Free By a Slow River by Philippe Claudel Page B

with an insinuation, stayed mum in their houses. The guys in the cafés just drank in silence. All you heard was the sound of bottles and swallowing, of glasses being emptied, nothing more. A stuporous tribute of sorts. Even the summer seemed to flag. There were gray, stifling days, as if the sun didn’t dare show its face, spending its hours behind ample clouds the color of mourning. The youngsters weren’t hanging around, or going fishing, or throwing rocks through windows. Even the livestock seemed listless. The bells chopped time like a dead tree trunk. Sometimes the howl of wolves could be heard, but it was only Martial Maire, the simpleton who’d understood everything and who huddled against the door of the school, bellowing. Maybe all of us should have done likewise. Maybe there’s nothing else you can do in such circumstances.
    I should have asked the prosecutor some questions. That’s the way it’s done in cases of violent death—of suicide, I mean, since we have to call a spade a spade. Yes, I should have. It was my duty, but I let it go. Could he have added anything to what I knew? Not much, I’ll wager. And facing him I would have felt like a prick, twisting my cap, looking at the floor, the ceiling, my hands, without daring to come to the point—whatever that was. He was the one who’d found her. He was taking a stroll when he’d noticed the open window and seen the body. He’d rushed over, forced the door of the room—locked from the inside—and then . . . nothing more. He took her in his arms and laid her on the bed. Then he sent for me. All that he told me, once Barbe had led us out and we walked around on the lawn without knowing where to go or what to do.
    In the days that followed, Destinat remained secluded in his château. He spent his hours at a window, looking at the little house as though expecting the young teacher to appear. This much I would learn from the evening of Barbe’s brandied testimony.
    We tried to find out whether Lysia Verhareine had a family— or, rather, I tried a bit and the mayor tried very hard. We came up empty-handed. Just an address on some envelopes, a crossed-out address of a former landlady; the mayor spoke with her on the telephone but only half understood her because of her northern accent. All the same, he grasped that she knew nothing of her former tenant. When letters arrived, the landlady would forward them to the new address—that of the château—which the girl had sent to her. “And were there a lot of letters?” the mayor asked, with me right there next to him. He never got an answer. The telephone cut off. In those days it was still unreliable. And it was wartime besides. Even the telephone had been mobilized, I guess.
    Next we questioned Marcel Crouche, the mailman, who never managed to finish his rounds because of other rounds he never refused: rounds of wine, brandy, coffee with rum, Pernod, and vermouth. By late morning, he would end up sitting against the wall of the washhouse, slurring political humbug and then snoring like a saw, his mailbag clutched under his arm. With the château toward the end of his route, he was by then already walking as if on the bridge of a ship, tossed by a heavy storm.
    “Letters—sure there were letters. I looked at the address, not the name. When it said château, it was for the château. Whether it was for the prosecutor or the young lady, I wouldn’t know fuckall. I just delivered them, and he sorted it out. I always give mail to the prosecutor himself, never to Barbe or to Solemn. That’s how he wants it, and after all it’s his house.”
    Marcel Crouche poked his big nose, ravaged by smallpox, into his glass of brandy, sniffing the liquid like the very elixir of life, which I suppose for him it was. All three of us drank in silence, the mayor, the mailman, and me. Then there was another round. From the expressions on our faces, the mayor and I figured we were thinking the same thing. But we also both