The Elder Man Read online

  So you say, thought Armin, eyeing the hellhound with some misgivings, but Michel was draped all over it with complete confidence, and Armin relaxed a little.

  Just past the outhouse, the forest grew sparser, and the place began to look a little more tended. There were hedges of mixed shrubs, unclipped but obviously planted, and the path was flanked in places by rather wild beds of raspberries and ebullient swaths of flowers, positively abuzz with bees, and all manner of things—herbs of some sort—that smelled funny when his knees brushed against them. The path went steadily downhill. They must have been halfway to the bottom of the valley when they turned a corner, ’round a low porch almost swallowed by greenery, like a cool, dark cave, and came upon the strangest house Armin had ever seen.

  He had been prepared to the general look of cob houses from some quick online research he had done before leaving Frankfurt for Anja’s house in Normandy, but this was something … else.

  There were the organic shapes, not a straight line to be seen anywhere, and the grass roof, but while most cob houses he had seen looked like more or less ordinary cottages, albeit picturesque with some sculptural bits thrown in here and there, this looked like more sculpture than house. Every wall was intensely alive with twisting, arching, coiling shapes of strange fractal trees, which sometimes morphed into antlers—some of the antlers were real—or twisting serpents and dragons. Windows of various shapes twinkled from behind dragon wings and twisting tree limbs. Bits of the house were actually separate buildings, connected by porches, pergolas, or covered walks, all inter-planted with shrubs and creepers so that it was hard to tell where the grass-roofed buildings started and the garden began. It looked like the house had grown organically out of the soil, like a complicated mushroom colony, rather than being built.

  It was all perfectly absurd, preposterous. A joke. It was also compelling, fascinating.

  Armin, who had come here firmly intending not to be impressed, was impressed.

  “Wow,” he said, “It looks like a film set.”

  “Well, it isn’t,” said Allie with an emphatic sniff. “It’s as real as it gets.”

  Well, I love you too, he thought, peeved by her sour tone.

  For the first time he felt a stab of curiosity about the builder. He suddenly figured it must be some crazy elderly man, in his seventies, at least. The house looked like it had been here forever. It must have taken decades to sculpt all those shapes.

  “No shoes in the house,” Allie said. “House rule number one.”

  Armin took off his sneakers in the porch, and Allie kicked off her sandals. The little boy let himself into a door that stood negligently ajar, preceded by the black dog. Allie and Armin followed.

  Armin was, at this point, rather anxious about meeting the house’s owner. By now he had a fully formed vision of a fearsome sort of fanatic messianic figure, and if Allie’s mood was any hint, not a very benevolent one, so he was not at all surprised when, just inside the door, he was met by a tall, tall man, taller even than he, thin as a stork, with a full, flowing, silver-white patriarchal beard and hair, like an ancient prophet right out of the Old Testament. He wore a very faded Hawaiian shirt, khaki shorts, and odd socks, one orange, one blue. This bizarre apparition stared down at Armin like an accusing judge, in silence, waiting.

  “Er,” said Armin, cautiously reaching his hand forward. “Er, Armin. I am really, really sorry I’m a day late. I…”

  The man’s left eye narrowed to a slit. The right eye went wide and white and round and began twitching violently. Then the man poked Armin in the chest with a hard, bony finger, said, “Pfft!” and stormed out of the door.

  Oh wow, that went well, thought Armin. Allie opened her mouth to talk, but before she could say a word, another man walked in from a side door.

  “Oh, there you are! I was beginning to worry!”

  “Vani,” said the little boy, running up to him and hugging his leg. “J’ai faim!”

  “Eh, bien, deux minutes, Mimou,” said the man, ruffling the child’s hair.

  “Everything okay on the way?” he asked Allie in English. He was not as tall as Armin, but tall enough to top Allie, who was not a small woman, by half a head at least. He had dark brown hair, wet, and a graying beard, also wet, on a tanned, energetic face dominated by a great Roman nose and large, expressive brown eyes. It was hard to tell his age. He might be anywhere between forty and fifty-five. He had obviously just finished showering and was barefoot. He wore an old, worn t-shirt and shabby jeans cut short just under his knees.

  Armin, who had been sent off to a workshop, not knowing exactly what to expect, was suddenly acutely aware that he was, in fact, a guest in the private home of these unknown people.

  “Yes,” said Allie. “Just the chantier in Beynac. The road is closed again. I had to drive to the dark side of the moon to go round it. All well with the workshop? And dinner? Where’s everyone?”

  “In bed, most likely. All done up.”

  He flashed a luminous grin at Armin, the first true smile he had seen all day and one that could well make up for a much longer wait. It positively lit up the room. “The first time you cob, you use muscles you never knew you had. Best recipe for sound sleep. I’m Van, by the way.” He offered Armin his hand.

  “I figured,” said Armin with a sigh of relief. “I’m Armin. Of course.”

  “Look, Armin, I’m sure you are as tired as I am. I’ll show you your quarters, and then you can have a bit of dinner. There’s some excellent lamb stew left over. I’ll warm it up for you.”

  Armin grimaced.

  “Anything the matter?”

  “No, no, well, it’s just that, ahem, I am a vegetarian.”

  “Oh dear. Never mind. Vegetarian or vegan?”

  “Just vegetarian.”

  “Whew. Omelet okay?”

  “Brilliant. Thank you. Sorry to be such a pain.”

  “Don’t mention it. Come, I’ll show you to your room.”

  Van put a hand to Armin’s shoulder and gently turned him and led him back to the door. Armin, after Allie’s warnings, was dumbfounded by this direct, practical, and indeed intensely agreeable man.

  The “room” was actually outside the house. Van, Armin noticed, did not bother to put shoes on to walk there but waited patiently for Armin to slip on his sneakers then led him around the house and showed him to a minuscule roundish building, more like a large toadstool really, almost swallowed by creepers and some plant with immense paddle-shaped leaves and yellow daisy flowers.

  “We call it the palace. Our little joke. Sorry, it’s a bit cramped for a tall chap like you. We were hoping for someone shorter.”

  Armin had to stoop low to enter the small door. Inside it looked larger than Armin had expected, but it was still pretty minuscule. A bunk was built into the wall. There was a little shelf under a rounded window and some storage space under the bed, and some niches were carved into the volume of the clay walls. One of them had a family of teddy bears in it. Just in case a guest should feel low and lonely, thought Armin. Another, near the head of the bed, contained a little row of old books.

  “It’s not much, I know, but you’ll be only sleeping here. You’ll see where everything else is tomorrow. Come, leave your bag, and let’s feed you afore you fade away. You look starved half to death, if you don’t mind me saying it.”

  Back in the house, Van busied himself very briskly in a small kitchen crowded with shelves of mismatched crockery, jars of home preserves, dried herbs, and ropes of onions, garlic, and chilies hanging from the rafters.

  “You will have to go find me some eggs, Armin,” said Van.

  “Er…” said Armin.

  “Michel, show the city boy where to find eggs,” said Van in French to the little child. “And bring these to the paphoonies while you’re at it.” He gave the child a bowl of broken eggshells

  Armin, who didn’t like children much and could not make heads or tails of the little boy’s piping, lisping French, followed
him outside rather apprehensively.

  It was nearly dusk. The garden looked both larger and denser, more mysterious. It was like no garden Armin had ever seen. There were no lawns and no orderly flowerbeds. All the trees were fruit trees except for the forest trees, some of which reared up like ancient, patient sentinels here and there among the lower vegetation. Hedges, vines on poles and wires, and the occasional fence enclosed and disclosed spaces. It was rather like a labyrinth of smaller gardens, all on a steep slope broken up in shallow terraces by a sequence of ancient stone walls.

  The large dog loped ahead of them, obviously happy to be on the move again.

  Michel was eager to communicate and pointed at things and explained them at length to Armin, who understood not a word but nodded and grinned like a maniac, feeling both an idiot and slightly aggravated. Eventually Michel gave him up as a hopeless dullard and took to conversing with the dog, who looked both keen and intelligent and wagged his tail with approval at every full stop. The dog’s conversational skills obviously far outstripped his own, and Armin had an acute wish to turn tail and go back to Frankfurt, where people were sensible and wore shoes and bought eggs in the shops like everybody else.

  They made their way to what looked like an orchard. There was a creaky rickety gate, and Michel made a kiss-kiss sound, which brought a number of rustling birds to the fence. Armin, who had expected chickens, was astonished to see a flock of coal-black ducks.

  Black ducks?

  Michel went through the gate, scattered eggshells all over the grass, and the ducks fell on them like little, fat, wallowing dinosaurs. There was a small hut under the trees, and Michel went rummaging in the straw and whooped softly.

  “Tien,” he said. Take—that much even Armin could understand—and loaded some rather dirty eggs into Armin’s hands. The eggs were a pale blue-green. Duck-egg blue. It had never occurred to him that duck-egg blue was the color of a duck’s egg. He suddenly smiled, and Michel smiled back. They made their way back to the house in companionable silence. The dog had disappeared.

  At the house the bizarre old man in odd socks was back, and a newcomer had made an appearance, an enormously portly young man with a head of dark curls tied in a ponytail and merry brown eyes in a perfectly round, red, sparsely bearded, moon-like face. He wore an apron with a spatter of sauce on it over a tent-like t-shirt.

  Allie introduced them, in French. “This”—the thin old man—“is Monet. He’s a painter and lives a couple of hundred meters down the road. He comes to give a hand when he can and looks after the garden and animals when we are away at workshops. We would be lost without him. And this”—the fat young man—“is P’tit Paul. He’s a gourmand and the best chef in the Dordogne. He bakes and cooks at all of our workshops, bless him.”

  Monet shook hands, uttered another hiss, and resumed his seat.

  Paul said, “Salut. Ça va?” and Armin realized he really needed to put his elementary schoolboy French to use or be truly bad-mannered.

  “Ça va,” he said, miserably, and mercifully Van popped his head out of the kitchen door and called for the eggs. Armin scuttled over in a hurry. He was ill at ease with human beings at the best of times, much preferring to communicate with them via e-mail and text, and meeting a whole tightly knit gaggle of French-speaking people was almost more than he could take, especially in his current reduced state.

  Allie was laying the table. P’tit Paul sat down with a beer and a sigh, and Armin stood about uncertainly as Van cooked a complicated thing that didn’t look like any omelet Armin had ever seen. It was full of mushrooms, cherry tomatoes out of a jar, bits of cheese, garlic, a scatter of herbs and chili flakes, and crème fraiche melting on top of everything. The stove where he was cooking was made of clay, like the rest of the house, and fed on small sticks. The kitchen was cramped and a little smoky, which brought back Armin’s lingering cough.

  Van shot him a keen, piercing glance.

  “Oy, there. Sit down this minute before you faint on us. It’ll be ready in a moment,” he said, and Armin did sit at the table, feeling slightly embarrassed as Allie put cutlery in front of him rather brusquely. Michel brought a basket of sliced bread and offered it to Armin, saying, “Armand?”

  “Merci.” Armin took a slice and tried to explain that his name was Armin, not Armand, but Michel remained stonily unconvinced. Then Van appeared with the omelet, which he sliced in the pan with a wooden spoon and dished out in front of Armin with a practiced flourish.

  “Eat while it’s nice and hot,” he said. “Don’t stand on ceremony. It ain’t the mayor’s house.”

  The omelet was extremely good as far as Armin could tell, given that his taste buds were almost as numb as his nose. He did his best to compliment the cook and converse in French, mostly for the sake of Michel, who shrank away when Allie asked him to speak English. Michel didn’t understand Armin’s French any better than Armin understood his and had to have everything translated from French to a different kind of French. Armin felt more useless than ever.

  “That’s a nasty cold you have there,” said Van in English, taking pity on him, while the child, Allie, and Paul carried on in French on the other side of the table.

  “Yeah. Picked it up in town, just before traveling to Normandy,” croaked Armin. “It was going ’round and ’round all winter and spring. Finally got it. I got to my aunt’s place in such a state that I just lay in bed for four days. That’s why I am a day late. I am sorry. I was really knocked up.”

  “Gods, I hope not,” said Van, bursting into laughter.

  “Argh… Knocked out,” he corrected with a groan, putting his face in his hands. He was too destroyed to keep up a conversation in German, let alone French and English at the same time.

  “I will make you a tea, kiddo. It will make you better in no time,” said Van kindly.

  “Ah, don’t worry. I brought some aspirin.”

  “I will make you tea,” Van repeated flatly and went back to the stove to boil water and rummage in a cupboard full of old jars. It was strange how Van’s departure immediately made Armin feel intensely lonely, as if he had lost his only ally at the table. The other three were still talking in French at great speed, with the occasional hiss, click, or cluck from the painter.

  The tea turned out to be thick, murky, and dark crimson, like blood. Van poured it into a chipped earthenware mug then handed the mug and a jar of honey to Armin, who looked at the concoction in dismay.

  “Don’t worry,” said Van. “I am not trying to poison you. There, look. We’ll all drink the same. Just in case you already brought the plague amongst us, gods forbid.”

  He smiled and poured more tea. Allie, Paul, Monet, and Michel took it happily, with no hint that there was anything very alarming about it, and Armin finally dared to try it. It tasted intensely medicinal but, once generously sweetened with honey, not actively horrible. As he drank, the warmth of it spread into his gut like searching fingers.

  It did make him feel better, but it also made another problem worse.

  “Well, I’ll—er—I need to use the, um, outhouse,” he said, finishing the last of his tea in a certain hurry.

  “It’s a common affliction. No need to be bashful,” said Van with a smile. “You know where it is and how everything works?”

  “Yes, yes, thank you, Allie showed me.”

  Armin was almost at the front door when Van called out from the kitchen.

  “Mind the toads!”

  “Toads?” asked Armin, horrified.

  “Yeah. They are all over the paths in the evenings.”

  Oh, for fuck’s sake.

  “They are poisonous, aren’t they?” he said shakily.

  “Only if you pick one up and lick it. Look, I’m not worried for you. I am worried for them. Try not to step on one. They are very fragile animals.”

  You’ve got to be fucking kidding me, thought Armin, putting on his shoes and stepping out into the night with his iPhone held out in front of him as a flashlight.


  ****

  Van

  The boy had not been gone for thirty seconds before there was a muffled shriek outside. Van gave a snort of laughter. Allie sank her face into her hands with a groan.

  “I apologize. Oh shit, Van, I apologize. I didn’t mean to bring such a visitation down upon you. I don’t know what Anja was thinking sending him here. My God, what a useless lump.”

  Van smiled and sat down at table, pouring them all another cup of tea, bee-balm tea this time.

  “Be merciful. That poor lad is dead on his feet. He’ll do quite fine, after a good rest. He’s where he needs to be. You did well to bring him.”

  Allie looked up at him then, unconvinced. “You think so? He is such a … city boy.”

  “Oh, well. I’m sure we’ll knock some sense into him.”

  “And a few good meals too, hopefully,” put in P’tit Paul, who was a good-natured soul and loved to feed people until they burst.

  Van nodded and then shook his head. It’d take more than a few good meals to get that young man steadily on his feet. But one had to start somewhere. “You do that, Paul. You do that.” Monet nodded emphatically.

  “What do you say, Monet, about this city boy?” asked Van.

  Monet put his hands on top of his head, palms forward, fingers splayed, and wagged his head from side to side.

  “I thought so,” said Van, and the others laughed.

  When Armin came back, looking rather paler than before but somewhat relieved at having accomplished his first business in a composting toilet, and having survived the toad-strewn walk, Van looked closely at his eyes and laid a hand on his forehead. Armin made to take a step back, astonished, but Van was used to people being startled by his directness and was quite unfazed. It was good to be startled out of one’s poise from time to time.

  He tut-tutted.

  “Go to bed, lad. And don’t set the alarm. Have a good sleep-in tomorrow morning. It’ll do you good. I am sure we can survive the morning without your help. Just wander down to the building when you wake up.”