Malevil

  Using an old roofing lath that he scoured and planed, Meyssonnier made us a graduated dipstick that enabled us to check on the rate of consumption. At the end of two weeks it was clear that it was very small. According to Thomas’s calculations, continuing at our present rate it would take six years to empty the first barrel. After which time we should have to find some other source of light, since it was unlikely that any walnut trees had survived the general destruction of our flora.

  I still had two flashlights with almost new batteries in them. I handed one over to La Menou for the gate tower and kept the other in the keep, it being clearly understood that neither was to be used except in the case of an emergency.

  Thomas suggested that we could make washing less unpleasant by piling the fresh droppings from our three mares on the flagstones of the keep roof beneath the water tower. Our cold water supply ran in a zigzag course beneath the stones, and Thomas was fairly sure that the fermenting droppings would produce enough calories to warm it. We were all skeptical at the outset, but his experiment succeeded. And apart from the added comfort it contributed, it was also, in the primitive state into which we had fallen, a first step upward, a first victory. Little Colin swore that if only he had the use of his workshop in La Roque he could have made the central heating work again on the same principle.

  Peyssou was delighted to have Meyssonnier in his room, but it took a certain amount of diplomacy to persuade Colin to sleep alone in Birgitta’s room. What he would have liked, I think, is to replace Thomas in mine. I turned a deaf ear to his hints. The others had always accused me of making a pet of Colin, of “letting him get away with anything.” But that didn’t mean I was blind to his faults. I was certain that I would have been making a very bad bargain if I had exchanged a roommate like Thomas, so calm, so discreet, so reticent, for little Colin.

  And besides, Thomas was already quite isolated enough as it was: by his youth, by his city origins, by his cast of thought, by his character, and by his ignorance of our patois. I had to ask La Menou and Peyssou not to overdo the use of their first language—since neither of them had learned much French till they went to school—because at mealtimes, if they began a conversation in patois, then everyone else, little by little, would begin to drop into patois too, and after a while Thomas was made to feel a stranger in our life.

  It must also be admitted that my friends found Thomas disconcerting. The rigor of his mind was matched by an equal stiffness in his manner, which was always cold. He always spoke briefly and to the point. He couldn’t reach out to people. And above all, since he lacked all sense of humor, and even a sense of the comic, to an unimaginable degree, he never laughed. This imperturbable air of seriousness, such an oddity in our world, could well be taken for arrogance.

  Even Thomas’s most visible virtue did not win him appreciation. I noticed that La Menou had very little admiration for him, even though I knew she had a soft spot for handsome men, such as Boudenot the postman, for example. But the trouble was that despite Thomas’s undeniable good looks, they were again not the sort of good looks appreciated around here. The Greek statue look and the perfect profile were not part of our canon. In Malejac a great beak and a heavy chin didn’t matter, so long as there was vitality behind them. We liked great thickset lads, always ready for a laugh and a joke, and a bit on the boastful side.

  And besides, Thomas was a “new boy.” He had never belonged to the Club. He had no part in our memories. And because I spent a fair amount of time with him, in order to compensate for his isolation at Malevil, the others were a little jealous of him, especially Colin, who was always needling him. But Thomas was totally incapable of engaging in any kind of verbal ping-pong. His thought processes were so slow and so inflexibly serious that he never even attempted to reply to Colin’s sallies. And this silence was construed as contempt, so after having made fun of him, Colin then felt an even greater grudge against him. There too I had to play the diplomat, bear down on Colin a little, and keep the wheels oiled.

  The Bible readings had become a nightly occurrence, much less monotonous in practice than I had feared, since they were frequently interrupted by lively observations and exchanges. Peyssou, for example, was very much put out by the discrimination Cain was obliged to suffer at the hands of the Lord.

  “Do you think that’s fair then? Do you?” he asked me. “You have this boy who’s slaved away to make all the vegetables grow, all that digging and watering and hoeing—that takes it out of you a bit more than taking a few sheep for a walk every day—and the Lord doesn’t even bother to look at his offerings? And the other young whippersnapper, what’s he done, I ask you, except follow his sheep’s bottoms over the hills? So why does he get all the favors, eh?”

  “The Lord, He must already have had this suspicion, thinking Cain was going to kill Abel perhaps,” La Menou said.

  “All the more reason not to make trouble between them with unfairness like that,” Colin said.

  Meyssonnier leaned closer to the fire, elbows on knees, and said with secret satisfaction, “Given that He was omniscient, He must have foreseen the murder. But if He foresaw it, why didn’t He prevent it?”

  But this insidious argument missed fire with the others. It was too abstract.

  The more Peyssou thought about it, the more he identified himself with Cain. “The fact is,” he said, “it doesn’t matter where you go, there’s always a pet. Look at Monsieur le Coutellier in school. Colin always in the front row next to the stove. And me always at the back with my face to the wall and my hands on my head. And what had I done? Nothing!”

  “Oh, come on, that’s not true!” Colin said with his gondola smile. “We all know why Le Coutellier made you stand at the back. Because you couldn’t keep your hands off you-know-what through the hole in your pocket.”

  There was laughter at this engaging memory.

  “And that’s why he made you put your hands on your head too,” Colin added.

  “All the same,” Peyssou said, “if someone is making sure you always get the rough end of the stick, how can you help it? You’re bound to turn nasty. You’ve got that good lad Cain, a hard worker who grows his carrots and takes them to give them to the Lord. So what then? He doesn’t even look at them. Which just goes to show,” he added bitterly, “that even in those days the Authorities didn’t give a damn about agriculture.”

  Although the Authorities were now a thing of the past, this observation met with general approval. Then silence fell, and I was able to continue my reading. But when I got to the place where Cain knew his wife and she conceived and bore Enoch, La Menou interrupted me. “And where did she spring from, I’d like to know,” she said sharply. She was sitting on the hearth seat behind me, with Momo opposite her, already half asleep.

  I turned to look at her over my shoulder. “Where did who spring from?”

  “Cain’s wife!”

  We all looked at one another, puzzled.

  “Perhaps the Lord had made another Adam and Eve somewhere else,” Colin suggested.

  “No, no, of course He hadn’t,” Meyssonnier said, as ever a stickler for orthodoxy. “If He had, then the book would say so.”

  “So she was his sister then?” Colin said.

  “Whose sister?” Peyssou asked, leaning forward and staring into Colin’s face.

  “Cain’s sister.”

  Peyssou continued to stare at him but said nothing.

  “Bound to be,” La Menou said.

  “Still, it seems...” Peyssou said, then stopped.

  A short silence. It was odd, considering their fondness for a bawdy joke, how uncomfortable the idea of incest made them. Perhaps for the very reason that in the depth of the country...

  I went on with my reading, but I didn’t get far.

  “Enoch,” Peyssou said suddenly, “That’s a Jewish name.” Then he added with a slightly self-important and knowledgeable air, “I knew a fellow in the Army named Enoch. He was a Jew.”

  “Well, it’s
hardly surprising he had a Jewish name, is it?” Colin said.

  “Oh, and why is it hardly surprising?” Peyssou asked, once more leaning forward to stare into his face.

  “Because Enoch’s parents were Jewish, weren’t they?”

  “His parents were Jewish?” Peyssou said, opening his eyes very wide and clutching his knees with outspread fingers.

  “And his grandparents too.”

  “What!” Peyssou said. “You mean Adam and Eve were Jews?”

  “What of it?”

  Peyssou’s mouth gaped, he sat for a moment without moving, eyes fixed on Colin. “But Adam and Eve, we’re descended from them too,” he said at last.

  “Right.”

  “So we’re Jews too then?”

  “So?” Colin said stolidly.

  Peyssou collapsed against the back of his chair. “Well, you know, I’d never have thought it.”

  He chewed over this revelation for a while and must have eventually construed it as proof of yet another flagrant piece of favoritism, because after a moment he asked indignantly, “Then why do the Jews think they’re so much more Jewish than us?”

  Everyone laughed, except Thomas. To look at him, lips firmly sealed, arms folded, chin sunk on chest, legs stretched out straight in front of him, it was clear that he was finding little interest in these exchanges, and even less in the readings that provoked them. It occurred to me that he would probably have gone to bed directly after the evening meal if it weren’t for the need, shared by us all, of soaking in a little human warmth after his hard day’s work.

  The fact that we even laughed on occasion during the course of those evening sessions was something that I found amazing at first. But then I remembered what my uncle had told me about his evenings as a prisoner of war in Germany. “Don’t you go thinking we just sat there around the stove wailing our heads off, Emmanuel, out there in East Prussia. Quite the opposite. We amazed the Boches with our merriment. We told jokes, we sang, we laughed. But underneath, Emmanuel, it didn’t mean much, you realize. It was a monastery sort of merriment. There was an emptiness behind it. Even good friends around you, it’s not really a substitute.”

  Monastery merriment, yes, that was it, the exact phrase, and I really became aware of its accuracy only then, as I listened to my friends as they argued, with Volume I of Uncle Samuel’s Bible on my knees. And since my left side was frozen by that time (what icy weather for May!), I got up and shifted over, stool and book as well, to the other side of the fireplace, though I wasn’t going to stay there long, because I was too close to Momo, and the heat of the fire was making his smell even more distressing than usual. I made a note to speak to La Menou and suggest a wash for Momo as one of tomorrow’s chores.

  Beyond my companions (and it took a conscious effort to include Thomas among them, he is so different) I could see their shadows dancing up the wall as far as the great ceiling beams. I couldn’t make out the far end of the hall, it was too big, but between two flickers of flame I could make out on my left, between the two mullioned windows, the stretch of unplastered stone wall bristling with steel-bladed weapons. Behind Peyssou there was the long refectory table, gleaming from La Menou’s ever-active duster, and on the right, the two swag-fronted commodes from La Grange Forte. Beneath my feet were the great stone flags covering the vaulting of the cellar below.

  An austere setting: stone floor, stone walls, neither curtains nor carpets, nothing warm, nothing to suggest the presence of a woman. A world of men alone, without heirs, waiting for death. An abbey or monastery. Everything was there, the work, the “merriment,” the readings from the Scriptures.

  I don’t know how, but somehow from the Jews who “think they’re so much more Jewish than us” the conversation had moved on to the problem of finding out whether or not there were any survivors in La Roque. It was a subject that cropped up every evening. There was a standing plan to go there before long, but it wasn’t that easy. After a great struggle we had finally cleared the road from Malevil to Malejac of the trees brought down by the fire, but the nine miles from Malejac to La Roque was a very hilly, twisty road mostly through chestnut woods. From the little we had seen of it, it seemed certain that it must be equally obstructed by the remains of the great fires, and we had no fuel left to clear it. On foot, before, it used to take a good three hours on average to reach La Roque. If we had to negotiate fallen trees all the way, it would take a whole day now, then another day to get back to Malevil: forty-eight hours that for the time being—until our sowing was over and done with—we could ill afford to waste.

  Or at least that was my usual argument. Now, with the big book heavy on my knees, I listened to my companions and kept mum. Because I was the one it had first occurred to, I was responsible for raising this hope in them of finding life at La Roque. And now, by dint of talking about it every evening, they had given my abstract conjecture a shape and body. Yet the larger it loomed for them, the more it shrank in my own mind. I made no effort whatever to urge on the projected expedition. Quite the contrary. While Meyssonnier and Colin went on patching together that plow of theirs I was quite happy to stay at Malevil with the other two, pulling nails out of the old planks and organizing our storeroom.

  I could see that there was an element of withdrawal and resignation in my attitude. I was shrinking into myself day by day; I was already more than half the compleat monk. And sitting there listening with half an ear—faithful to my strategy of intermittent attention—neck pressed against the stone upright of the fireplace, I wondered whether it would make any difference if I really believed in God. Of course I knew it would land me with a new set of problems, among them: Why has God allowed His creature to destroy His creation? But leaving the field of ideas out of it, would religious faith at least bring a little warmth into my heart? I didn’t know. But I didn’t think it would. It was so far away, all that. So abstract. When I dreamed, it wasn’t about God.

  I had two sorts of dreams, the waking, consciously evoked sort with which I furnished my sleepless hours, and then the other, involuntary sort while I was asleep. In my waking hours, with my chest, my belly, my thighs pressed hard against the mattress, I conjured up Birgitta again. And when she was really there, alive, warm, satin-smooth in my arms, then I hurled myself upon her, I kneaded her, I bit her. No, to say I bit her isn’t enough. I engulfed her, I drank her, I ate her. And that, I suppose, is why she vanished so soon. And why it was growing more difficult every time to bring her back to life.

  The dream I dreamed in my sleep—almost always the same—was far less frustrating. I was walking down some stairs in Cimiez, above Nice, on a bright summer morning. The stairs were familiar, even though I have only walked down them once in real life. They were wide and full of light in my dream, because the sun was streaming in through tall windows. And as I walked down them, a girl was running up to meet me, her hair floating loose, her arms hanging gracefully at her sides. She had lovely breasts, alive with the eagerness of her ascent. And as she moved to meet me across the halfway landing, the sun lit up her hair floating behind her. She climbed the last stairs, face lifted to greet me. I didn’t know her, and yet with all her eyes, with all her mouth, she was smiling at me in friendship. And that was all. It stopped there. And yet I felt—how can I express it?—as refreshed by that vision as if I had been breathing in the scent of armfuls of lilac.

  The night before, immediately after this dream, I had woken up, and the reaction as it faded had been very painful. I experienced simultaneously an appalling sense of grief and acute physical distress. I could feel my rib cage shrinking tight around my heart, and as though the two things were connected I also had an abominable impression of solitude. Or rather, this loneliness made itself apparent to me in the form of a pain centered in my chest. I sat up in bed and concentrated on trying to breathe. And to my great surprise I succeeded without the slightest difficulty. Heart, lungs, they were performing their functions, there was no specific place where it hurt, just a tremendous t
ightness in my throat and that curious sensation of tension mounting and mounting while you wait for it to explode—and that does finally burst as the tears start to flow.

  As they streamed down my cheeks, without a sob, the same wearisome refrain repeated itself over and over in my head: I didn’t marry, I have no children. The death of the human race was at hand. I was going to see it. Because suddenly I was obsessed with the absurd conviction that all my companions, even Thomas, who was fifteen years my junior, would die before me, leaving me alone. And I could see myself, old and bent, walking endlessly through Malevil’s enormous rooms, listening to my own footsteps reverberating in the cellar, under the arched ceiling, in the great hall of the house, in my own room up in the keep.

  It was the first light night since the day it happened, or perhaps it was already morning. On the sofa across from me, and much lower than the level of my own rustic double bed which stood so high on its wooden legs, I could make out Thomas’s face, eyes closed, cheek pressed on his pillow in defenseless sleep, the bedclothes pulled up to his chin and around the back of his neck as a protection from the draft from the window. Once again I admired his features, his Grecian nose, the firm outline of his lips, the molding of his cheeks. I noticed that in sleep he had lost the stern expression always seen on his face during his waking hours. In fact he looked somehow childlike and vulnerable. His beard was fair and grew slowly, so he only had to shave every other day. And since he had shaved that morning, there was not the slightest shadow on his cheek. It looked quite smooth, with a velvety bloom, and the hint of a dimple that I had never noticed before just by the corner of his mouth. His curly blond hair, cut short when I met him that day in the undergrowth, had grown since he had come to live at Malevil, and now gave him an almost feminine air.