Malevil, Page 61

  Mob justice is not pleasant to watch, but in the circumstances it did seem to me genuinely just. And it would have been hypocritical to try to stop it or deplore it when I had done my damnedest to bring it about.

  When the cries of the crowd finally ebbed, I knew that they were clutching no more than an inert body in their hands. I waited. And little by little I watched the tight cluster around Fulbert loosen and disperse. They moved away from one another, returned to their places, picked up the chairs they had knocked over, some still flushed and angry, others, it seemed to me, rather ashamed, their eyes on the ground, hangdog expressions on their faces. I looked at the body abandoned in the middle of the aisle. I signaled to my companions to join me. They advanced along the aisle, walking around the body when they reached it, without looking down. Only Thomas stopped to examine Fulbert.

  We didn’t speak, even though the new recruits had all moved discreetly away. When Thomas got up from his knees and continued up the aisle toward me, I detached myself from the group and took two steps forward to meet him.

  “Dead?” I said in a low voice.

  He nodded.

  “Well,” I said in the same quiet tone, “you should be glad. You’ve got what you wanted.”

  He looked at me for a while. And in his eyes there was that mixture of love and antipathy that he had always shown toward me. “You too,” he said tersely.

  I climbed the chancel steps again, turned to the congregation, and asked for silence. Then I said, “Burg and Jeannet will carry Fulbert’s body to his room. Monsieur Gazel, will you be good enough to accompany them and keep vigil? As for the rest of us, I suggest that we resume our assembly in ten minutes from now. We have decisions to be made together that involve the interests of both La Roque and Malevil.”

  The shuffling and murmuring were subdued at first but grew in intensity as soon as Burg and Jeannet had carried Fulbert’s body out, as though the collective act that had deprived him of his life had been expunged by its disappearance. I asked my companions to keep away all the people trying to crowd around—though as tactfully as possible of course—since I had two or three urgent interviews ahead of me that required a certain measure of secrecy.

  I walked down the steps and went over to the opposition group, the only section of the population that had shown courage in time of misfortune and dignity in triumph, since none of them had taken part in the killing, not even Marcel. After the push that had knocked Fulbert to the floor, he had not budged from his place, nor had Judith, the two widows, or the two farmers, whose names I now discovered were Faujanet and Delpeyrou. It was the ones who had trembled before him who had rounded on Fulbert and killed him.

  Agnès Pimont and Marie Lanouaille kissed me. Marcel had little tears running down that shoe-leather face of his. And Judith, more manly than ever, seized my arm as she said, “Monsieur Comte, you were magnificent. Dressed in white like that—mystic, wonderful—you looked just as though you’d jumped out of the window there to slay the dragon.” And as she spoke she continued to dig her strong fingers into my right biceps. I was to observe later that she was incapable of talking to any man still of an age to attract her (which given her own age was no narrow category) without massaging his upper limbs. I remembered that she had introduced herself at our first meeting as “unmarried” as opposed to “a spinster,” and as I thanked her I couldn’t help wondering if, in these months since the day it happened, she had remained insensible to Marcel’s Herculean shoulders, or Marcel to her powerful attractions. I thought that without irony, because she is really attractive.

  “Listen,” I said, lowering my voice and drawing them aside, together with Faujanet and Delpeyrou, whom I shook warmly by the hand, “we haven’t much time. You must organize yourselves. You can’t let Fulbert’s ex-bootlickers run La Roque. You must propose the election of a town council. Put your own six names on a piece of paper and produce your list there and then. No one will dare oppose you.”

  “Don’t put my name,” Agnès Pimont said.

  “Or mine,” Marie Lanouaille said quickly.

  “Why not?”

  “There would be too many women. That would annoy them. But Madame Médard, yes. Madame Médard is a teacher,” Agnès said.

  “Call me Judith, my dear,” Judith said, placing her hand on Agnès’s shoulder. (So she squeezed women too.)

  “Oh, I don’t think I would ever dare,” Agnès said with a blush.

  I looked at her. It was a lovely sight, that fine, fair skin with the color rising behind it.

  “And what about a mayor?” Marcel said. “The only one of us here that can talk is Judith. I wouldn’t want to offend you at all”—he looked at her with tender admiration—“but a lady mayor, that they will never accept. Especially with you not speaking the patois.”

  “I have a question to put to you,” I broke in immediately. “Would you accept someone from Malevil as your mayor?”

  “You?” Marcel said hopefully.

  “No, not me. I was thinking of someone like Meyssonnier.”

  I could see out of the corner of my eye that Agnès Pimont was a little disappointed. Perhaps she had been expecting another name.

  “Well, now,” Marcel said, “he is a responsible fellow, and an honest fellow...”

  I put in, “And he’s had military training. Which is going to be very useful in organizing your defense of the town.”

  “I know him,” Faujanet said.

  “Me too,” Delpeyrou said.

  That was all they were going to say. I looked at their frank squarecut tanned faces. That “I know him” implied no reservations.

  “Still and all,” Marcel said.

  “What ‘still and all’?”

  “Well, he’s a Communist.”

  “Now, Marcel, be serious,” Judith said. “What’s a Communist without a Communist Party?”

  She tended to speak in a very clearly articulated classroom voice that would have got on my nerves slightly if I’d had to be around her day in and day out. But Marcel seemed to find it very impressive.

  “That’s true,” he said with a shake of his bald head. “That’s true, but all the same we don’t want any dictating here. We’ve had quite enough dictators for a while.”

  I said sharply, “Meyssonnier is not that kind of man at all. Absolutely not. In fact it’s an insult to suggest it.”

  “No offense meant,” Marcel said.

  “And you forget that now we will have the guns,” Faujanet said.

  I looked at him. Face almost a perfect square, the color of earthenware. Shoulders equally square. And not a fool, clearly. I liked the way he’d brought up the question of the guns by presupposing the solution he intended.

  “I take it,” I said, “that the council’s first decision will be to arm the inhabitants of La Roque.”

  “In that case, all right,” Marcel said.

  Looks were exchanged. Agreement had been reached. And Judith, surprisingly I thought, had shown great tact. She had scarcely spoken at all.

  “Right,” I said with a quick smile. “Now all I have to do is persuade Meyssonnier.”

  I left them and turned to beckon Marie Lanouaille over to speak to me. She came promptly. She was a brunette, about twenty-five, with a plump, firm body. And as she stood there with her face tilted up, waiting for me to disclose my plans, I was suddenly seized by a powerful, violent desire to clasp her in my arms. Since I had never even flirted with her, never thought about her in that way at all before, I had no idea to what I should attribute this sudden impulse, unless it was an automatic physical desire for relaxation. No, perhaps relaxation wasn’t the right word. Because love too is a struggle; but a struggle that must suddenly have appealed to some deeper instinct in me as being more positive than the one I had just been involved in, and even an antidote to it, since it gave life instead of taking it.

  Meanwhile, however, I suppressed even my desire—as Judith our great biceps kneader would not have—to fasten my hand on the pl
ump and charming flesh of her upper arm, a temptation made very difficult to resist by the fact that her dress had no sleeves.

  “Marie,” I said in a slightly muffled voice. “You know Meyssonnier. He’s a simple man. He won’t want to live up in the château. Your house it quite big. You wouldn’t like to take him in, would you?”

  She looked up at me open-mouthed. The fact that she hadn’t said no immediately was encouraging.

  “You won’t have to cook for him. He’ll almost certainly institute communal meals in La Roque. You could look after his washing and so on, but that’s all he’d need.”

  “Well, now,” she said, “I wouldn’t say no myself, but then you know what people are like. If Meyssonnier came to live in my house you know what they’d say.”

  I shrugged. “And even if they did say that, what can it possibly matter? Even if it were true?”

  She looked up at me rather sadly, then nodded, and at the same time, because it had been cold in the chapel, she rubbed the arms I would have so enjoyed squeezing myself.

  “Ah, my poor Emmanuel, you’re right, you’re right,” she said with a sigh. “After all we’ve been through here!”

  So finally it was yes. I thanked her and asked after her baby, Nathalie. Then came five minutes of absolutely mechanical conversation of which I heard not a word, not even the things I said myself. However, right at the end, Marie expressed an emotion that awakened and moved me.

  “I’m almost afraid to breathe, you know. Because of everything happening, she hasn’t had any injections against things. Nor Agnès’s little Christine either. So naturally, I’m thinking all the time, My Nathalie, she can catch anything. And we have nothing! No doctor, no antibiotics, and all those horrible diseases in the air, which you never thought about before, because there were the injections. The smallest little pimple, and I’m terrified. And not even any peroxide left now. Do you know all I have to nurse her with? A thermometer!”

  “And who’s looking after her for you now, poor Marie?”

  “An old lady in the town. She’s looking after Christine too.”

  Then I asked her to find Agnès for me. She came over at once. And with Agnès it was different. I could be brief, authoritarian, and secretly tender.

  “Agnès, I want you to assign your vote to Judith for the meeting and go back down into the town. Go and see that Christine’s all right, then wait for me in your house. I have something to say to you. I won’t be long.”

  She was a little bewildered by this shower of orders, but as I expected, she made no protest. We exchanged a look, just one, then I left her to look for Meyssonnier.

  I was taking a lot on myself with Meyssonnier, I knew that. As I approached him I felt a certain remorse at manipulating my fellow beings like this, and especially when it came to him. And yet, it was in the interests of us all, of Malevil as well as La Roque. That is what I always told myself when my own cunning became a little odious even to me, as I knew it did to Thomas sometimes. It was monstrous, what I was going to ask of Meyssonnier. I was slightly ashamed about it. And yet that had not prevented me from busily going around collecting up my trumps, making sure I presented myself for the fray with a winning hand, one that had carefully taken into account all his mayoral ambitions and even his private temptations.

  He listened to me without a word, with those narrow features molded by years of conscientious effort and duty, the flickering eyes, the straight fence of hair above (which somehow or other he had contrived to cut or have cut). I was very much aware of what I was doing: I was offering him the keys to both La Roque and Marie Lanouaille on a golden salver. And even both of those together would not easily persuade him to say goodbye to Malevil. It was going to break his heart anyway, I knew. But what choice had I? Who was there in La Roque to replace him? No one.

  When I’d had my say, he said neither yes nor no. He needed more information, and he needed to ruminate.

  “If I understand you correctly, my task in La Roque will be a double one: to establish a community life and to organize the town’s defense.”

  “The defense first,” I said.

  He shook his head doubtfully. “The thing is, that won’t be easy, you know. The walls are too low. You could climb them with a ladder. And how can I man that length of battlements? I won’t have the men. Especially young ones.”

  “I’ll give you Burg and Jeannet.”

  He replied with an unenthusiastic grimace. “And then weapons. I would need Vilmain’s rifles.”

  “We have twenty. We’ll split them.”

  “I’d need the bazooka too.”

  I laughed. “You’re going too far! What’s this sudden nationalism? You’re already taking the interests of La Roque a little bit too much to heart, it seems to me!”

  “I didn’t say I was going to accept,” Meyssonnier said coolly.

  “And now you’re blackmailing me into the bargain!”

  But I couldn’t get even a smile from him.

  “All right then,” I said after a moment’s thought, “when La Roque’s fortifications are completed, I’ll let you have the bazooka two weeks out of every four.”

  “Well, that would be something,” Meyssonnier said, still cool, still giving nothing away. “Then there’s all the booty Feyrac brought back from Courcejac. Quite a lot. Would you be claiming any of that?”

  “What is there? Do you know?”

  “Yes. Someone just told me. Poultry, two pigs, two cows, good stocks of hay and beets. The hay is still there in the barn. At least they weren’t fool enough to burn that down.”

  “Two cows! I thought they only had one at Courcejac.”

  “They’d hidden the other so as not to have to give it to Fulbert.”

  “Well there’s a thing! What people! They didn’t give a damn if the La Roque babies died of hunger as long as their own were well fed! A fat lot of good it did them in the end!”

  “So,” Meyssonnier said curtly, bringing me back to the subject in hand. “What do you say? Do you want a share?”

  “Do I want a share! What gall! The whole lot belongs by rights to Malevil, since it was Malevil that conquered Vilmain!”

  “Listen,” Meyssonnier said without a smile. “This is what I propose. You can take all the poultry—”

  “The poultry you can stuff. We’ve already got more than enough at Malevil. They eat too much grain.”

  “Wait. You take the poultry, the two pigs, and we keep the rest.”

  I began to laugh. “Malevil two pigs and La Roque the two cows! And that’s your idea of fair shares? But what about the hay? And the beets?”

  He said nothing. Not a word. After a moment, I said, “But in any case, I can’t make the decision all on my own. I would have to ask the assembly.”

  Then since he still remained stubbornly silent, eyes grave and stern, I went on with rather bad grace: “Well, since you have only the one at La Roque, we could perhaps stretch a point with the cows.”

  “Well, that’s something,” Meyssonnier said dolefully, as though he had just got very much the worst of our bargain.

  Then silence. He was ruminating again. I didn’t try to hurry him. “If I’ve understood correctly,” he said with an expression of distaste, “I am also going to have to respect all the democratic forms, spend my time arguing the clock around, and listening to petty criticisms about everything from people who’ll do nothing else, just sit on their behinds and complain.”

  “Don’t exaggerate. You’ll have a town council worth their weight in gold.”

  “How do I know they won’t be just a weight around my neck? What about that woman, for instance?”

  “Judith Médard?”

  “Yes, Judith. What a tongue she has on her! And what is she exactly, anyway, that woman?” he said suspiciously. “A so-called Socialist?”

  “Not at all! She’s a Christian Radical.”

  His face cleared. “Ah, that’s not so bad. I’ve always got on quite well with that kind of Catholic. The
y are idealists,” he added with half-concealed contempt.

  As though he wasn’t! But at all events he seemed completely reassured. Because Marcel, Faujanet, Delpeyrou—those he knew. It was Judith who had seemed to him, if I may so express it, pregnant with uncertainty.

  “I accept,” he said at last.

  Since he had accepted, it was my turn to state my conditions.

  “Listen,” I said, “there’s one thing I want clearly understood between Malevil and the La Roque town council all the same. The ten rifles, and the two cows from Courcejac, if conceded, will not be gifts to La Roque. They are being put at your personal disposal during the entire duration of your functions in La Roque.”

  He looked at me critically. “You mean you want them back if La Roque kicks me out again?”

  “Yes.”

  “It might not be so easy.”

  “In that case,” I said, “the rifles and the cows will become elements in a general negotiation.”

  “More horse trading, you mean,” he said with an indefinable air of accusation.

  All this, on his side, a little cold. Distant even. I was embarrassed. It was painful for me, taking leave of him like that, without anything to recall the warmth that always marked our relations back in Malevil.

  “Well,” I said with rather forced bonhomie, “so here you are, mayor of La Roque! Are you happy?” My question wasn’t an apt one, as I realized immediately I’d asked it.

  “No,” he said curtly. “I hope I shall make a good mayor, but I’m not happy.”

  One blunder always tends to lead to another. Trying to cancel the first I made a second. “Even though you’ll be staying with Marie Lanouaille?”

  “Even though,” he said without a smile, and walked away.

  I stood there, his rebuff heavy on my heart. And the fact that I’d deserved it was no consolation at all. Fortunately, however, I wasn’t given time to brood too long about the state of my soul. Fabrelâtre touched me on the elbow and asked to talk to me, with a politeness only a hairbreadth away from obsequiousness. I wasn’t exactly fond of that long white church taper, with the little toothbrush under his nose and his eyes blinking away behind his steel-rimmed spectacles. And nasty breath into the bargain.