Read Online By a Slow River by Philippe Claudel - Free Book Online Page A

war unfurled its manly little carnival over many kilometers; from where we were you might have thought it was a scale miniature of battle. Everything was so small. Death couldn’t abide this smallness; it was fleeing and taking its replica of suffering with it—its kit of dismembered bodies, of lost cries of hunger and belliesful of fear, of tragedy.
    Lysia Verhareine took it all in with her eyes wide open. She was holding on her knees what at first I took to be a book—but when she began writing a few seconds on, I saw it was the little notebook covered in red moroccan. She jotted down some words with a tiny pencil that disappeared in her hand, and as she put those words to paper, her lips were pronouncing others, unless they were the same. I felt like a thief, gazing at her this way at her back.
    I was remarking as much to myself when, slowly, she turned her head toward me, leaving her beautiful smile on the distance of the battleground. Like a prick, I stood there nailed to the ground, not knowing what to say or do. If I had been totally naked, I couldn’t have been more embarrassed. I ventured a little nod. She kept on looking at me, and for the first time I saw her face smooth as a lake in winter: the face of a dead woman. I mean the face of a woman dead within herself, as though nothing inside her was coursing or pulsing anymore, as though her blood had gone somewhere else.
    That moment seemed endless, as a session of methodical torture. Then her eyes traveled from my face to my left hand, where Gachentard’s rifle dangled. I saw what she was seeing. I turned red as a woodpecker’s ass. I babbled several words, regretting them immediately. “It isn’t loaded, it’s just for—” And I stopped. I couldn’t have sounded any dumber and in retrospect should have simply held my tongue. She let her eyes linger upon me: a fusillade of darts, acid-tipped, piercing every inch of my skin. Then she shrugged and returned to her landscape, letting me fall back into the universe from which I’d come: a realm much too ugly for her—too narrow, or perhaps too stuffy, of which gods and princesses know nothing, though they sometimes pass through it on tiptoe—the universe of men.
    After that Sunday, I put my all into avoiding her whenever I caught sight of her from afar. I sidled through alleys, angled into doorways, or hid under my hat when no other cover was at hand. I could no longer bear to see those eyes, haunted as I was by a great shame, not quite knowing why. What had I seen, after all? A young lady, alone, writing something in a red notebook as she looked out over a landscape of war. I too had a perfect right to be strolling in the orchards if I felt like it!
    I hung the rifle on a spike above my door. It’s still there. And it has taken the death and burial of everyone for me to begin my Sunday walks again. Since then I’ve gone up there every time, as on a pilgrimage, to that place in the meadow where I saw the young teacher sitting at the edge of our world.
    I always sit in the same place—hers—and catch my breath. That takes quite a few minutes these days. I look out on what she saw, the broad landscape now calm and slow again, without flashes or plumes, and I see her smile once more at the boundless beauty, spattered with desolation. I see all that again as though the scene were to be performed once more, and I wait. I wait.

X
    The war went on and on. All those braggarts who were sure we’d be sending the Krauts back home with a quick kick in the ass, after three weeks—they shut their traps now. The first anniversary of the hostilities wasn’t observed anywhere but at Fermillin’s bistro. He was a tall, lanky guy with a head like a candle snuffer who had worked ten years for Northern Railways before discovering his vocation—“like a call from heaven,” he said—for selling spirits.
    His place was called Au Bon Pied, the Right Foot. Many had pointed out that the name didn’t make much sense for