Malevil

  I rolled over abruptly in my bed, turning my back to him, and it occurred to me that one day I must revise our sleeping arrangements, have a rota system in fact, so that I wouldn’t always have Thomas in my bedroom, since mine is really the most comfortable. And at the same time I became aware of an odd feeling of anxiety and guilt for which I could discern no particular cause but which kept me awake, my muddled thoughts broken only by the briefest dozes now and then. And even these were broken into by nightmares so painful and humiliating that I eventually got up. I picked my clothes up in a bundle from my chair, left the room, and went down to the bathroom on the floor below. But even there, until I had finished shaving, the hateful and shameful fantasies pursued me. I took a shower and stayed under it a long time. I felt that I was washing off the filth of my dreams.

  It was five o’clock by my watch when I emerged from the keep into the small courtyard. As on every other day since the day it happened, the weather was cold and gray. I was the only person up in Malevil. My steps echoed on the cobbles. The vast keep, the ramparts, and the house were massive weights bearing down on me. I had two long hours of solitude stretching ahead before breakfast.

  I walked out across the drawbridge, then through the outer enclosure to the Maternity Ward. Bel Amour was asleep on her feet, her foal as well, leaning against her flank, but as soon as I put my chin over the partition of her stall, Bel Amour’s little ears pricked up, she opened her eyes, saw me, and puffed the air out through her nostrils in a tiny muffled neigh of greeting. She took a step toward me, and the half-wakened foal staggered, then moved forward in its turn, wobbling on its long, slender legs until it had regained the support of its mother’s still swollen belly. Bel Amour reached her head over the partition and laid it without any ado on my shoulder, so I could stroke the top of her cheek as I looked over at the foal.

  It’s something that always melts the heart, a young animal, young human animals included. Malice had the same white blaze on her forehead and the same dark chestnut coat as her mother, and she was returning my scrutiny with an astonished look in her beautiful, innocent eyes. I would have liked to go into the stall and stroke her too, but I wasn’t sure that Bel Amour would be very pleased about that, so I deprived myself of the pleasure. Bel Amour laid her mouth, then her soft damp nostrils against my neck and gave another friendly snort. Everything indicated that she was perfectly happy. She was looked after, even spoiled, by us, she was well fed, and she had her foal. She didn’t know that Malice was her last offspring, and that her kind, like ours, was doomed to extinction.

  The day was spent on our customary monotonous tasks. And in the evening I lived once more through the same fireside scene, elbows on my Bible, head in hands, listening intermittently to the conversation about La Roque. The fire had sunk low by now, and La Menou, dozing on her hearth seat, suddenly shook herself and rose, thereby giving the signal that it was time for bed. Immediately there was a great noise of feet on stone and chairs being banged back into place around the table. Tongs in hand, La Menou arranged the dying logs skillfully in the fireplace so as to ensure that there would still be embers left next day, and as I lingered for a moment on my feet, my closed Bible under one arm, joking and laughing with my companions, I was afraid of the moment when I would be back once more in bed, trapped in the same old circle of thoughts like a prisoner in his exercise yard.

  I remember that evening well, and the dread I felt at the thought of another sleepless night. It is vivid in my memory because it was the following day that everything changed and things began to move.

  As in a classical tragedy, the event was heralded by signs, portents, premonitions. It was just as cold as on all the previous days, the sky opaque, and the horizon still invisible. At breakfast, ever since Prince was born, we all had a little milk to drink, a little less than a bowl each, and even then Thomas had been forced to insist at length that everyone drank it, for dietetic reasons, since neither Meyssonnier, Colin, nor Peyssou liked milk. Momo, on the other hand, guzzled his down with gluttonous delight. Clasping the bowl in both filthy hands and emitting little anticipatory grunts of pleasure, he would fix his shining black eyes on the liquid in it, and gloat over the sight of its snowy surface for a few seconds before gulping it down, so quickly and so avidly that two thin white trickles would run down each side of his chin and then down his grimy neck, through the bristles of his two-week beard.

  “You know, Menou,” I said when he’d put his bowl down again, “it’s time we faced up to it. Your offspring is due for ablution.”

  My words had been chosen with the intention of leaving the potential protagonist in ignorance as long as possible of the intended operation, which depended for its success on total surprise.

  “I’ve been thinking the same thing a while now,” La Menou answered, keeping her language equally allusive and without looking at Momo. “But on my own, as you know...” Then she added, “But whenever you like.”

  “Fine, then right after breakfast, I suggest. While Peyssou is out plowing the plot by the Rhunes with Amarante. After all, four of us should be enough.”

  I am quite certain that Momo hadn’t grasped either the word “offspring” or the word “ablution,” which was after all why I had used them. And I had also taken care, like La Menou, not to look at him during our exchange. But despite our precautions, his infallible instinct warned him. His glance flashed from his mother to me, he jumped to his feet, knocking over his chair, and shouted in a furious voice, “Eave ee ahone, ham hyoo! Momo hate horter!” (Leave me alone, damn you! Momo hates water!) Whereupon, snatching up the slice of ham from his plate, he took to his heels and was out through the door in a flash.

  “He had you nicely there,” Peyssou cried with a laugh. “And now you won’t get near him for the rest of the day.”

  “There you’re wrong,” La Menou told him. “You just don’t know Momo. He will just forget. Any idea at all, no sooner does he get it in one ear than it’s flown out the other. That’s how he never worries about things. He can’t remember anything to worry for.”

  “Well, he’s a lucky lad then,” Colin said with a shadow of his old smile. “Because my trouble is the opposite, my head’s too full of ideas. All going around and around all the time. So that sometimes I’d rather I was an idiot and have none.”

  “Momo is not an idiot,” La Menou told him sharply. “Emmanuel’s uncle always said it: ‘That Momo, he’s intelligent, you know. It’s just the language he can’t learn. And that’s why nothing sticks with him.’”

  “No offense intended,” Colin said politely.

  “Oh, I didn’t take it the wrong way, don’t worry,” La Menou said, flashing him a smile, her bright eyes momentarily lighting up that tiny death’s head perched on its thin little neck. “And where do we look for him, my Momo, right after breakfast? I’ll tell you where: in Bel Amour’s stall, where he’ll be fussing over her as usual. You wait for him to come out, and there you are. With four of you to one it will be child’s play.”

  “Child’s play!” I said. “It’s a game I’d be glad to get out of, I can tell you. And whatever you do, look out for his feet. Meyssonnier and I will take an arm each and get him down. Then you take the right foot, Colin, and Thomas the left. But be careful, because he’ll kick. And he has very strong legs on him.”

  “Just the way you used to dunk me in the river, damn you,” Peyssou said, his great peasant’s face split by a broad smile. “Rotten mob of bastards,” he added fondly.

  The laughter this caused was cut off abruptly. The door of the great hall flew open with a crash and Momo reappeared, mad with excitement and joy, yelling and jumping up and down where he stood, arms waving. “Hehaho! Hehaho!” he shouted.

  Although I was by now at least as expert as his mother in decoding Momo’s speech, I had no idea what he was saying. I looked at La Menou, and clearly she hadn’t understood either. In Momo language “I’m hurt” came out as “Haihuh,” and anyway his evident jubilation excluded any
idea of a fall or wound.

  “Haho?” La Menou asked at last as she stood up. “What’s that? Haho?”

  “Haho! Hawhosake!” Momo yelled, hopping with fury, as though beside himself with indignation that we weren’t able to interpret his words.

  “Now then, Momo,” I said as I too got up and went over to him, “calm down and explain! What exactly is that haho?”

  “Haho!” he screamed again. Then suddenly stretching his arms out on either side of him, he waved them up and down as though he was flying.

  “A crow?” I said without thinking.

  “Hess! Hess!” Momo said, and his face alight with gratitude, he cried, “Hood oh Ehanooel! Hood oh Ehanooel!” (Good old Emmanuel!), and would certainly have hugged me if I hadn’t held him as far away from me as the length of my arm would allow.

  “Now, Momo, are you sure? A crow here at Malevil?”

  “Hess! Hess!”

  We exchanged totally incredulous glances. We had all accepted, ever since the day it happened, that the race of birds was silenced forever.

  “Hum anh! Hum anh!” Momo cried, tugging at the arm with which I was fending him off. I released my grip, and immediately he was off and out of the door again, his feet scarcely touching the ground. I ran after him, preceded by the clattering of his hobnailed boots across the cobbles and followed in turn by our companions, La Menou included, and not left as far behind as one might have expected, I noticed, looking back.

  Ahead, I saw Momo halt and freeze on the drawbridge. I stopped too. And there it was, barely twenty yards away across the outer enclosure, opposite the entrance to the Maternity Ward. Not noticeably thin, obviously not injured, its blue-black feathers gleaming with health, it was hopping heavily to and fro across the cobbles, pecking up a barley grain here and a seed there with its big beak. Once aware of our presence, it froze and turned sideways in order to scrutinize us with one vigilant bead of an eye. It straightened its neck, though without managing to eliminate the bend of its back, so it looked like a hunched old man, hands clasped behind his back, head cocked slightly to one side, peering at us with a very wise and circumspect air. No one in the group moved, and our very immobility must have alarmed it, because it suddenly spread its great blue-black wings and skimmed away from us with a single loud “caw.” Then it flapped slowly upward, alighted on the roof of the gate tower, and hid behind the chimney stack, from behind which, after a moment or so, its big drooping beak reappeared, followed by one sagacious eye still fixed on our motionless figures.

  We walked out into the enclosure then, heads in the air, eyes fixed on what it was allowing us to see of it.

  “Well now,” Peyssou said, “if you’d said to me, ‘The day will come when you’ll be glad to clap eyes on a crow,’ I’d never have believed it.”

  “And seeing it so close,” La Menou said. “Because the Lord knows what suspicious beasts your crows are. And so cunning with it that they’ll never let you come closer than a hundred yards without they flap away.”

  “Unless you’re in an automobile,” Colin said.

  The remark cast a chill, because it belonged to the world of before, but the chill was quickly thawed by the general euphoria that had gripped us all, a euphoria masked by a sudden gush of words, but none the less sharply felt for all that. Agreement was reached that on the day it happened, whether by chance or instinct, the crow must have been in one of the many caves with which the cliffs all around are riddled (and in which Protestant fugitives used to hide during the religious wars). It had been wily enough to get well inside one of them and stay there for as long as the holocaust lasted. And when it grew cold again, it had fed on carrion, perhaps even on the corpses of our horses, who could say? But on the reasons that were driving it to seek our company disagreement was strong.

  “I know why he’s pleased to have found some men still alive,” Peyssou announced. “It’s simply because where there are men he knows there’ll always be something around for him to eat. It’s as simple as that, believe me.”

  But this materialistic theory did not wholly satisfy, and oddly enough it was Meyssonnier who contested it.

  “I admit he was here looking for the barley,” he said with an air of authority, legs apart, hands in pockets, and nose in the air, “but that doesn’t explain why he’s so tame. Because there’s all the barley that gets wasted in the Maternity Ward—Amarante, for example, is so greedy she always manages to knock a good quarter of her feed onto the floor—and he could come and get that during the night.”

  “I think you’re right there,” Colin said. “Crows in a flock, they’re always suspicious because they know we’re always out to get them. But on their own, you can tame them quite easily. Do you remember the cobbler, over at La Roque, for example?”

  “Hess! Hess!” Momo crowed excitedly, very pleased with himself because he did remember the cobbler.

  “Ah, they’re clever birds, and that’s a fact,” La Menou said. “I remember Emmanuel’s uncle one year, he put down his scarers in a field of corn they were spoiling for him. Bang, bang, they went all day. And believe it or not, by the end, those crows didn’t care a fig for his fireworks. They didn’t even fly away when they went off. Calm as judges they stood there, pecking away at the corn.”

  Peyssou burst into laughter. “Oh, they’re cunning buggers all right,” he said with respect in his voice. “When I think how they’ve made my blood boil! And once, just once, that’s all, I managed to kill one. With Emmanuel’s .22.”

  There then followed a long and detailed descant of praise to the crow, his intelligence, his longevity, his willingness to be tamed by man, his linguistic aptitude. And when Thomas, somewhat surprised, pointed out that the crow was after all a pest, no one even bothered to contest so ill-judged an observation. First, because although in the old days one might well have waged war on a pest, it was without hatred, with something even approaching amused respect for its tricks, and with the underlying knowledge, when all was said and done, that everyone needed to eat. And also because this particular crow, who had come there expressly in order to fan our hopes that other survivors still existed elsewhere, was now a sacred animal. From that day on it was to be given its own small daily share of barley; it was already part of Malevil.

  It was Peyssou who brought the conversation to an end. The evening before, we had carried the plow that Meyssonnier and Colin had constructed down to the small field beside the Rhunes, and Peyssou was anxious to take Amarante down there and begin plowing. As he set off toward her stall with his slow swinging stride, I gave Meyssonnier a wink; and before he could even yell out, Momo was already powerless, both arms and legs held immovable, then lifted bodily into the air and carried at a trot like a bale of hay toward the keep, with La Menou’s tiny legs flashing to and fro to keep up with us as she kept repeating with a happy little laugh every time her son yelled at us to let him go, “Oh, but you must be washed. It’s good for you, you dirty big thing!” Because for her, washing Momo, something she had been doing now for almost half a century, ever since she put his first diaper on, was by no means a chore, however much she affected to complain of the task, but a maternal rite that still warmed the cockles of her heart, despite her little boy’s age.

  At my suggestion, no one had taken a shower that morning, so we were able to fill the tub with tepid water and dump Momo in it to soak while Meyssonnier attacked his beard. Poor Momo, overwhelmed by sheer numbers and by now demoralized, had ceased all resistance, and after a moment or two I was able to withdraw from the scene, taking care to remind Colin that the door must be bolted after me as a precaution against a surprise escape. I went up to my room to collect my binoculars, then made my way up to the top of the keep.

  During our discussion about the crow in the outer enclosure I thought I had seen a slightly less gray patch in the gray sky and I was hoping I would be able to make out La Roque. But it had been an illusion, as I realized at my very first glance. The binoculars merely confirmed my disappointme
nt. Leaden sky, visibility minimal, color nonexistent. The meadows in which not a blade of grass remained, and the fields in which not a single sprouting spike could be seen, seemed to be covered in a uniform gray dust. In the old days, when people came out from the town to visit me and admire the view from the top of the keep, they used to marvel at Malevil’s silence. But that silence was no such thing, thank God, except to city dwellers. A distant automobile on the road by the Rhunes, a tractor plowing, the cry of a bird, an obstinately crowing cock, a guard dog determined to earn his keep, and in summer, needless to say, the grasshoppers, the cicadas, the bees in the Virginia creeper. Now, yes, there was silence indeed. Sky and land, nothing but lead, anthracite, blackness. And then the immobility. The corpse of a landscape. A dead planet.

  Eyes glued to my binoculars, I probed at the spot where La Roque ought to be, unable to make out anything but grayness, unable even to say whether the grayness I was looking at was part of the land or of the gray lid pressing down on us. I lowered the glasses gradually till I was looking at the field in the valley where Peyssou should by now have harnessed Amarante and begun plowing. At least there would be something alive to look at there. I looked for the mare, she being the larger and therefore the more easily locatable, then becoming slightly irritable because I couldn’t find her, I removed the binoculars from my eyes. At once I could see the plow, stationary in the center of the field, and beside it, stretched motionless on the ground, Peyssou, his arms flung out on either side of him. Amarante was nowhere to be seen.