Once in Europa Read Free Page A

to be in the mole-skin business! That’s what we are going to be doing …
    The absence of the mourned is as precise as their presence once was. Albertine’s absence was thin with arthritic hands and long grey hair gathered up in a chignon. The eyes of her absence needed glasses for reading. During her lifetime many cows had stepped on her feet. Each of her toes had been stepped on by a cow on a different occasion, and the growth of its nail consequently deformed. The toenails of her absence were the yellow of horn and irregularly shaped. The legs of her absence were as soft to touch as a young woman’s.
    Every evening he ate the soup he had prepared, he sliced the bread, he read the Communist Party paper for peasants and agricultural workers, and he lit a cigarette. He performed these acts whilst hugging her absence. As the night drew on and the cows in the stable lay down on their bedding of straw and beech leaves, the warmth of his own body penetrated her absence so that it became his own pain.
    On All Souls’ Day he bought some chrysanthemums, white ones the colour of goose feathers, and placed the pot of flowers, not by the tombstone in the churchyard, but on the marble-top commode in the Middle Room beside the large empty bed.
    A week later the snow came. The children ran screaming out of school, impatient to build snowmen and igloos. When Félix delivered his milk to the dairy, he repeated the remark that Albertine had made every year when the first snow fell:
    Let it snow a lot tonight, let the snow get so high our hens can peck the stars!
    Through the kitchen window he stared at the white mountain. Mick was licking a plate on the floor.
    The winter’s long, it would be better if we could sleep.
    The dog looked up.
    Who do you think is going to win the elections? The same gang as before, eh?
    The dog started wagging his tail.
    Do you know what you like and what they manufacture in Béthune? Do you know, Mick?
    Félix strode across the kitchen towards the massive dresser. To take something off its top shelf it was necessary to stand on a chair. Its doors, with their square panes of glass and their bevelled window frames, were big enough for a cow to go through.
    So you don’t know, Mick, what they manufacture in Béthune? From the bottom shelf he picked up a packet of sugar.
    Sugar, Mick, sugar is what they manufacture in Béthune!
    Brusquely he threw two lumps towards the dog. Three more. Six. Then he emptied the whole packet. Fifty lumps of sugar fell onto the floorboards in a cloud of dust.
    Sugar in Béthune! Milk here! He shouted the words so violently the dog hid under the table.
    One day in January he noticed that the floorboards, instead of being bread-coloured, were now grey like slates. He put the dog out, he stoked up the stove with wood, he took off his boots and trousers and began scrubbing on his knees. He had left it too long, the dirt was engrained. He ground his teeth, he refilled and refilled the bucket with water from the giant saucepan on the stove. The planks slowly changed colour.
    The more he scrubbed, the more he saw the countless washings the floor had undergone as but a single instant in an eternity of dust and neglect. He straightened his back and looked up at the dresser. On the top shelf was their best china, decorated with sprays and garlands of flowers: violets, forget-me-nots, honey-suckle.The way the flowers were painted around the rims of the plates, in the hearts of the dishes, on the flanks of the bowls, made him think of ears, mouths, eyes, breasts.
    He put on his trousers and boots, laid down sheets of newspaper and stepping from one sheet to another reached the door. Outside it was snowing grey snow. He teetered like a drunk into the stable and there, his forehead resting on one of his cows’ haunches, he vomited till there was nothing left in his stomach.
    A few days later he beat the cow Myrtille. Myrtille had the bad habit of butting