Malevil

  “Meyssonnier had two sons. He worshiped them,” I said.

  “And his wife?”

  “Less. She used to have rows with him all the time over his politics. She said they lost him customers.”

  “Was it true?”

  “Yes, it was true. Life in Malejac for poor old Meyssonnier was always a war on two fronts. The mayor and the clerical clan on one side, and at home his wife.”

  “I can imagine,” Thomas said.

  But it was said in a slightly curt, irritable tone, as though he had no suffering left over to devote to Meyssonnier. I alone, in fact, had any emotions available for others, and La Menou too, of course, since we had neither of us lost people close to us. I didn’t count my sisters as close to me.

  While Thomas lay silent in the blackness, I tried to make use of my sleeplessness to revive a little hope in myself. I thought about La Roque. The reason being that La Roque, a tiny town about nine miles away from us, was an old walled town built on a hillside and, like Malevil, protected to the north by a cliff. That morning, up on the keep, I hadn’t seen anything in that direction, but then you couldn’t see La Roque from Malevil anyway, other than in conditions of exceptional visibility. As for trying to make it to La Roque on foot, to settle the matter once and for all, that wouldn’t be possible yet for a long time, at least to judge by the time it had taken Thomas and the others to cover the mere mile or so down to Malejac.

  “The métro or the underground parking garages,” Thomas said suddenly.

  The dominant note in his voice, as in Meyssonnier’s, and probably in my own too, was not grief but a gray astonishment. And for my own part, over and above this general mental stupor, I was experiencing a cottony numbness. I was thinking in a vacuum, with infinite slowness. I couldn’t manage to link things together. It took me several seconds to work out what Thomas had meant.

  “Do you know the Champs Élysées parking garage?” Thomas asked in the same weak but clearly enunciated voice.

  “Yes.”

  “Infinitely long odds,” Thomas went on. “But anyone who happened to be in there, or in the métro, could well have survived, for the moment. But what about afterwards?”

  “What do you mean, afterwards?”

  “Trapped like rats, that’s what I mean. Running from exit to exit, finding them all blocked by the rubble above.”

  “Perhaps not all of them,” I said.

  Again silence, and the longer it lasted the more it gave me the odd sensation that it was making the blackness all around us even blacker. All the same, after a moment I became aware with great clarity that in giving this assessment, apparently so objective, of the possibilities of survival for a handful of the Parisian population, Thomas was actually thinking about his own family.

  I said again, “Perhaps not all.”

  “Let’s assume that then,” Thomas said. “But it still only puts off the moment. In the country you live so self-sufficiently. You have all you need: salt meat, seed and cereals, preserves of all kinds, jam, honey, barrels of oil. But in Paris what would it be like?”

  “They have the big food stores there.”

  “All smashed to smithereens or burned down,” Thomas said with abrupt savagery, as though he had suddenly resolved not to entertain even the slightest hope.

  I didn’t reply this time. He was quite right. Burned down, smashed into the ground, or looted. Looted by the hordes of survivors killing one another for any food that remained. And suddenly, in a flash of vision, my mind grasped the horror of those vast urban concentrations in their annihilation. Tons of collapsed concrete. Miles of shattered buildings. A chaos in which nothing familiar remained, not even a street. Even walking made impossible by the heaps of rubble. A wilderness of silence and the smell of burning. And underneath those shattered buildings, corpses by the million.

  In fact I knew the Champs Élysées parking garage well. I had parked my car there the previous summer when I had taken Birgitta to Paris for a two-day spree. It was a pretty terrifying place to be in at the best of times. And I could imagine it plunged into darkness, the survivors scurrying desperately from floor to floor, finding all the exits blocked.

  At that point, I don’t know how, presumably from sheer exhaustion, I fell asleep and entered a terrible nightmare world, the underground Champs Élysées parking garage merging into the métro, the métro into the Parisian sewer system, and the bands of survivors into scurrying rats. I was one of the rats myself, and at the same time, standing outside myself, I observed myself with horror.

  —|—

  Momo woke us up next morning by hammering on our doors. La Menou had planned breakfast as a surprise treat. She had spread the long refectory table in the house with a brightly colored, albeit slightly darned, Basque tablecloth (the least new of the dozen tablecloths that my aunt had kept folded up in her armoire, and that La Menou washed and mended for me with jealous zeal, as though I was sure to live for two hundred years), and on the cloth were wine and glasses, and on each plate a slice of pickled pork belly and a slice of ham—a sign that our domestic economy had relaxed slightly now that La Menou was sure Adelaide would live to farrow—and beside each plate a large slice of bread spread with lard, since it was better to finish a loaf than let it go to waste. The loaf, now three days old, was rock hard. And there was no butter. It had melted in the now defunct refrigerator.

  When everyone had appeared I sat down, leaving them all to select their own places. Thomas sat on my right, Peyssou on my left. Opposite me was Meyssonnier. On his right, Colin; on his left Momo; and on the other side of Momo, at the foot of the table, La Menou. I don’t know whether it’s true that there is the seed of a habit in every action, but this seating arrangement never varied subsequently—for as long, that is, as there were still only the seven of us to be accommodated.

  I experienced a sensation of unreality eating that breakfast—which was not so very different from those that La Menou laid every morning for Boudenot—and eating it what’s more with a knife and fork, sitting on a chair, faced with a clean tablecloth, with nothing anywhere in the great hall of the house to remind one of the event we had just lived through, except for the trickles of lead down the tiny colored panes of the windows and a layer of gray dust and ash on the ceiling beams. As for the floor, La Menou had already found time to sweep and wash the flagstones; and she had polished the walnut furniture back to a high shine, as though in her courageous determination to live and to reaffirm her roots in everyday routine she had resolved to erase even the memory of what had happened.

  But she had not been able to erase the expressions engraved on the faces of my friends. They all three ate without so much as a glance at anyone else, without a word, and almost without moving, as though looks and movements might have the power to break the state of stupor still anesthetizing their suffering. I foresaw that their awakening was going to be horribly painful and would result—certainly in Peyssou’s case anyway—in further crises of despair. After my conversation with Thomas and the nightmares that had followed it, I had spent the rest of the night thinking things over, and I had come to the conclusion that the only way to provide any advance protection against the shock that lay in store for them was to put them all to work as soon as possible, and myself with them. I waited till they’d finished eating, then I said, “Listen, men, I want to ask for your help and your advice.”

  They lifted their heads. How dead and sad their eyes were! And yet I could see all the same that they were already reacting to my appeal. I had said, “Listen, men,” a manner of addressing them I hadn’t used since the days of our Club. By using it now I was taking up the same attitude toward them that I had always taken then, and I was counting on their doing the same thing. And also, that “Listen, men” meant that we were about to tackle something together, something difficult. It was a second appeal concealed beneath the first.

  I went on: “Problem number one. There are twenty-one very dead animals out in the first enclosure: eleven hors
es, six cows, and four pigs. I won’t bother to mention the stink, since my nose isn’t the only one aware of it, but it’s quite clear that we can’t go on living in these conditions. We’d end up very dead ourselves if we tried. So that, it seems to me, is our problem number one, the most urgent one: What are we to do to get rid of those tons of carrion? [I hit the word “tons” hard.] Luckily my tractor was garaged in the Maternity Ward, so it wasn’t destroyed. And I have some diesel oil, not a vast quantity, but some anyway. I also have plenty of rope and even a few hawsers. So my question is, How do we dispose of the carcasses?”

  They came to life. Peyssou suggested dragging “the poor creatures” out to the public dump near Malejac and depositing them there. But Colin pointed out that the prevailing winds around here were from the west, which meant that they would blow the stench of our dumped carrion back at us almost constantly. Meyssonnier suggested a vast pyre on the road level, so the remains could then be pushed down into the dump below. But I was against such a funeral by fire for twenty-one large animals, since it would require an enormous quantity of wood. And wood was one of the things we were going to need a great deal of next winter, both for cooking and to keep ourselves warm. Indeed that was certainly going to prove one of our most arduous tasks in the near future, prospecting for wood, often at considerable distances, cutting an adequate supply of already half-consumed trunks and branches, then carting it all back to Malevil.

  It was Colin who came up with the idea of the sandpit down by the Rhunes. It was quite close. The track was downhill, which meant the actual transporting of the corpses would be easier. And once they had been deposited in the deepest of the pit’s bays we could shovel sand down from the pit edge above to cover them.

  Someone, I don’t remember who now, objected to the length of time the shoveling would take.

  Thomas turned to me. “When you and Germain were excavating the trench for the mains cable to Malevil, didn’t you once tell me you used dynamite cartridges in the rocky sections?”

  “Yes.”

  “Are there any left?”

  “A dozen or so.”

  “That’s more than enough,” Thomas said. “No need to shovel at all. I can guarantee to blast enough of the pit bank down to cover them.”

  Glances were exchanged. The matter was now theoretically solved, but no one was unaware of just how appalling the actual execution was going to be. I didn’t want to leave them preoccupied with such a wholly negative prospect.

  “There is another decision that will have to be made fairly soon too,” I said. “An agricultural matter this time. Here is the problem as I see it: Ought we to risk resowing right away? I have quite a stock of barley in, and hay too. In fact I had enough put by to keep twenty or so animals, feeding them generously, till next harvest. Right, well the 1977 harvest, I don’t need to go into that!... But if you look at it another way, since I now have only three animals left to feed, what with the hay and the barley together I’ve certainly enough to hold out till the 1978 harvest. I also have enough for the sow too, and more. The only problem in fact concerns ourselves.”

  A slight pause, then I went on: “And our problem is bread. I have no wheat, except a small amount of seed grain.”

  There was a sudden tension in the air and the faces around the table became grave. I looked around at them. It was the age-old fear of not having enough bread to eat that was suddenly griping their guts. An inherited fear. Because they themselves had certainly never experienced that lack, or their parents before them, even during the war. In 1940, in our little neck of the woods, my uncle had often told me, they had reopened the old bakehouses and there had been no lack of clandestine bakings, despite the Vichy government and its bread coupons. “Hard times, yes,” La Menou used to say. “But, Emmanuel, we never went short of bread.”

  Proof that though the oral tradition of famines in the old days had been lost, nevertheless that immemorial dread still lived on in the peasant unconscious.

  “I reckon you’re right about the harvest this year anyway,” Peyssou said. “Coming back from Malejac yesterday, I stopped on the way and dug down a little way with a stick into the field I sowed with wheat for this year.” (It struck me as a good sign, that reaction, considering what he’d just lived through.) “And I found—nothing,” he said, opening both hands palm outward on the table. “Ten times nothing. The dirt was like it had been baked. Nothing but dust, you’d have said.”

  “Your seed wheat, how much do you have?” Colin asked.

  “Enough to sow five acres.”

  “Well, that’s something,” Meyssonnier said.

  La Menou was on her feet, slightly away from the table so as to leave the men free to talk, but all ears, her eyes restless and concerned, her face drawn into lines of profound attention. By no means ready to clear the table, which would have meant going out of earshot. And when Momo began making childish noises and shuffling around the table, she intercepted him with a box on the ears that sent him sulking into a corner.

  “In my opinion,” Meyssonnier said, “you’d be risking nothing by sowing an acre or two.”

  “Risking nothing!” Peyssou erupted in his gruffest and most bearlike tone, giving Meyssonnier a look of reproach. “Nothing but losing an acre or two of seed! And you think that’s nothing do you, carpenter?” (This habit of addressing people according to their trade was a peculiarity of the Club and denoted as much affection as sarcasm.) “Well I can tell you here and now, with the earth like it is now, it couldn’t grow you so much as a single dandelion by the end of summer. Even if you watered it nonstop.”

  He banged the table with the flat of his hand as he spoke, then followed the gesture through by seizing his glass in the hollow of his great hand and emptying it at a swig to give extra emphasis to his pronouncement. I looked across at him with relief. Argument had resuscitated the Peyssou I knew.

  “I think Peyssou is right,” Colin said. “In pasture, when you burn a pile of weeds at Easter, it stays bare all summer. For the grass to come again you have to wait till the next spring. And what’s a heap of burning weeds when you think what the earth has just been through?”

  “But still,” Meyssonnier countered, “if you plow well down, if you turn the soil over deeply enough, there’s no reason why the soil shouldn’t grow something.”

  I listened and watched them. It wasn’t Meyssonnier’s argument that decided me but another consideration altogether. I couldn’t give them back their families, but I could at least provide them with a purposeful activity and a goal. And without that, once the horses were buried, they would just eat their hearts out in idleness.

  “Listen,” I said. “I must say I’m pretty well in agreement with what Peyssou and Colin have said in principle. But I don’t see why we couldn’t give it a try, on an experimental basis.” I paused slightly in order to let this weighty phrase make its mark. “And without it costing us too much in the way of seed.”

  “That’s just what I said too,” Meyssonnier put in.

  I went on: “And it so happens I have just the place for it. A small field down by the Rhunes, an acre and a quarter, no more, down in the valley bottom below the nearest arm of the cliff. Uncle Samuel had it properly drained, and it’s perfectly sweet. Last autumn I mucked it well and plowed the muck well in. So it might be worth at least trying there, replowing, sowing again. Just over an acre—that’s not going to eat up too much of our seed. And we could even gravity irrigate if the spring turns out too dry, since the main Rhune runs alongside.

  “And there’s another thing,” I said. “I doubt if we have enough diesel oil left to do the plowing, not if we use it to bury the animals. So we’re going to have to think about building a single plow”—I looked at Meyssonnier and Colin—“and train Amarante to pull it.” I looked at Peyssou, because he’d used a horse to drag-hoe his vines.

  “Well, if it’s going to be an experiment,” Peyssou said with an air of prudent concession, “I must say I’d be interested to see t
he result. If you can afford to lose a little of your seed.”

  I looked at him hard. “Don’t say ‘You,’ Peyssou; say ‘we.’”

  “What do you mean?” Peyssou said. “Malevil belongs to you, doesn’t it?”

  “No, Peyssou, it doesn’t,” I said, shaking my head. “All that is finished, in the past. Suppose I die tomorrow from illness or an accident, what would happen? Where’s our lawyer? Or our laws of inheritance? Or even our heir? Malevil belongs to those who work in it, and that’s all there is to it.”

  “I’m absolutely in agreement with you,” Meyssonnier said, delighted at finding my pronouncements coinciding for once with his principles.

  “All the same though,” Peyssou said, unable to believe what he’d heard.

  Colin said nothing, but he looked across at me with a shadow of his old smile. He looked as though he was saying, Yes, yes, I quite agree, but what difference does it make really?

  “All right,” I said, “then that’s agreed is it? Once we’ve buried the animals we start to work making that plow, and then we sow down by the Rhunes?”

  There was a murmur of approval. I stood up, and La Menou began clearing the breakfast things off the table, every gesture expressing her disapproval. By saying that Malevil belonged to everyone I had reduced her to a lowest common denominator and stripped her of the power and glory of her position as sole mistress of our ship after me. However, during the days that followed she obviously decided that this collectivization of Malevil didn’t mean much, that it could only have been a polite manner of speaking on my part, intended to put my guests at their ease, and eventually she ceased to worry about it.

  I have no wish to describe the burial of the animals, it was too horrible. The worst part perhaps was getting the horses out of their stalls, because they had already swelled up and couldn’t be got through the doors. We had to knock down the walls.

  We also had to start thinking about clothing, because Colin, Meyssonnier, and Peyssou had nothing but the work clothes they’d been wearing when they came to visit me the day it happened. Luckily I had kept a great many of my uncle’s clothes, so I was able to provide Meyssonnier with a reasonable wardrobe. But Colin presented a problem. I had to persuade La Menou to hand over her husband’s suits, which she had been keeping in mothballs for twenty years without the slightest hope of ever seeing Momo benefit from them, since he was far too big. Which was certainly no reason to give them away! “No, Emmanuel, no! Not even to Colin!” So in the end we all had to set on her, bawl her out, and even threaten to take them from her by main force, those 1950s suits, before she finally gave way. But when she did, it wasn’t by halves. She insisted on altering them all to fit him, poor Colin, who was a good two inches shorter than her man had been. A fact that softened her heart. Because small men and little women, as she said, have to stick together. “And me, as I stand here, Emmanuel, never an inch over four foot eight, and that’s standing up straight too.”