Come, Barbarians (5 page)

THE CONSULATE URGED HIM TO CREMATE HIS DAUGHTER. IN THE MIDDLE
of these conversations, instead of listening to the young Québécois bureaucrats, he flipped through his choices. If only he had run for her. If only they had gone home at six thirty, as planned. If they had found another town, another house, another country. If they had learned to speak Spanish in school instead of French: Guanajuato or Seville. If they had saved their marriage in Toronto—another neighbourhood, maybe. The suburbs. Some fried chicken village in Quebec.

“Monsieur Kruse?”

“Yes.”

“You’re still with me?”

The nearest crematorium was in Orange, a small city thirty kilometres down the road from Vaison-la-Romaine. He toured the facility and, in the midst of a chat about receptacles for her ashes, he excused himself to run to the toilet and throw up. There was no one else in the unusually large room, designed for crowds. Every click and slide of his
shoes echoed in the toilet. Kruse had checked the regional bus stops, thirty-nine of them, and had questioned hundreds of people: restaurant and café operators, hoteliers and owners of
chambres d’hôtes.
No one had seen his wife on the day of the dead or any of the four days thereafter. They had seen the newspapers. In their eyes he was a desperate cuckold whose wife had disappeared into the South of France. He knew Lily was gone, but in the crematorium, for the first time, he believed it. He was alone with his echoes. The funeral director knocked gently and opened the door. They could not wait much longer, as they had entered high season for death. The towns of the Vaucluse were full of retirees and many of them succumbed before winter, the anticipation of January air igniting and overpowering their imaginations. There were laws and rules and with respect, Monsieur, he did not have infinite space in his refrigerator.

Jean-François and Pascale de Musset’s joint funeral came first. On the fifth of November, a cool and dreary Thursday, the cathedral filled quickly. Officials from the town rushed to set up folding black chairs behind the pews. Media from Marseille and Paris set up in the back. Several hundred people stood on the brown grass outside Notre Dame de Nazareth, in a murky spray that threatened to transform into rain. Kruse had come early, to look for Evelyn, though the smell of incense and the whispering around and about him was too much; he surrendered his seat to a retired woman in a veil he recognized from the Tuesday morning market. She did not thank him. The cloister where they had inspected the little flowers and the fat bees was inaccessible, so Kruse sat on the moist curb on Rue Saint-Exupéry, where he was close enough to hear through the outdoor speakers but far away enough that no one would be obliged to look at him. They did anyway.

Afterwards, the procession of black limousines and pedestrians crossed the Roman bridge. All the newer bridges had been destroyed in the flood. The de Mussets had a family crypt in the Saint Laurent cemetery; it had been there long enough that rain and sun had stained it black.
There was a substantial cross above, like two dull swords. Mourners filed into the sloped corridors between the dead. Small children and babies were propped up on the crypts of Vaison-la-Romaine’s other prominent families. Graves were decorated with small stone and ceramic souvenirs, real and fake flowers, plaques and murky tablets declaring “
Tu seras toujours parmi nous
” and other truths. Older and richer families had tombs up in the shade, on the hill, many with statues and reliefs depicting both the lost loved ones and their saviour. The de Musset crypt was just below them. Dogs chased each other through the feet of the mourners as the sound system squealed and crackled. The spray turned to rain and, at once, hundreds of black umbrellas arose and popped.

He recognized Front National officials from the fundraiser in Villedieu and from outings with Evelyn: a meeting in Arles, a rally in Malaucène. The de Mussets had brothers and sisters but none who lived here. He stayed at the gates with two young cashiers he knew from the Super-U grocery, women in their twenties with long black-painted fingernails and dyed black hair, small-town goths, women who would always smoke. All that emerged from the speakers was an apology. Rain had made it too dangerous for outdoor electricity. Words were then spoken but none that Kruse could hear. The cashiers stared at him and spoke to each other until everyone in the small crowd around him was aware of his presence and properly distracted. A few men, with beer in their breath and strong accents, shoved him. He excused himself, for standing in their way.

Kruse walked around them all and climbed as high as he could climb. It was difficult to see, in the fog and the rain, with so many black umbrellas.

She had not come.

He booked an hour the following afternoon, the smallest room available in Hall 1E of the crematorium in Orange. It was outside the city core, set in the first wave of what would become the French approximation of a power centre. There were supermarkets, chain stores selling furniture, electronics, and shoes, and next door, a discount wine store.
Marigolds came with the cremation package, and under the fluorescent bulbs they shone like creamed corn. There were no guests. Lily’s teacher might have come, or the parents of some of her little friends, the family from Nyons, the bartender in Villedieu, the banker, the woman from the cheese shop, but he didn’t invite them. No higher authority was present, so Kruse said a few words about Lily, to Lily, in English; everything he had said aloud, since her death, to police and the coroner and the consulate in Nice, the insurance company and the municipal officials and the funeral director, had been in his studious French. It was not a speech worthy of his daughter’s spirit. Speaking his own language, Lily’s language, undid him.

After Evelyn had destroyed her toys and ripped her books, she had come back to bed, sweaty and shivering. This is what Kruse did not tell the gendarmes. The anonymous source, close to the accused and the deceased, did not tell the newspapers what she had demanded. Kruse had said, “Can I do anything?” and for two hours she did not speak. She mumbled and sighed, wept, said her daughter’s name in a prayer to no one. Then, at 3:16 in the morning, Evelyn answered his question.

“Yes.”

“Yes what?”

“You can do something.” Light from the pedestrian street splashed teeth on the ceiling. “I think you know.”

“Tell me what you want.”

“He could barely walk.”

“The gendarmes said—”

“He was drunk. Boris Yeltsin drunk. You well know what that makes it. Stop pretending.”

“He’s been charged.”

“By his own friends in the police. The mayors. The political party. I’ve been studying these people and I know how it works. Don’t tell me you haven’t thought about this. I could feel you vibrating with it in Villedieu. Do it.”

“We can’t assume, Evelyn, just because—”

“He’s a murderer. And his asshole friends, down in the bar, they’re murderers too.”

“Who were they?”

“One had long hair, one short. Men in suits. Men like you.”

Kruse’s hands ached from making fists. She was on her hands and knees now, on top of the sheets.

“You know what I want, Chris. I know you want it too.”

“No.”

“It’s all I want. It’s all you want. I take back everything I’ve ever said about what you do.”

“About what I do?”

“The business you’re in.”

“Evelyn—”

“I love what you do. Go do it.”

“It was an accident. We have to accept it as an accident, an accident, darling. Forgive him and continue. We go back to Toronto. We start over, and—”

“So you won’t?”

Kruse stood up out of bed, walked again to the window and opened it. The air was cool on his chest. In the distance, garbage trucks were already running. Some towns in the south were populated by Algerian immigrants, others Tunisians. Vaison-la-Romaine was a Moroccan town. The garbagemen were Moroccans.

“Long as we’ve been together, you’ve done one thing. I never liked it or even understood it. Now, when I ask you to go and do your job for me, for Lily, just once, you’re too good. Too pure.”

“You told me to leave her.”

“No, I didn’t. Don’t you say that again.” He could hear she was up out of bed. “You owe me, Chris. You have to undo your mistake. You should have run faster and you should have run sooner. Go up that hill.”

“And do what?” Kruse whispered it through the open window, a test, before he turned and said it out loud. “I don’t hurt people.”

“Bullshit.”

“I protect people.”

“But not your daughter.”

His legs could barely hold him.

“All right.” She pulled on a pair of imitation leather pants and the disobedient nipples of her small breasts peeked through the white cotton of her polo shirt. “All right,” she said again, and walked out of the bedroom and down the hall, down the stairs.

Kruse leaned out the window and watched her glide up Trogue-Pompée in the pale street light. In her right hand she carried Lily’s bamboo fairy wand. She swiped it once like a riding crop, whipped the air, and then she started to run.

On his way back to Vaison-la-Romaine from his daughter’s cremation, he took the wrong exit from a roundabout and passed Gare d’Orange. A block later, he pulled over in front of a tavern decorated with a mud-splashed Père Noël from the previous Christmas. Orange station was the closest to Vaison, connected by the regional bus system. It was not yet five in the afternoon. His daughter’s urn sat on the passenger seat, a silver box with her name engraved on the front. He briefly debated taking it, taking her with him. He pulled the emergency brake and left the car in front of the tavern, jogged to the station past the clipped and leafless branches of the plane trees that reached, tortured, for the sky. Lily, who so adored Halloween, called them witches’ hands.

There were cameras in front, inside, and on the platform behind the station, a whitewashed mid-century modernist rectangle attached to a more substantial building in the back. An armed security guard stood near the door, his huge arms crossed. When they had renewed their
passports, they were forced to buy six photos. Only two had been necessary, so the rest, of Lily and of Evelyn, were in his wallet.

The security guard suffered from the syndrome that affects all security guards: he daydreamed for a living. He barely looked at Evelyn’s photo. Her hair in the photograph was newly dyed and especially blonde. She had not wanted to smile but both Lily and Kruse had tried to make her laugh. The dimple on the right side of her mouth seemed to be the only thing holding the frown in place. The guard invited Kruse to speak to the supervisor on duty, who had an office through the heavy metal door. All he had to do was knock.

“Harder,” said the security guard.

The door opened a minute later and a somewhat less-bored security guard stood before him. Kruse asked for the supervisor by name: Madame Aubanel. Keys jangled as she walked out of her office and into the hallway. She was nearly six feet tall and shaped like a pear, a tawny-haired woman with glasses that magnified her eyes. He introduced himself, they shook hands, and he pulled out a photograph of Evelyn. Unlike the other security guard she listened to his pitch before telling him no, with a detailed explanation why. After six months in France he had come to see how bureaucracy had replaced Catholicism.

“I promise it won’t take long, and I’ll pay for my time.”

“It’s absolutely against the regulations, Monsieur, to show security footage to non-security personnel. I am forbidden.” She lifted her right hand to her mouth, to catch a cough, and said with a whisper, “How much?”

“Whatever it takes, Madame.”

She asked him to come back at nine o’clock and to bring five thousand francs.

The mistral had finished blowing. The sky and the air were blue and sharp. The quality of light now, as dusk began its long sigh over Orange, most resembled early May, the month of their arrival. Northern Provence wasn’t nearly as fragrant or as green, as drunk with itself,
as it had been at the height of summer. But now, in this season and through his fatigue and anxiety, every colour, every late-blooming flower and evergreen, every stained stone building, every man and woman and baby and bird was sharp with contrast.

It was not yet winter but the women dressed differently, replacing their white and off-white linen dresses with jeans and long-sleeved shirts, scarves. Lily’s fourth birthday was in three weeks, so she would have had time to change her mind, but Kruse had already decided she would be a fashion designer when she grew up. For the figures she sketched, Mommy and Daddy and
la maîtresse
and her friends from school, Lily created flamboyant outfits. Often, in her drawings, Kruse wore a jacket that was also a live falcon.

The retired soldiers of the Roman empire had settled in Vaison and here in Orange. He walked from the station to the old city centre, with a hill in the middle of it and an enormous theatre turned black by two thousand years of weather. Retired couples holding hands, out for a stroll, were a minority. Tough boys in soccer suits stared at him.

Kruse paid the entry fee for the theatre and walked its dark corridors, waiting for his appointment at the train station. It was cold where the sun did not reach. In the auditorium there were hundreds of seats and, on stage, pillars and a statue. The lights above were modern; Elton John was set to play here in a week. There were only a few other tourists in the theatre. One of them, a handsome man in a navy suit, leaned back and appeared to watch Kruse. There was something familiar about him, so Kruse climbed the stairs for a better look. He was a friend of Jean-François’s maybe, from the party in Villedieu. The man stood up and walked the length of the row and down and away without another glance in Kruse’s direction. It was the slow and confident walk of an athlete.

At nine o’clock Kruse arrived at the main door of Gare d’Orange. It opened before he could touch it and Madame Aubanel rushed him inside, nervously chattering. The video cameras were off but eyes were
everywhere. She led him down a hallway, her big feet pointed out like a cartoon ballerina’s, and into a small room that smelled of sausage with three television sets attached to a video machine. It was already several years out of date so Kruse could not hope for much.