It is easy for Oncle Fernand to force the Sandlers upstairs at gunpoint, because Oncle Fernand was in the war and was forced like that himself. Now it’s his turn. The Sandlers babble as they stumble upstairs, especially Madame. He prods her buttocks with the barrel. Oncle Fernand thinks women shouldn’t wear trousers, anyway. Jean-Luc watches him do everything from another part of his head; his head is like a tank, which Oncle Fernand is commanding, staring through the gun-slits. Jean-Luc is just part of the crew. A young, scared gunner crouched below in his desert goggles.
When the two pass Maman’s bed, covered in splashes of blood, they make strange gurgling noises and go quiet. He should have removed the big scissors, still sticking out of her throat. He pressed one of the blades in slowly as far as it would go. Her mouth is still wide open, her blank eyes staring up at the damp patches on the ceiling. She couldn’t believe that he would do it, but he did. Oncle Fernand can do anything, despite his limp. He’s never liked his sister-in-law.
The Sandlers crouch in his bedroom, very white, trembling as if freezing cold. ‘Dollars, dollars,’ repeats the husband; Madame is unable to speak. Oncle Fernand makes the husband tear the top sheet into strips and tie one of the strips around his wife’s mouth and the other around her wrists. Then Oncle Fernand, who has seen prisoners of the Germans tied up this way, ties the husband up himself, so tight that the veins swell on the wrists and the teeth push out from the stained cotton. The Sandlers’ grin like toothpaste advertisements and gurgle. The cloth gets wet quickly. Their eyes are huge and frightened. They remind him of owls.
He pushes them onto his bed with the gun’s barrel, where he discusses with Jean-Luc what to do. Everything that was on the monument must be replaced, quickly. The evening nurse is Colette. They have about an hour before she comes. It feels good, having no one watching them from the keyhole, no shrieks and orders and moans.
First, he must replace Bibi. The nails he used for her are too small. There are nails in the wall, for pictures, which he removes with the pliers on the table. Five of them. That will do, says Oncle Fernand. The hammer is also on the table. The toy pram lies where it fell the other side of the bed.
Oncle Fernand asks Jean-Luc to put on the Johnny Hallyday very loud again, which he does. But it is Oncle Fernand who unbuttons Madame Sandler’s silk blouse; he rips it off, in the end, because her hands are tied. Oncle Fernand has a great deal of trouble unclasping her bra at the back. She’s crying. Her breasts are not pointed like Bibi’s. Her husband makes a move and Oncle Fernand lifts the butt of the gun and brings it down on the gagged mouth. There’s a crack. The wet cloth reddens as if binding a wound. The husband whimpers and groans on the floor. Oncle Fernand, just to be sure, kicks him in the belly very hard because that’s what the SS soldiers did to him when they found the boys had gone from the Mas. The husband has trouble getting his breath, now.
Oncle Fernand doesn’t bother with Madame Sandler’s jeans, because Bibi is legless. He only undoes the top two buttons, to show the navel properly. A few hairs curl over and Jean-Luc feels his frog plump its cheeks up, wanting to croak, but ignores it.
He ties her wrists to the bed’s frame at the head and her ankles to the frame at the foot. Then he fetches the bloodstained top sheet from next door and tears that, too, into strips. This is the cobweb, says Oncle Fernand. For a joke, he retrieves the sieve from the floor and places it on his head. They all had helmets, he says; they made fun of my limp, their helmets wobbling on their foreign heads. The sieve falls off and hits the husband on the nose as he lies there, still trying to catch his breath.
Oncle Fernand has difficulties driving the short nails home through the rubbery nipples, even though he keeps his knees firmly either side, pressing on Madame Sandler’s armpits, pinning her down. Tap, tap. Tough beef-gristle.
The navel is easier, although Oncle Fernand feels the long nail should have been even longer; the navel is less like beef-gristle and more like punching a hole in an old dry orange. He doesn’t bang it all the way in, fearing he might otherwise kill her. Her muffled screams can hardly be heard under the music. My love is 100 per cent, blood for blood. Our blood is the same. She lies there like the wounded Christ, bleeding at the nails in her nipples and her navel. The last two nails are driven into her palms, but the picture-nails are more like tacks and fall out as the hands squirm.
He ties the husband, who has made a mess in his trousers, by his fat neck to the foot of the bed. His gag is bright red. The eyes stare at him, bigger than ever, as the next song begins. They are dark brown. Maybe he’s whimpering through the music. Oncle Fernand picks up two of the oxidised spoons and uses one for each eye, placing his free hand firmly on the forehead and holding the face still. It is like removing plum-stones, although Oncle Fernand’s hand is shaking. It reminds him of what people did in the war, on both sides, French and German, even French and French. The eyeless husband roars in his throat like a distant boar, his sockets big and black and dribbling blood. Then he falls very quiet, quivering from head to foot.
The eyeballs sit in each spoon like stolen birds’ eggs. It is no different, Jean-Luc thinks as he watches, from removing the eyes of a fish.
Which reminds him about the spider, the fish-bone spine that was the spider. Oncle Fernand ponders. The spine will have to be exposed. Eight legs. Fortunately, Oncle Fernand (like Jean-Luc) has flayed many a hare or rabbit or tough, bristly boar in his time: old Gabriele, Jean-Luc’s grandfather, taught Fernand and his brother Elie, and Elie taught Jean-Luc. Who still remembers the smell of the hides.
Elie’s brother takes his nephew’s sharpest Opinel and begins at the shoulders with little nicks like stitches. The honey on the kisses of my mouth, Jean-Luc whistles as he watches from the back of his head. The skin has blemishes, spots, warts, the blood running past them down to the underpants exposed above the belt.
When the skin is tugged hard, coming away like a fishing net, the spine is not much more than a line of creamy nobbles under the blood and purplish matter, but Oncle Fernand says they haven’t time to do it any better, they still have to drive over to the Mas des Fosses and finish off there.
‘I’d like to go via Marcel Lagrange’s place, he’s usually there after five,’ says Jean-Luc.
Oncle Fernand agrees, of course. He remembers old Père Lagrange pointing him out in the café to the SS captain, but they can’t go digging up Père Lagrange. Marcel will do.
Jean-Luc thinks the husband might have passed out, because he has hardly resisted, wriggling only when the skin was tugged and jerked away; the fatty film underneath, more like a chicken’s than a hare’s, worked through sharply by the blade.
Jean-Luc feels the man’s pulse through the streaks of blood and can’t find it. The man’s dead. He must have had a heart attack from the pain. He’s certainly not a true martyr like the suffering saints flayed for their goodness, then, Jean-Luc jokes. The woman is panting, Jean-Luc sees it in her nail-nippled chest, her nailed belly going in and out. Her eyes are fixed on the ceiling, like Maman’s, but gleaming with tears. There is as much blood as when they’d slaughter a pig in the old days, back in the Sixties. Like the Arabs, Jean-Luc thinks. Like the Muslims and their goats. All over the walls.
Changed into blue overalls, his face and hands washed, Oncle Fernand has to reach the van just outside the door without being recognised. Because of Jean-Luc’s eye problem, Oncle Fernand is driving. He has perfect sight. Colette will be coming in fifteen minutes: she has her own key.
Jean-Luc watches out through the kitchen net until there’s no one in sight, and then bolts with Oncle Fernand to the van, parked just in front of the Sandlers’ hired car, a few long metres up the street. The limp is a nuisance, it slows him up, the street stretches away with all its difficult buildings. Old Lucille spots him from her door. He’s carrying the gun, but she doesn’t lift a hair.
‘Save some rabbit for me, Jean-Luc!’ she calls.
Despite Jamie’s manifold problems, they appeared not to be of a sexual nature because, as even Helena had once commented in a moment of despair, Jamie was a neuter. At least, he had never shown any interest in either gender. Helena, who’d always had a fondness for the subject and at one time (before the iceberg of Aids) had preached an earnest and rather exhausting form of free love as the key to a higher awareness, was left perplexed. Her attempts to throw pretty girls at him, or broach the gay question, had got nowhere. It was, in fact, the aspect of her son that most disturbed her. She even wondered, in a moment of revelation, if his restless dissatisfaction wasn’t because his life-role was to be a monk, and offered to pay for a retreat in a Carthusian monastery in its Alpine fastness. Nick would simply refer to him as their resident Bakunin, who was not only the founder of anarchism but also impotent, pouring his frustration into revolutionary activity and destructiveness.
Now, however, with the girls temporarily out of earshot, playing at the back of the house (Nick had briefly checked them – happy as lambs in front of the barn), they could worry the subject a little more, and Sarah reasserted her opinion that Jamie had been screwed up by his mother’s total anarchy on the sexual front. She and some of her more advanced partners would wander around the house nude, Nick had told her. There was even this cultural idea that children could be in on it all, being ‘magical’. Cherubs, faeries, elves, all that. (‘Yuk,’ Sarah had commented. ‘What a deluded generation you were.’ And Nick had earnestly pointed out that he was nothing to do with all that free-love stuff, that he’d been petrified of girls until he was about twenty.)
‘What I’m trying to say, Nick, is that I’m reasonably certain Jamie watched me skinny-dip.’
‘OK. So did Jean-Luc. Maybe half the village were watching.’
‘Right, thanks a lot. But do you see my point? Maybe I’m some of the problem. Maybe he’s attracted to me. Jamie, I mean,’ she added, glancing towards the door into the sitting room.
‘As Bakunin was to one of his sisters.’
‘Well, I’m not actually related to him, but I am forbidden fruit and not much more than ten or eleven years older. You’re almost nineteen years older than me.’
Nick scratched his thinning hair and pretended to look agonised. He did, in fact, feel fairly agonised, although this was not the first time they had discussed the possibility of a kind of vegetal attraction. ‘So what’s the solution? Put me in a nursing home and marry Jamie?’
‘Try to be objective, Nick.’
He huffed and puffed. ‘Maybe we should ask Alan to hire Jamie as an Art Brut chaser,’ he said. ‘He’d be rather good, smelling out naivety and oddity.’
‘Did I hear a noise?’ Sarah asked, lifting her head like a hunting dog. ‘From the back?’
They listened. Their nightingale was taking a break: they hardly noticed it, now. Nothing but slight gusts under the lintel. Nick rose and opened the door and looked. ‘They must be in the barn,’ he said. ‘Do you want me to check?’
‘Oh,’ said Sarah, ‘let’s be chilled out. Light on our feet. They’re fine. In the old days they’d have just roamed, wouldn’t they?’
‘Not at two years old, methinks.’ But they might have done even at two, back then. You’d have to research the yearly statistics for child accidents, drownings in pools and rivers. Like road accidents in the Twenties: appalling. You’d probably be surprised.
But he didn’t say this to Sarah. Instead he said, ‘Yeah. We’ve lost our primary innocence,’ remembering the way he’d roam in the fields himself, as a boy. Adulthood was like a photograph that wasn’t quite as good as the real thing.
The axe is already in the back of the van. It slides about among coils of rope and old sacks and various other tools as Oncle Fernand races around the corners. Jean-Luc is surprised Oncle Fernand can drive at all, let alone like this. Papa always said that his brother was timid, hardly drank, wouldn’t harm a fly, just gave off whiffs of the tannery.
Fortunately, no one else is on the road. There is no one at Marcel’s house, either, so Jean-Luc blows the yapping dog off its chain at point-blank range then boots the bungalow’s feeble door open for Oncle Fernand to go in and turn all the cooker’s gas taps on. Marcel would usually have a fag in his mouth. If his wife, Cécile, arrives first, or one of his horrible kids, too bad. There’ll be nothing much left of the house, if it goes up. Their fault, for having a gas canister under the cooker. Against the European norms, that.
They just have time to nip into the main bedroom for Oncle Fernand to piss all over the double bed before the gas drives them out.
Marcel Lagrange is on the drive, locking his four-by-four, eyeing the van suspiciously. He turns as they emerge and his jaw drops, his cigarette stuck to his lip. The gun is pointing at his head, which ends up a second later as a bright red smear over the four-by-four’s side window as Jean-Luc’s ears buzz from the shot. Marcel slides down as if drunk, the top half of his face blown off to the nasal bone, then manages to fall onto his hands. He waits there, on all fours, wrecked head dangling. He is still breathing; they can hear the whistle of it.
‘It’s because he’s got no brain,’ Jean-Luc laughs.
Oncle Fernand tips Marcel over with his foot. He rolls onto his back and the short, muscular arms subside slowly, quivering for a bit on the ground. The belly sticks up like Mont Blanc. The cigarette is still glued to the bottom lip. There is nothing much above it, to speak of. They can smell the gas a bit, even out here.
‘Pretty picture,’ says Oncle Fernand, rearranging the limbs as if Marcel Lagrange were a shot animal. ‘Don’t want to break with tradition, do we?’
They bump up the Mas’s track and stop in front of the plaque and Oncle Fernand attacks its stone with the edge of the hammer. The woods ring like a bell, like the village bell that has rung every quarter-hour of Jean-Luc’s life. The air is as dry as cigarette paper, the heat’s around the corner. Another summer.
When the name Fernand Maille has gone, they cut across on foot through the trees to come out by the tumbled wall, axe and rope in hand. Jean-Luc points out in a whisper that he never managed to get the kids’ heads satisfactorily, they were either blurred or too small. And now he’s lost the camera. Oncle Fernand tells him not to worry. It takes a moment before they hear the voices, understand them as human.
High, excited voices in the barn. Jean-Luc stumbles along with Oncle Fernand, whose limp doesn’t slow him that much after all. The long-handled axe is heavy; they leave the gun propped behind the pool-shed. He’s not so sure about Oncle Fernand’s ideas, now, but he is the tank commander, he does know best. The monument has to be made. What’s been lost has to be made up for. Years and years.
The pool is crystal clear, now, better than a mirror. There is a toad, sitting at the bottom as if surprised. ‘Pools are like that,’ says Jean-Luc, studying his own face. ‘Dirty as hell one day, transparent as heaven the next.’
The girls are playing in the middle of the dark barn, beyond the chopping block. This is the hardest part, he thinks, but Oncle Fernand urges him on. It is for the sake of the monument. Without the faces, it would not be complete. Jean-Luc wonders whether it matters if it is not complete, but he is not the commander, he has to obey. They fire cannon and spit fire and blast buildings to smithereens. They destroy whole cities for the sake of the monument. They get rid of the riffraff.
The girls laugh at him because he is talking to Oncle Fernand, saying Yes, of course, you must do it for the sake of the monument. They think he is here to play, they clutch his trouser legs and pull on his hand and he has to shield the axe with his body, putting it behind him because the blade is greased and sharp. Oncle Fernand doesn’t know the girls, he doesn’t even like children. This is a surprise, because Jean-Luc’s father always said how good Fernand was with children in the village, showing them simple tricks with cards in his timid way. How his eyes would light up and he would put on funny voices like an actor and make them laugh.
Oncle Fernand puts on one of his funny voices and tells them to hide in the barn, only in the barn; but they must hide so well that they can’t see each other. Then he’ll try to find them. They run off separately, squealing, as Oncle Fernand counts up to ten.
‘The key to it all is this word interpretation,’ Nick said, anticipating supper by several hours and chopping up veg. He was on the courgettes, slicing them lengthways into four then, holding the four parts together, slicing them crossways so he ended up – theoretically, at least – with four small quarters per section. ‘Interpretation can be transparent or opaque. When it’s transparent, it’s like a top interpreter translating from another language. When it’s opaque – shit.’ He had cut his finger. No, he hadn’t. Not even a bead of blood.
‘All right?’
‘Yup. I thought I’d cut my finger. Blood with the stew, but no. So when it’s opaque, it’s like when someone says, “You’re interpreting my thoughts.” With negative implications, usually. You’re actually imposing something. History can’t exist without interpretation. Actually, nothing does. We’re interpreting all the time. But with history it’s very fraught. It’s not just a matter of translating from another language, transparently. It’s imposing your own order on a confusion of facts. Hm?’
Sarah grunted, half in her book. ‘Who said that originally? History’s a confusion of facts?’
‘Isn’t that mine?’
‘’Fraid not,’ said Sarah. ‘I mean, someone said it before you. Vico?’
She was looking through Exciting Things To Do With Nature in a rare moment of quiet while Nick prepared supper early so it could stew happily while they went for a walk before (if the girls let them!) an hour or two of work. She was succeeding in not fretting too much about the girls when they were out of sight and sound. She was not a security-camera operator. She would, she thought, put that in her secret journal later this afternoon. They were imbibing the freedom of a natural environment. Tammy could be trusted, she was nearly nine, after all. Nine! Impossibly mature. She herself was left hours on her own in Aden, with pool and all. As long as the faint squeals were there, like the tiny bubbles in the kitchen window’s original glass, she would not worry. She was even successfully forcing herself not to look through the glass every two minutes. She was letting go of her anxieties, media-fed, manipulated by the status quo.
The journal was secret because it was emotional, not intellectual; it went against the Nick Regulations. It was growing more and more honest.
‘Anyway,’ he went on, untroubled by Vico, ‘a historian is always opaque, but strives for transparency. How do you think all that pans out, for the intro?’
‘Pretty good,’ said Sarah, wondering whether the pine-cone mobile would be feasible, given past experience. They’d found some very dry pine cones in the attic, before clearing it out for Jamie. She thought they were in one of the caves, now, for extra kindling.
‘Where are those pine cones we found in the attic, Nick?’
‘Pine cones? I burnt them last week.’
‘Oh bother.’
‘There are plenty in the pine wood, beyond the holm oaks.’
‘They need to be very dry and light. It doesn’t matter. The kids sound as though they’re having a wild time,’ she observed. ‘I think it’s your turn to check, Nick. I caught Beans really devouring one of the picture books, by the way. She’s obviously going to be a reader, like Tammy. Alicia’s more into the spatial, physical thing. But it’s early days.’
‘When I’ve done this last courgette,’ he muttered, somewhat miffed that she hadn’t listened properly to what was so important to him.
Oncle Fernand hunts them down, one by one.
He finds the youngest first, who has not really hidden at all. She’s standing behind the huge, old, orange-painted beam dumped there by the builders years ago. He brings her gently to the chopping block and lays her head on it and tells her to listen to the wood, it’s telling her something deep inside. As she presses her ear to the grain, excited, the axe blade swings down with its own full weight and bites through the neck with a snap. The head’s expression is still excited as it bounces, rolling to rest at Oncle Fernand’s feet.
He kicks it away. The blood pumps out of the torso in little snuffles, sounding like a hedgehog.
They find the next youngest crouched behind a mouldering bale with her eyes tightly shut; she looks up at Oncle Fernand with a mischievous smile, as if he’s only pretending to be cross. He swings the axe down on her skull and it bursts open, exploding like a shot-at watermelon, like a bull Jean-Luc once saw pierced messily in the corrida in Nîmes. Another two swings remove the head. Then he looks up and sees the eldest in the hayloft, staring down. She has the worst look of terror and shock Jean-Luc has ever seen. But Oncle Fernand is used to this, he was in the war. He has been in every war since then, he says. They’re all the same.
He climbs up the ladder to the hayloft. The old ladder squeaks like a trapped rabbit. The eldest is now crouched in the corner, screaming with her small fists pressed to her chin. The noise is too loud for safety, but Oncle Fernand acts swiftly. His hands are like a boxer’s red gloves. They close white-knuckled on the axe and bring it swirling low round his body as she scampers off, catching her deeply on the tendons under the right knee, so that they whip up like elastic bands. She falls and starts to wail. The axe handle is slippery with sweat, it looks like. It takes three swings, unfortunately, to remove her head, and the head has the same look of terror as it did when she was staring down. It only stopped making a racket on the third swing.
He hears a man’s voice from the yard. The father is calling out their names like an alarm – running towards the barn, from the sound of his voice. Oncle Fernand makes it down to the ground off the ladder as the father appears in the entrance, a silhouette in the huge bright blazing square of the missing doors. The father hesitates for a moment, probably blinded by the barn’s shadow after the sunlight, or maybe seeing the small head by the chopping block and not understanding it.
They can hear his breath, he must have run hard. Not good at his age. He stretches his arms out either side, as if to greet them.
Afterwards, Oncle Fernand will tell Jean-Luc that you must never hesitate in war. The father understands the head and opens his mouth but his huge, high AAAAAAAH is interrupted before it gets to the H. The axe cleaves him through on one side with a single stroke, with no time even to bring his arms up to shield himself. Jean-Luc hears the blade crack on the hip-bone, from what he can see of the angle. A hand flies up and lands on the ground by Jean-Luc’s feet. He’s not sure how the writhing man is finally despatched, but it reminds him of the time his father’s dog was gored by the boar, steam rising from the warm entrails.
He and Oncle Fernand slip in them a bit as they leave the barn and cross at a hop to the pool and splash their hands and faces, the blood snaking away in threads; then Oncle Fernand grabs the gun by the shed and they run together to the house. There is no time to lose. The boys have gone and the foreign riff-raff are still in occupation. If a single person is left, Oncle Fernand will be forced back up the track and shot through the nape once more. The only monument will be a sad, stupid stone with plastic flowers on top.
The Englishwoman is in the kitchen, reading a book. Of course, she screams and screams when she sees Oncle Fernand with blood all over his jacket, pointing the gun at her. She has to be whole, Jean-Luc reminds Oncle Fernand. She has to be naked and whole.
She runs off into the sitting room and up the stairs, but it is not difficult to hunt her down. Jean-Luc knows the rooms in the house back to front. Jean-Luc is scared of meeting his rival in love, Raoul Lagrange, because ghosts are not like flesh and bone, an axe or bullet or pellets go straight through them like fog. Raoul does not appear, though. He’s probably scared stiff himself, because Oncle Fernand is more powerful than most ordinary ghosts, staring through his tank-captain’s goggles. It’s the difference between a pig and a wild boar, Jean-Luc reckons.
They corner the Englishwoman in the attic, hearing the creaks from the landing. The big space is still nothing but dust and spider webs and a sack of pine cones for the fire, dry as bone by now, and a couple of ancient crates full of empty bottles. The attic’s dust rises in clouds and makes Oncle Fernand cough, and Jean-Luc hits his head on one of the low beams. He swears and kicks at some old newspapers the colour of piss. He glances at the big black headlines on the nearest one. The Allies Bomb the Northern Ports, he reads. France-Soir, March 1943. The window in the roof is glazed over with dust and bird-muck. There’s bracken heaped on the floor: Jean-Luc knows what that is. The Englishwoman sobs.
They force her out at gunpoint all the way to the pool. She is wringing her hands and pleading with them, weeping so much that her nose runs and her nice black top is soaked at the collar. She is calling for her husband, whom she hasn’t realised is the pile of red rubbish in front of the barn. She has the attic’s dust on her skirt. As Jean-Luc watches, Oncle Fernand makes her take off her clothes down to the undies and then her undies, too. He doesn’t misbehave as she stands there, clasping herself and shivering: he prods her with the gun until she half-falls, half-jumps into the pool. Each time she swims to the side and holds it, pleading, he stamps on her fingers. The water is cold. She is gasping. Oncle Fernand can’t shoot her or she would not be whole. Now and again she calls out for help in English. She calls out her husband’s name, then her children’s. The woods take no notice. Birds sing in the pauses. Blackbirds, wrens, chiffchaffs.
After less than half an hour she turns quiet; she wearies and lies on her back instead of paddling. She is blue with cold and shivering, making little ripples that finally hit the sides. She lies on her back and slowly the clear, clean water covers her mouth, her nose. A bubble touches the surface and bursts, and then another, smaller, rising from her mouth. Then nothing. She is stretched out flat on her back, eyes wide open, naked from head to foot, and the water covers her completely like a plastic sheet. She is dead, thinks Jean-Luc. It is better than the photo he used on the monument.
He bends his head and cups the clear water in his palm and sucks it up between his lips, noisily. It doesn’t taste of chlorine: it tastes of her – her sweat, her hair. His throat welcomes the water.
This is all Oncle Fernand’s achievement. The last square is always her naked body, stretched out under the surface, with the water rippling over her and making her body quiver. It melts at the edges like ice. He uses the heel of his hand to make it melt more and still more. As he does so there is a distant boom, suddenly, like a bomb has been dropped or a plane has broken the sound barrier. The water trembles a little over the white flesh. Oncle Fernand lifts his head, and so does Jean-Luc. A patch of dark, low cloud drifts into view over the trees, smudging the clear sky.
‘That’s smoke,’ says Oncle Fernand.
‘That’s Marcel Lagrange,’ Jean-Luc grins.
And they both laugh fit to bust.