The First of July(28)

The days went by, then the weeks. He had enough to eat, he slept well enough, he became fit again. He mostly succeeded in not thinking about home.

The men were decent enough. Young Pierre was only fifteen; his sister was married to a bargee who passed by, waving, his boat heaped with coal, once a week. Pierre Duval with the soldier son had a wife and daughter in Valence-en-Brie. Flame-haired Pierre was from Britanny and provided the muscle. The oldest worker was Marcel, an ill-tempered Parisian. As far as possible, Jean-Baptiste tried to keep out of his way. Therzon was an idiot; it hadn’t taken Jean-Baptiste long to figure that out. When it got really hot, Therzon took off his shirt to work and revealed “vengeance” tattooed on his arm. Or rather “v-e-n-g-e-n-a-c-e,” although the letters were clumsy and the tattoo was inflamed and hard to read at all. Therzon kept picking at it. When old Pierre Duval, though he was not very old, asked Jean-Baptiste about his family one day, he had simply said his mother was a widow.

“She must miss you.”

Jean-Baptiste shrugged. “I suppose so.”

“Well, at least you’re not too far away, eh?” Pierre patted him on the back, his attention already taken by a cart delivering stone.

Usually Jean-Baptiste put up scaffolding on a central pier, alongside young Pierre, on the basis that they were the only two who could swim. Pierre would secure the boat to an iron ring and Jean-Baptiste would climb onto the thick stone base, holding a line. He looked down: the water was drawn into the thick pillar and swallowed, and from time to time it made a great gulping noise. When rivercraft passed by, the water was first hurled upward and then sucked back, exposing the slippery bright-green stone of the footings. He was regularly soaked. Under the arch it was cool, but it stank. There was a marker on the bridge to indicate that beneath the opaque surface, the Seine went down another fifteen meters. What was on the bottom was something he didn’t like to think about. If he went into the water, his ability to swim would have little to do with his fate.

Jean-Baptiste tried to forget Marcel’s words and not think of his mother, because when he did, he could see only her curved back and Vignon clutching her breasts as if they were handles keeping him steady on a bucking fairground ride. With time, what he hated most was what he had called her as he rode. Vignon the liar, the philanderer. Vignon the German. Now this foreign duke had been murdered and there was talk, among the men and on the headlines of the newspapers he stopped and looked at, that the Germans were wanting war and plenty of good Frenchmen wanted it too. And what if his mother had married the doctor and he, Jean-Baptiste, would have had a German father without even knowing it? What if Vignon had become his patriotic enemy as well as his personal one?

After a few weeks Jean-Baptiste learned to ignore Therzon’s crude jokes and Marcel’s malign view of his fellow man. But he did take in the discussions about the murder of the duke, who turned out to be a sort of Austrian prince. Pierre Duval had said it was a disaster while Marcel thought he had it coming. He also stopped and listened when Therzon told young Pierre not long afterward that German spies had been arrested in Paris.

“They’ll be for the guillotine,” said Marcel as he came within earshot. “Or the firing squad.”

“But we’re not at war,” Jean-Baptiste said. “We didn’t kill the Austrian.”

“Those Germans and Austrians are as thick as thieves, and they hate us French and they’ll be laying their plans.” Marcel dropped his voice, came close. His fingers holding the pipe were dark yellow.

“They’ll be watching and listening. Finding our weak points.” His eyes opened wide.

Therzon, who’d been inexpertly rolling tobacco, looked up. “I heard police are doing checks on men working on the river. Rivers being like roads, they say—for armies and spies.”

Red-beard Pierre snorted.

“You’re the one who likes to know everything. You’d like a bit of spying.”

Therzon licked the edge of the cigarette paper. “And you’re looking a bit pale, red-beard—you not fancying a visit from the gendarmes?”

“I did time,” red-beard Pierre mumbled. He had a way of stroking his beard when he was anxious, not to show it off, but rather as if he was checking that someone hadn’t taken it. “Way back. A fight. Over a woman. I’m no friend of the law.”

Jean-Baptiste thought that was probably why Vignon had appeared among them when their old doctor had died. There he was suddenly, in his pale linen and his neat beard, with his watch chain, his singing, and his laughing contempt for the remedies the old women set so much store by. Learning the river’s secrets. Bastard. Worming his way into their trust. Into his mother’s trust.