Page 54 of The Strawberry Thief
I know just how she would look,mon père: her eyes as flat as mirrors. And something hidden inside me would die, a thing that has been growing there for years, like a shoot from a hollow tree. I close my eyes and try to pray –anything but that, please:better death and damnation than that –but it seems absurd to expect Saint Jérôme to show me any sympathy. I am ablaze with misery: my head pounds like a hammer; my eyes and nostrils are filled with the scent of smoke.
And then I hear a sound,père. A soft sound of footsteps behind me. I am no longer alone in the church; someone is standing by the door. A clammy sweat enfolds me. Have I inadvertently spoken aloud? Do I look guilty in any way? The footsteps come from the back of the church, from the region of the confessional. Perhaps someone has come to confess. I scramble to my feet; I turn, and as I do I see the door closing gently on a flash of scarlet—
Who was it? A woman, in red. But who? And why did she leave without a word?
The confessional screen has been left ajar. I move to close it, and on the bench I see a green folder, tied with a piece of bright pink clerical tape. For a moment I am unable to move. My prayer – my selfish, blasphemous prayer – has somehow, miraculously, been answered.
I pick up Narcisse’s confession. My hands are trembling like aspen leaves. Is this an answer to a prayer, or a final verdict? In any case, I have to know. I cannot live without knowing for sure, even if it confirms the worst, even if it means my end. Head pounding, hands shaking, mouth dry as dust, I open the manuscript where I left off, and once again, I start to read.
8
Thursday, March 30
I spent the next three days awaiting the inevitable discovery of my crime. Raised in the eye of a Catholic storm, the whole of my upbringing based on the myths of guilt and divine justice, it simply never occurred to me that I might get away with murder.
And so, Reynaud, I waited for the eye of God to turn my way. I waited for the burden of guilt to settle onto my shoulders. But neither of those things happened. I slept dreamlessly in my little bed. I ate the eggs from Tante Anna’s hens – the eggs that only she had been permitted to eat – and finished the bread that she had baked. After that, I started on one of the hams that she had put down for the winter, and fresh fruit from the orchard, and vegetables from the garden plot, and cheese from the cool pantry.
I covered Tante Anna and Mimi with two heavy rolls of tarpaulin, but even the cold of the cellar was not enough to completely halt the decay.
Once, the priest called round to ask why Tante Anna had not been to church, and I knew that this was the moment at which my crime would be discovered. But I told him she had a migraine (Tante Anna was prone to migraines), and that she was lying down in her room, and to my surprise, the priest went away, and when he returned, my father was home, and his authority had been restored.
I’ll admit, I hadn’t given a great deal of thought to what I would tell my father. I had never been prone to wild tales, and besides, the bodies in the cellar told their own gruesome story. He arrived late one night – a Thursday, I think – with a satchel of papers and photographs, and found me asleep, with the lamp still on, and the door to my bedroom open. Tante Anna would never have allowed either of those things, of course: but Tante Anna’s reign was over.
If my father had given me time to think, perhaps I might have tried to lie. As it was, he barely had time to ask why Mimi’s bed was empty, and the whole sorry story came pouring out – the blue-and-white dish; the strawberries; the locked door and the Mason jar. It sounded absurd when I told him – ‘Mimi’s dead. I killed Tante Anna’ – and yet my father stayed very calm, as calm as the plaster Jesus that hung above Tante Anna’s bed, listening in a silence that might have seemed forbidding if he had not taken my hand in his, and held it very tightly.
‘Show me,’ he said. And so I led him to the cellar, and showed him the rolls of tarpaulin. He looked underneath, his face very still, and then he said: ‘I need to think,’ and sat down on the slab by Mimi, and lit a skinny cigarette, and smoked it very slowly, cupping it inside his palm in the way that the War had taught him to.
I’d never thought of my father as any kind of thinker before. In fact, I’d often heard Tante Anna call him an oaf and an imbecile. But that quiet passivity had always hidden a deeper core. The doggedness that had sent him in search of his twin brother’s widow now turned itself to my predicament, which quietly, and without reproach, had now becomeourpredicament.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said, when my father looked up. It seemed the proper thing to say. And yet I still felt no remorse, nothing but grief for poor Mimi, and sorrow for my father, and fear that I would be guillotined, or maybe shot like a traitor.
He looked at me. ‘Sorry won’t fix this,’ he said. ‘We have to think of a story.’
And so I sat on the cellar floor, like a schoolchild waiting for storytime, and listened to my father as he lit another cigarette, and paced between the hanging hams and shelves of strawberry preserves, and sometimes spoke, as if to himself, in that soft, reflective voice. In all my life I’d never heard my father speak as fluently as he did to me that night. Now he did, as if the death of Tante Anna had released him from the spell that had kept him silent all his life.
‘I used to stutter badly,’ he said. ‘I stuttered almost from infancy. Anna used to correct me. She used every possible method but one. Sympathy was beyond her. Patience was impossible. Her methods were ridicule and blame, so that every time I opened my mouth seemed like a declaration of war. I used to imagine her as a hen, pecking at the words on my tongue. I often wondered if my brother had the same impediment. If he did, they cured him of it. But I had Tante Anna. I stayed mute.’
He smiled and blew smoke into the air. In the light of the oil lamp it gave him a golden nimbus, like a saint’s.
‘I had to go north, you understand,’ he said. ‘It was essential. Not because of the widow, but because the widow remembered him. My brother. The twin I never knew, taken away in infancy.’ He crushed out the cigarette under his heel. ‘Narcisse and Modeste. What old-fashioned names. Someone’s idea of a joke, perhaps. I was named for the beautiful boy who pined for himself in the looking-glass. He was Modeste, the quiet one. The one who sacrificed himself. That made us opposites, he and I, reflections of each other.’
I listened in fascination to the tale my father told. I didn’t understand it all, but I was old enough to know that this story wasn’t meant for me. It was my father’s confession, Reynaud – one that no priest would ever hear – and as he went on, I understood that it was also his way of saying goodbye.
Another confession. The father, this time. Must I also givehimabsolution? It seems there is absolution for all, except of course for me,mon père– I must carry my guilt forever. Does absolution even work once the person is dead? Or is it up to God after that? Wasn’t italwaysup to God? And if so, how can anyone ever be sure if they have been forgiven? I turned the page, and read on:
‘My brother’s widow had been on the run since the very end of the War. Something to do with the Nazis. Black market trading; maybe more. Village talk. I didn’t ask. I traced her to Nantes eventually. She was living in a boarding-house with her three children, taking in sewing work. She was ill. Her legs didn’t work. She’d had to leave her farm behind. I introduced myself, but neither my name nor my brother’s seemed to mean anything to her. I later found out that he had changed his Christian name when he was a child. I didn’t blame him. I might even have done the same, if Tante Anna had allowed it.’
My father ground out his cigarette on the floor where my aunt’s blood had spilled. ‘Talking makes you thirsty,’ he said, sounding surprised. ‘I didn’t know. I’m not used to talking so much.’ He went to the shelves of bottles and jars; selected a bottle of cider. I still remember the sound of the popping cork, festive in that place of death. There was foam at the bottle’s mouth; the ghosts of past summers gilded the air.
‘I did what I could. I paid off her debts. I owed that to my brother. In return she gave me an old album of photographs. Pictures of my brother’s life. His childhood. His adopted life. He looks very like me, but younger, now, brave in his army uniform. He enlisted early on, and died on his very first outing. He was thirty. Older than most. Another year, and he might have missed the draft altogether.’
My father took another drink straight from the bottle, and belched. Then he looked back at Tante Anna lying under her tarpaulin, and gave a twisted smile, as if even now he was aware of her silent disapproval. He raised the bottle in what looked like an ironic toast, and went on:
‘Narcisse, you might have wondered why I never joined the army. The fact is, I wanted to. I tried, but my age was already against me. Besides, the stammer I’d had since childhood made it hard for me to communicate. I tried several times – I even wrote a letter to the Commissaire – but every time I presented myself, my voice refused to function.
Tante Anna was jubilant. ‘I always knew you were weak,’ she said. ‘You can’t even die for your country. Imagine being such a worthless thing that even dying’s beyond you.’
He managed her voice so convincingly that I was almost alarmed, Reynaud. It was as if she had crawled into his mouth, and was using his voice as a medium.
