Malevil

I went into Princesse’s stall. My uncle had passed on a little of his prejudice against cows to me, but all the same, that great big fat-bellied animal with the square muzzle moved my heart. There she lay, patient and motherly, on one side, revealing her vast belly and the teats that were going to provide us with food. Just looking at her—weak as I was, legs shaky, stomach hollow and gnawed by hunger—filled me with a terrible thirst for milk. I wasn’t forgetting that she hadn’t calved yet, I just ignored that troublesome fact. In my mind, heated by my fast, I was almost hallucinating now and then, seeing myself as Romulus or Remus being suckled by their wolf, lying under Princesse and sucking with sensual pleasure, squeezing the great swollen teat between my lips, waiting for the moment when it sent its streams of warm liquid spurting against the back of my throat.

  I was deep in these fantasies when La Menou returned from the gate tower carrying what from its maroon wrapping was clearly a carton of sugar. Ah, she was not going to stint where the animals were concerned, that was clear. I got up and followed her, hypnotized by her burden. I watched, eyes unmoving, mouth running with saliva, as she took those beautiful shining white lumps of sugar in her thin little hand and dropped them into the bucket of water. She noticed my look.

  “Poor Emmanuel, you’re hungry!”

  “Fairly, yes.”

  “Only I can’t give you anything before the others come back.”

  “I didn’t ask you for anything,” I said with a pride that rang only too hollow, and which La Menou completely ignored moreover, since she handed me three lumps of sugar, which I accepted. She gave the same number to Momo, who promptly stuffed all three at once into his great maw. Whereas I carefully snapped each oblong tablet in two so as to make it last longer. I noticed that La Menou hadn’t taken any herself.

  “What about you, Menou?”

  “Oh, me,” she said. “I’m so little, I don’t need as much as you.”

  The warm sugary water mixed with wine met with Amarante’s approval. She drank it all down greedily, and after that it became possible to make her accept the bran. I experienced an incredible feeling of elation watching her eat the handfuls I held out to her one by one. At that moment, I remember, it occurred to me that even in the country, where people are after all very fond of animals, we don’t really value them as much as we ought, as though it were quite natural that they should always be there, to carry us, to feed us, to do our bidding. I looked at Amarante’s shining eyes, with the slight margins of white that told me her fear had not yet quite subsided, and I thought, We’re not grateful enough. We don’t thank them enough.

  I got to my feet and looked at my watch. We had been in the Maternity Ward three hours. I emerged from the stall, knees almost giving way under me, remembering that I’d promised myself to bury Germain before the others got back. La Menou and Momo joined me outside.

  “They’re not doing too badly, that’s what I think,” La Menou said. Not for anything in the world would she have said that the animals were saved. She would have been too afraid of tempting whichever power it was—God or the devil—that was now keeping watch on the words of men to punish them the moment they expressed too much hope.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  The others returned at one that afternoon, hollow-eyed and haggard, covered in ashes, hands and faces black. Peyssou was naked to the waist. He had used his shirt to make a bundle of the bones or fragments of bones they had found in their houses. None of them uttered a word. Except Meyssonnier, very briefly, to ask me for wood and tools. Nor would they eat or wash until he had finished making a small box, about two feet long and a foot wide. I can still see their faces as Meyssonnier, the casket finished, picked up the bones one by one and laid them in it.

  It was decided to bury it in the flat area outside the gate, at the place where the rock gave way to soil, and beside the grave where I had just buried Germain. Peyssou dug a hole about two feet deep, throwing the soil into a heap on his left. The little box lay beside him. Its very smallness was a piteous sight. It was hard to imagine that what remained of three families was now enclosed inside that tiny coffin. But presumably my friends had decided not to collect the ashes surrounding the bones, for fear that they were mingled with those of mere objects.

  I noticed that after lowering the box into the hole he had dug, Peyssou arranged a number of large stones on top, as though he was afraid it might be dug up by a dog or a fox. A useless precaution, since in all probability the world’s entire fauna had been destroyed. Having filled in the hole, Peyssou arranged the soil left over in a small rectangular mound, taking great care to straighten the edges and square off the corners neatly with his spade. Then he turned to me. “We can’t just let them go like this. We must say the prayers.”

  “But I don’t know them,” I said, dumbfounded.

  “You’ve got a book, though, with them in it?”

  I nodded.

  “Perhaps you could go and get it.”

  I said quietly, “You know what I think about all that, Peyssou.”

  “That’s nothing to do with it. It’s for them you’ll be saying them, not for you.”

  “Prayers!” Meyssonnier said, also very quietly, looking down his nose.

  “What about your Mathilde? She went to Mass, didn’t she?” Peyssou asked, turning toward him.

  “All the same,” Meyssonnier said.

  The whole discussion was conducted in low, restrained tones, and there were long silences separating our utterances.

  “My Yvette,” Peyssou said, eyes fixed on the ground, “it was church every Sunday, and every evening Our Father and Ave Maria in her nightgown at the foot of the bed.” (While he was expressing it, the memory became too intense. His voice choked and he remained frozen for two or three seconds before going on.) “So there you are,” he went on at last. “If she was for her prayers then, now that the moment has come for her to go I’m not going to let her go without them, that’s all. And the kids neither.”

  “He’s right,” Colin said.

  No one knew what La Menou thought, because she didn’t open her mouth.

  “Anyway, I’ll go fetch the missal,” I said after a moment.

  I discovered later that during my absence Peyssou had asked Meyssonnier to make a cross to mark the grave, and that Meyssonnier had agreed without any protest. When I reappeared, Peyssou said, “It’s very kind of you, but if it upsets you that much, then Colin or me can read them.”

  “No, no,” I said. “I don’t mind doing it, since you say it’s for them.”

  I was given the benefit of La Menou’s opinion when we were alone later. “If you’d refused, Emmanuel, I wouldn’t have said anything, because where religion is concerned it’s always a delicate subject, but I wouldn’t have thought you were right inside. And besides you said them so well, better than the priest. He always stammered through them so fast that no one understood anything, and he looked as though he was somewhere else the whole time. But you, Emmanuel, there was feeling in it.”

  We had to settle our sleeping arrangements for the night. I offered Thomas the sofa in my room, which left the room next to mine free for Meyssonnier. I gave the one down on the second floor to Colin and Peyssou.

  Lying on my bed, exhausted and unable to sleep, I kept my eyes wide open. Not the slightest gleam of light. Ordinarily, the night is a collage of grays. This one was the color of India ink. I could make out nothing, not even the vaguest outline, not even my hand an inch from my eyes. Across from me, lying beneath the window, Thomas tossed and turned on his bed. I could hear him. I couldn’t see him.

  There was a knock on the door. I jumped, then called out “Come in” automatically. The door squeaked as it opened. Any and every noise in that darkness acquired an abnormal intensity.

  “It’s me,” Meyssonnier said.

  I turned toward the voice. “Come on in. We’re not asleep.”

  “Me neither,” Meyssonnier said rather unnecessarily.

  He stood there in the doorway, unable t
o make up his mind to come right in. Or so I supposed, since I couldn’t make out even his outline. We could have been spirits in some world beyond death and still have been no more invisible to one another.

  I could follow his movements from the slight noises he made. He closed the door behind him, moved forward, and bumped against the chair. He must have been barefoot, because he swore. Then I heard the tired springs of the chair squeak beneath his weight. So he wasn’t just a shade after all. He had a body still, just like mine, trapped between two dreads: that of dying, and that—no less terrible now—of living.

  I thought Meyssonnier was about to speak, but he said nothing. Colin and Peyssou were together in the room downstairs, Thomas and I up on the third floor. Meyssonnier had been alone in Birgitta’s room. He had been unable to bear the combination of darkness, sleeplessness, and solitude.

  At that moment I suddenly recalled his wife Mathilde and his constant quarrels with her. I felt slightly guilty because I couldn’t recall the names of his two boys. How was he managing to go on living at all, that’s what I wanted to know. After all, apart from Malevil itself and my work, my life had been a void. But what about him? What effect must it have on a man when everything he has loved is buried under the earth in a tiny wooden box?

  I was lying naked on top of my bed and sweating. We had hesitated about the window. The bedroom was so stifling that at first we had opened it as far as it would go. But it had been impossible to go on breathing in the acrid smell of burning for long. Outside, nature was in the final stages of the greatest auto-da-fé of all time. There were no flames by now; at least they would have provided some small light. Nothing came in through the window but the deathly smell of the charred countryside. After a minute or so I had asked Thomas to shut it again.

  There was nothing in the absolute darkness of the room but the breathing of three men, and outside, on the other side of the overheated walls, a dead planet. It had been murdered at the height of spring, its buds scarcely formed, the little rabbits scarcely born in their warrens. Not an animal left. Not a single bird. Not a single insect. The earth charred black. Man’s habitations nothing but ashes. Here and there, blackened and splintered stumps that had been trees. And in the middle of it all, a tiny handful of men. Perhaps kept alive as guinea-pig observers in some experiment? It was ludicrous. Right in the middle of that charnel house, a few human lungs pumping air in and out. A few hearts pumping blood. A few human brains racing. Racing to what end?

  When I spoke, I am fairly certain it was purely for Meyssonnier’s sake. I just couldn’t go on any longer bearing what he was thinking to himself over there, all alone, sitting in the blackness in front of my desk.

  “Thomas?”

  “Yes.”

  “How do you explain the fact that there hasn’t been any radioactivity so far?”

  “It may have been a lithium bomb,” Thomas said. Then in a weak yet objective tone, apparently devoid of all emotion, he added, “It was a clean bomb.”

  I heard Meyssonnier shift in his chair. “Clean!” he echoed in a dead voice.

  “That means it doesn’t produce fallout,” Thomas’s voice explained.

  “Yes, I realized that,” Meyssonnier said.

  The silence fell again. Breathing, nothing more. I pressed my hands against my temples. If the bomb was clean, that meant that whoever exploded it intended to follow it up with an invasion. But he wouldn’t be doing any invading. He had been destroyed in his turn; the total radio silence told us that much. And as for France, it wasn’t worth bothering with the possibility that she might have had time to engage in any war. She had been destroyed as part of a global strategy, so the territory could be occupied. Or so the enemy could be prevented from occupying it. A tiny preliminary precaution. A little pawn, sacrificed at the very beginning of the game. In short, “a calculated write-off,” as the military jargon had it.

  “And would that be enough, Thomas, just one bomb?”

  I didn’t add “to destroy the whole of France.” He knew what I meant.

  “Yes,” he said, “one large bomb would be enough, exploded twenty-five miles up, above Paris.”

  He said no more, obviously feeling there was nothing to be gained from further details. He had spoken in a clearly articulated, unemotional voice, as though he was dictating a math problem to a classroom of students.

  That’s the sort of problem I ought to have used myself, it occurred to me, in the days when I was a teacher with students. A bit more up to date, after all, than the one about the two taps and the plughole. Given that the explosion cannot transmit itself as pressure because of the low air density at high altitudes, but given also that the effect of its heat, for the same reason, will be experienced at a distance that will be proportionally increased by the height of the explosion, at what height above Paris must you explode a bomb of so many megatons in order to burn down Strasbourg, Dunkirk, Brest, Biarritz, Port-Vendres, and Marseilles? And I could have introduced variations too. Have two X factors instead of one; have them calculate the necessary number of megatons as well as the optimum altitude.

  “It’s not just France,” Thomas said suddenly. “It’s the whole of Europe. The world. Otherwise we’d have been able to pick up something on the radio.”

  At that moment I saw Thomas again in the cellar, Momo’s transistor radio in his hand, moving the tuning needle endlessly to and fro across the lighted dial. It had saved his life, as it turned out, that inflexible scientific curiosity of his. If it hadn’t been for that inexplicable radio silence he would already have left at the crucial moment.

  “Hold on though,” I said. “What if there were some sort of screen between you and the radiated heat? A mountain, or a cliff, the way it happened here.”

  “Yes,” Thomas said, “locally.”

  In Thomas’s mind that “locally” was a qualification scarcely removed from negation. I took it differently. It confirmed me in the suspicions I had already begun to form. In all probability there had been other spots in France spared the full force of the bomb, and possibly here and there other groups of survivors. Inexplicably, I felt a warm feeling of hope flow through me. I say inexplicably, because man had just signally failed to demonstrate that he deserved to survive, or that any encounter with him was likely to bring unadulterated joy.

  “I’m off back to bed,” Meyssonnier said.

  He had been there for barely twenty minutes and spoken hardly at all. He had come to visit with us in an attempt to drive away his loneliness, but he was carrying the loneliness inside him. It had followed him into our room, and now he was about to take it back with him into his own.

  “Good night,” I said.

  “Good night,” Thomas echoed.

  Meyssonnier did not answer. I heard the door squeak as it closed behind him. After fifteen minutes or so I got up and knocked on his.

  “Thomas is asleep,” I said untruthfully. “Am I disturbing you?”

  “No, no,” he said in a dead voice.

  I groped my way over to the little bamboo writing table I’d put in there for Birgitta. To break the silence I said, “Can’t see a damned thing.”

  And Meyssonnier answered strangely, in the same dead voice, “I’m wondering if it’s going to get light again tomorrow.”

  I felt my way to Birgitta’s little wicker armchair, and as I touched it a memory came back. The last time I had sat in it Birgitta was standing in front of me, naked between my legs, and I was stroking her. I don’t know if it was simply the effect of that memory, but instead of sitting down I remained standing there, hands resting on the back of the little armchair.

  “Are you sure it doesn’t bother you being alone in here, Meyssonnier? You wouldn’t rather I put you in the same room as Colin and Peyssou?”

  “No, thanks,” he said in the same flat, tenuous voice. “And have to listen to Peyssou talking nonstop about his family? No, thanks. I’ve enough thoughts like that in my own head.”

  I waited, but nothing more cam
e. I knew it already. He would never say anything. Not a word. Either about Mathilde or his two boys. And suddenly, just then, their names came back to me: François and Gérard. Six and four.

  “It’s entirely up to you,” I said.

  “Thank you, it’s very kind of you to take so much trouble, Emmanuel,” he said. And so ingrained was the habit of politeness in him that in pronouncing those words, because they were a customary social formula, for a few seconds he regained his normal voice.

  “Well,” I said, “I’ll be off now.”

  “I’m not throwing you out,” he said in the same tone. “You’re in your own home here.”

  “So are you,” I rejoined briskly. “Malevil belongs to all of us.”

  But he refrained from any comment on that.

  “Well, see you tomorrow then.”

  “After all,” he said, and his voice had become dead again, “after all, forty, that’s not so old.”

  I stood there in silence, but nothing more came. “Not so old for what?” I asked after a moment.

  “Well, if we survive, that means thirty years ahead of us. At least,” he said. “And nothing, nothing.”

  “You mean without a wife?”

  “Not just that.”

  What he meant in fact was “without children,” but there was no way he could bring himself to actually say it.

  “Well, it’s time I went now,” I said.

  I went over, groped for his hand, and squeezed it. He scarcely responded to the pressure at all.

  By some sort of contagion I could feel almost physically what he was going through, and it was so painful that I felt what was almost relief when I was back in my own room. But what was waiting for me there was perhaps worse. Masked, if possible, by an even greater degree of reticence and modesty.

  “Is it bad?” Thomas asked in a low voice, and I was grateful to him for his interest in Meyssonnier.

  “You can imagine.”

  “Yes,” Thomas said. Then he added, “I had some nephews in Paris.”

  And also, I happened to know, two sisters and his parents.