Quick, Mick!
Fallen back onto the soil, the mole, no longer capable of flight, began to squeal.
Have him!
The dog ate the mole.
Alone in the house, Albertine asked herself for the hundredth time the same question: when she was gone, what would Félix do? Men, she considered, were strong-backed, reckless and weak, each man combining these essential qualities in his own way. Félix needed a woman who would not take advantage of his weakness. If the woman were ambitious or greedy, she would exploit him and use his strong back and his recklessness to ride him where she wanted. Yet now he was forty and the woman had not been found.
There had been Yvette. Yvette would have cuckolded him, just as she was now cuckolding the poor Robert whom she married. There had been Suzanne. One Sunday morning, just before Félix did his military service, she had seen him caressing Suzanne on the floor beneath the blackboard in the schoolroom — the same schoolroom where he had learnt as a boy! She had crept away from the window without disturbing them, but she repeatedly reminded her son, when she wrote to him in the army, that school-teachers can’t sit on milking stools. Suzanne had left the village and married a shopkeeper.
Was it going to be worse for her son to be alone than to have married the wrong woman? This question made Albertine feel as helpless as she had sometimes felt as a child.
In the evening Félix emptied the sacks full of potatoes into a wooden stall in the cellar under the house. Potatoes just lifted from the earth give off a strange warmth and in the darkness of the cellar they glow like children’s shoulders after a day in the sun. He looked at the heap critically: there were going to be far less than last year.
Did you finish? asked Albertine when he entered the kitchen.
Four more rows to do, Maman.
I’ve just made the coffee … Get under the table! You’re not firm enough with that pup, Félix.
He caught five moles this afternoon.
Are you going out tonight?
Yes, there’s a meeting of the Dairy Committee.
Félix drank the coffee from the bowl his mother handed him and began reading the Communist Party paper for peasants and agricultural workers.
Do you know where the biggest bell in the world is, Maman?
Not round the neck of one of our cows!
It’s called the Tsar Kolokol, it weighs 196 tons and was cast in Moscow in 1735.
That’s a bell I’ll never hear, she said.
When he went into the stable to start milking, she took out his suit from the wardrobe which her husband had made one winter when they were first married, and brushed the trousers with the same energy as she had once groomed their mare. Then, having laid the suit on the high double bed beneath her husband’s portrait, she did something she had never done before in her life. She took off her boots and lay, fully clothed, on top of the bed.
She heard Félix come back into the kitchen, she listened to him washing by the sink. She heard him taking off his trousers and washing between his legs. When he had finished, he came into the bedroom.
Where are you? he asked.
I’m taking a rest, she said from the bed.
What’s the matter?
A rest, my son.
Are you ill, Maman?
I feel better now.
She watched him dress. He stepped into the trousers with the creases which she had ironed. He put on the white cotton shirt buttoned at the cuffs, which showed off his handsome shoulders. He slipped into the jacket — he was putting on weight, no question about that. Nevertheless he was still handsome. He ought to be able to find a wife.
Why don’t you go to a dentist? she asked. He glanced at her, puzzled.
He could arrange your teeth.
I haven’t a toothache.
He could make you more handsome.
He could also make us poorer!
Let me see you in your cap.
He put it on.
You’re even more handsome than your father was, she said.
When Félix returned to the farm that night, he was surprised to see a car, its lights on, parked outside the house. He entered hurriedly. The doctor from the next village was in the kitchen washing his hands in the sink. The door to the Middle Room was shut.
If there’s no improvement by the morning, your mother will have to go to the hospital, the doctor said.
Félix looked through the kitchen window at the mountain opposite, which, in the moonlight, was the colour of a grey mole, but he could not see around what had happened.
What happened? he asked.
She telephoned your neighbours.
She won’t want to go to the hospital.
I have no choice, said the doctor.
You’re right, said Félix, suddenly furious, it is her choice which counts!
You can’t look after her properly here.
She has lived here for fifty years.
If you’re not careful, she may die here.
The doctor wore glasses and this was the first thing you noticed about him. He looked at everything as if it were a page to read. He had come straight to the village from medical school full of idealism. Now, after ten years, he was disillusioned. Mountain people did not listen to reason, he complained, mountain people drank too much, mountain people went on repeating what they thought they had once heard as children, mountain people never recognised a rational process, mountain people behaved as if they thought life itself was mad.
Have a drink before you go, Doctor.
Does your mother have a supplementary insurance?
Which do you prefer, pears or plums?
Neither, thank you.
A little gentian? Gentian cures all, Doctor.
No alcohol, thank you.
How much do I owe you?
Twenty thousand, said the doctor, adjusting his glasses.
Félix took out his purse. She has worked every day of the year for fifty years, he thought, and tonight this shortsighted quack asks for twenty thousand. He extracted two folded bank notes and placed them on the table.
The doctor left and Félix went into the Middle Room. She was so thin that, under the eiderdown, her body was invisible. It was as if her head, decapitated, had been placed on the pillow.
An expression of irritation, like that on a dog’s muzzle when it sniffs alcohol, ruffled her face whilst her eyes remained closed. When the spasm was over, her face resumed its calm, but was older. She was ageing hour by hour.
Noticing the dog lying on the floor at the foot of the bed, Félix hesitated. She would have insisted on the dog being put out.
Not a sound, Mick!
He climbed onto the bed beside his mother so that he would be reassured by her breathing throughout the night. She stirred and, turning on the pillow, asked for some water. When he gave her the glass, she could not raise her head. He had to hold her head up with his hand, and her head seemed to weigh nothing, to be no heavier than a lettuce.
They both lay there, awake and without saying a word.
You’ll get the rest of the potatoes in tomorrow? she eventually asked.
Yes.
Next spring there’ll be fewer moles, she said. There won’t be enough for them all to eat to survive the winter.
They breed quickly, Maman.
In the long run such troubles correct themselves, she insisted, if not by next year, by the year after. Yet you, you, my son, you will always remember the Year of the Thousand Moles.
No, Maman, you’re going to get better.
The next day whilst he was cutting wood on the circular saw, Félix stopped every hour to go into the house and reassure himself. Each time, lying on the large bed, her arms straight by her side, she opened her eyes and smiled at him.