By a Slow River Read Free Page A

into, a child murder to boot—a little girl, even. As he turns on his heel, his moustache fringed with yolk, he says with coquettish affectation, “And this door, where does it go?”
    Everybody looks at it as though it has just appeared, like a vision of the Virgin Mary: a little door ajar on the frozen trampled grass, an opening in a wide enclosure of high walls; behind these walls a park, a stately park with stately trees; and behind all these trees that interweave their naked branches, the outline of an imposing residence, a manor house, a great complex edifice.
    Bréchut’s the one who answers, twisting his hands in the cold. “It’s the park of the château.”
    “The château,” the judge repeats, as though mocking him.
    “Well, yes. Mr. Prosecutor’s château.”
    “How about that? So that’s the place . . . ,” the judge said, more for himself than for us, who at that point may as well have been a scattering of chickenshit. He seemed rejuvenated to hear his rival invoked amid whiffs of a violent death—a powerful man like himself, whom he hated. Why, in fact, no one quite knew; but I was content to believe it simply the judge’s nature.
    He perked up, arranging his heft on that exotic butt rest, which he’d placed right across from the little door, at which he stared as if awaiting the start of a puppet show. He sat there a long time, while the rest of us tried to keep moving, stamping our feet and puffing into our gloves, until young Bréchut couldn’t feel his nose and Crusty’s cheek shaded over into grayish purple.

III
    You have to admit that even for a château it’s impressive. With its brick walls and slate roofs, it’s the jewel of the ritzy part of town. Oh, yes, we do have one, as well as a hospital (that was always full in those years of worldwide slaughter); two schools, one for girls and one for boys; and the enormous factory, with its round stacks that pierce the sky, assailing it with plumes of smoke and clouds of soot, summer and winter, day and night. Since it was founded at the end of the 1880s, the factory has been the mainstay of the whole region. Few are the men who don’t work there. Almost all of them have left their vineyards and fields for factory work. And ever since, brush and brambles have raced along the great hillsides, devouring the orchards, the vine stocks, and the furrows of good earth.
    Our town isn’t very big. It’s not V, far from it. All the same, you could get lost here. By that I mean it contains enough shady nooks and belvederes that a soul can always find a place to nurse his melancholy moods. To the factory we owe the hospital, the schools, and the small library—which won’t accept just any old book.
    The factory owner doesn’t have a name or a face; it’s a group or, as the show-offs like to say, a
consortium.
Rows of houses have grown up in what was formerly a field of grain. Whole little streets of them, built one exactly like the next. Housing rented for a pretty penny or for nothing—in exchange for silence, obedience, public order—to workers who’d never hoped for so much and who found it pretty funny to be pissing in a toilet instead of through a black hole punched in a fir plank. The ancient farms, the few that still resist, have clustered up against one another, tightly embracing the church as though by reflex—a hug of old walls and low windows—and exhaling from the cracked-open doors of their barns the sour smells of stables and curdled milk.
    The owners even dug us two canals, one large and one small. The big one is for the barges that bring in coal and limestone and carry off the soda ash. The little one feeds the big one whenever it happens to need water. The construction went on for ten years or more. Gentlemen in ties went around everywhere, their pockets full of cash, and bought up land hand over fist. In those days you could avoid being sober for a month, they were buying so many rounds of drinks. Then one day you didn’t