The Lost Goddess

7

The cold winds moaned and howled right outside Annika’s cottage. The sound was distressing, like anguished mothers were wandering along the derelict lanes of Vayssières, crying at the ancient doors, searching for their murdered children. Here in the very middle of the Cham des Bondons.

This was Julia’s first visit to the Cham since she had been dismissed by Ghislaine last week. She was glad to be with Annika again, with her friend. Yet she was also, as always, unsettled by the surroundings. She couldn’t understand why Annika lived quite so close to the stones. The Cham was wonderfully atmospheric, but why choose to live in the only habitable cottage in an otherwise abandoned village?

It was just a little too eerie.

Annika was crossing the low-ceilinged living room, bearing a tray with a pot of tea.

“A habit I collected in China. Green tea. Cha!”

Julia’s friend was originally from Antwerp: she was a demure, wise, and graciously elegant sixty-two-year-old Belgian. So her mother tongue was Flemish, but her English was nearly as good as her French. Annika was also an archaeologist, although semiretired. As two single women in the macho world of archaeology, they had bonded almost as soon as Julia had arrived in Lozère.

Annika was graciously pouring the tea. Julia sat back and stared around the little cottage. She found her Belgian friend’s taste in decor consistently intriguing: the drawing, the paintings, the elegant sketches, the wistful etchings of winter scenes, of skaters and frozen lakes. Maybe from Belgium, or Holland.

Annika stood and returned to the kitchen to fetch some cake.

Taking advantage of the moment, Julia looked farther along the wall. Hanging next to those wintry, Breughelish scenes were several prints of French cave paintings. Julia recognized the lions from Chauvet and the “sorcerer” of the Trois Frères. And there, on the far wall of the sitting room, a picture of the Hands of Gargas, from the Gargas cave in the mid-Pyrenees: stencils of hands made on cave walls by men, women, and children in the early Stone Age.

Sitting here in this weather-beaten cottage, aged thirty-three, Julia could still vividly recall the day she first saw the Hands of Gargas. In a way those hands were the reason she was here.

She was only fifteen when it had happened. As a special treat, as part of a long, unique holiday in France, her mother and father had taken her to see the great ancient caves of the Dordogne and the Lot, Lascaux and Cougnac, Rouffignac and Pech Merle, with their famous and glowing cave paintings.

There, confronted by these stunningly ancient tableaux — some painted twenty thousand, even thirty thousand years ago — Julia had almost cried, ravished by their primeval yet timeless loveliness.

But that was only the beginning. After the Dordogne they had driven south, to the Pyrenees, to go and look at Gargas. And the Hands. And where Cougnac and Pech Merle had delighted, the Hands of Gargas had troubled her, and truly moved her.

They were just plain, simple, humble stencils of human hands: but they were so silently poignant, so piercingly mute. And so vividly new. It was as if a Stone Age family had walked into the cave just an hour before Julia and placed their hands against the rock face and blown the pigment through a straw around the fingers, creating the stencil. Somebody had indeed lifted up a little child in one section of the cave — or so it was supposed by the experts — so the tiny infant hand could be stenciled alongside the adults’.

Why?

And why were so many of the hands disfigured? Julia had wondered about this then, even as she wondered about it now. Why the disfigurement? Fingers were severed or bent in most of the Hands of Gargas. No one knew the reason. Since the discovery of the cave in the nineteenth century, many theories had been provided for these “mutilated” hands — a hunting code, a disease, frostbite, a ritual and tribalistic disfigurement — yet none of them really fitted.

The mystery was everlasting. Painfully unanswered.

It was, therefore, the Hands that had decided Julia’s fate. Standing in Gargas feeling giddy and awkward and flustered and adolescently attracted to the young French student who was their guide, Julia had resolved — there and then — to make these precious subterranean cloisters her world. At that moment she had resolved to study prehistory; and then to become an archaeologist.

To solve the puzzles.

At first her parents had been pleased by her impetuous decision: their precious daughter had a charming vocation! But when the mid-teen ideal evolved into late-teen reality, those familial attitudes had changed. First she’d shocked Mom and Dad with her decision to leave not just Michigan but the country: she wanted to study at McGill in Montreal. This was partly, as she had patiently explained to them, because McGill had a great archaeology department. Also, living in Quebec, she could learn to speak French, by immersion, by actually living with French-speakers: something she really desired.

But there had been other reasons for her decision that she had not explained. Barely hidden inside her was a simple yearning to go somewhere different, somewhere real, somewhere with history and culture and a European flavor — just somewhere with flavor — to get away from the stifling, boring flatness of the Midwest, the boring snowy no man’s land on the border, the bored kids doing boring meth in the boring mall next to Meijer’s. And there was one further memory of Michigan she couldn’t bring herself to address: yet it, too, chased her away.

And so she had done it: she’d moved to Montreal and a freezing apartment in a handsome city where fat Americans spoke French and ate fries with curd.

The memories faded, just for a moment. Julia stared up at the Hands of Gargas. Apologetic, tragic, mutilated. Full of remorse. And then again her mind flicked back, through the mental photos: to that day she left Montreal — for London.

If their daughter’s quitting Michigan had been troubling for her parents, her decision to quit North America entirely, to do her PhD in London, had been bitter. Then the remorse had really kicked in, the guilt of an only child entirely deserting her family and pursuing a career — instead of giving them grandchildren.

To compound Julia’s growing sense of error, her subsequent career had begun to disappoint, it had all trailed off into a mediocre teaching job at a mediocre London college. Soon after that, the weekly transatlantic phone calls from her beloved mother and father had become an unspoken ordeal, a silent yet insidious reproach: No, I am not coming home; Yes, I am still “just teaching”; No, I haven’t got a fiancé; No, there is no prospect of grandchildren. Goodbye, Dad, goodbye, Mom.

Goodbye.

Julia sighed and shook her head.

Annika set a plate of sweet cakes on the table; she was speaking.

“You must understand Ghislaine, he is a disappointed man. A very disappointed man, but determined, too.”

Julia knew that Annika and Ghislaine went way back. They were the same age. They had been friends, apparently, for decades. Annika had worked under the ludicrous Ghislaine since the 1970s, across France, now in Lozère.

She leaned forward.

“Annika, do you mind if I ask a personal question?”

The older woman shrugged in a neutral way and pulled her gray cashmere cardigan a little tighter around her shoulders. “Not at all. You have told me all of your life! Why not ask me about mine?”

“Were you and Ghislaine… were you…”

“Lovers. Yes.”

“In Paris?”

“In 1969. We shared political ideals. We were at the Sorbonne together. We learned Maoism together! We even went to China together in the early seventies. Hence, Julia, the tea.” Annika puckered her slightly overlipsticked lips to take a hot sip, then she set down the handleless porcelain cup.

“So?”

“Do not blame him, Julia, for the way he acts and is. He has… beliefs, even now. Beliefs that brought him here. And me. There was a time we shared ideals as well as kisses, and we were both interested in the caves, in prehistory. Archaeology.” The two women simultaneously looked at the wall pictures, the cascading lions of Chauvet.

“Of course, we are no longer together now. We do not share kisses.” The smile was brief and unmirthful. “But we are still friends, after a fashion. À la mode. I will not betray him. He is a sad man, conflicted. And he has his family name.”

Julia was bewildered.

“Why won’t he take my find seriously?”

“What makes you think he doesn’t take it seriously?”

“The way he just dismissed me! Sacked me!”

Annika squinted at Julia, then she looked out the window, where the wind was searching among the stones, lamenting its widowhood. “He wouldn’t do that lightly.”

“Why?”

“Think, Julia. Think.” Her older eyes assessed the younger woman for a moment. Then she continued: “You do know he is attracted to you, yes?”

“Sorry?”

Her friend sighed, quite patiently. “He may seem older to you, but he is a lover of beauty.” Her smile was sad. “Youthful beauty…. I know him, Julia, I saw the way he reacted, when he first met you. And you were blithely unaware of this?” A shake of the head. “You are one of those women, if I might say so, Julia, that does not realize her own attractiveness to men. This is true, isn’t it? Mmm? Yet your blue eyes, the blond hair, the blond hair you always keep tied back—”

“No. Annika, really, it’s idiotic. No.” Julia was blushing fiercely. And yet a thought was also tugging at her: the way Ghislaine had approached down the cave, like an attacker, like a man intent on… No, she chided herself, this was absurd. Not all men are like that.

She sat forward, seeking answers.

“Annika, even if it’s true, what’s the relevance? What’s any of that got to do with my dismissal, for God’s sake?”

“What I’m trying to say is he… liked you.” She lifted a hand. “Please. It is true. But he is also professional. He sincerely admires you as an archaeologist, that’s why he hired you. And for all these reasons, he would not dismiss you summarily. No.”

The picture clouded. “But then, why do it?”

“Perhaps he takes your find very seriously. Too seriously. And remember, he is conflicted.”

Julia could only feel lost.

“There are many mysteries in Ghislaine’s past. But it is not for me to reveal, not for me to shine the lamp on the cavern wall. But do not think less of yourself. That is all.”

Her cake uneaten, Julia brooded.

Annika was always a little evasive; self-consciously mysterious in her thoughts. But all this stuff, this was a seriously new level of annoying coyness. Even though she liked and admired Annika, Julia couldn’t help thinking, Get over yourself.

She tried again. And this time she would be more specific.

“What did he mean by Prunier’?”

“You can Google this yourself.”

“I did. And I found out. Prunier is a tiny village, twenty kilometers away. North Lozère.”

“Yes, I know.”

“So I went there, Annika. And there’s nothing there. I expected a collection of some sort. A small museum of archaeology, more skulls and skeletons, that kind of thing. But all I discovered was a boulangerie and a church. And some old lady who scowled at me. There is nothing in Prunier.”

Her Belgian friend smiled distantly.

“So you did not find. Do not worry. It probably will not help you anyway.”

Julia silenced her desire to swear, by drinking tea.

Annika added: “Consider it possible: some things are meant to be hidden.”

“And the relevance of that is?”

“The truth is hidden in the caves! But it has always been hidden there, hasn’t it? And we still do not know quite what it is.” The Flemish lady allowed herself another long, melancholic glance at a picture on the wall: at the beautiful twinned horses of Pech Merle, peculiar, elegant horses cantering away from each other since the Ice Age. “I always think, even today: why did they paint so many animals and so few humans? Isn’t that strange, mmn, Julia? And when they do paint humans, they are so sad or forlorn, no? The poor boys of Addaura, the terrible Hands of Gargas, the little stick man at Lascaux, with the slaughtered bison and his intestines, his chitterlings, like so many andouillettes, pouring out of the stomach! There is some more green tea.”

Julia flinched at the image: the spilled intestines of the wounded bison, at Lascaux, one of the more horrifying tableaux of Ice Age art. Troubling, like the Hands of Gargas. But why? What did any of this mean? The frustration was piercing, not least because Julia felt she deserved proper answers. After all, Annika had invited her over — after Julia had mentioned her find, the skulls, the argument. Yet now the older lady was being difficult, and shrugging, and mysterious, and stupidly European.

“Annika. I came over to talk. Can’t you just tell me? We’re friends. Why is Ghislaine being so obstructive? If you can’t tell me anything then I don’t—”

The telephone rang. Annika rose and crossed her little living room. Phone in hand, she stood under a wall poster of the Cougnac paintings. Julia tuned out from the overheard dialogue, not wishing to intrude. It looked like Annika was having a slightly painful conversation: whispering, white-faced, nodding tersely.

“Oui… oui… bien sûr. Merci.”

The receiver carefully replaced, the older woman came back to the coffee table, wrapping her cardigan even tighter — as if the wind were blowing down from the werewolf-haunted steppes of the Margeride and directly through the room. Picking up her cup, Annika drank some tea and cursed:

“Merde. The tea is cold.” Then she looked at Julia. “That was the police. Ghislaine has been murdered.”