Not first in the bathtub, of course. He shook his head.
Now the boy was sitting on the toilet shivering wet, and that was because Christophe had not respected the reality of things. Florian struggled to loosen his bowels, muscles pale and stiff, rigid with effort. When the boy had finished, Christophe put him back in the tub.
A solution for the soiled sheets, a permanent one. After several weeks of daily washes, the old man’s back was in a certain amount of pain. He had considered letting the boy lie in his own filth, but had seen the boils people developed from lying in unclean beds and they were another matter altogether, worse even than urine and feces. He had no desire to clean pus or administer additional medicine.
The water ran clear. Christophe sat Florian on the edge of the tub and dried his upper body. He pulled the boy up and held him at the waist, drying his lower body with his free hand. Lea peered into the bathroom through the small window and watched them. Dancers: the older one, clothed in simple cotton rags, bowing before his partner. The other, thin and naked, hanging from his embrace.
12.
Christophe carried the boy upstairs and lay him on the freshly-made cot. His hair was still wet and Christophe thought he could see the boy peering through his parted eyelids. The old man stood over the little liar and watched Florian’s eyelids flutter and press together. He watched his own hand reach out and slap him across the face. Now his cheek was red and the child had learned a valuable lesson. Your hand is my hand, thought the old man. That hand was mine. I have hurt the child. Nonsense, he thought, the child is unconscious and does not realize what happened. But you do. Yes I do, thought the old man, and felt profoundly unhappy. He pulled the sheet over the boy as if to disguise his act.
Through the skylight a dull light crept, filling the room with shadows. The old man placed the milk jug at the foot of the child’s bed. Between the streaks of rust, its surface shone azure like a beetle’s shell. Christophe unwound the length of garden hose and made sure the rubber band was secured. He tied a length of string around the boy’s waist and ran the hose off the end of the bed and into the milk jug, where the boy’s urine was to collect. I must instruct the other children to stay away from this contraption, Christophe thought.
The dinner table was covered in filthy cutlery and dishes, flies standing atop morsels of dried porridge. The old man watched one of the insects as it rubbed its legs together and looked in no discernible direction. In the courtyard, an angry child continued to throw stones. Christophe walked through the kitchen and opened a drawer. From it he removed two batteries, relics now, these small metal cylinders wrapped in colorful plastic. He rolled them back and forth between his palms until the batteries felt warm, then inserted them into the portable compact-disc player. Not his last two, but close.
The usual disc was already inside. He removed the headphones from the drawer and placed them over his ears, appreciating the quiet this produced. The old man sat in his chair with the device balanced on his bony thighs. Slowly, he closed his eyes and allowed the music to take its place, populating the darkness in its sparse and mournful way.
When Christophe disassembled the music and returned it to the drawer, the boy had ceased throwing rocks in the courtyard. None of the children could be heard. He noticed the leaves had begun to fall from the sapling, each of them a very specific shape and color, most long, thin, a shade of orange, scattered on the grass, forming no pile, meager and deformed. Young. He knew this marked the beginning of autumn, the tired season, so humid that the bones of the old ached terribly, a season shaken into the tree by the cruel hands of children and lasting longer than any other.
He looked out the window, down through that molten deformation the years had caused. In the thickness of the pane where all was warped, there came another change in the old man’s mind. Glass is dust, he thought, sucked from the earth and heated, in the same way we paint a corpse to forget its true nature, and transparent only by name. Christophe heard the voice of his wife.
Just for tonight, she said, and looked at him with a hopeful quake in her eyes, dissolving at the edges.
He stood halfway between the doorway and the bed, watching her on the bed, his wife’s resolve built from the flimsiest of materials, before he leaned through the silence to take his pillow, one knee propped on the bed, smelling her indefinable scent like that of dried berries, then sliding open the drawer beneath the bed and carrying the spare bedding into the living room, sinking, sinking where his ribs held together, as water collapses dust.
Christophe had slept crumpled on the sofa for a month and three days before he purchased a military bed in a surplus store near Gambetta, built of square aluminum tubing and dark grey polyester, permanent enough to accommodate his entire body, but foldable with the hope that his wife might change her mind, as if her mind were the only barrier to their reconciliation. He set it up in his office, perpendicular to the desk, and his wife never mentioned its purchase. They continued to work together in the store, her attending to the thinning stream of customers, him cleaning the floors, restocking the bins, wiping the counters, vacuuming, receiving the increasingly erratic deliveries, carrying the boxes from room to room. None of the customers noticed a difference. Most were too worried with their own problems, and anyways they had always thought Christophe was some sort of employee, as his tasks showed no sign of ownership.
He touched her in the evenings, when his mind set itself on pleasing her, which he went about systematically. After she angled his mouth correctly and achieved a dry orgasm, he would slide up and kiss her once on the mouth, then place his lips on her neck as he entered her, thrusting a dozen times, saying I’m going to come, and her simply responding, fill me, until he did and they lay still for some moments, in union.
Then even this daily ritual ceased, replaced by the hard military bed, and her alone in the bedroom, limbs spread to meet the empty space, and him wondering what if anything had altered. We should leave the city as soon as possible, Christophe, but he would not leave the store, and he would not leave Paris, and anyways the accounts were exaggerated to catch people’s attention and profit from the resulting panic. He was a stubborn fool but she could not bring herself to leave him there alone.
In this manner, and despite not delivering the killing blow, Christophe caused his wife’s death.
She no longer loved me, said the old man to the window. These are the daydreams of a foolish child. But he could hear her cracked voice and see her long uncombed hair, and her burst open eye, and the white liquid oozing from where the other eyeball had been pushed into a slant, so she looked away like a fish. His dead wife with the soles of her sneakers barely scuffed, the sneakers he had found in the Marais, among the empty shoeboxes and thick chunks of broken glass. They’re comfortable, she had said, and smiled at him. That night he had slept soundly on the military bed, a cold breeze coming through the window of the office, and Paris was quiet. Not even a car in the streets, just the sound of gunshots at dawn, closer together and breaking the silence now, echoing down the narrow streets and up into the window, until the old man awoke in a sweat. He was lying on the sofa in the farmhouse.
Christophe looked into the fireplace where Lea had stood the day before. It was empty. The stone was shining where no soot covered it, and the sounds continued. He rose from the sofa and walked to the window. The boy was throwing rocks again. Then, after a few throws, Rodolphe did not lean over to pick up the next stone. His head was bobbing up and down. He began spinning his arms like propellers. Soon the boy was running around the courtyard, face red, eyes wide and vacant, shoes raising dust, lips vibrating to the sound of a motor.