Two months later
The blush of pink wings filled the sky, skinny legs trailing behind, long necks thrust forward like rosy walking sticks. The flamingos were lifting off the water in the last rays of the setting sun, when the lagoon looked on fire and the shadows lengthened. We were all caught on the cusp between night and day.
I sat astride Cosette and ambled peacefully around the dense beds of reed that fringed the lagoon. A lurid green tree-frog crossed our trail and Cosette whinnied softly to tell me about it. We took this track every evening, sometimes with Léon at our side on Achille, to watch the thousands of flamingos leaving their feeding grounds to fly to their roosting sites for the night. I watched the scene with infinite pleasure and each time I saw the birds leave, I thought of how I had left for Paris because I thought my world lay there.
Foolishly, I’d thought I could live without the place that formed the bedrock of who I am. I gave Cosette’s neck a pat and with no direction from me she stepped off the trail into a dense knot of tamarisks and undergrowth where a silvery white egret was preening its feathers on the roof of a dilapidated hut. It was draped in sea-green moss and silvery lichen, leaning back into the foliage behind it as though trying to hide. Exactly like the person who built it.
I dismounted and loosened Cosette’s girth, so that she could graze in comfort.
Inside the hut lay some lengths of timber and a box of nails. I took a hammer off the rickety windowsill and continued the task I had started yesterday, replacing the rotten planks at the back. It was not my hut. It was André’s. He had built it in the days when he ran free on the marshes, but it had slowly shed its sturdiness over the years.
I hadn’t heard from André. I didn’t expect to.
It had taken me a long time but I had finally learned what manner of man he is. A man of blind devotion to his country. I won’t say what manner of man André was because I choose to think of him as alive. Still on the prowl out there. Of course I know I could be mistaken. But he is still a fundamental part of my family, and I hold on to that.
I continued to bang in nails contentedly and looked out through the grimy window at the first clouds bunched on the horizon, moody and gold-tipped. Dark political clouds were rolling from the east too that would test France to the limit, but I had faith in my country. In my country and in my fellow countrymen and women.
Traitors like Clarisse will not succeed in dragging France into servitude under the yoke of Communism, because we will root them out, every last one of them. I hit the shiny head of the nail with my hammer, driving it into place, just as we will drive people like Clarisse into the place they deserve.
I was wrong when I thought I could be a part of that world, but it took a person like Léon to show me that a world of lies and secrets and deceit is not a world I want to be a part of. So I work on the farm now. I have great ideas for it and sit at night with Léon drawing up plans and schemes that Papa will agree to. The world is changing and we will be changing with it.
And when André comes, the hut will be ready.