Bed of Nails (3 page)

*

The young woman was twenty-four years old, a literature student. On her bedside table was an empty tube of powerful barbiturates, no doubt prescribed by a doctor who had irresponsibly handed out sleeping pills to an oversensitive student with insomnia. Since she had left no note, which seemed unusual for someone of a literary bent, Guérin concluded that this was a suicide attempt that had got out of hand and succeeded better than intended. The telephone, still grasped in the hand of the young woman on the bed, was the clincher. Category: “cry for help”, subcategory “unintentional irreparable damage”.

The small apartment was full of whispers, sobs and choking sounds. The police did their work in silence. Cries of “No, no!”, or “It can’t be!” were heard, tearing into people’s consciences. They came from the mother, whom the father was clasping tightly in his arms, to stop the poor woman entering the room. Her daughter, white-faced, with purple lips and eyes already clouded with postmortem cataracts, could hear her no more.

Guérin sometimes found it hard to express his sympathy with suffering families. Such awkward and belated displays of concern made him uneasy.

Lambert – as happened every time the suicide was a pretty young woman – was in tears alongside the parents. Lieutenant Guérin, embarrassed himself, silently thanked him for it.

The police might hate letting their emotions show, but the public didn’t mind at all. Families adored Lambert. Guérin had always needed a man who could cry somewhere in his life. He had found one, two years earlier, his sleepy branch of coral, in a cramped office with blood on the ceiling.

Faced with what was clearly a suicide, Guérin was required to ask the parents the usual questions. If you couldn’t do compassion, professionalism was usually appreciated by civilians in shock. He checked the things he had to: statements from the neighbours, timing, state of the apartment, make of pills, level of alcohol required to make them lethal, state of the body, and so on.

Standing there in the bedroom, he wondered distractedly what was wrong with his Easter Island theory. He sat down to think, and after a moment, slapped his forehead. Churchill had laughed when he saw the American anglers too, and yet they were genuinely sad people … This wasn’t his usual behaviour. When the pathologist arrived to write the death certificate, he stood at some distance looking surprised and troubled. Guérin greeted him at first without thinking. He smiled, before realising that he was sitting on the bed, alongside the corpse of the literature student who was holding a telephone out to him. A wave of shame swept over him and he sprang up from the bed.

As the hot blood flooded out of his face, he felt a great chill all over his body, followed by an immense fatigue. It was the responsibility weighing down on him despite his shame. The intimate responsibility of having to explain underground forces, violent and
hypocritically denied. Invisible forces which sometimes emerged – passing through parents whose innocence was doubtful, and coming to the surface as a show of power – in the shape of the dead body of an unfortunate young woman. Guérin had realised, as he saw himself sitting on the bed occupied with distant theories, that he was becoming a habitual and willing plaything of these forces, a fragile rationality in a murmuring flood. The young woman’s stomach gave a grotesque gurgle. Her body was losing liquid substances which had nothing to do with the eternal flow of the soul.

The pathologist, sickened, stood back to let Guérin leave.

On the steps of the church, two slices of history were warming their bones in the sun. With their fading eyesight and bent backs, they stood gazing at the springtime leaves and the village facades whose cracks they had watched expanding over the years. The view before them contained trees, flowerpots, the town hall, Mme Bertrand’s general store, the post office, Michaud’s bakery, the Bar des Sports, and the main road cutting through the middle of the village.

Under his bronze helmet, the metallic eye of a World War II soldier leaning on his rifle seemed to cast doubt on the durability of the plasterwork on the houses.

The old men, cloth caps pulled down over their heads, their outlines as angular as the twisted arms of sundials, projected onto the steps shadows of a timeless rural existence. The church clock struck the half-hour, a single dull note. Reminded of the passing of time, the old men shrank a little more inside themselves.

The stones were warming up, the wooden shutters made cracking sounds and in the bar three glasses were saluting the sun by clinking. In the priory garden, under the gentle shade, a woodpecker was terrorising a colony of insects with its beak. The village stood quite still, representing nothing but France, on a day like any other.

A little breeze sprang up from the west, fluttering the flag on the town hall, and the tender leaves on the trees, carrying all the
sounds away with it. Silence fell on the square for a moment. The bronze eye projected its mute enquiry to the horizon, the village waited, and some of its reason for existing went into that wait.

A new sound, distant and raucous, came to rescue the two old men from boredom. They straightened up and listened, their rheumy eyes dilated with curiosity.

Up the little road from the valley – along which they had already witnessed the arrival of electricity, two or three wars, family-planning clinics and the odd guitar-playing hippy – came the sound of a car with a faulty exhaust.

“Oh, ah. The American.”

“Hadn’t seen him for a bit, had we?”

They waited, eyes fixed at the place where the road entered the village, to see the car arrive. Their excitement mounted.

“Reminds me when the Yanks come marching in, in ’44. Remember?”

“Do I! Fritzes going that way, Yanks coming this way. And their teeth! White as anything.”

“Mme Bertrand, she chucked her geraniums out the window.”

“And old Michaud, he come out with his bugle an’ all.”

“Hadn’t seen hide nor hair of him all the war, had we?”

The caps turned towards the bakery.

“Him and his rotten flour, six feet under now, and good riddance.”

Two disapproving faces dispatched further disgust in the general direction of Michaud’s tomb. The racket from the car grew louder as it passed the cemetery.

“Here he comes.”

With a popping of its exhaust, the rusty little white Renault van passed in front of a hoarding, braked and rolled to a halt in front of the post office. The two old men immediately became absorbed in gazing up at the cloudless sky.

The American extracted himself from the van, carrying a shopping
bag, and waved to them. They replied with an imperceptible nod from each cap, then, as the tall foreigner turned away, they riveted their eyes on him until he vanished inside the grocery. He closed the door behind him.

“Oh, ah, here comes André.”

Attracted by fresh blood, another old man was approaching, leaning on a stick with a rubber tip, bringing the number of sentinels on duty to three.

André looked across at the Renault. The other two, with a tilt of their heads, indicated the grocery.

“He’s on his own, just got here now.”

Ten minutes later, the American emerged from the shop. He crossed the square on his long legs and entered the baker’s. The sound of its bell tinkled across the square.

“André, remember old Michaud and his bugle in ’44?”

André turned towards the church’s Romanesque doorway and spat carefully, so as not to dislodge his dentures.

“The priest, he was holding up the music for him and all, his eyes as dry as the Pope’s balls, oh he was happy, no bother.”

“We all had a good time with the Yanks.”

“That’s right, we all did.”

“Washed our hands in wine an’ all.”

“Communion wine!”

From his granite plinth above the twenty or more engraved names, the bronze soldier from 1940 affected not to hear.

“Funny to see him here, though, the American.”

Silence fell once more on the square.

A milk lorry went slowly past. The three old men followed it with their eyes until it disappeared down the road from which the van had come.

André pushed at the gravel with the rubber tip of his walking stick.

“Eh, oh! Where’s he gone now?”

The baker’s shop was empty.

“Morning,
messieurs
!”

The American, appearing from an unexpected angle, came up to them with a smile. The three caps jumped, shuffled closer together and tipped down towards the ground, mumbling inaudible greetings.

The American now went into the post office, emerging a couple of minutes later with a parcel under his arm, got back in the van and drove off again back down the valley. As he disappeared, the sharp reports from the exhaust echoed through the streets.

The three sentinels redeployed in a straight line, each one seeking a place in the sun.

“Always in a rush he is. Never even stops for a chat.”

“Matthieu said he saw him up the dam only yesterday, with his bow and arrow.”

“He don’t fish, he just shoots.”

“But what does he shoot if he ain’t fishing?”

“Matthieu didn’t say he was fishing, he said he was walking.”

“With a bow and arrow? And anyway I know what he said, seeing he said it to me, didn’t he?”

“I was there too, didn’t say he was fishing.”

“Well, tell you something, he don’t buy much meat, that lad.”

“Anyway, he don’t say much either, the American, so you wonder what he’s doing here.”

“Yeah, it’s like he was just coming back. But he never come here in the first place.”

The church clock started striking eleven. The three old men took themselves off in different directions. André hobbled towards the post office, while the other two headed for the grocery and baker’s respectively.

The square was empty. In the distance the sound of the faulty exhaust faded away.

*

He cut the engine, after running along the flat out of the village, and freewheeled downhill. He put a cassette into the old car radio and alongside the squeaks of the bodywork and the colours of springtime, Jimi Hendrix’s guitar made his loudspeakers crackle. “Voodoo Child”. The van gently gathered speed.

He braked as he reached the turn-off, then took the forest track. The suspension, completely shot to pieces, let the wheels do what they liked, and the van seemed to float along on the stones. From here in, to get to the end without the engine, he didn’t even have to brake. The vehicle bounced along so loudly that he couldn’t hear the music.

A turn of the wheel to the left, and up the little track. A slalom between the dried-out ruts left from the winter.

The van slowed and came to a stop at the end of the trail, just under the big oak tree. He celebrated his small victory by listening to the end of the track, hands still on the wheel, before he switched the cassette-player off. Getting out of the car, he went down the steps made of logs. A quick glance at his universe. With the ambiguous satisfaction on his face of a man who owns nothing.

The winter had been long, but now spring was there, brushing away his doubts about the wisdom of his return. He rekindled the fire, then, with a few tools and the parcel newly arrived from Australia, he walked further into the forest. He had been waiting two whole months for this spare part. It took him only a few minutes to replace the propeller of the little turbine installed at the end of the hydraulic system which he had set up: fifty metres of P.V.C. tubing, running along the hill to transform the stream into enough energy for two electric bulbs, a very small fridge, a radio, and a Dremel power tool.

He walked back, started to prepare the perch he had shot the
night before up at the dam, and put it on the embers. In the wood, above the sounds of insects and birds excited by the spring, he could hear the little Australian wind pump recharging the four twelve-volt batteries with its new propeller.

The fish tasted good, and he smiled, thinking of the three old men.

*

The 4x4 shook as it travelled over potholes and rocks. The cool morning air came in through the windows, and the woman at the wheel took off her cap, which wouldn’t stay in position. The equipment, radio, shotguns, torches, chevaux-de-frise, and radar, rattled together preventing any communication between the three gendarmes.

The vehicle, overladen already, gave up completely in the deep grooves of the uphill section. Grudgingly, the three of them embarked on the final stretch on foot. The officer with a grey moustache brought up the rear behind his colleague, Michèle, a fine-featured blonde with a Teutonic backside. Her gun bounced on her wide hips, which was a cheering sight. The third, leading the way, was a spotty, stiff-legged youth, who took his career rather seriously.

They reached the camp out of breath. The beat-up Renault van, the hippy’s tepee, the suspicious vegetable patch.

The youngest walked round the car, sniffing like a dog, and kicked one of the smooth tyres. The blonde, hands on hips, was looking closely at the tent, from which floated the last wisps of smoke from the night before. On a line, stretched between two trees, some clothes and undergarments were hung to dry. The officer had thrust his thumbs into his belt, as a way of registering his overall disapproval of the encampment.

“So where is he?”

The valley ran down from the tepee towards a stream shaded by trees. The other way was the north-facing slope, dark and steep. The woman went down a few steps made of logs. The uprights of the tent, made of chestnut stakes, were wide open. A little excited, she leaned inside. A camp bed, with blankets rolled up, a fireplace, a small fridge, some cooking pots, a wooden chest and two rows of books stacked directly on the ground. The blonde pulled her head back out from this deserted intimate scene.

“Not here.”

The youngster, having finished his inspection of the van, pushed his cap up on his forehead.

“What’s that noise?”

His superior listened. In the forest, up above them, came the distant echo of an axe.
Chtock
.

The three gendarmes took a path leading towards the little wood.