2

IN THE WINDOW of the horlogerie, Valerie saw her pensive face reflected back, its sunlight breaking through now and again. Her hair was long and ash-blond, tucked under a sun-hat, her backpack slouching on her shoulder. She was tall, with the self-conscious stoop of her teenage years, when she’d imagined her head like a top-heavy sunflower dangling from its stalk. Her eyes were no particular colour—grey on a cloudy day, azure by the sea. “How the world looks from thirty-five thousand feet,” said Gerard once, gazing at her. Perhaps she was as fogbound as the weather on these islands.

They’d honeymooned here over thirty years ago, spending a week at the pension of his cousin Marguerite. In those days Saint-Pierre was a humble town of shopkeepers and fishermen, its ragged mists too chill and austere for tourism, and it crept into the twenty-first century much the same as it had always been. Valerie didn’t care one way or the other. She’d loved the comforting fog, the frailty of this island, its slender hold on life.

“But why would you go to such a place again?” asked Gerard.

“It’s a trip to France.”

“D’accord. C’est évident.” He shrugged.

It was also, Valerie realized, a chance to visit with cousins who she only saw on their occasional trips to Quebec.

Gerard had been a good father, but after Andre and Chantal left home, he gave up his local TV news job to become a freelance correspondent. Sarajevo, Belfast, Haiti — his accounts of a terrorist bombing or a massacre would explode into a rumble of words that shook the house.

“And what did you learn?” she’d ask him.

“What I always learn.”

“And that is?”

Gerard would grow quiet. “To be a good witness,” he’d say.

He’d grown up in Montreal, troubled by the bombings of the sixties, so impatient with violence that he regarded even moderate indépendentistes with disgust. Nor would he speak about the loss of his first love, Ora — not how she’d perished, or even where; not even the fact that she’d died too young. “What I remember, I live,” he’d say, as he paid keen attention to the sufferings of innocents in combat. He purloined his sorrow into a journalist’s fury in Somalia, his indignant voice echoing across the French-speaking world. He was desperate to understand what had driven the Balkans to insanity, and why humanity had turned its back on Rwanda. He kept a suitcase packed. He never let up.

“I cannot rest in this small place,” he’d said to her once. He’d just returned from Sarajevo. He had a deadline to meet.

“But I live here and I love you, and doesn’t that matter?”

“Have you seen my disk?” He yanked open a drawer. The disk was loaded with war-crimes documentation. She’d retrieved it from the clutter of his desk.

“Would you put it in my laptop, please?”

Valerie did, but before she could zip the bag shut, he grabbed it and ran out the door.

***

Valerie became mute, overwhelmed by so much sorrow. When Gerard discussed human rights with his auspicious colleagues, she’d find reasons to be elsewhere. In recent years the burden of pain that entered the house had grown worse. She told her husband this. “Is it because you’ve forgotten that I love you?” he asked her.

Perhaps she had. Or perhaps he’d forgotten that she loved him. Often he was too preoccupied for sex. Yet she, too, had become absorbed in another kind of life.

***

Gerard was a Montrealer, but she’d met him in Toronto thirty-one summers ago. He’d been the superintendent of a stylish little brick-and-gabled rooming house, his father’s investment, a place for a worried Quebecer to put his money, a hedge against the French province detaching itself from an English nation. In his spare time, Gerard had tended its garden with a skill Valerie admired. When they married and bought a home in Toronto’s west end, she was still unused to short summers and the chill climate of Southern Ontario. She asked Gerard for some gardening tips.

“There’s nothing special to know,” he said. “The plants come with directions.” He seemed indifferent. Yet he offered to dig the beds for her.

On a warm October Saturday, Gerard began to turn over the soil. With his foot on the edge of the shovel, he thrust his weight into the ground, heaving dirt out of the pit, forming a trench. He was city-bred, yet he had the dishevelled attractiveness of a farmer, his muscles conditioned and used to hard work, a casual ease in his body that she’d always loved.

Moments later the sunlight paled, crushed by a fist of cloud, shards of it falling upon a lean and shadowed figure in working clothes, a tired man who looked as if he were digging a grave.

“Gerard?” she said.

He didn’t answer.

“Everything’s okay, sweetie?”

Nothing. She felt certain that he couldn’t hear her. “Ça va bien?”

He looked up, his face drawn. “C’est fini maintenant. I’m done.”

Valerie planted bulbs and filled in the trench with soil. She became a skilled gardener. Years later, when the kids left home and Gerard became a freelance correspondent, she studied horticulture, bought a truck, and began to hoe and plant, water, and mulch for busy Torontonians who didn’t have the time. Dark loam rich with life, a living bed of earthworms and microorganisms — through it she bound herself to all that gave substance to the living world. With a shovel, she’d turn the soil, get down on her hands and knees, and scoop up a clump or two. Could use peat or bonemeal, she’d think; a bed of oak leaves for acid. She had a good touch, a practiced sense of texture and weight. Up close she’d sniff the warm smell of decomposition, the microscopic nursery of all living things, and then time broke open in her hands, space dissolved, and the pliant soil became the ground of human habitation, the fields on which farmers toiled, and the dirt roads on which soldiers marched and terrified people ran. She began to feel in the earth the warmth of flesh, of Gerard and his cameraman dashing across Sniper Alley in Sarajevo, or bribing Syrian border guards with cigarettes and cash, or trailing refugees across dangerous frontiers in Eritrea. Then she met woe: the souls of women in Somalia and Rwanda, their bodies ravaged, their gardens soaked with blood. She didn’t have to travel to find sorrow. It was the soil from which the world was made.

Long ago her husband dug this grave.

She didn’t know how to tell Gerard that his grief had seeped into her bones. Nor did she know what human thing she could do about any of it.

In Saint-Pierre, she’d hoped to talk to cousin Marguerite about Gerard, to ponder her own life, to find words to say to her husband that would ease the burdens of intensity and silence. She worried that their marriage might be over, that whatever joy they’d known had disappeared. They didn’t know how to talk, the two of them. Not to each other.

Valerie meandered up the slope of the town’s streets as they turned northward and toward the hills. On Rue Maréchal Foch, tiny clapboard shops and restaurants were jammed together in crazy, irregular rows, as if some gravitational force were pulling them down the hill and into the sea. She kept walking upward.