by PIERRE MILLE
Henny could not figure out what that bar of iron or steel was that Pousse, the blacksmith, had just thrown onto his charcoal fire. It was all rusty, rectangular, with curious bulges on both sides from top to bottom. One of Pousse’s sons grabbed it in his strong pincers, turned it around and around, already growing red. His younger brother, standing at the patched old leather bellows, blew up the fire.
Pousse’s wife came in with a bucket of water. She was almost as big and strong as her husband—breasts swinging under a kind of hemp bag, the only garment she wore; on her feet, sabots without stockings.
“All right,” said the blacksmith, “set it down.”
He took a deep breath, picked up his hammer, then replaced it. “Big nails, you want?” he asked Henny. “What’re they for?”
“Yes, big ones,” the young man said. “For the wall in the stable, between the cows and the pigs. It’s rotten—the pigs get through it, and scatter the cows’ straw around. Big nails, like these here.”
He held out some long four-sided spikes, almost as completely rusted as the bar of steel.
“Them was made by machine, in the old days,” said the blacksmith. “That’s the only way they’d work, by machine— and there was none of these forged for a long time. . . oh, centuries and centuries. I don’t know how long. It was my great-great-grandfather that taught himself blacksmithing here. Where’d you find them you got in your hand? In the roof of that old building, the Church, they call it?”
“I was up there, but there’s no more left. Nothing at all, except the big roof-beams.”
“Yes, the rest is all gone. They cleaned it all out, one way and another. And it’s the same thing in them big houses, what they call chateaux. You know the one at Toué? I was there the other day with a gang from the neighborhood. We picked up the last stones. We’re going to use them to build up the town wall, over on the west side. It isn’t strong enough over there.”
“I know it isn’t—that’s where They got in, last year.”
“I’ve got something to make me remember it better than you,” said the blacksmith, pointing to his wooden leg, then to the tiny blue dot of the scar on his shoulder.
“And They killed my boy!” the woman said. “Oh, if we just had rifles. They have ‘em!”
“There’s a few left,” said Henny, “but what about powder? And even if we had the powder, those rifles only take cartridges made of copper, or some other metal in thin sheets. Where’d we find them?”
“I’d take care of that all right,” the blacksmith said proudly. “It’s the powder we need, like you say. They got some!@
“Not much,” Henny said. “Not many rifles, either. Because it takes all kinds of things to make rifles—carbon, iron, steel, complicated machines, and factories for all that—”
“Just the same, They make ‘em!”
“Yes. You know Milot, the one that lived with Them because he wanted to work in Their laboratories, only They wanted to kill him, and he came here to hide two years ago? Well, he says it’s always the same way—it’s one of the laws of human nature. He says he read an old book, written in ancient French, and this book said that ever since the beginning of the world there’s been ups and downs in every kind of industry—clothes, houses, transportation. Periods of decadence after periods of perfection. In the arts, too, he says.”
“The arts?” said the blacksmith. It was a meaningless word to him.
“All the arts and all the industries,” Henny insisted, “except making weapons. People have always kept on making weapons—always kept on inventing them and perfecting them, even—ever since the first man. That hasn’t ever stopped.”
“I understand that all right,” said the blacksmith. “It’s not like that with us, but Them! The only way they got to live is to take what us Champiards make to live on ourselves…In the old days, everybody knew how to read, they say. I don’t know how myself, of course, but you ought to read us that book, in the evenings, in the winter, when you come here with your Jčne.”
“I’ve never read it myself. I haven’t got it. I told you, I got all that stuff from Milot. Even if I did have the book, that wouldn’t do any good. It’s written in the old language—you wouldn’t understand it. No more than we can understand the people that live three days’ march from here.”
The language they spoke was debased French, in which certain consonants were beginning to disappear or had already done so, while some vowels were transposed. Henny, three centuries earlier, had been Henry, and Jčne had been Jeanne. Cheuzi had been Choisi, near Compiegne. And they themselves were unaware that some of the words they used —the names of different kinds of beef, mutton, and poultry, as well as military terms—were distorted forms of Russian and Chinese words.
All this had been too much for the smith’s slow and untrained mind. He went back to the nails. “Well, anyhow, them you brought me—where’d you find ‘em?”
“At my place—in a wing of the house that’s falling down. I’m taking it apart little by little, and I put aside anything that’s useful.”
“Yes, everybody does that. But what happens when there’s nothing more to pull down? People don’t look ahead. What are our kids going to do when they grow up?”
“Your grandfather probably said the same thing—but we got along. Whatever happens, people get along—they adapt themselves to get along, even if they have to grow smaller, like plants in poor ground.”
“True,” said the blacksmith simply. “I’d sooner live poor than die.”
As he spoke, his eldest daughter came in, carrying two big earthenware pots with care.
“Just back from the potter’s? It took you long enough. What were you doing, watching him throw the pots on the wheel?”
“Well, that wasn’t all,” she said tranquilly. At sixteen, strong rather than pretty, sturdy and happy-looking, she was obviously pregnant.
“You’re right, as long as young folks keep making love, the world’ll go on,” said the blacksmith philosophically.
His two sons roared with approving laughter, slapping their red hands on their leather aprons.
“They say there’s even more kids born now. That’s what the old folks claim.”
“Its likely,” Henny answered. “We don’t farm with machines any more, like the old days—you can’t just send away for what you want, you have to make it all yourself—so we need more kids. And of course They kill some. . . . And there’s others that die, anyhow—there’s no more doctors.”
“Yes there is!” said the blacksmith. “There’s old Ma Jatte —she knows all about healing!”
“Yes, but they had doctors, before,” Henny insisted.
The blacksmith shrugged. He was content with his life, whereas Henny’s poor scraps of culture, the traditions handed down by his forebears, sometimes made him long fiercely for vanished, legendary days. The smith remained calm as he beat on his anvil, his face illuminated by the white sparks from the heated metal. He was a man without memory; he found his kind of existence tolerable, never having known another.
From the bucket into which he had tossed them red-hot, he drew out several dozen crudely shaped nails, the heads flattened by a final blow of the hammer; they were rather like those that in the old days could be found embedded in the walls of Roman ruins, or in the most ancient of Christian churches; but these had a still rougher look. The others were the product of an art transmitted over long generations; these of a stumbling, reborn industry.
Henny put them into the scrip he wore at his belt. “What do you want for that?”
“Got any eggs?”
“Yes—Jčne keeps a good poultry yard; the hens lay.”
“Four dozen nails, that’ll be four dozen eggs.”
“You certainly don’t work cheap!”
“You think it’s so easy to get iron? You have to travel a long ways on the track now—folks have been getting the stuff there so long—it’s getting used up.”
Now Henny recognized that bar of metal, with its curious humps on top and bottom, which the blacksmith had cut into pieces to provide raw material for his work: it was an iron rail, rusted all over. This was the mine that had furnished metal to the surrounding countryside for three centuries. People had torn up the track out of prudence, to begin with, to keep the Enemy—the City Raiders—from using it to reach them and pillage them. But it was a long time now since the last locomotive had been a heap of old iron—they had all been taken apart, scrap by scrap. One had been wrecked a few leagues away. The memory of it remained, for three villages had fought over the copper tubing it in. Copper!—almost the only metal that could be used to make the alembics in which alcohol was distilled. Cheuzi had won the victory, and it was the blacksmith’s skill in repairing the apparatus that made him one of the most important men of the city. The community—one might have said the tribe—of Cheuzi was the richer for it. Neighboring villages that had no alembics traded wheat, cattle, hides tanned with oak bark and ashes, for the precious alcohol. For this was almost all that remained of civilization—alcohol! To get it, sometimes they even traded off their plows—swing plows, like those of ancient times. This did not suit the blacksmith at all, and he denounced the poor quality of these tools, the clumsiness of his rivals. It was in this way, among a few artisans of this neo-barbaric people, that a wraith of competition kept alive a certain desire to do well, a remnant of patient ingenuity.
* * * *
Henny followed the city walls to get back to his dwelling. All the villages now were fortified, in a rudimentary way that nevertheless enabled them to fight off their enemies when they attacked with mounted troops, as was usually the case. But these villages, reduced in number, were actually more populous than before—the smallest, least able to resist, had been abandoned. Thus Cheuzi, which had boasted less than five hundred inhabitants in the days of civilization, now had more than fifteen hundred. Built at the confluence of two rivers that protected it from northwest to northeast, leaving it exposed only on the south, it had become a little city piled up on itself, all squeezed together, no greater in extent than before; it had narrow, winding little streets, houses of two or three stories—behind each one, wherever possible, an interior court for the animals, farming implements, and the stored harvests.
Some houses still remained from ancient times, particularly those built long before the Great Disaster, dating from the seventeenth or eighteenth century; the economical constructions of a later date had fallen down. New ones had been put up in their place, and the very inefficiency of their builders had served to make them more massive. They had shutters of solid wood, pierced to admit light, without windowpanes —glass was not to be had except in fragments, which were considered precious objects, to be used in ornament. It had grown customary to replace the stairways with movable ladders, so that each householder could barricade himself in the upper story, where he kept food supplies and as much as possible of the harvest.
Henny stopped at the house of Pafot, his nearest neighbor; he needed help to repair his pigsty. The custom of exchanging voluntary labor had grown up among the Champiards, little by little, out of necessity. Except for a few indispensable artisans—blacksmiths, weavers, potters—there were no more professional craftsmen. Even the weavers had to be supplied with hemp or wool, ready spun, and the potters with clay. The division of labor is a thing of cities; never, in any era, has it been firmly established in the countryside. Since the Disaster, it had entirely disappeared.
Pafot, who in earlier times would have been called Parfond, told Henny that he was putting in his hay, but that tomorrow he would send him a “Prisoner.” This was the name given to a class of people who had become practically the slaves of the community—captives taken in the course of the attacks that the village had so often sustained. They worked on the community projects, or else were loaned out to the Champiards. Many of them were Russian, German, even Chinese. But if a Cheuzi girl should grant one of them her favors—not an infrequent occurrence—the children sired by him were born free; so far had the conception of true slavery vanished from their minds.
Here was one of the rare traditions that the Champiards had retained, without even calling it into question, from the dead era when it was believed that no man could ever become another man’s property. But gradually these unions were modifying the character of the race, while at the same time they hastened the deformation of the language. It was not uncommon now for the Cheuziens to have almond eyes, prominent cheekbones, faces more or less triangular in shape. This change in character had become more marked since the sack of Cheuzi, two generations before, when the town had been taken by the City Raiders: many men had been killed, nearly all the women raped by the rebels’ Chinese mercenaries. Nevertheless—a curious thing—these members of a new race continued to call themselves French. The idea that the country belonged to them, and them alone, even though they were ignorant of its extent and boundaries, remained in their minds, obscure but profound, ineradicable. They were the people of France.
* * * *
Leaving Pafot, Henny went on to his own house. The door was constructed of beams, crudely put together but solid, reinforced with heavy crossbars. It was fastened at night, or in case of need, by a strong wooden bar; in the daytime, by a knotted cord. There were no more locks; that was an art too difficult even for the proud blacksmith. Henny untied the knot.
Once this must have been a vast, opulent dwelling. There had been two buildings, set apart from each other, of which one was now in ruins; hardly anything was left but the skeleton of its roof-beams. The other had been kept in repair by Henny’s ancestors and by Henny himself, in the poor measure of the means they could command. All the windows had been replaced by solid wooden shutters. Most of the interior doors were missing.
In winter, it was much harder to keep warm here than in the houses the Champiards had learned to build for themselves, where huge fireplace-hoods made it possible to heap up great logs. These fireplaces of the civilized era, intended for some other fuel, or kept only for display—traces of a central heating system could be found in the cellars—gave out only a feeble warmth.
Several centuries earlier, in the French countryside, one might have stumbled across an old run-down chateau transformed into a farmhouse; there, where in other times one would have found tapestries, furniture, breathing a sense of elegance, lightness, beauty, now one would see only harness hung from the walls, onions drying in a corner; a crude table, long and thick, used for preparing food as well as for eating; rough chairs and benches. Such was the appearance of Henny’s home. He was not ashamed of it, never having seen anything else, living as everyone around him lived.
He called, “Jčne! Jčne!”
No answer. He felt no uneasiness at first; there was no threat to Cheuzi at the moment. He knew his wife to be in good health, happy and cheerful.
“She’s still with her chickens,” he thought, “or else in the stable.”
The hens greeted him with the round, disdainful eye they reserve for men, and the unpredictable gait that always takes them to the spot toward which one is convinced they are not going. In the stable, the cows, lying in their straw, raised their heads a moment, then went on chewing their cuds: it was only the master, a man not to be feared. Having established this point, they were content; but Henny could not see Jčne anywhere, not even in the old formal garden, now turned into a kitchen plot. He went back into the house, climbed the worn stairs to the second story. Anxiety was a tightness in his chest.
“Jčne!”
He breathed out; up there, stifled by the bales of hay that filled the attic, farther away than this attic itself, from a garret that he could not remember having entered since his childhood, a voice answered, “Is that you, Henny? Wait, I’m coming!”
Jčne came into view—very young, hardly more than a child—crawling over the tops of the bales piled to the ceiling, without haste, her movements slow and sure.
“My little Jčne! You scared me—I couldn’t find you anywhere.”
He told himself he had been frightened over nothing. In these times men lived always expecting the worst; they knew by experience that the next moment was never without peril. But hereabouts they were hardened to it. As old man Pousse, the blacksmith, had said, it was enough to live. You escaped from one danger only to run into another. Well, that was the condition of life itself, just as it must appear to the wild animals that were hunted by men and by beasts of prey: from the first moment to the last, it was the threat of imminent death, always. And yet they adapted themselves to that incessant horror; their beating hearts slowed as soon as the cause of their alarm was past; they played, they made love.
But Henny’s nature was more sensitive; almost alone in his generation, he felt that poignant emotion his distant ancestors had known—apprehension, useless, even pernicious apprehension, inhibiting the instinctive reflexes of defense and self-preservation. Henny had been afraid like a man, a lover, of the old times: his little Jčne!
In the days of civilization, they had known nothing of the strength of a symbiosis like this. It had been pleasure, then, that united the man to his mistress, his wife; sometimes, more and more rarely, to children as well: but each continued to live a separate, individual life. For Jčne and Henny, there was desire and pleasure; and there were also the imperious demands of the earth they tilled.
“What were you doing, Jčne? I looked for you everywhere. The idea of finding you up here! And what are you hiding behind your back?”
She had just come to a halt, glowing with a joy he had not seen in her face for years. Champiard girls, bound to rough and monotonous work, grew solemn early; even in adolescence, they achieved only a brutish sort of coquetry, and in the transports of their first loves there was more exultation than gayety. It is true that the Champiards had developed a taste for singing, which their ancestors had lost; but their most moving songs, even those in which they tried to express some cheerfulness, were fiery rather than light-hearted. Ordinarily they no longer danced in couples, but in groups from which, now and then, a single dancer, man or woman, would come forward for an instant.
Jčne, one of the few blondes in the district, was slender and strong. There was logic in her head, violence in her blood; she was impetuous and reasonable. For a long time the difficulty of obtaining steel needles of sufficient smallness—big ones were still made, hammered out of crude iron, then sharpened on a stone—had forced women to give up sewn garments. Jčne’s hemp shirt was only a sort of sleeveless sack. Her tan homespun skirt, the natural color of sheep’s wool—dyestuffs were harder and harder to come by—was a single piece of cloth, not sewn together but merely overlapped on the left side. Her feet were bare, like Henny’s and most of the other Champiards’ in summer, unless they wore sabots to work in the fields. In winter, they wrapped these sabots in strips of woolen cloth.
Jčne held her brown, shapely arms behind her, concealing something; her face was ecstatic, triumphant.
“What is it?” Henny asked. “Come on, show it to me!”
At that moment he felt as young as she—and indeed, he was only a few years older—infected by the spirit of play that radiated from her. But Jčne still refused to let him see the thing she was hiding so jealously.
“Just imagine!” she said. “You told me there was nothing left in that room at the end of the attic—but I have a better memory! I thought I remembered seeing a trunk or a bos there, when I was very little. And all of a sudden, as in a dream, I saw it, and I was sure, absolutely sure that under all the dust, that thing was made of leather! Leather, do you understand? Hard leather, the kind they don’t make any more! I climbed up into that room. The lid was closed with an iron lock, not a piece of rope. That must be old, very old! But the lock was all eaten away with rust—I hit it once with a wooden mallet, and it broke. And inside, it was just full of things—such things! Dresses, imagine! And thin, thin —what did they make them out of? Clouds of gold, pink, green like the trees, blue like the sky. Yes, clouds! They fell into powder when I tried to unfold them. But down at the bottom, in a pretty little case that kept it safe, there was this! Look, Henny, look!”
They had walked down the stairway; they were standing in the main hall, at the foot of the steps. With a gesture like a lover’s, Jčne opened the case, showing two little high-heeled dancing slippers made of silvery white satin, spangled with gold, with rosettes of paste jewels.
“How it shines, how it shines! And I can make it shine even more!”
She crumpled a few leaves of soapwort in her hands, dipped them in water, scrubbed the rosettes, then moistened them with clear water. The little flames of light that darted from the stones were reflected in her eyes.
There is a magic in certain things. Henny felt a sudden sense of devotion, a need to pay homage to the feminine grace that had vanished generations ago. In his rough homespun, he went to one knee and made as if to slip those frail objects onto the bare feet of his wife, who stood there excited, almost dancing.
“You’re crazy, Henny, you’re crazy! And stupid—so stupid! In my bare feet, and dressed the way I am . . . It’s not right, they weren’t made for that, I know. Wait and see.”
He watched the miracle of that reborn coquetry, the magnificent coquetry of the ancient time. Jčne went to a heavy chest, made of oak battens painstakingly put together, and hunted for her finest, prettiest length of hempen cloth. She measured what she needed by eye and with her outstretched arms, and cut the piece off with a decisive gesture.
“Wait and see,” she repeated, “wait and see! What a pity this is so small!”
Women nowadays collected every fragment of glass with care. A whole windowpane was a treasure worth an ox; it was the rarest gift a lover could make to his mistress. By laying the glass over a piece of zinc, also found in the ruins, a mirror could be made that would give a wavering, dismal reflection. Jčne owned one of these mirrors; she had always been proud of it; but today she wept over its inadequacy.
Another moment, and she was naked in the charm of her youth, the ardor of the blood that flowed in her veins, the strong, graceful lines that rose from her round knees, her long thighs, to the smooth lyre-curved belly, to the pink tips of her breasts—vigorous, healthy, made for desire and possession. At another time she would have been proud of her beauty; now she thought only that, naked, she might become beautiful; she was naked only to become dressed. A woman dressing does not give herself; she is preparing to give herself, later, when she has savored the appetites she arouses.
Around the curve of her hips, around her pliant waist, Jčne unrolled and draped the gray-brown cloth—that poor, humble cloth. She had to make its folds follow the lines of her body; an instinctive knowledge taught her how, with only one or two of the bone fibulae that had taken the place of pins. She found the place: a knot on the right shoulder, the left breast uncovered, the other hidden by the guileless folds of the cloth.
She paused for thought, bit her lips. “No,” she said, “it’s not right yet.”
She found a way to lower the back, changed the neckline to expose the upper halves of her round, firm breasts. And, turning continually before the imperfect and inadequate mirror, she lost patience because she could never see all of herself at once.
“You’re beautiful!” said Henny, marveling. “I mean it, you’re beautiful. Isn’t that funny, I never thought you could be so beautiful!”
She combed her hair with a boxwood comb that Henny had carved with his own hands, one winter evening at the blacksmith’s. She meditated again, then bound her hair with a double string of red berries across her forehead.
“Now,” she said, “now!”
“The little shoes, the beautiful shoes!” said Henny drunkenly.
“With my legs bare? You don’t understand anything. No, wait!”
She took the narrow strips she used to wrap her ankles above the sabots in wintertime, and braided them in loose interlacings around her legs to the knee; their color made them blend into the sort of stola that her feminine genius had just recreated.
Then, seating herself, she spoke like a queen. “Now you may put my shoes on, if you please!”
He kneeled for the second time. “How little they are! How little they look! Can you walk on them? It’s impossible, I don’t believe it!”
She took a few hesitant steps, hindered by the baffling high heels; then, gaining assurance, she curtseyed, walked, danced, drunk with joy, her young head as if in the clouds. “Am I not beautiful!”
She repeated, “Beautiful! Beautiful! Beautiful!” She intoxicated herself with this word, with the magical power that she felt radiating from her whole body. And by a contrast that struck bitterly home, made him awkward, humiliated him to the point of anger, Henny, in his peasant blouse and the petticoat she had knitted for him, felt himself ugly, dirty, crude, inferior to her, at the very moment when he felt the furious desire to carry her off, take her, have her beneath him, all to himself, no longer seeing her but still having before his eyes the vision of this woman, tall, slender, glorious as he had never seen her before.
Yet it took only one step, one movement from him: she fell into his arms. She had understood both his aroused senses and his timidity, and it gave her an immense satisfaction, stronger, more delightful than the most delightful ecstasy, even while it prepared her for that ecstasy. She was not being taken, this time: she was giving herself, granting herself. For Jčne, it was a new, unknown feeling, this revelation of the power women had possessed in the old time, and it exalted her to the point of frenzy.
But suddenly, as he was about to become her master again, the master who takes, tears, violates . . . she pushed him away at arm’s length and cried, “Henny! Henny!”
“What?” he said roughly, taken aback.
“Henny, all that must have been real—all those things? The time when everything was wonderful, when women were really beautiful, the way I tried to be beautiful? If they saw the way I dressed up, they’d think it was a make-believe, a lie, something to laugh at. Henny, Henny, what was that time like, and why isn’t it that way any more?”
* * * *
Thus began the great revolt among the Champiards that shook the power of the City Raiders.