Lovers on All Saints' Day

The Lodger

THE NIGHT BEFORE, at around nine, Xavier Moré had arrived on foot at the Lemoines’ house. He suddenly appeared in the kitchen, filling the doorway, looking like an old scrounger. His skin was as dry and rough as blotting paper, and the wisps of white hair across the top of his head looked like paint peeling off a clay wall.

“I’ve come to get my car,” he said.

Georges and Charlotte looked at each other.

“Why don’t you come in and have a hot drink?” she said. “We’re just finishing dinner.”

“I don’t want anything. I just want my car.”

Several months earlier, Jean Moré, Xavier’s only son, had asked Georges if he’d keep his father’s old Porsche in the barn. “He’s still drinking a lot,” he’d said. “I’d rather chauffeur him around than see something happen to him on the highway.” The strategy worked out well: Xavier began to get used to being a passenger, even seeming to forget he’d ever sat behind a steering wheel. Meanwhile, the Porsche slept in Georges’s barn, surrounded by bags of manure and rusty shovels.

“The car’s here, but we don’t have the keys,” said Georges. “Your son has them.”

“That’s a lie,” said Xavier. “The keys are here, too. I want it. It’s mine and I want to drive it.”

Georges listened closely: there were no traces of alcohol in Xavier’s voice. He couldn’t remember the last time anyone had arrived on foot. It hadn’t happened since wartime, when they were young enough to walk the five kilometers between their houses without breathing any heavier. More than once they’d gone as far as the border by bicycle, unconcerned about the risk of running into German soldiers, to buy potatoes at lower prices. But now they were old men, and old men don’t walk alone, at night, braving the autumn cold of the Ardennes. Georges took Xavier by the arm, led him to the table like a blind man, and Xavier accepted a glass of port: no matter that he’d suffered an attack of gout a couple of weeks earlier that had forced Jean to hire a nurse from the Rocourt hospital. Georges wanted to say: Don’t worry, think of tomorrow. Tomorrow everything will have changed, one goes hunting and forgets the bad things.

“I don’t really know why I came,” said Xavier.

“You wanted to see us,” said Charlotte.

“Well, yes. But it wasn’t urgent.”

“I have an idea. Why don’t you stay overnight? You can’t go back at this hour.”

“We could call a taxi,” said Georges. “There’s a car service in Aywaille—”

Charlotte cut him off. Her blue eyes reproached him for something.

“We don’t need any taxis. The guest room is made up.”

“This is stupid,” said Xavier. “My Porsche is sitting in your barn and I want to take it. What has my son told you, might I ask? I’m fine. Do you think I’m drunk?”

“We’ll call Jean,” said Georges.

Xavier lifted his arm and the wine in his glass was illuminated with a yellow light. He threw the glass down on the wooden floor, hard. But the glass didn’t smash: its stem snapped off with a quiet sound, and the port spilled out, forming a long puddle.

“Merde,” said Xavier.

He fell back in his chair, his head in his hands. “Just as well. The doctor said I wasn’t allowed any.” He didn’t look at Charlotte, but said:

“I wanted to talk to you.”

“Well, talk to her,” said Georges.

“It was nothing. I was feeling lonely, it happens to us all.”

“All of us,” said Charlotte. “But that’s why there’s—”

“Not to you two, of course. You’re the happy family, the little house on the prairie.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” said Georges.

“Nothing, nothing. Don’t get paranoid.”

Then there was a knock at the door. Xavier smiled, and in his smile there was a bitterness Georges had never seen.

“There’s my son, flesh of my flesh, blood of my blood. It’s touching. Everyone worries so much, they notice I’m not home and go out looking for me.”

—

BUT ALL THAT had been the night before. Today, Georges didn’t want to worry about bitter thoughts. Charlotte took his hand and he felt the roughness of her skin. He adored that roughness, and hearing his wife’s smoker’s voice, and stroking her gray hair, calmed him. Xavier chose his life without anyone forcing him to do anything. The past was far behind them, everyone made their own selves. That was terrible, but it was true.

He poured himself some coffee and thought he could add a few drops of cognac without harming his aim. The mountain cold had stayed in his hands, and as he lifted the warm coffeepot his fingers thawed out. It was almost eight in the morning and the room was beginning to fill up with people and voices. Hunters crossed the paved courtyard with long strides; through the window Georges watched them arrive. The rubber soles of their waterproof boots barely dented the silence. Some of them left the back doors of their four-by-fours open, and the dogs barked from inside their cages when a tortoiseshell cat ran past toward the lake.

Georges knew the routine by heart. Jean Moré, the host, was welcoming the hunters, and at his side was Catherine. Tradition forbade a hunter’s wife serving as a beater, but they didn’t concern themselves about that. Sitting at the dining room table, standing in the faint light coming in the window, or trying to warm up in front of the fireplace were the rest of the beaters. They had fluorescent jackets flung over their shoulders and hunting horns hanging around their necks like medallions. It was the same team as ever, except for the presence of a novice toward whom Jean was feigning tolerance.

“Gentlemen.” Jean raised his voice. “I’ll ask you to finish up your drinks and come outside. It’s time to get started. I don’t want the morning to slip away before we’ve all done what we’ve come here to do.”

“Well,” said Georges. “We’re getting under way now.”

“Go and kill lots of boars,” said Charlotte. “And bring them back to me, and I’ll cook them for you just the way you like them, and we won’t share them with anybody.”

Georges kissed her on the forehead.

“I’ll go, kill ’em, and come back,” he said. “Like in the movie.”

There wasn’t yet complete daylight in the yard. The sky was still overcast. In the inner courtyard, figures cast no shadows. On the paved surface, boots surrounded Jean with a murmur of rubber. The hunters wore green, but no green was the same as the next. Their jackets were thick fleece, adorned with yellow edges like fine epaulets and deer embroidered on the lapels, with buttons like coins on the sleeves and deep pockets in which nothing jangled, no keys, no matches, because those were garments for the hunting season, and no daily or habitual objects, nothing betraying domestic life, would ever be forgotten in their pockets.

“The circle, gentlemen,” said Jean.

The hunters surrounded him. Jean gave out the orders of the hunt speaking with his trumpet in one hand and a lit cigar in the other. Jean was one of the most respected hunters in the Ardennes, as his father had been, and Georges still felt moved at seeing the son of his best friend acting as maître de chasse.

“I have little to tell you, gentlemen, because you all know the rules. No shotguns, rifles only. Do not fire into the encirclement or toward rocks. The first boar is off-limits, as are females, roe deer, and stags.”

He kept quiet for a few seconds, as if looking for a way to round off his speech. After a moment, he let his cigar get soaked in the drizzle, took two steps toward the barbecue, and threw it in with the firewood.

“That’s it,” he said. “Good luck, and good hunting.”

The group dispersed on the other side of the gate. Each hunter seemed to have arranged beforehand which four-by-four he’d be riding in. The doors opened, the cars began to spew brightly colored supplies — red and purple plastic cylinders that looked like pieces from a children’s board game — green arms checked rifles, opened and closed portable stools, and the beaters pulled on their orange vests.

Xavier was leaning against Georges’s four-by-four. He held a black umbrella and a folding stool, the leather of which had been mended several times. Georges approached him without speaking. He patted him affectionately on the back and a cloud of dust came off his coat.

“How are you?”

“Fine. How else would I be?”

It was as if they hadn’t seen each other the night before. Georges decided to play along. He helped Xavier stow his rifle behind the backseat, with his own guns. Like several of the hunters, Georges couldn’t help bringing his old Browning shotgun on the hunt, even though he knew full well that its use would be forbidden. Balanced among the guns was a big mushroom he’d picked on the way there that fit perfectly, and wouldn’t get too knocked around along the way.

“Hope your dog doesn’t eat it,” said Georges.

Stalky, Xavier’s dog, was a golden retriever, old like his owner and tired from hunting with him for more than twelve years. An illness had damaged his sense of balance some time ago, and he walked with his head tilted to one side as if he were looking at a crooked picture.

“My dog doesn’t eat mushrooms,” said Moré.

“I know,” said Georges. “I was joking.”

“Yeah. Well, don’t make ridiculous jokes.”

They went across the Route de Modave and headed toward Aywaille, and only stopped at the north edge of the forest long enough for the beaters, sheathed in their fluorescent vests like neon scarecrows, to get out with the dogs and each take up their positions. The varied barking of the beasts and a mélange of their names filled the air. Stalky barked, too. “You’re not getting out yet,” said Xavier. “You’re staying with me.” From the other side of the grounds, a narrow track that would only allow the vehicles to proceed single file — one car behind the next, bumper to bumper — led to a field that the hunters would cross on foot on their way to their positions. The barbed wire along the edges of the track was almost grazing the doors of the four-by-fours.

“Why are they stopping?” said Xavier.

“Here comes your son.” Georges leaned out the window. “What’s going on, Jean? Why are they getting out?”

“This is where we’re going to leave the cars, Monsieur Lemoine,” said Jean Moré, who was coming along assigning positions. “Park as close as possible to the one in front, to leave space.”

“Give me the keys,” said Xavier.

“I have things to get out of the back, too,” said Georges, and then asked Jean: “Where’s my stand?”

“In front of the woods.” Jean pointed.

“Give me the keys,” said Xavier.

“Yes, yes, don’t be impatient,” said Georges, and took the keys out of the ignition and handed them to Xavier without looking at him. “And your father? Where should he go?”

“On the corner of this side.” Jean’s hand moved through the air, indicating the precise angle the trees established. “If there are any boars, these are magnificent positions.”

“They’re useless positions,” said Xavier.

“That’s not true, Papa.”

“If you were assigned that spot, you’d be offended.”

It was true, but Georges kept quiet. Being patronized this way had stopped mattering to him quite a while ago. With his dry hand he reached for an apple in the glove compartment and stuck it in his right pocket; he felt the warm contact of the fleece and his arthritis let up for an instant. Xavier, who did wear gloves, criticized him for his stubborn refusal to cover his hands on these freezing mornings. By the time Georges got out, Xavier had already unloaded all the gear they needed. Stalky was beside him, howling. Georges checked his door. Before letting go of it, he asked:

“Have you got the keys?”

“Don’t worry, you can close up. I’ve put them safely away.”

“Okay. But don’t let them jangle.”

“Don’t worry,” said Xavier, “I won’t be moving much. You’re a lucky man.”

“Nonsense, our positions are as good as each other. They’re spots for old hunters. But we are old hunters.”

“I was talking about Charlotte,” said Xavier.

His eyes had reddened and his skin was turning pale: it was almost possible to see the blood retreating from his forehead and cheeks. Two or three times in the last few years, always after too much wine, Xavier had come out with some brusque comments about Charlotte. This was the first time he’d touched on the subject while sober. Georges, however, confronted the matter with the false tolerance of someone talking to a drunk.

“No hard feelings,” he said.

“Of course not. She chose you. She stayed with you. What hard feelings could there be? Don’t be a hypocrite.”

“All that’s past. The only thing—”

“All right, all right,” said Xavier. “Spare me the philosophizing, I beg you.”

He can’t stand seeing us, thought Georges, he can’t stand seeing what we’ve attained. They went their separate ways. In front of the southern edge of the forest was a pasture where three Limousin cows were grazing. Georges looked to the right and to the left: Xavier, hunched over, was heading to his position with Stalky trotting eagerly at his side, and the complicity or harmony that had developed between the dog and his owner over the years was plain to see; on the side nearest the road, the crowd of younger hunters broke the line of the horizon. The vision of the armed silhouettes reminded Georges of those images of men disembarking in Normandy during the war. He walked patiently toward the spot he’d been assigned. He was, for the first time since the day began, truly alone. He was grateful. He stopped, inhaled the cold air, and all the mountain smells, manure and pine, rain and damp moss, washed over him like a wave. Every once in a while, an isolated engine broke the silence, and the only noise that Georges heard, while he settled down, was the sound of the joints of his portable stool as he unfolded it over the dead leaves. Soon, as he loaded his rifle and shotgun, he heard the echo of the metals colliding and, when he finally sat down, putting his gun across his lap and leaning his rifle against an oak tree, the uneven chorus of horns that announced the beginning of the hunt. Suddenly, the image of a Flaubert book and a train ticket to Nancy came to mind.

—

THE DAY GEORGES TURNED FIFTY was also Jean Moré’s initiation to the hunt, Jean having killed his first boar that very morning. Charlotte organized a gathering at home for friends of the family and some fellow hunters. The boar’s head rested on its side on the lawn, beside the stump of an oak tree. The hunters shouted, let’s see him wearing the head, put it on, and Georges eventually lifted the head and set it on Jean’s head like a hat. Not much blood spilled, but enough to give Jean’s black hair the look of a cow’s placenta, and the baptism was complete. Georges would later think that eating with hands dirty with boar’s blood wouldn’t have been so bad. But, at that moment, it hadn’t occurred to him to act any other way. He went inside through the kitchen door and his eyes took a couple of seconds to adjust to the darkness. He found Charlotte sitting on the floor beside the gas stove, surrounded by pheasant feathers. She had her apron on; she was not crying, but she was panting as if she’d been running. On top of the plastic tablecloth was the pheasant they’d be eating later, its throat slit and innards now cleaned out. On the other side of the bird, the Flaubert book: a blue hardback with gold lettering.

“I was going to leave you,” said Charlotte.

She seemed convinced that the world would not be transformed after those words, or that she’d be able to fight against the transformation. Like a puzzle, everything fit together in Georges’s mind. But it was too late (a thousand little signs proved to him) for reproach or jealousy, for confrontation or a scene.

“He gave you that book?”

“Yes. With the train tickets.”

“To where?”

“France.”

Georges looked out the window. Xavier and Jean were playing with the boar’s head. The most obvious strategy for the adulterer was to show up at social gatherings where his lover would be. That way he gave the impression of not having anything to hide and, therefore, that nothing was actually going on.

“I thought I was pregnant,” said Charlotte. “We were going to live in Nancy until the baby was born.”

Georges looked at her chestnut hair and the vertex on which the button of her blouse joined the line of her breasts. Having a child with Xavier in another country was a way of beginning a new life. Later Charlotte and Xavier would have married. Everything would have gone back to normal, and they might even have returned to Belgium. But Charlotte wasn’t pregnant. She’d chosen not to run away; she didn’t need a new life.

“I’m staying,” she said. “I’m staying with you.”

“Are you sure?”

“You don’t know how much I’ve suffered. I don’t want any more of this. I want us to go back to being ourselves.”

“But we haven’t stopped being ourselves, Charlotte. You’ve lied very well. You have an admirable talent.”

“No sarcasm, please.”

“Also, you’re not young. This is no time to be having babies.”

“Let me stay.”

“How long has it been going on?”

“I don’t know,” said Charlotte. “Three, four months.”

“Exactly.”

“I don’t know, dear.”

“Of course you know. That book is an anniversary gift, I’ll bet you anything. Madame Bovary. He’s not what you might call subtle, our friend Xavier.”

They did not embrace. They did not kiss, not even like friends. But their marriage was safe, even if just for this moment. The next step would be to work at it, work tenaciously. Georges loved her, and that certainty should be enough for him to go back with Charlotte, for that complicated return to the body of a woman he’d never left. That Charlotte was not young, at forty-five, was false, but that didn’t prevent them from feeling the excitement of the surprise of realizing they’d stay together, that they had their whole lives ahead of them.

—

TO FRIGHTEN THE PREY, to force them to leave the woods and expose themselves to the hunters’ sight, each beater had developed a particular and private voice that Georges, over time, had begun to be able to distinguish. He made an effort, a sort of personal challenge, to discern them in the air. That oooooooo with hands clapping was from Guillaume Respin; Frédéric Fontaine shook the bushes with a polished stick and shouted ah-ah-ah-eeeee. Catherine had decided, quite a while ago, to do without onomatopoeia.

“Get a move on, brutes!” she shouted. “Foutez le camp!”

But no animal escaped down this side. With a bit of luck, the hunters on the other side would trap at least one boar. Georges looked up, but the pigeons were flying too high: it would be arrogance for a man whose aim was not as sure as it used to be to attempt such a shot. Nevertheless, he pointed his rifle at the gray sky and looked through the telescopic lens, dusty and smudged with fingerprints: years ago he would have tried, he thought calmly, his finger caressing the trigger. He lowered the gun and listened to the beaters; the commotion of branches breaking under their feet didn’t drown out that other commotion of their threats. It was possible to follow those movements among the trees, because the boundary of the woods was clearly established and the way the wind played with the sounds intensified the voices as soon as the beaters came around the western corner.

Then three shots rang out.

“Tiens,” Georges said to no one. “Someone’s had some luck.”

He tried to relive the sound of the shots, and smiled as he guessed someone had fired a shotgun and was going to be admonished by Jean. He imagined the prey, made bets with himself: a young boar, an out-of-season deer, a banal rabbit that had made someone react too quickly? He was attentive to the rest of the noises. The beaters were covering the second flank of the woods and the dogs barked as if to cut through the cold.

A fourth shot rang out.

Georges inhaled deeply, because ever since he was a little boy the smell of gunpowder in his nostrils, in case by chance the wind was blowing in his direction strongly enough after a nearby shot, had fascinated him. He couldn’t smell anything this time. Instead, he was surprised to hear the three horn blasts signaling the end of the hunt.

Why were they stopping already? Didn’t they still have a good stretch to cover? He didn’t react yet, waiting for confirmation. A hunter shouted from somewhere:

“Pap, pap, pap.”

Georges didn’t hide a grimace of disappointment. That was the sign: the hunt had been called off early. What had gone wrong?

“Pap, pap, pap,” he shouted in turn.

Swearing, the hunters began to show themselves throughout the forest. They no longer walked calmly as they had earlier in the morning, but hurried like boys; they wanted to get back to the cars as fast as possible and find out which beater had sounded the trumpet three times before having gone all the way through the woods and settle that innocuous blame, and then, finally, carry on to the next place. Georges did the same. He didn’t stop to sniff the air. He wasn’t paying attention to mushrooms or chestnuts fallen among the grass. He didn’t even allow himself the basic curiosity of who had shot what. His gaze was fixed on the line of cars of which his, being the last to arrive, was now the first. He was pleased about that: he’d leave before the rest, avoid hearing the disputes and reproaches. When he was getting to the end (now the beginning) of the convoy, he saw Jean arriving almost at a run, his face disfigured with rage.

His wife was following him. Five meters or so behind them the group’s novice was walking. His lank reddish hair had fallen across his face and he had recent acne scars on his chin. Georges knew Jean’s words referred to him, not to the others: Respin and Cambronne hadn’t even appeared yet, and the rest of the beaters were too far behind to even hear him.

“Idiot! He’s an incompetent idiot! We’ve completely wasted the woods, shit. How incompetent can someone be. But by God he won’t be coming out with us again. If it’s up to me, he won’t ever be with us again.”

“It wasn’t him, dear,” said Catherine. “I was with him, I swear it was someone else.”

“I had to learn the hard way. But one thing’s for sure, this is the last time a beginner gets his first chance on my hunt.”

“But it was someone else,” said Catherine.

“Everyone back to their vehicles,” shouted Jean. Dark looks from one or more of the hunters reminded him that he was speaking to older men who deserved respect. His tone calmed down then; but in his throat remained the suppressed fury of a spoiled little boy.

“I beg your pardon, gentlemen. Someone brought this station to an end ahead of time, and we’ve missed out on some good opportunities.”

“Where’s your father?” said Georges.

“I propose we simply forget this matter and proceed to the next stop.”

“Jean,” said Georges.

“Yes sir.” Jean turned impatiently.

“Where is your father?”

Jean looked around at all those present. He looked toward the field, looked at the grazing cattle, looked over the barbed wire.

“Has anyone seen my father?”

The heads moved from one side to another, like at a tennis match.

“Where’s he got to?” said Jean, lowering his voice.

He leaned on one of the posts holding up the barbed wire. A notice stapled onto the wood said: PROCEED WITH CAUTION. HUNTING SEASON. NOVEMBER 1986.

“Well, it doesn’t matter,” he said at last. “He’ll catch up. To your cars, gentlemen.”

“But we can’t leave,” said Georges.

“Why’s that?”

“Your father has my car keys. He kept them for some reason.”

The line of cars was stuck. There was no way to move a single one of the four-by-fours, not even a meter, without Georges moving his first. And his was locked and the hunter who wasn’t there had the keys.

Jean’s hands flew to his head. He looked at the beaters. He was about to order them to go and look for his father and bring him there as quickly as possible, when Respin and Cambronne emerged beside the wire fence.

“Monsieur Moré,” said Respin, “can you come with us?”

“You blew the horn? Which one of you was it?”

There was no answer.

“Really, my friends, men with your years of experience…”

But the beaters didn’t say anything.

Jean felt for a cigar, felt for his lighter. Georges, although from a distance, managed to see that his thumb was clumsy as it sparked the lighter, and that the tall flame trembled in the hand that trembled. Jean’s hand had trembled. Georges gathered up the sympathy he was unable to feel at that moment and offered:

“Go with them. I’ll come with you, I’m right behind you.”

Jean’s eyes shone. His feet had turned to stone and did not want to move.

“Please, Monsieur Moré,” said Cambronne, “come with us.”

Jean and Georges followed them in the direction of the forest, trying to keep up. Georges felt in his chest and thighs the effort that pace was costing him. From behind he could see the two beaters, the line of their shoulders that rose and fell in a terrible cadence, the color rising in their cheeks. Still from behind he saw them stop and look at each other (not with a look of someone questioning or conversing, but with a vacant expression that only wants to avoid the present urgency), and then look at Jean, who arrived alongside them. In the center of that incomplete picture, framed by three pairs of rubber boots — one gray, another tobacco-brown and filthy, the third pair green and tied up with fine laces over long woolen socks — was Stalky, shot several times. A wide gash in his side stained his coat; some fur stuck to the viscous flesh. His still-palpitating guts steamed in the cold air, and the blood was an intense red against the green of the grass. Two steps from the animal, fallen in the undergrowth, Xavier’s lifeless body came into view.

Georges saw Jean lose his self-control. He saw him throw himself on his father’s body and open his shirt without really knowing what he was doing, as if the impulse to do something, anything, was moving his hands with memories of imagery picked up from films. The chest was pale, and the hairs that outlined a snowy forest formed, as they reached the neck, a tangle of stiff, dry clots. Jean spat on his hands and tried to clean his father’s shoulders off with the saliva on his palms. Then he began to pummel the body. “Get up, Papa,” he said. “The hunt’s not over, it’s just that the novice blew the horn too early.” When Georges put a hand under his arm to lift, Jean had a tuft of wool between his fingers. Just like when he was a child, thought Georges, just like when the three of them went fishing and Georges would be shocked at how much patience Xavier had with that spoiled little boy who was always wanting piggyback rides and digging things out of his father’s belly button with his baby finger.

—

“EVERYONE LEFT SO SOON,” said Catherine quietly. “I never thought I’d feel so lonely in my own house.”

Georges looked around: indeed, the hunters had slipped away without a word, little by little, like the tide going out. At our age, he thought, nobody likes to think of someone else’s death. He was wearing his leather shoes, and the feeling on his feet was agreeable, fresh and firmer, because in old age his ankles had started to ache after wearing rubber boots. In the reading chair that no one in this house used for reading, Charlotte was sitting in an oblivious position, as if she’d forgotten she wasn’t alone. She crossed her legs, and her drill pants rode up above her ankle, revealing porous white skin and a sock whose elastic no longer worked very well. There was some wisdom in her dark drill pants and man’s shirt and her face with no makeup. She’d always refused to have children, and now that he was old, Georges had convinced himself that this characteristic formed part of the same description in which he would have included the masculine cut of her shirt. And now Georges was looking at her. You’re thinking about him. He realized his forehead was heating up and took off his overcoat. Under his arms were dark sweat stains. But earlier, when he’d had to embrace Jean to distract him, he’d behaved with an unfamiliar calm. When he’d held Jean’s head between his hands, to draw his attention away from the fissure in his father’s skin and the vision of the destroyed muscles and the appearance of a thick, white tendon like a worm in the burned flesh, at that moment, Georges was another person. The people from the Modave commune took forty minutes to get there. The ambulance, with its siren and flashing lights turned off, five minutes more. In all that time Georges did not move. His feet were planted on the ground like a bullfighter. Jean wanted to be cradled in his arms. The woman from the commune began to ask questions, and Catherine answered them as if she were taking an oral exam. Only when the body was ready to be transported did Georges begin to feel a headache from the deferred tension. Catherine approached Jean. “They’re asking if you want anything, or if they can take him.” Jean turned on her.

“How stupid you can be sometimes,” he said.

And he climbed into the ambulance.

Now, Catherine walked between the swinging kitchen door and the table where the spout of the coffeepot had stopped steaming. She poured herself a glass of port and went to sit under the floor lamp, closer to Charlotte than to Georges. She looked pale, and her voice was laden with sadness.

“What did they do with Stalky?” she asked.

“Respin,” said Georges, “and some others. They buried him right there, in the forest. They’d already seen some vultures circling.”

“You should have gone with him, dear,” said Charlotte.

“With whom?”

“Jean,” said Charlotte.

“No, he shouldn’t,” said Catherine. “There are lots of people with him, people who know about these procedures. I need company, too, Madame Lemoine. I think I’m more bewildered than my husband.”

She took a sip from her glass. An imprint of her lip remained on the edge, because Catherine used a moisturizing balm before going out hunting to keep from getting chapped lips. Then they heard the noise of a car’s engine, and the sound of gravel displaced by tires. Catherine stood slowly, went out to the porch, and returned and sat down. “It wasn’t him,” she said. It was Respin, coming back.

“What will it be like now? Madame, what was it like when your father died?”

“You’d better ask him,” she said, gesturing toward Georges. “I barely remember.”

Georges kept his face blank. He preferred to avoid the subject.

“He was with me,” said Charlotte. “It was the beginning of the war. I saw it all from the window. My father ran, it was stupid to run when we hadn’t done anything, the soldiers fired and he slipped and when he fell to the ground some crows were startled.”

“How old were you?”

“Seventeen.”

They looked at the pale rectangle of the window. Respin walked past in the direction of the stables, his hands holding up the lapels of his coat, his hair blown about by the wind. “He can’t keep still,” said Catherine. “When he’s nervous, he’ll invent any excuse not to sit down. There are times when Jean can’t stand it.” The novice followed him with a shovel over his shoulder. Georges thought he saw a trace of blood on the edge of the aluminum, but then he thought that shovel had been used to bury the dead dog, and maybe knowing that detail was manipulating his imagination. Away from the hunt, an animal’s death always shakes us up, thought Georges, perhaps because it seems not to have any justification.

“One of the crows had a blue ribbon tied to its leg,” said Charlotte. “I guess it must have escaped from somewhere.”

“They weren’t getting along,” said Catherine. “Now it’s going to stay like that. That’s what I don’t like.”

Catherine had changed into a more comfortable outfit — now she was wearing a green sweater with a roe deer embroidered across the left-hand side of the chest — and, after unplugging the phone from the front hall and plugging it in behind the reading chair, brought a chair from the dining room, placed it beside Charlotte, and began to make calls with an address book open on her lap. The pages were thick embossed paper, and the panels of her small and full address book looked hand-drawn. While she spoke, Catherine ran her index finger down the black lines. Georges listened to her dictate the details of a notice for Le Wallon. Xavier Moré. M-O-R-E. Comblain-la-Tour, 1917. “He just died,” she said, and hearing the deliberate imprecision of her phrase seemed to surprise her. Charlotte, meanwhile, distracted herself with the illustrations that appeared in the notebook, on the facing pages of the directory. She lit a cigarette. Georges watched her inhale deeply; the straight line of the smoke, bathed in yellow light, was like the trail of one of those planes Georges hated, because they brought back memories of the war, and flew over the Ardennes frequently these days, toward the NATO military base.

Catherine covered the mouthpiece with her hand.

“They’re maps of places that don’t exist,” she said. “Chinese, Armenian, things like that.”

“Maps of paradise,” said Charlotte.

“Yes. Some of them. But they’re not all religious, look. This is a map of the center of the earth.”

“Are they not helping you?”

“They asked me to hold. This is the first time I’ve done this. You two don’t have to stay until Jean arrives, Monsieur Lemoine. You look tired.”

“I am a bit.”

“We can stay a little longer,” said Charlotte. “It’s no trouble, is it, dear? Besides, I want to see more of these maps, they’re fascinating.”

“I don’t know. It’s almost dark.”

“It’s barely five,” said Charlotte.

“Seriously? And night’s almost fallen, how incredible.”

“They’ve got this little tune playing,” said Catherine. “Funeral parlors are so funny…”

Charlotte put a hand on the book. Her skin was dry and blue veins mingled with wrinkles. Beneath her long, marmoreal fingers were the phone numbers for the letter H and a sort of aerial view (as might have been produced by one of the MiGs that flew over them) of the Labyrinth with Happiness in the Center. ENGLAND, 1941, was printed in the margin.

“Xavier gave it to you, didn’t he?”

“To both of us. Before we were married. One day he showed up with it as a present, just like that, for no special reason.”

“No reason,” Charlotte repeated.

“I mean, it wasn’t Christmas, or either of our birthdays.”

“Yes,” said Charlotte. “I knew what you meant.”

Then someone came back on the line, and Catherine held the receiver between her shoulder and head to take down the details of the ceremony. Tomorrow, 2 pm. Burial 3 pm. Charlotte took the pencil from her hand, crossed out tomorrow and wrote Friday.

“For later,” she said. “One likes to remember what day it was.”

She smiled a sad smile and added:

“Who knows why.”

Catherine looked at her. Then she lowered her head.

“Is it going to be really horrible? For Jean, I mean.”

“Make love,” said Charlotte. “That helps, I think.”

—

IT WAS COMPLETELY DARK when Georges pulled up to the junction of the road to Hamoir and the road to Marches. He turned right where Catherine’s pickup truck once ran out of gas, several years ago, and Georges and Charlotte tossed a coin to see which of them had to go collect her. The twenty-franc coin had landed with the king faceup, so Georges had to put on his white dressing gown and siphon some fuel out of the smallest tractor with a piece of hose, sensing at each suck the imminent taste of gasoline and feeling sick from the vapors. Now — it seemed implausible to him — that ingenuous memory didn’t end with early-morning laughter, with Charlotte’s refusal to kiss him or even get close to him because his breath stank of gasoline, but in a question: Had they spoken in his absence? That night, while he was rescuing Catherine, had Charlotte phoned Xavier? Georges feared that the past was beginning to transform. He slowed down as they passed the gypsies’ place, a mobile home embedded on the edge of the access road for so long that the lawn had devoured the tires and struts. On the aluminum steps leading to the little door slept a white rabbit, luminous in the night and puffed up with cold.

The house was getting to the stage when it seemed to be shrinking, because fewer rooms got used with the passing years, until some were opened only to dust them. It wasn’t a spacious place, but they’d been able to build two stories and an attic in spite of the restrictions in force at the time. The front hall smelled of leather and furniture polish. As they went inside, Charlotte and Georges knew that falling asleep would be impossible. That fixed and invariable routine a couple of their age gets into was in their case one of fascinating symmetry: Georges took off his shoes and put on his slippers while Charlotte got the coffeepot and filter ready for morning; Georges went up to their bedroom while Charlotte took her arthritis medication, in the kitchen and almost behind his back, as they both maintained the fiction that she wasn’t old enough to need it yet. But that night, none of that happened: they walked into the dining room listening to the wooden floorboards creaking under their steps, and while Georges sat down in his green velvet chair, Charlotte dug out the Stéphane Grappelli record. It was Xavier’s favorite. After the concert in Liège in 1969, Georges had gone up to Grappelli and asked for an autograph. “For Xavier Moré,” he’d said. Grappelli had signed the cover with a black felt marker.

She let the needle down onto the vinyl. The music sounded distant, as if coming from the other side of a curtain. Charlotte sat on the other side of the fireplace and switched on the radiator. Seeing her so distracted, in that effort to maintain her serenity, in that dispute with her own affections and with twenty-year-old ghosts, made Georges feel strange, almost superfluous in his own house.

“Do you know why he did it?” he said.

“As if you care,” answered Charlotte.

Georges stood up and offered her a cigarette. Charlotte was not surprised that he’d guessed her wish. The lighter’s flame whispered as it burned the paper around the tobacco.

“He was my friend, too, you know,” said Georges. “Or rather, he was my friend most of all.”

“That address book was going to be a gift for me,” said Charlotte. “Or rather, he did give it to me.”

Georges had imagined. He chose not to say so.

“But you didn’t accept it.”

“I couldn’t. But it’s so pretty.”

“That was after you’d decided to end it.”

Georges’s phrases walked a fine line between statement and query. As he spoke, he looked at the bellows and old newspapers; he stared at the wood in the fireplace although it wasn’t lit. He knew he was irritated with Charlotte, and the effect seemed obscurely agreeable or necessary.

“A long time later. Like four years. We’d drifted apart, there wasn’t any risk. Nothing would have happened if I accepted. But I didn’t accept it.”

Georges made no comment. He listened to her describe the paper Xavier had used to wrap the gift, a page from the newspaper. But not just any page, it was the front page of Le Wallon from March 11, 1963, the date of the last time they’d made love. It was here, said Charlotte, it was in our guest room, Xavier was my guest for a couple of hours and then he left, before you got back from Liège, because he knew he wouldn’t be able to look you in the eye that afternoon. Charlotte had torn the paper angrily and thrown the notebook, with all her might, and it had ended up in the hydrangeas and they’d had to ask Nadia, the youngest daughter of the gypsies, to climb into the shrub to retrieve it. Xavier behaved very stupidly afterward. He gave Nadia a hundred-franc note and told her not to tell anyone about what had happened, and she, with hydrangea petals in her hair, took it without knowing what it was all about. “Why, dear?” said Charlotte. “Why bribe an eight-year-old who’s done nothing but look for a book in the flowers? You’ll scoff, but at that moment Xavier struck me as a faint-hearted coward.” Georges did not scoff. He just listened.

“But it was a lovely little address book,” said Charlotte.

“Useless, though,” said Georges. “Maps of places that don’t exist.”

She pretended not to have heard.

“Later, I asked him if I could borrow it to photocopy one of the maps. Xavier had already given it to Catherine, but he took it for an hour and photocopied all the maps at the paper shop in Aywaille, the one beside Riga. I saved one of those photocopies, just one, the one I liked best. I still have it, dear. If you want I’ll show it to you.”

—

THE ENGINE GAVE three false starts before finally firing up properly. As far back as he could remember, driving a tractor relaxed him, but this was the first time he’d done it at night. Luckily there was no wind, because the cold would have been unbearable; the night was dark, the clouds invisible, the threat of rain persistent. The field where the neighbors’ cows occasionally grazed was less than one hectare; the grass grew during the spring and part of the summer, and Georges waited anxiously for the moment he could climb on his tractor to mow it. It was an old machine, a Ford 5000, but it still worked well; the Gallignani baler it towed collected the hay with its forks and bundled it into cubic-meter bales, which it tied up with a rough cord, so later the youngsters, Jean and his friends and sometimes Catherine, could go around the field picking them up with a pitchfork and taking them to the barn to store until they were sold. This year, the summer was long; at the end of September there was still hay to cut, and tonight, the last Sunday Georges had climbed on his tractor to cut and bale hay seemed recent to him. The land was covered in dry yellow stubble, and had taken on that look of an old dog who’s lost too much fur. Georges flipped a switch; above his head, three white lights came on, the yellow of the loose hay brightened, and shadows appeared behind the wooden posts. It was as if Georges was wearing a gigantic miner’s helmet. The serenity of the night — the crickets rubbing their legs, the short howling of wind in the trees — was soon drowned out by the private racket of the engine. Under the dome of the night sky, in that clearing of light that seemed to come from a reflector hanging from the heavens, Georges felt vulnerable.

What he’d seen in Charlotte’s eyes was not nostalgia: it was nothing immediate, nothing present; it was barely a memory of an infatuation. But it bothered him, perhaps because of what that memory might illuminate. In the pocket of his shirt, folded in four, was the map of the Islands of Pleasure. Charlotte had handed him the page, saying:

“The original is from an eighteenth-century watercolor. It’s from Rajasthan.”

And she’d quickly added:

“That’s in India.”

Georges was shocked by so much precision. The conferring of a date and a geographical location didn’t prove anything, didn’t make the map more credible; pretending to give reasons for which those islands might have been able to exist although in reality they didn’t exist, the date and place achieved, for Georges, the opposite effect. But it would be different, of course, if another person were the origin of that page. Twenty years earlier, it was his wife’s lover who’d handed her what she’d just handed to him. Against his chest, against his left nipple, the page burned; on his tongue, the word Pleasure had a bitter taste, like an unripe blackberry. That was probably not the only thing his wife had sought from Xavier, but he felt that resolving this doubt would console him.

The night smelled of dry grass despite the imminence of winter, which kills fragrance. Georges looked in the direction of the house. An eye of yellow light floated in the air, the tiny bathroom window. He knew what that meant: the door between the bedroom and bathroom was open. Charlotte was reading, or pretending to read, in bed and getting ready to sleep. But she wouldn’t sleep tonight. At that moment, the tractor turned the corner of the pasture and Georges had his back to the light. The noise of the engine and the pinion and the roller isolated him, and behind the tractor he was leaving a corridor of a trail. Any hunter, he thought, could track and shoot him. He was lost in these absurd ruminations, thinking of how he could outwit the hunters coming after him, when the tractor turned to face the yellow window again, and in it was a silhouette. Charlotte’s arms moved in the air, as if she were a shipwrecked woman who had glimpsed a rescue ship. Although he could not hear her, although focusing on the expression on her backlit face was impossible, Georges understood there was some news about Xavier. He left the tractor by the wire fence and walked toward the garden. On the sandstone patio, the chairs leaning up against the table suggested a restaurant that had just closed. Only when he was a few meters from the wall did he look up. Charlotte was a bodiless face disfigured by perspective, a statue on a church’s domed ceiling.

“He’s ready,” she said. “We can go to the wake.”

“You want to go?”

“Of course. I don’t know. I hadn’t considered not going. I feel bad, dear.”

Georges looked down. Dry leaves were piling up beside the stone wall. He tried to exaggerate an impatient face so it would be visible in the half-light.

“And why you? What do you have to do with this?”

“You told me yourself that he talked about me on the way to the hunt. He’s been in a bad way for a long time, everybody told us. And it’s as if what happened before banned us from worrying, you know?”

“No,” said Georges. “What you’re saying is absurd.”

“He was our friend. And we haven’t allowed ourselves to take him seriously, to lend him a hand. As if what happened before would come back, what a couple of idiots. Jean wants to talk to me, but I’m not going alone. Will you come with me?”

Georges did not cushion the harshness of his words. He felt contemptible and, without knowing why, also felt that he didn’t deserve Charlotte. But that didn’t stop him from saying what he was going to say.

“No. It’s late. I’m tired and we’ll have more than enough tomorrow.”

Charlotte looked distressed. She spoke to him of the man who had wanted to escape this life, of the terrible confirmation that it was another life he would have liked to live and hadn’t. Charlotte accepted that it was stupid, but in the past few years she had wondered what fault any of this was of hers; she had asked herself so often that now she couldn’t help devoting all her attention to him: to try to accompany Xavier, even if only in spirit. Georges turned away as if to cut off his wife’s words, because the mention of the spirit invoked for him, through some sort of piercing contradiction or terrible irony, the map of the Islands of Pleasure. On the lawn a rectangle of a more lively green was projected. Georges felt something fuzzy rising in his throat. He held his breath, and the nausea descended. He spoke to the silhouette’s shadow.

“I’m going to be on the tractor for a while longer.”

“I’m not going to go alone, dear. Won’t you come with me?”

“No,” he said. “It’s your affair.”

—

INSTEAD OF WALKING toward the orange shape of the tractor, he went around the house by the shed side and found, in the middle of the rough carpet of stable sawdust, Xavier’s Porsche. For a moment, he wanted to sit inside it, but then the idea struck him as macabre. He leaned on the boot; the darkness was total. “Do you know what that means?” Charlotte had said to him. “Regretting now, at the age of seventy, the life one’s chosen?” Of course, she’d said, it was hard for him to see all that: for him things had come out well, like for a poker player. A few years or months or days ago, even just yesterday, Georges would have said: This is what all past life is, the results of an ongoing strategy.

Now he wasn’t so sure. But he had a hunch: the past would become imagining Xavier wearing his father’s hunting jacket, a Frenchman who’d belonged to the louveterie and devoted his life to hunting wolves. Because that was a man, the clothes of those who’d gone before, and Xavier’s were heroic clothes: imagining him like that, romantically dressed up as a gentleman of bygone days, could justify Charlotte’s feeling attracted to him. But that tranquillity was artificial. Meanwhile, neither they nor anybody else could guess what had gone through Xavier’s mind. Maybe it was absurd to think he’d killed himself over her, but everything in Charlotte’s words seemed to suggest that. Now, it seemed obvious to Georges that only her sense of decency had prevented his wife from confessing that certainty. One doesn’t reach such decisions by chance, that was true. But to think of such a long-ago cause… Did that really happen? Did men really kill themselves for love, and for long-past love affairs? What surprised him most was how Xavier’s image began to change: he could no longer remember him as he was, those memories were already contaminated by his suicide. Georges admired the courage: not just of putting the barrel of a gun beneath one’s face (just one traditional barrel; Xavier had not succumbed to the fashion for double-barreled shotguns), but seeing himself reflected, a second before, in the death of a dog, and carrying on with the process of one’s own death. It was incredible what frustrated love could do to a man. It could track him, the way dogs tracked the trail of the scent of prey (a wolf, for example), and hold him at bay. Georges, too, standing on the sawdust-covered floor, was a man at bay. He imagined Jean’s phone call, the questions he would have asked Charlotte, that woman his father had loved. Georges hated him: he hated him for involving his wife in all that. Then he retched again, and this time, without kneeling, Georges threw up watery bile smelling of wine and stale bread.

—

WHEN HE WENT BACK to the house, it was after eleven, and Charlotte, perhaps, would be asleep. Georges preferred to stay downstairs. A long time had passed since the last time he hadn’t said good night to his wife — both beneath the covers, he overcome by weariness and she trying to read a couple more pages of some Montherlant novel — in the way routine prescribed. He imagined Charlotte was still dressed. Ready to go out, he thought, ready to go and see Xavier no matter how late.

He knew he loved her. He had always loved her, even when he found out about the deception. Now those episodes came back as if fresh, with that terrible attribute the past has of never passing, of staying here, and keeping us company. How could he have prevented it? How comfortable the future was, that future people so feared. Of course, they ignored how difficult the pain of the past was and the memory of that pain, because it was like clothes that have fallen in the hay in summer and keep scratching your neck and back all day long.

The previous night, after Xavier had left, Georges had spent a couple of lazy hours cleaning his Browning, using silicone to repair a frayed strap, brushing the buttons on his hunting jacket. The implements hadn’t been put away, and were still there, looking at him as if they’d warned him that today would be special and it would be better to stay home, that he should have made up some excuse to not go out boar hunting. He looked for the biscuit tin that he’d used to store ammunition as long as he could remember and took it into the kitchen. He put the kettle on, and the air smelled of gas and then burned match. While he was waiting, Georges began to organize the cartridges and bullets that got mixed up over time or just stayed there, on the windowsill and in the cutlery drawer, making the reality that no children lived in this house unmistakable. When he had all the 8x57s in a single pile, the kettle began to fret on the stove. Georges put a lemon tea bag in a thick glass, striped from use, and let two sugar cubes dissolve in the boiling water. With the biscuit tin in one hand and the glass of tea in the other, he went to sit beside the telephone. He took out the map of the Islands of Pleasure; for the first time he looked at it closely. Water flowed around a circle, and in the water two fish swam, one coming and one going, one trying endlessly to catch up to the other, but it was impossible to tell from the drawing which one was chasing and which escaping its pursuer. Georges turned the photocopy over and wrote on the back in pencil:

Charlotte Lemoine

Xavier Moré

Georges Lemoine (me)

Charlotte

Georges

Xavier (him)

To have lost her forever

Never to have been with her

He heard dogs barking, far away and distorted by the echo. Their house seemed different at night, and this silence, through which he usually slept, now stimulated him, made him tense and alert, aware of the whole world. He saw his reflection in the windowpane, translucent like a negative; he saw the shadow of the guns in their rack, like billiard cues, steady and disciplined. Perhaps overwhelmed by detail, in a mental atmosphere too similar to that of an opium addict, Georges did not pick up the phone at the first ring — he might have confused it with the barking, or he might not have heard it — and when he did, the black receiver fell asleep in his hand. Jean’s voice called from the other end of the line, serious, electronic, disconsolate.

“Allô? Allô? Madame Lemoine, are you there? Madame, I need to know, I need to speak with you. You’re the only one who might know.”

Georges realized that revealing his presence would be like surrendering. Accepting that Charlotte formed part of that small tragedy, that she’d had power over the life of a man who was not her husband, would be to discover that he and his wife had not lived alone all these years, that there had always been a specter between them. Then he also realized that all those precautions were futile. It was naive or ingenuous to believe that the past was capable of burying its dead. From this night on, Moré would appropriate part of the house: he would be a permanent lodger, someone Georges would see by just turning his head while smoking a cigar or brushing his teeth, someone who would watch him and his wife sleep, standing next to their bed wrapped up in his father’s green hunting jacket, until the end of time. Georges hung up the phone; he immediately unplugged it, yanking with such force that he broke the socket, leaving blue and red wires sticking out of the wall. He didn’t stand up; his legs would not have done his bidding. He thought he was unable to go upstairs, to confront Charlotte’s sadness, her silent tears, her likely guilt and perhaps her accusations. So he would stay faintheartedly downstairs, as he’d read about wolf hunters doing centuries ago in the Black Forest: parties of armed men who would allow night to overtake them among the trees, unable to return to the village without the body of the beast that had stolen their hens, dismembered their goats, and disturbed the slumber of their defenseless wives.