“A white cat crossed the road?”
“The gendarmerie fined us for blocking the road and would not let us film there, despite all our permits.”
When the Vichy regime fell, and no zone in France was safe for a collaborator, Céline and Lucette fled to Germany with their cat, Bébert—a tabby with a large head; there was a portrait of him in the book. They were offered refuge at Sigmaringen Castle in the Danube Valley, unlike so many others who were turned back, sure to be arrested. (More good luck.)
But they were stuck living under the same roof with Marshal Pétain and Pierre Laval, chief of state and prime minister, respectively, of Vichy’s puppet government, doomed and dishonored men who now despised each other.
Céline’s wife spent her days in the castle of the disgraced teaching modern dance to the wives of the Nazi administrators. (The book had a photo of her at her ballet barre, her lumpy physique reminding me of the woman who did yoga on public access TV in the 1980s of my American childhood.) Nightly, everyone gathered—even Laval and Pétain despite their animus—to listen to transmissions from Paris, in order to find out who among them, huddled by the radio at Sigmaringen, was listed next for public execution. (Céline never did hear his own name announced over that radio: very good luck.)
I put the book down and looked out the window. I heard wind, and no truck driving up the road.
Part of attraction is the unpredictable nature of everything, the manner in which you wait, and want.
Good for you, I thought at René, for reducing me to those who wait. But also, go to hell.
Having decided he was not coming, I finished the final two cans of my six-pack and went to sleep.
ON ANOTHER SWIMMING EXCURSION with the group, I was walking alongside Aurélie as she chatted with two commune members, Sophie and Paul, when they fell to whispering.
I had been around for a month at this point. My friendship with Aurélie was helping to expand my credibility, but I suspected holdouts.
At the river, Aurélie and I sat on a rock together in the sun.
“I’m sorry about that,” she said. “It’s a strange kind of snobbery, in my opinion. A fear of foreigners.”
“It’s good to be cautious,” I said, being cautious myself. “They don’t know me. I’m an outsider.”
“You’re not an outsider. It is obvious Pascal likes you and respects you. Sophie and Paul, they were just being rude. There is no reason to keep a secret. I’m sure you’re aware that we object to the Tayssac reservoir, and to what is happening to the water of the Guyenne. We are planning to make our feelings known at the agricultural fair, by blocking the entrance and staging a protest.”
She said the hope was that it would be big. “And that’s why it’s ridiculous for them to act like that. You’ll know. Everyone is going to know.”
I had started seeing posters for this fair.
They were on the side of the road as I drove from the house to Le Moulin. They were outside Leader Price in Boulière, where I shopped weekly for supplies. Naïs was putting one up in the bar in Vantôme when I went in, alone, for no reason but to have another look at her. I’d ordered a coffee and listened to the old men, who were talking about the fair and who was entering what animal or bringing an antique tractor, and they were each calling the other’s old contraption a junk pile that would not make it down the D79.
The fair was a couple of weeks from now, in mid-September, and would take place at the local lake, mine and René’s, where the fishermen sat with their carp poles, a lake that might itself be sacrificed to the megabasin.
At the river that afternoon, amid the usual scene—Moulinards jumping from the limestone shelf, toddlers covered in mud, Burdmoore making his pronouncement and his big leap—I noticed, on the opposite bank of the river, the boy with the braids and the cross around his neck, the one who had knocked up his teacher.
I immediately recognized him, even from a distance.
Pascal had never said his name, but Franck was how I had begun to think of him. Even as he wasn’t the Franck from the Italian documentary. He was the Franck from this place, Franck of Vantôme.
Imagine being from Vantôme.
Imagine having thirty-one Facebook friends and a stock advertisement for Lamborghini as your banner photo.
But Franck, I mean this Franck, he looked really happy. He looked different now than when I’d seen him that first day with Pascal. He was not with his group of rowdy boys, boys among whom he was a natural leader, a central figure, performing for the others, lording over them his courage and his tan body, the cross at his neck and his long braids, the trouble he’d made for the commune.
Franck looked more innocent now, more like a child. His Franckness, a kind of confidence, was still there, and yet it wasn’t mean. It was sweet. He was with family, his parents, I assumed, and his comportment with them was different than how he’d been with the other boys. French hippies was my impression of the parents, the father with long dark hair and a thick beard. They sat on a blanket with a toddler while Franck ran back and forth from the river with offerings for the toddler, pebbles, a branch, a piece of a broken toy he’d found lodged in the silty shallows. Franck held up the broken toy and the baby smiled and reached for it eagerly. Franck smiled too. He set down the toy and ran back to the water. He hollered to the baby. Did a handstand, fell over, did another handstand, to the baby’s squeals of pleasure.
If you didn’t know the story, you would think he was the adoring older brother, dedicated to the much younger one, the parents looking on, having had one early, a love child, say, and the other late, an accident, and look how the older one helped out. Look how he doted on his baby brother.
You would never guess from seeing them that the thirteen-year-old was the father of the two-year-old. But that’s how it was.
These hippies were raising the baby. Fatherhood, for Franck, was doing goofy handstands and making the baby clap.
But seeing Franck bring the baby pebbles like this task was the most important thing in the world, like his reason for being was to delight that baby, I got a feeling like envy.
Franck was involved in something pure. He loved someone totally, not because his parents said be nice to your brother, be a good big brother, be gentle, be kind, but because the child was his. There seemed enormous mystery to this arrangement, a child blessed to have an even smaller child of his own.
“That kid is a complete asshole,” Aurélie said, watching me watch Franck.
VII
LES BABIES
UPON RETURNING TO the Dubois place that night, I reported to my contacts that Pascal and the Moulinards were planning to disrupt the agricultural fair here, in two weeks.
From there, things accelerated.
In less than forty-eight hours, I was informed that Deputy Minister Platon would make a visit to this fair—unannounced, and with little security. It seemed that my contacts had moles inside the Ministry of Rural Coherence who were able to arrange this. As if Platon were a pawn they could move here and there, and not a man with his own agency and autonomy.
My job was to let the Moulinards know that Platon would be coming.
If Pascal Balmy was to attempt to harm Platon, I was told, that would be best.
He’s not capable of it, I responded. He’s not reckless.
