Come, Barbarians (4 page)

To run off the cake and to avoid boring her with politics before a boring hour of television politics, Kruse took Lily outside.

Before the flood, they had a routine. On Wednesday and Saturday mornings, the Kruse family would walk to Place Montfort and visit the bakery for pain au chocolat, croissants, or maybe brioche with a spot
of jam. The baker-politician-landlord would walk out from behind the counter to move a strand of blonde hair and kiss Lily on the forehead, leaving a trail of flour. Here, Kruse became comfortable with synonyms for “beautiful”:
belle, jolie, ravissante, superbe.
Other mornings, Tuesdays and Thursdays, Kruse volunteered at Boulangerie J.F.

The de Musset garden was spread out and concentrated in pockets of the best sun: ripe tomatoes grew here, lemons there. The fig tree had produced lovely fruit that Kruse would carry home from the bakery, his payment, after his mornings around the oven. After only a month in school Lily understood everything and she was learning the singsong Provençal accent:
Bonjour-uh. Au revoir-uh.
School, she said, was
chouette-uh.
When she played with the toys they had packed for her, she made nasal sounds—French sounds—if not words. They hunted for cicadas in the shrubbery around the de Musset house and failed to find any. They played hide-and-seek,
cache-cache.
Lily could not remain hidden for longer than a minute without giggling or singing, betraying herself. Hiding in silence made her lonesome and scared. The heat of the day had collapsed into the cool of the early October night. They inspected the grapes, which were just about ready to be picked. In neighbouring villages, the big harvest party—the
vendange
—had already begun.

Lily wore a grey cotton dress with short sleeves and her arms were covered in goosebumps. Kruse took her hand and led her back into the house.

There was a musical introduction and then Bernard Pivot. Pascale had explained about the famous man: he was a socialist, surely, if not a communist, but a very smart and curious one. The moment the camera revealed Jean-François, Lily screamed and clapped. Evelyn gave her an ultimatum. If she did not remain quiet for this very important show she and Papa would walk home early together. Lily promised—if, if, she could have one more tiny sliver of chocolate cake.

Pivot put on and removed his reading glasses with startling honesty. Much of what they discussed was beyond Kruse, who knew little and
cared little about French, or any, politics, but the theme was clear. Most thinking people would say the Front National, since its birth in 1972, has been a race-obsessed party with a limited view on who is and is not sufficiently French. Yet many of those Jean-François had helped rescue from the wreckage on September 22, often at personal risk, were North Africans and gypsies. Pivot contrasted the baker-politician’s heroism with the reputation of the Front National as isolationist, anti-Europe, and anti-intellectual.

“Aunty?” said Lily.

Evelyn shushed her. “
Anti
is ‘against.’ We’ll explain later.”

On TV they spoke for twenty minutes about the soul of France and how it too might be rescued. Pivot, it turned out, was also a nostalgist. He remembered the thirty glorious years after the Second World War with as much affection, and melancholy, as Jean-François. They remembered growing up in this enchanted place, where French people were French people and where immigrants—there are good ones, after all—wanted nothing more than to be French. Bicycles, baguettes, berets. Yes, it was an international stereotype but there was great comfort in it, and unity. While he could not agree with the entirety of Jean-François’s analysis, Pivot declared the Front National an utterly transformed if not simply misunderstood party. He concluded the program by calling Jean-François de Musset the most articulate and most attractive conservative leader in France.

Before the night was out, national organizers and fundraisers were calling to set up meetings with Jean-François. Kruse, Evelyn, and Lily sneaked out, quietly waving at Pascale, who would be on the phone for hours. Evelyn, walking down the hill into their Roman quarter, was so pleased with what she had achieved she briefly wept. The party in the picturesque central square of Villedieu three weeks later, on Halloween, was designed as Jean-François’s national coming-out party.

There were quotations from
Bouillon de culture
in
Le Monde
, the
first of the lieutenant’s articles that Kruse read in its entirety. The cause and effect of what had happened Halloween night was clear enough, tempered with words like
présumé
and
accusé.
Jean-François de Musset, politician and hero, drank too much on the evening of his fundraiser in Villedieu. He ran over and killed a three-year-old girl. He was charged with the crime and released. The girl’s mother, a foreigner, went to his home and murdered him and his wife in a fit of vengeful rage.

At the end of the story in
Le Monde
, after the turn, there were speculations from an anonymous source “close to the accused and the deceased.” The foreigner, a Canadian woman named Evelyn May Kruse, was deeply involved in the Front National party and was carrying on an affair with Jean-François de Musset.

The lieutenant leaned against the back wall of the conference room with his arms crossed. Kruse read the paragraph once more to be sure he had understood. He had understood. His right hand went cold, as it always did before a fight—nerve damage in his shoulder, from an ugly job in Montreal. Madame Boutet returned with a smelly plate of cheese and cured meat, dried fruit, and two baguettes. The articles in
Le Figaro, La Provence
, and
Le Dauphiné Libéré
carried the same information from the anonymous source: Evelyn was deeply involved in the party and carrying on an affair with the most articulate and most attractive conservative leader in France.

It was dark when they dismissed him from the interview room, three and a half hours later. The wind had calmed but only barely; it whistled and whined around the corners and through the empty corridors of Vaison-la-Romaine. Already the air was cleaner. No more grit in his eyes, no more humidity. He had eaten some of the meat and cheese, but it hadn’t oiled any of the ironworks in his stomach.

The trap he had set in the front door of the horse stable had been
sprung: the book of matches sat half a metre inside. Kruse moved to the shoe cupboard near the door and slid his rattan fighting sticks out from their hiding place. No one was in here now. His teacher, mentor, and business partner, Tzvi Meisels, was a flawed religious Jew but an amateur spiritualist. Tzvi had convinced himself that if he followed his intuition without any doubtful mental chatter it led him correctly eighty percent of the time. In his work with the army and with Mossad, this confidence had saved his own life and the lives of his men. He had insisted Kruse hone his own sense of self-trust.

At the base of the stairs Kruse knew who had been in the house. He climbed up. Evelyn had sprayed her perfume into a silk floral scarf and had hung it from the door handle to Lily’s room. The bottle itself and other toiletries were gone, with some of her clothes. So was Marie-France, the turtle
doudou
, and an envelope of family photographs. She had not left anything for him, not a note or a map or a denunciation of what he had read in the newspapers; only a spray of perfume in her least-favourite scarf.

The gendarmes had wanted to know how long she had been sleeping with Jean-François de Musset. It confused and muddied her motivation, which had seemed so clear: you kill my daughter and I kill you. Who was the anonymous source, close to the accused and the deceased? You can never really know her heart.

The great wind, her camouflage, shook car alarms to life. He turned on the lamp. There was still water in the glass on her side of the bed, next to the guidebook she studied every night. Evelyn had never been to Paris and she wanted her first time to be perfect, with the right hotel, the right restaurants, museums, and sites of execution. They had planned to spend Christmas in the city, three weeks. Eighteen percent of the time there was snow at the end of December, even if it wasn’t cold enough to stick.

Twenty-four hours earlier, at the hospital, a bearded man in a rumpled seersucker suit had asked them to give Lily’s organs to the state.
Unfortunate children across the country could use her eyes, her liver, her heart. Not everything in her had been ruined. All they had to do was sign the form. Evelyn listened carefully. She looked at Kruse, squeaked, and answered the administrator. “Why would I give anything of her to France? You stole her from me.”

“Madame. You are refusing out of simple spite?”

La rancune
, “spite.” She turned away and stared for a moment, evidently at public service posters tacked to a billboard. Wash your hands. Watch out for lice and AIDS. Then she jumped at the administrator with a right cross. Kruse caught up Evelyn and led her to the sliding doors. Until this moment he had not wanted to leave, to give her up. He had been hoping, not consciously but in some waiting room of his heart, that a doctor would emerge from a hallway and take off his glasses, wipe his forehead, and tell them Lily was going to be all right. The operation was a success. It was a miracle. He helped Evelyn down the old stairs to the Grand Rue, floodlit and deserted at midnight, and when she collapsed against the outer wall of a lavender shop and wailed and cursed God and begged God and cursed God again, windows opened along the street. The Vaisonnais, men and women they recognized, looked down silently.

For a long time, ten minutes or an hour, they stayed on the Grand Rue. She couldn’t move and didn’t want to move. Neither did he. Kruse fantasized about crossing the street, running for Lily, carrying her on his shoulders, holding her hand. Always hold Daddy’s hand on the road,
la main de Papa.
When she began to shiver Kruse bundled his long wife into his arms and carried her down to the converted horse stable on Rue Trogue-Pompée, his hard soles clacking on the stones. He carried her up the marble stairs and into bed, this bed. He drew her this glass of water.

Kruse had performed CPR on his dead daughter until Evelyn had taken her from him. His first and most powerful instinct, to rush into the crowd and find him and destroy him—all of them—did not
weaken or fade. Some men in Front National T-shirts surrounded Jean-François, jostled each other, and delivered short sermons. The organizers from Paris remained at a distance, pale and sick. Kruse only saw Jean-François in flashes. Men and women held each other and led each other away. It was not a thing anyone should see. Music was still playing in the plaza, a German dance song called “Rhythm Is a Dancer.” After his initial plea for an ambulance, all Kruse could do now was shout into the crowd that it would be really goddamn nice if someone turned that shit off. He only realized afterwards, by the looks in their eyes, he had been speaking English.

The police cars arrived quickly. He mentioned this to Huard and Boutet during the interview: he was sure he had heard the sirens before the accident. How could that be? And even before the cars arrived, Huard was there in his grey sweater. The lieutenant had run up the hill from his house at the base of Villedieu and stopped. It was difficult to spit out his questions, through his panting and the phlegm.

“A car hit her, Monsieur?”

“Yes.”

“And she’s dead?”

Kruse could not say the word. Yes.

One of the men in a Front National T-shirt met the gendarme, his hands up. “It was me. I confess. I was driving the car.”

Journalists on the other side of the street shouted the man down. In his response to them and to the gendarme, he and his supporters said
les étrangers
several times. Jean-François de Musset was the next president of the republic. These, these, were foreigners. There didn’t seem to be any risk of Jean-François trying to escape; he was sitting on the gravel now, against a tree, lolling sweaty and drunk. The men in T-shirts tried to prevent the gendarme from speaking to him, his old rich friend. It was an accident,
alors.
She came from nowhere, the wild little thing.

Jean-François wasn’t arrested until the cars arrived. There was a
harmless scuffle, between the men in the Front National T-shirts and the police. Television cameras hovered. One of the print journalists laughed out loud. Someone must have told the ambulance driver there was no great hurry. There was no great hurry. Evelyn would not let them take Lily at first. A paramedic asked for permission to sedate Madame. Kruse shook his head no.

They followed the ambulance to the hospital. It was the paramedic who told them Jean-François had been charged and released. A court date had been set. He was at home, in his faded yellow farmhouse behind the château.

Soft light from the street shone flatly into the horse stable on Trogue-Pompée. Normally, he would be tuned to Lily in the next room. When his daughter woke for a bathroom break or a glass of water, or when she startled herself out of a nightmare about cats, it was his job to tend to her. Evelyn dozed in the miserable silence. Like her daughter, she had blonde hair with a hint of natural curl and bright green eyes. They were closed now, crunched. Both of them had one dimple above and to the right of their lips, those crooked smiles. She was breathing too quickly. The French, who insisted on making these sorts of determinations, said both Evelyn and Lily looked Swedish. Maybe Norwegian.

Evelyn wasn’t more than one-sixteenth of anything, a mongrel. Still, she preferred a coherent and traditional culture—a feeling of us, something to protect from them,
les étrangers.

Kruse leaned over the bed to touch her forehead, the way he would have touched Lily’s forehead if she were sweating and thrashing, to check for fever. She slapped his hand away and hopped out of bed, pushed him and stomped, in her T-shirt and panties, into Lily’s room.

“What are you doing?”

She didn’t answer and he didn’t want to watch or stop her. For the next half hour Evelyn broke Lily’s toys, ripped the pages from her picture books, threw her little clothes on the floor and stretched them and tore what she could tear. Kruse remained in their bedroom, the master bedroom overlooking the Roman ruins, where he had thought they were falling in love again.