“Pang, are you saying that Chemda’s grandmother volunteered to be experimented on?”
“Vol… an…?”
“Volunteer. It means, it means… Are you saying she asked them to do it to her? To cut her head open?”
“Yes. Yes! Doi! That is it. She ask them to do this, to cut her open, to make her brave like lion, like brave animal, but it go wrong and then she like… dead woman. Sitting there. For many year. Staring at the river. Sad story, so sad.” Pang nudged the boat onto the mud, darkly frowning, almost despairing. “I always ask. Always. Why? Why anyone want that? Why anyone ask to be cut open? To be cut into many pieces?”
12
Only when Officer Rouvier had driven away, swinging out of the hospital parking lot, did Julia begin her walk back to her apartment. It was a walk through the biting cold of the rain, but she didn’t mind.
She was glad for the cold and she was glad for the drizzle. It matched her sober and melancholy mood. And her slow footsteps were a soft and suitable backbeat to her thoughts, her deep deep thoughts. Of irritation at her own overreaction to Rouvier, and of fear and sadness at the murder of Ghislaine — that grotesquely brutal savaging. Raped by knives, or claws, or teeth.
Raped by animals.
Wearied by her own pensiveness, Julia stopped on one street corner; she was standing under the softly illuminated awning of an old bank. Crédit Agricole.
She couldn’t resist anymore. The past had been hammering at the present for so long: it was a jangling phone that wouldn’t stop ringing. A shrieking car alarm, waking up the neighborhood. She had to confront this painful memory, or it would drive her mad.
She had been nineteen. When it had happened. In Sarnia.
It was a teenage rite of passage in Marysville. To cross the border into Canada, where you could drink underage — by American standards. And her friends’ usual stop was Sarnia, a small, ugly Canadian border town of warehouses and derelict railroads and bleakness and freight trains and the Charity Casino. And liquor stores selling cut-price bourbon and Labatt Blue Light.
She and her friends must have done that trip a dozen times, yet that one night it went wrong. Maybe they drank too much, smoked too much skunk. Maybe someone had done some pills, E, she didn’t know. She couldn’t remember. But suddenly the evening was out of control and someone with a VW kombi offered to drive her home, but they didn’t go home; minutes later, an hour later, she was in the back of the kombi with a guy she liked, Callum, and he was kissing her, and she was half undressed, and kissing him, and laughing, and drinking more and more, and barely aware there were other guys in the van. Watching. Predatory. Watching.
By the time she began to realize, it was too late. She was naked and the other boys were laughing, because they thought she was enjoying it — was she enjoying it? — then she had done it: she had sex with one, maybe two of them, and the others were watching and laughing, and she shuddered to remember the way they touched her, grabbed her, like animals, slavering; and as she sobered the terror began, and she screamed and screamed and someone took pity and slapped down the others and bundled her from the van. The friend had called her father, who had arrived in Sarnia at two a. m. to find his daughter half dressed and weeping and refusing to talk, standing in the lobby of the Charity Casino like a whore. Like she was a whore. Wondering if she was actually a whore. Worse than a whore.
She’d loved her father that night. His delicacy and tact, the way he didn’t ask too many questions; the way he just hugged her and protected her and rescued her. And then he played his favorite jazz on the car radio, to fill the father-daughter silence, as they drove home through the comforting dreary suburbs, silent in the frost.
Three months later she had the abortion. She’d kept that to herself as well. Another shameful secret. Half a year later she got into McGill and she left it all for good.
The cold Lozère rain eased a little. Julia stepped from under the awning of the Crédit Agricole and recommenced her walk home.
Why was this memory seeking her attention now? Her childhood, however bland and ordinary and boring, had been largely happy. She loved her parents; her parents loved her. She’d enjoyed a decent education. There was just that one incident that clouded it all, just one. And she had gotten over it, in principle. So she thought.
Maybe it was the animality of the attack on Ghislaine that reminded her. She thought of the boys in the van; they had been her friends, then they became a pack, just like that. A wolf pack. How easily man was reduced to animal.
Or maybe it was the blood on Ghislaine’s body. Like the imagined blood of her abortion. The crimson of her guilt.
The echoes were many.
Her apartment was near now. Puddles on the gray pavement reflected the Mende streetlights; they also reflected her pensive, downcast face. Julia let her mind wander away, away from the past. To the conversation with Rouvier.
Yes.
The sudden revelation was like the reflection of a moon unexpectedly emerging from behind the clouds: large and startling.
Yes.
In Verlaine, that’s what Rouvier had said. In Verlaine.
And that’s what Ghislaine had said, in his own way. You’ll find it in Prunier. The same way Rouvier had said in Verlaine.
You’ll find it in Prunier!
Could this be the answer? To the puzzle? Was this why she was stymied?
She had presumed when Ghislaine had said “in Prunier” he meant “in Prunier, the village in north Lozère”; and last week she had visited the place and found nothing.
But maybe when Ghislaine had spoken that day on the Cham he meant his phrase in the same way an academic might say “in Shakespeare” or “in Darwin.” Ghislaine’s meaning must have been: You’ll find it in the works of Prunier, the scholar.
Quickly, she collected her chastened wits. Prunier or Prunières was a not entirely uncommon surname. It belonged to no scholar she knew, but this was evidently an obscure corner of French science. Maybe a local man? Or someone very dead, from very long ago.
Two minutes’ walk to her apartment, and two hours in front of her laptop screen, laboriously translating the most obscure and recherché French websites, finally gave her the answer: Pierre-Barthélémy Prunières.
She was right.
It turned out he was an antiquarian who flourished in the mid-nineteenth century. Pierre-Barthélémy Prunières did much research in Lozère; and he came from Marvejols. Long forgotten, he was once, the website said, known for his research in osteo-archaeology: skulls and skeletons he unearthed in the caves and dolmens of his native region, like the Baumes-Chaudes in the Tarn. And near Saint-Pierre-des-Tripiers — in “la grotte de l’homme mort.”
La grotte de l’homme mort?
The cave of the dead man.
She wrote down the phrase on a pad, circled it, stared at it. The name was poetic, but it meant nothing in itself. She circled the name again, then returned to her computer. And ten more minutes on the laptop brought her a much more sincere frisson, a real buzz, a frightening revelation.
The word pulsed on the screen: trépanation.
Trepanned.
Her thoughts whirred. It seemed this man Prunières had unearthed precisely the same kind of remains as Julia. A hundred and fifty years before.