The Fortress
Danielle Trussoni
ALSO BY DANIELLE TRUSSONI
Angelopolis
Angelology
Falling Through the Earth
Copyright © 2016 Danielle Trussoni
All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication, reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system without the prior written consent of the publisher—or in the case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, license from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency—is an infringement of the copyright law.
Bond Street Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House Canada Limited
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Trussoni, Danielle, author
The fortress / Danielle Trussoni.
Issued in print and electronic formats.
ISBN 978-0-385-68209-1 (bound).–ISBN 978-0-385-68210-7 (epub)
1. Trussoni, Danielle. 2. Authors, American–21st century–Biography. I. Title.
PS3620.R88Z46 2016 813’.6 C2016-900635-2
C2016-900636-0
Text design by Lucy Albanese
Cover design by Laywan Kwan
Cover photograph © Paul Edmondson / Stocksy
Published in Canada by Bond Street Books, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited
www.penguinrandomhouse.ca
v4.1
a
Contents
Cover
Also by Danielle Trussoni
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Prologue
Enchantment
The Magician
Portcullis
Enceinte
Moat
Battlements
Pitch
Buttresses
Le Mistral
The Knight
Oubliette
The Fortress
The White Queen
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
FOR ALEX AND NICO.
May all your castles rise from solid earth.
This is a true story. I have used the real names of major characters, and have changed the names of everyone else. My memory doesn’t always follow a strictly linear timeline, and neither does this book. The dialogue and text messages have been reconstructed from memory. While I have confirmed the details of events with many of the people who experienced them with me, this is my story, and reflects my feelings and memories.
If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.
—HENRY DAVID THOREAU, WALDEN
Prologue
Tu aimerais danser? Would you like to dance?
Bien sûr, the Frenchman says, and within seconds I’m making my way onto the dance floor with a scorching-hot monsieur. We push into the crush of people, pressing closer and closer under the blue and red lights. I step back, and he steps forward; I turn and find his hand ready to catch me. We’ve only just met, but we are dancing together, effortlessly, as if we’ve choreographed it all in advance. The music is pounding, and we are inside it, elevated by the crowd, by the rush of blood to the heart, by the sound pulsing around us. As we dance, he touches my arm, and my whole body goes electric. For the first time in forever, I want to reach out and hold someone, and that man is right here, inches from me, ready to pull me into his arms. I know I shouldn’t be doing this. I am tempting fate, calling to the unknown, welcoming danger, courting it. Yet I move a little closer and then a little closer, until I am right there, in his arms. I can no longer tell the difference between walking to the edge of a cliff and jumping off. I just close my eyes and go for it.
When I open them, my husband is staring at us from the bar, his arms crossed over his chest, drill-sergeant style. A shiver of apprehension ripples through me. He doesn’t like this dancing-with-a-Frenchman thing one bit.
“What’s the matter?” the monsieur asks, leaning close to my ear.
“My husband,” I reply.
He glances over toward the bar. “Do you need to go?”
“Probably,” I say. “But I’d rather stay.”
“Then you will just have to come back to Paris,” he whispers, pressing his lips to my ear. “Without your husband.”
Before I can respond, my husband is at my side. He grabs my arm and pulls me away from the Frenchman.
“What in the hell are you doing?”
“I’m dancing.”
“We’re leaving.” ’
“I don’t want to leave.”
And I know, as soon as I say these words, that I mean them in every sense: I don’t want to leave the club with my husband; I don’t want to go back home with my husband; I don’t want to spend the rest of my life struggling to believe a failed fairy tale. It is only now, at this moment, in this club with this man, that I know for sure that there is no going back. My life is about to change.
“Come on,” my husband says, and turns away., I look back to the Frenchman, left standing on the dance floor, and wave. He smiles and lifts a finger into the air, as if checking the direction of the wind. I want to believe that this small gesture, this sign given in haste as I’m being hauled out of there, signals a turning point in my life. An ending. And a new beginning.
Enchantment
Before the club in Paris, and before the Frenchman, I was a woman in a fortress.
Or, more precisely, I lived with my husband and two children in La Commanderie, a medieval fortification at the center of the French village of Aubais, pronounced “obey,” as in “love, honor and…Aubais.” Built by the Knights Templar in the thirteenth century, the fortress stood high on a hilltop and could withstand attack from every angle. There were arrow slits in the walls and a perch from which to spy the enemy coming. The foundation was sunk deep into the rock of the village, rock that millions of years before had formed the Mediterranean seabed. Occasionally, when I examined the rock, I would find imprints of fossilized shells, ancient swirls of disintegrated calcium that created the bedrock of the entire region. The fortress rose from this long-gone sea like a stone Leviathan, strong and unsinkable. It was a defensive place, a place of barriers, one meant to resist catapults and battering rams. A place in which we could shut everything out, even the truth.
An ancient granite wall surrounded the fortress. Outside the wall the sun scorched the streets to a sizzle. Inside, a deep shadow fell over a courtyard, where my family ate lunch at a weathered wooden table. I picture us now, as we were then: My two children, Alex and Nico, our pug Fly Me to the Moon (Fly for short), and our three cats: Napoleon, Josephine, and ChouChou. I see me, a thirty-six-year-old woman in an oversize sundress and sunglasses, walking barefoot over hot flagstones, slipping between slats of sun and shade as I make my way past the cats, to my husband, Nikolai. Tall and dark and handsome, he wears a black top hat perched on his head. He bought the top hat in a junk store and wore it as a joke, but the joke became a habit and the habit an eccentricity, and so the hat stayed, giving him the air of a dark magician, one who could—with a flick of his wrist—coax a dove from the depths of nothingness.
Under our feet, deep below the hot flagstones, was a treasure-filled tunnel, or so we liked to imagine. According to legend, the Knights Templar had constructed a system of tunnels between La Commanderie and the fortified city of Aigues-Mortes, where St. Louis launched the Crusades. These passages allowed the Knights to move in stealth to defend the king, to hide valuables, and to transport goods for their voyages to the Holy Land, but anyone looking at a map would have serious doubts that such a tunnel actually existed. The swampy port of Aigues-Mortes is more than ten miles from Au
bais, the terrain rocky. Even so, I liked to believe that there was some truth to the story and that deep below the fortress, carved into the compacted limestone, was a hidden space, a tunnel guarding Templar treasure.
La Commanderie was eight hundred years old and had many owners after the Knights Templar. One built an olive press on the property. Another created an Italianate courtyard with flagstones and a window-lined salon to border it. One used the garden as an arena for bullfights—or les courses camarguaises, as they say in the Languedoc—and I liked to imagine the matador and the bull moving around each other in the courtyard, attacking and hiding, one beast pursuing the other. When the Nazis requisitioned the property in the forties, they used it as the center of their operations in the region, a legacy that older villagers remembered. The fortress had seen olive oil and bullshit and swastikas. And then we arrived.
We hadn’t been in the market for a dark, drafty, thirteenth-century fortress, but we walked through the door, took one look, and knew that La Commanderie had been waiting for us. The realities of buying and living in a historic compound in a tiny village in a foreign country didn’t strike us as daunting. The fact that we were thousands of miles away from family and friends didn’t dissuade us. The problems with the house itself—the oil-sucking monstrosity of a heater, the leaky roof, the mold-infested bathroom, the broken sewage pipe—seemed manageable. It was precisely the scale of the fortress—so outsize, so unrealistic—that made it ours.
The day we moved in, we pushed open the gate together. Over ten feet tall, the blue ironwork speckled with rust, it was so heavy that it took the two of us with our combined weight to move it. It swung open, creaking on old hinges, and suddenly we were not a couple on the verge of divorce. We were the owners of La Commanderie, a structure more powerful than us, a place so solid that it would—it must—be strong enough to save us. I remember looking at the thick walls of the fortress, at Alex and Nico in the courtyard, and thinking, This is it. This is where we will finally be happy.
—
THE FIRST TIME I saw Aubais was from behind a dusty windshield. Our car climbed a narrow, winding road, twisting and turning, and then suddenly it appeared: a medieval stronghold lifting into a perfect blue sky. One of my guidebooks claimed that the sun shone an average of three hundred days per year in the Midi, and it seemed to me then that this luxurious abundance of light had melted the edges of the village clear away—they declined softly from the center, leaving only the village château, its windows shuttered, at the top. Village houses crowded the streets below the château, yellowed and uneven as teeth in an ancient mouth. And at the very bottom of the hill roamed a herd of bulls, their horns long and sharp as daggers.
We found the village by looking online. I’d typed the words “South of France rentals” into a search engine and clicked on links, Web sites, and message boards. Also punched into the search engine were the words “beaches, mountains, vineyards, paradise.” I’d strung these words together in a more or less random sequence, composing a surreal love poem to my fantasy home, and then thrown them out into the digital universe, asking the powers-that-be to send something special back. They sent me the village of Aubais.
As the car climbed up into the village center, I looked down at the surrounding countryside. Knotty black stumps of Syrah vines grew below, clipped back after the previous harvest. Now it was spring, and their leaves were beginning to sprout and twist, each new tendril spiraling up, seeking sun. A stream wrapped around the village, feeding water to a laverie, where villagers had once washed their clothes by hand. There was a boulangerie with fresh bread in the window, a tabac selling newspapers and cigarettes, and an épicerie filled with vegetables and spices. And through it all there floated a pervasive, almost eerie, sense of calm. When I rolled down the car window, I heard nothing but the hum of the engine. No sirens or screeching tires or garbage trucks or train clatter. Nothing. I grew up in rural Wisconsin, where the only sound (aside from the shouts of my sister and brother and me) was nature: birds singing in the trees, crickets chirping in the bushes, insects buzzing, bullfrogs croaking. I felt that I was home again.
As we parked, my eyes adjusted to take it all in: the angular sweep of clay roof tiles, the blue wooden shutters, the flinty peak of the church steeple. The village château was run-down, and while the romantic in me (which was about 90 percent of me at that juncture) liked to imagine a king and queen sitting on ramshackle thrones, in reality the building had been cut up into apartments owned by summer people. One day I would gaze through a window at the top of the château and see clear to the Mediterranean. In this vista there were white Camargue horses and, beyond this, the jagged rise of Pic Saint-Loup, craggy wine country known for its strong, delicious reds. Garrigues fields filled with lavender and rosemary and olive trees spread for as far as I could see. Beyond this, far from sight, were the remnants of Roman roads, limestone conduits grooved by the weight of ancient wheels that had once carried wine and soldiers to and from Rome. Two thousand years later, the tracks were overgrown with honeysuckle, blackberry bushes, buttercups. Olives, grapes, and flowers—such things thrived outside the village.
But in the village itself, all greenery died. The fields and streams were replaced by cool, lifeless limestone. A labyrinth of ancient passageways cut through the village—rue du Roc, rue Droite, rue de la Commanderie—forming a series of transits past the old marketplace, the statue honoring the dead of the First World War, a stone bridge overlooking the bulls. There were both a Catholic church and a Protestant church, and it was said that the village tolerated both religions, although Huguenots had not been allowed to bury their dead in the cemetery. Instead families dug into their cellars and gardens, leaving corpses in unblessed ground, causing all variety of ghosts and unquiet spirits to move through the old houses, through the winding streets, through the branches of the olive trees. We were a little like those ghosts: displaced outsiders searching for sacred ground.
For the first time in our marriage, we had the luxury to try. I’d just had a big professional success: My first novel was bought by a publisher in New York; then the movie rights sold. Offers for my second novel—which I hadn’t even begun to write yet—were pouring in. At thirty-five years old, I had found success doing something I loved and, for the first time in my life, I wouldn’t have to struggle to pay my bills. And yet when success arrived, it cracked the atmosphere of my life like a sonic boom, knocking me off balance. I didn’t understand how to react. Struggle I understood. Scraping by, I knew what that felt like. But successful? That was a whole new game for a girl who had worked her way through college and was still paying off student loans. It’s hard to imagine that the very thing I’d dreamed of could be so strange, so unmooring, but it was. I was wary of this success. I was fearful of it. I was worried that the same magic that had created good fortune would take it all away again. And then there was my marriage. Nikolai and I had been married eight years when we moved to France, and I doubted we would make nine. I blamed our rift on the endless hours we’d been working, the strain of being parents, and the lack of money. I blamed it on the fact that we hadn’t taken time out for us and for our marriage. And so I proposed to use our windfall to move far away from everything—far from successes and troubles—to a beautiful, unreal place where we could protect our fragile love.
—
IN THE BEGINNING there was nothing fragile about us. We met at a potluck in the fall of 2001, when I was a fiction-writing student at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Nikolai was part of the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa, a three-month stint that had brought him to the United States from his native Sofia, Bulgaria.
“Let me help with that,” he said, taking a platter of maki sushi from my hands so I could pick up Alex, my one-year-old son, who was tugging on my jeans. I swung Alex up onto my hip, balancing him as I set out wasabi and soy sauce with my free hand.
“You rolled these yourself?” Nikolai asked, impressed.
“I
lived in Japan for three years,” I said, giving Alex a piece of cucumber maki to chew on. “Sushi is easier than sandwiches.”
“Japan?” he said. He had a soft accent and a way of speaking that was both definitive and careful. His hair was black and clipped short, his eyes large and green, his lips full and his skin olive. He was looking at me inquisitively, carefully, as if I were some exotic butterfly blown down from the sky. “Why Japan?”
I met his gaze and smiled. “Why not Japan?”
That was who I was then, a young woman ready to go anywhere and do anything, so long as it was new and exciting and far from home. I was trying life out, seeing what felt right, and my relationships with men weren’t much different.
We met again at a party at my place a few weeks later. We stood at the stereo and chose music together—a mix of the Smiths and Depeche Mode and the Cure and Joy Division, bands we’d both listened to obsessively in high school. Over the course of the night, we talked and talked, telling stories about our lives, all the things we’d done before we knew each other.
I was a twenty-seven-year-old aspiring writer, mother of Alex, and maker of maki sushi. My parents had divorced when I was twelve, and I’d moved between my mother and father until I was eighteen. My grades were bad in high school, but I took classes at a local college to make up for it and was eventually accepted at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. I double-majored in history and literature and graduated summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa. After graduation I started traveling. I studied in London, spent time in France, and lived for nearly three years in Japan with my first husband, Sam, a man I’d met at a bar at age twenty-three and married before I knew what hit me. Alex was born in Japan, and I was accepted to Iowa’s M.F.A. program the same month. Now, as the program was coming to an end, I found myself adrift, waiting for the next big thing to happen.
