Once in Europa (14 page)

The rain does better on the window pane, Odile, write it again!

In the garden he straightened his back, looked at me slyly and said: When you marry, Odile, don't marry a man who drinks.

There isn't a man who doesn't drink! I said.

Fetch me a glass of cider from the cellar, he ordered me, from the barrel on the right.

He drank the cider slowly, looking at the mountains with snow still on them.

I'd give a lot, Odile, to see the man you're going to marry.

You'll see him all right, Papa.

He shook his head and gave me back the glass. No, Odile, I'll never see the man you marry.

He said it smiling, but I couldn't bear him saying it. I couldn't bear the silence of what it meant. I said the first thing that came into my head: I won't marry a man unless I love him, and if I love him, he'll love me, and if we love each other … if we love each other, we'll have children, and I'll be too busy to notice if he drinks, Papa, and if he drinks too much too often I'll fetch him cider from the cellar, so many glasses he'll go to sleep in the kitchen and I'll put him to bed as soon as the cows are fed.

The Barracks below are scarcely visible in the snow. I can spot them because of blue smoke coming from a chimney. A woman is crossing the footbridge over the river. The Barracks were three minutes' walk from the factory—the same as our house in the opposite direction. From our house to the footbridge was five minutes' walk. Three if I ran. Mother often sent me to the shop by the Barracks to buy mustard or salt or something she'd forgotten. I walked to the bridge and then ran. At whatever time of day, the men who lived there would cry out and wave. They worked on shifts, and of those not working or sleeping some would be washing their clothes on the grass, some preparing a meal by an open window, some tinkering with an old car they hoped to put on the road. In the winter they lit bonfires outside and they brewed tea and roasted chestnuts. They were forbidden to fish in the river.

If I stopped running they held up their arms and grinned and tried to pat my head. I was always relieved to cross the bridge back to our side. Father said the Company had built the Barracks to house a hundred men as soon as the factory was finished. The Company knew they wouldn't find more than two or three hundred local workers and so they foresaw from the beginning that they would need foreigners. Every man who lodged in the
Barracks had his own secrets. Three, four, perhaps more. Impenetrable and unnameable. They turned over these secrets in their hands, wrapped them in paper, threw them in the river, burnt them, whittled them away with their knives when they had nothing else to do. Hundreds of secrets. We in the village on our side of the river had only four. Who killed Lucie Cabrol for her money? Where above Peniel is the entrance to the disused gold mine? What happens at the bridegroom's funeral before they put him in his coffin? Who betrayed the Marmot, who was Michel's uncle, after the factory-gate meeting? Only four secrets. Across the river they in their sheds kept hundreds.

From here, river, house, sheds, factory, bridge, all look like toys. So it was in childhood, Odile Blanc.

One blazing July day in 1950, Mademoiselle Vincent, the schoolmistress, came to the house. I hid in the stable. She wore a hat whose brim was as wide as her shoulders; it was silver-grey in colour and around it was tied a pink satin ribbon.

Merde! said Father. It's the schoolteacher. Look, Louise!

I'll be slipping out, Achille, said Mother.

I have come to talk to you about your daughter, Monsieur Blanc.

Not doing well at school? Do sit down, Mademoiselle Vincent.

On the contrary, I've come to tell you she—she scratched her hot freckled shoulder—on the contrary, I've come to tell you how well your Odile is doing.

Kind of you to come all this way to tell us that. A little coffee?

Father poured coffee into a cup, took off his cap and adjusted it further back on his head.

She's never been difficult, has our Odile, he said.

Her intelligence—

I don't know how you see it, Mademoiselle Vincent, but to my way of seeing, intelligence is not—

She is a pupil of great promise.

Wait a year or two, she's only thirteen, said Father. In a year or two her promise—do you take sugar?

It's just because she's thirteen that we have to decide things now, Monsieur Blanc.

Even in my day, Father said, nobody married before sixteen!

I want to propose to you, Monsieur Blanc, that we send Odile to Cluses.

You said she's causing no trouble, Mademoiselle. At least that's what I understood, what sort of trouble?

Mademoiselle Vincent took off her hat and laid it on her lap. Her greying hair, a little damp, was pressed against her scalp.

No trouble, she said slowly, I want her to go to Cluses for her sake.

How for her sake?

If she stays here, Mademoiselle Vincent went on, she'll leave school next year. If she goes to Cluses she can continue until she gets her CAP. Let her go to Cluses. She was fanning herself with a little notebook taken from her handbag.

She'd have to be a boarder? asked Father.

Yes.

Have you mentioned it to her?

Not before talking to you, Monsieur Blanc.

He shrugged his shoulders, looked at the barometer, said nothing.

Mademoiselle Vincent got to her feet, holding her hat.

I knew you'd see reason, she said, offering him her hand like a present.

I was watching through the stable door.

Nothing to do with reason! shouted Father. In God's name! Nothing to do with reason. He paused, gave a little laugh, and leered at Mademoiselle Vincent. She was an old man's last sin—I wonder if you can understand that, Mademoiselle—his last sin.

It will mean a lot of work, she said.

Don't push her too hard, said Father, it won't change anything. You'll see I was right one day. Odile will be married before she's eighteen. At seventeen she'll be married.

We can't know, Monsieur Blanc. I hope she goes on to take her Baccalaureate.

Back of my arse! You see Odile as a schoolteacher?

She might be, said Mademoiselle Vincent.

No, no. She's too untidy. To be a teacher you have to be very tidy.

I'm not very tidy, said Mademoiselle Vincent, take me, I'm not very tidy.

You have a fine voice, Mademoiselle, when you sing, you make people happy. That makes up for a lot.

You're a flatterer, Monsieur Blanc.

She'll never be a teacher, Odile, she's too … he hesitated. She's too—too close to the ground.

Funny to think of those words now in the sky.

Twice in my life I've been homesick and both times it was in Cluses. The first time was the worst, for then I hadn't yet lived anything worse than homesickness. It's to do with life, homesickness, not death. In Cluses the first time I didn't yet know this difference.

The school was a building of five storeys. I wasn't used to staircases. I missed the smell of the cows, Papa raking out the fire, Maman emptying her piss-pot, everyone in the family doing something different and everybody knowing where everybody else was, Emile playing with the radio and my screaming at him, I missed the wardrobe with my dresses all mixed up with Maman's, and the goat tapping with her horns against the door.

Ever since I could remember, everyone had always known who I was. They called me Odile or Blanc's Daughter or Achille's Last. If somebody did not know who I was, a single answer to a single question was enough for them to place me. Ah yes! Then you must be Régis's sister! In Cluses I was a stranger to everyone. My name was Blanc, which began with a B, and so I was near the top of the alphabetical list. I was always among the first ten that had to stand up, or to file out.

In the school there I learnt how to look at words like something written on a blackboard. When a man swears, the words come out of his body like shit. As kids we talked like that all the time—except when we made traps with words. Adam and Eve and Pinchme went down to the river to bathe, Adam and Eve were drowned, who do you think was saved? At Cluses I learnt that
words belonged to writing. We used them; yet they were never entirely ours.

One evening after the last lesson I went back into the classroom to fetch a book I'd forgotten. The French mistress was sitting at her table, her head buried in her hands, and she was crying. I didn't dare approach her. On the blackboard behind her, I remember it so well, was the conjugation of the verb
fuir
.

If somebody had asked me in 1952: What place makes you think of men most? I wouldn't have said the factory, I wouldn't have said the café opposite the church when there was a funeral, I wouldn't have said the autumn cattle market, I'd have said: the edge of a wood! Take all the edges of all the forests and copses in the valley and put them end to end like a screen, and there'd be a frieze of men! Some with guns, some with dogs, others with chain saws, a few with girls. I heard their voices from the road below. I looked at them, the slimness of the young ones, the way their checkered shirts hung loose, their boots, the way they wore their trousers, the bulges just below where their belts were fastened. I didn't notice their faces, I didn't bother to name them. If one of them noticed me, I'd be off. I didn't want to say a word and I didn't want to approach them. Watching was quite enough, and watching them, I knew how the world was made.

Take this loaf to Régis, said Mother. When it's freezing so hard the cold penetrates to your very bones and a man needs his food in such weather.

She handed me the bread. I ran as fast as I could towards the factory; there was ice everywhere and I had to pick my way. All was frozen—railway points, locks, window frames, ruts, the cliff face behind the factory was hung with icicles, only the river still moved. At the entrance I called to the first man I could see, he had bloodshot eyes and spoke with a strong Spanish accent.

Régis! Big man of honour! he shouted and jerked his thumb upwards. I waited there on the threshold for several minutes, stamping my feet to keep them warm. When Régis arrived he was with Michel. They were of the same class: '51. They had done their military service together.

You know Michel? asked Régis.

I knew Michel. Michel Labourier, nephew of the Marmot.

For God's sake come in and get warm, hissed Régis between his teeth as I handed him the loaf.

Father—

It's not the same if you're with me. Give me your hand. Jesus! you're cold! We've just tapped her.

They led me away from the big furnaces and the massive cranes overhead, which moved on rails in heaven, to another much smaller workshop.

You're going to school at Cluses? Michel asked me.

I nodded.

Do you like it?

I miss being at home.

At least you'll learn something there.

It's another world, I said.

Nonsense! It's the same bloody world. The difference is the kids who go to Cluses don't stay poor and dumb.

We're not dumb, I said.

He looked at me hard. Here, he said, take this to keep your brains warm. He gave me his woolen cap, red and black. I protested and he pulled the cap down on my head, laughing.

He's a communist, said Régis later.

At that time I didn't know what the word meant. We sat against a wall on a pile of sand. I let a handful of it run through my frozen fingers. I could feel its warmth through my stockings, touching my calves. Régis rummaged in a tin, took out his knife, and began cutting a sausage. There were some other men at the end of the shop.

So here's your sister come to see us! shouted one of them.

Odile's her name.

There's a Saint Odile, did you know that?

Yes, I shouted, her fête is the thirteenth of December.

She was born blind in Alsace, the man shouted back. He was at least fifty and thin as a goat's leg.

Was she?

She saw with her eyes for the first time when she was grown up. Then she founded a monastery.

The thin old man, who wasn't from the valley and who knew all about Saint Odile, was pulling on the chains of a pulley which worked a machine for grasping and lifting massive weights.

Now he's going to take the hat off the bread, said Régis.

I've just given you the bread, I said, understanding nothing.

See over there what's sizzling?

In the sand?

That's the bread with its hat on. Now watch!

Several men began to prod at the bread with long bars. To every blow the thing responded by spitting out fire. I was eating sausage. The old man's machine came down and lifted the top off the bread as if it were a cap. Under the cap everything was incandescent. I could feel the onrush of heat, although I was at the other end of the shop. The edges of the white-hot underneath were dribbling like a ripe cheese. When a dribble fell off and hit the ground it made a brittle noise like glass and turned black. All the men were holding up shields in front of their faces.

Each bread weighs a ton, said Régis. He drank from a bottle of wine and some of the wine ran down his neck. A ton, he continued, and ferromolybdenum is worth six thousand a kilo—work it out for yourself, you're still in school—one bread is sold for how much?

Six million.

Correct.

The bread, one and a half metres in diameter, was now phosphorescent in the sand. Régis wasn't looking any longer. I couldn't take my eyes off it.

Do you know the story of the Two Hunters? Régis asked.

Which story?

The story of the Two Hunters in the Forest.

The bread was changing colour. Its whiteness was turning violet. The violet of a child with croup.

I don't think I know the story of the Two Hunters.

Once there were two hunters in the forest up at Peniel: Jean-Paul and Jean-Marc.

Water from a pipe in the roof, with hundreds of holes in it, was falling like rain onto the bread. It was scarlet now.