By a Slow River by Philippe Claudel Page B

received her like a queen, or so she told me. He would offer her a glass of wine, speak graciously of the skins, of the fair weather or foul, and smile in a way that showed his fine features to advantage. Then he would pay her and help her unload her cart before escorting her back to the road as a beau might have done.
    For twenty years Joséphine had lived at the far end of rue des Chablis, almost in the fields. Not a house, really, just a few planks blackened by the rain, held together thanks to some daily miracle. A shack so dark it scared the kids. We all imagined it was chockful of stinking hides, dead animals, dismembered birds, and mice with limbs outstretched tacked to little boards.
    I did go there, twice. I wouldn’t have believed it but for having seen it with my own eyes. It was like passing through the doors of a shadow world and emerging into a realm of light. You would have thought you had entered a doll’s rooms, an immaculate place, all in rosy tones with little curls of ribbon tied everywhere.
    “So you thought I would live as I work,” Joséphine said to me the first time, as I stood openmouthed, like a bream at the market, taking it all in. There was a bouquet of irises on a table spread with a lovely cloth; on the walls, painted frames surrounded pictures of cherubs and saints, the kind priests give to altar boys and to children at First Communion.
    “You believe in all this?” I asked her, pointing with my chin at the graceful gallery. She shrugged her shoulders, less in mockery than to suggest the obvious: There was hardly any point in discussing the matter.
    “If I had beautiful copper pans, I’d hang them up just like that, and they’d create the same effect—the feeling that the world isn’t so ugly, that there’s a bit of gilding here and there.”
    I felt her hand on my shoulder. Then her other hand, and finally the heat trapped in her woolen layers.
    “Why’ve you come back here, Dadais?”
    It was the nickname Joséphine had used for me since we were seven years old, but I’d never asked why. I was about to answer, to launch into grandiose sentiments right by the water, standing in my shirtsleeves, my feet in the snow. But the cold made my lips tremble, and suddenly I felt the shock of imagining never being able to leave again.
    “You’ve come back, haven’t you?”
    “I’m only passing through; it’s not the same. There’s nothing for me here. I don’t have regrets. I did what had to be done. I did my part, and you know it.”
    “But I always believed you!”
    “You were the only one.”
    Joséphine rubbed my shoulders, as if to shake some sense into me. The pain of the blood returning to my veins gave me a tonic jolt. Then she took me by the arm and we ambled along, an odd couple in the snow that winter morning. We walked without saying a word. Now and then I glanced sideward, looking in her ancient face for her former girlish features, a futile effort. I let myself be led around like a child. I would’ve gladly closed my eyes and somnambulated, placing one foot in front of the other, hoping deep in my heart never to open my eyes again, to go on and on like this in what might have been death or else a slow stroll, without aim or end.
    At my house, Joséphine sat me down with authority in the big armchair and wrapped me snugly in three coats, one layered on the other; now I was an infant again. She went off to the kitchen. I put my feet up near the stove. In my body, bit by bit, everything was coming back—the stirs and the aches, the creaks and the cracks. She handed me a boiling-hot bowl of steaming plum brandy and lemon. I drank without saying anything. She drank too. When she finished her bowl, she clicked her tongue regretfully.
    “Why didn’t you ever get married again?”
    “What about you? You’ve stayed all alone.”
    “I knew everything about men by the time I was fifteen. You have no idea what it’s like to be a servant! Never again, I said to myself,