“No such thing has ever been known to happen here,” he said in a melodious voice. “As far back as I can recall, never once has a villager disappeared.”
“We’re not from the village,” Herman murmured. “We live in Paris from September to June. And our summer house is outside of town, maybe 800 meters away.”
“Ah, interesting.”
The young man nodded, and the corners of his mouth mechanically pulled back into a respectful, formal smile. All at once—from that smile and from the gendarme’s nonchalance, his almost flirtatious preciousness—Herman understood that he had no intention, tonight at least, of working on his case, of even just writing down what Herman had told him, and that his light, mannered tone might have no other goal than to tell him so without undue harshness.
Seeing him so disinclined to take an interest, Herman began to doubt that things would be any different the next morning.
“He doesn’t care if anything happens to Parisians,” he thought, “and if it does, it’s not his problem.”
“Once summer’s over, once the thirty-first of August has passed, then you want nothing more to do with us, do you? If we insist on staying till fall we do so at our own risk, we’re all on our own, and no authority is going to protect us. As far as you’re concerned we have no legal existence, that’s how it is, isn’t it?”
Offended, the gendarme shook his head. He assured Herman that at any time of year outsiders would find aid and protection from the local constabulary, and no gendarme had the right—not even the mayor had the right, or the town council, or the prefect—to decide otherwise.
“But do you ever have outsiders here in the fall? Or any season but high summer?” asked Herman, a little annoyed, less amiable than he would have liked.
“In truth, never.”
And the young man ingratiatingly added that Herman was the first Parisian he’d ever seen in the autumn rain and the stinging cold that inevitably settled in on the first of September, not to leave again until the middle of June. He didn’t say if he thought it was a good thing that a vacationer had crossed over the border of summer for the first time, if as a villager he found that development auspicious or galling. Herman was desperately curious to know. He folded his arms and put on a casual air.
“Is it in any way risky for me to stay here? Am I in any danger of arousing the antipathy of the locals?”
“No, no, of course not!”
The young man smiled more broadly, made placating gestures with both hands, assured Herman that everyone here would be glad for the opportunity to deploy their hospitality, which for many was nothing short of a mania.
“And in any case, as soon as you find your family you’ll go home, right?” he concluded, his tone slightly pleading, as if, thought Herman, the tightly clenched reins of perfect, codified politesse for a moment slipped slightly from his grasp.
“How will I ever find them without your help? You haven’t even written down their descriptions!” Herman cried.
“Come back tomorrow. As I told you, this isn’t the time. My shift officially ended an hour ago. I did turn off the light, and people generally don’t come walking into a dark building.”
Having said that, the gendarme gave a little bow, his eyes fixed on Herman’s shoes. Herman sighed, then turned toward the heater to warm his belly a little. He couldn’t bring himself to walk out into the rain, to go home—more than a kilometer away now—to end up adrift in the silent house, which he didn’t know in such weather, and fret all through the night. But his clothes were now thoroughly dry, and he had no excuse to linger in the gendarmerie. He nodded to the young man and went out.
“My God, what do I do?” he moaned when he was outside.
Had he ever known such helplessness? He felt terribly weak, desperately ill-equipped to face a situation of this sort. Not wanting to pass the shops again, he decided to take the lane, a narrow road that bypassed the village and climbed directly to the plateau where his summer house stood, his and many others, all of them now closed up for the year. The rain was still coming down; the cold was sharper now that night had fallen. Herman pushed on as best he could through the dark, whimpering, “My God, my God” over and over in a shivering voice, and for the first time he thought it would have been a fine thing, that evening, to have a house in the village, nestled among all the others, to walk home on a brightly lit street where he might meet some acquaintance he could pour out his troubles to. Very likely under the influence of the gendarme’s words, he found himself thinking that Rose and the child could never have disappeared if they had had such a house, if they’d simply emerged from one of these houses so huddled together that everyone must know everything that goes on in the houses next door, and if, rather than going off for eggs by the desolate country road that led to the farm—a road hemmed in by fields edged with tall mulberry hedges—they’d simply made for the nearby village grocery, which sold eggs from that very farm. No villager had ever disappeared, the gendarme claimed, and Herman wholeheartedly believed it. He was just as convinced that no such misadventure had ever befallen an outsider in the heart of the summer either, and since he and Rose were evidently the first to cross over into fall, they were the first to face the consequences of an untested experience.
“If there’s going to be trouble, best to face it head on,” Herman mumbled, trembling and terrified. “But will we be able to leave tomorrow? Oh, my God, my God…”
The start of the school year was five days away. He didn’t want to question whether they would be in Paris before then, but already he was fearing the disorder set off in his very tidy mind by this encounter with autumn in the village; in the region which, as he stumbled hunched and cold along the lane, he no longer considered it a privilege to be.
“Cursed fall,” he muttered, “cursed place! Another two weeks here and I’d be done for. But I won’t have it said that we backed away from trouble, not even the little one.”
He had some difficulty finding the house in the fog, unlit as it was by the garden lamps that shone from dusk to dawn all summer on the adjoining lots. The rooms were freezing cold and the house had no heater. For ten years they’d been coming to this place, and until the thirty-first of August Herman and Rose had known nothing but unending warmth. Only the sight of the pastures, dazzlingly green, almost artificial-looking, made them suspect that it wasn’t the same all year round, but they never thought to ask anyone to confirm that lazy assumption.
Herman lit the stove’s four burners, pulled a mattress into the kitchen. The cold and the primitive conditions made his despair complete. The best thing he could do, he thought, was try to get some sleep so he could get up early in the morning and launch a serious search. Remorsefully he told himself: “No one could possibly be more feeble than me. Out there on the lane my teeth were chattering in terror, and it was for myself that I was trembling, not for my loved ones. I’d never find the strength tonight to go scour the road and the hedgerows. No: first thing tomorrow, I’ll get the gendarmes to help me.”
2 – But the next morning, recalling the previous evening’s discussion with the very unhelpful gendarme, he decided it would be smarter to talk to the mayor. He knew the mayor had no direct power over the gendarmerie, but he vaguely reflected that the mayor was a sort of boss all the same, and in both age and education closer to him, Herman, than those young rural gendarmes, so surely he would quickly grasp the urgency of the matter, and would exert his moral influence to force an immediate inquest.