Malevil

  My knees and palms were still hurting, but strength and awareness were by now slowly returning, and I realized how very little we were talking and with what care we were avoiding any reference to what had happened. At the same instant, and for the first time, I felt slightly uneasy at being unclothed. La Menou must have shared the feeling, because she murmured just then with a disapproving air, “Whatever do I look like, for heaven’s sake!”

  She had spoken in French, the language of official and polite sentiments. She promptly began to put her clothes back on, quickly followed by everyone else, and as she did so she continued in a louder voice, but in patois, “Not a tempting sight, that’s for sure!”

  As I dressed I glanced surreptitiously across at Colin and Meyssonnier, and as little as I could at Peyssou. Meyssonnier’s face, hollow and shiny, looked as though it had been stretched lengthwise, and his eyes were blinking nonstop. Colin’s still wore a gondola smile, but it was strangely artificial and frozen, totally unrelated to the anguish I could read in his eyes. As for Peyssou, who no longer had any reason to stay in the cellar now that he had eaten and drunk his wine, he was making no move to leave, and I carefully avoided seeming to look at him in case I should force him into movement again. His big kindly mouth was trembling, his broad cheeks kept twitching, and with his arms hanging at his sides, his knees slightly bent, he looked like a man drained of all will and all hope. I noticed that he kept glancing across at La Menou, as though he was expecting her to tell him what to do next.

  I went over to Thomas. I couldn’t see him very clearly, since that section of the cellar was in near darkness. “In your opinion,” I asked in a low voice, “is it dangerous to go outside?”

  “If you mean from the point of view of the temperature, no. It’s much lower now.”

  “There’s another point of view, you mean?”

  “Of course. The fallout.”

  I stared at him. I hadn’t thought of fallout. I took note, however, that Thomas obviously nursed no doubts as to the nature of what had happened.

  “So it would be better to wait?” I said.

  Thomas shrugged. His face was totally without animation, his voice colorless. “The fallout could keep coming for a month, two months, three months...”

  “So?”

  “If you’ll let me go and fetch your uncle’s Geiger counter from your closet, we can settle the question here and now. For the moment at least.”

  “But that means exposing yourself!”

  His face remained as unmoving as a block of stone. “You have to realize,” he said in the same flat mechanical voice, “that in any case our chances of survival are very limited. Nothing will be able to last long, flora or fauna.”

  “Not so loud,” I told him. I realized that, though they had not dared move closer to us, our companions all seemed to be straining their ears to listen.

  Without saying anything more, I took the key to my closet from my pocket and held it out. Thomas immediately began pulling on his raincoat, put on his crash helmet, his big watertight goggles, and his gloves. Thus equipped, he suddenly looked rather frightening, since both raincoat and helmet were black.

  “Is that sufficient protection?” I asked in a half-choked voice, touching him with one hand.

  His eyes behind the goggles remained expressionless, but his frozen features twitched in what could have been the beginning of a smile. “Let’s just say it’s better than going out stripped to the waist.”

  As soon as he had gone, Meyssonnier came over to me. “What is he going to do?” he asked in a low voice.

  “Measure the radioactivity.”

  Meyssonnier stared at me with hollow eyes. His lips were quivering. “He thinks it was a bomb?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you?”

  “I do too.”

  “Ah,” Meyssonnier said, and that was all.

  Just that one “ah,” then silence. He wasn’t even blinking now, and his eyes were lowered. His long face looked like wax. I glanced over toward Colin and Peyssou. They were watching us, but they didn’t come over. Torn between the hunger to know and terror of hearing the worst, they remained as though paralyzed. Their faces seemed quite expressionless.

  Thomas returned ten minutes later, the headphones still over his ears, the Geiger counter held at arm’s length. He said curdy, “Negative in the inner enclosure. For the moment.”

  Then he knelt down beside Germain and passed the counter to and fro over the body. “He’s negative too.”

  I turned to the rest and said in an authoritative voice, “Thomas and I are going to climb the keep in order to get some idea of what has happened. Don’t move from here. We shall be back in a few minutes.”

  I was expecting protests from the others, but nothing of the sort happened. They were all in that state of stupor, prostration, and bewilderment in which any order at all given in a commanding tone is promptly accepted. I was sure they wouldn’t budge from the cellar.

  As soon as we reached the small courtyard formed by the keep, the drawbridge, and the Renaissance house, Thomas signaled me to stop, and he began passing his counter methodically to and fro across the ground. I watched him, dry-mouthed, without emerging from the cellar entrance. Even there I was immediately smothered by the heat, which was in fact still much greater than that in the cellar. Yet, I don’t know why, it never occurred to me to check it by glancing at the thermometer I had brought up with me.

  The sky was gray and leaden, the light intensity extremely low. I looked at my watch: ten past nine. Stunned, my brain like cotton, I wondered vaguely if this was the dusk of Zero Day or the next morning. An absurd question, I eventually realized after an effort of reflection that seemed painful in the extreme. At Eastertime it would already be dark by nine in the evening. So of course this must be the morning of Zero Day plus one. We had spent a day and a night in the cellar.

  Overhead I could see neither blue sky nor clouds, but only a dark gray uniform layer that seemed to be closing us in like a pall. The word pall conveys exactly the impression of half darkness, weight, and suffocation that sky gave me. I looked up. At first glance the castle didn’t seem to have been damaged, except that the scorched stone of the upper portion of the keep, which rose above the level of the clifftop, was now a russet color.

  The sweat began to run down my face, and I finally thought to consult the thermometer. It was registering plus a hundred and twenty-two. Lying on the centuries-old flagstones over which Thomas was moving his counter there lay the half-charred bodies of a few magpies and pigeons. They had been the keep’s habitual occupants, and I had occasionally complained about the pigeons’ cooing and the magpies’ shrieks. I would not have occasion to complain from now on. All was silence, except in the far distance, perceptible only when I concentrated on it, a continuous sequence of cracklings and hissings.

  “Negative,” Thomas said as he walked back toward me, face bathed in sweat.

  I understood him well enough, but somehow, I don’t know why, his brevity of speech irritated me. There was a silence, and since he made no further move and remained motionless as though he was listening to something with great concentration, I went on impatiently, “Shall we go on?”

  Thomas stared up at the sky without answering.

  “Well, come on then,” I said with an irritation that I was having difficulty in restraining. It was the product, I think, of extreme fatigue, mental distress, and the heat. Listening to people, talking to them, and even just looking at them, everything was painful. I added, “I have my binoculars. I’ll pick them up on the way.”

  The heat in my room on the keep’s third floor was appalling, but everything was still intact, it seemed to me, except that the lead holding the tiny panes of the mullioned windows had melted and run down the outside of the glass in places. While I went through every drawer in my bureau looking for the binoculars, Thomas picked up the telephone, held it to his ear, and moved the cradle up and down several times. The sweat was pouring d
own my cheeks by now. I threw him a vicious glance, as though blaming him for having induced a shortlived gleam of hope in me by his actions.

  “Dead,” he said.

  I shrugged my shoulders angrily.

  “Well, we have to check,” Thomas said with what looked almost like a flash of ill humor.

  “Here they are,” I said, feeling slightly ashamed.

  And yet I was still unable to suppress that feeling: a kind of irritable and impotent hostility toward my fellow men. I hung the binoculars around my neck by their strap and began climbing the last section of spiral staircase, with Thomas at my heels. The heat was stifling. I stumbled several times on the worn stone steps and was forced to clutch at the baluster with my right hand, and the palm of that hand began burning again. The binoculars bumped and swung against my chest. The weight exerted by the strap against the back of my neck seemed unbearable.

  When we emerged from the spiral staircase into the open air at the top of the keep, we could still see nothing, since the roof was completely surrounded by a wall about eight feet high. There was a set of stone steps jutting out from the wall and leading up to a parapet about a yard wide, but without any rail. It was this parapet, from which a vast area of the surrounding countryside could be seen, that my uncle thought too dangerous for me at the age of twelve.

  I stopped to regain my breath. No sky. The same lid of leaden grayness stretching to the horizon. The air was literally burning, and my knees trembled as I made the effort to climb those last few steps, panting for breath, the sweat dripping from my forehead onto the stone. I didn’t climb up onto the parapet. I was too uncertain of my balance. I remained standing on the last step, with Thomas on the one below.

  I took a slow look all around and went briefly into a state of shock. I must have swayed as I stood, because I felt Thomas’s arm against my back pressing me forcibly against the wall.

  The first sight I saw needed no binoculars. Les Sept Fayards was just smoldering embers. There was nothing left of the collapsed roofs, the windows, the doors. Nothing still standing but blackened stretches of wall, standing out against the gray of the sky, with here and there the stump of a tree sticking up out of the ground like a burnt stake. Not a breath of wind. Thick black smoke rose vertically from the ruins, and every so often I could see a line of red flames advancing across the ground, flickering up, then sinking back again like a damped-down campfire.

  A little farther away, on my right, I finally managed to make out what had been Malejac. The church steeple had vanished. And the post office too. Ordinarily the latter was easily recognizable, an ugly two-story building standing apart from the rest on the road leading up the side of the hill toward La Roque. The whole village looked as though it had been flattened by a vast fist, then raked into the ground. Not a leaf. Not a single tile roof. Everything the color of ashes, black and gray, except when a tongue of flame shot up briefly, only to die again almost immediately, like all the rest.

  I raised the binoculars to my eyes and focused them with shaky hands. Colin’s house was the first you came to in the village itself, Meyssonnier’s stood a little outside it, on the slope down toward the Rhunes. I could find no trace of the first, but I identified Meyssonnier’s from a gable that still remained standing. There was nothing left of Peyssou’s farm and the beautiful spruces planted all around it but a little blackened mound.

  I lowered the binoculars and said in a low voice, “Nothing left.”

  Thomas nodded but said nothing.

  I ought to have said no one left, since it was quite clear from a single glance that apart from our own tiny group the entire countryside all around was dead—with its entire population. The view from the top of the keep was one I knew well, and from an early age. When Uncle Samuel had loaned me his binoculars for the first time I had spent a wonderful afternoon, along with the rest of the Club, lying on the parapet (I can still feel the pleasant warmth of the stone against my naked thighs) identifying all the farms nestling among the little hills, a process accompanied, needless to say, by a vast expenditure of swear words, yells, and virile challenges. “Hey, you great asshole, take a look there, that’s Favelard down there, just between Les Bories and La Volpinière!” “What’s the matter with your eyes?” “I bet you a pack of Gauloises that’s Favelard!” “Cussac!” “Cussac my ass!” “I bet you both balls it’s Cussac!” “Dummy, that’s Cussac over there next to Galinat. Anyone can see that because of the tobacco shed!”

  And now I looked out to find all those farms I had always seen nestling there—Favelard, Cussac, Galinat, Les Bories, La Volpinière, and many other more distant holdings whose names I knew, even though I didn’t always know the owners—and all I could see was blackened ruins amid the still smoldering woods.

  Because in our part of the world we had always had plenty of woods. In summer, when you looked down from the keep, what you saw was the cool dark green of the chestnut forests frothing away to infinity, broken here and there by clumps of pines or oaks, and down in the valleys the lines of Lombardy poplars—planted for future profit but meanwhile providing the landscape with elegant vertical features—together with occasional Provence cypresses, more costly trees, planted singly beside the farmhouses for the sake of the pleasure they brought.

  But now, poplars, cypresses, oaks, and pines had all vanished. As for the vast chestnut woods that had covered entire hillsides, leaving only a few unwooded areas on the upper slopes, where the houses stood with their gently sloping meadows all around them, of all that there was nothing to be seen but flames. And sticking up from the flames was a forest of blackened stakes, dying amid the continual crackling and hissing I had heard as I emerged from the cellar. It was the great side branches that had split away from the trunks and fallen to the forest floor that were flaming still, and the effect was as though the hills themselves were slowly being consumed by fire and burning themselves away to ashes.

  On the road that ran beside the Rhunes, just below the now shattered and blackened Château des Rouzies, I caught sight of a dead dog. I could see it in minute detail, since the road was quite close and my binoculars high-powered. A dead dog! you may say, when so many men and women had lost their lives! It’s true, but there is a great difference between what you know and what you see. I knew that hundreds of human beings had burned like torches in the villages and farms all around Malevil, but that dog, apart from the birds in the courtyard, was the only corpse I saw, and there was a particular and horrible detail in the circumstances of its death that affected me deeply. The poor beast must have attempted to escape from the paddock or yard where it had been caught and tried to run away along the familiar road; but its paws had been caught fast in the melted tarmacadam, and it died there, stuck fast, roasted where it stood. Through my binoculars I could see the four limbs clearly, caught in the blackish gravelly mixture, which as the dog collapsed had been pulled upward by the paws without cracking, forming a little black cone around each leg, and still imprisoning them.

  Without looking at Thomas, without even noticing that he was there, as though after all that had happened any relationship between one human being and another was henceforth impossible, I kept saying over and over again in a quiet murmur, “It’s horrible, it’s horrible, it’s horrible.” It was an insane litany that I was powerless to break off. My throat was gripped in a vise, my hands were shaking, sweat was pouring into my eyes, and apart from that one overwhelming sensation of horror, my mind was blank. There was a gust of wind. I took a deep breath, and immediately a pestilential odor of decay and burned flesh invaded my body with such force that I felt it was actually coming from me. It was enough to make one vomit. I had the sensation of being my own corpse, yet somehow still alive. It was a sharp, putrescent, sweetish odor that seeped in and took possession of my whole being, something I would live with inside me till the end of time. The whole world was now nothing but a vast common grave, and I alone was left, with my companions, to live on in this charnel ground, to bury the dea
d and live on forever with their odor.

  I was losing my reason, and I think I must have realized it, because I turned around and signaled to Thomas that I wanted to climb down. And once back on the flagstones of the keep roof, the high parapet all around us cutting off that view of a burning world, I squatted on my heels, empty, lifeless. I don’t know how long I remained in that state of prostration, which was already like a death. It was a kind of psychic coma in which, though I had not lost consciousness, I was totally deprived of reflexes and will.

  I felt Thomas’s shoulder against mine, and when I turned my head toward him with a slowness that surprised me even at the time, I saw his eyes staring at me. I had some difficulty in focusing my own, but when I had done so I realized what it was his eyes were saying to me, and saying with all the more intensity because he was in the same state of paralysis as myself and unable to speak in any other way.

  I watched his lips. They were bloodless and dry. And when he did speak, to utter only a single word, he had difficulty unsticking them from each other. “...Solution...”

  Eyes blinking, I stared at him again with painful effort, for I felt myself ready to sink back at any moment into my trancelike state. Tearing the words out of my throat, terrified by the extreme feebleness of my voice, I said, “What... solution?”

  The answer took so long coming that I thought Thomas had lost consciousness. But then I realized from the tensing of his shoulder against mine that he was summoning up his strength to speak. I heard him only with the greatest difficulty. “Up steps...”

  As he said the words he made a tiny painful gesture with his bent forefinger toward the parapet. Then in a whisper he went on: “Jump... Done with it.”

  I looked at him. Then I turned my eyes away. I sank back into my passivity. A series of unconnected thoughts milled confusedly about in my head. But then, in the center of them, a clearer idea suddenly formed and captured my attention. If like Colin, Meyssonnier, and Peyssou I had had a wife and children, at this moment they would be alive, the human race would not be doomed to vanish from the earth, I would have something to fight for. And now I had to return to the cellar to tell my companions that they had lost their families, and wait with them for the disappearance of mankind.