Free By a Slow River by Philippe Claudel

of course. I left the kid behind and took off like a wild rabbit, imagining I’d discover Destinat disemboweled, probably by an unhappy convict who’d returned, after twenty years’ hard labor under the hot sun, to pay his respects. I was even already telling myself on the path to the door that, when all was said and done, he deserved an end like that, the astonished victim of a really savage murder, since among all those heads he’d gotten over the years there were surely some perfectly innocent ones, people conveyed to the scaffold with their arms and feet firmly bound, screaming for someone to listen to reason.
    I arrive at the gate with my hair still wet, my shirt in disarray, my trousers half buttoned, and my heart knocking against my ribs. I see him standing on the flight of steps, ramrod straight, a devilish commander, a true master of morose ceremonies, Swiss Guard of an unholy see: Mr. Prosecutor, very much alive, his guts apparently intact and no sign of mayhem on his person. As soon as I see him like that, erect as a flagpole, hands open on nothing, looking off in an awkward daze, I tell myself, If it isn’t him; I tell myself—and everything stops. I see Lysia Verhareine, again turning the corner of the Mureaux farm, I see the scene countless times in rapid succession, more real than life itself in all its precise details: the swaying of her dress and her little bag, the nape of her neck white under the rising sun, Bouzie pounding on the anvil in his forge a few steps away, Fermillin’s red eyes, old lady Sèchepart whisking a broom in front of her doorstep, the scent of fresh straw, the plaintive cries of the swifts that skim the roofs, the mooing of the cows that Dourin’s son is leading to the park. All that, ten times, a hundred times, as though I were taking refuge in this scene, as though I wanted to lock myself inside it forever.
    I don’t know how many minutes the prosecutor and I faced each other wordless on the steps. I don’t much remember our gestures or expressions at that time, anything that could have distinguished one part of that moment from another. It isn’t my
present
memory that’s at fault, it’s the memory of that moment which, even as it was happening, cut itself to pieces, leaving gaping holes in the fabric of my recollections. Maybe I became an automaton, following him about mechanically; maybe he guided me, took me by the hand. Who knows! My first clear memory is the pounding of my heart I felt once again, the blood in my chest. My eyes were open. The prosecutor was at my left, leading me from behind. The walls of the little tenant house were covered in light-colored cloth in that room adorned with bouquets of flowers. I recall a few pieces of furniture: a chest of drawers, a wardrobe, a bed.
    On her bed lay Lysia Verhareine, her eyes closed. Closed for all time, on the world and on the rest of us. Her hands were clasped upon her chest. She was wearing her dress of that morning, the shade of vineyard peaches, and little shoes of a singular brown— the brown that earth turns when crackled by the sun, when it becomes silky dust. Above her a moth whirred around like a madman, bumping against the half-open windowpane before heading back in precarious circles toward her face, then back again to the window, a dance that seemed like some hideous pavane.
    The collar of her dress, slightly open, revealed on the skin of her throat a deep furrow, an almost blackened red. With a feint at the ceiling, the prosecutor indicated a suspended lamp made of blue porcelain, complicated and flanked by a counterweight in the form of a globe—the five continents, the seas and oceans in gleaming copper. Then he drew from his pocket a delicate belt of woven leather, embroidered with daisies and mimosas, out of which a hand, once supple and sweet, had fashioned a loop, the philosopher’s very image of perfection, the union of promise and fulfillment, beginning and end, birth and death.
    Not a word