“My mother died of AIDS,” says Tristan, like an epilogue to “The Little Match Girl.”
Dumestre mutters. He yawns. “Shit, I fell asleep. How does it end?”
“She dies.”
“I thought so,” Dumestre says. “It couldn’t have ended any other way. What about us?”
“What?”
“You think we’re gonna die?”
“What do you want us to die from?”
“Dunno. I’m hungry. Just think, if the partridge hadn’t got left in that hole, we could’ve had one hell of a roast.”
“The partridge?” asks Tristan, dazed.
He’s lost the thread of the conversation. The word Dumestre didn’t hear and will never hear still resounds in his own head: AIDS, like a single wobbling music note. My mother died of AIDS. He had never uttered that sentence before. He’d never had the chance. Even with Emma. When they were getting to know each other, it was too early, they were too young, and then, in the passing years, it had become too late.
“The partridge I wanted to give you for your wife. Remember it? Pretty little thing.”
A pretty little thing, Tristan thinks. And, for a moment, he’s no longer sure if this epithet applies to the bird or to Emma.
He’s hungry too. He thinks of the rabbit. The rabbit in the gamebag. What have I done with him? he wonders.
Because of fear, because of the storm, he forgot his promise, he neglected his duty.
“I think I left my bag outside,” he says to Dumestre in an anxious voice.
“What’s in there? A bar of gold?”
“No, nothing, but, well, it’s bad form.”
This sentence that makes no sense seems to satisfy Dumestre; he nods in the darkness.
“Go ahead,” he says. “Go find it. That way you can take a look around, see if the rescuers are coming.”
Tristan crawls along the narrow tunnel and, as he approaches the entrance, he perceives the racket, louder and louder, more and more worrying, that prevails outside their burrow. Rolling, rumbling, grinding, wrenching. His eyes, accustomed to the half-light, distinguish the smallest details of the nocturnal spectacle that together are offering up the heavens and the earth.
Anger, rage. Everything is possible: the earth can open up; it can shake, cave in, swallow things. It’s like some monster, after sleeping under the earth’s crust for millennia, has awoken from its long hibernation. It stretches its colossal limbs, its joints unfold, its thick skin unfurls, it howls, it yawns, arches its back and sets forth, breaking the horizon line, smashing ridges, trampling valleys.
Tristan no longer knows if it’s hot or cold outside. He feels swept up by a movement that surpasses him. His body is nothing. His thoughts collide with what he sees, without understanding it.
A pale yellow stroke slices the heavenly canopy. The clouds, which have lost their immateriality, as though loaded with iron filings, with soil, with pebbles, race toward either side of the bright arc. A cow moos, then wails, as if to announce the clap of thunder that flashes moments later, making the ground tremble. Trees several feet tall bend under the wind’s hand, making them look as flexible as strands of hair. Sparkles glisten all around. That’s water, thinks Tristan. Water in the place where, a few hours ago, there was a field.
Farther away, a little lower down, through the rain’s dense, silvery strokes, he notices a shape that’s difficult to identify, moving about majestically. What is that? he wonders, studying the triangle—yes, it’s definitely a triangle—sliding along the valley, slowly, lazily, apparently inhabited with a different tempo. That house, Tristan says to himself, but the word “house” resists, doesn’t identify with this moving shape; so he tries “barn,” and the sentence manages to build itself: that barn is floating on the prairie.
It’s not over, he says to himself. It’s right in the middle of happening. A storm. A rise in water level. A flood. We’re not going to die. Dumestre and I are already survivors. Nothing can happen to us here, where we are. But the others, in the village… Tristan hoists himself out of the hole to look for any lights. A wave of mud, whipped up from a puddle by the agile wind, smacks him in the face.
Before going back into the burrow, at the bottom of their refuge, he gropes around for his gamebag, grabs hold of the strap, and takes it with him without verifying its contents. Without being able to explain why, he’s convinced the rabbit is still there. The animal hasn’t escaped. He waited and fell asleep under the orange-scented dish towel.
“Any news from the front?” asks Dumestre, whose voice surprises Tristan at the cave’s entrance.
Tristan wasn’t expecting him to be so close. He can’t see him. When he went outside, Dumestre was lying down, dozing, but now he seems to be seated. His voice is coming from higher up, it’s better placed, he’s articulating more clearly. Tristan senses danger, as if his companion were preparing to spring on him, but to what end? What reason would he have to harm Tristan? They’re stuck with each other.
Tristan doesn’t answer Dumestre’s question. He doesn’t tell him about the hurricane rumbling outside. He keeps quiet. Then takes a deep breath and says, in a flat voice, leveled by fear: “You’re sitting up?”