The Book of Nights E-Book

Sylvie Germain

• Herausgeber: Dedalus
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Serie: Dedalus Hall of Fame
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 451

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

One hundred years of French history seen through the eyes of the Peniel family

Das E-Book The Book of Nights wird angeboten von Dedalus und wurde mit folgenden Begriffen kategorisiert:

Leseprobe

To Henriette and Romain Germain

Dedalus Hall of Fame

To celebrate thirty years of publishing on 30 November 2013 Dedalus has created its own Hall of Fame for books which have a special place in the Dedalus story. The first 3 titles selected are:

Pfitz – Andrew Crumey

The Book of Nights – Sylvie Germain

Memoirs of a Gnostic Dwarf – David Madsen

These titles will be followed in July 2014 by:

Bad to the Bone – James Waddington

THE AUTHOR

Sylvie Germain was born in Chateauroux in Central France in 1954. She read philosophy at the Sorbonne, being awarded a doctorate. From 1987 until the summer of 1993 she taught philosophy at the French School in Prague. She now lives in Angouleme.

Sylvie Germain is the author of thirteen works of fiction, eleven of which have been published by Dedalus, a study of the painter Vermeer and a religious meditation. Her work has been translated into twenty one languages and has received worldwide acclaim.

Sylvie Germain’s first novel The Book of Nights was published to France to great acclaim in 1985. It has won five literary prizes as well as the TLS Scott MoncrieffTranslation Prize in England. The novel’s story is continued in Night of Amber in 1987. Her third novel Days of Anger won the Prix Femina in 1989. It was followed by The Medusa Child in 1991 and The Weeping Woman on the Streets of Prague in 1992, the beginning of her Prague trilogy, continued with Infinite Possibilities in 1993 and then Invitation to a Journey (L’Eclats du sel). The Book of Tobias saw a return to rural France and la France profonde, followed in 2002 by The Song of False Lovers (Chanson des Mal-Aimants).

Her next novel Magnus, was written in fragments, and creates a powerful study of the Holocaust and the long shadow it left. It won the Goncourt Lyceen Prize for the best French novel of 2005. It was published by Dedalus in 2008 followed by Hidden Lives in the autumn of 2010.

THE TRANSLATOR

Christine Donougher was born in England in 1954. She read English and French at Cambridge and after a career in publishing is now a freelance translator and editor.

Her translation of The Book of Nights won the 1992 Scott Moncrieff Translation Prize. Her translations from French for Dedalus are: seven novels by Sylvie Germain, The Book of Nights, Night of Amber, Days of Anger, The Book of Tobias, Invitation to a Journey, The Song of False Lovers and Magnus, Enigma by Rezvani, The Experience of the Night by Marcel Bealu, Le Calvaire by Octave Mirbeau, Tales from the Saragossa Manuscript by Jan Potocki, The Land of Darkness by Daniel Arsand and Paris Noir by Jacques Yonnet. Her translations from Italian for Dedalus are Senso (and other stories) and Sparrow (and other stories).

NON est mon nom

NON NON le nom

NON NON le NON

Rene Daumal Le Contre-Ciel

And the angel of the lord said unto him:

Wherefore askest thou after my name,

seeing it is wonderful.

Judges, 13, xviii

‘With his mother’s cry,

Night took possession of his childhood

one September evening,

rushing into his heart with a taste

of ashes, and salt, and blood, never again

to leave him, running through his life

from age to age – and speaking its name

in the face of history.’

But the night that seized him, for ever racking his memory with terror and anticipation, and the cry that entered his flesh, there to take root and there to bring conflict, came from infinitely further back.

Oceanic night of his ancestors in which all his people had risen, generation upon generation, in which they had lost themselves, had lived, loved, fought, been wounded, lain down. Had cried out. And fallen silent.

For this cry too originated from further back than his madness. It came from the depths of time, an ever-surgent echo – ever on the way, ever resounding – of a manifold, unassignable cry.

Cry and night had torn him from childhood, alienated him from his own, smitten him with solitude. But thereby made him irremissibly at one with all his people.

Mouths of night and cry confounded, open wounds across faces that in a violent fit of forgetfulness suddenly remember another night, an other-cry – even older than the world.

Night out of time that presided over the emergence of the world, and cry of unearthly silence that opened the history of the world like a great book of flesh leafed through by wind and fire.

Charles-Victor Peniel, called Night-of-amber, destined to fight to the midnight of night.

Contents

Title

Dedication

Dedalus Hall of Fame

The Author

The Translator

Poem

I Night of Water

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

II Night of Earth

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

III Night of Roses

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

IV Night of Blood

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

V Night of Ashes

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Night of Night

Copyright

I

Night of Water

In those days the Peniels were still fresh-water people. Going with the almost currentless flow of the canals, they spent their lives on the horizontal of a world levelled by the greyness of the sky – and overwhelmed with silence. They knew nothing of the earth but these banks edged by towpaths, bordered with alders, willows, birches and white poplars. The earth around them lay open like the palm of a hand, incredibly flat, flush against the sky, in a waiting gesture of infinite patience. And likewise were their hearts surrendered to the sky, sombre hearts, full of endurance.

The earth to them was an eternal horizon, a land always slipping away on their line of vision, always receding on the skyline, always skimming their hearts without ever seizing them. The earth was a domain of open fields stretching to infinity, of forests, marshes and plains steeped in the milt of mists and rain; drifting landscapes, strangely distant and familiar, with rivers threading through them – and following the course of these slow waters, they lived out their lives more slowly still.

They knew nothing of the towns but their names, legends, markets and festivals, as reported by the land-dwellers they encountered where their boats put in.

They knew the outlines of these towns, fantastic engravings etched on a background of sky and light in perpetual metamorphosis, set against fields of flax, corn, bluebells, straw and hops. Mining towns, cloth-manufacturing towns, towns of craftsmen and commerce, rearing their towers and belfries in the wind that blew in from the sea yonder, and testifying themselves in the face of history – and of God – to be cities of serious and hard-working men. And so did their hearts rear up, straight out of the immensity of the present.

They knew nothing of men but those they met on the reaches, at the locks and on the wharfs, exchanging with them only simple words squared like stone through usage and necessity. Words forged in keeping with the water, barges, coal, the wind and their lives.

They knew nothing of men but what they knew of themselves – the rough lightward-turned surfaces of face and body, reversed out of impenetrable shadow. Amongst themselves, they spoke even less, and to themselves not at all, so much did the words always reverberate with the dissonant echo of a silence too profound.

But they had a better knowledge than anyone else of the light and dark of the sky, of the wind’s moods and the rain’s texture, of the earth’s smells and the rhythm of the stars.

In their own company, fresh-water people were more apt to call themselves by the names of their boats than by their family names. There were the folk on the Justine, the St-Eloi, the Liberty, the Bel-Amour, the Angelus, the Swallow, the Marie-Rose, the Heart of Flanders, the Good News, or the Mayflower. The Peniels had the Mercy of God.

1

Vitalie Peniel had brought seven children into the world, but the world had chosen only one – the last. All the others had died on the day they were born, without even taking the time to utter a cry.

As for the seventh, he cried even before his birth. During the night preceding her confinement, Vitalie experienced a sharp pain such as she had never known before, and a tremendous cry resounded in her womb – like the cry in the mist from the boats returning from fishing on the high seas. She knew this cry, having heard it so often in the past, when she stood clutching her mother on the beach, watching for the return of the Northern Rose and the Lamb of God, on which her father and brothers had gone fishing. Yes, she was well acquainted with that cry rising from the mists, having twice waited for so long to hear it, and having met with it, beyond all expectation, only in fantastic echo inside her mother’s frantic body. But she had left the world of those too violent waters to follow a freshwater man, and she had driven those cries from her memory. Yet now a new echo had just risen up again from the depths of her body and her forgetting, a great sea-in-springtide cry and she knew that this time her child would live.

‘Listen,’ she said to her husband asleep at her side, ‘the child has just cried. It’s going to be born and wants to live!’

‘Don’t talk nonsense, poor woman,’ replied the man, turning to the wall, ‘your womb’s but a grave that can give birth to nothing!’

At daybreak, whilst her husband was already up attending to the horses, Vitalie bore her child, all alone, at the rear of the cabin, propped up against the pillows. It was a son. He cried louder than the day before as he emerged from his mother’s body and his cry terrified the horses standing huddled together on the bank in the lingering darkness. The father, on hearing this cry, sank down on his knees and began to weep. Seven times the child cried, and seven times the horses reared, lifting their necks to the sky and swaying their heads. The father wept all the while and seven times he felt his heart stop.

When he got to his feet again and returned to the cabin he saw his wife’s body gleaming in the semi-darkness with a chalky-white brilliance, and the child laid between her knees, still dripping with water and blood. He went over to the bed and caressed Vitalie’s face, a face overcome with tiredness, pain and joy. This face he scarcely recognized. It seemed to have become detached from itself, raised by an onslaught of light that welled up from the depths of her body, and dissolved into a smile more ethereal and palely illuminant than the light of a half-moon. Then he took his son in his arms; the little naked body was an immense weight. The weight of the world and of mercy.

But he found not a single word to say, to mother or child, as though the tears he had just shed had washed him clean of all language. And from that day forth he never spoke again.

Vitalie crossed herself, then made the same sign all over the newborn baby’s body, to ward off misfortune from every scrap of her son’s flesh. She remembered the ceremony for the christening of boats, in the course of which the priest, dressed in white surplice and gilt stole, sprinkled the new boat with holy water, even in its least recesses, so that death should find no hold when the sea swelled up against it. But while she was recalling these rites celebrated on the strand of her native village, lulled by memory, she gently drifted off to sleep and her hand fell back before it had finished tracing a final sign of the cross over the child’s forehead.

So did the last-born of the Peniels take his share of life, and in exchange he received the name of Theodore-Faustin.

Actually, the child seemed to have taken more than his share, as though he mustered in himself all the strength stolen from his brothers, and he grew with the vigour of a young tree.

At first he became a boatman as all his paternal ancestors had been, spending his days on the barge and on the banks, between the luminous smile of his mother and the impregnable silence of his father. This silence was stamped with such great calmness and such gentleness that at his side the child learned to speak the way a person learns to sing. His voice modulated itself against the background of this silence, taking on a timbre at once low-pitched and light, and inflections similar to the water’s undulations. His voice seemed always on the point of falling silent, of dying away in the murmur of his own breath, and it had strange resonances. Whenever he finished speaking, the last words he had just uttered persisted for a few moments more as an imperceptible echo that seven times rippled the silence.

He liked to play at the front of the boat, where he sat facing the water, with whose lights and shadows he was more familiar than with anything else. He would make paper birds that he coloured in bright hues, then launched into the air. They would wheel round for a moment before falling onto the water, where their wings collapsed and their colours bled away in trickles of pink, blue, green, orange. He also carved little barges out of pieces of bark and branches gathered on the banks; he would stick a big mast in them, to which he tied a handkerchief, and then he cast his boats onto the current, loading their empty holds with the weight of all his dreams.

Vitalie was never again with child. Every night her husband held her close and joined with her, dazzled by the whiteness of her body that had become all smiles and happiness. He would fall asleep inside her, into a sleep deep as oblivion, absolved of dreams and thoughts. And dawn always came upon him like a renascence of his own body merged with his wife’s, whose breasts since the birth of their son had unstintingly produced milk with a taste of quince and vanilla. And of this milk he drank deep.

The father remained at the helm, and Theodore-Faustin minded the horses. There was Tallow-coat, the big black mare that always swung her head as she walked, and two rust-coloured horses named One-eyed-red and Greedy-red. Well before daybreak Theodore-Faustin would come and feed them, then until evening he accompanied them along the towpath. When they stopped at locks or loading-stations, he would venture a little among the land people, the lock-keepers, café-owners and traders, but he never mixed with them, always held back by some obscure fear relating to all human beings. He dared not talk to them, so much did the strange intonations of his voice surprise those who heard it, and who then made fun of him to protect themselves against the vague disquiet they felt at the sound of it. During rest-stops, he would stay with his beasts, whose heavy heads and silken-lidded eyes he liked to stroke. The enormous globes of their eyes, which took fright at the slightest thing, rested upon him a gaze infinitely more gentle than that of any of the land people he had encountered – excepting his father’s, and his mother’s smile. Their eyes had the mattness of metal and frosted glass, at once translucid and without transparency. His own gaze could plunge and penetrate deep into theirs, but could distinguish nothing there: he became lost in the precipitate of sand-choked light, of muddy water and smoky wind that had accumulated within them in a lustrous bronze-brown silt. There, for him, lay the hidden face of the world, the mystery part of life where it meets death, and the seat of God – a haven of beauty, calm and happiness.

His father died at the helm of the new barge he had bought a few months earlier. This was the first boat of his own, that he was not just working. And it was he who had chosen the name inscribed in large letters on the barge’s prow: Mercy of God.

Death entered his heart suddenly, without warning, making no sound. So unobtrusively did it steal upon him that he did not even start. He remained standing upright, facing the Scheldt, his hands on the wheel, his eyes wide open. Theodore-Faustin, who was leading the horses on the bank alongside, did not notice anything. Yet there was that strange behaviour of the three animals: together, they stopped for a moment and turned their heads towards their master, but when Theodore-Faustin looked over in that direction he saw nothing out of the ordinary. His father was, as usual, on duty at the helm. It was Vitalie who noticed: she was at the back of the boat at the time, busy wringing out some washing that had been left to soak in a large bowl. It was her body that registered alarm. An intense coldness suddenly came over her and penetrated her flesh to the bone. Her breasts froze. She jumped up and rushed towards the front, colliding with everything that lay in her way, like a blind woman. Her breasts hurt, she was short of breath and she could not call out her husband’s name. At last she got to him, but was stopped short the moment she placed her hand on his shoulder. She had just seen the still man’s body, as though caught in a flash of lightning, blaze in dazzling transparency at the touch of her hand. And through this body, like some tall windowpane, she saw her son beyond, further along the towpath, leading the horses at a slow steady pace. Then darkness descended and the man’s body was steeped in shadow. He collapsed then with a subdued rustle, and landed, as he fell, in Vitalie’s arms. This body seemed to her to be heavy with the accumulated weight of all those nights during which he had lain upon her, embracing her and binding himself to her with his every limb. The weight of a whole lifetime, of so much desire, of all their love, suddenly brought down in a cold inert mass. She was borne under by his fall, and collapsed beneath him. She tried to alert her son, but already her tears prevented her from calling out. White tears, with a taste of quince and vanilla.

When Theodore-Faustin came running onto the barge he found the two bodies of his parents intertwined on the bridge, as though in silent and desperate struggle, and entirely bathed in milk. He separated these two bodies of fearsome heaviness, then stretched them out side by side.

‘Mother,’ he said at last, ‘you must get up. Don’t stay lying there, like father.’

Vitalie obeyed the voice of her son and let him carry the body into the cabin, where he laid it on the bed. At last she followed him back to the cabin, and shut herself inside on her own for a while to lay out the dead man. It was in the milk of her tears that she washed him, then she dressed him, crossed his hands on his chest, lit four candles around the bed and called her son back.

As soon as he entered the room, in which his mother had put a drape over the window, Theodore-Faustin was overcome by the almost nauseating smell of sweetness that hung in the semi-darkness. There was a strong trace of tart quinces and vanilla in that close atmosphere. This smell deeply disturbed Theodore-Faustin, who experienced the taste of it even in his very flesh, and inside his mouth. And this taste, at once strange and so violently familiar, scared him as much as it delighted him, stirring within him a rush of obscure desires. He tried to call to his mother, but his cry was choked in the spate of milky saliva that suddenly filled his mouth. Vitalie sat next to the bed, perfectly erect upon her chair, her hands laid flat on her knees that were closed together. Her chest scarcely moved, although her breathing made curious hoarse and spasmodic hissing sounds. Her face, in the dancing light of the candles, emerged only sporadically and partially, with its surfaces unequally lit. This fragmentary face seemed not so much to be made of flesh and skin as to result from the shifting play of bits of paper cut up and stuck down this way and that, and it suddenly put Theodore-Faustin in mind of the paper birds he used to make as a child, and then throw upon the water. But this bird-profile was capable of neither flight nor fall, and was completely colourless; it was in a very still state of repose, on the verge of absence.

He finally came up to the bed and leant towards his father to kiss his brow, but as he bent down he was arrested by the recumbent man’s eyes, which remained half-open. His father’s gaze more than ever resembled that of the horses – the glow of the candle-flames penetrated deep into the amber-brown of the irises, but was not reflected in them; they were illuminated from within. Fossil-light, stratified water, a still, ashy wind. And the vista thus glimpsed, through the slit of his eyes, reached ad infinitum into the invisible and the mysterious. Was this, then, where the seat of God lay, in the throes of gentleness, silence and absence? Theodore-Faustin kissed his father’s face three times, on the eyelids and on his lips, and placed another four kisses on his shoulders and hands. Then he came and knelt beside his mother, and resting his forehead on her lap, he began to weep quietly into the folds of her skirt.

2

From that day Theodore-Faustin took his father’s place at the helm of the barge, and Vitalie replaced her son, leading the horses. But he alone continued to feed them and tend them, ever seeking in their eyes the reflection of his father’s gaze.

He was just fifteen, and already the responsibility had fallen to him of being master aboard the Mercy of God, that heavy lighter, its holds filled with coal, gliding imperturbably all along the Scheldt. But this boat was not just his; it remained his father’s. It was even his father’s second body – an immense posthumous body, its sides filled with black concretions torn from the bowels of the earth like so many residues of millennial dreams. And these blocks of dreams he delivered to the fires of the land-dwellers, those strangers isolated in their stone houses, over there.

He could not yet be the master, he was only a ferryman whose job was the perpetual towing of a body grown fantastic, on the surface of the water, flush with the sky, in the bosom of the earth – at the terrifying mercy of God.

So the days, months, years passed. One evening at dinner, Vitalie said to her son, speaking to him in profile: ‘Now, have you never yet thought of taking a wife? The time has come for you to marry, to build your own family. I’m already getting old, and soon I shall be good for nothing.’

The son did not reply, but the mother well knew what his thoughts were. She had been aware for some time of a new unrest within him, and she had heard him murmur in his sleep the name of a woman.

She knew this woman: she was eldest of the eleven daughters of the bargees on the St-André. She must have been coming up to seventeen; she was blonde and astonishingly pale in all seasons, as fragile and slender as the reeds standing by the banks, but she was hard-working and knew the work well. She was said to be dreamy and even inclined to melancholy, unlike her sisters, but gentler and more silent than all of them. Which was surely why this girl had been able to touch her son’s inward heart. And Vitalie had no doubt that his feelings were fully reciprocated.

Yet, what she could have no inkling of was the strength those feelings had gained in her son’s too long-unclaimed heart. From a succession of chance meetings at locks and at various waterman’s locations, Theodore-Faustin had allowed himself to be surprised, then charmed, and in the end tormented even to pleasure and pain by the young girl’s image. This image was so inwardly engraved upon him that he carried it even within his gaze, and he could not open or close his eyes without seeing it transparent in all things, even in darkness. This image had melted through his flesh, and every night he felt his skin burning, and his whole body maddened with irrepressible desire. And now, with his horses, he sought less to penetrate the mystery of their eyes than to rub his head, aching from love, against their blood-warm, blood-sonorous necks.

‘You see,’ Vitalie went on after a period of silence, ‘I know the girl you’d like to take as your wife. I like her very much, too, and I’d be happy for her to come and live with us. So why wait to go and ask to marry her?’

Theodore-Faustin squeezed the glass in his hand so tightly that he shattered it and cut his palm. When his mother saw the blood running on to the wood of the table she stood up and came over to him.

‘You’ve cut yourself, your hand needs bandaging,’ she said, but he gently pushed her away.

‘Leave it,’ he said, ‘it’s nothing. All I ask of you is not to mention that woman’s name until the day when she’s finally mine.’ He surprised himself by this ban he had just imposed, more than he did Vitalie, who acquiesced without surprise.

‘Very well,’ she said, ‘I shan’t mention her name so long as she’s not one of us.’

*

Theodore-Faustin made his marriage proposal several weeks later, one day when his barge, heading downstream, passed the St-André on its way up the Scheldt. As soon as the barge came into view, he immediately left the helm, dived into the cabin, quickly put on the shirt he kept for special occasions, crossed himself seven times before opening the door again, and waited for the St-André to skim past the side of his boat. As the two barges passed each other, he jumped overboard on to the St-André’s bridge, and walked straight up to old Orflamme, who was standing at the helm, his short black pipe stuck in his mouth like a duck’s beak.

‘Nicolas Orflamme,’ said Theodore-Faustin, without further preamble, ‘I’ve come to ask for your daughter’s hand.’

‘Which daughter?’ said the old man, tightly screwing up his eyes. ‘I’ve eleven, you know!’

‘Your eldest daughter,’ he replied.

The old man seemed to consider this for a moment before remarking simply, ‘That’s fair. The first should come first.’ Then he immersed himself in his pipe-smoke again, as though nothing had happened.

‘So?’ said Theodore-Faustin anxiously. ‘Do you agree?’

‘The fact is that I’ll miss her, my first-born,’ sighed old Orflamme after a moment’s reflection. ‘She’s probably the shyest and dreamiest of my daughters, but she’s also the most loving. Yes, indeed, I shall miss her …’

The St-André sailed on, gliding upon the purple- and silver-glinting water catching in the light of the bright March sun, slowly moving away from the Mercy of God, which continued on its course in the opposite direction.

‘You haven’t answered me,’ said Theodore-Faustin, rooted to the spot, three paces from Nicolas Orflamme.

‘The fact is that it’s not up to me to answer,’ said the other. ‘So go and ask her.’

She was already there. He had not heard her approach. He saw her as he turned round. She seemed more absent than ever as she fixed her tranquil gaze upon him. He lowered his head, not knowing what more to say, and his eyes were absorbed in the dazzling whiteness of his own shirt. He did not know what to do with his hands, which weighed terribly on the ends of his numb arms. They dangled pitifully in space, like dead poultry hung up on butchers’ stalls. His eyes travelled along the deck of the bridge, then fixed upon the young girl’s feet. They were bare, powdered all over with coal-dust, on which the light caused minute watery reflections to sparkle purplish-black. And he was seized with a violent desire for those thin sparkling feet. He clenched his fists, then let his gaze rise over her dark dress, girded with an apron patterned with tiny squares that covered the girl’s belly in a dizzying chequered labyrinth. And so he reached her shoulders, where his eyes finally came to rest, incapable of meeting the sight of her face.

‘Help me …’ he murmured at last, his voice almost imploring her.

‘I’m here,’ she said simply.

Then he lifted his head and dared to look at her. But once again words failed him. He slowly raised his frozen hands towards her face and lightly touched her hair. She smiled with such gentleness that he was overwhelmed by it.

Her father, who still had his back to them, suddenly cried out, ‘It sure is silent, that marriage proposal of yours! Have you lost your tongue, you great oaf? How do you expect her to answer if you don’t say anything, blockhead?’

‘I certainly can answer him,’ said the girl. ‘And my answer is yes.’

This ‘yes’ reverberated in Theodore-Faustin’s dazed head with more resonance than the chimes of bells pealing out in celebration of a holiday. He seized her hands and squeezed them hard in his.

‘And your boat, you useless fellow,’ said Nicolas Orflamme, ‘look at it floating off downstream with no master aboard!’ Theodore-Faustin turned to him. ‘Maybe, but the master who’s about to return to it is the happiest man on earth!’ he cried. And he jumped overboard again, on to the bank, without even saying goodbye, and ran till he was breathless after his drifting barge.

When Vitalie saw her son arrive, his face all flushed and his eyes sparkling, she asked him, laughing: ‘So, may we say your beloved’s name now?’

‘You may say it and shout it!’ replied Theodore-Faustin, completely out of breath.

3

The marriage was celebrated about mid June. It was a very simple wedding, with the festivities held at an inn on the banks of the Scheldt, upstream of Cambrai. Noemie wore an ivory-white dress trimmed with lace round the neck and wrists, and she had pinned to her belt a tulle rose with silver pearls at the heart of the flower. In her hand she held a long bouquet of eleven stems of cotton-grass, which her sisters had picked for her. Theodore-Faustin had plaited his horses’ tails with ribbons of white gauze and decorated the mast of his barge like a maypole. At about midday it started to rain, but the rain did not drive away the sun. It skipped in the light, in fine sparkling drops, the colour of melted amber. Nicolas Orflamme raised his glass to the health of bride and groom, and cried out merrily, ‘Sun and rain! But it’s the devil marrying his daughter!’

That day Noemie forsook the name of Orflamme for that of Peniel, and forsook her father and mother, her ten sisters and her childhood, to become Theodore-Faustin’s wife. She felt light, infinitely light, although an invincible melancholy still tormented her in some indefinable way. What it was that she loved in the man she had just chosen for her husband, she would not have been able to say. All she knew was that to live apart from this man would surely have driven her mad.

Vitalie beheld her daughter-in-law seated at her son’s side with a secret happiness mingled with surprise and gratitude. Here at last was the daughter she had never had, and this girl, she thought, was too pure to be in any danger of being blighted by the curse with which she herself must have been afflicted to give birth to so many still-born sons. For the first time, too, she considered the cold barrenness of her widow’s solitude, and her body, already old, quaked at the knowledge of now being excluded from the wild season of love. She thought of those nights of long ago, so vivid in her memory and still fierce upon her flesh, when her body, buried beneath her husband’s, whitened under the sheets, like a big bath of milk tasting of quince and vanilla.

Theodore-Faustin himself was not thinking of anything. He sat very close to Noemie, trying to hold pace with her heart, which he sensed beating imperceptibly at his side. He listened, beyond the clamour of the guests’ voices, laughter and songs, to the high-pitched whistles of the black-necked grebes and the strangely resonant hooting of the bitterns rising from the banks of the Scheldt in the warmness of the evening. And for the first time he realized how greatly his father’s silence had marked his heart and shaped his own voice into a tremulous plaint of exquisite silence. Then he thought of those days long ago when he used to walk with the horses along the towpath, beneath the gaze of that father who had never spoken to him, and his body, momentarily exulting in desire, yet began to shudder with emptiness upon hearing the distant cries of the birds nesting by the river, as though through them his father were expressing his absence. He suddenly seized Noemie’s hand and squeezed it so tightly he almost hurt her. She lowered her eyes, but when she looked up again a smile full of calm and trust lit her face. And at once he forgot his anguish, and recovered both his strength as a man and a child-like happiness.

Early the following spring Noemie gave birth to a son. He was called Honoré-Firmin and he took his place aboard the Mercy of God with radiant ease. He was a quiet and happy child, who seemed to have no knowledge of anger or sorrow. Everything, to him, was happiness and enjoyment. He learned to sing even before he could talk, and to dance before he could walk. He put so much fervour into living that all around him experienced the passing of the days as so many promises of joy fulfilled by each evening. Then came a little girl, whom they called Herminie-Victoire. She had her mother’s gentleness, in fact she resembled her in every respect, but her brother always knew how to distract her from her cares and fears.

They both loved the fantastic stories that Vitalie would tell them in the evening, before going to sleep. There was the story of Jean-the-bearcub, son of Gay-the-Gaylon, who set off through the forest to rescue the king’s three daughters held prisoner by the terrible Little-old-Bidoux; and the story of Jean Hullos, known as the Marmot, who, deep underground, came upon the stone that burns; and the misfortunes of the lovely Emergaert, imprisoned by cruel-hearted Phinaert; and then the thousand and one adventures of Till Eulenspiegel and his fellow beggars …

When Vitalie recounted these legends peopled with fairies, ogres, devils and giants, water sprites and wood sprites, the two children would see the face of their grandmother, who sat by the bed on which they were huddled up together, suddenly shed upon their cot a subdued chalk-white glow. And their very own grandmother seemed to them to be endowed with strange and terrifying powers – an immortal old woman hailing from the mouths of the Scheldt.

Sometimes, too, she told them stories of fishermen lost on the high seas on flaming ships; or catching in their nets fabulous fish that sang with women’s voices; and stories of drowned men returning from the bottom of the ocean to visit the living, bringing to the just pearls of sunlight and rings of moon- and star-dust, and casting fearful spells on the wicked. All these stories had a resonance that persisted long afterwards in their sleep, sweeping their dreams into eddies of crazy images, and the world upon their waking seemed a mystery that both captivated their hearts and terrified them. Herminie-Victoire was glad she was a river-child, and that her home was not among those mysterious land-folk, always battling with some demon or cruel and jealous giant, nor among those other, yet wilder, folk of the sea-shore. But two stories in particular distressed her: there was the story of tall Halevyn, singing in a marvellous voice as he rode through a forest bathed in moonlight, amid the frail bodies of long-haired virgins hanged from the branches of the trees; and that of young Kinkamor, who ran all over the world, and other worlds besides, in order to escape Death, who nevertheless followed him every step of the way, wearing out thousands of shoes in this chase. She decided she did not want to grow up. ‘That way,’ she said to herself, ‘I shall always pass unnoticed. I shall remain small, I shall even make myself smaller and smaller. So tiny and discreet that not even Death will ever be able to find me, no matter how many shoes it might put on to pursue me. And no wicked fiance will ever be able to find me either. In any case, I shall stay right here. I shall never leave this barge. Death will never catch me if even Life doesn’t know I exist!’ And she locked herself up in her childhood, as within a chestnut-burr of everlastingness and invisibility.

Honoré-Firmin by contrast burned with the desire to leave the boards of this floating stage where nothing ever happened, to set out to travel the world and sail the seas. He wanted to visit all those towns raised in stone, reaching to the skies, their streets swarming with people; he wanted to travel through those forests haunted by wild animals and wicked ogres of which he was not afraid. The too-slowly flowing waters of these canals and rivers in flat countryside bored him. He dreamed of sailing in enormous ships, their sides crammed not with cheerless coal but with spices, fruit, dazzling textiles, weapons and gold – and slaves, too. He pictured himself entering ports, rowdy with the sounds of men, horns and birds, in the red glow of sunset. And, like Jan the Great Bell-ringer, he was willing to sell his soul to the devil in order to see his wishes gloriously come true.

4

But the devil had no time for the souls of children thirsting for adventure; mankind itself had just initiated its witches’ sabbath in honour of gods that were faceless and nameless, though equipped with dauntless mouths and maws. The maws of these gods rang hollow, and in their lairs the roars of hunger suddenly began to resound with much rolling of drums and blaring of bugles. And so Theodore-Faustin was asked to leave his excessively quiet boat in order to take his place at the emperors’ board. Long ago, when he came of age to do military service, he had had the incredible good fortune to draw a lucky number. But, for all that he was so poor, he had not even appreciated the enormity of this kindness of fate, so overwhelmed was he at the time by another happiness. He had merely said to himself that it was the very strength of his love that had protected him. And he had settled himself into the magic of this love with equal ease and confidence. But all at once this luck he had thought eternal had run out – not that his love had lost any of its strength, quite the contrary, but very simply because the lottery wheel had now gone into a spin, promiscuously naming those who had already been called up and those who had been forgotten, those in love and those not in love, the happy and the despairing.

And then he was gone, off to war, without even time to await the arrival of his third child, although so soon to be born; and above all, not understanding in the least the part that, without warning and without recourse, he had just been assigned to play, in red trousers and pomponed kepi.

The very next day after his departure Noemie took to her bed. Vitalie thought her daughter-in-law was going to give birth within the next few days, if not hours, for her time had come. But neither within hours nor days was the young woman delivered. And weeks passed and nothing happened. Noemie remained imperturbably confined to her bed, lying inert beneath the weight of her enormous belly. She was heard crying all night and all day long, but there was no sign of her tears; only the faint murmur of an incessant inward trickling could be heard when passing close to her. Soon her belly seemed swollen with emptiness; it had the hollow resonance of a cast-iron cistern with water dripping into it with owl-like hoots.

Honoré-Firmin came into his own having to stand in for his absent father. Although only thirteen, he managed from the outset to show authority and competence. As for Vitalie and Herminie-Victoire, they each in their own way had to forget their age. One forced her body to rediscover vigour and endurance, the other was unable any longer to shrink into her childhood. And so the Mercy of God continued to observe its routine while father fought at the front, far away in the hinterland, and mother lay in the semidarkness of the cabin, desperately holding back inside her frozen body the child she was carrying.

Theodore-Faustin marched for a long time, loaded up with all his campaign equipment and his bayonet rifle, which hurt his shoulder and banged against his side. He marched for so long his legs trembled. It seemed to him, when at last he took brief rests at halting-places, that the flesh on his calves and thighs had caught fire and that his knees had become soft and spongy. He trod the ground as he had never yet trodden it, crossing towns, fields, bridges and forests that he was seeing for the first time, with vague surprise mingled with fear. It was summer, the weather was fine, the ripe corn swayed alongside the paths, and the banks around the meadows were all spangled with pretty, brightly coloured flowers; the earth smelled good, his companions sang funny songs full of verve, but he himself was so sad at heart that he could not laugh, or sing, or even talk. He felt as though he was dragging round a body that was not his own and his name at roll-call rang so false that he never recognized it. He thought of his family, and particularly his wife, who must have already given birth to their last child. It was surely a son, for latterly Noemie’s body had had that same smell of ivy and tree-bark as when she was expecting Honoré-Firmin; when she was pregnant with Herminie-Victoire her skin had had the flavour of rye and honey. To this new son he would give his father’s name, for the boy would be the child of their reunion and of a new beginning.

The nights especially were painful to him, so unused to sleeping alone had he become after all these years. Noemie’s body kept tormenting his dreams; he saw it getting bigger, turning and twisting round him, he felt it panting, slipping into his arms, but he was never able to embrace it. And he would wake up sweating, haggard, amongst those hundreds of strange men lying around him, men who themselves tossed and moaned in their sleep.

He had not been gone two weeks and already he was scared by the length of his exile, and he wondered whether, through solitude, his body, like his mother’s after his father died, would end up becoming hard and rugged like stone. But the war was well under way and the enemy so close that soon Theodore-Faustin lost the thread of his thoughts and of his homesickness in favour of other thoughts. These, moreover, gathered day by day into one single thought, as compact and cutting as a steel break-water, which he was continually slamming against. The fear of death, of his own death, had just reared up inside him, all at once reducing to dust his memory, dreams and desires. The enemy was at hand, closing its grip ever more tightly round the camp. Already all the peasants in the area had fled, abandoning their farms and fields, taking their chance and disappearing into the depths of the forest, carrying away in their jolting carts their shabby furniture, their plates and dishes, bundles of linen, and their children and old folk squashed in amongst all this bric-à-brac. But he could not flee, he was caught in the heart of the battle, and for days already he had been living in a state of constant alarm, not even distinguishing between night and day any more, so much had the fires and blood and cries that kept rising from every corner of an ever more closed-in horizon transformed space, time, sky and earth into an enormous mire. Great storms, such as the high temperatures of August always bring, sometimes broke towards evening, with purplish glimmerings and bright yellow flashes, the spattering of rain mingling with that of machine-guns and the explosions of thunder with those of shells. The world’s state of confusion then reached its apogee, throwing men, horses, trees and the elements pell-mell into the same inextricable debacle.

When he was called, Theodore-Faustin no longer heard his name as an incongruous sound but as a terrifying word of danger, for each time it seemed to him that he was being denounced to Death. And he responded with extraordinary alacrity, without even taking time to think, so preventing his name from being uttered twice and Death from taking note of it.

Now, again, someone called him. ‘Peniel!’

He came running, prepared to do anything to silence that intolerable cry. ‘Peniel,’ the fellow repeated, ‘it’s your turn. Water fatigue. Take these canteens and get a move on. Don’t come back unless they’re filled.’

He tied the bunch of canteens to his belt and with them jangling from his waist he set off in search of water that he stood little chance of finding. The battle all around was raging, the wells were filled with mud or corpses, and the river secure behind enemy lines. For a long time he crawled blindly among the bodies lying everywhere strewn on the ground. Bullets kept whistling past him but none of them hit him. This went on for so long that he completely lost all notion of time. Then suddenly a fantastic silence spread over the battlefield. He stopped, holding his breath the better to listen to this miracle of silence. Death rattles and cries still rose on all sides and he even heard sobs. But this sound of moaning and of the suffering of countless dying soldiers served only to heighten the silence even more relentlessly.

The experience of being unhurt, without even a scratch, and so alone amid these hundreds of dead and wounded, suddenly overwhelmed him with amazement and happiness, an amazement and happiness so great, so savage, that he started to laugh, to laugh to the point of insanity. He could not stop. He rolled onto his back and let his exhausted body draw renewed strength from those peals of uncontrollable laughter. He laughed into the vast August sky flashing above him, drunk with the smell rising from the earth that was all churned up and gorged with the blood of men and horses. He laughed louder than the dying men shrieked or sobbed.

Was that the sound of his laughter, galloping back from the river like that, like an echo? Maybe this careering laughter was going to bring him some water. The galloping sound drew nearer, ever nearer, punctuated by another very regular sound, a swift whistling that on each occasion expired in a soft thud. It all came so fast – as fast as his laughter.

He saw passing over him the sweat-glistening belly of a dapple-grey horse and a body that leaned from his mount’s flank with extraordinary suppleness. He also saw the gesture–so assured and full of grace – that the horseman made with his arm. This arm seemed amazing to him, it was so long and curved. How that arm sliced the air and how his gesture accentuated the youth and animation of the horseman’s handsome face. Theodore-Faustin, still in the grip of laughter, noticed all this in a flash. He even noticed that the horseman was smiling – a vague, rather absent-minded smile, like that of an adolescent lost in a daydream – and that this smile raised the fine tips of his blond moustache. He noticed, too, that the horse had turned its head towards him and that its enormous globulous eye was lowering over him, but this eye was just a big unseeing ball, rolling loose. He heard the air whistle above his head and almost immediately afterwards heard the whistling expire in a soft thud. Already horse and rider had disappeared. In fact everything had just disappeared, even the sky, suddenly submerged in a rush of blood.

Theodore-Faustin instantly stopped laughing; the sky in spate was pouring blood, filling his eyes and mouth. He felt a word no sooner rise to his mouth than drown in it. It was his father’s name, the name he wanted to cry out to Noemie, to give to their son. The horseman rode straight on, still dancing lithely in his saddle with tireless ample gestures accompanied by those whistling sounds.

So the war ended for Soldier Peniel. It had lasted less than a month. But then it established itself within its victim’s very body, where it carried on for nearly a year. Theodore-Faustin remained for so long, with eyes closed, limbs inert, lying on an iron bedstead at the far end of a room, that when he finally got up he had to learn to walk again. Indeed, he had to relearn everything, starting with himself. Everything about him had changed, especially his voice. It had lost its deep timbre and those very soft inflections. He now spoke in a screeching jerky voice, with accents that were harsh and overforceful. He spoke with effort, constantly searching for words that he then cast into disjointed, almost incoherent sentences. Worse still, he spoke with violence, hurling his broken sentences like fistfuls of pebbles at those he addressed. But worst of all was his laughter; an evil laughter that seized him seven times a day, shaking his body to deformity. It was more like the grating of a rusty pulley than a laugh, and during every one of these fits his features were twisted in wrinkles and grimaces. But his entire countenance, even in repose, was in any case disfigured. The uhlan’s sabre-stroke had shattered half his skull and face, and an enormous scar diagonally scored his flesh from the top of his head to his chin, dividing his face into two mismatching sections. This wound formed a strange tonsure on the top of his skull, and at every fit of laughter the too-tender skin could be seen bulging and quivering like a piece of soft wax.

*

He was congratulated, and even decorated. He was allowed to go home. It was the height of summer. He went back across the countryside he had come through a year before. The fields were laid waste, the bridges in ruins, the villages reduced to ashes, the towns occupied, and the people everywhere seemed mistrustful, withdrawn, nursing their griefs and their shame with hunted looks.

He came back alone. Of all his companions who went with him, there was not one left; most were dead, the others had long since returned to their families. He came back alone, and late. But he felt no joy nor any hurry to get back. He was indifferent. This delay was one he could never make up. It was too late, now and for ever.

5

He did not even greet his family when he returned to them. And they did not recognize him. When they saw him arrive, they instinctively huddled together, without a word, seized with terror at the sight of that man with convulsive gestures, his face split in two and so crudely sewn back together. Vitalie stood between the children, and all three of them observed in silence this stranger they had yet so eagerly awaited. Herminie-Victoire suddenly began to cry. Her father stared at her viciously and, stamping his foot, shouted, ‘Stop that noise, you silly girl!’

Honoré-Firmin took his sister in his arms and held her close. Vitalie finally approached her son, but she did not know what to say. She held out her hands in an awkward, almost suppliant gesture. Theodore-Faustin turned away and asked in his shrill yelping voice, ‘Noemie. The child. Where are they?’