Herman set off running down the road. His panic returning, he saw from afar that no light was shining in his house, which meant Rose hadn’t come home, so he immediately turned toward the village, still running, breathing heavily, throwing out little cries and involuntary interjections.
“Really, in weather like this,” he hiccupped, frantic, “isn’t it strange…it’s scary… And the boy, out in the cold…”
And that abrupt drop in temperature put the finishing touch on his terror, convincing him that by waiting one day too long to go home and thus breaking with a ten-year habit, by letting September come to them here when September was a month they knew only in Paris, he and Rose had laid themselves open to unknown tribulations they might not be strong enough to withstand. Because what did they know of the fall around here, what did they know of these people’s ways once all the outsiders were supposed to have left? The fact was that outside of summertime they knew nothing about the place at all.
“We have no idea what dangers we might face around here,” Herman told himself, panting, “the rain, the wind on the back roads, these simple people who might not take kindly to strangers on their turf once the thirty-first of August has passed… How stupid, how blind…”
He didn’t think for a moment that Rose might be in one of the many village shops: it would be unlike his wife to spend hours poring over merchandise. Nor did Rose and Herman or even the little boy have any friends they might be visiting in the village, they knew no one Herman could call on and ask if they might have seen Rose come by, although every day in the summertime they came down together to do their shopping, and everyone knew them by sight. But Herman strongly sensed that he mustn’t let himself go running to anyone desperately asking after Rose. That would be a sort of indecently misplaced thing to do, even a grave transgression of the rules of deportment, whose specifics he nonetheless knew nothing about, even if he was beginning to grasp their spirit.
He slowed to a walk a little before the village’s first houses, trying to force a casual gait in spite of his trembling legs, his dripping face.
“They’re going to wonder why I don’t have an umbrella,” he told himself uneasily.
He walked three times around the deserted village square, hands in his pockets, and his shoulders were suddenly racked by outright convulsions. He hurried down the main street, heading for the gendarmerie.
However certain he was that he wouldn’t see Rose inside, he couldn’t help glancing into every shop he passed by, and he sensed that the owners, idle at this late hour, were also watching him as he passed, their expressions inexplicably disapproving. Was it, Herman wondered, because they were surprised to see him still here on the first of September, in the rain, in soaked shirt sleeves, finding that suspicious in itself? Maybe the people around here didn’t like outsiders experiencing autumn, which was in a sense none of those outsiders’ business, maybe they thought the intrusion into their mysterious post-summer life indiscreet? For a moment Herman was excited—his worry forgotten—to find himself here in the village in this season unknown to his fellow Parisians, who by now were all back in their apartments, vaguely assuming, as Herman once did, that the region they’d just abandoned had gone into hibernation, awaiting their return the next summer, perhaps preserved in a perpetual green mildness.
“If they only knew,” thought Herman with a flush of pride, “how it rains here all day long from the first of September, not to mention the cold, they’d never dream! I’m going to have a good surprise for them, I’ll tell you that…”
For the first time he noticed that the women behind the counters of the bakery, the charcuterie, and the hair salon all wore the same blouse he’d seen on his farmwoman neighbor, with the same scarlet-hearted apple blossom print, and it compressed their breasts in just the same way, and was tied with those same multicolored cords of very specific signification, which, Herman thought, gave them that formal, slightly haughty air and that ramrod posture, only their necks seeming to move fluidly, extending their heads toward their interlocutors as the farmwoman had so graciously done to express her attentiveness. In the hard white light of the shops, the little flowers’ red-glowing hearts strew bloody dots over the women’s immobilized busts as they bent their foreheads nearer the windows to observe Herman with their stern, severe eyes. They smiled when Herman looked back, but only with their lips, an almost urbane smile, excessively revealing their teeth. They dipped their heads in a rudimentary bow, their eyes looked down and then away, the blood-red flecks on their blouses rippling with that discreet movement.
Abashed, Herman stopped looking through the shop windows. He ran until he reached the gendarmerie, at the far end of the main street, among the village’s very last houses, where the rows of streetlights came to an end and the Paris-bound national highway started. The building was dark. He pushed open the door all the same, and light filled the office the moment he entered, blinding him. He squinted, then cried out in relief: “Oh, so there’s somebody here!” And his apprehension found some respite at last.
A gendarme was sitting at the one desk in the room, shifting his pen back and forth from hand to hand. He’d turned on the lamp as soon as the door opened, but Herman saw nothing to suggest he was waking from a nap. His eyes were bright, calm, attentive. Herman immediately headed toward the big gas heater purring in the corner, turned his shivering back to it, and let out an “Oh…” of almost painful contentment. He thought he saw the gendarme’s gaze drift again and again to his shoes, made of fine, orange-tinted leather, unsuitable for walking the back roads.
“I’ve come about a serious matter,” he began.
“Tomorrow. The office is closed.”
The gendarme wasn’t smiling, but his face radiated a deep, gentle courtesy that again left Herman at a loss. He thought he could justifiably assume that expression signified an eagerness to be helpful at any cost; as if, in spite of his words, the gendarme were crying out: “I am here to serve!”
Encouraged, Herman pretended he hadn’t heard the gendarme’s answer. He explained in detail that Rose and their eight-year-old son had disappeared, that they were supposed to go home the next day, emphasizing—a little absurdly, even to him—that in previous years they’d never once delayed their return to Paris. He asked the gendarme to take down his description of Rose and the boy. And as he spoke his anxiety began to swell again, until, drained, he felt his voice crack, his stomach tighten.
“You must understand,” he repeated, though he knew he’d said more than enough, “I’ve never seen the fall here before, this rain, this biting cold… We were always gone by now, and we had no idea what happens here afterward.”
The gendarme listened, sitting still, making no move to take notes, bent slightly toward Herman, every detail of his face marked by tact and distinction. A long silence followed Herman’s speech, and he stood wearily rubbing his hands behind his back near the blazing heater. At last the gendarme gently raised his eyebrows, as if he’d been waiting to make sure his guest was done before answering, so as not to risk breaking the thread of his reasoning. He was a very young man with pale hair, vaguely yellow, incomparable to anything in nature—typical, Herman reminded himself, of the region.