The Barracks below are scarcely visible in the snow. I can spot them because of blue smoke coming from a chimney. A woman is crossing the footbridge over the river. The Barracks were three minutes’ walk from the factory — the same as our house in the opposite direction. From our house to the footbridge was five minutes’ walk. Three if I ran. Mother often sent me to the shop by the Barracks to buy mustard or salt or something she’d forgotten. I walked to the bridge and then ran. At whatever time of day, the men who lived there would cry out and wave. They worked on shifts, and of those not working or sleeping some would be washing their clothes on the grass, some preparing a meal by an open window, some tinkering with an old car they hoped to put on the road. In the winter they lit bonfires outside and they brewed tea and roasted chestnuts. They were forbidden to fish in the river.
If I stopped running they held up their arms and grinned and tried to pat my head. I was always relieved to cross the bridge back to our side. Father said the Company had built the Barracks to house a hundred men as soon as the factory was finished. The Company knew they wouldn’t find more than two or three hundred local workers and so they foresaw from the beginning that they would need foreigners. Every man who lodged in the Barracks had his own secrets. Three, four, perhaps more. Impenetrable and unnameable. They turned over these secrets in their hands, wrapped them in paper, threw them in the river, burnt them, whittled them away with their knives when they had nothing else to do. Hundreds of secrets. We in the village on our side of the river had only four. Who killed Lucie Cabrol for her money? Where above Peniel is the entrance to the disused gold mine? What happens at the bridegroom’s funeral before they put him in his coffin? Who betrayed the Marmot, who was Michel’s uncle, after the factory-gate meeting? Only four secrets. Across the river they in their sheds kept hundreds.
From here, river, house, sheds, factory, bridge, all look like toys. So it was in childhood, Odile Blanc.
One blazing July day in 1950, Mademoiselle Vincent, the schoolmistress, came to the house. I hid in the stable. She wore a hat whose brim was as wide as her shoulders; it was silver-grey in colour and around it was tied a pink satin ribbon.
Merde! said Father. It’s the schoolteacher. Look, Louise!
I’ll be slipping out, Achille, said Mother.
I have come to talk to you about your daughter, Monsieur Blanc.
Not doing well at school? Do sit down, Mademoiselle Vincent.
On the contrary, I’ve come to tell you she — she scratched her hot freckled shoulder — on the contrary, I’ve come to tell you how well your Odile is doing.
Kind of you to come all this way to tell us that. A little coffee?
Father poured coffee into a cup, took off his cap and adjusted it further back on his head.
She’s never been difficult, has our Odile, he said.
Her intelligence—
I don’t know how you see it, Mademoiselle Vincent, but to my way of seeing, intelligence is not—
She is a pupil of great promise.
Wait a year or two, she’s only thirteen, said Father. In a year or two her promise — do you take sugar?
It’s just because she’s thirteen that we have to decide things now, Monsieur Blanc.
Even in my day, Father said, nobody married before sixteen!
I want to propose to you, Monsieur Blanc, that we send Odile to Cluses.
You said she’s causing no trouble, Mademoiselle. At least that’s what I understood, what sort of trouble?
Mademoiselle Vincent took off her hat and laid it on her lap. Her greying hair, a little damp, was pressed against her scalp.
No trouble, she said slowly, I want her to go to Cluses for her sake.
How for her sake?
If she stays here, Mademoiselle Vincent went on, she’ll leave school next year. If she goes to Cluses she can continue until she gets her CAP. Let her go to Cluses. She was fanning herself with a little notebook taken from her handbag.
She’d have to be a boarder? asked Father.
Yes.
Have you mentioned it to her?
Not before talking to you, Monsieur Blanc.
He shrugged his shoulders, looked at the barometer, said nothing.
Mademoiselle Vincent got to her feet, holding her hat.
I knew you’d see reason, she said, offering him her hand like a present.
I was watching through the stable door.
Nothing to do with reason! shouted Father. In God’s name! Nothing to do with reason. He paused, gave a little laugh, and leered at Mademoiselle Vincent. She was an old man’s last sin — I wonder if you can understand that, Mademoiselle — his last sin.
It will mean a lot of work, she said.
Don’t push her too hard, said Father, it won’t change anything. You’ll see I was right one day. Odile will be married before she’s eighteen. At seventeen she’ll be married.
We can’t know, Monsieur Blanc. I hope she goes on to take her Baccalaureate.
Back of my arse! You see Odile as a schoolteacher?
She might be, said Mademoiselle Vincent.
No, no. She’s too untidy. To be a teacher you have to be very tidy.
I’m not very tidy, said Mademoiselle Vincent, take me, I’m not very tidy.
You have a fine voice, Mademoiselle, when you sing, you make people happy. That makes up for a lot.
You’re a flatterer, Monsieur Blanc.
She’ll never be a teacher, Odile, she’s too … he hesitated. She’s too — too close to the ground.
Funny to think of those words now in the sky.
Twice in my life I’ve been homesick and both times it was in Cluses. The first time was the worst, for then I hadn’t yet lived anything worse than homesickness. It’s to do with life, homesickness, not death. In Cluses the first time I didn’t yet know this difference.
The school was a building of five storeys. I wasn’t used to staircases. I missed the smell of the cows, Papa raking out the fire, Maman emptying her piss-pot, everyone in the family doing something different and everybody knowing where everybody else was, Emile playing with the radio and my screaming at him, I missed the wardrobe with my dresses all mixed up with Maman’s, and the goat tapping with her horns against the door.
Ever since I could remember, everyone had always known who I was. They called me Odile or Blanc’s Daughter or Achille’s Last. If somebody did not know who I was, a single answer to a single question was enough for them to place me. Ah yes! Then you must be Régis’s sister! In Cluses I was a stranger to everyone. My name was Blanc, which began with a B, and so I was near the top of the alphabetical list. I was always among the first ten that had to stand up, or to file out.
In the school there I learnt how to look at words like something written on a blackboard. When a man swears, the words come out of his body like shit. As kids we talked like that all the time — except when we made traps with words. Adam and Eve and Pinchme went down to the river to bathe, Adam and Eve were drowned, who do you think was saved? At Cluses I learnt that words belonged to writing. We used them; yet they were never entirely ours.
One evening after the last lesson I went back into the classroom to fetch a book I’d forgotten. The French mistress was sitting at her table, her head buried in her hands, and she was crying. I didn’t dare approach her. On the blackboard behind her, I remember it so well, was the conjugation of the verb fuir.