The Day of the Bees Page 9
I hear the Officer shout in panic. “Let’s get the hell out of here!”
There are footsteps of men running, motorbikes starting, the whine of engines dying away in the distance.
I am left inside a dominating hum, a steady strum pulling me away in its current as the golden cloak unravels back into the sky. The bees spool heavenward. I am with them. I am leaving you Francisco. I see you below me on smashed knees. Already a new life is growing in me. But who is its father? My lover or my enemy?
Village of Reigne
My Dearest Love,
I am desperate to hear from you. I have received no letters. Perhaps the postal official Royer is holding them? Each time I make the journey to Ville Rouge I pray that Royer will have a packet from you—weeks and months of letters arriving all at once, a great gift. I worry that what I told you in my last letter, about the Day of the Bees, has caused you not to write. I do not blame you. I understand your Spanish pride so well. How difficult it must be for you to share this torment of a child conceived in joy and pain. Then I realize I haven’t mailed my last letter to you. But did I really need to mail it? Wasn’t the message already conveyed with every glance I gave you in our last days before you left me in Ville Rouge? Maybe I will never mail that letter. Maybe I will wait until this war is over so that I can hand it to you myself. But what if this war never ends? What if we are only at the beginning, standing on the first dune of an endless desert? This thought is too cruel to contemplate.
I am here alone within my stone walls. How long have I been here? The wind drums around me outside. Is it the wind? Or is it a giant moth turning into a butterfly with a woman’s body, beating her translucent wings against my door? She thinks you are here with me, standing at your easel before the fireplace. The problem with the muse is that the sucking of inspiration drains her. She becomes used, the butterfly turns gray. All I wanted was to hold you as a married woman in this temporal world. You denied me that in a time of crisis. If only you had eyes to see! I told you in the beginning, if you would come to me I would give you everything I had as a woman. If I were only a mistress-muse I would be lost to you. What do I care if I am immortalized in your art? I wanted to be your wife. It is a crime against nature to squander love. Time is the jury. Now time ticks inside of me. It is a ticking of a different nature. Is it a bomb or is it beauty? All the sucking of inspiration from the muse hollows her heart, the butterfly turns into a worm. Does she have the will to begin again? Does she have the strength to live for a child that so divides her heart? God will surely strike me dead for such thoughts. But then God will probably not even hear me. God turns a deaf ear to self-pity.
How many days have passed since I began writing you this letter? How many weeks have slipped by as I try to catch my random thoughts on paper? How many trips to Ville Rouge have I made with the hope of having word from you? How many encounters with Monsieur Royer? Royer with his pudgy fingers pawing the air around me, convinced I am about to set the table for him and serve the meal. Royer in his stiff-brimmed cap, his tight-fitting uniform with its medal of officious rank pinned prominently to the jacket lapel. Every other minute he strikes a heroic stance, as if posing for the bronze statue he is certain will be erected to him in the town square, memorializing his sacrifice to public service. He struts and puffs. Sometimes you would think him a Vichy officer, or a German officer, or a militia officer, or an officer of Pétain’s police. It seems everyone is an officer of one sort or another in this countryside that is now frozen to an eerie standstill at the center of a world that boils with war.
Strange news comes to us every day, but not in the newspapers. In the newspapers there is only celebration of local agricultural feats: who has raised the biggest goat, how much jam was preserved by this or that farmer’s wife, how lousy the grape harvest was, how many tons of potatoes were grown this season compared to last. There is no news of what is actually occurring here—of the people in rags who travel the back roads with their few belongings, plunging into the bushes at the slightest sound of someone approaching; of the troop trains moving constantly; of the airplanes droning in the sky throughout the night. Nor is there real news of what is happening in darkened Paris, in frozen Russia, in burning London. No, this news is never found in print or on the radio. This news is carried on the lips of the people. A snatch here, from the baker when one gets bread. A trifle there, when one is at the greengrocer. Or in the butcher shop, where there is no meat but only a snippet of gossip, a slight innuendo, a scrap of a secret. Nowhere is a whole truth spoken, never is an entire sentence finished. Just the beginnings of things are hinted at; even then the speaker looks at you while pretending not to look at you, watching you trying to make sense of the tidbit just heard. The speaker wants to see your reaction. Are you happy about it? Are you sad? Are you indifferent? The speaker wants to know what side you are on without divulging his or her own. There is a show of patriotism, but it is paranoid patriotism. So the paranoia becomes reality, and in a way this becomes our strange defeat, for lies, innuendo, and facts merge together—unanswerable, unprovable. Are the foxes crazy? Is it true the troop trains don’t all have soldiers in them, but men, women, and children being shipped east? And to what? Is icy Russia freezing armies in their shoes? Is London burning from a blitz of rockets? Is the farmer’s pig pregnant? Are all the squirrels rabid? Can you trust your husband or is he an informer, and for whom? So we all are culpable in this conspiracy. In war rumor becomes fact, and fact is the sum of many minds trying to rationalize their compromise. What price survival? Can anyone truly condemn another unless he or she too has had a pistol placed to the head? Does one choose to live by emptying one’s conscience slowly, drip by drip, each excruciating day?
I have so much time to think of these matters. Matters that wouldn’t matter to me at all if I were by your side, for to live or die with you would decide my fate. I have only myself now, and next to my heart beats a new heart, a ticking clock, its hands sharp as cleavers, moving second by second, dividing my self.
Royer has hinted that he has something for me. It’s something from you, I hope. I am about to give him anything he wants. What do I care about the consequences of my body now—what’s done is done. I will grovel for a scrap from my true love. Isn’t this terrible? Isn’t this a hideous thought? But what are my shallow thoughts against these black-and-white days, where people disappear into their own shadows, terrified of their potential cowardice. Terrified they will walk the wrong road and find a dead body left from the night before, when the shadows leapt out and actions spoke where words could not.
This is to tell you I found a woman lying in the road to Ville Rouge. Flies buzzed around her body sprawled on the ground. I don’t know what made me go to her; she was obviously dead. What could I possibly do? She could have been me, for I walk this same road to Ville Rouge every week. It could have been me in her tattered dress. I looked around. There was no one. The hillsides were barren. I stepped toward her. I had to see her face. I just had to. I knew that sometimes these dead bodies were booby-trapped with trip wires and hidden explosives, to blow apart the inquisitive enemy. But who was the enemy? Who was this woman?
I knelt at her side, reaching out my shaking hand, my fingers touching her cold flesh, sending a hot shock through me, my own body convulsing with a shiver, a deep shiver to my soul. I took her by the shoulders and pulled. Her mouth was gagged and she bore no wound except the one that had bled her to death. A sign to all those who rose to resistance in the night, a clear signal that their actions had been discovered and were being dispatched back with a message. If the dead resistance fighter was a man, his left testicle would be smashed. If it was a woman, her left breast would be cut off. How curious, the French Revolution never ended. Even when another country invades us we are all too ready to turn our weapons against each other. I rolled the dead woman over. Her left breast had been cut off. She was my age. I reached out and held her hand … I feel it still. The smooth flesh of her hand in mine. We st
eady each other in these terrible winds of war blowing around us, blowing around the stone walls of my cottage as I write this.
LOUISE
Village of Reigne
No one knows I am pregnant. I hide it beneath layers of skirts and sweaters, dresses and coats. But I cannot hide it from everyone, and so I confide in you. These letters, written by candlelight late at night, are the only window through which I can be observed. I write them hoping to expose myself to you, and perhaps to myself. The joy we shared dims with each day I don’t hear from you. The buzz in my blood, caused by your distant touch, grows fainter. I try to force myself—oh I don’t want to lose you! I try to force myself to remember. Once we sought all life in each other, in each moment, each breath, each bite of food, each sip of wine, each caress; the sacred mornings when I brought coffee and toast to our bed, your eyes melting on me, butter sliding through your fingers, a suck of kisses to wake up by, kisses to live for, kisses to die from. The things a woman remembers. All the sacred mornings.
Now I awaken to a cold room. A bed with only one person in it is an empty bed. I instinctively reach for your slickness, to feel you rising between my closing fingers. A new morning. The sun sheds light on my empty bed. The floor is icy to my feet. I am almost out of firewood. I am almost out of absinthe. It is absinthe that keeps me warm at night, absinthe that glows in my gray moth’s body. There is nothing else to drink here in the country. The times of fancy cognacs and heady wines are over, disappeared from store shelves, siphoned off for the ubiquitous officers and cozy politicians. All that one can find, if one is lucky, is the local crude absinthe. Absinthe may have been illegal before the war, but the locals considered its outlawing a Parisian conspiracy to keep those who worked an honest day tilling the darkest earth from dreaming of their own destiny, weaving their own art, making their own laws. In this provincial place the locals are condescended to by outsiders, who consider their customs quaint. But these people are not quaint; their customs are carved in stone by the predictable realities of natural seasons passing over the land. Simple as that.
So absinthe can be had for a price. If you sometimes suspect that my letters are a little too flowery or vague, unlike the way I would normally talk, then think of absinthe’s golden-green honey sliding off my tongue and opening a new throat through which I can cry—and oh, I hope, sing. I am a bird singing her song. But it is my song, with its bits of chirping and trilling, a woman’s thoughts—that is all. I ask myself, do birds dream? They obviously find it difficult to write, as I do. You may even require a translator when reading this. Forgive my poor letter.
I am almost out of absinthe and I am going to get some more today when I see Royer, who hints of news from you with mincing smiles, and some secret “thing” he wants to “show” me. As if I don’t already know what it is! But I am desperate to hear from you. All I have to live for is my past with you, because that is a certainty. My future is already divided.
LOUISE
Village of Reigne
My Darling,
Seeing Royer today was what I expected, but also what I had not expected. As usual I went to the post office in Ville Rouge late in the day. Royer was at his desk, industrious in his paperwork and taking the odd citizen’s complaint. The citizen standing before him when I arrived was a distraught woman waiting for a letter from her son, who had been conscripted into the army and disappeared in a troop train heading east. She had heard nothing from him; she didn’t even know what country he was in. Perhaps there had been a mistake with the postal authorities and his letters were misplaced? That is not to say that she didn’t have the highest regard for the competence of the postal authorities, and most of all the highest respect for Monsieur Royer. Surely he could help her, since he alone had the power to contact the head office in Marseille, and Marseille could contact Lyon, and Lyon could contact the capital, Paris. The missing letters could be found, waiting to be handed over to the dear mama. Certainly Monsieur Royer could accomplish that.
Royer smiled smugly. He informed the tearful mother that it was true he wielded considerable power within the vast postal system, and luckily for her, he also had a cousin who actually worked in the Lyon post office. Things could be done, actions undertaken, mountains moved, rivers straightened, and with luck, voilà—an avalanche of the good son’s letters could fall on the saintly mother’s head. The mother hugged Royer with gratitude. He assured her it was nothing. All in the line of duty. What else is a public servant for, other than to serve?
What else, indeed, I thought.
The relieved mother turned to leave, but Royer summoned her back.
“Do you know, Madame, what one longs for during these perilous times?”
The mother was confused. “Longs for? I only long for the safe return of my son. That is all I want.”
“Yes, there are such longings, all justified of course, the grand hopes for which one prays to God each night. But then there are mere mortals like me, toiling in the obscurity of public service, deprived of the simplest of pleasures.”
“Simplest of pleasures?”
“A lamb stew.”
“Lamb stew?”
“As simple as that.”
“But lamb is almost impossible to come by! The newspapers report that the men hiding in the mountains, making trouble for us all, have killed every lamb, every goat, every hare. Those men eat everything, that is why there is no meat in the butcher shop. Even when one has a valid food ration book, one cannot get so much as a tiny lamb chop.”
“Precisely.” Royer rolled his tongue provocatively along his lower lip. “That is why one longs for huge chunks of lamb, steeped in steamy fig juice, swimming next to islands of sweet onions.”
The mother placed her hand to her heart. “I don’t know … it’s so difficult, almost impossible.”
“It is also nearly impossible to move mountains, to shake the sky, all for a letter from a mother’s only son.”
“But lamb! Gracious, I haven’t had lamb for a year. I haven’t had any meat for six months!”
“Think about it, Madame. Think about how savory it is. Think of your joy in preparing the stew as I talk to my cousin in the Lyon post office about the nasty army censors who are cruelly withholding a son’s most intimate thoughts from his dear mother. Think of this, Madame, as you are cutting tender lamb into thick slices.”
The mother shook her head in bewilderment as she walked out the door, mumbling, “Lamb and letters. Letters and lamb.”
Royer locked the door behind her and turned to me. Before he could say a word I cut him off.
“The last time I was here you told me to come back in three days, that there would be something for me.”
Royer moved behind his desk with a secretive expression, speaking softly, as if passersby outside in the street could overhear him.
“My dear, you look so flushed. Your face is always so red, but red in a good way. Red as the wine in a duck sauce, lips as crimson as a raspberry sorbet.”
“I didn’t come here to hear you read from the menu. I want my letters.”
“Letters?” He smiled slyly. “I think you need something more than that.”
“I need nothing more than that.”
“Ah, but a pregnant woman is in need of many things.” He stopped, waiting to see the impact of his words. I said nothing.
“A pregnant woman is most in need of a man.”
I realized he now had two things over me: his knowledge of my physical state and the letters from you. I needed somehow to find a way out of this dilemma, to disarm this man who held such power over my life. I opened my mouth to speak, to explain all, to try and stop the damage this man could do. But he spoke first.
“Yes, your color is like a field of burnt-orange squash flowers blooming in springtime. My niece in Nice is eight months with child. She has that color too. Not a color really, but a blush, a blush of happiness, of expectancy. What is it Madame Happy calls that condition? Oh yes—the bloom before the blossom
drops.”
“I—”
“Then I realized, Louise is not pregnant! That is not the nature of her lovely bloom. No. I realized that each time you were here, and I have an educated nose for such matters—a nose that can separate the bouille from the baise—well, I caught the scent of dried wormwood and copper, crushed herbs, and the very sweat of those who till our own beloved Provençal earth. And I realized—” He rolled his eyes like a schoolboy, trying to look up into his brain for some remembered homework as he stood before a demanding teacher, trying to pull down from his memory some lost final piece of the puzzle. “I realized,” he pursed his lips and let flow:
“With Flowers and with Women,
With Absinthe and with this Fire,
We can divert ourselves awhile,
Act out our part in some drama.
Absinthe, on a winter evening,
Lights up in green the sooty soul;
And Flowers, on the beloved,
Grow fragrant before the Fire.
Later, kisses lose their charm …”
He looked at me blankly, trying to recall the rest of the poem.
I knew the rest, knew it well, for this was one of your favorite poems, “With Flowers and With Women.” How often I lay in your arms as you softly spoke those words after we had made love, tears forming in your eyes. And I thought: What a melancholic romantic Spaniard you are. But it was a Frenchman who wrote the poem. You are all impossible romantics!
Royer kept gasping, trying to find the missing words to complete his triumph of memory. I helped him:
“Having lasted several seasons;