The only baby I’d ever have is the one I’d find in a dumpster, left where no one else could hear it cry.
Since that will never happen, I will remain forever childless, and in the meantime nurse only beer, like the ones I had put in the trunk of the Škoda.
“GOD’S WAY OF REMAINING ANONYMOUS,” Pascal might say of the phenomenon of coincidence, in explaining to himself why Deputy Minister Paul Platon was coming here, and how it could be that I’d been informed of such a thing in advance, and secretly.
But, Pascal, a coincidence is not God’s way of remaining anonymous.
“Coincidence” is a term you choose for the good work it does to cover what some part of you knows, but a part that cannot be allowed to speak.
The coincidence, as an explanation for things that are mysteriously aligned, is hiding what is not a coincidence, Pascal, and is instead a plot.
LATER THAT AFTERNOON I peeked into the woodshop. René wasn’t there. Burdmoore and I were graced with a moment of privacy.
Burdmoore had done much more than was on his toilet-roll-long rap sheet. He told me he’d robbed twelve bank branches in the New York Tri-State area and had killed a drug dealer, an act of goodness, he said, to remove harmful elements from the Lower East Side in the late 1960s. He was adept with firearms, but old-fashioned ones, guns that people don’t use much anymore. It was perfect that I had the P38, which I planned to give him on Saturday.
He had mentioned his experience with guns as an aside, part of his general braggadocio, but now I made clear that the confrontation with Platon, which I had previously outlined only in vague terms, involved weapons.
“Some of us,” I said, “are going all the way with this. Platon signifies the ruination of this place. Not just as a place, but as a chance for people to live without the constant incursions of the state. Farmers are killing themselves, as you know. They feel there is no future. We must push back, and with everything we have.”
He said nothing. I kept going.
“A lot of people talk. But when push comes to shove, they aren’t willing to risk anything. Most people don’t have the will or the experience to execute a serious plan. You do.”
“That’s probably true,” he said, “that most don’t have the guts or the training. When I think of all the mistakes, the dreams, the fifty lives I’ve led, I have to ask myself, what does it mean if I let it all go, if I just fade out, ingloriously, in some hospital in a foreign country?”
I was headed to the Škoda. Not just for a secret beer. I had an errand to run.
I went to the town square. I parked behind the church and stayed in my car.
I watched as Naïs wound the handle of the torn old cloth awning, which retracted inward like the pleats of an accordion. She locked the café doors. Rolled down the metal shutter with muscular efficiency. Loaded bags of groceries into her car.
I assumed she was bringing these home to Bruno. I pictured him in the kitchen of the house, on a visit from the deep, to enjoy a stew that Naïs had prepared. Bruno at a little table, dipping bread into this stew, the two of them talking very little or not at all.
She got behind the wheel and set off. I followed at a safe distance.
She took the D79, as I had anticipated. She turned left at a crossroads after the lake, a traverse that went upward in switchback.
She took another left. I arrived at that turn: a narrow gravel road, not much more than a walking lane that went through dense woods. I watched as her little hatchback rambled along, listening with my windows down to the mealy sound of her tires on the gravel. Her brake lights bloomed (her one brake light; the other was out). Her car turned right.
Thank you, Naïs.
Thank you for showing me the way to Bruno’s.
Having made a mental map of this route, I returned to Le Moulin.
I joined a group assigned to make banners and listened as people shared news of various developments: Crouzel and some other farmers around Vantôme would open gates and turn off electric fences, and drive their cattle down toward the lake, to collect on the D79, behind the tractors and milk tankers.
At dinnertime, the discussions and planning continued. As I entered the dining hall, I saw that René and his woman were seated together in the back of the room. She looked up at me. I got a plate, put rice on it, ladled some kind of stewed meat over the rice, and sat down with the people on my banner-making committee. As I ate, I noticed that René and his woman weren’t speaking. They chewed glumly, and then he got up to clear his plate and left. Perhaps they were having an argument.
I carried my dish to the washtubs, slid what I hadn’t eaten into a compost bucket, and double-dipped my plate. I heard Burdmoore telling someone a story in broken English. His method for being understood was to speak English as if it were his second language, clipping off definite articles, voice loud, repeating himself.
As I left the building, René’s woman—what was her name, I could not recall, hadn’t bothered to learn it—caught up to me.
“I need to speak to you,” she said. “You have something with René?”
“Sorry?”
“You are seeing my partner, René? He goes to your house?”
“No,” I said.
She walked next to me, quiet, trying to figure out how to respond in the face of my flat denial.
I thought of René driving forty minutes on winding roads to see me, like he had indicated he would tonight. I saw him lifting me up, my legs wrapping around his back.
I was thinking of that as I walked toward my car with her alongside, and I guess I didn’t realize I was smiling.
“There’s something the matter with you.”
I turned the flame of my French skills to low. “Sorry? Can you… repeat?”
“I… don’t… like… you.”
René likes me just fine, I thought at her.
Or at least I remembered it that way, but later I understood that I must have said it out loud.
IT WAS TEN P.M. when I heard the commune truck come up the little road and stop in the woods. René. I let him in.
