Malevil

  “Yes, but I’ll tell you something,” La Menou said. “My mother now, she died at ninety-seven, but I’m not expecting to live that long now, not when I think that there are no doctors, and just the slightest touch of flu, phut, away you go.”

  “You can’t be certain of that,” Peyssou said, “because even in the days when you didn’t see much medicine and such around here, there were still people who lived a long while. My old granddad for example.”

  “All right, so let’s say fifty years,” Colin said with a note of exasperation in his voice. “In fifty years we shall all be gone, the whole lot of us, except perhaps Thomas, who’ll be seventy-five. Think of that,” he added, turning to look at Thomas. “You’re going to have a high old time, aren’t you lad, all alone here in Malevil?”

  At that, the silence became so heavy that I lifted my head from my book. Though as a matter of fact I had been unable to read a single line of it that evening, so worried was I by the low state of our morale since the birth of Malice. I couldn’t see La Menou, because she was perched on the hearth seat behind me, and Momo only indistinctly, because although he was in my line of vision the flames and smoke of the fire made it impossible to distinguish anything but his slouched form. But I could observe the other four on their chairs facing me, and without embarrassing them, since the fire behind me kept my face in shadow. The only drawback to this position was that only my right side got any warmth and light, and eventually my left side would become numb with cold. So before long I got into the habit of shifting myself over to the other pillar of the fireplace halfway through the evening, taking my book and stool with me, in order to warm up my cold side.

  Thomas, as usual, was quite expressionless. On Peyssou’s good-natured round face, with its wide mouth, its big nose, its large and slightly protruding eyes, and a forehead so narrow that he seemed to have difficulty keeping his hairline away from his eyebrows, I could read despair, as though in a book. But little Colin’s bitterness was almost more disturbing. Because although it hadn’t been able to erase his gondola smile, it had leached him of every trace of gaiety. Meyssonnier had the faded look of an old photograph in a drawer. But still that same knife-blade face, the two very close-set gray eyes, the high narrow forehead, the brush of short hair. And yet the flame had gone.

  “You can’t be sure,” Peyssou said, turning his head to look at Colin. “How can you be sure Thomas will be the last one here? Even though he is young. At that rate there wouldn’t be anyone buried in Malejac graveyard but old people, which you know is not so. Though I don’t mean to offend Thomas by saying so,” he added with his usual peasant courtesy, bowing slightly in Thomas’s direction.

  “It doesn’t matter to me,” Thomas said in even tones. “If I’m left alone it’s no problem. Up on the keep and over, right away.”

  I was angry with him for saying that, with everyone else in such a depressed state.

  “Well, my boy, we see things very differently, that I can tell you,” La Menou said. “Me, if I was left alone in Malevil, I wouldn’t say goodbye so quickly, not while there were the animals to look after.”

  “That’s true,” Peyssou said. “There are the animals.”

  I was grateful to him for having said that, so spontaneously and so resolutely.

  “Oh, the animals,” Colin said with a kind of bitter violence so different from the almost chirruping, fluttering gaiety that always lay behind everything he said before, “they’d manage all right without you. Not at the moment, I don’t mean, now that everything is burned and destroyed, but when the grass starts growing again, then you could just let Adelaide and Princesse go if you wanted. They’d always find enough to live on.”

  “Yes, but animals can be company for a body too,” La Menou said. “Why, I remember La Pauline, when she was left alone on that farm of hers, after her husband fell off the trailer with a stroke and they’d killed her son in the Algerian war. She told me herself, you’d never believe it, ‘Menou,’ she said, ‘but I talk to them all day long, these animals of mine.’”

  “La Pauline was old though,” Peyssou said, “and the older people are, the more they want to go on living. I really can’t see why.”

  “You’ll see right enough when you get there,” La Menou told him.

  “Oh, I didn’t mean that for you,” Peyssou said hastily, anxious as always not to hurt anyone. “And anyway there’s no comparison. La Pauline was a big woman. She hardly ever moved from that chair. And you, you’re always trotting here, trotting there.”

  “Oh, yes!” La Menou said. “I’m always trotting, all right! I trot so much that one day I shall trot myself right into the graveyard. Oh, do be quiet, you great booby,” she was immediately forced to add for Momo’s benefit. “I’ve told you we’re not talking about tomorrow, so stop that noise.”

  “There’s one thing I can’t get out of my head though,” Meyssonnier said. “It’s been on my mind ever since Adelaide and Princesse had Prince and the piglets. Fifty years from now, not a man left on earth; but the pigs and the cows, they’ll be teeming all over by then.”

  “It’s true,” Peyssou said, resting his massive forearms on his spread thighs and leaning toward the fire. “I’ve thought about that too. And I can tell you, Meyssonnier, it’s a thought I can’t stand: Malejac with its woods and its pasture again, cows all over, and not a man anywhere.”

  Silence fell and spread. All their faces were turned toward the flames in a gloomy daze, as though they could make out in their flickering the future Peyssou had described: Malejac with its woods and its pastures again, cows all over, and not a man anywhere. I looked at my friends and saw myself in them. Man is the only animal species capable of conceiving the notion of his own disappearance, and the only one capable of the despair that notion brings. What a strange race: so savagely determined to destroy itself, so savagely intent on preserving itself.

  “So what it means,” Peyssou said, as though finally reaching the end of a long train of thought, “what it means is that surviving isn’t enough. If you want to be interested in it, then you’ve got to know it will go on when you’re gone.”

  He must have thought of Yvette and his two children as he spoke, because his face suddenly froze and he stayed there without moving, forearms resting on his thighs, mouth still open, staring into the fire with lost eyes.

  “There’s no proof that we’re the only survivors though,” I put in after a moment. “It was the cliff shielding us to the north that saved Malevil. It’s possible that there are other spots, and maybe not so far away either, where the same conditions saved other people.”

  But I refrained from mentioning La Roque by name. I didn’t want to arouse too much hope in them for fear of the possible disappointment.

  “I don’t know,” Meyssonnier said. “A cellar like Malevil’s, that’s not something you come across often.”

  I shook my head. “It wasn’t the cellar so much as the cliff. Look at the animals in the Maternity Ward. They survived all right without being in the cellar.”

  “Ah, but it’s very deep as caves go, your Maternity Ward,” Colin said. “And just think of the thickness of the stone, above and on both sides. And besides, who’s to say that animals haven’t got greater powers of resistance than us.”

  “As a matter of fact,” I said, “I’m inclined to believe the opposite. That mentally our power of resistance is greater than theirs.”

  “I would say that they suffered less physically,” Thomas said. “The sudden heat must have been more violent in the cave, but it would have been shorter. The air cooled down quicker out there. There wasn’t that oven effect that we had in the cellar.” Then with a look at me he added, “But I agree with you. There must have been other survivors here and there all over the place. Even in the cities.” Then he stopped abruptly and pressed his lips together as though to prevent himself saying any more.

  “Well, all I can say is I don’t believe it, that’s all,” Meyssonnier said with a shake of the head
.

  Colin raised his eyebrows again and Peyssou shrugged. The fact was that they were almost comfortable now in their unhappiness and didn’t want to hear about anything that might disturb it, as though there was a kind of security down there, in the thick mud of their despair, and they didn’t want to risk losing it.

  There was a very long silence. I looked at my watch: barely nine o’clock. The fire was still a long way from having consumed its nightly wood ration. A pity to waste all that warmth and go up to bed so soon in our icy rooms. I went back to my reading, but not for long.

  “And what is it you’re reading there then, my poor Emmanuel?” La Menou asked.

  “Poor” was simply a term of endearment, it didn’t mean she felt sorry for me.

  “The Old Testament.” Then I added, “The Scriptures, if you prefer.”

  Because I was pretty sure that La Menou’s knowledge of the Bible went no further than the potted and bowdlerized version that she had been given during her catechism classes.

  “Yes, of course,” she said. “I recognize it now. Your uncle too, he was always there reading at it.”

  “What!” Meyssonnier exclaimed. “You’re reading the Bible? You?”

  “I promised Uncle Samuel I would,” I answered curtly. “And I must say I find it interesting.”

  “Come on now, Meyssonnier,” Colin said with something like his old smile, “are you forgetting that you were always first in Scriptural Knowledge?”

  “Oh, what a grind he was, eh, old Meyssonnier!” Peyssou exclaimed with a brief flash of merriment. “He could reel it all off like a talking book. The bit I always remember best is the youngest son and his brothers who sold him into slavery. And isn’t it the truth,” he went on after a moment’s reflection, “that it’s always someone in the family who’ll do the dirt on you worst?”

  Another silence.

  “And why don’t you read it to us out loud?” La Menou said.

  “Out loud?” I echoed.

  “And why not?” Peyssou said. “I know I’d like hearing them all again, those stories in there, because I can’t remember a one of them now.”

  “Emmanuel’s uncle,” La Menou said, “the poor man was always ready to please, and sometimes he used to read me pieces out of his book of an evening.”

  “Come on, Emmanuel, don’t make us twist your arm,” Colin said.

  “But it may bore you all,” I said, taking care not to look directly at Thomas.

  “It never would. What nonsense,” La Menou said. “And it’s a better thing listening to your book than sitting saying nothing worth listening to, or all staying shut up in our own heads thinking.” And she added, “Especially now there’s no TV.”

  “I think you’re quite right, Menou,” Peyssou said.

  I looked across at Meyssonnier, then at Thomas, but neither returned my glance. “I certainly don’t mind, if everyone wants it,” I said after a moment. Then since Meyssonnier and Thomas just went on staring into the fire and refusing to speak, I said, “Meyssonnier?”

  He wasn’t expecting a direct attack like that. He straightened up and leaned back in his chair. “You know I’m a materialist,” he said with dignity, “but as long as no one is trying to force me to believe in God, I have no objection to listening to the early history of the Jewish people.”

  “Thomas?”

  Quite relaxed, hands in pockets, legs stretched out in front of him, Thomas fixed his eyes on the tips of his boots. “Given that you are already reading the Bible to yourself,” he said in a totally noncommittal tone, “why shouldn’t you read it out loud?”

  An equivocal reply to say the least, but I decided to make do with it. I also had the feeling that a reading would do my friends good. During the day they kept busy, but the evening was a bad time for them; that was when they missed the warmth of their homes. There were scarcely bearable silences sometimes, and then I could almost see their minds whirring around, endlessly, pointlessly, in the void of their present existence. And besides, the life of the primitive tribes described in the Bible was not without a certain resemblance now to what our own had become. I was certain that they would find it interesting. I also hoped they might be fired by the example of the Jews’ stubborn determination to survive.

  I moved over to the other side of the fireplace, carrying my closed book and my stool, in order to warm up my left side. La Menou threw a bundle of twigs onto the fire to provide me with a little more light, I opened the Bible at the first page, and began reading the book of Genesis.

  As I read, I felt deep emotions stir in me, mingled with a feeling of bitter irony. It was, beyond any doubt, a magnificent poem. A great song telling of the creation of the world, and there I was reciting it in a world destroyed, to men who had lost everything they ever had.

  —|—

  [NOTE ADDED BY THOMAS]

  While certain details are still fresh in the reader’s mind I should like to point out two errors in Emmanuel’s account.

  1. I think that Emmanuel must have lost consciousness several times while we were in the cellar, because there was no point at which I was not there beside him, and yet for most of the time he couldn’t see me and didn’t answer when I spoke to him. One thing I can state categorically however: At no point did I see him sitting in the rinsing tub. And no one else did either. This illusion on his part must have been the result of delirium, and similarly his later remorse for his “selfishness.”

  2. It wasn’t Emmanuel who closed the cellar door again after Germain’s “terrifying” entrance. It was Meyssonnier. In his semiconscious state at that time, Emmanuel must have substituted himself for Meyssonnier, whose movements, strangely enough, he has described very accurately apart from attributing them to himself: in particular the way Meyssonnier dragged himself over to the door on all fours, but without going over to Germain’s body.

  I should also like to add an observation:

  Although an atheist, I am not anticlerical, and although I did display a certain reticence when Emmanuel began his Bible readings in the evenings, it was purely because this ceremony—that may not be quite the right word but I can’t think of a better—seemed to me to reinforce rather too strongly something that already existed: the almost religious nature of the influence that Emmanuel exercised over his friends. Especially when Emmanuel read the chosen passages the way he did, with his beautiful deep voice so vibrant with emotion. I willingly concede that Emmanuel was a man of brilliant imagination, and that his emotion was mainly a literary one. But that’s precisely what I found dangerous: the confusion.

  Because to say, as Emmanuel does, that Genesis is a “magnificent poem” is to ignore rather too easily the scientific errors with which it teems.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Those first weeks after the day it happened leave me with a sensation of grayness—outside as well as in our lives—of dull grief, of marching on the spot, of dead end, of futile striving. Because we worked very hard, at tasks that were often totally uninteresting but that we took on as a matter of discipline, and also because we were trying, despite everything, and without feeling any great love for life, to organize ourselves for survival.

  Meyssonnier and Colin continued to perfect a plow to which we could harness Amarante, while Thomas, Peyssou, and I harnessed ourselves to a chore that was less urgent perhaps but in the long run just as useful: collecting, listing, and storing away all the metallic objects we could find—including those that at first glance might perhaps seem of no value but which, from the very fact that they could no longer be made, were from then on literally priceless.

  We began, of course, with all our farm and construction tools and equipment. I myself had not always been very thrifty about such things in the past, because if you left a pair of pincers to rust in the grass, or simply lost it, you could always replace it so easily. From now on we had to get it firmly through our heads that such acts of negligence were practically crimes.

  The store was set up on the ground floor of t
he keep, where there was already a quantity of shelving, built to store the apples from an orchard that had now ceased to exist. I placed the most precious of the tools into locked boxes, and with his assent we elected Thomas unanimously for the office of storekeeper. Which meant that from then on no tool could be borrowed without a written record of the borrower and the time of issue being made.

  The task completed, I recalled that in one of the unoccupied stalls in the outer enclosure I had stored a number of old planks bristling with nails, my intention at that time, during the restoration of Malevil, being to use them for kindling for the fireplaces during the winter. An unthinkable idea now! The days of such thoughtless waste were over with a vengeance. Nothing could be thrown away any more: not the smallest sheet of paper or cardboard box or empty food can, not a plastic bottle or length of string or cord, not a single bent or rusty nail. The word trash can had ceased to have a meaning.

  We retrieved the old planks from the stall. We pulled out all the nails with hammers and pincers, taking infinite pains not to break the heads. And after straightening them all individually on a flat stone, we stored them away, neatly arranged according to size, in a compartmented box in the storeroom. Using a hand saw rather than the power saw, in order to save gasoline, we cut away any rotted or badly splintered sections (the only pieces now destined for the fire), cleaned away the plaster or cement on the two sides, and arranged the planks in piles in the stall, arranged according to size and kept strictly horizontal by means of blocks, in order to make sure they did not warp during cold weather.

  In preparation for the expected tourists, I had got in a stock of giant candles. I still had two dozen of them not yet unpacked, plus another four still almost intact in their brackets down in the cellar, and two half burned.

  We decided to make use of them with the utmost parsimony, and since I still had two barrels of walnut oil, Colin made us a series of little lamps out of cylindrical food cans. He pinched the edges of them together on one side so as to form a beak to hold the wick, which was just a strand of hemp from an untwisted rope, then he cut little handles from the lids of the cans and used my soldering iron to fix them to the lamps on the side opposite the wicks. He made as many of these lamps as there were bedrooms in Malevil at the time, which is to say four. When our evening session around the fire was over, we all lit our lamps with a twig from the fire so that we could find our way easily to our beds through the darkness and could see to undress. La Menou was given the job of distributing the oil, because she was already responsible in any case for the second barrel, which had been earmarked for cooking purposes but had not yet been broached.