“After some years. Ten, eleven? Things become bad in the city, and I decide it is better to return with what you call it, a tail between the legs, than stay there. But it is only because my father is dead that I am able to come back.”
River nodded. “And Patrice?”
“All that time Yevgeny has him, at Les Arbres. My parents never see him, my father because he does not want to, and my mother because my father. But Yevgeny sends her photographs. I have these pictures still. I will show them to you.”
But she made no move to rise. Instead, she said:
“I went there, of course. To Les Arbres. But they do not let me in. Yevgeny, he comes out. He tells me I am not welcome, that I am no longer Patrice’s mother. That he has a family, and does not need me.”
“I’m sorry,” River said.
“I too. Because I know he is right, I am not Patrice’s mother. I give him birth, that is all. But still, I want to see him, I demand to see him, and then Frank comes, and Frank, he is very clear, very direct. He tells me that unless I leave, he will have police arrest me. He will tell them that not only am I a prostitute but a drug addict also, and other things like that. Threats.”
River knew better than to ask if she had been a drug addict.
For a while, Natasha sat gazing into her past, and then she rose and crossed the room, opened a drawer, retrieved something and returned. It was an envelope, unsealed. When she tilted it, several photographs slithered out; more than several. They seemed to be in order already, the topmost one the earliest. It showed a man with dark Russian looks, holding an infant.
“Yevgeny,” Natasha said. “With Patrice.”
More followed. The child grew older, learned to stand on his own feet; sometimes in the company of other children.
“Who are these?”
“The eldest two, they were at Les Arbres from the beginning. I do not remember their names. And here,” and she plucked a photo from the pile of her son at five or so, with another boy, slightly younger, “this is Patrice with Bertrand. Bertrand is Frank’s son.”
“Where did he come from?”
“I think the usual place,” Natasha said.
“I meant—”
“I am teasing. There are six or seven children in the end. All boys. The first two, and then Patrice and Bertrand and two or three more. All I know is what I hear, and what I see from photographs.”
“Yevgeny kept sending them, then.”
“While my mother lived. When she died, he stops. The last picture I have of my son is ten years old.”
This was said in a matter-of-fact tone.
“And the mothers, they were living there too?”
“Never for long. There were some Russian women, and a French girl, I think. An Englishwoman too, a different one. But they never stay long. Only the children stay.”
“Why do you think they left?”
“Once there was a rumour that bad things had happened, that the women were . . . killed or murdered or something, but the police, they make enquiries, and afterwards the rumours stop. The women, they move away because they are not happy there. They return to Moscow or London or wherever, and they leave their children behind, because this is how they like things to be. But I think it is how Frank likes things to be. Like with my own father, he says how he feels about things, and that is how the things become. They are the law. I think, at Les Arbres, Frank makes the law.”
River looked through the remaining photographs. Patrice grew older, Bertrand did the same, and in one shot the latter stood under a tree, the expression on his face familiar to River, though he couldn’t think why. And again the thought struck him that this boy was dead now, and whatever future he might have had when this was taken was now an irretrievable mess on a bathroom floor. And even that presumably cleaned away by now; nothing more than a stain, an afterthought.
Another photo showed Patrice and another boy with two adult males.
“Who are they?” he asked, certain he already knew half the answer.
“That is Frank. The other, that is Jean. The Frenchman.”
Frank was tall, fairish, though not enough to be called blond; broad-shouldered and—here, at least—unshaven. He wore a short-sleeved shirt, and his arms looked strong and capable. He wasn’t smiling. Rather, he seemed to be questioning the value of having his picture taken at all; as if he felt little need to have his presence confirmed by outside agency.
“Who’s the other child here?”
Natasha said, “That is Yves. He is called Yves.”
He looked younger than Patrice, and to River’s eyes an ordinary boy; his features a little blank; a canvas waiting to be scribbled on. Was he five years old? He might have been about that: River couldn’t tell. But Natasha’s tone had shifted, mentioning Yves’s name. There was the same note of distaste as when she’d spoken of Frank. Distaste, unless it was fear.
But who would be frightened of a five-year-old, wondered River? And then remembered: five-year-olds grow up.
“You don’t like this one,” he said.
“I do not know him.”
“But you know him enough not to like him.”
She was quiet for a while, then said, “Sometimes you see him at the market, in the café. He looks at people like they are a different species.”
“In what way?”
“Like they are insects, or worse. Lower than insects.”
Growing up at Les Arbres, surrounded by men. River wondered what the boys had been taught.
He said, “What did they live on, do you know?”
“Money?”
“Yes.”
“I do not know. Some of the villagers call them hippies at first, but even then it was late for hippies. And besides, they do not have guitars or take drugs, and there are not enough girls. So I think they have made their money somewhere and decide this is where they want to live, that is all. Somewhere remote, but not impossible. Somewhere . . . their own.”
“Did the children go to school?”
“No. Jean, he is a teacher, or he has qualifications. It is enough. They are educated at Les Arbres.”
“Which has now burned down.”
“Yes.” Natasha leaned forward. “And that is why you are here, yes?”
“No. I didn’t know that had happened. I didn’t know about Les Arbres at all before today.”
And I don’t know much more now, he thought. Or understand, anyway. But still, he had a grinding feeling in his stomach, as if he had ingested more knowledge than he was yet aware of, and it was trying to claw its way out.
Either that, or his hunger was becoming violent.
“Thank you,” he said at last. “Thank you for speaking to me.”
“You don’t know where they are,” she said.
“No.”
“But you are going to find out.”
“I’m going to try,” he said.
“If you find my son,” she said, “you will tell me, yes? You will tell me where he is?”
River lied to her, as sincerely as he knew how.
Limping through the rain again, he made his way to the centre of the village and found a bank, with a cash-machine embedded in its wall. As he fed his credit card into its slot, he had the sensation of reappearing on the map; an awareness that he could now be tracked. His brief holiday among the dead was over. When emerging from the underworld, he vaguely recalled, it was best not to look over your shoulder; you could lose everything you thought you’d recovered. Even so, he took a moment to glance at the photograph he’d stolen from sad Natasha: her son, Patrice, and the other boy, Yves, their teacher, Jean, and the man Frank, who stared out from the celluloid as if already regretting the moment of contact it would produce, years later, here in the rain; the house that was the photo’s backdrop a sodden ruin, and his own son a corpse in another country.