Free By a Slow River by Philippe Claudel Page A

was said. Our eyes would seek each other’s gaze, then return once again to the young teacher’s body. Death had not stolen her beauty—not yet, in any case. To that extent, she remained among us, so to speak, the face of a woman almost alive, her complexion very fair. Her hands were still warm when I placed my hand on them, somewhat embarrassed at first, because I expected her to open her eyes, to look at me and protest this intimacy I was presuming. I closed the collar of her dress to hide the finely traced bruise. Now the illusion would be perfect: a sleep that does not speak its true name.
    The prosecutor let me be. He didn’t dare make a gesture or take a step, and when I turned away from Lysia’s face to look at his, I saw in his disoriented eyes a question to which I had no answer. Goddamn it, do I know why people die? Why they choose to die? Do I know any more today than I did then? After all, death was more his game than mine! He was the one who summoned it regularly, knew it on chummy terms, so to speak: an acquaintance he renewed several times a year when he went to the prison yard at V to see his will done before setting off without a qualm to have his lunch at Bourrache’s.
    I offer him the thin belt, by way of asking if he’d been the one who had . . .
    “Yes,” he replied, without my having to pronounce the word.
    I cleared my throat. “You didn’t find anything . . .?”
    He looked around him slowly, at the wardrobe, the chair, the chest of drawers, the dressing table, the bouquets of floral sentinels posted more or less everywhere in the room, the hot thick night forcing the window, the bed, the little curtain, the night table on which sat a delicate watch whose spreading hands continued to move time forward; then he met my eyes once more. “Not a thing,” he said, still dazed, no longer the prosecutor. I had no way of knowing exactly whether this was a statement or, in fact, another question—or just the words of a man under whom the ground kept giving way.
    On the stairway there were the slow, difficult, painful steps of several people: Barbe and Solemn, followed by Hippolyte Lucy, the doctor. A good doctor, thin as a rail, humane and very poor; those two things went hand in hand. If the patient was needy, he hardly ever charged for a house call, and the needy included nearly everyone in our town. “You can pay me later,” he’d always say, with the most earnest of smiles. “I’m not hard up,” he’d add with a growl, yet it was poverty that killed him, in 1927. “Starved to death!” said Desharet, his fat jerk of a colleague, with his garlic breath and ruddy face, who’d come from V in an automobile wrapped in chrome, oily leather, and brass to examine the doctor’s brittle body. He’d finally been found on the floor in his kitchen— his kitchen unfurnished, without so much as a crust of bread or a pat of butter in sight, only a plate that had been clean for days and a glass of water from the well. “Starved to death,” the bastard repeated, as though put out by having to bend down to meet the body, over which his belly and jowls were hanging, all trussed up in flannel and English cloth.
    Dr. Lucy put his hand on the girl’s forehead and let it slide down her cheeks, toward the insult on her throat; as soon as he saw it he stopped. He joined our perplexed company, starting his own contemplation of all our questions that would never be uttered. Barbe gave us to understand we had nothing further to do there, in this girl’s room, which would remain just that. With a nod, she directed us to the door. We obeyed like children—Solemn, the doctor, the prosecutor, and I.

XI
    And still the war went on. It had produced so many cadavers there was no point in counting anymore. But the news of the young teacher’s death—and the way it happened—came as a blow to our town all the same. The streets were deserted. The gossips, the fucking backbiters, the old blabbermouths usually ready