Fiction from The Literary Review
Frames and Wonders
JANETTE TURNER HOSPITAL
1. Frame of Reference
“No,” the man says, “we're not interested.”
“We might be,” the woman demurs. “Let me see.”
“Don't indulge him. He'll expect to be paid.” The man catches his reflection in plate glass and looks away. Though he thinks he is aging well, he does not like growing old. He does not like to have a record kept. “They are parasites,” he says irritably. “Public nuisances. As bad as the beggars, and such amateur work.”
“Look,” she says. “Double exposure.” She leans across the bistro table, the Polaroid snapshot in her hand. In the photograph, a man and a woman are drinking wine at a sidewalk café. They could be lovers.
Reluctantly, the man looks and then smiles. “Les yeux dans les yeux,” he says.
“Mm. And look.” She points. Behind the figures in the photograph, ghostly beneath the window-painted lettering of Brasserie Bastille, their reflections mimic and float. “It's us, exactly. Don't you think that's perfect? Multiple selves, anchored nowhere. And you hovering above your own shoulder, watching us.”
“It is not a good photograph,” he says. “It is not well composed.”
“I like it. After all these years, same café, same regrets, same high-voltage gaze, same old impossible shadow dance. A perfect re-run. Except that we've never both been in the same frame before. And except that we're old.”
“Non,” he says. “Mûr. Nous sommes mûrs, Odette.”
“Sounds much better,” she agrees. “Ripeness is all.”
“Tu es encore belle.”
She smiles and touches the smudge of birthmark beneath his eye. “I am such a sucker for perfect imperfections.”
“Excusez-moi, madame.” The street photographer coughs deferentially and eases a second snapshot between one wine glass and the bottle of Bordeaux. This photograph shows a man and a woman leaning close to look at a photograph that shows a man and a woman leaning close.
“Here we go round the mulberry bush,” she says.
He closes his eyes. “Do you remember the summer we found the lost village?”
“I remember we went in search of a place for one whole summer. We never found it.”
“What?” He stares at her. “How can you say that?”
“Because it's true. You know the place doesn't exist.”
“We spent a whole day there, and a night. Why don't you want to remember? We had wine and apples.”
“And we picnicked beside the pond?”
“Yes, yes, exactly.”
“But we never did sleep in the king's hunting lodge.”
“Si, si. We made love in the royal bed. You cannot have forgotten. You must remember that.”
“I remember your fantasy. You embellished it every night.”
He is agitated. He tears a Pastis coaster in half. “C'est incroyable. It is because my English was so poor then, and your French was not yet good.” He puts his head in his hands. “So much I explained to you, so much you never understood.”
“Swann,” she says. “Dear Swann.” She takes his hands and kisses his fingertips. “Half the time, we were lost in mistranslation, that's true, but I did understand your obsession with that place. We found no trace of it. It did not exist.”
“I took photographs,” he insists. “When you left, so brutally, without any warning, I sent you copies.”
“You took photographs of wishes and of birds in flight. You sent a postcard of an empty cage.”
“It is very revealing,” he says bitterly, “this repression. This need to deny. It is very Puritan, very Australian. Very damned Anglo-Saxon. You are all terrified of desire.”
“Are we going to fight again? It's the way you confuse passion with possession that scares me. It's that insane French jealousy, that need to control. I felt caged.”
“Love is a cage, yes, and the Anglo-Saxons lock themselves outside it.” He is angry. He sweeps the importunate street photographer aside. “And so you wipe passion from your memory. The past, you erase.”
“Swann,” she says wearily. “You invent the past.”
“In the king's hunting lodge,” he says, “in the photograph, you look as you should always look. The face of a woman well-loved is like the face of a . . . d'une biche, how do you—?”
“A fallow doe.”
“Yes. Soft and most beautiful. I keep that photograph always in my wallet since that day.”
“This is impossible, as usual,” she says. “You don't know what you make up and what is real.”
2. This is not a sign
First photograph: the woman is framed by the sign. There is a stone wall, a saint's niche, a Saint Someone—benefactor of pigeons—chalked with shit. Wild rose has choked the gate open. The woman sits on the ground between two posts, the gate behind her. Above her head, on the crosspiece, the name of the village is scored. The woman is pointing up at the black letters. She speaks to someone outside the frame, the tilt of her chin suggesting challenge. Can you read this sign? she seems to be asking. Or possibly: Can you translate me?
The sign says: LA FORET LE ROI.
Second photograph: a man leans on the same sign from the other side. He looks directly and intensely at the viewer. Below one of his eyes, a small birthstain, attractive, resembles the map of France. The man smiles, but sadness clings to his smile. Because his arms are hooked over the cross-board, and because his chin rests just above the T, he has the air of a man in the village stocks.
The words on the other side of the sign remain the same, but a red diagonal line runs from the lower left corner of the crosspiece to the upper right. Decoded, the slashed letters mean: You are leaving the village of La Forêt le Roi.
Other translations, however, are possible. For example: This sign is inaccurate. It is forbidden to use these words. This village has been discontinued. Translation unavailable. Not to be read.
The woman cannot find the photographs but she knows they exist. She can remember, yes, in some detail, the last time she held them in her hands. The day was cloudy. She was indoors, reading a book, and the photographs slithered out from between the pages and fell to the floor. She thought the book faintly ridiculous, though absorbing. It was in French, a nineteenth-century traveler's meditations on the world: In Asia and the exotic lands of the South Pacific, the observer wrote, the appreciation of fine wine does not exist. This is due to a diet of fiery spices and boiled food, two barbarisms which have destroyed the palate in the contrary hemisphere. Such lands, one might say, constitute the realm of bad taste, for below the equator and east of Constantinople, one of the five senses is extinct. In Australia, there is a bird that laughs when people eat.
She had gathered the photographs up from the floor and studied them. Time passed; an hour, two hours, she does not know. Darkness surprised her. She turned on the lamp and closed the book. She has a clear image of pages 56 and 57 shutting themselves over the prints, and of her hand reshelving the book. The rest is hazy. She cannot remember the book's title or the author, though the minute she sees them she will know. She remembers the shape of the volume and the color. Cloth-bound. Red, with bleached patches where silverfish have dined. She has searched high and low, in all the likely and unlikely places. For the Nth time, she is working her way through her library, A to Z and Z to A.
3. Afternoon of a Faun
“It's getting dark. We must have taken the wrong path again.”
“Shh.” He presses his fingers against her mouth. “Don't move!” Behind his shoulder, the wheel of sun skims the vast beech-tree crowns. Her eyes water. “Bouge pas, chérie,” he whispers, and steps backwards through long grass, two paces, three. He is quiet and careful as a cat. Behind her: the abrupt wall of forest. Behind him: wheat fields, red scatter of poppies, black crows against blinding gold.
He whispers, “Look this way. Look at me.”
“I can't. The sun.”
“Shh.” At the soft click of the shutter, she hears leaf swish, the shuffle of a branch, deer again. They are always watching but never stay. Before she turns they have gone, white behinds scudding away through the shadows like cirrus fluff.
“Two biches, very young.” He indicates a square with his index finger and thumb. “It will be perfect. Everyone in my same . . . ” He emphasizes the shape made by his hand.
“Frame,” she says.
“Frame, yes.” He strokes the camera. He draws spatial arrangements in air. “Three pairs of eyes, the white tails of the biches, your white shirt. It will be excellent. One can wait years for such a moment.”
“I think I spoiled it. I think I moved.”
“No, ma petite biche. High shutter speed, it doesn't matter. I will call it Secrets du bois.”
She begins to sing, “Down there came a fallow doe, As great with young as she maun go,” but trails off.
“Is it an Australian chanson?”
She laughs. “No. It's a ballad. Old English. Train of association with the deer.”
He frowns, deciphering this.
“Fallow doe,” she explains. “Une biche. It's a song about secrets and death in the forest.”
“Always in forests there are secrets and death.” He reverts to French; she speaks English; it is simpler that way, though often they move erratically back and forth, new language to old, old to new.
“Maybe if we follow the deer scat,” she says. “Maybe that's the right path. Maybe the deer will lead us to the village.” She walks out of sunlight, into the cavern of beech and oak. Instantly the light changes, fails, turns aqueous. The temperature drops. All around her are low unnerving sounds. She shivers. “It's spooky in here.”
He is changing film, kneeling on the narrow grass levee between forest and wheat. He nods into the woods. “The deer trail might lead to a body. There was a murder last year.”
“What? Here?”
“A woman from our village and the curé from La Thierry.”
“From our village? From St. Sulpice-des-Bois?”
“Yes,” he says in English. “It was a scandal. She was enceinte.”
“Pregnant.”
“Yes. She was . . . ” He searches for the English word but gives up. “Absente,” he says, frustrated, and turns back to French. “She was missing for weeks, and then a hunter found the bodies in there.”
“Now you tell me.” She steps quickly back into the light.
“En fait, the deer found the bodies and the hunter found the deer.”
She looks warily into the trees. “A priest and a pregnant woman. Were they lovers?”
“What do you think? They were found naked.”
“Oh.” She begins humming the ballad to herself and breaks off. “There's a murder in the ballad too, and lovers, a knight and a maiden. I wonder why something like that gives us such a—frisson? There's not an English word, isn't that interesting? Un tel frisson. But it seems indecent to feel it, it seems obscene.”
He is checking his light meter, holding it close to the trees. “The forest is erotic,” he says. “And so is death. And so is mystery.”
“Down in yonder green field,” she sings, “there lies a knight slain under his shield, with a down— Did they find out who did it?”
“No.”
“Nothing? No clues?”
“Yes, a clue. Another body, a woman, in the forest near La Thierry. The chef de police in Etampes thinks the same killer, quelqu'un du coin.”
“Someone local.”
“Yes. Now you see why I do not let you walk alone.”
She bridles at this. “No one lets me or doesn't let me. I do what I choose.”
“No, I forbid it. The killer could be anyone you meet.”
“Maybe you should keep me inside the house. Because it could be the baker. The baker goes everywhere in that van. He knows every woman in six villages.”
“He could be the baker. He could be anyone.”
“He could be you.”
“He could be me.”
“Down in yonder green field,” she sings, the notes low and annoyed. “With a down, hey down. There lies a knight slain under his shield, With a down, derry derry derry down down . . . ” She leaves the boundary line between forest and field and moves out between the wheat rows where the fading light is still golden as butter. “Haven't you finished reloading yet? I'm starting back. I think we're lost.”
“You cannot cross the field, that is trespassing. We are not lost.”
“Well then, the village is lost. Forgive us our trespasses or we won't be home before dark. And we're not going to find La Forêt le Roi, that's certain. Not today.”
“We are not lost,” he repeats. “Simply, we have not yet found the right path.”
“Precisely my point. And we're not going to find it in the dark. Let's go.”
“No, we wait for the partridges. They will arrive now, momently.”
“At any moment,” she corrects. “We must be at least ten kilometers from St. Sulpice. Once the sun goes—”
“Et voilà. Des perdreaux.” They always appear close to dusk, the fledgling partridges, and always in pairs, nervy, intense, small high-speed feathered propellers, flying low over the wheat fields and into the black trees where death waits: hawks, hunters' guns, owls. She watches the pearled blur of wings and the birds seem to her unbearably vulnerable. “Venez, venez, mes petits,” he murmurs, excited. He points the camera like a gun. A high thrumming rises from him, and she turns away, disturbed. The fledglings vanish between the trees. Panic, unaccountable, swoops down on her. She begins to run through the wheat toward St. Sulpice.
“Chérie, what are you doing?”
In minutes, he catches her and reaches for the back of her shirt. She tears loose, hears the ripping, then he has her again. He covers the back of her neck with savage kisses.
“Stop it. You're hurting me.”
“Un chasseur aime chasser,” he murmurs. A hunter loves to hunt. She can feel the camera against the curve of her spine. “You should not provoke,” he says. “But you like to provoke.”
“I don't like to be hunted as though I'm wild game, and nor do I like to be lost. Look what you've done to my shirt.”
He runs his fingertips over her breasts. “You look better this way.”
“This is insane. It's nearly dark. You got partridges yesterday, and the day before.”
“Sometimes from six rolls of film, I do not find one single shot which pleases me.”
“You're obsessive. You're more interested in your wretched Nikon than in me.”
“To be jealous of a camera, c'est ridicule, chérie.”
It's not jealousy, she does not say, her heart thudding. It has nothing to do with jealousy. She does not know what it is. It is something shapeless and dark, like the black spaces deep inside the woods.
“Bouge pas.” He focuses, clicks.
“Don't,” she says, angry, covering herself.
He pulls the shirt from her, rams it into his camera case. “I am an eye, chérie, this is what I am. Please. Like this. Or running, yes, if you want, that's good, c'est magnifique!”
They are both gasping now, the wheat in tumult as they pass. She cannot tell if the tolling bell is a church or her heart or the blink of shutter or thudding feet. She trips and falls and rolls into darkness. His weight crushes her, the wheat stubble scratches her back. “Perfect,” he is laughing. “ The light is perfect. I will call it Nymph fleeing, with bare breasts. Or Diana the Huntress.”
She beats at him with her fists, she tears at his clothes, they bite, their embrace is violent and smells of soil and want and hay. Afterwards, spent, they look up through the smashed wheat at the darkening sky.
“Nymph and Satyr,” he murmurs. “But no one to put us in the same frame.”
She rolls onto her side and stares at him. “You arrange us in your head the whole damn time,” she says, furious. She bites his shoulder. “You weren't even here. You're an onlooker, you know that? A bloody voyeur. You're always some place else, inventing us.”
“I am not guilty as charged. I have been framed.”
“Oh, that's good. A pun in English, that's very good. Everything's just a game inside your head.”
“Just a game? I am very serious about games, mon petit joujou.”
“I'm not your toy. We've been walking all afternoon and we haven't even found the right path, let alone your precious village.”
He laughs. “Is it Australian? You cannot enjoy the game without kicking the goal?”
“Is it French, forgetting which fucking game you're playing?”
“Mais c'est toi. You are my fucking game. I never forget.”
“Lose the time clock, lose count of the score, change the rules as you go, declare yourself winner anyway.”
“Bien sûr. I always win.”
“If that's a dare, you're playing a dangerous game.”
“You like dangerous games. We both like dangerous games.”
She shivers.
“What are you frightened of?” He strokes her neck with his fingertips. He bites her lip. “Are you frightened of me?”
4. Swann and Odette
She calls him Swann because he calls her Odette.
“Odette?” she says. “Why? Because you stalked me?”
“Because Odette played with men the way cats play with birds, and because Swann won her back against all odds.”
“A trophy. And then he walled her in chez Swann and she had to drop right out of the world. I don't like the sound of it.”
“It was you who came looking for me. It was you who came back.”
“Because you sent signals. You set out lures.”
“Yes,” he acknowledges. “And you were looking for them. You knew where they led. You flew right into my cage.”
“And I can fly right out again.”
“Or you might not want to. Or I could stop you. That is the game.”
5. Swann's Way
“We will stay longer on the road,” he decides, his finger on the old map. “This time, we will follow the road to here, direction Etampes, but since Boissy-le-Sec we will cross the fields.”
“I thought that was trespassing.”
“We will cross between the fields. On the right-of-way.”
The shutter clicks. She has him, profile against afternoon light, both maps unfolding their wings. She can see the bright plume of obsession. He believes it means something, that they found the map in the wine cave beneath their house. He believes it means something extraordinary. The map is cobwebbed and water-stained. When they unfold it, pieces fall away like ash. In the lower right corner is a royal seal and a stamp:
Propriété de Monsieur Bousquet, forestier du roi, 1681.
Pavillon de chasse du Roi.
La Forest le Roi.
She moves closer and presses the shutter again.
“Since Boissy-le-Sec,” he says, “we will search closely for the path. It should show itself here.”
“After Boissy-le-Sec.” She moves, focuses, clicks.
He raises his eyes, reproachful. “You are wasting my film.”
“You said 'since.' You can only use 'since' for time, not place.”
“ 'After' is place?”
“Okay, so English isn't logical. 'After' can be place. For example: before the wine cave, after the wine cave. As in: After the wine cave, Swann became obsessed with the king's hunting lodge.”
“Because the steps to the wine cave go down to the seventeenth century,” he says. He runs his index finger along the margin of the map. “Forestier du roi, 1681. The question is, how has it arrived in our cave du vin, the map of the king's forester? Why has it travelled fifteen kilometres, maybe twenty, from La Forêt le Roi?”
“Maybe the forester was Protestant? Maybe he was appointed by Henri IV and Louis XIV inherited him? And then bang, 1685, Revocation of the Edict of Nantes by Louis, and the Huguenots had to flee for their lives.”
“How do you know these things of French history?” he asks, amazed.
She thinks about it and shrugs. “Must be one of the oddities of an Australian education, a passion for dates. Mention a king or a war, and a year pops out like a cuckoo from a clock: 1066, 1215, 1337-1453, that's the Hundred Years' War in case you don't know your own past.”
He says, offended: “Those scars on the bell tower of St. Sulpice? English catapults, 1405. Our grandmothers tell us the stories.”
“You're joking. Of the Hundred Years' War?”
“The stories are passed down and down, and in the mairie, records are kept from the twelfth century. Children find pieces of armor.”
“They do? But not from the Middle Ages.”
“Si, si. Chain mail, coins, it is very bad luck to put an English coin in your pocket. They find Roman coins too, but that is lucky.”
In St. Sulpice-des-Bois, she is subject to a kind of vertigo. History floats. Time flutters like partridge wings. Monsieur Bousquet hovers over the king's hunting map while William Dampier, buccaneer, maps the northwest coast of Terra Incognita, inventing the shape of Australia as he goes.
The house itself, the house of Swann and Odette, once a stable, is three centuries older than the royal forester's map. Sometimes Odette presses her ear to the thick stone wall (it is cold; it is never warm, not on the hottest day; it is never light inside the house; they live in dusk), sometimes she holds the former stable like a shell to her ear and hears Crusaders thundering by, hears kings on hunting trips, hears the guillotine in the village square.
“On the old map,” Swann says. “There is still the s. Do you see?” He points to the curled baroque script: La Forest le Roi.
“When did that change? The circumflex accent instead of the s?”
“I don't know. A long time ago. And on the map of the département, latest edition, here it is, the same village. La Forêt le Roi.”
“Either way, it doesn't really make sense. The Forest the King. Why no partitive?”
“For the Sun King? Redundant, I suppose.”
“Anyway, we've driven along every back road and every unpaved rural track in that area. There's nothing there.”
“It is on the map. The mairie is very exact.”
“That doesn't prove the village still exists. Probably ten generations of fonctionnaires transferred the old to the new, year by year, without checking.”
“In the mairie, they always check. The road is not transferred,” he points out. “In the old map, you see? The village is on the main highway from Etampes to Versailles. Now, on the map of the département , you see how the autoroute is very far from the villages? La Forêt le Roi is here, but there is no road that leads to it.”
“Proof enough that the village has gone the way of the king's forester.”
“No. Not proof enough,” he says. “Not in France. There are footpaths and bicycles and canal boats and horses and carts.”
On the seventeenth-century map, the footpaths are marked. On the map of the département, they are also marked. Some of the paths correspond. Some do not. In any case, the translation of lines from map to terrain is a highly intuitive skill, like water divining.
“We will find it,” he says confidently. He measures something with thumb and forefinger on the royal forester's map and checks it against the modern map for scale. “The path should arrive somewhere here, when we can see the steeple of La Thierry.”
“Why does it matter? What do you think you'll find?”
“It was where the king took his mistresses, the hunting lodge. Un grand chasseur, le roi soleil. Of women and of deer.”
“Oh, so that's it. Hunting where the king hunted, and fucking where he fucked. That turns you on?”
“Certainement.” He is gathering up the maps and setting them aside, his hands trembling. She is awed, she is bemused, she is sometimes frightened by his flash floods of desire, the way appetite seizes him as a hawk might seize quail. But she is never certain who is hunter and who is prey. She cannot tell which one of them has power and which has none.
“All you really want,” she teases, “is a photograph of me in the lodge where Louise de la Vallière got laid.”
“Tais-toi, chérie. Tais-toi.”
The table creaks and groans with their weight. Time slithers, maps realign themselves, kings watch, the forest lures.
6. After the Hunt
“After the hunt,” he says, drowsy, “they say the king was inflamed. He liked to make love with the stag hung outside his window, dripping blood.”
“Charming. Eros and death again, that really turns the French on.”
“It turns everyone on. The French are honest about this, the puritan English are not.”
“I am not English.”
“Australian, English.” He shrugs to indicate the splitting of hairs. “Anglo-Saxon, protestant, puritan, inhibé, tendu . . . How do you say it?”
“Inhibited. Uptight.”
“Uptight, yes. But now . . . ” He kisses her. “Now you are more décontractée.”
“In French, I am someone else.”
“Now you have the face of a biche. You should look always like this. Et voilà, I have you on film. I will keep you this way.”
7. Secrets du Bois
“Here is where we will search,” he says, trailing an index finger across the map of the département, “after we leave the rue d'Etampes.”
“Through the forest? But the old highway would not have gone through the forest.”
“Three hundred years,” he says. “Trees grow again.”
“The forest where the bodies . . . ?”
“Si. I will be with you.”
“But the hunters? And you told me they still hunt wild boar.”
“We won't be in danger. The hunting season hasn't begun.”
8. Rue d'Etampes
Along the route to Etampes, each village is quiet as death. Stone house-fronts and high walls hug the road. The streets are limestone canyons, desolate. Rambler roses suck at the mortar and the walls are thorn-barbed and honeysuckle-choked, but beyond all that noisy color, hush crouches.
“No one lives in France,” Odette says. “Not outside Paris. That's my theory. The villages are decoys left over from the Hundred Years' War.”
“Listen.” Swann pulls her close and turns her to the wall that rises sudden as a rampart from the street. He presses his body against hers, and presses hers hard against the wall. “Listen,” he says against her ear and his hot breath is like waves breaking in her head. “What do you hear?”
“Surf. Ocean. The sea of you.”
“It's the law of village and not-village. You can hear it behind every wall. Someone is whispering to someone else: C'est l'Anglaise et le Parisien. Again.”
“Then tell them I'm not l'Anglaise. I wouldn't be English if you paid me. Je suis l'Australienne.”
“It's all the same to them. It is slicing the hair. You speak English.”
“Anyway, there's no one here. It's a ghost village,” she insists. “If we ever find La Forêt le Roi, there'll be no way to tell if it's abandoned or alive.”
“You are wrong. Already everyone in St. Sulpice knows. Listen.” He puts his ear to the wall and pretends to repeat what he hears: “They are taking the direction Etampes, they have passed through Venant, they are in Boissy-le-Sec, they are leaving the road. Even in La Forêt le Roi they know. They are waiting for us.”
“Then the baker tells them.”
9. The butcher, the baker
Each day, when the baker leans on his horn, she opens the gate in their wall. It is ten exactly by the church-tower clock. The baker parks in the cobbled square where the guillotine once stood, opens the back doors of his van, and leans against the shrine to Our Lady who wears white, a powdering of pigeon-shit centuries thick. The hot fresh smell of yeast pulls people like ribbons from behind high walls on all sides of the square.
“Ah, l'Anglaise!” the baker says every day. “Bonjour, madame. Combien de baguettes aujourd'hui ?”
“Deux, s'il vous plaît, monsieur. Je ne suis pas anglaise. Je suis australienne.”
Day after day, not a word, not an intonation changes.
“No one lives in France,” she says, “and nothing changes. Ever.”
“That is how we know we will find the village,” Swann explains. “And how we know they will be waiting for us.”
She says: “I dreamed there was blood on the baker's hands.”
10. Down among the Dead Men
“It's so dark in here,” she says. “I've always loved forests. Rainforests. Our kind of forest. But this one scares me.”
“Look! Look there. A hunter's abri.”
“It's the hunters more than the murders. I'm scared of guns.”
“Look.” He points to a small dam, a drinking trough. It is a lure. As they watch, a fawn pricks its way across moss on dainty unsteady legs. At the trough it pauses, sensing something, and stares at them with its huge and lustrous eyes, and then it is gone, a streak of taupe and white.
“The hunters stay downwind,” he explains. “They wait till the deer start to drink.”
“That's so cruel. That's so unfair.” She examines the water hole. “It's quite steep. It's very—merde!” Her feet slide, she clutches at saplings, she slithers into the mud.
Swann laughs, changing light reading and shutter speed. “I'll call this one 'Fallen Woman.'”
“Oh for God's sake,” she says, and hurls a handful of mud at the lens.
“My Nikon!” he cries.
She sees his face and pulls herself up, scrabbling at roots, ferns, small trees. She begins to run, headlong, deep into the forest. Tangled ivy clutches at her ankles. She lurches forward. Her lungs hurt, she feels a stitch like a knife in her side. She runs like a deer. She can hear the thudding of his feet, of her heart, of the blood in her ears. She falls and staggers up and hugs the trunk of an oak for support and then she sees the white stag and cannot even scream.
Massive, the color of soiled cream, he watches her, unblinking. His antlers seem vast and ancient, austere as the scaffolding that once stood in Place de la République. She cannot breathe. The stag's basilisk eyes are impassive. Thou shalt not pass, the eyes say.
“Please,” she sobs.
Welcome to the royal hunt, the eyes say. There is no escape.
She seems to faint. A blackness floats before her eyes. She is buffeted by something, by history, by time, by the illicit, by something that is hurting her wrists. There seem to be cords. She sees the leather strap of the camera case.
“Magnificent, magnificent,” Swann breathes. “The royal stag. I got you both. I'll call it 'The Huntress Bound.'” He is taking her violently from behind. The tree bark strafes her face, her belly, her breasts. Her wrists are bound with the leather cord to the trunk. “He's still watching us,” Swann says, his voice drunk with arousal. “He knows this scene.”
Swann's skin is slick against her back. She can feel his nails deep in her thighs, drawing blood. Beyond her bound wrists, beyond the bark-strafed skin of her forearms, her eyes meet the eyes of the stag.
11. Woman Getting out of the Bath
When she steps out of the bath, the water is pink with blood.
“Like that,” he says, pulling away the towel. “With your hair wet, and one foot still in the water, and the steam rising.”
She feels drugged. The shutter flickflickflicks like an eyelash. She is wet as a seal and slippery, her movements tidal.
12. Déjeuner sur l'herbe
An old man leans on a pitchfork and stares at them stupidly. His face is seamed like a quarry. He has no teeth. Behind him, the floor of the stone barn is piled with hay. They can see a few sheep and a horse.
“We could ask him to take a photograph,” Odette says.
“We don't need it. We've already got proof. The village sign.”
“Both of us together, I mean.” She smoothes the linen cloth on the grass near the edge of the pond. From her backpack, she takes out the glasses and the wine.
Swann says: “I'm going to pick apples.” A tree heavy with fruit hangs over the pond and Swann is climbing, the Nikon slung around his neck. “I knew it,” he says. “From up here I can see the iron spikes where the stags were hung. It's the hunting lodge. The stone barn was the hunting lodge.”
Odette watches the old man who watches Swann. That is surely his apple tree, she thinks. This is his barn. He could be a royal by-blow. He could be Monsieur Bousquet's great-great-grandson, five times removed.
“Can I tempt you?” Swann swings down out of the tree. He offers an apple and laughs. When she bites into it, the eye of the Nikon blinks. “Eve in Eden,” he says, and the high bright sound is in his voice. “Tonight, when the old man goes, we'll sleep on his hay.”
“I'm going to ask him to take a photograph.”
“He won't have a clue what to do. Look at the way he looks at us. You might as well ask him for the moon.”
“He thinks we're trespassing.”
“He doesn't. No one owns a village pond or a village well. He's not thinking anything.”
“He's scared of us then.”
“Inbred,” Swann decides. “I suppose it's possible that no one from outside has been here for a hundred years.”
“I'm going to ask him just the same.”
“But I will take your photograph,” Swann promises. “I brought six rolls of film. I want you in the king's hunting lodge, naked in hay.”
“Just once, I want one of us together. I want the picnic on the grass, just this one peaceful scene, for a keepsake.”
“You don't need a keepsake in Eden.”
“It's no good, Swann. I'm leaving. You must have known. You must surely have realized that.”
His face goes still. She sees his knuckles turn white and the wine glass break in his hand.
“You're bleeding,” she cries.
He lifts his bloodied palm to her face and strokes her cheek. “I won't let you leave,” he says.
13. That Obscure Object of Desire
A man and a woman are drinking wine in a sidewalk café.
“Your hair is grayer than last time,” Odette says. “It suits you. Men look more distinguished with age.” She touches the birthstain under his eye with her fingertip. “Mon cher volcan.”
Swann takes her hands and kisses them. “There is still a wildness in you, Odette,” he says. “Ma biche sauvage. You were like a doe in the forest, always poised to take flight.”
“You were so violent, Swann, when we were young. You frightened me.”
“Violent?” He raises startled brows. “Mais non. It is your puritan fears you remember.”
“I found an old photograph. Our picnic with wine and apples in La Forêt le Roi.”
He closes his eyes. “A thousand and one nights in the king's hunting lodge,” he sighs fondly.
“I was going to bring it, but I've managed to misplace it again. I know it's somewhere in the clutter in my study.”
Swann takes a deep slow breath. “I can smell the hay. I beguiled myself for years with that fantasy. It was a considerable work of art.”
“We asked that old man to take the picture.”
“I had some sort of idea for a show. A la recherche du village perdu, something like that. I had the entire composition, in detail, inside my head.”
“Late afternoon. You can tell, because our shadows are very long.”
“I had a hunting lodge and a pond and an apple tree. I even had the lighting and the angles worked out.”
“The essence of pastoral tranquility,” she muses. “You would never guess what was just outside the frame.”
“The map was real though,” he says. “The possibility was always there. Camus wrote that the way matters little. What suffices is the will to arrive.”
“Do you remember the photograph of you leaning on the village sign?” she asks. “You look pensive. You've found the object of your obsession but it isn't enough. I love that picture. It's the essence of you.”
He traces her lips with one finger. “In my wallet,” he says, “I carry the photograph of you in the king's hunting lodge. You look the way you should always look.”
“I only look that way in French,” Odette says.
