The sea, dense, molten, was starting to glare, and we left the coast for the grassy steppe and tangled blue-purple growth, which stretched to the foothills, mild preliminaries to mountains blocking the horizon.
‘Flax.’ She pointed to a bluish tinge some way ahead, always liking to name species, sometimes erroneously. We took shade at a doorless cabin, where I put hands on her shoulders, and at once she looked worried, as though our contentment hazarded too much, risking what she called the evil eye of the universe.
‘Erich… You like it here? With me?’
‘But of course. Especially with you.’
‘You don’t sometimes think…?’
‘I never think – not once.’
She at once reclaimed the day’s promises, laying her head on my shoulder. ‘Monsieur Here and There.’
‘By no means. Monsieur Hermes. Guide of Souls.’
Looking up, she shone. ‘I do not enjoy saying this, but he was also lover of secret messages and underhand dealings, even thieves.’
Back in sunlight, we breathed in the free expanse, where the mountains seemed about to move, trampling the little hills. About half a kilometre ahead a man was leaning against a sallow haystack, bare-armed, in jeans and singlet. Seen nearer, flat cheeks and narrow eyes. Mongolian? Latvian? Movies often used haystacks for hideaways for arms caches, fugitives, murderous trysts, but we gave him friendly greeting. His expression remained fixed, he said nothing, his silence like a smack, so we offered no more. Refusing to quicken our step, we soon braced ourselves to look back but could see no one.
‘A M. Cunning Fox.’ Nadja was unperturbed. ‘Or, perhaps a Paraiyan who has been eating beef, thus polluting any Brahmin at sixty-four paces. He must have a lair under the hay.’
Fox or Paraiyan, he had matched no pastoral serenity but older unsettled Badlands, though unable to spoil our delight in the day and each other.
By noon we were hungry. Objecting to carrying picnic paraphernalia on a hot day, Nadja would trust, sometimes woefully, to a good fortune. We knew, however, a trustworthy farm, already visible, shambling, whitewashed, in the folds of lesser hills. Now hot, we skirted a beef-red landslip, glowered at a board, Acquired for Development, hastened on, eager for lunch, while continuing exchanges not serious but seldom altogether stock. She considered my soul pale grey streaked with black. I retorted that hers was dark crimson and saw her, years back, small, dark, not scared but angered, wandering lost between village shacks and a treeless plain.
She comprehended something of this. ‘Some people made me feel important but never free.’
Around the farm, the light melted, shredded by trees. A silence was unpropitious, the yard and its few crude tables deserted. Where was bearded Pierre, where burly, gurgling Marcelline? A neigh would now startle, like a voice from the sky. My spirit groaned at the note on the gate. Fermé.
At once resigned, about to retreat, I should have been more sapient. Nadja was already thrusting open the gate, glancing at the notice, then shrugging as if at a joke in poor taste. Her knock was aggressive, so that I was about to warn, with Stendhal, the door remaining intact.
More knocks. I quailed with embarrassment as a window opened and Marcelline peered out, swart, brigandish, under a red kerchief, wrathful and, I judged, powerful.
Nadja’s versatility was very seldom repressed. She could, within instants, be pert, flirtatious, pleading, disdainful, head nicely lifted, eyes about to moisten, a smile promised in return for agreement. A smile I coveted. She was now the fine lady in distress. ‘Madame… chère madame… we would…’
She faltered, wearied, despairing, her bright clothes and trim legs suddenly pitiful. The bristly face at the window somewhat relaxed ‘But, madame, but, monsieur…’ My bulk, if not my personality, could register. ‘We are not able today. You must realize…’
Where I would stutter or gabble Nadja was resolute. ‘Of course you are not able. What an idea!’ Her expression was incredulous, shocked, though she spoke as if to a refractory child. ‘But we need a few moments’ rest. And know so well that your repute is so justly earned. We have tramped so far to reach you…’ Touching her foot, she implied torn muscles, bleeding soles, agonized veins, while I reconsidered the Silk Road, the Santa Fe Trail. ‘On so beautiful a day, madame, a day for a festival. Yet so exhausting. But, horror, the very thought of troubling you…’ Unscrupulous, she hesitated, as if groping for a handle. She was famished, perhaps stricken, certainly ready to faint, her sign surely over-melodramatic. But no. Marcelline’s smile was a broad caress, the door swung, her rough voice as if released on a spring.
‘Oh, madame!’ Nadja was already critically surveying the sorry tables, before changing to the businesslike, commanding, though seeming to ask questions.
‘Some of your admired vin de passage. A few crumbs and, could you but manage it, possibly a scrap of butter. Your cheese is, of course, widely esteemed. And should you, by merest chance… seafood…’
The list lengthened, Marcelline joined us, shirt, blouse, black crumpled hat clearly intended for an occasion more formal. Nadja’s smile, back at me, was a virtual leer, though I managed to halt her before she added canard à l’orange, crème brûlée, my intervention nevertheless provoking a look from Marcelline suggesting I had uttered an obscenity.
With a flourish just short of an embrace, Nadja concluded. She scorned one table, deigned to accept another, waited for a chair to be wiped, Marcelline calling, ‘Pierre, Pierre… it’s Madame,’ while, feeling myself a second-class convict, we sat and waited, haystacks and Latvians forgotten, the surroundings luxuriant as Muslim Paradise, naked houris tactfully in abeyance.
‘There!’ Nadja watched chickens strolling around the yard pump. ‘These things matter.’
‘Indeed they matter.’
We were shaded by eucalyptus, shabby but still fibrous and sticky. Pierre lurched out, heavy, clean, in black Sunday suit, bowing like an ill-constructed robot, then, from a stone jug striped yellow and scarlet, brimming with green wine which, Nadja reminded me, very distinctly, was internationally famous, a laudation delivered with a private wink, for, though deliciously cool, it was sourer than Alain’s notorious vin du maison.
Scrub oak drowsed on slopes behind the barns, dark amongst a yellow spread of charlock. A convoy of crows flew through unclouded blue.
‘How good it is, Monsieur Erich. Just as if…’
Her brows contracted, not in pleasure but as if at an untoward memory, then, hastily, she took her glass, gulped wine like a stevedore and, recovering, gazed appreciatively at inquisitive chickens; a dog, almost hairless, like worn carpet, slunk forward, blearily examined us, but we failed his requirements and he subsided near dusty nettles and marigolds. Undismayed, we listened to murmurs, kitchen clatter, a cork popping. A butterfly, velvety tropical orange, sank me into jungle fantasies. Basking pumas, abnormally swollen trees, drums pounding acclaim or fear.
Nadja spoke, impersonal, dropping her usual, rather hurried manner.
‘I was thinking of an old lady, dwelling in a place of shades and torments, though dressed in jewels, in grandeur. And, Erich… she was allowed no calendars, behind the bars and shutters, all seasons were alike. But once a year, always on the same date, she called for traveller’s clothes, a carriage, servants and, very orderly and calm, announced to the nurses that she must leave, to visit her son.’