They were just plain, simple, humble stencils of human hands: but they were so silently poignant, so piercingly mute. And so vividly new. It was as if a Stone Age family had walked into the cave just an hour before Julia and placed their hands against the rock face and blown the pigment through a straw around the fingers, creating the stencil. Somebody had indeed lifted up a little child in one section of the cave — or so it was supposed by the experts — so the tiny infant hand could be stenciled alongside the adults’.
Why?
And why were so many of the hands disfigured? Julia had wondered about this then, even as she wondered about it now. Why the disfigurement? Fingers were severed or bent in most of the Hands of Gargas. No one knew the reason. Since the discovery of the cave in the nineteenth century, many theories had been provided for these “mutilated” hands — a hunting code, a disease, frostbite, a ritual and tribalistic disfigurement — yet none of them really fitted.
The mystery was everlasting. Painfully unanswered.
It was, therefore, the Hands that had decided Julia’s fate. Standing in Gargas feeling giddy and awkward and flustered and adolescently attracted to the young French student who was their guide, Julia had resolved — there and then — to make these precious subterranean cloisters her world. At that moment she had resolved to study prehistory; and then to become an archaeologist.
To solve the puzzles.
At first her parents had been pleased by her impetuous decision: their precious daughter had a charming vocation! But when the mid-teen ideal evolved into late-teen reality, those familial attitudes had changed. First she’d shocked Mom and Dad with her decision to leave not just Michigan but the country: she wanted to study at McGill in Montreal. This was partly, as she had patiently explained to them, because McGill had a great archaeology department. Also, living in Quebec, she could learn to speak French, by immersion, by actually living with French-speakers: something she really desired.
But there had been other reasons for her decision that she had not explained. Barely hidden inside her was a simple yearning to go somewhere different, somewhere real, somewhere with history and culture and a European flavor — just somewhere with flavor — to get away from the stifling, boring flatness of the Midwest, the boring snowy no man’s land on the border, the bored kids doing boring meth in the boring mall next to Meijer’s. And there was one further memory of Michigan she couldn’t bring herself to address: yet it, too, chased her away.
And so she had done it: she’d moved to Montreal and a freezing apartment in a handsome city where fat Americans spoke French and ate fries with curd.
The memories faded, just for a moment. Julia stared up at the Hands of Gargas. Apologetic, tragic, mutilated. Full of remorse. And then again her mind flicked back, through the mental photos: to that day she left Montreal — for London.
If their daughter’s quitting Michigan had been troubling for her parents, her decision to quit North America entirely, to do her PhD in London, had been bitter. Then the remorse had really kicked in, the guilt of an only child entirely deserting her family and pursuing a career — instead of giving them grandchildren.
To compound Julia’s growing sense of error, her subsequent career had begun to disappoint, it had all trailed off into a mediocre teaching job at a mediocre London college. Soon after that, the weekly transatlantic phone calls from her beloved mother and father had become an unspoken ordeal, a silent yet insidious reproach: No, I am not coming home; Yes, I am still “just teaching”; No, I haven’t got a fiancé; No, there is no prospect of grandchildren. Goodbye, Dad, goodbye, Mom.
Goodbye.
Julia sighed and shook her head.
Annika set a plate of sweet cakes on the table; she was speaking.
“You must understand Ghislaine, he is a disappointed man. A very disappointed man, but determined, too.”
Julia knew that Annika and Ghislaine went way back. They were the same age. They had been friends, apparently, for decades. Annika had worked under the ludicrous Ghislaine since the 1970s, across France, now in Lozère.
She leaned forward.
“Annika, do you mind if I ask a personal question?”
The older woman shrugged in a neutral way and pulled her gray cashmere cardigan a little tighter around her shoulders. “Not at all. You have told me all of your life! Why not ask me about mine?”
“Were you and Ghislaine… were you…”
“Lovers. Yes.”
“In Paris?”
“In 1969. We shared political ideals. We were at the Sorbonne together. We learned Maoism together! We even went to China together in the early seventies. Hence, Julia, the tea.” Annika puckered her slightly overlipsticked lips to take a hot sip, then she set down the handleless porcelain cup.
“So?”
“Do not blame him, Julia, for the way he acts and is. He has… beliefs, even now. Beliefs that brought him here. And me. There was a time we shared ideals as well as kisses, and we were both interested in the caves, in prehistory. Archaeology.” The two women simultaneously looked at the wall pictures, the cascading lions of Chauvet.
“Of course, we are no longer together now. We do not share kisses.” The smile was brief and unmirthful. “But we are still friends, after a fashion. À la mode. I will not betray him. He is a sad man, conflicted. And he has his family name.”
Julia was bewildered.
“Why won’t he take my find seriously?”
“What makes you think he doesn’t take it seriously?”
“The way he just dismissed me! Sacked me!”
Annika squinted at Julia, then she looked out the window, where the wind was searching among the stones, lamenting its widowhood. “He wouldn’t do that lightly.”
“Why?”
“Think, Julia. Think.” Her older eyes assessed the younger woman for a moment. Then she continued: “You do know he is attracted to you, yes?”
“Sorry?”
Her friend sighed, quite patiently. “He may seem older to you, but he is a lover of beauty.” Her smile was sad. “Youthful beauty…. I know him, Julia, I saw the way he reacted, when he first met you. And you were blithely unaware of this?” A shake of the head. “You are one of those women, if I might say so, Julia, that does not realize her own attractiveness to men. This is true, isn’t it? Mmm? Yet your blue eyes, the blond hair, the blond hair you always keep tied back—”
“No. Annika, really, it’s idiotic. No.” Julia was blushing fiercely. And yet a thought was also tugging at her: the way Ghislaine had approached down the cave, like an attacker, like a man intent on… No, she chided herself, this was absurd. Not all men are like that.
She sat forward, seeking answers.
“Annika, even if it’s true, what’s the relevance? What’s any of that got to do with my dismissal, for God’s sake?”
“What I’m trying to say is he… liked you.” She lifted a hand. “Please. It is true. But he is also professional. He sincerely admires you as an archaeologist, that’s why he hired you. And for all these reasons, he would not dismiss you summarily. No.”
The picture clouded. “But then, why do it?”
“Perhaps he takes your find very seriously. Too seriously. And remember, he is conflicted.”
Julia could only feel lost.
“There are many mysteries in Ghislaine’s past. But it is not for me to reveal, not for me to shine the lamp on the cavern wall. But do not think less of yourself. That is all.”
Her cake uneaten, Julia brooded.
Annika was always a little evasive; self-consciously mysterious in her thoughts. But all this stuff, this was a seriously new level of annoying coyness. Even though she liked and admired Annika, Julia couldn’t help thinking, Get over yourself.