A Citizen of the Country Read online

  “Did you ever see such a thing?” the sergeant enthused. “So many people! So many builders!” Pétiot puffed his pipe in agreement. On many of the little buildings, and even on individual stones in the wall, the late-afternoon sun picked out inscriptions. Ils ne passeront pas! The Germans won’t pass this spot. Vive la France! vive la République! Many of the stones had names, died for France, 6 sept 1870. It’s easy to make inscriptions in chalk, but all this effort was disconcerting, like art made by the insane. As the coach negotiated the hill, the sheep moved away from the road like bits of the walls that had not yet settled in place.

  Reisden had been given a room in the main building, the actual castle. Before Sabine, Montfort had been a bad doss; one had pounded the mattress to scare the mice out. Now the windows had been repaired, the cracked glass replaced, the corners swept clean of their accumulations of dead leaves and dust-tigers. The old furniture had been cleaned of its grime and polished until it glowed. The bedstead in Reisden’s room was eight feet high and carved with medieval angels with slanted eyes, like a magnificent tomb, very André. But what Sabine had added— Someone had told her that Flemish medieval castles need Flemish medieval furnishings, so she had gone to, at a guess, the biggest department store in Belgium and ordered a wagon-load of the Middle Ages. The walls were covered with bright wool machine-made hangings featuring unicorns, armored heroes, and droopy-haired maidens. The bedside clock looked like the ass end of Rouen Cathedral in brass and was an alarm clock. Reisden, fresh from furnishing his family’s apartment, made shooing motions at it. He discovered the chamber pot underneath the bed, finest medievalesque china, hand-painted with André’s coat of arms. He sat on the edge of the bed and laughed. The house stationery featured a color print of the castle. He wrote a note to Perdita, describing the clock and chamber pot.

  Downstairs, the Great Hall had tortuous new Gothic-style dining chairs but was still lit by torches and candles; the torches guttered and roared away in their holders and the candles melted away in a chill draft. André sat at one end of the table, silent, refusing food, wine, even water, staring with a fixed smile. From time to time, he took a notebook from his jacket pocket and scribbled a line of dialogue. Sabine cut her fish into scraps as though it were André’s liver.

  She had changed to a yellow-green satin and was wearing a large, plain necklace of brown beads. Russian amber: she wore it with a stiff-necked consciousness that it was fashionable. It was, but not on her. Patriotic, though. Perhaps Cyron had given it to her. She fidgeted in her dress, pulled at the weight of the necklace. Her clothes oppressed her.

  After dinner the soldiers took over the billiard room (which now actually had a working billiard table) and André went into the library to write. Reisden stayed with Sabine and Mme Pétiot in Sabine’s new music room, waiting his chance to talk with Sabine.

  He was reasonably good at small talk, and for a while they spun the wheels of polite conversation. Sabine said the weather had been so warm that the wheat and the hay were well along. Did he have land? No, he didn’t; only in the Carpathians. She said she wanted to have more parkland around the house; it wasn’t fitting to have only sheep-graze and beet fields. She asked if he would like her to play the piano, to which the only possible answer is how extremely delightful. With the flourishes of uncertainty, she began to make her way through a Chopin piece that Perdita would have made interesting. Montfort was a damp house, in spite of Sabine’s new central heating, and the piano was correspondingly out of tune. Sabine threw her head back, smiling over her shoulder at him, imitating the flirtatious female musicians in Italian moving pictures.

  From Pétiot’s wife, who had had a long trip, came disapproving yawns. She was staying because she thought they needed a chaperone. Reisden couldn’t disagree.

  The music came to its long-anticipated end. Reisden excused himself. It was moonlit out, a clear night. He let himself out the front door, breathing the night air with relief, and walked up the hill; at least he could look at the towers.

  Had she been flirting with him? Not personally. Most of the men she’d met had been suitors for her money. She wanted romance.

  “Wait,” he heard behind him in breathy nasal tones. With a rattle of pebbles, Sabine was making her way up the hill behind him.

  “Where is Madame Pétiot?” he asked. “Is she coming too?”

  Sabine, breathless, came up beside him. “I told her to go to bed,” she said, self-satisfied.

  My dear, has no one ever told you one doesn’t tell the guests to go to bed? No. Clearly no one ever had, the way no one had told her not to buy machine-made tapestries. Perdita would say he was being a snob. It’s not snobbism, he protested, it’s a matter of class. He was being a snob. André would be too. Style wasn’t the only barrier between André and Sabine, but it didn’t help.

  “I wanted to talk to you alone,” she said. “Is my husband crazy?”

  “Is he?” he temporized.

  Over her childish face, in the moonlight, came a sudden darkness. “He locks himself in his dressing room at night,” she said. “He makes me stay here, when I want to come to Paris.”

  “Do you know why?” he asked.

  Sabine nodded. “He got sick to his stomach on our wedding night. He threw up all night. Now he says I poisoned him.”

  “On your wedding night?” This was new. “Not Egypt?”

  “That was later. Everybody got sick on our wedding day. It was the salmon. But André made a big story out of it, he threw up all night, every time I knocked at the door he said he was just about to be sick again. And then he kept saying he was still sick, and when we were going to Egypt he was trainsick or seasick, and then later . . . Are you going to put him in an asylum? Papa Cyron says he will if André doesn’t get better.”

  This was news too. “I want to cure him.”

  “Good luck!”

  “Don’t you?”

  Sabine shrugged. “He’s not like I thought he was.”

  “How did you meet him?”

  “I saw him at the theatre—” Her face glowed suddenly. “He was— Necrosar! When I realized he wasn’t married and came from my region, when I knew I could marry him, I couldn’t sleep, I stayed up all night every night thinking of him.”

  Reisden said, really dismayed, “Hadn’t you met him outside the theatre?”

  “He is like that,” Sabine said simply. “It’s not just the theatre, it’s not just acting. I know he’s like that. But he won’t be like that to me and I don’t know why.”

  No. Necrosar wasn’t just acting. “Do you really want to be married to Necrosar?” he said. “Not André?”

  “Better than what I’ve got! I’m not married to anyone!”

  “Necrosar is a half-truth,” he said.

  She sighed impatiently and changed the subject. “Tell me about your wife,” she said. “She’s an actress or something, isn’t she? She’s off on tour? And you don’t mind?” Sabine said, crossing her arms. “She goes off and gets all glamoured up for all those people out there, and she doesn’t pay any attention to you?”

  Of course I mind; I’m as frustrated as you are. “I don’t want the woman onstage,” he said, “I want all of her, the one who gives concerts, the one who practices, my son’s mother, my wife.” Applause from the audience, he thought; what a hero our Reisden is.

  “I don’t get anything,” said Sabine. “Backstage it’s Jules or Ruthie fixing him eggs. Eggs! Necrosar! Where am I? What does he want me for, but my money?” she said bitterly. “And when I spend it, he doesn’t even like what I do; he laughs, hollow, huh huh, and then he ignores me.” They were standing by an unfinished low wall. She sat down on it, discouraged, tired; she leaned against a pile of chalk blocks brought up from the stone-dump, ready to be built into the wall. He watched her, a little concerned; she hadn’t eaten much and she was pale. With both fists she grasped the tight waist of her dress and the corset beneath it and pulled both away from her body, as if her stomach hurt and she was u
nable to ease it. She sighed, then held her hands palm-flat over her stomach. The gesture was crude but extraordinarily sensual, as though Sabine were all flesh, as if her very flesh was sad, deserted, pained because André didn’t care for it; still Sabine cared for it. She looked up and saw him looking at her; the look hung in the air between them for a minute, complete intimacy. Two deserted people. Two of the people backstage. She sat up straight and looked at him questioningly, challengingly: You might accept it, her look said, but not me.

  “Let’s look at the abbey, shall we?” he said, not wanting to share a moment like this with his friend’s wife; not while his own wife was away.

  He bored her talking Perpendicular and High Gothic while he shone his torch up the towers. The ruins were immensely old, shaggy with the grass and bushes that grew in the cracked stone. No wireless antenna snaked up among the gargoyles; at least Jules and he weren’t giving away government secrets. Around the doorless door, the revolutionaries of a hundred years ago had decapitated every saint and angel; through the archway nothing was left of the abbey but rubble, blackened timbers too big to re-use or burn for fuel, bits of paving moth-eaten by the moon. Brambles snagged at their feet. The remnants of walls half-enclosed them. Where the crypt had been, a hole led into darkness. “Be careful,” Reisden said.

  “I was married here,” Sabine said. “My shoe heels sank right into the mud. I wanted to get married in Paris but I did it for him because Counts of Montfort have to marry at Montfort Abbey.”

  Reisden said nothing.

  “He did It to me once,” Sabine said, embarrassing him. “Papa Maurice talked to him about duty, and one night a couple of months ago he got drunk as a pig on old slops and came in and did It, and then he locked himself in his dressing room again. He acts as though it never happened.”

  The top of the hillside was hillocked with mounds and ditches. They had come back to the top of the path, and she needed to jump down to get back on it. He went first. She stood above him, holding out her arms, waiting to be helped down. She jumped clumsily, her foot slipped, she fell; he put his arms around her. Her mouth pressed against his, tentatively, saltily.

  “No, Sabine,” he said, moving back and depositing her at a safe distance.

  She burst into tears. “I just don’t know what to do.”

  He could feel her body in the palms of his hands. “Start by not doing that,” he said.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “I’m on your side,” he said, “but not that way.” He sighed. “Egypt,” he said in a businesslike way. “What happened in Egypt?”

  “Nothing.”

  “He was ill.”

  “I didn’t poison him,” Sabine said.

  He heard a half lie. “What did you do?”

  “Everybody knew what was happening,” she burst out. “What wasn’t happening. Even my guide. So one day my guide took me to a place where they sell things. You know, things? The guide said they always worked and they were safe.”

  He stared at her, and tried not to.

  “They were safe,” Sabine said hotly. “I knew they were. Because— because why should anyone give somebody something like that when it wasn’t safe? I didn’t poison him, I didn’t. It was a powder in a little paper packet and I put it on some sticky candy, thinking he’d eat a piece and ... He was working all night, writing something, and he ate it all.”

  Reisden nodded, sickened. He’d seen André work; André grazed constantly and without thought, like a sheep. “He overdosed himself.”

  “I didn’t mean anything,” said Sabine. “He says I poisoned him, but I didn’t mean to.”

  She clasped her arms around herself. The gesture was part pleasure in her body. But it troubled her, touching her own skin, half of it was almost a shiver, and her face went bleak again. “He has real poison,” she said. “He has it in his office, arsenic, I’ve seen it. And I have a feeling, I have feelings sometimes ... as if it’s all bad somehow, something’s going to go wrong.”

  What could go wrong that hadn’t already?

  She looked up at him through her black heroine’s eyelashes and gave the answer.

  “When he did It,” she said, “I think It worked. I mean, I get sick in the mornings and I can’t button my clothes, Mademoiselle Françoise is having to make me new dresses, and the birds follow me, Mademoiselle Françoise says that’s an infallible sign. But he-- He’ll say it doesn’t belong to him. And he has to say it’s his. He can’t be that crazy and say it isn’t his, can he?”

  Zeno Puckett is looking for a cowboy

  AH, WELL, THAT WAS grand, wasn’t it? André was going to be a father. That would make things simpler, wouldn’t it?

  André not only had to be helped; he had to be helped, now, thoroughly. Or God pity the child.

  Montfort owned a new Rolls, courtesy again of Sabine’s money. The next day, Reisden and André went out in it to scout locations in the Flanders countryside. They left the chauffeur behind and Reisden drove. André sat in the front seat, his long hair blowing in the wind, the light making his cheekbones prominent and crude: Necrosar out in the daylight.

  The hamper Sabine had packed for them sat on the back seat. When they had got beyond the first rise, André made Reisden stop and take a sample for analysis from each dish she had given them. Cold lamb with a confit of onions; a salad of early greens and palm hearts; fresh bread; cheese and apples; a bottle of wine. There could be ergot in the bread, André said; who knew what the palm hearts really were.... Reisden said that it was probably what it appeared to be, a rather nice lunch.

  “Look at the apples. Did she inject them?”

  “André, you know more ways of poisoning than I do.” Of course André did.

  “If you inject them next to the stem, the injection’s invisible.”

  “Ass,” Reisden said uneasily.

  The day was glorious. André leaned out from behind the windscreen, letting the wind batter his face. His face looked thin, almost skeletal.

  “She doesn’t seem sinister,” Reisden said. “She’s unhappy.” Just like you, André.

  They went round to a small, ancient, moated castle, Olhain, which André wanted for Méduc’s house. André made sketches of battle scenes. From Olhain they motored to Arras and talked with the postcard-seller-witch on the Grand’Place. The old man smelled like sheep; his postcards were fly-blown. He had pictures of himself for sale, the same picture Ruthie had bought. In the back of his shop Reisden noticed silver francs, pierced for a love charm, and small wax-corked bottles filled with liquids and drowned herbs.

  Sabine had probably bought charms from Omer Heurtemance before she turned to fly agaric in Egypt and nearly killed André. Love charms. Witchcraft. Reisden bought a couple.

  “You believe in witches?” André asked after they left.

  “I believe in knowledge; I’m taking them to Paris to be analyzed.”

  ***

  They ate a late lunch at a cafe on the square. The local cheese, Coeur d’Arras, smelt like something long dead. André liked it. They were washing the foul stuff down with beer when a stranger approached the cafe. He was about six and a half feet tall, with a long loping gait and a face like a monkey, and he was wearing, of all things to see in French Flanders, an American ten-gallon hat. He looked at them with a weary pessimism.

  “Don’t either of you boys speak English, I guess,” he said.

  Reisden had astonishing numbers of brothers-in-law in Arizona; one of them had visited Paris last winter. “Nope,” he said.

  “Well, tar me. Put ’er there, friend.”

  The cowboy folded himself down onto the cafe chair, accepted beer, and declined cheese. André and he sniffed at each other like two dogs wondering whether the other was a dog at all. The cowboy’s name was Zeno Puckett, he came originally from Lamapo Flats, Missouri, and he was looking for a friend he’d met riding in the Carver-Whitney “Wild America” show in Moscow. He reached into an enormous pocket and brought out a small, flat, badly prin
ted grey book. “My pal wrote that. T.J. Blantire.” The book had been published by a newspaper in Chicago, the title was Through Russia on a Mustang, and the frontispiece was T.J. himself in a Russian fur hat, sitting on a depressed-looking animal in front of a dacha.

  “You maybe seen T.J.?”

  Between the hat and the enormous dark drooping mustache, there wasn’t much to see of T.J. What there was looked like a badly stuffed walrus. But it was the only picture Puckett had of T.J., and, he said, T.J. was missing.

  “T.J. wrut to me from Paris and he said he was signed on to a movin’ pitcher here. Said he would be obliged if I’d come help, because there was more horses than he could rightly handle. Here I am in Ay-rass, though, and nary a sign of T.J. to be found.”

  Reisden passed the book to André. “André, is that your missing horse wrangler?”

  André contemplated the mustache under the hat and shrugged.

  “Would T.J. have gone off with a woman?” Reisden asked the cowboy. “Because I’m afraid that’s what he’s supposed to have done.”

  “Dang,” Puckett said. “T.J. is a wild young thing. Don’t know the gal, do you? Because I would sure like to get a hold of him.”

  André didn’t.

  “Do you want T.J.’s job?”

  They gave the cowboy an introduction to André’s production manager and sent him off. Then, while the shadows lengthened across the square, André did geometry, figuring what time of day he should film the guillotine scene in the Grand’Place if it were to be filmed in late July. He brought out his guillotine model. They would be late for dinner; but André did not want to be at Montfort for dinner, or at all.