The second sword, p.1
The Second Sword, page 1
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THE SECOND SWORD
A TALE FROM THE MERRY MONTH OF MAY
For Raimund Fellinger, in memoriam
Then said he unto them, But now, he that hath a purse, let him take it, and likewise his scrip: and he that hath no sword, let him sell his garment, and buy one … And they said, Lord, behold, here are two swords. And he said unto them, It is enough.
—LUKE 22:36–38
I
BELATED REVENGE
“So this is the face of an avenger!” I said to myself on the morning in question as I looked in the mirror before setting out. I mouthed this statement without a sound, yet articulated every word, moving my lips with exaggerated precision, as if to read those lips in the mirror and commit the formulation to memory, once and for all.
In the past I’d often talked to myself this way for days on end—and not just in the last few years—but at this particular moment I experienced the conversation as unprecedented for me, and also unheard-of—in every sense.
So this was how a human being spoke and looked who, after years of hesitating, procrastinating, and occasionally forgetting the whole thing, was about to leave the house and exact long overdue revenge, on his own behalf, true—perhaps—but beyond that for the sake of the world and in the name of a universal law, or also merely—why “merely”?—in order to shake up and thereby wake up a certain public. What public? The one that mattered.
The strange part was this: as I gazed at myself, the “avenger,” in the mirror, seemingly the embodiment of calm and projecting an authority that transcended all others, and spent probably a good hour taking stock of my image, especially the eyes, almost unblinking, I felt my heart growing increasingly heavy, and once I’d left the mirror and my house and garden gate behind, it even ached.
My usual way of talking to myself, always quite loquacious, was often not only silent but also completely expressionless, going unnoticed by others—or at least so I imagined. At other times I shouted at the top of my lungs, alone in the house and at the same time—again in my imagination—with nary a soul far and wide, to quote the poet Uhland, shouted in joy, in rage, mostly without words, simply shouting, the shouts exploding out of me. But as an avenger I now opened my mouth, rounding it, pursing it, stretching it, twisting it, tearing it open, silent all the while, performing a time-honored ritual, certainly not what I would have chosen on my own, a performance that during my time in front of the mirror had taken on an actual rhythm. And this rhythm had eventually generated sounds. From me, the avenger, singing had issued forth, a wordless singsong, a menacing one. And that was what had brought on the heartache. “Stop that singing!” I shouted at my image in the mirror. And it promptly obeyed, breaking off its humming, though that made my heart twice as heavy. Now there was no going back. “Finally!” (Another shout.)
The moment had come to sally forth to seek revenge, the campaign to be carried out by me and me alone. For the first time in a decade, instead of just showering, I took a morning bath, then donned, one leg and one arm at a time, the grayish-black Dior suit I’d laid out neatly on my bed with the white shirt I’d just ironed; on the lower right side the shirt had a butterfly embroidered in black, which I pulled into sight just above my belt. I shouldered my carryall, which itself weighed more than its contents, and left the house without locking up, my practice even when I expected to be gone for a while.
Yet I’d come back only three days earlier, after spending several weeks roaming the northern interior of the country, to my chosen home on the southwestern outskirts of Paris. And for the first time I’d felt the tug of home, I, who since the premature end, if not sudden termination, of my childhood, had been leery of homecomings—not to mention one to my birthplace—indeed had had a horror of any kind of homecoming—a clenching sensation in my body down to the last reaches of my intestinal tract—especially there.
And these two or three days after my belated but, for the first time in my life, not so much happy (get thee behind me, happiness!) as harmonious homecoming had reinforced my awareness of being where I belonged, and once and for all. Never again would anything disrupt my sense of being settled in and attached to that place. It was, quite simply, pleasure in the place, a stable pleasure, and that place-pleasure grew with the passing days (and nights), and, unlike in the nearly three previous decades, was no longer limited to the house and grounds, didn’t depend on those at all, but pertained purely to the place. “How so? To the place in general? The place specifically?” — “The place.”
What added to my unanticipated place-pleasure, not to say faith in the place (or, if you will, my late-blooming local patriotism, of a sort more likely to be manifested by certain children), was the fact that in this area yet another of the new holidays that had been proliferating in recent years, and not only in France, had just been announced, tacked on not to the long summer holidays but to those around Easter, themselves already not that short, and now extended, in this year of my tale of revenge, to include the period leading up to the first of May.
With many people away, the place felt more spacious, expanding from day to day, and at moments, standing for an entire day, losing its borders altogether. Days went by without the eruption of that two-dog barking on the other side of the hedge that would cause my hand, writing out words or numbers (on a check, a tax form), to jerk suddenly and scrawl a line—and such a thick one!—clear across the sheet of paper, whether a check or whatever. When a dog did bark, it was way off in the distance, reminding me of long-ago evenings out in the country, which now added to my awareness and space-sensation of homecoming, or of a homecoming in the offing.
In this period fewer people were out and about; far fewer. Sometimes from morning to night I’d meet only two or three on the street or on the usually crowded square in front of the station, and most of those were strangers. But didn’t the occasional person I knew from sight also walk, stand, or sit (mostly sit) like a stranger? Like an entirely different person. And whether acquaintances or strangers: we never failed to greet each other, and what a greeting it was. Often people asked me for directions, and I could always oblige. Or almost always. But when I wasn’t acquainted with a particular location, that very fact gave me and the other person a jolt of energy.
During three full days at home I didn’t once hear the clattering of helicopters from the military air base on the Île-de-France plateau transporting state visitors to or from the Élysée Palace down in the Seine valley. Not once did the spring wind waft snatches of music from the airstrip to “us,” as I involuntarily thought of my fellow residents and myself: the solemn music played as coffins containing the remains of soldiers killed in Africa, Afghanistan, or elsewhere were unloaded from state aircraft onto the platform of honor known as the “tarmac,” to be welcomed home by the French fatherland. The sky, at mid-altitude, crisscrossed, darted across, flitted across (the first swallows), shot across (a very different kind of shooting and not the belated arrival of falcons and other taloned birds) by almost all imaginable birds, although—yet another absence—this time no eagle, otherwise circling summer after summer alone through the empty sky way high up, at the sight of which I’d once, at noon on a soundless day in high summer, thinking myself equally alone on the ground, had a vision, rather apocalyptic and certainly terrifying: it occurred to me that in the eye of that immense eagle I was the last human here on earth, spotted through the last remaining celestial opening.
And—to regain the local asphalt and cobblestones underfoot after scanning the heavens that way—in this entire period no crashing of garbage cans at the crack of dawn, none of the constant rumbling and roaring in the background, but rather, if any racket, only an intermittent one, now seven side streets away, now three stone’s throws away past the second traffic circle, and now, after a dream or two between waking and sleeping, the garbage can by the door of my nearest neighbor, the one who in his entire adult life, actually quite long, hadn’t once, so far as I knew, ventured beyond his house and this town: but here, and with the few others out there, neither a banging nor a clanging as they were emptied, as if there were hardly anything in them, just a brief whoosh, then a rustling, almost a chirping, not unlike a secret chiming; and finally the gentle sound of the cans being set back on the ground, probably also thanks to certain local trash haulers who from time to time raised their glasses to me in the railway bar. And then the continuation of these dozy images, setting the mood for the day.
Time and again in my life I’d recalled the old more or less biblical story of the man whom God or some other higher power seized by a shock of his hair and whisked away from his accustomed place to somewhere else entirely—another land. And as for me, unlike the hero of that story, who I think would have preferred to stay put, I’d wished that I, too, could be spirited away, grabbed by a shock of my hair and transported by a merciful power through the air to live somewhere else? Not to live! Just to be swept away from the here and now!
During the three days before I set out to put my plans for revenge into action, I grabbed a bunch of my hair almost hourly, though no t to lift myself off the ground and whirl myself away, over the horizons, but to anchor myself or keep myself grounded, standing on my own two legs in the here and now and, miracle or not, feel at home for a change. Every morning, as soon as I got up, I seized a shock of hair, first with my left hand, then with my right, pulled and shook it, hard and harder, perhaps looking to an observer like a person about to rip off his own scalp—yet it produced a well-being that gradually spread through my entire body, from my head down to my thighs, knees, and little toe, and not only the little one, fulfilling me, quietly pounding, soundlessly drumming through me with a sensation of being rooted in place, a sensation threatened anew with every passing hour.
To complement this oddity—a different one turned up every couple of years, opening my eyes to new possibilities—I noticed from one day to the next that among the houses orphaned during the two-week Easter holidays, one house appeared to be occupied. As if it were a local rule, or even a local law, whenever I’d passed a dozen lowered shutters and the like, I’d come upon a house where at least one window, if not all the windows, especially those on the ground floor, let me see inside, into living and dining rooms. Because the curtains were also drawn back, seemingly on purpose, the sight had something welcoming, indeed inviting, about it, whether tables were set or not: “Come on in, whoever you are!” Yet these rooms never had anyone in them. And this very absence of occupants tempted me to come closer and whetted my appetite—for all sorts of things. It seemed unthinkable that somewhere in the expanse of a house like that, the male or female owner or the couple, the entire clan, might be hiding, spying on me, whether in the flesh or on a screen. Although I always felt seen, the gaze was well-intentioned and accommodating. These houses were unoccupied only for the moment; in another minute I’d be welcomed from a completely unexpected direction, whether in French, German, or Arabic (any language but English). And the voices of children sounding as if coming from high in the treetops.
And once, on the second or third—and, for the present, final—morning of my return and homecoming, in front of just such an unoccupied hospitable house, in the tiny front yard, where the grass grew like grass instead of aspiring to be a lawn or such, a barbecue grill, looking as if recently improvised out of iron rods as in olden times, was smoking, two plumes of smoke from side-by-side fires, with one plume rising straight into the sky in classic fashion, the smoke even and bright, while the other plume was pressed toward the ground, likewise in classic fashion, dark and sooty, if only initially, as it left the fire: for after that, this second plume, swirling along the ground in twists and turns, in contrast to the antediluvian tale of fratricide, made its way into the sky as well, the blackish smoke, puffing hither and thither, giving way to white, bright, feathery cloudlets, (almost) indistinguishable from the halfway transparent plume from the other side of the grill, its twin, and, even more astonishing, a truly unprecedented phenomenon: higher up the two smoke plumes actually joined for a few moments and intertwined, over and over, in ever new configurations, just before they both became completely transparent and vanished into space, as the next smoke rocket and its companion rose from the grill below.
And lo and behold: the person who now came out of that seemingly empty house and invited me into the yard for a treat was my former letter carrier, la factrice, followed, a few steps behind her as usual, by her husband, likewise un facteur, she having retired a few months ago, while he’d been pushed into retirement years earlier. I still have the note in which she, “votre factrice Agnès,” informs us, the residents of the area, that she, who always covered her route by bicycle, would make her last rounds, tournée, “on 10 July 2020,” and when I thought at one point that I’d lost that slip of paper, I, who’ve lost so many things in life without experiencing any regret, felt almost heartbroken—and how it cheered me when from amid the piles and piles of papers, without my hunting for it, that particular note surfaced and is now lying in front of me on my writing table. The three of us sat in the yard again until late afternoon, and the two former letter carriers described how they—he from the Ardennes in northwestern France, she from the mountainous region in the southwest—had been recruited by the national postal service to come to the outskirts of Paris and the Île-de-France, untrained country folk who, however, were hardier than residents of the metropolis and ideally suited for delivering the mail by bicycle—in those days unmotorized, obviously—pedaling up and down the innumerable inclines characteristic of the greater Paris area and known in bikers’ terminology, including that of the Tour de France, as faux plats, false level stretches, the hills almost invisible to the eye but all the more noticeable on a bicycle.
Though summer was still some way off, I recall this one day, indeed all three days, as the longest of the year: as if each night were delayed past the natural divide between day and night; as if the sun, “seemingly miraculously,” refused to set, at least until I was present for the next happening in the village, and then another, and another. And when night came on, there was no sense of its getting dark.
Again: lo and behold! The shutters were still lowered on the house next door, where the husband and wife who’d built it had died in quick succession ten years earlier—the excellent paint job hadn’t begun to peel yet—but across the overgrown garden, where here and there a rose bush was coming into bloom, more splendid than before, a clothesline had been strung, crowded from one end to the other with children’s clothing, most of it in dark colors, clothes that at one time would have been described as “shabby.”
And listen: along the wood roads in the hills the creaking and squeaking of tree limbs as the wind rubbed them together, echoing the hospitable opening of garden, house, and wine-bar doors all through the area (the fire pit I’d seen earlier hadn’t remained the only one).
And take a look: the clearing from which the clicking of hundreds of boules would usually have made itself heard was deserted except for a car parked on the edge, and behind the steering wheel a man sat motionless, his eyes fixed on the clearing, on the broad graveled surface grooved by the balls; he seemed to have chosen this spot the way people from inland Portugal are said to drive to the coast, their only plan being to sit in their cars for a while without getting out, simply to gaze at the ocean. But isn’t the man in the car in fact Portuguese, a mason, who unlike today often has cement dust in his hair when he sits of an evening on a stool near me in the bar at the railway station?
So listen, will you: that rushing sound under the side street: that can’t be the sewer, can it? — But what is it then? Where’s the sound coming from? — It’s coming from the brook or little stream that over millennia carved out our rather small upland valley, flowing from its source higher up, near where the palace now stands, from Versailles down to where it empties into the Seine. The brook was covered over more than a century ago. — So it’s our Marivel hidden underground that we hear rushing that way? — Yes, that’s the one, that’s its name, and see that curve in the street over there: it marks the exact course and curve of the Marivel. What a rushing. You won’t hear a toilet being flushed, a washing machine on the spin cycle, a fire hose rushing that way; only a brook can make that sound. And in no time you’ll see its water, have it before you, out in the open, where you can wash your face with it, drink it (no, that’s probably not such a good idea). — How so? — Look over there, see that pump, the cast-iron one in the overgrown yard? Go and pump it! — But it’s all rusty. — Just brush off the rust and keep pumping. — Now something’s coming; it’s a muddy slurry, shit-brown. — Keep pumping, little pumper, keep pumping. — Well, will you look at that!
These unstructured days were coming to an end, however, and I sensed that most keenly when I looked from the street into the schoolhouse and saw the classrooms, still empty at the moment, but not for long. The large windows had already been washed, the floors and desks mopped or wiped down. Yet this image of time about to run out, like all the other local images of transitoriness, had nothing depressing about it. Stacked in layers on the windowsills and elsewhere were books, atlases, and other “instructional materials,” not in new arrangements but rather in their time-honored places, and from a corner by the blackboard gleamed a globe; and all that, including the sparkling windows and the neatness of the bright classrooms as they waited quietly, communicated itself to me, standing outside, radiated a joy in learning that had nothing to do with me personally, or if it did, with someone I’d been once upon a time, long, long ago — In reality, too? — Reality?
