Come, Barbarians (3 page)

Farmers had been burning grape wood in the valley below the village. Smoke hung and swirled in a deep green bowl. A moat of phantoms, Lily called it, in French:
un fossé de fantômes.
When they had arrived in May to repair themselves, this little family, Lily could hardly say hello and goodbye in her second language. After four months in the playground and two months in school she corrected her parents’ pronunciation. She had pulled him to the edge, the plateau, the perch, to show him this: the dark green valley meeting the blue sky and, at the bottom, the moat.

Kruse’s almost-four-year-old daughter had inherited his need for occasional stillness. Either that or she pretended to need it, to please him. She watched him and traced the scar that ran down the left side of his face. She leaned against his hard arm and looked out thoughtfully, imitating him. Autumn flowers bloomed. The wind changed and they could smell pizza from the plaza of Villedieu.

On Saturday, October 31, Lily wore a fairy costume. Evelyn had sewn it with swatches of baby blue satin from a shop on Cours de Taulignan, Vaison-la-Romaine’s main street. It would have been unimaginable a year ago: Evelyn with the time, the patience, the joy, the matrix of priorities to sew a Halloween costume.

They would have to leave early to make Lily’s seven o’clock bedtime, so they had arrived at three thirty to help out. It wasn’t a Halloween party because they did not celebrate Halloween in Provence. It was something else altogether. Evelyn had helped tie blue and white and red helium balloons to little bags of silty stone. Two men from Paris fixed a political banner over the arch that led to the church: “Front national pour l’unité française.” Orange lights had been strung from the branches of a wilting plane tree some years ago and many, most, had failed. Earlier that afternoon the mayor of Villedieu had ordered his sons to replace them.

“It’s starting, you two.” Evelyn stood under one of the arches separating the square from the edge of the hill.

Kruse had planned to watch from afar or avoid it altogether. Some of the villagers, he had heard, were appalled: the Front National in their public square. “Maybe we’ll stay over here.”

“The TV people want us in a group, so the crowd looks big.”

“I don’t want Lily on TV, at a political rally.”

Evelyn closed her eyes for a moment, as though it required every cell in her body to remain calm. “Please, Chris. I’m not asking for much. No one you know will see you.”

It wasn’t that. But it was a little of that.

Lily insisted they each take a hand and bounce her back down the path, to the smell of hot dough and the music. There were two restaurants in Place de la Libération, one specializing in pizza and the other in galettes. On Halloween-not-Halloween, Café du Centre added its own tables and chairs near the fountain. A France 2 television crew had set up in front of the village hall and some print journalists in wrinkled jackets sat smoking and waiting at corner tables, alone. The mayor and his sons carried five picnic tables from the courtyard of their own house.

Mothers sipped pastis. Ruddy men in soiled shirts, the grandfathers of the village, studied their cigarettes. A fancy ghetto blaster sat in an open window with impossibly blue shutters. It was Callas singing the Habanera: “L’amour est un oiseau rebelle.” Love is a rebellious bird. Evelyn had bought Kruse an opera appreciation class two birthdays ago. With opera, a small library of essential books, two serious magazine subscriptions, and a Woody Allen box set, she had resolved to make a man of culture of him, change him, inspire him to be someone else, someone in Europe who recognizes arias.

Autumn was the finest season, everyone said so, gentle enough even at sunset that Evelyn hung her thin sweater from the otherwise-ignored No Smoking sign next to the stone fountain and sat nearby. The fairy was not inclined to sit. Creatures in need—bugs mostly, and birds—demanded Lily’s attention, her special powers and her kind heart. The magic wand,
la baguette magique
, was made of bamboo.

Evelyn’s long legs were bare, crossed just above the knee. One of her black slip-on shoes swung from her unpainted toenails. The gay man who had fitted Evelyn for her wedding dress had called her legs exquisite. It was not a word Kruse could use but he carried it around, and her legs were no less exquisite with the red welts on her shins: evidence of recent nighttime attacks from continental insects. He did not understand her obsessions, she did not understand his, and nothing—not even a year in France—was going to repair that. But he was nearly finished his first glass of wine. Her skin was unusually tan and pretty in the late-day sun. She spoke to a man and woman from Nyons and caught him watching her.

This was why they had crossed the ocean.

The waiter walked out of Café du Centre with a full tray of beer and muscat, and knitted around the tables and feet and baby carriages and dogs. Kruse made the briefest eye contact with him, to call him over without calling him over. The waiter raised his eyebrows and nodded, just like that. They had only been here a few months and already it was just like that. It was about calm now, and beauty, just as she had planned. Kruse drank wine among strangers. He had his own
levain.

Jean-François and Pascale de Musset entered the plaza from the path that led to the church and the château. Two or three of the Front National organizers from Paris—men and women with pressed shirts and dresses, designer eyeglasses, cellular phones, pinched accents, and a lot of perfume—shouted and gestured like circus masters and everyone stood to applaud. A small group, two women and a young man, booed. Those around them cheered more loudly, stepped in front of them. Lily wanted Jean-François and Pascale to see her fairy costume so she jumped and waved. Kruse tried to stop her but it was too late. The de Mussets were a childless couple and had become once-a-week babysitters and regular gift-buyers. Jean-François stopped and picked Lily up, laughing, as the applause around them continued. He was a tall
man with an enviable pile of grey hair and a long nose that made him more distinguished if less handsome. The television cameras caught it.

Lily shouted, in French. “What am I?”

Jean-François smelled her. “A bowl of soup?”

“No!”

“The president of the republic?”

“No!”

“I know: a wild boar.”

“No, no, no, Monsieur.”

“You’re a princess, it’s evident.” Jean-François put her down and pointed behind him. “And that is your château.”

He continued along and someone handed him a glass of champagne. Their newly famous landlord and best French friend entered the crowd and for the rest of the evening they did not speak to him. Instead they spoke of him as the next leader of the Front National, inheritor of French conservatism, rescuer of the French idea, true heir of de Gaulle. Lily was upset because she was not able to tell Jean-François that she and Maman had designed the fairy costume themselves. Why didn’t anyone even know it was Halloween around here? She did not have to trick-or-treat because, after her pizza, Kruse ordered her a crème brûlée.

Pascale lost Jean-François. She asked Kruse and Evelyn to look around, if they didn’t mind. It was becoming strange, his absence, all of these people had come for him. “He did warn me.” Her hair, so black it appeared wet, was pulled back into a tight bun and she wore a blue dress with a white and red scarf: Madame Tricolore.

“About what?” Kruse held Lily so she wouldn’t run back to the fountain with her new friends.

“That some of the Parisians would take him aside, discuss strategy, make recommendations: say this and don’t say that, walk this way, be ambitious but not too ambitious. The movement has a leader, after all. One wouldn’t want to seem …”

There were only two possibilities: up here at the top of the hill or in the bar-tabac at the bottom. Evelyn went down and Kruse stayed up. He and Lily walked through the pizza and galette restaurants, toured the alley, peeked in the old church, and returned to the square.

Lily danced with the other little girls, looked for beetles and spiders and scorpions, dipped her magic wand in the fountain. Just after seven o’clock, Lily’s bedtime, Evelyn walked back into the square.

“He’s down there.”

“With Parisians?”

“Maybe Parisians. Two men in suits, and he’s drunk. Plastered.”

Jean-François drank wine but it was difficult to imagine him drunk. He was a courtly and careful man, vain in a crowd.

“I tried to speak to him, and the men, both of them, told me to fuck off. I mean, more politely than that but not much more politely.”

“You want me to go down there and …”

“No, Chris, but thanks. My honour is intact.”

Kruse led her across the plaza. “That’s the thing with fascists. One day they’re nice and the next …”

Evelyn squinted. “That isn’t funny here.”

They told Pascale he was at the bottom of the hill, leaving out his condition, and spent the next hour saying goodbye to her and to others, men in the party who had taken too much wine and wanted to thank Evelyn with hand-holding and multiple kisses and bits of devotional poetry they had memorized long ago. Lily hugged Pascale too long and too hard, one of those things she did.

Pascale did not seem to mind. “That all of this should come from a disaster. Good night. Good night, my little fairy.”

Traffic enters Place de la Libération on four thin medieval roadways that snake into and out of Villedieu. Nothing here had been built for cars.

They walked past the fountain and toward a parking lot at the bottom of the hill. Kruse and Evelyn walked along the houses while Lily
skipped, in character, on the opposite side of the road. There was no formal sidewalk here, but the cobblestones did end in a rough path of gravel decorated with old trees. She swung her wand about and sang in French and in English, turned frogs into princes. In the distance, the sound of sirens. When they had first arrived, the French siren had been exotic and glamorous. Kruse called her over but either she ignored him or did not hear over the noise of the party and her own singing. He started to cross the street but Evelyn pulled him back.

“Let her be.”

Kruse would later wonder why he did not hear the engine sooner. Where had the sirens come from? He watched Lily and he watched Evelyn, her tan face and the veins on the back of her hand. In the plaza, under the inconsistent orange lights, he had studied the unlit pockets they created along the wall, the sloped path toward the broken château, entrances and escapes, hiding places, covered positions, until he took another glass of wine and forced himself to notice other things. Evelyn had succeeded: his business was no longer his business.

The headlights were not turned on.

Lily stopped skipping. She saw it first, swerving toward her, and froze. There would have been time, if Kruse had started at that instant, to run across and snatch her up and pull her into a doorway. By the time he started to run it was too late. The car roared up the old road, its new tires slapping the cobblestone. Evelyn screamed behind him and said no, as the white Mercedes of their landlord and best French friend accelerated into their daughter.

SOMEONE HAD BEEN IN BOULANGERIE J.F. SINCE THE MORNING. THE
poster with
“fasciste”
over Jean-François’s head had been removed. Flowers were scattered about. Candles had been placed before the door, though they had blown out in the new wind. No one had left flowers and candles for Lily, not in Villedieu and not in Vaison-la-Romaine. Inside, the stone and stainless steel workshop shone in the faint light, most of the sun doused by stage one of the mistral: dust. Three nuns in their habits bent into it and either ignored him or couldn’t hear when he offered to help with an arm or directions. Cours de Taulignan was deserted. The people of Northern Provence had hunkered into their dim little houses to make stew.

By ambition Jean-François de Musset was a regional councillor on his way to the palace. By trade he was a baker, as his father had been. He held the title of Meilleur Ouvrier de France—the best in the country. President François Mitterrand had bestowed the honour on him after a display of bread making, wine pairing, and historical speech making
at a series of arduous competitions in Paris. He had been profiled in every major newspaper and magazine in France, and had merited a small piece in
The New York Times
in the eighties. These pieces had been fitted into wooden frames and hung on the interior walls of his bakery, where they were stained by the sun and warped by humidity. The converted horse stable they rented from Jean-François and Pascale was small but it was clean and safe. Morning baguettes from Boulangerie J.F. were delicious. The baker and his wife had been kind to their daughter. Through Jean-François, Evelyn had found something to study and Kruse had found something to make.

The lieutenant greeted him at the door of the gendarmerie in a clean shirt and blazer. “We were just about to send a bulletin, Monsieur Kruse.”

“I was in Villedieu.”

“Why?”

“Perhaps you’ve forgotten. Last night, a drunk man—”

“Yes, yes.” The lieutenant’s smile faded for a moment. “That crime has been solved.”

“It must be gratifying.”

The gendarme fussed with his moustache. He had a name tag: HUARD, Yves. Behind him, a woman in uniform sat on a raised chair behind a desk, smoking and watching them watch one another. Pop music played distantly inside the building. From somewhere else, a man’s heavy and exaggerated laugh. All was ridiculous, the day after his daughter’s murder.

“Have you found anything in my wife’s notebooks?”

“Only one of us reads English, and he’s slow about it. I’d ask you to translate for us but I fear you’d be conflicted.”

“You’re wasting your time. She’s no killer.”

“See? Conflicted. Follow me, Monsieur Kruse.”

He never wanted to talk for the sake of talking. In the hallway he did. “You’re married, Monsieur Huard?”

“Not me, no. I was and then I wasn’t.”

“Children?”

“We didn’t make it that far, Monsieur Kruse. I regret it but I would have been a miserable father. I’m miserable at most things. Even interrogation, as you’ll soon see.” The lieutenant stopped and turned around, fixed Kruse in the eyes. “And how are you?”

There was no way to answer.

“And now the winds have come. Just think, if they had arrived last night the party would have been cancelled.”

The interview cell was not the bare walls and raw concrete of his imagination. It was a conference room with potted plants and a white screen for overhead projections. There was a fax machine and, in the middle of the table, a speakerphone. Madame Boutet’s hair was still wet. She stood up, in a thick black police sweater, to shake his hand.

“We hear you’ve been looking for her.”

“She’s my wife.”

“Rather you find her than us.” Madame’s nose flared. “Is that it?”

The handshake had lasted too long. He retreated.

“You’ve eaten something since this morning, I hope.”

“Not yet, Madame, but it’s in my plans.”

Lieutenant Huard clapped his hands. “Sous-lieutenant Boutet, how would you like to go next door and order us a lovely fromage-charcuterie?”

It was evident Madame Boutet would not like to do that. She paused a moment and stared at her partner, flatly but malevolently, and then she walked out.

“You’re in for it now, Monsieur Kruse. She can’t take it out on me but she can punish you. Please sit.”

The chairs were mismatched but made of leather, with wheels on the bottom. Kruse sat and leaned forward over the table. “You interviewed him, your old friend, after he killed her.”

“Killed? You mean Jean-François. I didn’t mean to imply we were friends. He was a wealthy and powerful man, an artisan. Who am I?”

“What did he say?”

“He was destroyed, Monsieur. I promise you that. He had strong feelings for your daughter. He knew his future, his career and life as he imagined it, were as dead as your Lily. This one terrible moment. He said he didn’t remember.”

“What didn’t he remember?”

“He was barely coherent and then as he came out of the fog, his drunkenness, it was as though he didn’t know how it had all come to be. From late-afternoon to midnight: nothing.”

“He was preparing his legal defence, no doubt. Evelyn spoke to him in the tavern at the bottom of the hill, or tried to speak to him, while he was drinking. He was with two men, from Paris I think, and they were rude to her.”

“I would ask my old friend about these men.” Lieutenant Huard twirled his soft, crumpled package of cigarettes on the table. “Their names and addresses. But someone stabbed him, you see. Do you know how many times? Did you read about it?”

“No, Monsieur.”

“We are fragile creatures, aren’t we?” Lieutenant Huard waited a moment, for confirmation. Then he winked and lifted a plastic bag from a side table, next to the coffee machine, and dug his hand into it. He pulled out a fragrant pile of newspapers.

“You haven’t seen these yet.”

“No.”

“While we wait for Madame Boutet, why don’t you take a look?”

There were two national newspapers,
Le Monde
and
Le Figaro
, and two regional papers,
La Provence
and
Le Dauphiné Libéré.
Each carried a version of the story on its front page. He skimmed the first few paragraphs of each.

France is not a violent country by American standards, but enough people are murdered that it isn’t automatically news when a man in Toulouse strangles his wife or shoots his business partner in the head
with a hunting rifle. It was news because Jean-François de Musset was a politician and, more recently, a national hero. This was the lead of all four stories. Lily was worth a sentence, a phrase. He pushed them aside.

“You didn’t read far enough, Monsieur Kruse.”

“I was in Villedieu last night. I know what happened.”

“Read all of the stories until the end. It will lead rather elegantly into some of our questions.”

A little more than a month earlier, Jean-François and Pascale had insisted the family spend a few days at their holiday home in Cassis, on the Mediterranean coast. Kruse had been volunteering at the bakery for two months, working as a free apprentice; if he was in France to change his life for Evelyn and for Lily, to learn how to make something beautiful, bread had seemed as beautiful as anything else. Evelyn was not one to work with her hands but she had been busy. She was studying Jean-François’s political party but also teaching him. She participated in meetings and events, provided advice, gently steered them away from extremes; his conservatism was her conservatism, even though he had never read Edmund Burke or Chateaubriand. She and Kruse accepted the offer of a beach vacation and drove their rental car to the pretty little town on the sea. Evelyn lay on a beach towel and read about the meeting place between French art and politics: a publishable paper, at least one, was revealing itself to her. He and Lily dug holes and buried each other in the sand. Even in September the sea was warmer than any Ontario lake.

One night in Cassis, Kruse and Evelyn hired a babysitter through the tourist office and spent way too many francs on food and wine in a waterfront bistro. Back in the apartment they made love so well they woke up Lily. The next morning the heat that sustained them on the Mediterranean moved north and smashed into the cool from the mountains, and Vaison-la-Romaine formed the unlucky centre of the most intense rainstorms and the most devastating flood since the seventeenth century. The Ouvèze river overflowed, knocking out everything
in its path but one of the oldest bridges in the world: the Roman arch separating the lower and upper towns. Over thirty people, most of them campers east of Vaison, were swept to their deaths. The man who organized the rescue and pulled several people out from trees and smashed buildings, in front of television news cameras, was a baker and Front National regional councillor named Jean-François de Musset.

Two weeks after the flood in Vaison-la-Romaine, the first Sunday in October, Jean-François was invited to Paris. One of the country’s most famous television talk show hosts, Bernard Pivot, sat across from him in a bright studio. The show was called
Bouillon de culture
and the Kruses were invited to watch with Pascale, at the farmhouse behind the château.

It was a night of magic: Lily had never seen someone she knew on TV. The de Musset domaine was an enormous converted farmhouse between yellow and brown, with a faded almost-pink terracotta roof and a small vineyard, down a secluded road. They had dinner before the broadcast: a beet salad, bouillabaisse with aioli, tomates confites, and a roasted chicken with lemon and rosemary, every ingredient from their garden or a product of the Tuesday morning Vaison-la-Romaine market.

During dinner Evelyn said very little. Kruse caught her staring at Pascale, a tiny but beautiful woman with enough Italian ancestry to give her a permanent tan. She moved in a slow but lively fashion, as though she were always stopping herself from breaking into a run. If Kruse hadn’t known that Jean-François was fifty-one and that he and Pascale had been lycée sweethearts, he would have had trouble guessing her age. She spoke to Lily almost all the way through dinner, formally and sincerely, about Lily’s hopes and dreams, her mission in life, her favourite colour, favourite music, favourite food, favourite country.

La France, évidemment.

Kruse knew enough, from Evelyn, to understand that Jean-François’s political party was in a curious spot. Young people were apt to deface a
poster with the word
fasciste
, and the Front National’s early incarnation had attracted men who were later outed as Nazi collaborators during the Second World War. The current leader had been caught on camera and on tape saying abominable things, and every few months the press found another anti-Semite or neo-Nazi member of the party, a skinhead or a Vichy man. But Vichy men were everywhere, embedded in every party and every institution in France, in its blood and bones, the architecture of its shame. The source of the Front National’s growing popularity in the last five years was its frankness about North African migration: the Moroccans on the sidewalk.

This was Evelyn’s port of entry into the Front National. She could help change its narrative, reposition it as the party best fit to return France to glory. Every great society in the history of the world has been a racist society by someone’s definition. If there were true racists in the party, Jean-François’s job was to isolate and remove them. But a culture needs coherence if it aspires to nobility, not a cult of fairness. Nostalgia is natural. Jean-François’s political party was only unique in its honesty. The changes that European leaders had proposed were dangerous, culturally and economically, and under Mitterrand, immigration in France had exploded while job growth had stopped. A conservative party could be honest and fair and open-hearted at once. Evelyn had worked with Jean-François on what he might say to Bernard Pivot and, by extension, several million French voters.

Kruse asked what Pascale thought of the newspaper editorials that predicted Jean-François would soon lead the Front National.

Pascale answered first with a sigh. “I am not a political woman.”

“No?”

“I am a woman who married a political man.”

“Sure. I can sympathize with that.”

Evelyn performed a long sigh. He knew what she was thinking in defence: substitute “political” with “violent.”

“I know what people say.” Pascale had hired a Moroccan woman and
her son to cater the dinner. They silently filled the wineglasses. She waited until they were out of the dining room, back in the kitchen. “There are extremists in the party, crazies, but they’re a minority. Maybe one or two percent. Crazy people are everywhere. The newspapers hunt them down.”

“We have to remove them from the party,” said Evelyn.

“Is that democracy?”

Evelyn felt the word “democracy” was flawed. It was all things to all people, Soviets and Americans and African dictators. “It’s necessary.

“Jean-François did join the FN to transform it. The current leader, the man who must be replaced, is a clown and a buffoon. Please don’t tell Jean-François I said that, but it is true. If he changes the party, perhaps these people will simply melt away and start their own. A party of genuine crazies, like they have in England and Austria.”

“Clown.” The chocolate dessert had jolted Lily. “Buffoon.”

“What has France lost, in only a few years?” Evelyn could now talk politics in French the way she did it in English—with authority. “A powerful religion, the most rigorous school system in the world, genuine art by genuine artists, honour and strength and purity.”

“Don’t forget our spirit of individualism.”

Evelyn had grown up in a family that had once been wealthy, an old shipping family. Her grandfather May had turned out to be a drunk and a gambler. He lost everything but his sense of distinction. It had formed her politics and her work ethic. And her machine of judgment. Evelyn had confessed she thought Pascale was pompous, a phony who had grown up poor and now carried herself like a baroness. “Individualism, after the Second World War? Please do tell me more about that.”