanderplatz!

You ought to be ashamed of yourself, trying to profit from other people’s suffering.

And dentists, what do they do?

You don’t even know how to listen to somebody’s blood pressure.

I’ll learn in five minutes.

A regular job is what you need.

Regular! You do your ironing, you do your ironing and you see nothing. There aren’t regular jobs any more. They’ve gone. There’s no way. My poor Mother, it’s like that, there’s no way.

Wislawa laid another folded green tablecloth on the pile by the window. The neighbours were now watching a football match and it sounded as if the commentator was running for dear life as he shouted his commentary.

In a moment I’ll make us something to eat, said Wislawa …

Is it true? asked Sucus, his eyes shut. Are there people in the village who live on a mountain so high up, so far away, that when they whisper they can hear an echo from the rocks?

There are places like that.

Sucus swung his feet up into the air as if he was going to walk on the ceiling and then, in one bound, stood upright on the still uncarpeted floor.

Why don’t we go back to the village, Maman, the three of us?

Three of us?

You, Zsuzsa, and me. Father always said there was a wooden house on the mountain and a pine forest that still belonged to us. We could live there. I’d cut down trees, you’d keep chickens, and Zsuzsa, she’d gather mushrooms and sell them on the other side of the frontier, like the woman Father told us about, what was her name?

Why am I crying? Wislawa asked herself.

We’d grow our own vegetables, said Sucus, and in the winter I’d get work on the ski lifts, and in the summer I’d cut wood.

It’s not like you think. There’s no way, my boy, there’s no way.

Sucus took the Métro in the direction of Eddington. He got down at Piton and walked along the sea road towards the tanneries. The road was lit with yellow overhead lights like an auto route. When there were no trucks passing, Sucus could hear the waves breaking on the shingle. He could also smell the tanneries. There were more corrosive smells in Troy—the smell, for instance, of the fertiliser factory in Gentilly, but, in the dark, the smell of the tanneries made him think of catacombs. From *kata*, which meant down-under in Greek. Down-under where Clement his father was.

When the road turned the headland Sucus’s spirits rose, for he could see, quite near, the lights on Rat Hill. Like many people born in cities he was frightened of empty distance. He ran a little. Soon he heard radio music. Suddenly, all the lights he could see went out. Then they came on again. This happened several times. In the pitch darkness the hill of huts and shacks was like a sleeping dog, when the lights came on it was like a dancing bear. Some of the houses had strings of coloured lights strung along their walls. It was impossible for him to find his way, for at night all his familiar landmarks were lost. It was either a labyrinth of lights or as dark as a well. He stopped by the door of a hut where some kids were sorting into piles the salvage brought back by the garbage collectors: one pile for electrical fittings, another for women’s shoes, another for medicines, another for large tins.

Do you know Uncle Dima’s house? Sucus asked a boy who was smoking.

The Blue House! Zsuzsa’s!

That’s the one.

The boys gathered round him.

A beautiful knife you have there, hinny.

It’s old, very old. It belonged to my father.

Can I see it? asked the one with the cigarette and dark circles under his eyes.

Sucus drew the knife out of its scabbard and held it up, the finger of one hand on its point and the other hand round its reindeer handle. In the light of the hurricane lamp in the hut the knife glinted like water.

Life is as thin as a sharpened blade. The rest is God.

Can I feel your shiv? asked the same boy.

Sucus shook his head.

I’ll give you fifteen thousand for it.

Sucus shook his head again.

Twenty thousand!

It’s not for sale.

Everything’s for sale, hinny.

Tonight I haven’t a sou, said Sucus, I’m telling you, I haven’t a single sou, and I’m not selling my knife.

Because your Dad gave it to you?

The boy threw away his cigarette.

There are things you don’t sell, said Sucus.

So you want to find Zsuzsa!

You’re lucky, man, because we know her!

Zsuzsa and her zazzle!

To find Zsuzsa, said the one who wanted to buy, you follow the electricity cables, up and up, till you pass the second blind pig on your left.

You know what a blind pig is, I guess?

I wasn’t born yesterday, said Sucus.

Nor was Zsuzsa!

How would you like Zsuzsa as a mum?

By the blind pig you turn right and it’s the Blue House.

The house inside was as crowded with things as Rat Hill was crowded with shacks and people and children and poultry. There were clothes, saucepans, cardboard boxes, cushions, plates, bottles, shoes, towels, rags, jugs, a table, a mattress on the floor, a TV set, a wardrobe, a gas ring, a gas cylinder, a sink. Yet the room was full of arrangements and touches which showed that women lived there.

Where the gigantic mattress touched the wall, the pillows had been placed in a straight line under the cloth that served as a bedspread, and along this mound was laid a runner of white lace. The plates on the shelf fixed to a wall of naked briseblocks were carefully stacked in descending size, the largest at the bottom. In the centre of the cardboard ceiling a photo of a flying gull had been pasted; from the bed it looked as if it were flying towards you. Most noticeable of all, there were five mirrors in the small room! The largest, in a gilt frame the shape of a church window, was rested against the wall by the back of the sink. Its grey surface was spattered with black spots where the mercury had disappeared. It looked like the soil of Rat Hill, but if you stood by the sink, in its solemn dark reflection you could see your whole body.

Look at this! said Zsuzsa’s mother, Kaja.

She held up the garment she was ironing by its shoulders. It was a tailored jacket, in black and white dog-tooth tweed. As she held it up, she couldn’t resist swinging it as it would swing on a woman walking, tight across the shoulders, flared over the hips.

It’s for Zsuzsa, she explained, she bought it this afternoon.

Smart, said Sucus.

There’s a skirt goes with it.

She went on ironing around her large splayed-out left hand which held the jacket in place. Sucus noticed that on one of the lapels there was a hole, black at the edges, which must have been caused by a burn.

It’s nothing! said Kaja, as if the weight of her ample, apple-brown body overflowing her violet cotton dress, could give such emphasis to the two words that the hole would disappear.

Did it happen ironing?

I’d say a burning coal fell on it, said Kaja.

How?

Must have thrown off her clothes by a fireplace to be fucked. Anyway, whatever happened, happened. If nothing had happened it wouldn’t be here tonight. Rich ladies don’t throw away tweed suits in perfect condition. It won’t show if you get her some flowers to pin there.

Kaja winked.

Are you hungry? I’ll heat some polenta for you. Naisi’s out the back with the girl. Tell her to come in.

On Rat Hill there was no flat ground except where men dug to build. Every home on the slopes had begun with a spade and a shovel. Now that some families were richer they sometimes began by hiring Achille, who had lost a leg and owned a recuperated bulldozer. Behind the Blue House a plot of about four metres square had been levelled with pick and shovel by Uncle Dima before he went to prison. The idea was to build a room for Zsuzsa and Julia: then Uncle Dima and Kaja would be able to sleep alone in the room where the mirrors were. The second room was occupied at night by Naisi. To justify this regal privacy, Naisi called the room his HQ. Since Uncle Dima’s arrest, work behind the house had stopped. The tiny plot was strewn with wood Uncle Dima had collected for the construction—planks, palings, packing cases, an old telephone pole. These made it look as if the lean-to the family was dreaming of building had just collapsed. It was often difficult on Rat Hill to tell the difference between what was falling down and what was going up.

Naisi and Zsuzsa were sitting on a crate amongst the debris and Zsuzsa was listening to her brother. Naisi could read, but it wasn’t books he read. He continually read the signs of what was happening on the hill and down in the city, of the new rackets of survival, and, best of all, of the latest plans for joining those for whom survival wasn’t a problem. Naisi read all the while—which is why he considered manual work a waste of time. Everywhere he went, he read: people’s characters, the way they lied, their fears, the city districts and the men who controlled them, the layout of buildings, rumours, new market prices, police reports, street maps—and when he wasn’t reading, he was thinking about what he had just read. This is why, talking in the dark behind the house, Naisi looked as if he was teaching his sister something. He wasn’t really. It was her way of listening and his way with words.

I wouldn’t ask you to at night, Naisi was saying, I’m talking about afternoons, afternoons only …

Sucus approached. Your new suit’s ironed, he said.

Flag, I want to be called Lilac, said Zsuzsa.

Lilac isn’t a name.

It’s the name of a flower and a perfume, and a tree.

It’s not a woman’s name. Lila! Lily! Lilith! But not Lilac.

Listen, the garbage man I bought my new rig from was singing a song. It was written by a friend of his called Ottay Riffat who lives on Tortoise. It goes like this.

Laying her head back, she sang:

<verse>
On the corner of the street
The lilac’s in flower
So I have to pray and implore
Lilac, oh Lilac
Oh let me pass by
Lilac, my sweet …
</verse>

Further down the slope two dogs were barking.

Zsuzsa got to her feet, kissed Sucus on the lips, and went inside the shack.

It’s a bad sign when dogs bark at night. In the village they say it’s because they have heard something in the forest.

It’s good you came, said Naisi. We’ve got to make some new people. Ever made a new person?

Maybe we made one a few nights ago!

We need ten, Brother-in-Law.

Give us a few years!

We need ten by the day after tomorrow.

That’s a lot.

With mugs, names, and numbers.

Papers?

Yes, international ones, we need passports.

Who’s paying? Sucus asked.

We’ll say I’m paying.

How much, Naisi?

Five hundred thousand for the ten.

You should tell him, Naisi, the one who’s really paying, said Sucus, you should tell him he’s making you look mean. Ten heists for five hundred thousand!

We’ve checked it out. It’ll take you and Zsuzsa a quarter of an hour, at minimal risk.

All ten?

If you get more, we pay more. Budapest Station. Tomorrow night. Ten o’clock. Platform 17. Schlafwagen 101.

What are you going to do with the passports?

I told you, Sucus, we need some new people.

It was at this moment that Zsuzsa appeared wearing the dogtooth suit. In the dark they could see she had changed and that a tight skirt ended just above her knees, but not much more than that. Yet the two of them went on gazing at her. Both men loved her. The barking of the dogs had stopped. Naisi straightened his shoulders and tapped on the earth with one of his boots to match his sister’s elegance. If he was a reader, she was why he wanted to read. He loved her the way a musician can love an instrument, or a pilot his racing car. All he wanted was to entice the best from her, so as to give it back to her as her own pleasure. The pleasure of being Zsuzsa. He had known nothing in his life as beautiful, in his eyes, as his sister. There was no jealousy in Naisi’s life, only this intimate, immense ambition.

Sucus loved her without any ambition. He loved her jealously, passionately, protectively.

<verse>
Lilac, oh Lilac
Oh, let me pass by …
</verse>

he hummed, and Zsuzsa opened her arms.

I can hear the sound of a hunting horn. The hunting horn is strange, always leaving, its back turned, speaking over its shoulder. Everything about it announces departure. And the hunting horn is as male as the harp is female.

I hear the horn beneath the high glass roof of Budapest Station, on platform 17, and it’s like the howling of a wild animal. I can almost touch the animal’s fur, warm, sweaty, golden burrs lodged in it, thick as felt. The bellowing of its voice bruises itself against the cast-iron pillars, crying for the wounds and the wounded to come.

<center>
<verbatim>* * *</verbatim>
</center>

Sucus and Zsuzsa were walking down platform 17 one behind the other, and there was nothing to suggest they’d ever met in their lives. Nothing to suggest it because Sucus’s thoughts were inaudible and invisible. He was thinking: In that skirt her legs look as tall as the sky! Yet I know where they end! His other thought was: Please God let it go well.

Zsuzsa was wearing her dog-tooth two-piece. On its lapel were pinned white dahlias Sucus had stolen that morning from a garden in Escorial. She was carrying a black canvas grip Naisi had supplied. It hung from her right shoulder, where buglers carry their bugles. Her hair was hidden in a white Egyptian turban, which her grandmother had taught her how to put on.

A strip of fine cotton muslin, at least three metres long. You fold it until it is quite narrow, then wind it round your head, leaving two long ends hanging. These you braid tightly into a white plait which encircles your head like a halo.

In front of the dark mirror by the sink it had taken Zsuzsa half an hour to make the Egyptian turban, which pulled back and covered all her hair.

You look like Nefertiti, Naisi had said as she left the house; then he added: Don’t worry about the grip, leave it if you have to. Schlafwagen 101. He’s famous for his lechery!

Along with the turban, Zsuzsa was wearing a pair of dark sunglasses. There was nothing to be done about disguising her two missing teeth. She had varnished her finger nails blood red.

Sucus, following Zsuzsa, was wearing his father’s raincoat. The label by the collar said Aquascutum. His father had explained the name to Sucus. Latin *aqua*, water. Latin *scutum*, shield. Clement had been given the raincoat by a restaurant owner for whom he had opened a thousand oysters at a banquet. A client had left it in the restaurant a year before and never come back. Wearing it, Sucus looked as though he had a regular job. Wislawa’s heart, when she saw him trying it on that morning, had tightened with a kind of hope.

It was a TEN train. Trans Europe Night. It would cross the continent and reach the far ocean in three days. Schlafwagen 101 was a sleeper, with amber-coloured curtains already drawn across the high-up windows. Its coachwork was burgundy red. Down near the platform somebody had written with a white aerosol: SHIT TRUCK!

Zsuzsa walked slowly past, looking up through her black sunglasses at the curtained windows and stopping once or twice so that the attendant should notice her. He did. She beckoned and he came to the door of his wagon. First, she handed him her luggage, then she stepped up herself. She was wearing white, flatheeled plastic sandals, the cheapest kind, such as are sold at the beach, but the way she stepped up the steps with these sandals on her feet made them look handmade!

I was eleven when my grandmother taught me to scythe. Men sweat buckets, she said, and die young, so you’d better learn now. And learn I did. When your scythe is well hammered and the blade on its sharp edge is so thin you can bend it with your thumbnail and the bright metal winks back at you, then scything is not a movement of your arms and shoulders, but of the hips, purely the hips. The grass knows when it’s being cut by a young woman and not a man. And for a similar reason the TEN train knew when Zsuzsa stepped up onto it.

I’m travelling to Paris, she said to the attendant. So I have to spend two nights on your train.

The Schlafwagen attendant was thinking: She’s a cayack, an upper-class cayack.

Sucus, still on the platform, was watching the Schlafwagen attendant talking to Zsuzsa at the top of the steps.

Let me explain, she continued confidentially, let me explain my dilemma to you.

It was Sucus who had suggested the word *dilemma* when they rehearsed that afternoon. *Dilemma* from the Greek *dis*, meaning two, and *lemma*, meaning that which has been taken in or perceived.

I’m sure you can help me, Mr. Schlafwagen Attendant. I just didn’t have time to make a reservation. It was a last-minute decision, and now the prospect of two long nights without being able to undress and slip into bed would be too much! If you can find me a berth, I’ll take your train. If not, I’ll go by air!

Up there in the coach, above the platform, it was another world. Space was very confined. Two people could scarcely pass in the corridor, they had to squeeze by each other sideways and yet everything brushed against was classy, classy and intimate. Most of the passengers not already in bed were preparing for bed, hanging up their jackets, kicking off their handmade shoes, taking off their Parisian scarves. Rich man’s shanty train, thought Zsuzsa to herself.

The Schlafwagen attendant, in his gold-braided, chocolate-coloured uniform, indicated the way to his bureau. From the table beside the sliding door with brass fittings he picked up his chart of reservations.

If you’ve no place, I’ll get down … Can you help me make up my mind?

As it happens, Madame, there is a spare berth.

Wonderful! Could I see it?

This was the decisive moment. Would he or would he not walk her down the corridor immediately? Abruptly and cunningly she changed her look: she pouted, her mouth went hard. He rose to the challenge and he rose to the bait.

Follow me, Madame.

He led the way down the corridor and unlocked cabin number 20. This berth was usually kept for last-minute arrivals who tipped well. But from the upper-class cayack the Schlafwagen attendant was going to refuse payment in money. The lace bedspread on the bunk showed a flying dove surrounded by stars.

Luck is never indifferent; it’s always either with you or against you. At that instant, the attendant, Zsuzsa and Sucus all believed they were in luck. Sucus, because the attendant had left the sliding door of his bureau open. Zsuzsa, because the spare berth was at the other end of the coach. And the Schlafwagen attendant, because when they crossed the frontier, he was going to get his ground rent.

Loudspeakers were announcing the departure in two minutes of the TEN train from platform 17.

Sucus slipped into the attendant’s bureau and slid the door shut. It was no bigger than the crane cabin. The passports of the passengers who had gone to bed were neatly arranged in a pigeonhole above the little table. He picked them, one by one like runner beans, and dropped them into the pocket of his raincoat. Then he slid the door back and walked casually down the corridor, like a man looking for a business colleague who has taken a stroll down the train. As he passed cabin number 20 he heard Zsuzsa exclaim: It’s perfect!

Sucus climbed down onto the platform, deliberately leaving the coach door open so she would be able to jump down.

If you care to give me your passport, Madame, we can arrange the little formalities of the ticket later.

No problem, darling.

The attendant, dumbfounded by the thrill of hearing this word so soon, hardly noticed her squeezing past him fast as a ferret.

I must kiss Mother goodbye! She’s waiting on the platform!

The train began to move. Sucus, alarmed that she had not yet appeared, was about to jump back on. But there she was in the doorway, triumphant. She landed on the platform as lightly as a magpie.

The Schlafwagen attendant, on the steps of his wagon, shouted, with furious regret, as the train gathered speed:

Your luggage, Madame, your luggage!

In order not to draw attention to herself, Zsuzsa turned and waved at the departing train. When the other people began to drift away, she followed the crowd.

You got them? she whispered.

Fourteen.

Slowly he took her hand and put it inside his father’s raincoat so she could touch the passports. She felt the whole wad of them. Then, smiling hard, she let her head fall from side to side like an idiot puppet. They both fell silent, suddenly exhausted. They were in a Métro going north.

It goes through the mountains where my father came from, the TEN.

Faraway mountains, she said.

At the other end of the coach a man started to sing, standing up. He was singing not for his pleasure but for money.

Why don’t we go there? asked Sucus.

Don’t be stupid.

We could take tomorrow’s train.

We could, yes.

We’ve got the cash.

First-class?

If you want, Lilac.

What would we do when we got there?

I’ve got a wooden house on a mountain.

You told me you’d never been there.

My father’s house. High up on the cliff-face, near a waterfall. We could live in it.

The Métro stopped at Temple. Many people got on, among them two dwarfs who took the seats behind Sucus and Zsuzsa.

You said everything was milk in your father’s village!

That’s what he used to say. Milk’s the only thing we have to sell in the village. If I heard it once, I heard him say it a hundred times.

The singer was now singing “Guantanamera.”

Naisi says you milk goats.

He says whatever comes into his head.

It’s not true?

Who knows?

You can kill chickens!

I can kill Schlafwagen attendants!

Fourteen, Lilac. That makes seven hundred thousand.

Let’s spend the night at the Hotel Patrai.

Where do you think it is?

It’s beyond Chicago. You can see it from Rat Hill. Across the bay. A big place covered with turrets like a cathedral. Let’s go there, Flag.

Behind them, the two dwarfs were also talking.

I’m nervous, said one of them to the other.

No need.

Suppose they drop us on the floor?

Can’t happen, there’s too many of them.

Suppose they toss us through a window!

Unlikely.

Are they young and strong?

Around your age, Samuel.

And the women …

They arrange the contests, if you ask me, for their women!

The women get excited. They love catching us, five, six, seven of them, holding the sheet out. When we bounce up we touch their tits. And they shriek.

The train stopped at Spallanzi.

How high do they throw us? asked Samuel, the younger dwarf.

As high as they can, up to the chandeliers.

I’m still nervous.

You can’t expect to earn big money without a little risk.

I don’t mind dancing …

It’s they who do the dancing, Samuel, not us!

We do the falling! said Samuel.

“Guantanamera” came to an end and the singer walked down the aisle, cap in hand. Most of the passengers gave him a coin or two. The elder dwarf found his wallet and slowly drew out a bank note.

You’re kings! Two kings! slurred the singer, who smelt of wine.

Sucus too pulled out a note. He had insisted that Naisi pay them half on rowing in, and half on delivery. He placed the note carefully in the man’s cap. It was a way of saying thank-you.

To the north of Budapest Station lay Sankt Pauli, one of the city’s red-light districts. It consisted of three parallel streets which, in the previous century, had been the quarter of the city’s printers. Now the shopfronts and workshops and living quarters had been converted into bars, strip joints, sex shops, and rooms, hundreds of rooms. Prostitutes lined the three streets there from eleven in the morning. I can tell you how men in Troy referred to them: as cruisers, flatbackers, koorvas, hookers, bangtails. Birds in the hedges have prettier names. But some of their pet names suggested more tenderness: Squirrel, Lorraine Luv, Feather Duster, Luscious Lou. All of these women dreamt of another life, and in this they resembled most people on this earth, but they had a better reason.

At the top of the third street was the most famous and spacious bar of the district, called Flores. On the evening of the passports, Superintendent Hector was sitting in this bar drinking whiskey. He was in a sombre mood. He had left the station in Cauchy Street at eight, eaten in an Italian restaurant, and come on to Flores. He only came here when he was feeling low. He chatted with the girls, who treated him not like a client but like a Seigneur. They knew who he was. They needed to keep out of trouble. They wanted to ingratiate themselves with him, but they’d also been told that he never went with any of them and that he hated silliness. So they treated him like a Seigneur. And this was balm to his wounded soul. Tonight Feather Duster was talking to him:

So they took us out in their yacht, yes, they had a Paraguayan flag, you should have seen what it was like on board, hot showers, a cocktail bar, video, white leather settees, Swedish glass, we laughed fit to kill when one of them said to me: All I want is a tour of the world!

Superintendent Hector wasn’t listening, he was thinking: In two weeks even the girls here will know I’m finished. When I come through the door, Winner may still say, A scotch, Superintendent, it’s my pleasure! For a couple of months, maybe, he’ll continue. Then one day, he’ll say to himself, What the hell, let the old bastard pay for his own jolts. And the new girls will eye me and the old hands’ll tell them, Let that one slide, honey, used to be a bogey, wants nothing, sits there to get a hard-on just watching us, never seen him offer a girl half a glass of bubbly … past it, we let him slide. Every day it’s getting worse, the Superintendent told himself. If I walk out on Susanna, I’m going back, I’m going back to the village.

So we didn’t return till Monday, Feather Duster was saying, it was quite a weekend! Though, to tell the truth, after two days it was nice to get ashore again and walk on solid ground.

Do you know where they were sailing afterwards?

To Izmir, they said.

What did they pay you in?

Superintendent Hector, is that a question I have to answer here in Flores?

Some champagne, Feather?

That would be nice, Superintendent … Dollars, they paid us in dollars, as a matter of fact.

A bottle of the Widow, said Hector.

When they raised glasses to one another, he looked into her eyes. They were unspiteful, insincere, generous. She looked into his and was surprised. She could see it coming before he knew it himself. He poured her another glass, the Superintendent wasn’t drinking. Before she took a sip, his hand was on her thigh. A large peasant hand. Here it comes, she thought. His fingernails began to play like a child’s in a fleece of wool.

Shall we go to my place? she asked when the bottle was empty.

Tell me your number. I’ll join you there.

As she left, Feather Duster opened her eyes big and raised her eyebrows to the girls at the bar. Look what’s got into the bogie, her look said. The Superintendent followed her a minute later.

To get in, to find the way back. The urge is sometimes so strong it will take the hand of anything—shit, piss, blood, whatever is warm, whatever was at home inside. Inside: where we were before we had to learn about life and were thrown out.

He had to walk five doors down the street. He knew the number. It was next to the Golden Fleece. He had a searing pain in his heart. This pain would take any way back in, like a blinded dog who had only its nose, it remembered a nameless happiness. He climbed the stairs to the second floor. Feather was already in her dressing gown.

Scythes! When I was young, I found it strange that they cut as they do cut. Enough to strike a single stone, and the blade’s edge tears like a mouth with a tooth knocked out. The scythe with its silvery edge and black shoulder is so close to blood, far closer than a needle or an axe or a knife. It’s so close to blood because of the thinness of its blade. The thinness of a garment.

Inside the marble hall of the Hotel Patrai there was nothing except a lift made entirely of glass and framed by golden-coloured metal. Even the floor of the lift was made of glass. As soon as Zsuzsa and Sucus entered the lift, its doors closed and they started to ascend, like the Madonna of the Cherubs into the sky, visible from every side.

The whole world can see us! giggled Zsuzsa. You’re sure you’ve got the smash?

Sucus nodded. Then he tapped the glass.

Bulletproof, he said.

When the lift at last stopped, they found themselves in another large hall, this one carpeted and wood-panelled. There were some small trees in tubs and two or three suits of armour.

Not a soul, said Zsuzsa.

It’s one o’clock!

To their surprise, at the reception desk at the far end of the hall sat an old woman rather like myself. She wore black, she had worn hands with arthritic knuckles, her forearms, if they could have seen them, were weathered, and the rest of her body, if they could have seen it, was very pale.

You require a room? she asked, looking at the register.

With a bathroom and a view onto the sea, said Sucus.

You have no luggage? remarked the old woman.

We left it at the airport, said Sucus.

We’re flying out tomorrow, said Zsuzsa, waving her sunglasses, so we only brought our—

Of course, said the old woman.

To Rio de Janeiro, added Zsuzsa.

Where else? said the old woman.

We’d like something to eat in the room, said Sucus.

I’ll send my grandson to take your order. If you’d be so good as to sign here, sir, and settle for the room immediately.

Sucus hesitated. It is difficult to invent a name for yourself on the spur of the moment. All names flee except the one given you by your parents. Finally, he invented Murat Ioannide.

The room is one hundred thousand, said the old woman.

Zsuzsa was looking at one of the suits of armour. Each finger-piece could bend three times. Over the breast the metal was finely engraved. Where his sex was, it made a shape like a small cake tin.

Why not champagne, darling? she proposed, looking straight into the visor.

My grandson will bring up a bottle.

Chilled, said Sucus.

As chilled as the bottle Boris kept in the trough of his yard before he died.

I don’t understand …

No, no, how could you? It was a village story. Here’s the key to your room, sir. On the third floor.

The room was far larger than the Blue House and the levelled ground behind it. Yet it was almost empty. Zsuzsa stood in the doorway transfixed. From the high ceiling hung a chandelier with strings of cut glass. In places, bits of glass were missing and you could see the bulbs. As one of the strings turned, traces of light shot all over the room. Between the two bay windows there was a television, and along half of one wall an immense wardrobe. The varnish had mostly worn off the floorboards which were the colour of grey sand. It was the bed that surprised her most. Neither of them had seen a four-poster before. It had a tattered canopy of yellowish silk, the colour of the bars on the wings of a goldfinch. Around the borders of the whole ceiling, acanthus leaves were modelled in deep white plaster.

What are we going to do, Flag?

Go in and shut the door.

They went in. Zsuzsa stepped out of her shoes and went round the room, touching things. The four posts, the goldfinch canopy, the lace runners on the bedside tables, the handles to the six doors of the wardrobe. She drew the velour curtains of the two windows and looked out into the night.

Once the Hotel Patrai with its private beach had been fashionable with the English, but oil from the tanking station further up the coast had polluted the sea, and now where the bathing huts had once been, there was a hovercraft station. All Zsuzsa could make out was a floating landing stage.

She lit the television and, pulling up her skirt like a whore, she sat astride it. Three cowboys rode between her legs. One fell off his horse. A sheriff entered a bar. Her two brown legs either side of the screen made the highly coloured actors look like toys.

She turned off the TV with her toe and went into the bathroom where the bath had rust stains and brass taps. There she played with the lights, switching them on and off by pulling a cord with a tassle. She came back and sat on the edge of the bed. Now the immense room, and the furniture and the fabrics from another century and another empire, were hers for the night. She took a large pillow and clutched it to her chest, smiling.

Let’s look at the passports, she said.

Sucus handed them to her and she arranged them in a pile on the top of the television. She opened the top one, examining the photograph.

A man, she said. She looked closer. Not one I’d trust.

She handed the passport to Sucus.

He’s American. From Carolina. Born 1957. Has blue eyes.

Any children?

Two.

Do they live with him?

Doesn’t say.

What does he do?

It says Federal Police.

He’s a scuffer?

That’s what it says.

I told you not to trust him, didn’t I? I can see through people, Flag. Like I saw through you in a flash, outside St. Joseph’s. I saw you were good, I saw you were going to be the man of my life. So I don’t have to read, do I? If I could read, I wouldn’t know more.

She picked up the next passport and studied it. You have to guess, she said. Man or woman?

Man.

No. Woman. How old is she?

Forty?

No, she’s my age. What colour is her hair?

Blond.

Wrong again. It’s black like mine.

Zsuzsa placed the passport face down on the TV.

Now for the big question. Think carefully. Is she beautiful?

No, she’s not beautiful at all.

You’re wrong, she’s very beautiful. She’s wearing a dog-tooth jacket, no burns, and pinned to it, there’s a brooch worth ten million.

Whilst saying this, she stretched one leg, then the other, and began to dance slowly past the windows. Sucus turned over the passport she had left lying face down. The small photo showed a bald man in his fifties!

She stopped dancing to watch his reaction. For a fraction of a second, before he bellowed, he looked lost, utterly lost. And at that instant she loved him more than she had ever done.

I think they’ve forgotten our supper, is what she said.

He took the lift down to the reception hall. There was a light by the counter. Near the telephone exchange a green eye was blinking. Otherwise everything was still. The old woman was fast asleep on a settee by the wall. Above the settee was a large poster announcing the films being shown in Troy that week. He tiptoed behind the counter. In the upright pigeonholes, below the hooks for the room keys, stood several passports. He hesitated. Walked round the hall. Tried the doors of a bar and the dining room. Tried the double glass doors of the lift with the word PATRAI written on them in gold. They were locked. No, he decided, no passports.

Zsuzsa sat cross-legged in the middle of the bed, beneath the goldfinch canopy, waiting for him. In the book of pictures I found in the presbytery the day Monsieur le Curé Besson came back sooner than expected and closed the book like a shutter, the same book where I found the picture called “Roman Charity,” there was another, which I will remember for ever. It showed the Queen of Sheba in her tent. Outside it was night, the stars in the sky a reminder of how short life is. The entrance to the tent, which was the colour of coral with cream trimmings, was wide open, its canvas flaps drawn back and held in two loops like curtains. The queen’s face was solemn and amused. I think she wanted to be solemn, but she could feel the laughter coming! She sat there in her tent, holding her hands tight between her knees. Zsuzsa, sitting on the bed, reminded me of Sheba.

She pulled off her Egyptian turban without untying it. Her dark hair sprang up, alive, glistening. Women everywhere, since the beginning of time, washing their hair, brushing, transforming to a glory, combing, platting, curling. It’s the only thing, hair, along with bird’s feathers, that is both apparel and nature. Its lights speak of this: they speak of silk, birds, water, fire, filigree, stars, rags, and dreams. There was a red line across Zsuzsa’s forehead where the folded muslin had been pulled too tight.

The door opened and Sucus returned.

Zsuzsa made room for him on her throne. The centre of the world was now the two of them. If the earth quaked, they would both tremble. When the sun shone, they would lie in the sunshine together.

The old woman’s fast asleep and everything’s shut, he said.

Never mind.

No grandson there. Like I told you, she’s got a few pages stuck together, the old lady.

No, no, she has her reasons, Flag. I knew there was no grandson. That’s why I ordered champagne. She invents him and makes him a waiter, see? There aren’t any waiters around the hotel when she arrives. She’s by herself. So she invents this grandson for company.

And we’ve got nothing to eat!

People tell lies to feel less on their own. Lies do that. They keep you company.

She got off the bed and walked slowly across the room in her bare feet towards the wardrobe. Take Naisi, she said, half of what he says is untrue. But if he didn’t invent, he wouldn’t last a minute. He’d drown in his loneliness. She opened one of the wardrobe doors. Inside was a mirror. He invents for me too. I play along because—who knows?—what he invents may turn out to be true. But I always know what I’m doing. Never forget that, Flag. There are so few people on this earth who know what they’re doing. They kid themselves. They say things for company. But I know. I know. You’re hungry, my poor Flag. You can eat me! Remember what I told you the first day we met—you’re going to eat me for ever and ever, Flag. She opened a second door of the wardrobe.

Tomorrow I’ll buy the sphygmomanometer, said Sucus.

Are you sure? I’m not sure.

I’m dead sure.

We need piles of lettuce, Flag.

Think how much we made tonight!

We invented something tonight, didn’t we?

You were famous.

Do you know what? I’m going to love you even more when you’re fat. She was looking at herself in one of the wardrobe mirrors.

Me fat!

Fat. When we get some lettuce. Then you’ll get fatter. Maybe I’ll get fatter with fewer worries. What would you say if I was fat like Maman?

Never …

The interior of the wardrobe had to be touched to be believed. Its wood hadn’t come from forests but from orchards: cherry, pear, walnut, peach. As large as one of our greniers, it had been made as carefully as a piano. In it would hang or lie folded the clothes of a lifetime. There were shelves, rails, drawers, racks, golden rods, and a small glass box like an aquarium.

What did they keep there? Zsuzsa asked herself. And suddenly she knew what she would keep there: peaches! The coat-hangers were padded and covered with satin.

I like men with tummies, she said, a little purse to pinch here, a little purse to pinch there …

She took off her jacket and put it on the hanger, then she wriggled out of her skirt. Her panties were of cheap black lace.

I’m not going to wear the same rig two days running, Flag. Tomorrow I’ll wear my jersey dress for you. It’s pinkish grey and sleeveless and you can see my back right down to where my arse begins. The shoulder straps are pearly, all stuck with sequins. I’ll wear it with silver stockings. Are you listening, Flag?

As an old woman I love lace. I can spend hours looking at lace. It shows me how there is order in what is undone, that nothing can be hidden, that everything is joined by threads. I see all this when I’m looking through the lace curtains. But I love it most on a body, when there’s flesh glowing through it and the lace and the skin tease each other with what is missing! The last stitches worn …

Or do you want me to wear my panther dress tomorrow? It’s imitation, Flag, made of wool. Made of jersey, like the grey one next to it, but it’s much tighter fitting and its black spots are like paw marks—as if … as if he stood on his hind legs and leant against me!

The wardrobe was empty.

You like my feather boa, Flag? Look! It’s orange and green!

As she said this, she was unbuttoning the poplin shirt she had lifted a month before from an Argonaut supermarket.

It must be a hundred years old, this bed, said Sucus.

It’s for getting married in, she said.

She folded her shirt and placed it on one of the pearwood shelves in the empty wardrobe.

You don’t want to see my dowry, Flag?

The posts are all carved, he said.

With leaves.

Yes, vine leaves.

No, fig leaves, said Zsuzsa.

You think I don’t know the difference between a vine and a fig.

Fig leaves! And after you’ve been married in a bed like that, one day you have a baby in it, she said.

Boy or girl? asked Sucus.

She hesitated. Girl.

What’ll we call her? Sucus laid his head back on the pillows.

Zsuzsa hesitated again. Jeanne, she said, and stepped into the wardrobe as though it were a phaeton to carry her away.

There is only one horse left in the village and it is owned by Jeanne. Jeanne is not her real name but everybody calls her Jeanne because many years ago, when she was young and beautiful, she played the part of Jeanne d’Arc riding a white horse in the village procession on the occasion of the five hundredth anniversary of the saint’s death. Hercule, the young road-mender, fell in love with her. And she married him because he was upright and strong. He could carry tree trunks of several hundred kilos across his shoulders without slackening his pace. As the years went by Hercule began to drink. It was as if his strength became thirsty, and then the roads he mended became thirsty, till finally his memories drank too. Jeanne became the saviour of their farm and of their six cows. Today her horse is grey and thirty years old. Scarcely a day passes when Jeanne doesn’t harness him and take him out to work. Even when there is deep snow, she uses him to pull the triangle that clears the road to their farm. Hercule, suffering from thrombosis of the legs, is nearly bedridden. The most he can do is to walk a hundred metres in his carpet slippers to the drinking trough and feed the chickens. With her horse, Jeanne works the fields, using farm machines which, in the age of tractors, are unfindable anywhere else. From afar, riding her tipcart, she and the horse look like ghosts. Near to, when you see her broad brown face, the colour of leather, and the fury in her eyes, you realise it is a woman you have met on the road.

Yes … Jeanne, repeated Zsuzsa from inside the wardrobe.

Through the tall bay windows of the immense room came the faint sound of a ship’s siren. It was a large ship, far away.

We’ve never spent a whole night together, have we, Flag?

The voice in which she said this, quietly, and yet as if she wanted each word to be so distinct it would carry across the sea like an answer to the ship’s horn, made Sucus lift his head from the pillow.

She was standing inside the wardrobe, framed by its two open doors. And she was naked. She was wearing only her earrings, each one big enough to pass a lemon through.

It’s as familiar to us as bread is, or the sky. It seems we’ve known it without a name all our lives. We start trying to find a name for it, very young, on the way to the village school. We ask the statue of the Madonna, we ask the cows, and the moon, but none of them can give it a name. Old woman that I am, I still don’t know its name. All I know is how it goes through us. Some of us more than others, but, even if only for a moment, it passes through all of us. Sometimes scarcely noticed. Sometimes remembered for ever. It’s a kind of power. But not the power men pump themselves up with. Perhaps this is why it has no name. It goes through us and joins us with the beginning of everything. It offers us the earth, more than the earth, the sky, heaven. When it’s happening we know it. We know it in our tubes and our knees, our hips and the palms of our hands. We become desirable. The man’s desire follows. Yet they can never begin it. They haven’t the invention. Each time they have to begin with one of us. Then, all that has happened is forgiven. We become love. This is why they hate us, those with power. They hate forgiveness. Whilst it’s happening, time stands still. Later in our lives, time takes its revenge on us, as it doesn’t on men. It can’t forget that something in us once forced it to stop. When all is forgiven, there’s no more place for power or time. So they glare with hatred at our love.

As she stood there naked in the door of the wardrobe, Zsuzsa felt this nameless thing running through her. She wanted, more than she had ever wanted anything, to share its promise with Flag. The swinging of her two earrings showed that she was moving. Her whole body was flickering, and yet she appeared to be standing quite still.

Sucus sat bolt upright and then, leaning forward on his arms, walked on all fours across the bed towards her.

She let her arms hang loose. Her body was dancing inside but she wanted to stay still. She wanted every hair and every piece of herself that had grown since she was a woman to be there before Flag’s eyes. Slowly, she raised a hand. She had large hands, Zsuzsa. She touched her belly and then cupped one of her tiny breasts as an offering to him.

Love treasures hands like nothing else. Perhaps other parts are more cherished, more kissed, more dreamt of, but hands are treasured like nothing else, because of all they have taken, made, given, planted, picked, fed, stolen, caressed, arranged, let drop in sleep, offered. At the very end of his life it would be Zsuzsa’s hands Sucus would be looking for.

She walked towards the bed. Together they took off his clothes. Soon the slight stirring of the four carved posts broke a few more threads of the tattered goldfinch canopy and the few grains of silk dust that fell on them were golden.

They were talking in the dark. They lay in one another’s arms and I heard their voices. In the wardrobe mirror there was a dim reflection of the window that looked over the sea. Otherwise I could see nothing. They spoke in whispers.

Come into the tent.

I am.

My poor Flag.

Lilac.

Shall we go?

We could, you know.

Take a sleeper to Paris.

No, no, the big sleeper out.

Far, far away.

My nose in your cunt.

Your nose in my cunt.

One-way tickets!

First-class, and not in a shanty train.

Nobody’ll notice.

We can’t yet. Your mother! Give me time to fill our wardrobe.

Wardrobe my arse!

It’s too soon.

You want to be older? When I saw my dad in hospital I said—

Come closer.

There’ll be nothing better.

Better than what, love?

This.

They’d separate us and take everything away from us.

I’d find you in secret and pass you things through the bars.

My poor Flag.

If not now, when? If not here, where? I remember his words.

Whose words? Was he talking about love?

No, it was Murat. He was talking about the future.

With me!

With my nose in your cunt.

Yes, yes …

They murmured like babies feeding and falling asleep. The next time they spoke their voices came from the foot of the bed.

I’m the tent, I’m the tent!

Open, tent!

It’s night.

Is there a moon?

I can see you in the dark.

Oh, now!

They made the purring noise that women and men make and which ends in a howl like a ship’s siren, like dogs barking, like a hunter’s horn, like an old woman crying. Then they went quiet. The wood of the bed creaked.

Are you awake, Flag?

Is it morning?

No.

Is it still dark?

Keep your eyes closed and I’ll tell you.

Probably it was his eyes she was kissing. Anyway, she was kissing him. Then she said:

Everything’s white, Flag, white, white like the walls of this room where we are marrying each other.

Hold me now.

** Selling

I HAVE LIVED all my long life in the village. What I know of Troy comes from *The Messenger*—the provincial newspaper—from television, from my dreams, from my broken heart, and from what those who come back tell me before they disappear for good. I have seen countless men go. They take the noon bus outside the Republican Lyre and they wave through the back window as the bus winds its way down the hill past the dairy. This is the first and easiest step they take. Once they have left the valley and are far from the blue waters of our river—until they become Trojans, if ever they do—there is nothing in the world they can trust or depend upon. They are obliged to become like Fox or Hare.

Sucus bought his machine for taking blood pressure. No sooner was he out of the shop with the box under his arm than a man tapped him on the shoulder. He tapped hard from behind, like a knocker taps on a door. Surprised, Sucus turned round.

You want a tutor? asked the man.

He wore a large felt hat and he was well-dressed. His hands were clean. But he had a face that was slipping sideways, as if running out of its mould.

No, Sucus said, I don’t.

You won’t be able to operate alone, not in this line. The man indicated the cardboard box with two snakes printed in blue beneath the letters MANO and METER. YOU need a tutor.

I don’t, said Sucus, I can learn in five minutes.

But you need a buyer.

A buyer to buy what?

Blood, my boy, blood. You’re in the blood business, aren’t you?

I read people’s blood pressure, it’s simple.

You talk about it like a book. I read! I read! If you want to read, here’s my card. Take it, and read it.

He handed Sucus the card with an absolute surety as if nothing else in the city existed except the little white cardboard rectangle.

I draw off and I buy, he declared.

On the card was written ZIA MEDICAL APPLIANCES, followed by an address in San Isidro.

It’s a new scam for you, you’re a beginner!

I wasn’t born yesterday, said Sucus.

I want a coffee, said the man in the large felt hat. I’ll explain the ground plan over a cup of coffee.

Instead of counting as a weakness, the disfigurement of his fallen face with its one drooping eye supplied him with a kind of conviction. All the niceties of life had fallen away since he was struck by his illness.

*Due expressi!* he commanded of a waitress in a coffee bar. Cheesecake?

No.

You don’t eat, young man, because you’re not earning enough.

I eat when I’m hungry.

Taking a customer’s blood pressure is dead easy, he explained, provided you’re not deaf. You don’t look deaf to me. You look as if you want to hear. Do you want to hear?

You’re doing the talking.

Some cheesecake?

Zia started to eat his own portion, sticking it with a fork and then biting voraciously from it with his teeth.

You pump up, he said, and you’re listening for where the silence stops and starts. You follow me? The heart goes quiet. Where it starts and stops are what you call your fucking readings. You talk like your father was a teacher.

My father opened oysters.

For your two readings you get one thousand five hundred. Price of two coffees in a nice Italian bar like this. No more. And you’re throwing a golden chance away! You’re missing what’s under your nose. Cheesecake?

Zia had finished his first portion and was about to order another. He wiped his lips with a folded handkerchief.

Do you know what I’m talking about? I’m talking about blood. What the old heart pumps! What keeps the brain connecting, what makes Old King Cole go big. You get it? I sell blood. You could be one of my suppliers. I’m offering you the chance of a lifetime. I pay my suppliers eight thousand per litre drawn off.

So, you’re proposing to buy my blood, said Sucus with a smile.

What did you do before this? asked Zia.

I did flowers, said Sucus.

Wreaths and all that?

White dahlias.

Okay. You don’t want to tell me. In this line you learn to misread, see? When you get a healthy client, you read wrong, you read a bit higher. Then you’re obliged to warn him, or to warn her—women are easier, because they’re more used to blood, more used to losing it. *Hypertension* is the key word. Hypertension causes varicose veins, strokes, clots, thrombosis, migraines, amnesia, blindness. It can ruin the retina of the eye. The client looks worried. Are there any medicines? she wants to know. You don’t lie. You never lie. Some cheesecake? All right, you don’t eat. I have to eat. I need blood sugar. Yes, you tell her there are medicines but they’re pricey! There’s a much simpler and healthier way, you say. Works like a safety valve! Her blood pressure is way up, you tell her, because she’s got too much blood, she’s too healthy! Being too healthy always gets a laugh out of them! Nature’s own safety valve, you insist … All they need is a little blood drawn off. And you can arrange it, especially for Monsieur, or especially for Madame, straightaway, no sooner said than done.

Who does the drawing off?

One of my nurses does. You bring the client.

How much do you pay?

Eight thousand a litre. I told you.

No, to the client.

If you’ve done your work properly, she or he believes she’s getting free treatment! They think they’re getting something for nothing. I’ve got three surgeries. One in Chicago, one off Alexanderplatz, and one by Olympia. Open every day between two and ten at night.

Do I get a retainer?

You refused it, my friend, three times. You didn’t want any cheesecake. Think it over. *Quanto fa, Signorina?*

That afternoon Sucus practiced listening for the two silences on Zsuzsa. She rolled up her sleeve and he wound the elastic wrapping around her long, thin arm. The right arm. He loved her arms like other men love money. They promised everything he could imagine.

They were in the Blue House, sitting on the mattress on the floor, with the lace over the pillows. He placed the little black disc on her artery, in the crook of her arm. Now he could hear her heart reverberating like a pile driver and the sound made him smile. He pressed the rods of the stethoscope further into his ears.

Across the room, the door to Naisi’s HQ was open and Naisi was lying on his bed with his eyes shut, calculating.

Zsuzsa, are you there? he asked. You haven’t forgotten the audition tomorrow at three?

How could I? she replied.

Don’t let it mess your mind, he said.

Sshhh! hissed Sucus, stop talking! I can’t hear.

Am I making you go deaf, Flag? Too many beats?

Be quiet! I can’t hear. There! It’s gone quiet. Thirteen. Now for the lower one. The d-i-a-stol-ic …

No need to be worried, sister, said Naisi, it’s only a gazupie, nothing more.

Sshh! It’s eight!

Later, Sucus and Zsuzsa strolled down Rat Hill towards the headland. It was sunny, with the special light of an autumn afternoon, when everything cast such dark and long shadows that the earth, and all that was standing on it, looked as if it was slipping towards the sun. The wind was blowing the stench of the tanneries out to sea. The washing, hung out since the morning, was already dry. Hens sat drowsy in the shade. Nobody was queuing up with plastic containers at the hydrants because, since September, water had been cut off every afternoon between three and six. In the blind pigs, only the damned were drinking. There was an autumn calm over the shanty town. Against the sky, the television aerials at the top of the hill looked like the shipwrecked masts of a fleet of toy boats.

They passed a girl on the path practicing with a hula hoop, trying to keep it up on her hips. Zsuzsa stopped to show her how to do it, then ran after Sucus and, pressing herself against him, did her disappearing trick.

She’s gone, she whispered in his ear, you won’t find her if you turn round, she’s gone! For ever!

She knew that pressing herself like this against the back of his legs excited him, and today she found it funny. His joke was getting bigger. She laughed, neighing through her nostrils on the nape of his neck, where his hair needed cutting. He looked like a mooch. She must cut it for him before he began on Alexanderplatz. Bigger and bigger grew his joke, and his ears were going red too. Suddenly, she sidestepped, ran in front, and turned to face him. Her brass earrings, the ones big enough to pass a lemon through, were swinging like church bells at a wedding. I love you, she said, and kissed him. He lifted her off the ground.

And I weep, as old women do, seeing everything beginning again and remembering.

It was a mystery why there were always so many people on Alexanderplatz. There was the bus station, but this couldn’t explain the crowds at night. Perhaps people went there simply because it was so big. Perhaps the bare, empty space, which was not like that of a park, compelled crowds to gather there, according to some natural law of men and streets and Man. All cities have one such space, where victories are celebrated, where crowds dance at the new year, where political marches begin and end, a space that belongs to the people, just as the buildings with pillars and carvings belong to the rich. When you cross it, it’s like crossing a stage. On this stage, in times of summary justice, tyrants and traitors are hanged from lamp posts. The eternal audience are the poor, all the poor of the past and all the poor of the future, among whom there are many who go straight to heaven, if you want an old woman’s opinion.

The kiosks and stands around the edge of the great open space sold newspapers, Coca-Cola, silver spoons, scarves, furry animals, cassettes, T-shirts with I ♥ ALEXANDERPLATZ printed on them, saffron, cameras, lace lingerie, cowboy hats, posters, toy buses like the real ones in the bus station, wigs, beer, sunflower seeds, electronic calculators. And the crowds were as diverse and strange as the things to be bought. Telling the difference between the villagers who had just arrived by bus and those who had come generations ago was easy. It was enough, if they were men, to look at their footwear, and, if they were women, to look at their hair. A question of thickness in both cases. The Trojans believed in thin, fine things.

A massive bronze statue with a fountain dominated the western end of the platz. Around this statue flew and alighted hundreds of pigeons, attracted by the vendors who sold packets of grain for visitors to feed them with.

The statue was of a sailor standing on a rock talking to an Aegean mermaid. She was Aegean because her tail divided into three. The sailor’s head was covered with lime from the pigeons, and this made his hair grey. The mermaid was protected from the bird shit since water flowed all over her, but the water had turned the bronze of her body green. According to legend, she was asking the sailor: Where is the great Alexander? And the sailor, according to legend, always told the mermaid: He lives and he reigns!

Nobody knew where. But the fountain was reproduced on hundreds of souvenirs—from rubber car mats to women’s brooches. It was at the foot of the bronze sailor that people, if they failed to meet in the crowd, would find each other.

Was the statue so famous because it offered a consolation concerning death? Alexander died, burnt out, in Babylon at the age of thirty-two; and yet, after twenty-four centuries, the green mermaid still wanted news of him!

Sucus arrived early in the morning with a folding chair which Naisi had given him. Naisi had six of these chairs stacked in a corner of his HQ. They had disappeared from the private beach of the Hotel Atlantic during a storm.

Sucus chose a pitch within sight of the other blood-jobbers, but somewhat closer to the statue. He judged that he would be able to observe things better from there. He slipped on his white coat, unfolded the chair, and sat down, the sphygmomanometer across his knees and the stethoscope round his neck. A few passersby glanced at him, a few scowled, none stopped.

At the end of Alexanderplatz, where the buses were, a man sat on the ground, his back to a tree, against which two crutches were leaning. Arranged on the earth around him like a fan lay copies of the revolutionary newspaper *Milestone*.

Always thin, Murat looked even thinner. His face had become a mask hiding another world. When passengers got down from the buses, he looked up and repeated: *Milestone!* Two hundred zloti! *Milestone!* The front-page headline read: TROJAN WORKERS REFUSE INTIMIDATION!

Murat believed humanity would advance towards a juster future he would not live to see. Perhaps his children would. If not them, his grandchildren. Meanwhile people had need of *Milestone*’s message. Whenever he arrived at this thought, he did his best to sell the paper by crying out its name. The rest of the time, seated on the ground, lost in the immensity of his compassion, he watched the feet of the people passing.

If Murat had known that, a hundred metres away, Sucus in a white coat was waiting for clients who never came, he would have taken up his crutches and gone to share his thoughts with the young worker who had saved his life.

Nothing is more improbable, he would have told Sucus, than the way we walk. I’ve learnt this, now that I’m a cripple. The foot moves with great independence and yet is helpless alone. One leg goes as far as it can, then, almost immediately, it has to stop, it has to wait for its partner to relieve it. I watch all day between the buses. Forgotten knees—the most ignored part of the body until they hurt or refuse to flex—forgotten knees flexing, legs bravely striding out, waiting for relief, striding out again, waiting, striding out—and this every two seconds in order to move a body, step by step, across the earth. I watch them between the buses, Newborn. The one-legged man is worse off than the man without legs at all. Sit with me, you’ll learn how the feet of a mother running after her child, smack the ground. How the feet of old men implore the tarmac. How the feet of the hungry shuffle. How porters’ feet move slowly to earn their living. The poor use their toes, the rich don’t. Hands are continually feeling for other hands. But the foot is singleminded, obstinate, dumb, attentive to only one thing—the arrival and passing of its partner. Like this mankind goes forward …

But Murat did not know his young friend was so near. After several hours Sucus got up, went to a kiosk, and bought two sheets of writing paper. On one side he wrote in large letters: HIGH BLOOD PRESSURE <verbatim>=</verbatim> HIGH RISK and pinned the sheet to his white coat. Nobody stopped.

After an hour he turned the sheet over and wrote: BE GOOD TO YOUR BLOOD. An old man in boots without laces came up and said, Yours is young! Sucus got to his feet. Fuck you! said the man. Nobody else stopped.

Sucus unfolded the second sheet of paper and wrote: A TEST IN TIME SAVES YEARS. People passed, eyes averted, nobody stopped.

On the last side he wrote: ONLY IOOO ZLOTI!

Within five minutes a young boy pulled at his sleeve and hissed, On Alexanderplatz no price-slashing unless you want your fucking face slashed!

Sucus raised his eyebrows without betraying any expression. The boy, teeth clenched, nodded in the direction of the other blood-jobbers. Sucus spat on the ground, packed his instruments, took off his white coat, folded up his chair and followed the ambling crowd.

He came to the statue of the sailor and the fountain. The water flowing over the mermaid’s breasts as she asked for news of the Great Conqueror made Sucus think of Zsuzsa wanting to call their daughter Jeanne. If their child was a boy, he decided, they would call him Alexander. The more opportunities are taken away from men, the more they dream of being fathers.

On the spot, only a few paces from the statue, Sucus unfolded his chair and stood up on it. His instruments at the ready, he surveyed the crowd. He spotted a group of well-dressed sightseers with cameras. They were buying grain to feed the pigeons.

Hey, lady! Hey, lady-in-the-hat! he shouted, I’ll do you for nothing, and your friends can watch. Come and see. Takes two minutes. Roll up your sleeve, lady. Don’t be shy—you shouldn’t be shy with shoulders like yours! Do you suffer from migraines? I do. And I’m telling you, here’s the answer! Let me read your blood pressure—systolic and diastolic—names like music, aren’t they? I’m offering you a test, I’m offering you a reading.

A pigeon alighted on his outstretched arm.

I’m offering you a free check-up, let me take your blood pressure!

She glanced at him for a fraction of a second, and he read in her eyes that it wasn’t a blood test she wanted. The pigeon flew off his arm.

Let me listen to your heart, lady, and I’ll tell you your future … I’ll tell you whether it’s going to be better or worse. You want to know, lady, where the great Alexander is?

Somebody tapped on his thigh. He looked down and saw Raphaele, the portrait-man, goggling up at him.

Last place I expected to see you, said Raphaele.

And you’re still painting the ceiling?

You never kept your promise, jammy.

I promise nothing.

You promised to come round—in exchange for the drawing I gave you. I told you I wanted to draw your trouser snake, didn’t I?

Get lost!

I’ll tell you something, jammy, I’ll give you a tip. You haven’t chosen the right pitch for your particular art here. You’ll never make it on Alexanderplatz. You look too young for medicine. You’d have to grey your hair. Try around the Sankt Pauli. The custom’s less choosey down there. They just want to hear if they can last the night. Without your white coat though. Hospital around Sankt Pauli means punishment, it doesn’t mean care. Down there, with no white coat, you’d have a chance.

I saw the marten this morning. He was running. He never runs blindly. He considers each mound in the garden before he jumps over it or skirts around it. When he skirts around, he keeps very low to the ground. Pointed, slim, and the colour of a flame. As cunning as he’s quick. It was three months since I’d seen my marten. Where he lives I don’t know, but it can’t be far from the house. We live side by side but invisible one to the other. When our paths do cross, it’s the result of an accident or a mistake. This morning he was being pursued by a dog. The marten, his skull as thin as a hen’s egg, is a sign of danger.

** Wanted

THE DAY WAS young. The fortunate who had jobs were going to work, the roads into Troy were crammed with traffic, those still in bed were mostly there alone, many dreaded the new day, the sun dazzled the sea. In the Cauchy Street police station the Superintendent was leaning back in his revolving chair, listening to a man whom he didn’t want to see. Hector’s appearance was changing for the worse. His face was becoming puffier and the backs of his hands with their black hairs were swollen. When I looked into his eyes, I had the impression that the tides of the sea were flowing through them, that he was adrift. It was his last week of work.

So, how did you know who it was? he asked his visitor.

I’m used to seeing people, the man said, I do it all day long.

Hector nodded and looked up blankly at the framed portait of the President above the door.

The question came to my mind as soon as I spotted her, continued his visitor.

The question?

Is this woman a terrorist? It’s not a thing I usually ask myself. I’m not a Police Superintendent like you. But there was something about this woman—his hand searched in the air for a word—which impelled me to ask it.

Where do you work?

At the Job Distribution Centre in Swansea. I’m due to retire at the end of the year.

It happens to us all, said Hector.

I can’t wait, said the man.

So you thought she was a terrorist?

Yes, I didn’t know *who* she was then. I just thought she was a terrorist.

So?

It was the way she was sitting.

Do terrorists sit in a special way?

The man on the other side of the desk now felt in his jacket pocket and produced a box of sweets which he held out to the Superintendent.

Since I gave up smoking, I eat these, would you like one?

Inside the box, the sweets were like brightly coloured Lego bricks with which, if you had enough of them, you could probably build a spaceship, or a telephone booth. Their colours were lemon-yellow, gold, rose-pink, black, mahogany-red.

No thank you, said Hector.

Inside they’re licorice.

Suddenly Hector thought of heroin. Who would think of looking twice at such sweets?

I’ll put the box here, said the man, in case you change your mind. He placed it on top of a radio transmitter on the desk.

She was wearing a cap pulled down over her forehead and sunglasses, he continued, chewing a sweet, and as soon as she noticed I’d seen her—Snap! She closed her handbag. All this at a café table beside a newspaper kiosk. So I bought my paper and crossed the street. Then I made a circle round the block and reap-proached the café. Do you follow me, Superintendent, I approached from the opposite direction this time?

Hector got out of his chair and walked over to the window. Go on, he said. Every day he spent more and more time looking out at the Mond Bank buildings, which grew taller and taller. Soon they would be finished, but before then, he would be gone.

I took a coffee standing at the counter, said the man, she was still sitting there and she hadn’t seen me.

Hector saw a figure climbing up an invisible tower to the cabin of the highest of the two cranes. If I were him, he thought, if I were a crane driver and not a bogey …

Then she took off her dark glasses to read the chit so she could pay. And I recognised her! Immediately! I saw who she was. Helen. No question. Helen. Your Helen.

Why are you so sure?

Sure? Why am I so sure? Anna Helen’s face has been on walls all over the city for months. With the reward printed underneath.

It’s a very grainy mug shot, but it’s all we had.

His visitor took another sweet and pulled at his hair.

It was her, he said, unquestionably your Helen. Have you had many people come?

Come?

To ask for the reward.

You’d be surprised.

Anyway, I didn’t stop there, Superintendent, I followed her.

The man’s grey hair was sparse but curly, and already sweaty. He must have pulled at it all his life. It reminded me of a newborn baby’s—the same sparseness and the same dampness.

I followed her systematically. She crossed the city on foot. Already suspect, don’t you think? I trailed your Helen, street by street.

So he’s arrived, muttered Hector.

Who’s arrived, Superintendent?

The crane driver.

I’m telling you I know where the most wanted woman in Troy lives!

Where?

Here’s her address.

The man held out a slip of paper. Hector left the window and read the address.

In Gentilly … How do you know she lives there?

At first I couldn’t believe my luck. Let me be frank with you, Superintendent, the reward is going to help us out with my pension. A million! You’ve got all the information you’re asking for there in your hands, Superintendent.

It seems unlikely.

I saw where she went in, but I couldn’t take the lift, so I didn’t know which floor she was on. Do have a sweet now, Superintendent, you’ll find them excellent. Then I was lucky a second time. I was hesitating, waiting in the street below, and suddenly she opened a window to shake out a carpet. The fifth floor!

Hector went back to the window. I’m listening, he said. The father crane was passing over the jib of the mother crane.

I took the lift and there I found two doors on the landing. So I rang both bells. No answer. This encouraged me, Superintendent, encouraged me because, after all, I’d seen her, she couldn’t have left! If she didn’t answer, it was because she was hiding!

You didn’t think about the risk you were running?

Yes I did, but it was worth it. A million! We’d buy a little place in the country. And I’d already worked out my cover. I was going to be selling insurance. Car. House. Life. I think I look the part, don’t you? Anyway, I rang again. Nothing. I tried to listen through the door. And then the other door opened, and there she stood in the doorway. And it was her. Your Helen.

Hector’s eyes returned to the jibs. To be up there, he thought, turning in the sky above the city.

So now you know where I live, this is what she said. Could I have a few words with you, I asked, it’s about insurance policies. And do you know what she replied?

Who?

The woman worth a million zloti. Tell me.

Forget you ever saw me, Grandad! Meanwhile I was trying to manoeuvre my way to see into the flat. If you want to survive, she whispered, fuck off!

Down here on the ground, thought Hector, only the pain is true. Nothing else.

I know I’ve taken a great risk in coming to see you.

We’ll take the matter up, said Hector. We have your address, and should we make an arrest, you’ll be informed immediately. The sergeant will show you out.

Hector turned to the window, and this time, feeling breathless, he loosened his collar. It was at this moment, after his visitor had left, that I approached him.

Do you remember your aunt who kept goats, Hector? One day in the tall grass behind her house she found a dead fox. Around the fox’s sharp teeth there were traces of froth.

Hector leant his forehead against the windowpane.

Your aunt was asking herself what she should do and you appeared. Do you remember? You were fifteen.

Look what I found first thing this morning when I went out to pee! she said to you.

Leave it to me, you replied and prodded the animal with the toe of your boot.

Should I phone the Mayor? your Aunt Helen asked.

No, Auntie. Forget it. You got a pick?

There’s one in the hen house.

I’ll bury him, you go and make us some coffee, you said.

Whilst your aunt was grinding the coffee in the kitchen, Daniel, the postman, arrived.

Do you know who’s dead? he asked you.

César at Sous-Chataigne?

Yes.

A strange thing happened to me this morning, it was you who said that, Hector. I wanted to have a shit, you said, so I came over to this wall here, I slipped off my braces, and I squatted down—

God Almighty! yelled the postman. I didn’t see it. Is it dead?

I felt something tickling my arse, you lied.

Not grass! said Daniel, beginning to laugh.

Imagine if I’d shat on it, you said.

You don’t get rabies if you shit on a dead fox, said the postman.

I’m going to bury him double quick, you said, two metres, not a finger less.

Meanwhile your Aunt Helen was listening to the whole conversation through the window, holding her ribs and swaying on her hips with laughter. You men! she whistled, you can’t even let an old woman pee on a dead fox with rabies!

For years after you left the village, she used to go on telling this story, and then she would add with pride: And today my nephew, today he’s in Troy, on the police force.

There was a knock on the door.

Come in.

Report just received, sir, concerning the passports stolen from the Trans Europe Night.

When?

A week ago.

I remember, we drew a blank.

A man with one of the passports was picked up last night at the airport. Goes by the name of Pende. He’s wanted on a number of narcotics charges by the heavies. Under interrogation he grassed.

On who?

He said he procured the passport from one Naisi. We had Naisi in here. You ordered his release.

There’s nothing I don’t remember, said Hector.

According to the description of the railway police, it seems the decoy woman may have been Naisi’s sister. As for her partner, it could be a sharpie who goes by the name of Sucus. Lives in Cachan.

Do we have anything on either of them?

On the bozo, no. The bimbo’s a stripper working in the Sankt Pauli.

Where’s Pende now?

At the C.I.A.T.

Seeable?

Yes sir.

I’ll be over, said Hector.

** Dear Body

SHE WAS HIS first client. Sucus had installed himself on the corner of Third Street, a few doors down from Flores Bar. She was wearing a sleeveless dress with a taffeta bolero over her shoulders. When she sat down, she took off the little jacket and placed it on her lap. Sucus wound the elastic wrapping around her massive arm. Her flesh sagged like underdone pastry, and the way she held her head and the way she questioned with her insistent lustreless eyes proposed that all flesh everywhere was derisory. There are prostitutes whose disdain goes further than that of most nuns. As his fingers touched her, arranging the wrapping, Sucus could feel the heat of her body and it was like no heat he had ever imagined coming from a woman, for it was dry, as dry as a cricket’s legs.

You’ve been doing this long? she asked. He nodded without daring to speak out loud. He was listening intently to hear the beat of her heart, to hear the silence come to an end. He let out the air as gently as he could, and the mercury sedately descended. She was holding her breath, suddenly anxious. All day she had had pains in her head and she feared her blood pressure was up.

Like a triumph he heard her heart coming in, and his eyes instantly flicked up to the systolic reading. He was listening to a beat that had not stopped since she was an embryo. The heart begins to beat thirty days after conception, when it is only the size of a breadcrumb. The first beat, coming from nothing, is pure gift. The first beat makes another death, before or after many passions, inevitable.

He heard the old woman’s heart beating like a gong at the top of a mighty staircase in some palace. Then the gong went silent and the palace vanished. Her heart was still beating but the disk he held to her artery picked up no sound. The diastolic.

Eighteen-twelve, he said, it’s a little high.

Not for me it isn’t, she said, I often have twenty.

He was taking off the wrapping around her arm and she looked at him with her lustreless eyes, awaiting death, grateful for the good news, wanting a drink, wondering if he would smile.

There are medicines, he said.

Are there? She began to laugh, and her laugh turned into a cough that made her spit. You really believe there are medicines, my little love?

He helped her up from the chair and she put on her bolero.

How much do you want?

Fifteen hundred.

With the tips of the two middle fingers of her right hand she pulled the banknotes out of her bosom.

A woman of the same age but thin and with straight golden-dyed hair, wearing a trouser suit, stopped on the sidewalk beside Sucus’s chair.

Harley, the woman said, I was looking for you.

Sucus pocketed the money.

Eighteen-twelve, that’s what you said, isn’t it?

I’ll write it down for you.

No need.

That’s high, Harley, said the woman in the suit.

Not for me, Fleece.

I want you to come and see Lilac.

Lilac? asked his client.

The circus number I told you about.

My memory’s going, Fleece. Lilac?

Come and see for yourself.

The two women walked arm in arm down the street, stopping and turning slowly from side to side and glancing up at the sky, just as elderly ladies might do in a rose garden. Sucus immediately followed them.

Outside the Golden Fleece there were photos of girls making mouths and signs with their fingers. Sucus examined them intently. Not one of them could be Zsuzsa.

I want to rock Sucus to sleep now. I have a cradle-bed in the barn that would be almost large enough. It was made many years ago by the great-grandfather who left behind the stone sabot. I want to rock Sucus to sleep in the cradle-bed and sing him a song. A song Zsuzsa might have learnt from Rifat, the friend of her garbage man. A song that goes like this:

<verse>
Sleepy night, happy day
Zero’s the plaything
And nowhere nothing
That isn’t in
That isn’t in
Your dear body …
</verse>

To this, all men fall asleep.

In a moment Sucus would have woken up, smiled at the girls, taken his chair back to the corner of Third Street, and found another client. But whilst Sucus was listening to my song, three brawling men woke him up, and I could do nothing. They came down the street with their arms around each other’s shoulders so they shouldn’t fall. They were like a single animal with reactions as slow as a bull’s. They lurched into the entrance of the Golden Fleece. One of them roared: We want to see some beaver. They staggered to the box office. Another pulled out a wad of notes. Sucus watched them. When the man stuffed the change back into his hip pocket, a note fluttered like a leaf to the floor. Sucus took two strides and put his foot on the bill. It was a magenta ten thousand. He stooped, picked it up and bought a ticket.

From the beginning, men compared women with flowers, and women, enjoying it, encouraged them. They fastened blossoms in their hair, they wore perfumes, they twined leaves, and they displayed themselves. What the Bible says has never been true of the women I’ve known. “Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin.” The women I’ve known only imitated flowers after they’d killed rabbits or raked hay or mucked out stables or cooked mash for the hens or carried wood from the forest. Yet still the men were right to compare us with flowers. Not because we are pure, but because, like flowers, we were created to attract. Like flowers our beauty is delicate. Like flowers the colours we were born with draw the eye to our most secret parts.

Beyond the ticket office, on the other side of the velvet curtain, the Golden Fleece smelt of beer and talc, a fermentation and a sweetness. There was no daylight and the walls were roughcast as in an underground garage. An usherette in fishnet stockings led the bull down a corridor.

Would you like number I?

Nothing can separate us—not even a bimbo in the buff! roared one of the bull-men, we’re going in together!

Sucus pushed past them to get to the end of the corridor.

What’s that guy want an extra chair for?

You don’t know why he’s carrying his own chair?

Why should he have a chair?

Why shouldn’t he?

I’ll tell you why.

He’ll tell us why.

To rest his cock on!

The three bull-men had well-cut suits and waistcoats. Their striped ties, loosened many times, had fallen half-way down their shirts.

You’ll be a bit tight, said the usherette, the berths weren’t built for three.

Not even a bimbo in the buff’s going to separate us!

They bundled into a cubicle the size of Yannis’s crane cabin.

Ring if you want anything, said the usherette and closed the door.

Along one wall of the cubicle ran a low upholstered couch on which the three bull-men sat down, side by side. Facing them, near their knees, was a wide, inclined sheet of glass like the windscreen through which Yannis, the crane driver, looked down on the city of Troy. On the carpet by their feet was an imitation golden chalice and a neat stack of paper towels.

We’re going to jerk off together, aren’t we?

This is my old woman’s tale. There’s precious little dirt in the world I haven’t cleaned up. And there’s nothing—however piteous—that I haven’t heard with ears that grow larger every year. With age everything else shrinks and your ears grow larger.

The light in the cubicle went off. The space beyond the windscreen remained lit but, curiously, little of this light filtered through, for the glass on the far side was opaque. The screen was made of a one-way see-through glass, first invented for prisons. Screwsglass, as it’s known in the trade. Screwsglass.

We want beaver! Now!

Every light went out. The three bull-men sat in pitch darkness. Not a word was said. When the lights came up, she was there, very, very close to the windscreen. It looked as though there was scarcely space for her to stand up. She was crouching with a kimono over her shoulders, a black kimono decorated with roses. She let the garment fall slowly to the floor and then she arranged her legs differently so that she was kneeling with her shoulders and head thrown back. The soles and heels of her feet would have revealed, to any who wanted to notice, that she had often walked barefoot.

The windscreen glass had the effect of magnifying what the men in the cubicles were staring at. This brought the woman closer to their eyes. Her pores were visible like the pock marks on the skin of an orange. Each hair of her body could be counted, each one, under the probing light, as distinct as an eyelash. She raised her hands slowly. The lights exposed traces of dirt beneath her fingernails. With her large hands she started to caress her small breasts.

Her tits are getting a hard-on! moaned part of the bull.

Small and tight! I bite! muttered another part.

Let’s have the creamstick! hissed the third.

She leant forward in the lit box till her hair touched the floor. Women everywhere since the beginning of time, washing their hair, brushing, transforming to a glory, combing, platting, curling.

She twisted her hips and lay on her side, knees tucked up, a thin, thin arm between her thighs. Show us some beaver now!

Close up against the windscreen she parted her lips with two fingers. In the village we call that part of a woman’s anatomy her “nature.” With two fingers she parted the ruffled lips of her nature. When a rose is still folded in its case and has never been seen, the colours of its petals can resemble what she disclosed and offered to the screwsglass.

A splintering crash reverberated through the Golden Fleece. Before the bull’s six amazed and gaping eyes, a man with a folded chair smashed the lit box, felled the bimbo, broke their windscreen and struck their three heads.

Dogs were barking.

Sucus fled. In the street the prostitutes watched him run past them. It was still daylight, the light of a late afternoon in autumn, the moment of the year when everything in nature is held in suspension and nothing hurries, when time slows down, almost stops, until caught short by the night of the first ice. Through this light Sucus was running.

As he ran, he made a wail in his head to keep out every sound and word. The wail went up and down like the siren of the fire engine that had come too late to put out the fire in Cachan, up and down to the sound of Zsu-Zsa. The faster he ran, the louder the wail.

He ran along streets thronged with people who were going home after work and whose feet were already anticipating leisure, liquor, soft shoes, a sofa. They stepped off the sidewalk to watch him, for his run was frantic, like that of a hunted deer. They let him pass and immediately they looked in the opposite direction to discover who was pursuing him and why.

And there was nobody to be seen. Some peered across the street, sure of finding men running along the sidewalk. There were only bus queues, women window-shopping, several beggars. Others glanced down the side alleys, where vans were unloading and cars hooting. Nobody was running. One man cocked an eye up to the sky expecting a helicopter. The sky was empty.

And Sucus ran on. He must be late for something, a matter of life and death, the Trojans concluded, but in their heart of hearts they knew that no man runs like that because he’s late.

The sun was going down into the dust which turned it red.

He ran so as to never stand still again, for, should he have stood still, he would have faced Troy and its sea and the October sky and the galaxies and the fringe of the universe from whose unaccountable vastness no correction of the truth could ever now come.

He ran between trolley-buses and motorbikes. He ran past a Hilton hotel, a supermarket for pet food, car showrooms, travel agencies, a law court, sauna baths, bridal suites, a wool shop for babies, florists, foreign exchange kiosks, funeral parlours, coffee shops, the Trojan Horse—and not a single one of any of their promises of victory, defeat, pleasure, escape, peace, quiet, justice, soothing hands could ever be for him. So he ran faster and faster.

To the west, the lights were being switched on in the Paris Hospital, and its windows were like the portholes of a liner sailing inland. In the maternity ward, there, in the hospital on the cliff-face, Yannis’s wife, Sonia, had just given birth to a boy who was going to be called Alexander. Yannis was in his crane waiting for news. Sonia was exhausted, eyes ringed with sweat, blood smears on her legs the colour of the clouds in the sky, triumphant, with life before her. Give him to me, she said to the midwife who was holding Alexander upside down, give the darling to me.

His heart would soon burst, and Sucus was running to burst his heart. The blood in his throat and chest beat the time of running feet. But they were no longer his feet. She was running towards him. She was at the other end of Park Avenue and with every stride she was coming closer. Often his eyes were shut. People stepped aside for him, cleared a way, as happens for the mad. Traffic stopped and drivers smiled with a patience unimaginable for that hour in the city—as if for a few seconds they had become camel drivers in the desert. To see madness in another bestows a kind of calm. She was wearing her panther dress pulled up to the top of her thighs and she was running barefoot.

The wail did not stop, but as he ran he held out his arms towards her. He was passing Spallanzi metro station. She was running faster than ever towards him. He could see her two missing teeth and her large hands. He ran on. She was upon him and he could hear her gasping. She ran through him, clean through him.

A schoolgirl who had come up the steps from the station saw a man running towards her with his arms held out rigid in front of him. Quickly, she pressed herself against the wall. He ran past. Minutes later her pulse was still racing. She continued to tremble, not because she had narrowly escaped being run down by this man, but on account of what she had glimpsed as he passed, of his face. Its features had been so contorted that they were no longer two eyes, a nose, a mouth, ears. His face had turned into an armful of snakes and the snakes were devouring one another.

First I drive the anvil into the grass bank, then I arrange myself above it, sitting on the slope. My boots with their metal eyelets point up in the air. My woolen stockings are, as usual, a little rucked. The anvil is where it should be, between my skinny thighs, and the blade of the scythe, which I’ve detached from the helve, lies across my lap.

Tapping again? demands Hercule.

My eyesight’s going.

Give it to me a moment. I hand him up the blade and he clicks his fingernail against it. Zing! No resonance! You can’t find a good scythe these days. He flicks it again. You can hear it, can’t you. No note at all. Trash!

I remember a scythe, Hercule goes on, which when you struck it, sung like a lark.

He walks slowly and painfully towards his house, where Jeanne is turning the cows out into the field, and I stay sitting on the bank, pick up my hammer, hold the blade to the anvil, and tap. I tap from the corner to the point. Drops of sweat fall on to the lenses of my glasses and the curve of the black metal blurs, blurs before my eyes.

Night fell in Troy. Sucus found himself alone by the docks, near the Customs House. There were soldiers there with a searchlight. He climbed up to the waste lot, where he had waited for Zsuzsa on their first night. There was a lamp on in the Cadillac. Sucus didn’t approach. He lay on the grassy bank. Sleep, I whispered to him, sleep.

He woke to hear a voice in his ear and he turned round to see a head in the grass.

Sometimes I have good dreams, said the man who had lost both legs.

Sucus stared at him as if he, Sucus, had gone deaf and had to lip-read.

Last Tuesday, I dreamt of brandy, said the man.

The soldiers on the road below were playing with their searchlight. The man’s lips were grey.

I was going to drink the whole bottle, said the man who lived in the Cadillac, and then it occurred to me it would be cleverer to leave a mouthful for the next time. So far I’ve not been able to get back. You look in a bad way, friend. Suppose we move over to the car, and I’ll make some coffee.

Sucus said nothing.

The man with the sandals strapped to his elbows dragged himself up the hill. It took a long time. Sometimes he seemed to slip back like a fly climbing up a window pane. Yet compared to Sucus, he felt able-bodied and agile. This did not surprise him, for he knew that every hour in Troy invisible blows fell and destroyed limbs without a name.

In the car he found a bottle of beer and he came down the slope, loins first, like a man who still has his legs comes down a ladder.

Drink, he said, and listen to me, friend. I’ve thought it all out waiting for sleep in my Cadillac. With no money there’s little left on the surface of this earth. It’s ashes and cinders like the moon. The best thing is sleep, if you can manage sleep. In dreams money’s abolished. Everywhere. Maybe you dream of money. But you never dream of paying! Nobody in the world dreams of paying. This is what makes waking up so terrible. This is what makes waking up worse than hunger. Drink your beer and get some sleep.

** Interrogation

THE DOORS to the Interrogation Unit were all locked in Cauchy Street Station. To do what they do on the ninth floor they require isolation from everything else in life and death; they need to believe that there were no stories before them and that there will be none after them. God in his loneliness created the world. They up there on the ninth floor try to destroy it, member by member. So all the doors were locked.

I heard grunts, footsteps and a voice. The voice belonged to Sergeant Pasqua although it was shriller than his everyday one. The grunts came from Sucus. The grief Sucus felt in his heart made him practically immune to the pain being inflicted on him by the sergeant. Each shock winded him, and smashed mercilessly against the inside of his skull. But between the shocks, the other pain was worse.

Who was with you? The sergeant screeched the question so many times that the four words lost their meaning. To begin with, they had referred to a gun battle on Rat Hill the previous night, during which Naisi and a police officer had been shot dead. Who-was with you! Who was with you! With repetition the words became like a circling vulture’s cry. And from far below, barely audible, came a squeak as from a mole or a field mouse. Whether its origin was the voice box or some other maltreated organ of the prisoner’s body, it was impossible to tell. Then came a silence. No cry, no squeaks, no footsteps, no hum. A door opened and the silence was broken by a second voice. Hector said: I want to see the prisoner alone, Sergeant, you may go.

Sergeant Pasqua marched off. In the sound of his boots, in the rhythm of his footsteps, there was an iron pride. Then there was heavy breathing and the noise of effort, as if two men were climbing up a steep ridge.

Long ago, during one of the long summers when I was in the alpage with the goats and the two cows, Desirée and Rouquine, a strange dog appeared. A medium-sized, black dog. Nobody had ever seen him before. He was lying in the grass not far from the chalet, where there was an outcrop of grey rocks on which I sometimes used to sit to watch the valley and the clouds a thousand metres below. The afternoon was hot, the grasshoppers were hissing, and the stonechats were perching on the yellow gentian plants, which swayed whenever one alighted or flew off. The dog was clearly very old. His hind legs were so stiff that when he walked he looked as if he wanted to crap. His awkwardness was comic. Yet after watching him take a few steps, you felt a kind of pity.

Towards the end of the afternoon I saw him again. And he was unrecognisable. At first I thought he was another dog. His hangdog tail was up and waving in furious circles. His walk was swift and brisk. He was with the brown bitch from La Fine’s chalet. She must have been in heat, for both of them were sniffing and licking under each other’s tails. I left them to it.

When night fell, and the stars were so bright above the pastures that they looked as if you could walk to them, he turned up again. I found him shivering in the grass when I went out to fetch some wood for the stove. He was lying in an odd position, his head was alongside his body, prodding it to see why it didn’t move. With considerable difficulty I brought him inside. He stretched out beside the stove, where the pinewood was crackling, and dozed. Sleep he couldn’t, for every few minutes his whole body was shaken by convulsions in his chest.

The stove quieted and the moon came up. We could see it through the windowpane that had a puddle in it. Somehow the dog got to his feet and went to the door. I opened it and he made for the rocks where I’d first seen him. There he lay down. And there he howled. Howled once. Ten minutes later he had disappeared. He had gone into the forest to die.

Men and women are not like this dog because they have words. With their words they change everything, and nothing. Whatever the circumstances, words add and take away. Either spoken words or ones heard in the head. They are always incongruous, because they never fit. This is why words cause pain and why they offer salvation.

Let’s begin with your name. Tell me your full name.

You have it written down.

How do your friends call you?

I don’t know.

Does the name Sucus mean anything to you?

Nothing.

Where were you yesterday around six o’clock in the evening?

I could hear the words of Sucus and the Superintendent through the locked door.

Nowhere.

Shall I remind you?

It makes no difference.

You were with a dealer named Naisi on Rat Hill and you had a Zig gun in your hands.

The sergeant told me Naisi’s dead.

My man fired in self-defence.

So he’s dead.

Naisi was resisting arrest and he wasn’t alone, there were two other guns with him. There were three of you. All of you were firing. Naisi, his sister, and yourself.

I wasn’t there.

One of my officers was killed.

He’s dead.

If you weren’t there, where were you?

Words were already taking Sucus and the Superintendent out of the locked room.

It was a lifetime ago.

How old are you?

You look it up.

I’m sixty-five. Your parents are alive?

My father’s dead.

A Trojan?

He came from the mountains.

Like I did.

My father wasn’t a bogey!

What did he do?

He was in commerce.

My father was a cattle dealer, said the Superintendent. What was your father’s line?

He opened oysters.

Anything else?

He opened oysters all his life.

Do you have a regular job?

What do you expect?

So you’re unemployed.

I worked on a building site.

In the city?

Across the road from here.

Where the cranes are.

Where the cranes were!

They’re still there.

Are they?

Come to the window, you can see them.

There was a silence. The two men must have been standing by the window that gave on to the Mond building site.

Look! said the Superintendent, something’s flying from the top of the tall crane there. It’s a flag.

Flag! repeated Sucus in a broken voice.

I can’t make out the insignia, said the Superintendent, my eyesight’s failing.

We’re on the ninth floor here, aren’t we?

Can you read the flag?

White stripes and a white cross on sky-blue. Most flags don’t change.

Then it’s Greek, the Greek national ensign.

The crane driver was a Greek.

You knew him?

A lifetime ago. His name was Yannis. He came from the island of Samos. He could draw a cork out of a wine bottle with his crane.

The flag wasn’t there yesterday, said Hector.

Yannis flew a flag on his crane each time his wife gave him a baby, explained Sucus, he had two daughters, one of them was named Chrysanthe. He was hoping to have a son whom he would call Alexander. What more do you want to know?

I want to know where you were last night. I want to know where your guns came from. I want to know who Naisi was working for. If you tell me, I’ll do my best to help you. Otherwise I must warn you, it looks bad for you. Killing a police officer isn’t something we let anybody do twice.

At this point Hector probably made some sign with his hand. Perhaps a cutting-the-neck sign.

It makes no difference.

How long did you work down there?

As long as I could.

You were sacked?

I hit the foreman.

You should never hit them!

That’s what Naisi said, his very words.

You admired Naisi, it seems?

Admired? Naisi tried to get by, he helped others get by. Now he’s dead.

There have been very few people in my life I’ve admired, said the Superintendent.

You shot down Naisi.

I told you my men fired in self-defence.

It makes no difference.

I’ll tell you something, young man. When I was very young, say about twelve—I hadn’t left the village yet—at that age I’d already guessed everything about life. Everything! But I didn’t realise it. I thought there was a lot more to come. Of course there were things I hadn’t done, things I hadn’t seen, but these were details. The essentials I knew—without realising I knew them. I thought fully grown men and women—particularly women—had secrets I didn’t yet know. These secrets gave them special powers, powers they could use when they were in trouble, or when they were looking for happiness. I was obsessed by these secrets. I wanted to learn them. Then I came to Troy. And after many years—for to begin with I wouldn’t admit it—after many years I had to face the fact that there are no secrets. Life is like you know it when you’re a kid. I don’t know more than you do, but I can help you and you can help me.

There followed another silence. The two men could look at the cranes out of the window. They could look round the almost empty white-tiled room, which might have been mistaken for a dairy, except that there was no milk and there were handcuffs hanging on a wall near a gunrack. They could look at one another: Hector in his dark blue trousers and tunic, with brass crowns on his epaulettes, and his swollen hands; or Sucus, haggard, his eyes wild with loss, his jeans torn, his shirt dirtied. Whatever they looked at had nothing to do with their words. Their words were already far away, disputing the next direction they should take, insisting upon their own destination. Both men were waiting and neither knew what for.

Let’s go back a few weeks to the night of October the twelfth, you were at Budapest Station.

There’s never any, any, any, going back, policeman. The secret you didn’t know when you were twelve was that things can be destroyed and can never be mended. Never.

You were on platform 17 in Budapest Station.

Not even God can change the past.

And you were not alone, you were with a young woman. Do you want me to tell you who she was?

Yes, say her name.

She was known as Zsuzsa.

Zsuzsa!

On the evening of October the twelfth, with this young woman known as Zsuzsa, you stole a number of passports from the Schlafwagen of the Trans Europe Night.

I was alone. There was nobody else.

How did you get into the attendant’s compartment?

The door was open.

Where was he?

He was talking to a lady passenger.

A lady passenger known as Zsuzsa?

I didn’t know the names of the passengers, except those whose passports I grabbed.

What mountains did your father come from?

The Aravis.

How many passports did you grab from the TEN?

Fourteen.

You handed them over to Naisi?

You can’t ask him!

And the name of your father’s village?

The TEN passes the Aravis mountains, did you know that, policeman?

Did he want to go back, your father wanted to go back?

Yes.

Tell me the name of his village.

Its name meant lucky-horse-with-a-broken-leg.

You’re lying!

He’s dead. Dead, policeman, from the old German *tot-tot-tot! Tot! Tot!*

There was no reply, and it seemed that neither of the men made any effort to break the silence. For a moment I asked myself whether they had both gone, taking the inside lift like Sergeant Pasqua. Then I heard the Superintendent whisper: Can you help me? There was the noise of a chair being pulled back, followed by shuffling footsteps.

Open the window.

It doesn’t open.

You have to unlock it. The key should be hanging over there by the gunrack. Can you find it?… That’s better … it’s good to take in some air. Your father and I, Sucus, came from the same village.

I’ve never seen windows with a key like this.

Prisoners try to jump.

To jump, policeman, or to kill themselves?

Tell me your papa’s name.

Clement.

Clement what?

Clement Gex.

Gex!

It makes no difference now.

Your father and I were in the same class. We rode on the same luge. And, my God, he’s dead. What did he die of?

TV.

I didn’t quite catch …

I said, I’m glad he’s dead.

It’s not always easy between fathers and sons.

I loved him. From the early Latin *Iubere*, to give something, to give pleasure.

I knew his mother, your grandmother. Angeline had the only peach tree in the village and she was very, very proud of it. The tree grew against the south wall of the house where your father lived as a boy, between the window of the kitchen and the pêle. Angeline planted it when she was young, despite your grandfather, who was against it. He said it was madness to plant peaches there. Nobody had a peach tree in the village, it would make the wall damp, and in the summer it would attract wasps. And your grandmother persisted, so that, after a number of years, it produced small juicy white peaches, about the size of billiard balls. Juicy and sharp and sweet. I can taste them on my tongue now. When there were too many wasps Angeline kept the windows shut. You’re Clement’s only child?

I was.

We all want to go back … just for a moment to look around. No, to look for something, really. Something lost. We think if we find it, we’ll die happy. In my experience nobody dies happy. Perhaps somebody who’s killed instantly, like Gilbert d’Ormesson on the platform. Perhaps d’Ormesson was happy when he died.

You don’t look too good to me, policeman.

I think I must lie down.

Next I heard a noise that surprised and puzzled me for a moment. It was repeated like the call of the cuckoo in the spring, but its note was less liquid. A dry, squeaky sound. Suddenly it occurred to me that it was a wheel turning, and then I guessed. A trolley with rubber wheels was being pushed over the floor.

Can you lift my legs? I heard Hector say.

Both of them grunted for different reasons, Sucus with effort and Hector with relief. Then there was a silence, a long silence from which emerged the sound of footsteps pacing up and down. Seven strides, turn, seven strides … The walk was repeated many times, and the steps brushed the floor softly as if they were being made in stocking feet, or by a bear in a cage.

I’m not going to make it back, declared the Superintendent in a low voice.

The steps stopped.

I’ve committed a murder.

What!

Last night.

Where were you?

Not on Rat Hill.

Who did you murder?

Zsuzsa.

You killed Naisi’s sister!

She was my wife.

Your wife?

Naisi’s sister was my wife.

So you were married, Clement’s son, you were married.

Do you want to know how I killed her?

Without words there can be no repentance. With words everything can happen again, like the story I’m telling you, yet they never change what has happened.

I’m married myself, whispered the Superintendent, her name is Susanna.

But you haven’t killed her. She’ll be waiting for you, policeman, when you get home tonight.

Yes, she’ll be waiting.

I loved her.

You killed her, you say.

You know I killed her.

I know nothing … It’s better if I take my glasses off, said Hector.

I killed her last night.

I can see a bit better. I don’t want to be taken home to the house.

I killed her last night, I tell you.

I just want to lie here.

What will they put on her?

Take off this holster, will you? It’s too tight.

What clothes do they put on in the morgue?

Slip off the tunic and then it will come. Loosen the buckle.

What clothes do they put on?

Gowns.

She was so beautiful.

There’s a bottle in the sink, pour me a little.

Slowly with feet that brushed the floor Sucus walked over to the sink.

Should be a glass somewhere. Take some for yourself too, said the Superintendent.

I heard the clink of a bottle and the gurgle of pouring, then Sucus’s walk back across the cage.

The dead stay beautiful, said the Superintendent after a gulp, the dead don’t get dirty. They stay beautiful … like my butterflies.

The surprise you were always expecting, said Sucus, when you were a kid, the surprise could come after death.

What was your fight about?

We didn’t quarrel.

Married and you didn’t fight!

I killed her without a word

Open the window more. You’re right, Clement’s son, the surprise could come now, open it.

Every morning when there’s snow, the robin comes to the window and I open it. I hammer the stale bread to make crumbs for him. He hops in and struts around at my feet, his little body puffed up and as round as a tangerine, his legs thinner than matches. *Mon gamin*, I tell him, *tu es le plus fidèle de tous*.

Through the locked door there was a dead silence. Then one of them said:

Do you believe in forgiveness?

It was impossible to be sure which one of them it was who asked the question. But it was the Superintendent who spoke next.

There was a curé I remember in the village, the Superintendent said, his name was Hippolyte Castor. Your father must have talked about him. He was related to your father. His sister’s husband had a sister who was married to an uncle of Clement Gex. Each morning the curé Castor walked from the presbytery down to the grocer’s to fetch his newspaper. I can see him now. To everybody he passed he wished a cheerful Good Day. The curé Castor was much respected, and if he was occasionally criticised for his drinking, there was always somebody to defend him, saying: Think of his life! His solitude! Wouldn’t you drink from time to time? Isn’t that reason enough?

Hector paused here, as if there were other reasons for drinking which he wanted to acknowledge but not name.

When the curé Castor came out of the shop, he began to read his newspaper. His feet knew their way back up the hill like a blind man’s. He never for a moment looked up. Sometimes he would pause in midstride, fascinated by a news item, one leg raised off the ground like a hunting dog. Those he passed refrained, out of tact, from addressing him. He saw nothing. He walked very slowly and by the time he reached the presbytery, he knew what had happened in the world during the last twenty-four hours. This man, the curé Hippolyte Castor, said that God forgave. He said forgiveness was divine. He went further. He said if forgiving didn’t exist, then God didn’t exist. He said God was forgiveness.

So we are alone and unforgiven, whispered Sucus.

I’m a policeman, I’m telling you what a priest said.

How can there be forgiveness?

I’m cold. Pass me the blanket.

Suppose I catch the white ship, policeman? It was the first promise we ever made.

Leave the window as it is. The first promise?

With Zsuzsa. To take a ship.

I can see it fascinated you. It’s a Beretta 921. You can take it out.

No.

The best light pistol in the world. It’s not service issue, it’s my own. Semi-automatic. Eight rounds … The pain is bad now, boy.

Where?

Everywhere. Hand it to me for a moment. Here you have what we call a second thought for the first shot. The first squeeze of the trigger is like a safety catch. It doesn’t fire. You squeeze a second time and it shoots. If you want to catch the white ship, take it.

One of the men behind the door groaned.

The place is full of bogeys, policeman. I can call for help.

For God’s sake, don’t do that! Stay with me. Is her real name Zsuzsa?

Her real name was Lilac.

What does she do for a living?

She’s dead. She worked for a gazupie.

I told you, the dead stay beautiful.

There was a thud and a gasp and I asked myself whether Sucus had hit the Superintendent. Then I heard sobbing. I had the impression both men were sobbing.

We’ll go back together, we’ll find the village, we’ll climb up the steps to the Republican Lyre—we’ll order champagne, we’ll sit on the terrace. I’m too old, Hector is too old, but you’re not, you’re Clement Gex’s son. Shout out for us both! We’re back! Hector Juaradoz and Clement Gex’s son are back … back for good, back for ever. Help! Help us!

And Lilac, policeman, can you hear me, I’m shouting so you can hear me, policeman, Lilac called me Flag!

When the shot rang out, I opened the door. It opened as innocently as any unlocked door does. The silence and stillness in the room were equally innocent. Through the open window came the murmur of Troy’s first evening traffic. The two cranes had stopped working. A tiny flag was fluttering from Yannis’s masthead. Hector lay, covered with a blanket, on a surgical trolley, which was undoubtedly kept in the unit for the resuscitation of interrogated prisoners. Head thrown back, mouth and eyes wide open, he was dead. His lips were the colour of the fore wings of the *Libythea geoffroji*, which is the most beautiful and rare of all the libytheids. The same pale blueish mauve is also typical of the colour of lips after an infarctus attack. A holster, of the type that carries the gun beneath the left armpit, hung, empty, from the handle of an open cupboard beside the sink. Inside the cupboard was a pile of paper towels. Sucus, from whose heart wound blood was still seeping, was sprawled face-down on the white-tiled floor. The Beretta 921, missing from the holster, was hidden under his body. His poor finger was still around its trigger.

** Voyage

MOORED TO THE dockside she dwarfs all buildings in sight. In villages, men, women and children dream of palaces. The poorer the home, the more perfect the palace. And the white ship is a floating palace. All her cabins are first-class and each one is different, with its own furniture and fittings and mementos. Voyagers who were homeless or exiled, passengers who lived all their lives in institutions are given, on my ship, the room of their dreams.

A small detail distinguished her from other liners when she was moored in the Trojan docks: on her seven decks there was not a single lifeboat or lifebelt to be seen. The few passersby who noticed this strange fact argued amongst themselves about what it might mean. Some maintained that lifeboats were automatically ejected from below-deck in case of an emergency. Others shrugged their shoulders and simply asserted that on such a ship, with such a reputation, they were not needed!

Naisi’s cabin was a conservatory such as might belong to an emperor, filled with flowering plants, among the greenery of which stood a piano and a synthesizer. On the floor were carpets from Aleppo whose woven flowers were as geometric and beautiful as the scrolls on banknotes. The colours of their weaving were beyond price. Beiges of honey, and blues of wood smoke in the evening light. Naisi, dressed in a pair of swimming shorts and seated in a wicker chair like a sun god was experimenting with a rendering of “Your Balls Are Hanging Out” on the synthesizer. The wounds in his chest were healed. Their scars had turned into tattoos, just as, over the centuries, gardens turn into flourishes on rugs. The largest tattoo, made from the wound that killed him, showed the palm of an open hand.

On another deck, in another cabin, Officer Frey, the policeman Naisi shot dead the day before during the siege of the Blue House, was preparing brochettes of fish. He was dressed in a loose anorak, like an Eskimo, with a hood over his head. The walls of his cabin were made of logs and had bearskins nailed to them. The grill of an electric oven was already alight, ready to cook the fish he was preparing. By his bedside lay a husky. Over the cabin radio came an Arctic weather report announcing temperatures of minus forty centigrade. He too was happy.

Sucus and the Superintendent were among the last to embark, and I received them as they came up the gangway together.

Welcome Superintendent, I said to Hector. How well you look! On C Deck you’ll find a bar called the Café de la Paix. A young woman who serves drinks there has already prepared a glass for you.

To Sucus I said: In cabin 316, the one next to yours, there is someone waiting to see you, little redstart.

Come in, said Naisi, when Sucus knocked on his cabin door.

It’s you! I thought you’d be gone already! said Sucus.

Make yourself at home.

What a cabin you’ve got!

The white roses knocked me over, said Naisi.

They’re snow queens.

Sucus went over to the porthole. I can see the Hotel Patrai, he said.

I can’t, said Naisi, nowhere.

Beyond the storage tanks there.

Nowhere.

Not those, the Exxon ones.

Show me your wound, said Naisi.

Sucus took off his shirt. By his heart there was a scar, with stitches still in it, in the form of a Z.

I never thought you’d be on this ship, Sucus said again.

She leaves every third day.

I thought every night.

Once, long ago, she used to. The schedule changed in Jerusalem at the time forgiveness began.

You talk about forgiveness like a bogey, Naisi.

Everyone on this ship is happy. So many passengers, and not a single tragedy, no grief!

Hundreds of passengers?

Thousands.

I heard what happened from Pasqua, said Sucus.

This ship’ll never take him! said Naisi.

You think he’s immortal?

They’ll throw Pasqua in the water for the crabs. He’ll be taken nowhere.

And the bogey’s forgiveness?

You’re forgetting something, Brother-in-Law. There are certain things which are unforgivable.

Do you know what I did? asked Sucus.

You used a Beretta 921. A black villain, isn’t she? I adore the Berettas. With her little black tail like a pig!

Who told you?

The herons. *Tzaplia* in Russian. Creatures from far away who bring a message.

So they know everything, the herons.

Not everything. Only the Devil knows all. Which is why ignorance is good. Stay ignorant, Brother-in-Law.

Where do you see the herons?

They come when the music plays.

It’s bound to come back, the grief, said Sucus.

Where are you going? asked Naisi later.

To the village, my father’s village.

Funny how our fathers come back, isn’t it? I’ve been thinking about it. Once they could save us from everything, our fathers, and so we go on believing it. I guess that’s why I’m going to Aleppo.

Do you know what I did, Naisi?

With the little black villain, yes.

It’s bound to come back, the grief.

Let’s get a drink, said Naisi. There’s a bar on the deck above with a little dancing lawn out back.

The two men walked slowly up a wide staircase, between two mosaics the colour of a lake depicting many sorts of birds, and in the foreground of each one herons.

*Tzaplia*, said Naisi, nodding at them.

Do you know what I did, Naisi?

Yes, I told you.

Naisi …

I’m listening.

Have you seen Zsuzsa on board?

Zsuzsa!

She has to be here.

You’re out of your mind, Brother-in-Law.

I killed her.

You could never have done that. Never.

Sucus killed Zsuzsa, whispered Sucus.

There are words said which have no expression. Their flatness says all. Before these three words Naisi opened his arms, and Sucus flung himself between them. For several weeks they stayed like that, embraced at the top of the stairway.

Installed at a corner table in the Café de la Paix, Hector was singing. As he sang, he looked softly but fixedly ahead, as if peering at a rock a few feet from his face. In this rock he heard other voices singing the same songs from his childhood.

A barmaid brought him a double mommi. Placing the ice-cold glass on the table, she poured in the water, for she knew exactly how strong Hector liked his drink, and the liquid turned milky, like a pearl. Then she sat down and quietly sang with him. Days passed before he noticed her, but when at last he did, his face broke into such a broad smile that he had to stop singing.

You know all the words? he enquired.

I learnt them for you.

Let me get you a drink.

I don’t need one.

My wife always needed a drink, said the Superintendent. When she drank her first glass at eleven in the morning, she raised her thin child’s arm way above her head and her little feet in buckled shoes had to trot fast to keep up with the adult legs crossing the lawn by the dovecote, whose beady birds frightened her, and when the first gulp of liquor lifted the first weight off her head, her father’s large hand, more protective than Achilles’ shield, grasped hers, at eleven every morning, and they walked together, the dead father and the frightened daughter, across the gravel path to confront … whatever the day might bring. I know all that now.

I want you to be happy, said the woman opposite him.

Then let’s sing again.

*They sang:* Delà la mer, il y a t’un pré<em>.</em>

It’s beyond me, said the Superintendent, how you remember every song.

All of us purser’s staff, all of us on this ship, explained the barmaid, are volunteers.

You know every song I know.

We had not given enough pleasure during our lives. So to make up for it, we volunteered as crew on this ship’s world cruise. A world cruise takes one minute.

Let’s sing “Sweetheart, Your Eyebrows Are Pencil Thin,” said Hector.

The ship had long since weighed anchor. On the open deck it was dark, or dark again. The waves of the black water were slow and wide, like those of an ocean.

A tanker passed by to port, but the officer on her bridge saw nothing and her radar screen recorded nothing, because, to other vessels at sea, the white ship was now indistinguishable from the night.

We have to find her, Naisi finally said at the top of the staircase, she must be on board.

I’ll take A Deck, said Sucus, and you take B, as soon as one of us finds her … we tell the other.

Below-deck everything was lit like a mountain slope of snow at noon when there’s not a cloud in the sky. Every grain of my ship sparkled that night.

Both men had but a single purpose: to find Zsuzsa. Yet neither hurried, for time could not rob them.

Sucus heard faint music coming from the ballroom at the stern end of A Deck, and he decided to look there first, in case she was dancing. He strolled down an aisle of shops—which was like a street in a city, except that there were no poor—towards the music. Suddenly he stopped before a window to look at a jersey dress, tight-fitting, with black spots like a panther.

At the same moment, he felt a pressure against the back of his knees and against his shoulder blades. He wanted to extend his hand and touch her hip as he usually did, but he did not dare.

He simply stood there without moving, for a year, and towards the end of that time he learnt that only a body can forgive a body, and that forgiveness, if it comes, comes from a honeycomb of tenderness secreted by the bodies concerned. His eyes shut before the shop window, he saw how forgiveness could never be the consequence of judgement. Forgiveness was not a principle, but a brush of lips on closed eyes. The prefix *for* in *forgie fan*, Old English, meant, like the Greek *peri*, enclosing, encircling, embracing.

He turned round to face Zsuzsa. No one was there, yet the word *forgie fan* persisted in his head and became part of the music that was still playing, and towards which he now walked. In the ballroom Sucus danced alone through the throng of dancing passengers. He was now sure to find her. *Forgie fan*.

On B Deck Naisi passed a casino. He could feel the quiet of held breath through the curtain, and this he could not resist. He slipped in. Zsuzsa was not there. The croupier wore a silver suit with wings on its back. When Naisi approached, the wheel was turning slowly, the ball jumping like a finger that teases over the spine’s vertebrae. It stopped on seventeen. The players who had lost turned away.

Tell me what you wish, sir, said the croupier, smiling at Naisi, are you playing to lose?

Nope.

To win then. You wish to win.

No, to gamble.

You want to gamble, really?

Yes, to risk all.

Passengers have little to risk, sir.

I’ll find something.

If you want to buy chips, sir, the bank’s over there.

The cashier was a boy of ten wearing white gloves.

Listen, Naisi said to him, I’ve seen you before. You lived on Rat Hill, didn’t you? Your name’s Kaddour, you died of typhoid fifteen years ago.

The boy nodded, smiling.

Listen, Kaddour, I need to shoot for the sky.

Then tell me what you’re buying with.

I’ve got a piano in my cabin.

The boy shook his head, although he still smiled.

If I win, said Naisi, supposing I win, I need to collect a bundle, a figure with countless noughts, Kaddour.

If you want to win, said the boy, I’ll give you five chips, if you want to lose I’ll give you fifty. You don’t have to buy them.

No, said Naisi, I need to wager. Can’t you understand that? If I win, I want to say to my sister—you remember Zsuzsa, Zsuzsa’s somewhere on this ship—when I find her, if I’ve won, I want to say to her: Here. They’re yours. Take it. Get everything you want … everything!

Then what are you buying with, Naisi?

Naisi hesitated. His pockets were empty. He could hear the wheel turning behind him, and he imagined how he would go up to Zsuzsa, who at this moment was probably dancing in the ballroom, and how he would tap her on the shoulder … All right, he said at last, I’ve an idea. Can I bet my place in this story? Can I buy with that?

The boy stared at him, his eyes wide open with admiration.

If I lose, said Naisi, I’m erased!

The boy handed him a hundred chips.

Meanwhile the years passed. Naisi won. Hector dreamt of butterflies by night and sang songs during the day. I mostly sat aft on the top deck, looking back towards the ship’s wake. I love the way the white turbulence of the water turns to calm eastern, and I love the surf as it disperses and recedes and becomes like pieces of lace clinging to the ocean’s skin.

Sucus and Naisi met at the top of the heron staircase.

No? asked Naisi.

No.

Then she must be on C Deck.

You go forward and I’ll take the stern.

I’ve just won a bundle for her, said Naisi, now she can have everything. Everything.

I told her, said Sucus, I told her when we did the passports, that I wanted to take her to the village and now we’re going there, we’re going to Lucky-Horse-with-a-Broken-Leg.

The two men were dreaming of Zsuzsa’s pleasure.

Aft on C Deck there was a hairdresser’s. He looked carefully under each dryer to make sure the woman sitting there wasn’t Zsuzsa. Next to the hairdresser’s was a cinema. How was he going to tell in the dark whether she was there? He went and stood in front of the screen and cried: Lilac, I love you! Then he waited. If she was there, she would reply. The audience was quieter than ever. Lilac, I love you! Silence. He turned round to look for the first time at the picture on the screen. He saw Zsuzsa. Zsuzsa was washing his hair outside the Blue House.

Out on deck the wind was plucking at the rigging and the white paintwork was dazzled. The ship had reduced speed and the water had changed its character. It was no longer ocean but inland sea, without swell and almost without waves. Its calm corresponded to Sucus’s conviction of being forgiven. Leaning over the ship’s railing, he saw a sheep’s head, apparently floating in the water below. The sheep was alive. Its head turned. He saw another, then another. The ship was passing a whole flock of sheep. They couldn’t be swimming, he told himself, their feet must be on the ground.

Amidships the two men met

So she’s in her cabin, said Naisi.

I think she’s forgiven me, Sucus said.

I told you …

You said there were things which are unforgivable.

I said that too. Let’s try the cabins.

They’ll be locked.

No problem. The purser calls them cabins, but you know what they really are.

Yes, said Sucus, our tombs.

So we just read what’s written on them. We’ll find her in no time. In no time. Have you been in your cabin yet?

I’ve been too busy searching.

You’ll be surprised when you go in.

Tell me.

It’s a stable full of cows!

Shit! said Sucus.

You must have chosen it.

They looked at each other, surprised by what the heart claims and the mind doesn’t know.

The ship had reached the Aravis mountains. It was early morning and the grass it was sailing over was still white with frost. The cuckoo was already repeating his call. The ship’s engines were making less noise than a tractor. Redstarts, chaffinches, coal-tits, swallows flew, chirping, warning, singing, between the orchards and greniers. I could hear them from my chair on deck. Everybody and every creature that morning had a hundred years to live. As the sun rose, the grass lost its frost and became green.

The black branches of the fruit trees, at the level of the lowest portholes, had just opened into white flowers, but their leaves were still folded. On the starboard side of the valley, behind a chapel, a giant apple tree in blossom looked like a cloud, the size of a pocket handkerchief. Only the rockface above the village was still half veiled in mist. As the sun rose higher, the fields on every side changed colour. From green to radiant yellow. They changed, as millions of dandelions opened their petals together.

I’ll do F Deck, you do E, said Sucus, and, walking slowly down corridors of cabins at the level of the fruit trees, he read inscription after inscription. None mentioned Zsuzsa. Naisi came running down a companion way from the deck above and grasped Sucus’s arm.

No?

No.

Naisi, listen, supposing—supposing she’s not on this ship!

Then she’s alive.

Yes?

Yes.

She’s alive!

I read it from the start, from the first evening I arrived, mused Naisi. Nobody can dream of how many different kinds of happiness there are on a ship like this.

The ship cast her anchor. And one by one the cows in Sucus’s cabin came down the gangway to the meadow. They placed their feet with great deliberation and care, like city women in high-heeled shoes do when walking over cobblestones. Once they reached the grass, they kicked up with their hind legs, they jumped, they charged each other with their horns, and they ran in circles. Delphine, who had had six calves, leapt as high as a goat.

I was sitting under my pear tree when the white ship sailed away to become the mountain that is always covered in snow. The cows waded deep into the grass of my orchard where they tasted, smelt, licked, swallowed, and ate so much that when they lay down under the trees to chew, they dozed. Sucus was stretched out in the grass not far from where I was sitting.

You see on the *adret*, he told me, you see the field up there, you see its yellow? That’s the yellow of Zsuzsa’s earrings, the ones which were big enough to pass a lemon through.

Then he wept for a millennium, there in my grass beside me.

When all was done and his eyes were dry, he stared at the sky and said: If I become that blue, old woman, nothing, nothing any more will separate me from Zsuzsa.

Yes, I whispered, I have taken off your coat of bees, yes, no more words … Sleep, Sucus, sleep. She’s alive.

** Epilogue | ~~

IT IS POSSIBLE you have been to Troy without recognising the city. The road from the airport is like many others in the world. It has a superhighway and is often blocked. You leave the airport buildings which are like space vessels never finished, you pass the packed carparks, the international hotels, a mile or two of barbed wire, broken fields, the last stray cattle, billboards that advertise cars and Coca-Cola, storage tanks, a cement plant, the first shanty town, several giant depots for big stores, ring-road flyovers, working-class flats, a part of an ancient city wall, the old boroughs with trees, crammed shopping streets, new golden office-blocks, a number of ancient domes and spires, and finally you arrive at the acropolis of wealth.

Should you visit Troy again, you will recognise Zsuzsa. It is impossible that you won’t now be able to pick her out from among the many thousands of faces, that fill the streets and corners and stations of the city every night. You would recognise her even from far away. Perhaps she will be singing for money in a train on the Eddington Line. Perhaps she will be seated, waiting, on a high stool against a bar, skirt pulled high up and legs crossed, in Sankt Pauli. Perhaps she will be married, the mother of several children, and when you pass her she will be pushing a pram. I do not know, for her life is not yet over.

Perhaps you will recognise her in one of the aisles of Santa Barbara where she will have gone to pray. Wislawa will go, whenever she can, to the same cathedral to pray for Branch and Sucus. Despite her losses, her poor health, her eyes, her poverty, Wislawa will find the strength to continue a little longer, for she has perched in the tree of God. I do not know whether the two women will ever meet there, where the mosaics on the floor tell the Story of Saint George.

Perhaps it will be in the Champ-de-Mars that you will pick out Zsuzsa and she will be on her way to visit somebody in prison. If you dare go to Rat Hill, perhaps she will be living there in another shack, and she will look like an old woman.

Poverty, loss, pain, passion, time or money will have marked her eyes, her hands, her mouth and the way she holds her arms and the way she places her feet, but they will not, I think, have changed her soul; in order to play this world she will still believe, and make others believe, that she’s its centre, its prize and its capital, and she is probably right.

If you doubt and ask yourself whether it’s really her, and you’re lucky enough to be close to her, you’ll be able to know by her two missing teeth and the long scars on her scalp, only partly hidden by her unruly, once-black hair … that it is really Zsuzsa.

<br>

Don’t fret, my little one. Fly! Everything’s going to be all right. Fly, my Heart.