Page 65 of The Strawberry Thief
‘She was harsh with the children,’ he said. ‘She would often lock them indoors if they were unruly or thoughtless. But this time, I knew something was wrong. When I opened the door of the room, I found my son barely conscious, and my daughter—’ Here his eyes filled with tears. ‘My daughter was prone to seizures, mon père. She must have been dead for quite some time. At first I thought my son was dead, too. He hadn’t eaten or drunk for days.’
It was a simple lie; simple enough for the priest to believe it. This one listened in silence to the tale, eyes narrowed against an invisible sun. And my father was convincing. His grief was certainly unfaked. When he had finished his story, the priest rose from his armchair by the hearth and said: ‘Where do you think your aunt could have gone?’
My father raised his hands helplessly. ‘All I can think is that she must have come to harm in some way. She would never have left the children locked up without food for so long. Maybe she collapsed somewhere, or fell into the river. I was going to ask for your help to organize a search for her.’
Lansquenet has always been a close-knit little community. Once the story was known, our friends and neighbours came out in force to help. My father led the searches. We searched the riverbank, the woods, the area around the farm. Some of the men used hunting-dogs, but Tante Anna’s scent was everywhere, and the disused well by the copse of trees went unseen and undisturbed.
I don’t know who it was, Reynaud, who first mentioned the river-folk. Even in those days they were there, though the War had been hard on the gypsies. Now, they had come out of hiding once more, moving up and downriver with the changing of the seasons. A band of them had moored their boats in the shallows of Les Marauds, down by the old tanneries – in those days still open, and reeking. You have to understand, Reynaud. I was a child, just as you were when you did what you did. Traumatized by the death of Mimi, and by my terrible deed. Terrified of discovery; sleeping little, eating less, my head filled with imaginings. The idea that someone else might take the blame, and carry it far away from me – downriver, even to the sea – was wildly, darkly appealing. And so, on my father’s suggestion, I helped to plant a suspicion in the minds of my neighbours and friends. I’d seen a man, a stranger, I said, hanging about the farm at night, just before Tante Anna disappeared.
‘What kind of a man?’
‘A tall man, dark, with a scar on his face.’
I’d taken the description from one of the books I’d read at school. I had no idea that I’d just described one of the river-gypsies. But the folk of Lansquenet needed no further encouragement. The thought that Tante Anna might have been the victim of a prowler was far more plausible than the truth that was right there under their noses.
They arrested the man, a Greek by birth, whose name was Yannis Vasiliou. Sixty-two; a loner with a murky reputation. It was said that during the War he’d worked for the black market. He had a violent history, he’d served five years in jail for assault, during which time he’d gained the scar that did so much to condemn him. He pleaded innocence, of course; but a search of his houseboat revealed a cache of stolen goods – nothing from our farm, but more than enough to confirm their suspicions that he had murdered Tante Anna when she had surprised him prowling about, and that he had disposed of the body in the hope of averting suspicion. A court in Agen found him guilty, and he was guillotined in Toulouse, where so many people had suffered the same fate at the hands of the Germans.
My father was never the same again. He never spoke of the Vasiliou case, although he kept a box full of clippings at the back of his wardrobe. His stutter returned, worse than ever, until I could barely remember his voice, and the image of that night grew dim and distant in my memory. He sent me off to school in Agen until my sixteenth birthday: most of my fellows were country boys, forced to board because they lived too far to travel to school every day. I saw my father only during the school holidays, and he was often busy then, leaving me to my own devices. He had created a new project, which took up a great deal of his time: he had taken to ordering and planting hundreds of oak saplings around the copse by the side of the cornfield. He’d hired a group of the river-folk to run the farm on his behalf, and he devoted much of his time to this mysterious new project. Everyone had a different theory about it. The most popular was that my father was trying to create the perfect conditions for truffles. Truffles love oak woodland, and there was far more money there than in wheat or sunflowers. The second, almost as popular, explanation was that my father had gone mad. Certainly, since Mimi’s death, he had never been the same. He had become increasingly withdrawn; he only ever seemed to speak to the river-folk who worked his farm. And oak trees take decades to grow – even if he were lucky enough to encourage truffles to grow on the site, it would surely not be in his lifetime. And yet he persisted: planting more than ten thousand trees – some from acorns, some saplings – in the eight years between Mimi’s death and his own.
By the time I finished school he was even more distant than he’d been when Tante Anna was alive. His project took up all his time, although it was still less clear to me now precisely what he was doing. His project – you could not call it a wood – stretched all the way to the bank of the Tannes, except for the little odd-shaped clearing that had once been a field of strawberries. In the clearing was the well in which we had buried Tante Anna, now blocked with a solid metal grate sunk into the concrete. At first I thought that maybe my father had wanted to keep the strawberry field, but as time went on and he made no attempt to cultivate or pick the fruit, I realized that strawberries were not a part of his design.
Left to my own devices, I ran a little wild. I drank. There was a girl in the village, a pretty girl, Eloise Goujon. I got her pregnant when I was eighteen and she was nearly twenty-one. We married in the village church, under her grandfather’s watchful eye. My father was there, but he barely spoke, barely joined in the celebrations. I remember him saying to me, just after the ceremony:
‘I want you to keep the oak wood, Narcisse. For Mimi’s sake, and for your own children, when you have them.’ And he put his arms around me for the first time since I’d been a boy, and whispered:
‘Love is the thing that only God sees.’
At the time I wondered if he was drunk. He certainly smelt of wine, although I had not seen him drinking. But in the ten years after Mimi’s death, my father had scarcely spoken a sentence without stuttering. Mimi’s name had not passed his lips since the funeral. As for the reference to God – my father was no Catholic. He never went to church any more, he never read the Bible. Nor was he drawn to Judaism, in spite of Naomi’s influence. As far as he was concerned, the God of the Torah was no kinder than the God who had sacrificed his son for the sake of a stolen apple. But it was the last thing I recall my father ever saying to me.
Six months after that, he died, leaving the farm to me and Eloise. The village curé – a young man, newly appointed after the death of père Matthieu – agreed to turn a blind eye to the circumstances. My father had made a confession, his first in over twenty years. Of course, the young priest did not reveal exactly what he had told him. But when my father hanged himself from a beam in the cellar, it was the priest who let it be known that old Dartigen had died of a fall – not quite a lie, but enough to ensure a decent funeral. There was no note. No diary. But at the back of his wardrobe I found the clippings relating to the death of Yannis Vasiliou, carefully stored in a shoebox, the lid marked in red ink:MURDERER.
That word, Reynaud. That dreadful word. For ten years it had remained unspoken between us. Now it glared from the lid of the box; accusing; condemnatory. I took it as a message from the man who had never forgiven me. And why should he? I was the one who should have saved Mimi. I was the one who sacrificed a stranger to protect myself. Worse still, I was the one who left him to carry the burden of memory, while I went on with my life, as if I were somehow entitled to all the things he’d forsaken—
I burnt the shoebox in the hearth, along with all its contents. I never told Eloise about the Vasiliou affair, or Tante Anna, or any of it. She was a kind, unimaginative girl, raised by her grandparents during the War. All she wanted was a home, and children, and a family. I gave her all that – but most of myself I kept hidden away from her. My father died when his burden became too hard for him to carry. I have carried mine until now. I tended it, and watched it grow. In sixty years my father’s trees have grown into an oak wood. I never really understood why he needed to plant them, but I’d always felt close to him there, as if the trees had somehow kept a part of his spirit with them.
Trees are very forgiving, Reynaud. They give their shade equally to the living and the dead. Innocence and guilt are nothing to them. I’m not going to tell you my spirit is there, but if I believed in spirits, it might be. In any case, I’m leaving it to Rosette. She will enjoy it, just as Mimi would have loved it, if she had lived.
Roux’s boat was moored under the trees, some way downriver from Les Marauds. The air was mellow with midges and the scent of blossom from the bank. A filament of hyacinth smoke arose from the boat’s little chimney. I sat down on the river-bank, as best as I could in my bulkysoutane, and pulled off the clerical collar. For a moment I closed my eyes, listening to the small sounds of the river; the whispering of leaves in the trees; noticing the sharp scent of the reeds; the distant rise and fall of voices from theBoulevard des Marauds. There were bees in the canopy overhead, and a scent of something burning. I opened my eyes, and I saw the door to the houseboat standing open, and a man standing on the deck – a man with red hair and a wary look.
‘Funny place to sit,’ said Roux.
I took a breath. ‘I was waiting for you.’
‘That so?’ His voice was warier still.
‘I have something to confess.’
6
Friday, March 31
Confession is good for the soul,they say. I wouldn’t know. My soul is dark. Dark as a stained-glass window in a place where no-one prays. I was a lonely child. A boy without any friends, and a family held together by the appearances of faith. My father was an alcoholic: he prayed to the Lord on Sundays, and on weekdays drank half a bottle of whisky per day, plus wine with meals; as well asapéritifanddigestif, andcafé-cognacat breakfast. My mother took comfort where she could in the arms of various different men. The only stable point in my life was the church, where Monsieur le Curé would talk to me as if I were a man of his own age, instead of a boy of seven or eight, and where I could enjoy peace and sanctity away from the taunts and jibes of my peers, and my mother’s perpetual rages.
Monsieur le Curé was neither a patient man nor an especially kind one. He had been ambitious, once, though his hopes of high office had died. Rumours of a previous post, somewhere in the north of France, which he had left, very suddenly, suggested some earlier scandal, but to me he seemed the image of what a priest was meant to be: hard as oak; upstanding and strong; impervious to weakness.
It was Monsieur le Curé who encouraged me to give up reading novels and to study the words of Saint Augustine. It was he who comforted me when the other boys were unkind, and told me I was better than they because I knew how to suffer. He told me I was destined for greater things than village life, and guided me towards the Church as a potential vocation. It was he who taught me that congregations are like sheep: they need a fierce dog to keep them in check, if they are not to fall to the wolf. And it was he who taught me that bringing order from chaos is the Church’s primary task, that even kindness can be misplaced, and that God’s law is paramount.
I’m not saying this to be forgiven. In fact, I’m not reallysayingit at all. The words that I try to express to Roux are poor, chaotic sentences; nothing like the carefully chosen words of Narcisse’s confession. Monsieur le Curé would have been dismayed at my inarticulacy. But words are not enough to say everything I need to confess. Words are feeble things in the face of the man whose life I stole.
