In the winter of 1949, Gaspard Valentin Renaud and Jean-Pierre Courcoul, who originally hailed from Ivry-sur-Seine and a small village outside of Limoges, respectively, pooled the money that they had saved up over ten years spent working as guards in the Con Son penitentiary and used it to lease twenty hectares of brushland in the sparsely populated stretch between Ban Me Thuot and Pleiku, upon which they planned to plant rubber. Neither of them had ever worked in the agricultural sector before, let alone traveled north of Saigon, but Gaspard was confident that the Highlands were the ideal site for their enterprise. First of all, it was cheap, he had argued, after Jean-Pierre had expressed concerns about the suitability of the climate of Darlac, but it still lay beneath the 15th parallel, and the trees would be able to grow. This had been assured to him by an acquaintance who worked at the experimental forestry station at Trang-Bom. Additionally, the remoteness of the region also made it unlikely that the Viet Minh, who were currently occupied with destroying the rubber factories around Binh Duong, would set fire to it.
But the Montagnards! Jean-Pierre had protested. Did he not fear the tribespeople who lived in the hills? Their intended plantation lay at the intersection of indigenous Rhadé and Jarai territories, and Jean-Pierre couldn’t imagine that two Frenchmen would receive a very warm welcome from them.
That’s the beauty of the thing, said Gaspard. The Montagnards actually prefer us to the ethnic Vietnamese! To them, the Annamites are deceitful invaders who are trying to take their land.
But are we not also taking their land? countered Jean-Pierre.
Gaspard shrugged dismissively. Well, perhaps. But at least we brought doctors, Jesus, and coffee along with us.
In the end, Jean-Pierre had agreed to go to the mountains, not because he trusted Gaspard’s scheme but because, after a decade of being slowly steamed alive on an island a hundred kilometers southeast of the geographical ass of Vietnam, the scent of hot sea air had become fused in his mind with his memories of the prison camp and of what he had done there, and he never wanted to smell the ocean again for as long as he lived.
In Saigon, they took out an additional loan; they would need to hire men to clear the land and then to water and graft and tend and stake and weed. They would need to hire even more to construct the compound where the latex would eventually be processed. Their farm would be small, but it would take several years for the trees to mature enough for tapping to begin, and Gaspard and Jean-Pierre knew that they would have to manage their money prudently. They headed north in a secondhand truck with seven hundred Hevea brasiliensis saplings tucked snugly in the back.
The first problem they encountered was that when they stopped in Dalat to spend the night after a long day of driving, Jean-Pierre did not want to leave. His eyes lit up when he saw the gabled villas, the men all wearing smart coats and scarves to fend off the mountain chill, the noble pines, the manicured rosebushes which only grew in this particular climate, the charming man-made lake around which couples strolled arm in arm, and he declared that he had been transported back home and wished to stay.
This is nothing like your home! Gaspard finally snapped, annoyed by Jean-Pierre’s squeal of excitement upon spotting a Vietnamese man sipping a chocolat chaud while wearing a beret. Gaspard hadn’t left Southeast Asia in the last fifteen years, so he was not even sure if he could correctly identify what home was or was not like anymore, but he could sense that Jean-Pierre’s nostalgia was imperiling his rubber dreams. Besides, he added for spite, that man isn’t drinking hot chocolate, he’s drinking soy milk.
Jean-Pierre’s face fell, and Gaspard switched tactics and tried to appeal to his sense of adventure instead. We didn’t leave France and cross half the world just to find more France, he gently cajoled. We came here to see wild elephants! We didn’t spend ten years being shat upon by gulls on Con Son to end up here in this…this…Potemkin Grenoble!—here he waved a hand up at the café terraces upon which Europeans nibbled ice cream made from the nonnative strawberries that flourished only in Dalat and nowhere else in the colonies—The city you’re seeing isn’t real, it’s just a dream concocted by the homesick in order to console themselves. It’s already fading. It’s not going to outlast this war, but you and I will, my little Jeanpi. We are in search of something greater. Something that is more than a dream.
Gaspard did not even let them eat supper at the Hôtel du Parc that night, despite Jean-Pierre’s pleading that if he could just eat a couple of real gougères, he would never complain about anything ever again.
I’m sorry, but it’s much too dangerous, admonished Gaspard. If you taste one, you’ll never leave. You must think of yourself as Odysseus and this as the land of the lotus eaters. The land of the gougère eaters! Ha!
He steered them to the Dalat night market instead for a meal of artichoke-and-pork-knuckle soup at a Vietnamese-run stall, telling Jean-Pierre that it was a fair compromise, because artichokes had been introduced by the French back at the turn of the century, which made the dish more or less European. Jean-Pierre could only nod silently and stare with glum resignation at the bones bobbing in his bowl.
In the morning, after consulting their map and checking that the trees in the back were secure, they started off on the treacherous mountain road that would lead them northwest. Jean-Pierre took the first shift behind the wheel, because he was the more capable driver of the two and they would face many steep climbs and nauseating hairpin turns on the first leg of their journey. They had to stop three times to clear fallen rocks from the road, twice to dig their wheels out of mud, twice more because there was too much fog to see, and once when a herd of three dozen wild boars came thundering out of the forest and across their path. Every fifteen minutes, Gaspard would claim to see something moving in the trees that he thought was a tiger.
When the landscape finally began to flatten and the lush forests of the Lang Biang Plateau thinned out to a less voluptuous greenery, Jean-Pierre switched places with Gaspard, eager to study their new world more carefully through the passenger seat window. The colors of Dalat had been emerald and mint, mahogany and claret, peach pink and the milky blue white of a cataract. Here it was all scratchy saffrons and ochres and olives, with the occasional sapphire peep of a lake coming into view before the road dipped and it disappeared behind the trees once again, like a secret being slowly teased out.
As they approached Ban Me Thuot he began to see cultivated farmland again and, finally, villages, the houses clustered like small archipelagos in a sea of coffee or pepper fields. He smelled the first of the rubber plantations before he could see them—the burnt stench of distant smokehouses where sheets of coagulated latex spent days in drying chambers, carried by the wind across the fields and over to his window. Jean-Pierre frowned and pinched his nose shut.
When Gaspard smelled the smoke, he leaned out of the truck to inhale even more deeply. Drink it in, Jeanpi! he laughed. That’s the scent of our new life!
The road took an unexpectedly sharp bend, and as they went around it the two men were suddenly confronted by a full and unobstructed view of the lake they had only glimpsed before. The sun on the water’s surface had transformed it into a pool of molten gold, and the dark green silhouette of the mountain range they had traversed earlier that morning loomed in the background like the carcass of a collapsed dragon.
Gaspard slowed the truck and then killed the motor. They were alone; there wasn’t another visible soul in all the surrounding miles of sun-soaked wildness. For several minutes, both men gazed at the scene in front of them with wordless awe. And then a cloud passed, the light flickered, and the water turned back into water. The spell had lifted, and Gaspard turned the key in the ignition. But they were both left feeling light-headed. It was as if they had been granted a quick taste of that wild and nameless thing that they had left France for as young men, momentarily distilled into sunlight on an unblemished landscape.
I’ll bet you anything that we’ll finally get to see our elephants here, whispered Gaspard reverently. This is the place that we’ve been searching for.
There would be an elephant, it turned out, but she was ancient and foul tempered and the last of her kind left in the backwoods town where Gaspard and Jean-Pierre had decided to start their new lives. She was named Su-Su, after the wrinkly squash she resembled, and on their third morning in the Highlands, Gaspard and Jean-Pierre had awoken to the sound of her headbutting their truck.
Su-Su belonged to a Rhadé elder and, now that she was too old to work, was generally given free rein of the village. The children adored Su-Su even though she did not reciprocate their feelings, and they would parade behind her like rats following the Pied Piper while she wandered from house to house, stealing pumpkins from front gardens. They just made sure to always maintain a safe distance from her feet and tusks.
While Gaspard and Jean-Pierre were assessing the damage to the truck, they heard a voice—in French—call casually to them over the stone wall that surrounded their house:
Old Su-Su’ll leave you alone if you bribe her. She likes bananas! You should always keep some handy. That’s what I do.
The man said his name was Lejeune. Louis Lejeune. But everyone called him Louis “l’Anguille” because a giant eel had bitten off three of the toes on his left foot thirty years ago. (Never go swimming in the Dak Bla River! he cautioned Gaspard and Jean-Pierre, after they had invited him inside for tea.) Over the course of the morning, they learned that Louis l’Anguille had arrived on the shores of Cochinchina as a young soldier in 1908. Five years later, he found work as a civil servant in the newly established province of Kontum and traded Saigon for the Highlands. He had had malaria twice (Nasty little disease; turned my piss purple! was Louis l’Anguille’s succinct take on it), and, under Sabatier’s tenure as provincial administrator of Darlac (Randy old goat. Unbelievable moustache. Pointiest fucking thing I’ve ever seen), he had overseen the French construction of the network of roads in the region. Now, weathered and seven-toed and nearly sixty-six years of age, he owned a very large coffee plantation and spent his days straining his malaria-weakened kidneys with vast quantities of rice wine and then veering indiscriminately between angry drunk and affable drunk. He hadn’t had a fellow compatriot for a neighbor in nearly four years, and invited Gaspard and Jean-Pierre over for dinner the following night.
I’ve got a local girl who does the cooking for me, he said. Very capable.
Can she make gougères? asked Jean-Pierre hopefully.
Even though Louis l’Anguille was the only other Frenchman within a ten-kilometer radius, Gaspard was upset by his presence, as it spoiled the illusion that he and Jean-Pierre were the first foreigners to ever set foot on this virgin Highland soil. He had chosen to overlook the fact that the former inhabitants of the house where they were now living had clearly been French as well; if it wasn’t obvious enough from the size of the place and the comparative luxury of its building materials (brick and decorative tile and painted plaster, as opposed to thatch and timber and bamboo), when they first moved in they had found a rattan sofa with two moldering silk cushions and the water-damaged remains of a Stendhal novel (Armance, sighed Gaspard with disappointment, picking it up too carelessly, tea-colored pages coming away from the spine in sheaves and falling to the floor before Jean-Pierre could catch them. I was hoping it would be Le rouge et le noir at least).
Jean-Pierre thought Gaspard’s hostility toward their neighbor was unwise. He hadn’t particularly liked Louis l’Anguille either, but it was obvious he held enough power here that if they did not stay on his good side, things would get difficult for them quickly. He would have thought that after ten years of working at a prison, Gaspard would have realized this too.
Sadly, Louis l’Anguille’s cook could not make gougères. Unlike in Dalat, with its herds of imported alpine cows happily cavorting around the temperate foothills of Lang Biang, there was no readily available dairy in the remote reaches of Darlac, apart from canned condensed milk. But she was as capable as Louis had advertised and prepared a dish for them that Jean-Pierre supposed bore some semblance to a lamb navarin, only made of goat instead of lamb and bamboo shoots instead of everything else and with the liberal addition of hot chilis that upon his first taste evoked the sensation of eating a spoonful of flaming gasoline but by the end of the meal he found almost pleasant—a good pain, like a sharp slap to the face when you were drunk, like a bite in the middle of a kiss.
The walls of Louis l’Anguille’s dining room were decorated with the yellowing tusks of Su-Su’s deceased kinfolk. The ivory of at least a dozen slain elephants was represented. Some tusks had been arranged into crisscross designs like macabre wainscoting, others jutted straight out of the plaster and had been repurposed into bottle racks for his rice wine. Gaspard spent the entire meal staring down into his stew to avoid having to look at them. But Louis’s private museum included more than mere tusks. The taxidermied head of a water buffalo and the skull of a muntjac were mounted in the living room. The muntjac was particularly unsettling, with its long canines and unbranched, Mephistophelean antlers. From every angle, it appeared to be grinning at them. In the entryway, Gaspard and Jean-Pierre had been greeted by an albino cobra, which was slightly comical by comparison—the taxidermist had given it mismatched glass eyes and done such a lumpy stuffing job that its body resembled a stocking full of eggs. The snake had been arranged into an imposing, half-coiled, ready-to-strike position, but it listed heavily to one side and was propped up against an old wine bottle, which did not balance it very effectively but did make it look like a bit like a possessive drunk. These parts used to be crawling with cobras before we planted the coffee fields, Louis l’Anguille told them. Couldn’t walk twenty meters without tripping over one. My men killed this spooky little bastard in this very spot when they were clearing away the brush to build the house. Thought it was only right to have him preserved and keep him around, since this was his home first. Even designed the place so that the entryway would be right where we found him!
He also boasted of owning a tiger skin rug that he kept in his bedroom, but because he did not invite them upstairs to look at it, Jean-Pierre doubted its legitimacy.
Louis waited until after dinner to show them the crown jewel of his collection. They moved out to the veranda to take coffee and dessert while overlooking a sunset-bloodied vista of coffee fields and the prickly shadowlands of uncleared bamboo and podocarpus forest. The air had cooled, and the gentle, jasmine-like fragrance of the small white flowers on the coffee bushes grew stronger as the light faded.
Louis’s cook brought out a large, cyan-glazed dish in which poached lychees swam in cinnamon-scented syrup. While tasty, Jean-Pierre found it visually suggestive of a bowl of disintegrating eyeballs. Louis l’Anguille sighed while spooning himself a portion—This is the closest I can get to a poire à la beaujolaise out here. The girl knows how to skin and cook any fish, fowl, or hairy beastie imaginable, but she’s no pastry chef. All she does is poached lychees, poached pineapple, poached jackfruit…she’s even tried to poach a durian before.
Does she understand French? asked Jean-Pierre as the cook reached around him and deftly poured a stream of hot water over his coffee filter. When he spoke, she glanced over at him and shook her head. Peculiar eyes on that one, thought Jean-Pierre to himself. They were pale and slightly golden in color.
Gaspard laughed. I’d say that you do—you clearly understood him well enough, he said, addressing the girl directly. The girl aimed a smile at the floor that was demurely polite, but her eyes met his, and she regarded him without any shame. And you can understand what I’m saying to you right now, Gaspard continued, don’t you?
She’s a little polyglot, this one is, said Louis l’Anguille proudly. She’s too shy to tell you, but she can understand French, Rhadé, and even a little Jarai. She doesn’t talk very much, but a quiet woman suits me just fine. Isn’t that right, Odile? The cook was no longer smiling. She gave him a cursory nod and retreated back into the house as quickly as she could with the hot kettle. Louis watched her leave before turning back to Jean-Pierre and Gaspard. I gave her that name, he said. Don’t you think “Odile” fits her? He took a sip of coffee. Now, have a look at what I’ve brought out to show you, boys. My finest specimens are in here.
The book he produced was bound in dark leather. Jean-Pierre didn’t know what he was looking at when he opened to the first page. It appeared to be blank. Then he saw that a pale, fine strand of hair, about twenty centimeters long, had been pasted vertically down the center of it, like a nearly undetectable crack in a plaster wall. In the bottom right-hand corner, printed neatly in blue ink: Madeleine.
Jean-Pierre looked up at Louis l’Anguille with confusion. It’s chronological, said Louis, as if this would clarify things for Jean-Pierre.
It did not. Jean-Pierre turned to the next page. The hair glued to it was a dark copper, and so long that it had been folded in half to fit on the sheet of paper. Camille, read the blue letters in the corner.
Now, she was a real stunner, said Louis l’Anguille, voice oily from the rice wine he had poured into his coffee and the old lust creeping back up his throat. Make sure that he can see too! he directed Jean-Pierre, motioning to Gaspard.
The book was as thick as a chair cushion. Now beginning to feel uneasy, Jean-Pierre started to flip faster, reading the names but trying to ignore their corresponding strands of hair. Jeanne. Marie-Sophie. Delphine. Caroline.
Slower, slower! laughed Louis. Or I won’t be able to keep up! This is how I keep my mind sharp in my old age—I’ll know I’m ready to die when I can’t put a face to the name anymore. He chuckled. Let’s see…Jeanne had a perfect ass. Caroline was a screamer—nice big tits on her but even bigger lungs. He leaned over Jean-Pierre to turn the next page himself. Ah, little Aurélie, he sighed, caressing the strand with a finger. What a temper. She caught me trying to get a sample from her for the book. Tried to scratch my eyes out. Got the hair anyway. I always do, in the end.
Jean-Pierre glanced over at Gaspard, who wasn’t even attempting to hide the disgust on his face. Keep going! said Louis, returning to his seat and slurping up a lychee.
The black hairs began a third of the way through. Thi. Hoa. Lan. Cam. Tham. H’Ni. Nhung. H’Bia. Yen. Some of the hairs were so long that they had been folded multiple times to fit, creating a dark sine wave against the white paper. The worst pages had the names written in quotation marks beneath a dark Asian hair, implying that Louis either hadn’t known her real one or had chosen a different one for her, à la Odile: “Lola,” “Babette,” “Mimi,” and “Gigi,” and several women who had been given only initials—X, V, A. Jean-Pierre turned the pages robotically, trying to shut out Louis’s commentary, the relentless recounting of what she had worn, the color of her nipples, how rough she had liked it, the things she had whispered in his ear, how far she could bend. Even though hearing it made him feel ill, he was still growing aroused despite himself, and he could tell from the poisonous expression on Louis’s face that this was exactly what the man wanted.
He was relieved when it became too dark to read and he could shut the book with feigned regret, then begin making the standard polite murmurings about the lateness of the hour, and how he and Gaspard ought to be heading home.
Louis l’Anguille rang a small bell to summon Odile. Promise me that you’ll both come back often, he said. Dine with me whenever you like. I can’t tell you how happy I am to have you as my new neighbors. Odile appeared in the doorway, and Louis handed her his revolting catalogue of bedded women. Take this back upstairs, my good girl. Be careful with it! Once she was out of earshot he turned back to Gaspard and Jean-Pierre. I’ve got a blank page ready for her. Have to wait a bit though. He chuckled. Not quite ripe, you see. She’s only just turned fifteen.
At this, Gaspard pushed his chair back from the table sharply and said that he was going to get their coats.
They walked back to their house in the velvety dark. Frog song shimmered in the air around them. How could such a vile man be allowed to live in a place as pure and beautiful as this? said Gaspard quietly. It was the first time he had spoken since leaving Louis l’Anguille’s. He doesn’t belong here, he continued, his voice still soft but shaky with anger. He doesn’t deserve beautiful things. The ground here should have swallowed him up the first time he stepped on it. The air should have…should have dissolved him into particles. The giant eel should have eaten all of him.
But didn’t he bring coffee and Jesus and doctors? asked Jean-Pierre sardonically.
Don’t be cruel, Jeanpi.
Jean-Pierre suspected that Gaspard’s outrage was actually a thin screen for his guilt, even if he could not admit this to either Jean-Pierre or himself. Gaspard had slept with plenty of local girls. So had Jean-Pierre. On the island, there was no one else, unless you were fucking each other or the prisoners or the goats. Do you remember the handsome Khmer? Jean-Pierre asked Gaspard.
Of course, Gaspard replied. I was thinking of him the whole time we were looking at that book.
The handsome Khmer was back on Con Son in a cell that stank of rotting mussels, with murderers and captured revolutionaries for neighbors and a rotating roster of drunks, opium addicts, and other miscellaneous dregs of French society for guards. (Jean-Pierre included himself and Gaspard in the last category.) Neither of them could remember his real name, just that he’d picked the wrong French girl to accidentally impregnate and was now growing old in a prison because of it.
I think he actually loved her too, poor unlucky bastard, said Jean-Pierre. He had spent a lot of time wondering whether the absence of love would make incarceration easier to bear or harder. He still did not know the answer.
That night, as he was settling down to sleep, he had the sudden sensation that he was being watched. He wandered from end to end of their old house, leaning out each window and looking for eyes glowing in the Highland darkness beyond their gate, listening for a rustle, a footstep, a cough. There was nothing. He retraced his steps, this time checking the shadows in every room for potential intruders, human or otherwise. The western wing that had been the servants’ quarters twenty years ago was now partially collapsed—anything could have crawled in through the rubble. Everywhere he went, he could feel something following him, always watching. Jean-Pierre hadn’t checked on Gaspard yet. He quietly pushed the door to his friend’s room open a finger’s width and saw that he was snoring peacefully inside. And it was then that he sensed the invisible gaze lifting from him and fixing itself on the sleeping Gaspard instead. Jean-Pierre backed away, mostly sure that whatever the watcher was, it was harmless, but unable to shake the feeling that he had betrayed his friend by leading the thing to him.
He returned to his bed. When he finally closed his eyes, the pattern of phosphenes that crackled across the blackness inside his lids took the form of thin, bright hairs. Ghostly hairs made of light. Hundreds upon hundreds of them. A ten-thousand-strand mobius strip wound around the interior of Jean-Pierre’s skull, spinning endlessly, each one whispering a name that he could not hear.
For the first years, they were very nearly happy. The rubber trees took to the red soil and began shooting skyward. Jean-Pierre and Gaspard had no problem hiring workers—a steady stream of Vietnamese were leaving the North and resettling in the Highlands, and they were in need of jobs. The settlement grew. A new school was built, and then a clinic. The cemetery expanded. There were patches of guerrilla fighting to the north and west of them, but they were left untouched by the greater war around them. While they waited for their trees to reach the age when tapping could begin, Jean-Pierre and Gaspard made money by renting out their truck for construction jobs that in the past would have been given to Su-Su and her pachyderm colleagues, and occasionally driving cargo down to Ban Me Thuot. (Su-Su herself had passed peacefully in her sleep; Jean-Pierre and Gaspard occasionally brought bananas to place on her grave.) On one of his Ban Me trips, Jean-Pierre met a French schoolteacher—a young widow, complexion like a peach, tinkling laugh and charming Normandy accent—and they began sending letters to each other. Jean-Pierre did not tell her what he had done for a living before coming to Darlac. Over the course of a year and a half, he made three visits to the city to visit her. On his third trip, as they were strolling the grounds of the newly constructed Khai Doan Pagoda, she paused in the discreet shade provided by a ficus and looked up at him expectantly. Gaspard would surely kiss her, Jean-Pierre told himself, before he was finally able to bring his mouth down to hers.
In her next letter, she promised that she would move out to the countryside to be with him and they would be wed once the rubber plantation began production in the following year. She had also enclosed a small lock of her hair as a romantic keepsake, tied with a silk ribbon. When Jean-Pierre opened it, he flung it away from himself like a hot coal. He put it in a drawer and could never look at it again.
They were frequent guests at the house of Louis l’Anguille. Even though they despised themselves for it, they went over on a regular basis for dinner. They tolerated his wildly exaggerated anecdotes and lecherous reminiscences and the cruelty he displayed toward his workers; they took shot after shot of rice wine when he wanted them to be drunk with him, vomiting off of his veranda when necessary and then continuing; they even offered to rub his two-toed foot for him when rainy weather made it ache. Jean-Pierre did it because Louis had successfully purchased their loyalty; he had lent them the extra money they’d needed to repair their house and hired them for what were clearly made-up part-time administrative positions in his coffee business: charity while they waited for their own plantation to be ready. Gaspard did it because he had fallen hopelessly in love with Odile.
It wasn’t worth it, Jean-Pierre would tell him. It wasn’t worth playing sycophant to a man he loathed just for the opportunity to exchange four words and a handful of glances with her during their brief interactions while she ladled out portions of bizarre poached fruits. And although he could not admit this, Jean-Pierre was jealous of Odile. He disliked how easily and instantaneously Gaspard had proffered his heart to her, and truthfully, he suspected that there was also Highland witchery involved. It was those unnatural eyes.
He tried to find other ways to warn Gaspard instead. Remember the handsome Khmer! he told him. Going after the wrong woman gets you locked up, unless you’re untouchable, like Louis. If you’re lonely, I’ll ask Marguerite to introduce you to one of her nice French teacher friends.
How could I be lonely—I have you, don’t I? I’ll always have you, Jeanpi. Gaspard would just say. Besides, I don’t need more than four words and a handful of glances from her. I love her, but I don’t have to have her. I just have to be near her. And that’s enough.
Jean-Pierre was troubled by his friend’s uncharacteristic sentimentality. Gaspard had never been one for maudlin declarations before. Louis l’Anguille had not mentioned his book again since their first dinner, and Gaspard and Jean-Pierre never asked him about it. Jean-Pierre knew that Gaspard would not be able to bear it if he ever discovered that the alleged page for Odile had been filled.
In the spring of 1954, mere days after Jean-Pierre and Gaspard had successfully harvested the first of the latex from their young trees, the smoked sheets still draped over their drying racks, they learned that Dien Bien Phu had been overrun by the Viet Minh. The French had surrendered. Shortly after, Jean-Pierre received Marguerite’s farewell letter, dated three weeks earlier and beginning: My darling, by the time you read this, I will have already set sail for France…
Are you going to leave too? he asked Louis over what would be one of the last of their dinners together. He had been disturbed by his own reaction to Marguerite’s departure. He would have hoped that the end of a two-and-a-half-year relationship would make him feel more than relief.
Louis snorted into his plate of fish. Of course I’m not. This is all just a little tremor.
A seven-year tremor?
Trust me—you can’t panic and toss away everything you’ve worked for, especially now that you’ve just started cutting your trees. Wait it out.
They did, nervously, for the next few weeks. And then they learned that there had been an ambush in Chu Dreh Pass, less than thirty kilometers away.
He’s packing! Gaspard cried, running into the house and seizing Jean-Pierre by the shoulders. I’ve just seen him!
Who’s packing? asked Jean-Pierre, even though he already knew the answer.
Who else do you think! That bastard Louis. He told us to wait it out, and now I’ve just seen him packing up all his fucking ivory.
How? Were you hiding in his bushes?
Gaspard ignored the question. He’s leaving. And he’s going to take her with him. He abruptly turned away from Jean-Pierre and punched the nearest wall, leaving bright dots of knuckle blood on the yellow paint. Then he tore out of the house again as quickly as he had entered. Jean-Pierre knew Gaspard had only hit the wall so that he could pretend afterward that the pain was the reason he was crying. He had seen his friend’s eyes welling with tears before he had even formed the fist.
It was for the best, thought Jean-Pierre. Odile gone, Louis gone, Marguerite gone, everybody gone except for himself and Gaspard. Just the two of them once more. They had the truck—they could get out when the time came. Maybe they would go to Algeria. He was feeling remarkably, foolishly calm about the entire situation when Gaspard stumbled back in just before midnight, drunk and clutching something in a rucksack.
Jean-Pierre was alerted to his return by the clumsy clinking of glass against tile. He entered the kitchen to find Gaspard pouring petrol into an old bottle, spilling it all over himself and the floor in the process.
Gaspard gave him a wobbly smile when he saw him. Do you know what, Jeanpi? he said, wiping his fingers onto his shirtfront, He doesn’t even have a tiger skin in his bedroom. Gaspard’s speech was slightly slurred. He lied to us! There’s no tiger, and the whole room smells like his pissing pot. Gaspard spat on the floor for emphasis. He tried to twist the cap back onto the bottle, then gave up after a struggle and handed it to Jean-Pierre. Help me, my old friend. His breath reeked of rice wine.
Jean-Pierre shut it for him. Where have you been? he asked—his second unnecessary question of the day.
Gaspard shook his head. He shoved the bottle of gasoline into his rucksack, where Jean-Pierre could hear it clank dully against something else inside. I can’t save her, Gaspard said, his voice cracking. He closed his eyes to gather himself and took several shaky breaths. Okay, he said after a minute, opening them back up. Now I’m ready. Let’s go! he said with forced brightness. He patted Jean-Pierre’s arm and strode back out the door. At the road he made a right, heading in the direction of their plantation instead of Louis l’Anguille’s house, which was a relief for Jean-Pierre.
But as Jean-Pierre was turning to follow him, he suddenly paused. He had felt it again—that old sensation of being watched, back for the first time in five years. Jean-Pierre swiveled his head to the left. He didn’t see anything moving in the darkness, but he hadn’t expected to.
Come on! Gaspard called. Jean-Pierre hurried after him, trying not to trip.
Every morning, when he and Gaspard walked together to the plantation, Jean-Pierre would experience a swell of pride as they rounded the bend and the neat, uniform rows of their trees came into view. He liked to think of them as their seven hundred leafy children. As they approached now, the wind picked up, making the dense tract of branches sway.
I snuck in, Gaspard finally admitted to him when they entered the trees. To Louis l’Anguille’s house.
I know, said Jean-Pierre.
They walked in deeper. After fifteen long minutes, Gaspard turned to Jean-Pierre again: I wanted her to come with us. I wanted to free her from him. And she wouldn’t go.
I know you did, old friend. I’m sure you tried your best.
Another fifteen minutes passed: I’m not a good man, Jeanpi.
Don’t say that. That’s not true.
It is. It is. I was never a good man to start with, and I’m the worse for thinking I was better than I am. I…I am not a man who deserves beautiful things. I’m not as bad as Louis, but I’m not good.
Well, said Jean-Pierre, if you’re not good, then I’m not good either.
At this point, they had reached the very center of the property. Nothing but trees extending in all directions, and varying viscosities of darkness. Gaspard unbuckled his rucksack.
I can’t save Odile, he said, but I can try and set the rest of them loose instead. He turned the bag upside down and the book of hairs tumbled out of it and onto the ground.
Did you see if she was in it? This was the first question Jean-Pierre had asked today that he did not already know the answer to.
Gaspard ripped the cap off of the gasoline bottle with his teeth and poured it out onto the book. It was too dark for Jean-Pierre to see that he was reserving half of it.
Stay back, Jeanpi, he said, producing a lighter from his pocket. Jean-Pierre took two steps away from the book. Gaspard gently nudged him back another meter. It was the tenderness of this gesture that finally began setting off the alarm bells in Jean-Pierre’s head.
The noise of the gas igniting took him by surprise. It was a whooshing sound, like the wings of a colossal bird swooping down on them. The flame shot up in a ferocious column and then fell back, crackling as the book began turning black at the edges.
Awash in orange light, Gaspard lifted the bottle a final time. He stepped forward into the fire as he emptied the remains of it over his own head.
Jean-Pierre ran toward him, in vain. He flinched first at the sound of the giant wings flapping again, which was Gaspard and his gas-soaked clothes catching flame, and then once more at the smell that came afterward, immediate and overpowering. But when he followed Gaspard into the fire, he did it without hesitation. He did not have to have him. He just had to be near him. It was enough. The pain that he met was something he could have never imagined. He was red and he was orange and he was gold, and then he was white, white, white, white.
He wrapped his arms around Gaspard, placed his own head beside his friend’s, and they held each other as they burned.
Just before dawn, their workers arrived at the plantation. They did notice the strong scent of smoke but thought it was unremarkable. The air always smelled like smoke because of how the rubber was cured. Then two of them discovered the first cobra, coiled in the roots of a tree, long and thin and pale and dangerously camouflaged against the bark. Snakes of this kind had not been seen in the region for nearly twenty years. While they were discussing what they should do with it, a separate group of workers came running over to tell them that they had seen another cobra, a few rows over. Then, while they were all trying to process what was happening, they heard a disquieting rustling sound and looked up to see a large black snake gliding toward them over the dead leaves, its hood flared. They fled.
Meanwhile, Louis l’Anguille had spent his morning stumbling across his foggy coffee fields, swinging his cane savagely at every unlucky plant or worker in his path. He was still drunk from the night before and in a howling rage, beyond certain that Gaspard and Jean-Pierre were the ones who had robbed him, and heading for their house. When he did not find them there, he went to go hunt them down in the rubber trees instead. He had not yet gotten word that overnight, a vast colony of snakes had taken over the plantation. It briefly struck him as odd that no one was there working when he arrived, but he was too angry and inebriated to give it a second thought. Louis marched off into the trees, eel foot dragging behind him.
Occasionally he thought he saw something moving out of the corner of his eye, or heard a sound he couldn’t place coming from behind a tree. Each time, he dismissed it, blaming the rice wine, which he had brewed himself. The rats had been bad last year—perhaps some droppings had gone into the vintage and this was a small side effect.
Louis only started to realize that something was not right when he reached the center of the trees. The stench of burnt human flesh was overwhelming, but there was no sign of a charred body. He saw the pile of ashes, still smoking, and shuffled over to inspect it.
As he approached, the ash heap moved. Louis knew he’d seen it—this wasn’t the wine playing tricks on his eyes. Down in that soft gray mound, something had shifted. Had wriggled, even. Curious, Louis leaned over and gave it a prod with his cane.
When they found him, four hours later, it was too late. He was on the opposite end of the plantation from where he had entered it, the side by the town cemetery. A funeral party noticed him propped up against a tombstone, covered in orange dirt from having to crawl out of the trees after his leg stopped working.
It was the right one that had been bitten. The limb had grown so swollen that later, the coroner wouldn’t be able tell how many puncture marks there had actually been.
He was incoherent by the time he got to the clinic. Two heads was what he kept saying. Two heads, two heads, over and over until his mouth couldn’t form the words anymore. It was the only thing they could understand. Odile arrived just in time to see the moment when his lungs gave out. She did not even try to hide her smile as they bundled him up and carried him away.