Come, Barbarians (2 page)

THE GENDARMES PRESENTED HIM WITH A LIST OF WHAT THEY HAD
taken: four of Evelyn’s notebooks, family photographs, all three passports, and some photocopied magazine articles about the Front National that Jean-François had given them. Madame Boutet and her partner with the moustache allowed him back inside and ordered him to be at the gendarmerie that afternoon. Once all the imported detectives from Avignon and Arles and Carpentras were finished their work at the bloody farmhouse behind the château, someone would be in charge of the investigation. Kruse stood at the window in the master bedroom, watering the flowers. This had always been his job, in Toronto and here, and today he received it like a gift. If Evelyn came home and the flowers were dead it would say too much.

Two German couples in shorts wandered through the ruins with pamphlets. They were regular people with regular marriages, Sunday night dinners with their grown-up children.

Sleep was impossible. Everywhere she had been, he went. Kruse
walked the narrow streets and through all the rounded, miniature plazas of the medieval upper town. He climbed to the ruined château, walked around it with some teenagers and, from its vantage point, looked down. Back in their neighbourhood he sat for ten minutes at an outdoor café along Place Montfort, watching for her. He took a coffee and some sparkling water on an empty stomach. The table was polka-dotted with dew. He had seen historical photos with the carved stone fountain, water flowing crookedly and splashing into a pool on one side, and the giant plane trees. The centre of the square, now a parking lot, was once a place to talk politics and children and play
pétanque.

From the café he could see the bakery, dark now, dark indefinitely. On the exterior rock walls, on each side of the bakery’s front doors, were political posters. They were identical: a photograph of handsome, long-nosed Jean-François de Musset with the three colours of the French flag behind him. Below the flag and his photo were the words “Front national pour l’unité française” and the initials “FN.” Jean-François looked off heroically into the distance; no politician in Canada would dare such a thing, to stray from friendly and competent. The poster on the right had been marked. Someone had written
fasciste
over his face in black, and in defiance Jean-François had not taken it down.

“If I take it down I acknowledge it hurts me.” They were in the bakery on a Tuesday morning. The sun had not yet come up. Jean-François was teaching Kruse how to fold the dough during fermentation.

“It doesn’t hurt?”

“Of course it hurts.”

Kruse walked through the fallen leaves and the horse chestnuts, into the cathedral. The three of them had visited the twelfth-century church many times as it had been on the way home from École Jules Ferry, though they had never taken up the priest on a Sunday mass. Evelyn was a conservative but not that sort. There were tiny blue flowers in stone vases in the middle of the cloister. One hot afternoon,
after school, Lily asked her parents to identify them. Neither of them knew much about flowers but they were pleased she had asked: it said something about a kid, that she was curious about flowers. Evelyn had picked her up, kissed her.

“What, Mommy? Why?”

She kissed Lily some more. Not one child, at École Jules Ferry, had said a word about her lip. At least nothing Lily could understand. Giant bees had flown lazily from vase to vase that day in early September, occasionally bumping into one another. There were so many first-century artifacts, in and around the church, that they had been stacked along the walls. On the way back to the horse stable Kruse had lifted his daughter to his shoulders and she had picked ripe figs from the branches overhanging the path. It was hot but not in the cruel manner of August. Someone had stepped on an enormous snail that morning; the shell was cracked and the meat of it was drying out in the sun. Kruse pointed at some birds landing on a chestnut tree, so she would not notice the snail.

There had been a magnificent shock of blood on her face when she was born. They didn’t let him see her immediately; the doctor ignored his questions and one of the nurses took him aside, to the window next to Evelyn’s bed. Lily and Henry were the names they had chosen. The doctor, and now another doctor, called the tiny thing Lily before he did. Kruse wasn’t sure this particular baby was his. It was not at all as he had imagined things. Maybe they could start over?

Some part of him, in these bewildering early moments, wanted to walk out of the hospital and keep walking.

“What’s wrong with her?”

“Mr. Kruse, this is important. Look at me: nothing is wrong with your child.”

“Then what are they doing?” When he tried to look over the nurse’s shoulder she moved to intercept his gaze. She was short and nearly jumped. It would have been comical.

“They’re making a determination.” Hospital light reflected off a film of sweat on the nurse’s upper lip. How we take our upper lips for granted. She glanced at the warming table and back to him. “What you have here is a very special girl.”

Given his choice of career, he had made an art form out of keeping his temper: to lose it was always to lose. Evelyn mumbled. He held her hot left hand. None of this had been part of their birthing class curriculum. Finally, Lily was wrapped in pink felt and he kissed Evelyn’s hand and they placed the baby in his arms. He had no idea how to hold her. Now at the end of her long screaming fit she slept with heaving and tinny breaths that were, they assured him, entirely normal. Nothing seemed normal: he had never seen a child born with what they called a unilateral incomplete cleft palate. The obstetrician, with a British accent, took him aside and delivered a speech. Kruse’s parents had died suddenly when he was a teenager, thousands of kilometres from home, and he was young enough that he had never heard any bad news directly from a doctor. In the years since his parents had died, doctors joshed him in the examination room, reassured him about his cuts and fractures, complimented him on his fitness, his commitment to clean living. There would be a series of surgeries, the obstetrician said. Upper-class British accent or middle-class? He had learned the difference for a client, a risk assessment, but he was both exhausted and radically awake at once. What was he supposed to focus on? Would she live? Would her face heal? Why was she crying so much? Evelyn called out for him and he moved toward her with the baby, but the obstetrician stopped him. Kruse had competed for a couple of years, in his teens and early twenties, and if he took a punch square in the face the referee would look at him the way the doctor looked at him now. Was he fit to continue?

In the end, the doctor said, Lily would look and sound extremely close to normal. How long was “in the end”? The word “extremely” sounded extreme, a fib, a plea.

It would take years.

“In my experience, having a child like this, a child with uncommon needs, brings a husband and a wife closer together.”

“Uncommon needs?”

“Emotionally and otherwise, Christopher, it’s hard work. You feel ready for it. Already you love this little thing more than yourself, yes? Yes.” The doctor stepped in closer. He held Kruse’s arm, to prevent him for another moment from presenting Lily to her mother. “But be aware: sometimes it doesn’t bring a husband and a wife closer together.”

On November 1, All Saints’ Day, the day of the dead, one of the priests in the cold cathedral recognized him. The afternoon papers had come out. No, the priest had not seen Madame Kruse. He delivered a short sermon about how this might seem to be about his daughter and his wife and Jean-François and Pascale de Musset. But it was really about God.

Kruse interrupted the priest to tell him the truth, as calmly as he could manage: none of what he was saying made the remotest sense. He spoke rubbish for a living. The priest listened and agreed. Where had sense brought any of them?

Evelyn was nowhere that made any sense so he searched the hair salon. She wasn’t at the swimming pool and no one had seen her at the fitness centre. The museum was closed. The rented Renault was still in its parking spot next to the post office. Buses departed from a bar-tabac on the other side of the Roman ruins. Had anyone seen her? The men and women in the bar-tabac, tucked into their noontime pastis, usually keen to talk to
l’étranger
, shook their heads with something like shame. The room smelled of licorice and smoke. Only two buses had departed this morning, one on the north route and the other on the south. Kruse looked at the map. Each route had between fifteen and twenty stops.

It was peculiar to use air conditioning in November. He drove to Villedieu, past the farmers in their tall boots. A man and a woman walked on the side of the departmental highway with rifles. The sky in the east and the north carried an ominous, ghostly green. He parked in the lot and walked up to the square past the lime and the gravel still stained with blood. The waiter from Café du Centre was wiping tables. All the tricolour balloons Evelyn had tied for Jean-François had been tossed into the corner, against the village hall. All of the Front National posters and banners had disappeared, along with the political strategists from Paris. Most of the helium had leaked out of the balloons that remained, yet he still had an urge to bring one home for Lily. The waiter looked as though it had happened to him too. He had just shaved and his skin shone. One of his eyes was smaller than the other, as though it were infected. No, he had not seen Madame.

“Would you take a drink with me?”

“I don’t think I can.”

“Please, Monsieur Kruse.”

“I have to keep looking.”

“You won’t find her. Not now.” The waiter placed his tray on an adjacent table and sat down. Kruse pulled out a hollow silver chair and sat across from him. The waiter adjusted the table so it would not wobble. “Is it true, what they’re saying in the newspapers? And on the news?”

Kruse still hadn’t seen or heard any of it. “You were here last night.”

“It’s not really about what happened here, the things they’re saying.”

If it wasn’t about Lily, about the end of his family, what the hell was it about? There was a faint roar in the air, a storm in the distance or an airplane. He wanted, like a boy, to go back in time. He wanted to pick up one of these chairs, five of them, and throw them as far as they would go. Down the hills, through the windows.

“The police were here again, today.”

“Asking about my daughter?”

“Different police. I’ve never seen police like these before. Not like on
television. They asked about your wife and J.F. and the Front National.” The waiter’s accent was strong, a country accent. His voice took a turn when he said “Front National,” as though it were the name of an illness. “They showed me pictures of men. Did I recognize any of them?”

“What men?”

“I didn’t recognize them.”

“What did they ask about Evelyn?”

“What she did for the party, your party.”

“It isn’t my party. It isn’t Evelyn’s party either. We’re foreigners.”

“They say it’s her party.”

When she was a teenager and a competitive athlete, Evelyn fell in love with Benjamin Disraeli. He had been dead nearly one hundred years, but at the end of her family’s wealth and in the humiliation that came with it she discovered and embraced the politician, who had grown up outside power, who had endured financial ruin, and who had embodied a careful and romantic sort of conservatism. While some girls had posters and photographs of Barry Gibb on their bedroom walls, Evelyn had an 1878 photograph of the sad-eyed Earl of Beaconsfield on hers. He wore a top hat for the picture and carried a newspaper on his lap. When she had spoken of her love affair with a dead man, Evelyn didn’t smile: her admission contained just as much wayward passion as screams for the Bee Gees. She memorized whole speeches Disraeli had delivered. From time to time, at dinner parties or at the intermission of the symphony, she would quote from them to prove a point. Evelyn insisted Kruse read a short biography of him, so he might understand. He couldn’t finish the book and she caught him out. She believed, as her childhood mentor had believed, that individuals are the source of all that is beautiful and transcendent and noble in the world. The role of the state is to create a safe environment for them and to get out of their way. Success is the child of audacity. Kruse could never really understand, or even remember, why these strange heroes of hers—first Disraeli, then Chateaubriand, then Edmund Burke—were
conservative instead of liberal, or where one word bled into the other. She never wavered from that early love and where it took her, even as it seemed destined to stall or cripple her career in the academy. Her time would come, as Disraeli’s time had come. She merely had to dress well and wait patiently for her Queen Victoria.

Her Queen Victoria was Jean-François de Musset.

“What else did they ask?”

“About J.F. and Pascale. Questions I couldn’t answer. Honestly, I didn’t know her, your wife. I served her wine. The party had meetings here and I barely listened to what they said.” The waiter rubbed his bare arms. He hadn’t done a push-up since leaving school. He shouted to be heard over slamming shutters. “I don’t know about politics.”

It was called the mistral, this wind.

Before the wedding and again when Evelyn was having her troubles he had read a book about marriage: “You can never really know her heart.”

“Are you a professor, like Madame?”

“No.”

The flimsy silver chairs were beginning to topple over now,
crash
after
crash.

“I asked you for a drink but I didn’t get us drinks. What would you like? We’ll move inside.”

Kruse thanked the waiter for his kindness and for his offer and walked the way he had walked with his daughter. Leaves collected in the shallow stone gutter. Dust whipped into his eyes. He was fifteen minutes late for his meeting at the gendarmerie, seven kilometres away in Vaison-la-Romaine, but he didn’t hurry.