North of Nowhere, South of Loss (16 page)

“Then the baker tells them.”

9. The Butcher, the Baker

Each day, when the baker leans on his horn, she opens the gate in their wall. It is ten exactly by the church-tower clock. The baker parks in the cobbled square where the guillotine stood, opens the back doors of his van, and leans against the shrine to Our Lady who wears white, a powdering of pigeon-shit centuries thick. The hot fresh smell of yeast pulls people like ribbons through the gates on all sides of the square.

“Ah,
l'anglaise!”
the baker says every day.
“Bonjour, madame. Combien de baguettes aujourd'hui?”

“Deux, s'il vous plaît, monsieur. Je ne suis pas anglaise. Je suis australienne
.”

Day after day, not a word, not an intonation changes.

“No one lives in France,” she says, “and nothing changes. Ever.”

“That is how we know we will find the village,” he explains. “And how we know they will be waiting for us.”

She says: “I dreamed there was blood on the baker's hands.”

10. Souls of the Damned

“It's so dark in here,” she says. “I used to love forests. Rainforests. But this one scares me.”

“Look! Look there. A hunter's
abri.”

“It's the hunters more than the murders. I'm scared of guns.”

“Look.” He points to a small dam, a drinking trough. It is a lure. As they watch, a fawn pricks its way across moss on dainty unsteady legs. At the trough it pauses, sensing something, and stares at them with its huge and lustrous eyes, and then it is gone, a streak of taupe and white.

“The hunters stay downwind,” he explains. “They wait till the deer start to drink.”

“That's so cruel. That's so unfair.” She examines the water hole. “It's quite steep. It's very –
merde
!” She slips and falls into the mud.

Swann laughs, changing light reading and shutter speed. “I'll call this one ‘Fallen Woman'. ”

“Oh for God's sake,” she says, and hurls a handful of mud at the lens.

“My Nikon!” he cries.

She sees his face and begins to run, headlong, deep into the forest. Tangled ivy clutches at her ankles, pulls at her legs. She stumbles on, gasping. She can hear the thudding of his feet, of her heart, of the blood in her ears. She falls and staggers up and hugs the trunk of an oak for support and then she sees the white stag and cannot even scream.

Massive, the colour of soiled cream, he watches her, unblinking. His antlers seem ancient, deadly as the scaffolding that once stood in Place de la République. She cannot breathe. The stag's basilisk eyes are impassive.
Welcome to the royal hunt,
the eyes say.
There is no escape. Thou shalt not pass.

She seems to faint. A blackness floats before her eyes. She is buffeted by something, by history, by time, by the illicit, by something that is hurting her wrists. There seem to be cords.

“Magnificent, magnificent,” Swann breathes. “The royal stag. I got you both. I'll call it ‘The Huntress Bound'.” He is taking her violently from behind, the tree bark strafes her face, her belly, her breasts. Her wrists are bound with a leather cord to the trunk. “He's still watching us,” Swann says, his voice drunk with arousal. “He knows this scene.”

Swann's skin is slick against her back. She can feel his nails on her thighs, drawing blood. Beyond her bound wrists, beyond the bark-strafed skin of her forearms, her eyes meet the eyes of the stag.

11. Woman Getting out of the Bath

When she steps out of the bath, the water is pink with blood.

“Like that,” he says, pulling away the towel. “With your hair wet, and one foot still in the water, and the steam rising.”

She feels drugged. The shutter flickflickflicks like an eyelash. She is wet as a seal and slippery, her movements tidal.

12. Le Déjeuner sur l'Herbe

An old man leans on a pitchfork and stares at them stupidly. His face is seamed like a quarry. He has no teeth. Behind him, the floor of the stone barn is piled with hay. They can see a few sheep and a horse.

“We could ask him to take a photograph,” Odette says.

“We don't need it. We've already got proof. The village sign.”

“Both of us together, I mean.” She smoothes the linen cloth on the grass near the edge of the pond. From her backpack, she takes out the glasses and the wine.

Swann says: “I'm going to pick apples.” A tree heavy with fruit hangs over the pond and Swann is climbing, the Nikon slung around his neck. “I knew it,” he says. “From up here I can see the iron spikes where the stags were hung. It's the hunting lodge. The stone barn was the hunting lodge.”

Odette watches the old man who watches Swann. That is surely his apple tree, she thinks. This is his barn. He could be a royal by-blow. He could be Monsieur Bousquet's great-great-grandson, five times removed.

“Can I tempt you?” Swann swings down out of the tree. He offers an apple. When she bites into it, the eye of the Nikon blinks.
“Eve in Eden
,” he says, and the high bright sound is in his voice. “Tonight, when the old man goes, we'll sleep on his hay.”

“I'm going to ask him to take a photograph.”

“He won't have a clue what to do. Look at the way he looks at us. You might as well ask him for the moon.”

“He thinks we're trespassing.”

“He doesn't. No one owns a village pond or a village well.

He's not thinking anything.”

“He's scared of us then.”

“Inbred,” Swann decides. “It's possible no one from outside has been here for three hundred years.”

“I'm going to ask him just the same.”

“I will take your photograph,” Swann promises. “I have six rolls of film. I will take you lying naked in the hay.”

“Where Louise de la Vallière got laid.”

“Yes. And in the pond by moonlight.
The naked shepherdess sings to the moon.”

“I want one of us together. I want a keepsake. I want the picnic on the grass, just this one peaceful scene.”

“You don't need a keepsake in Eden.”

“It's no good, Swann. I'm leaving. You must have known. You must surely have realised that.”

His face goes still. She sees his knuckles turn white and the wine glass break in his hand.

“You're bleeding,” she cries.

He lifts his bloodied palm to her face and strokes her cheek. “You won't be leaving,” he says.

13. That Obscure Object of Desire

A man and a woman are drinking wine in a sidewalk café.

“Your hair is grayer than last time,” Odette says. “It suits you. Men look more distinguished with age.” She touches the birthstain under his eye with her fingertip.
“Mon cher volcan.”

Swann takes her hands and kisses them. “There is still a wildness in you,” he says,
“ma biche sauvage.
You were like a doe in the forest, always poised to take flight.”

“You were so violent, Swann, when we were young. You used to scare me.”

“Violent?” He raises startled brows.
“Mais non.”

“I found an old photograph. The picnic with wine and apples in La Forêt le Roi.”

He closes his eyes. “A thousand and one nights in the king's hunting lodge,” he sighs fondly.

“I was going to bring it, but I couldn't find it in time. It's somewhere in the papers on my desk.”

Swann takes a deep slow breath. “I can smell the hay. I beguiled myself for years with that fantasy. It was a considerable work of art.”

“We asked that old man to take the picture.”

“I had some sort of idea for a show.
A la recherche du village perdu
, something like that. I arranged the hunting lodge and the pond and an apple tree. I could see them clear as a photograph in my head.”

“The essence of bucolic tranquillity” she muses. “You would never guess what was just outside the frame.”

“The map was real,” he says. “The possibility was always there. Camus wrote that the way matters little. What suffices is the will to arrive.”

“Do you remember that photograph of you leaning on the village sign?” she asks. “You look pensive. You've found the object of your obsession but it isn't enough. I love that picture. It's the essence of you.”

“In my wallet,” he says, “I carry the photograph of you in the king's hunting lodge. You look the way you should always look.”

“I only look that way in French,” Odette says.

NATIVITY

When he passes under the boom, his fingertips turn slippery on the wheel.
No vehicles over six feet.
Jonathan ducks his head, just in case, and listens for a thump, miscalculation being something he has come to expect. He wipes his hands, one at a time, against the car seat, but the grey fabric is clammy too. He leans out to take the ticket. Even in the parking garage, he notes uneasily, as soon as the barrier descends and locks you in, that particular fog settles. Any hospital, any city, the same thing: he has difficulty breathing.

He clicks on his headlights and follows the arrows up, second level, third, still no free spaces, fourth level, he can feel his pulse picking up speed, all these sick and dying people, this fog, he is practically hyperventilating now, he is allergic to visitation hours, to visitations,
Visitation of the Plague, Visitation of the Archangel Gabriel to Mary,
to this fever of unwanted associations, to fifteenth-century woodcuts plastering themselves across his windshield. He turns his wipers on. He has reached fifth level. Sixth. He may not be able to get out of his car. Does that ever happen? he wonders; blackouts, heart attacks, in hospital parking lots? Obviously. He can see attendants in Day-Glo vests checking, all part of the day's work. The attendants hold slim flashlight probes. They move from car to car. They are looking for bodies slumped low against the wheel.
Potius mori quam foedari,
Jonathan thinks. He wonders what the statistics are.

When he turns off the engine, the fog leaks in through the vents. The smell is always the same, a moist blend of anxiety, disinfectant, roses wilting at bedsides, sweat (the kind one smells on animals in veterinarians' waiting rooms), vital fluids, IV fluids, bed pans, over-perfumed visitors, death.

Maternity wards should be different.

Wards
, he thinks. Wardens. Detention. There is no getting away from threat. The concrete pillars undulate slightly, like the pulse in a baby's head, sucking back and then distending themselves. His sense of balance has gone. There is less and less space for the car and he can see that it will not be easy to back out. He will have to work at it.
(Labour's begun, the first phase, and she's been admitted. She especially wants you to be there. Can you drop everything and come down?)
He decides that Atlanta is worse than other cities.
(Apparently there are complications. Something called preeclampsia. Do you think you can make it in time?)
He is labouring now, tugging at oxygen, raking it across his ribs. Atlanta is worse because of the congestion, the smog, the violence, the rampant harm.

He does not seem able to move. He leans against the steering wheel and watches a Toyota draw a bead on him, nosing in, docking. He absorbs the soft vinyl jolt of front bumpers bumping.
The eagle has landed.
His mind is like that, a grab bag of not entirely illogical associations. The eagle has landed. The stork circles.

A man gets out of the Toyota. He has roses in one hand, a balloon string in the other. IT'S A BOY! the balloon says, sleekly silver, bobbing above the man's head. The man feels Jonathan watching. He grins and salutes. He is laughing a winning-the-lottery laugh. Rah rah rah, he burbles, or seems to. I've won a son, a son I've won.

Dr Seuss, I presume.

Dr Seuss tugs on his balloon and gives an exaggerated whoop of jubilation. Jonathan is not fooled. The man is terrified.

“Whoa, hey,” the man says, rapping on Jonathan's window.

Jonathan considers. This could be as good a summons as any. He opens his door part way, and extends his left leg. He gets both feet on the ground.

“Hey” Dr Seuss says. “Do you know where we get the free tokens?”

“Sorry?”

“Parking tokens. You know. We're supposed to get free ones.”

“Are we?”

“Uh-huh. All the new dads. I couldn't find the right desk last night. Mind you, in a bit of a whirl, I'm the first to admit. Know where we have to go?”

“Sorry,” Jonathan says. “No idea.”

“Shoot.” Dr Seuss is frowning a little, assessing him. “You know what? I can tell, just by looking at you, that your stork hasn't made delivery yet. Am I right?”

Jonathan thinks of possible responses, some of them violent. This startles him and piques his interest. He cannot recall ever before having the urge to hit anyone. He is a gentle, scholarly person. At least, that is how he thinks of himself. Other people – his students, for instance, or his son Ben and his daughter Stacey – probably think of him as out of it. He has certainly never had fantasies of violence. Never. But was that honest? Could a classicist truly claim a lack of interest in war, murder, bloody revenge, infanticide, patricide, noble self-immolation, the tearing of bodies limb from limb?
Potius mori quam foedari,
death before dishonor, and yes, at this moment, he would prefer a heart attack, or death by lions, or by man-to-man combat in the parking garage, or by, say, an out-of-control car ramming him against a concrete pillar. At this moment, he definitely feels such sudden escape would be preferable to blacking out in the delivery room in full public view. He slumps back into his car.

Dr Seuss bends over him. “Hey, listen, it's not that bad. It's over before you know it. Mine had ten hours of labour, I'm telling you, I understand why they call it labour, I was wiped, I thought it would never end.” He rubs his forehead with the back of his balloon-holding hand. “I stayed right to the end though,” he says proudly. He takes a wondering inventory of his own body, amazed by its strength. “Right to the last inning it's touch and go, you're scared the whole damn time, you're thinking there's no way the head and shoulders can get through without ripping her in half, there's no way, and then shazam, you win the pennant, know what I'm saying?
Pennant
? What am I talking about? This is the World Series, this is it, man, there ain't nothing like it. This time tomorrow, you'll know what I'm talking about. Hold these.”

He thrusts the roses into Jonathan's hand and fishes in the pocket of his jacket.

“Here, have a cigar. Think of it as a stolen base, and you're there on third just waiting for that one little extra push to get you home free. Compliments of Ernest Hampton Somerset the Third, Ernie for short, in honour of Ernest Hampton Somerset the Fourth, Ernie Junior for short.”

Bubbling would be the word, Jonathan thinks. He is bubbling on, Seussing and sluicing, covering up panic. And Jonathan is unexpectedly swamped by a great rush of mournful tenderness for Ernest Hampton Somerset the Third, whose son has not yet reached the age of disappointment. He stumbles out of his car.

“Your roses,” he says awkwardly.

“Oh geez, thanks. Don't know which way is up. I'm flying, I admit it to you, man. High as a kite. Feels like Christmas.”

“Merry September,” Jonathan says. “Congratulations.”

“Here's my card. Every kind of insurance you can think of. Listen, you've got to pull yourself together, it's important for
them,
you know. She's going to be fine, the baby's going to be fine, you're going to be fine, uh … what did you say your name –?”

Another small wave of turbulence rises in Jonathan and recedes. “Jonathan,” he says meekly enough.

“You're white as a sheet, Johnnie boy.” Ernie takes in the tweed jacket, the horn-rimmed glasses, the greying hair. “Starting over?” he guesses. “Is that why you're so scared?”

Jonathan blinks at him. “Pardon?”

“I mean, you know …” Ernie flounders a little. “Well, I thought maybe second family. Younger wife.”

“Oh.” Jonathan winces. “No.” He is leaning against his car, studying the cigar, trying to think where to put it. “It's my daughter,” he says faintly.

“Oh well, for God's sake, that explains it,” Ernie says. “Ginny's dad was a wreck. I'm not kidding you. A total wreck. We had to send him packing last night, hours before Ernie Junior took his bow.
Hours
before.” He hooks the balloon string around the bunched stems of the roses in order to free his right hand. He pats Jonathan on the shoulder. “Listen, Johnnie, before you can blink, you'll be passing out your own cigars, and signing the kid up for college. That's where I come in, by the way. College tuition fund, the best gift a granddaddy can give. You got my card, give me a call. You're not going to pass out on me, are you?”

“No, no. I'm exhausted, I guess. Long drive.”

“Where'd you come from?”

“Boston,” Jonathan says.

“Good God.” Ernie stares at him, and then walks to the back of the car. “How about that?” he says with wonder. He bends down and runs the knuckles of his balloon hand across the licence plate. He shakes his head. “How come you didn't fly?”

“Bad weather. Fog.” Inner or outer? he waits for Ernie to ask. Ernie keeps staring. “The airport was closed,” he explains. “So I had to drive to New York, and then I just –” He makes a vague motion with one hand. “I don't know. I just kept going.”

A long slow whistle curves out of Ernie's lips like an arc of spit. “How many hours that take you?”

“Um, around fourteen, I think, actual driving.” He frowns at his watch. “I stopped somewhere in West Virginia and slept for a few hours. Some ratty motel.”

Ernie whistles again and shakes his head. “We all go a bit crazy, I guess. It's kinda like their cravings for pickles or whatever, d'you think?”

Jonathan thinks it was one way to arrive too late.

“Lean on me,” Ernie offers. “Here, you hold the balloon. What's your line, by the way?”

Jonathan sighs. He has been blundering into situations of fleeting camaraderie more often lately, with the most improbable people. This bothers him. He fears it means that his haplessness is showing. He never knows how to extricate himself, but he has learned that it is definitely not a good idea to say, in answer to casual exploratory questions,
classicist,
or even
college professor.
It makes people too uneasy.

“I deal in old stuff” he says, replaying one of his children's jokes. He tries for their light dismissive tone. “I recycle it.”

“You mean antiques? An antiques dealer?”

“Antiques, antiquities.” He feels ridiculous, leaning on Ernie's arm, the two of them shuffling toward the elevator. He cannot bring himself to give offence and break free.

“Lot of money in that, Johnnie, especially in Atlanta. I could tell right off the bat from your jacket, by the way, not to mention your Yankee accent, that you were into something very upmarket.”

Non semper ea sunt quae videntur
, Jonathan thinks. He feels grotesque. He feels that Ernie has the better grip on life, that Ernie has more substance, more generosity, that Ernie deserves honesty, though he knows perfectly well that the truth will not be of the slightest interest to Ernie. Nevertheless.
“Non semper ea sunt quae videntur,
Ernie. As we say in the trade. Things are not always what they appear to be.”

“Very true,” Ernie says. “That's very true. Mind if I give you a friendly tip, Johnnie? No offence. But you should leave your car safe at your hotel where they'll have a security patrol. Rent one for driving around in while you're down here. With Georgia tags, know what I mean?”

Jonathan is studying the mylar balloon that still bucks at his own wrist.
Rara avis,
it should say.

“Some people down here have a thing about Massachusetts tags, is what I mean,” Ernie says as the elevator doors open at reception. “Listen, you think you'll be okay now? I'm heading up another level.”

“Your balloon,” Jonathan says.

“Oh, thanks. Give me a call, Johnnie, okay? I work national. Got clients in fifty states.”

Jonathan leans on the reception desk and gives his daughter's name. The nurse frowns at him. “You asthmatic?” she asks.

“No,” Jonathan says. “It's the –” He gestures at the fog. “Happens to me in hospitals.”

The nurse smiles. She runs a fingernail down the ledger on her desk, scanning names. Her fingernails are the colour of bruised plums, and Jonathan wonders how she bathes, how she attends to the body, without gouging furrows in her skin. He tries to imagine her making those rows of tiny braids in her hair, her long nails clicking like knitting needles. Other nurses come and go, ignoring Jonathan, sometimes leaning over the shoulder of the nurse at the desk to add brief notations to her book. The nails of the other nurses, Jonathan is relieved to see, are clipped. Perhaps desk nurses receive a special dispensation. But when they have other duties? He imagines the infant, his grandchild, prinked with blood. Nailed to death, he thinks ghoulishly. He feels lightheaded.

“I'm afraid I've arrived too late, nurse,” he says. “I think she will have had –”

“I'm not a nurse. I'm the receptionist.”

“Oh. I thought … because of your uniform.” He tries again. “I think she will have had the baby by now.”

The plum-lacquered index nail stops, scans horizontally, monitors data.

“Nope. Not yet. Let's see, D3. Oh yes, I know her. They brought her down to Delivery before I came on. About six hours ago, I think.” She laughs. “Everyone's been teasing her, she was so gung-ho for natural, they always are, the
primos
, for all of about twenty minutes, and she's swearing up and down, no way, no way she's a quitter, she's going to go the whole distance. And then she hears the screaming from Delivery 2, and asks for an epidural on the spot. We laughed so hard you'd have thought we were the ones with contractions.” She makes drumming motions with her right hand on the desk and the sound of her nails is like bird feet skittering on glass. “You can say a quick hello, that's all. We've got a lounge down the corridor there, where you can wait after that, if you want. She's being monitored because there are a few complications. It's only relatives now.”