The Elder Man Read online

  Armin demurred politely for a moment, but he was obviously pitifully relieved to be given such an early way out of the gathering and soon took his leave.

  Van watched the young man disappear toward the palace with interest. He hoped he would be comfortable. The palace was a small space even by Le Sureau Noir’s modest standards, and that lad must be close on six feet three. Definitely not a gnome.

  Allie was still looking rather ruffled, but Van thought the young man was rather engaging, considering the piteous state he had arrived in.

  It was a rule of Van’s that new guests always go gathering some food before being fed. It was a way he had of reminding newcomers that, out here in the real world, food had to come from somewhere, that it didn’t just appear magically in the supermarket’s shelves and fridges.

  Some people were irritated by this. But Armin had gone meekly enough, despite his flu and all and had come back looking a little calmer and a little happier than before.

  Van had found an orphaned fawn once and brought it home, to be raised by a nanny goat. It had been fascinating to watch that wide-eyed, long-legged creature growing taller and wilder by the day among his domestic foster-siblings, until the day he found out that, after all, like the beautiful ugly duckling, he did not quite belong. He had left finally and disappeared into the woods with his first velvet antlers barely poking out.

  This fidgety, lanky boy put Van in mind of that fawn. He had the lost, haunted look of one who’d been too long far from home.

  But perhaps he still didn’t know where his home was.

  ****

  Armin

  Armin made his way to his minuscule cabin feeling so utterly desolate that he almost wanted to cry. He hadn’t left anything much to pine for back in Frankfurt. He had more or less murdered his career, his boyfriend had left him and so badmouthed him to all of their acquaintances that there was little chance of him ever getting another lover within five hundred kilometers of Frankfurt, and he was certain that his aunt had dispatched him on this absurd job more to keep him out of sight than for any other reason. Surely there must be better qualified men to send to a building workshop. For crying out loud, the most manly thing I ever did was put up an IKEA bookshelf, and it collapsed before a month was over.

  He had nothing much to go back to. His whole life was in pieces.

  Even so, he missed the familiar quiet of his flat, where he was not expected to make polite conversation, to be nice to children and other strange beasts, and put up with dogs, ducks, and toads and composting toilets.

  Still, despite everything, he was a little relieved since dinner. He knew Allie had taken a dislike to him almost immediately. He didn’t really blame her. He had arrived a day late. He hadn’t been much company on the long drive here, and this place was so alien to him that he had been in a permanent state of bewilderment since he had stepped out of the car.

  Van was different however. Armin had expected some forbidding, controlling man, but he had been quite off. Van had poked some gentle fun at him, sure, but he had been considerably kinder than Armin would have expected. Certainly kinder than Allie, and far more perceptive. How did such a sweet French guy get hitched to that sour English virago?

  Is he French actually? He wondered, because he was cursed with that sort of inquisitive brain that never, ever shut up, however tired he might be. He sounds French when he talks in French. But when he speaks English, he doesn’t. Interesting.

  Armin kicked his duffel bag under the bed, too tired to unpack, undressed, careful not to crack his head and knuckles into any wall, and immediately dived into the bed. Despite the smallness of the room, it didn’t feel stuffy or claustrophobic. In the very last gray light of dusk, Armin looked around curiously. There were no hard edges anywhere, no square corners, no stark lines. It didn’t feel like a small box shutting him in but rather like a soft organic cocoon wrapped comfortingly around his aching loneliness. The rafters of the roof were not milled timber but round poles, with the twists and knots of the trees still in them, and they met in the middle in a spiraling circle that appeared to twist slowly and absorbed the eye irresistibly. The window didn’t have glass, and as a very small rain began to fall, pattering softly on the big leaves of the plants outside, a cool breeze from the garden moved the air almost imperceptibly, as if the small building was breathing around him. It was chilly in the open, unheated room, despite the fact that it was almost June, but the bed had both a thick quilted blanket and a heavy, dense duvet, and Armin was soon comfortable in his nest.

  He was in pieces after trying to accommodate his long limbs, sore with fever aches, on narrow train seats obviously designed for knee-less Ewoks and inch-high Smurfs. He finally let his exhausted body unwind, profoundly grateful for the solitude and the quiet. The raindrops played complex, elusive, ever-changing music on those big leaves under the window, and he plunged into a deep, deep slumber, a dreamless void, complete oblivion.

  Chapter Three

  Tuesday

  Armin

  Next morning Armin rose out of this welcomed coma by slow degrees and surfaced into the morning light with some confusion, not quite sure of where he was. He could not remember the last time he had slept so deeply. It was a few moments before he managed to reorient himself.

  There was a flicker of dappled sunlight in the strange, arched window on the other side of the room and absurdly loud bird-song in the air.

  He realized, with a start of surprise, that his cough had ceased and his airways were clear. That’s why I slept like a corpse, I suppose. He rolled over, pulling the duvet over his nose, intensely tempted to go right back to sleep. The bed was delicious. It didn’t have the intense detergent smell of “someone else’s home.” It was just right. His bones were not aching anymore. He thought he could float in this state of painless stillness forever. If I lay here very quiet, I will go back to sleep again, and I won’t need to think about how badly I fucked up and miscalculated. But eventually a certain sense of duty prevailed, and thinking he had to go through with this madness and write his damn article, he got reluctantly out of bed, picked a t-shirt and a pair of old Levi’s from his duffel bag, and ventured out of his toadstool and back into Van’s even stranger home.

  There was nobody to be seen, and as he made his way back to the kitchen, he allowed himself to peer around the rooms he passed. There was no sense at all to how they were interconnected. It was as if the house had sprouted limbs more or less at random over the years. But all the rooms had the same intensely sculptural quality. Everything was made of clay, stone, or naturally twisted, knotty wood. The floor was one smooth dark surface of burnished clay, and it felt weirdly alive under his thin socks, cool but not cold, with a texture like leather and odd, lapping organic edges where it met rough stones and sculpted walls and whole tree boles rooted into the ground like living pillars supporting the roof. Armin had the almost irresistible temptation to kneel on the floor to touch it and feel it with the palms of his hands, or maybe even his cheek.

  How long did it take to build this and make all these clay trees and dragons and serpents? It must have taken decades

  But surely Van was not that old. It was a mystery, but one that Armin left for some other time.

  He wandered into the kitchen, unsure where to wash himself and whether there would be breakfast, and where, and whether he was late for it and how rude that was, but the kitchen too was empty and silent, with the slightly eerie feel all strange empty homes have to a newcomer. On the dining table, however, there was a platter covered with a crock and a couple of folded tea-towels, a bowl of eggs, a bowl of strawberries, some small oranges, a loaf of bread, a jug of milk, a jar of muesli, a bottle and a note, written in large, neat capitals.

  ARMIN

  DRINK UP THE BOTTLE. HELP YOURSELF TO ANYTHING YOU LIKE FOR BREAKFAST. TUCK IN HEARTY, YOU’LL NEED IT. JOIN US AT THE BUILDING SITE.

  PS - DRINK IT UP!

  The half-liter glass bottle, obviously recycled from some other d
rink, contained a cloudy yellow liquid, and Armin thought it might be a bad joke. He opened it, sniffed at it with intense suspicion, detected a faint citrusy scent, and poured some of the contents into a mug. Definitely lemon and honey. And something else, earthy and aromatic, which he could not identify but reminded him of last night’s tea.

  Under the crock, the platter was full of assorted cheeses, butter, a jar of something that might be yogurt or cream cheese, and sliced cold meats. Armin was alarmed by the lack of proper refrigeration, but everything seemed wholesome enough. The unrefrigerated butter looked all right and smelled good, as French butter always did. Armin, who was astonished to be able to smell anything at all after his flu, was sorely tempted. He reasoned that Van, Allie, and Michel were eating this way all the time and were still alive and obviously healthy.

  Yeah, but God only knows what strange gut bacteria these forest weirdos have developed.

  Still, uttering a silent inward prayer to be spared from food poisoning—can you imagine being stuck for a week on an outhouse seat?—he made himself a cheese sandwich and then ate some strawberries. Everything was absurdly tasty, and he ended up eating a bit of everything except the meat, watering it down with the mysterious beverage before arranging the leftovers under the crock again and going out.

  In the porch he almost put on his shoes automatically then remembered Allie’s advice, and with a deep breath, he steeled himself, took off his socks, tucked them inside his sneakers, left them all behind, and walked out barefoot.

  Armin’s feet were long and fine-boned, impeccably groomed and awfully soft, and almost translucently white, marked by pale blue veins. He had never given much thought to them, but against the dark dirt outside, they looked rather like dead creatures dragged out of a subterranean lake. He stood gingerly on the ground, uncomfortably aware that there was in fact a ground under his feet, made of different substances and full of uncomfortable textures. The paths were not paved. They were just dirt packed hard by much treading and were littered with small stones and treacherous pine needles and startlingly cool clumps of short grass and small weeds. Armin looked down, worried by this dangerous lark of walking about barefoot on something so untidy and potentially inimical. He half walked, half hopped, half hobbled down the path, whimpering as little stones, pine needles, and bits of dirt poked the underside of his feet, completely unprovoked.

  He was not sure where in this maze of a garden the building place would be exactly, but there was a sound of voices and laughter floating through trees and hedges, and he followed as best he could. He became lost once or twice in the impenetrable thickets of raspberries and bee-busy flowers and rows of things that might be beans on poles or alien creepers, who knew, but he finally emerged in a more open space near the bottom of the garden. The place was shaded by huge trees, the beginning of the forest in fact. He registered a number of people, a few buckets and wheelbarrows standing about, but not what he was used to think of as a building site. No mountains of plastic-wrapped materials on pallets, no skips or mounds of bulky rubbish. Not even a little trash bin.

  There were mounds of reddish-brown ground and mounds of orange-red ground and mounds of rough-hewn stones of various sizes, some off-white, some almost black, some mossy and aged, and a neat pile of timber standing against a retaining wall. There was a large straw bale partly covered with a green tarp under a rickety roof of undulated metal and the skeleton of a roughly round building with a spiral-shaped roof, not unlike the one in Armin’s sleeping room, and a clear tarp spread on top, which gave it the airy, light-filled look of a greenhouse.

  Armin was still taking in the scene, standing uncertainly at the edge of the clearing between garden and forest, when somebody gave a short loud whistle and called his name.

  “Oh!” he said, spotting Van a few meters away. He made a beeline for that familiar face, nodding a good day to various mud-spattered people on the way.

  Van was standing in the middle of a green tarp, treading on some clumpy mud with an elderly but extremely sprightly woman. She had a head of frizzy silver-blonde hair bound back in a red bandanna, thick glasses, and a smile that looked thirty years younger than she was.

  “Oh, hey, Armin. Slept well? Breakfast on board? Edith, this is Armin. Ready to start?”

  “Yea-ah,” he said, unconvinced.

  “Very good. Take my place. This is Edith. She’ll show you.”

  And he left. Just like that.

  What the fuck? Isn’t he supposed to be teaching me? thought Armin, slightly peeved for whatever reason. He realized he was a little disappointed by Van’s departure. After last night’s kindness, this seemed a little abrupt.

  He stood indecisively. Edith looked equally nonplussed but only for a moment.

  “Are you coming in or not?” she asked, puffing and panting as her knees pumped up and down in the mud. It was not a yucky brown. It was a warm, rusty orange, rather beautiful. It was still mud, however.

  Armin looked glumly at the mess on the tarp. Edith’s calves where splashed with ochre muck all the way to her knees. She had clay on her hands, too, and had obviously brushed a strand of loose hair from her forehead, smudging clay over that as well.

  “Er,” said Armin.

  “Come on!” said Edith, grinning. “This is fun!”

  Fun, yeah, sure.

  Still, he rolled his jeans all the way up to his knees, stepped onto the tarp carefully, and put his toes to the edge of the mess, intending to gauge its temperature and consistency before committing to anything definitive. But Edith grabbed both his hands, smearing mud on his fingers, and pulled him in, and he almost fell over. He slipped on the wet clay at the edge of the mass and then got firmly stuck in the middle, off balance and horrified.

  “Come on,” said Edith, stepping sideway. “Let’s waltz!”

  “Yuck!” said Armin as the cold slimy mass parted under his feet and then found its way in every small crevice between his toes. Slimy clay fingers reached into every nook and cranny. It was much worse than just walking barefoot on the ground. This was the ground itself getting entirely too close and personal for his taste. He was being harassed by a tarpful of uncomfortably clingy, grabby, wet dirt. “Oh, yuck! Fuck! I’ll never get this shit off me!”

  “Don’t be such a baby. It washes off, you know? Step up and stomp down and let’s go round.”

  He followed Edith, and they lumbered around, treading heavily on the mud. There were harder lumps, which crushed under his heel and melted to mush. There were small stones that poked the underside of his feet, making him stagger and gasp in pain.

  It wasn’t much of a waltz, more of a drunken, tottering gig, and suddenly he found himself giggling hysterically.

  “That’s the spirit,” said Edith, giggling as hard as him. “I told you, it’s fun!”

  “It’s sick. It’s absolutely sick.”

  They laughed harder, hanging onto each other to keep from falling.

  “Let’s turn it,” said Edith, after a minute, still laughing and out of breath.

  “Turn it?”

  “Like this,” she said, grasping a corner of the tarp and beginning to pull. “You too.”

  He grabbed another corner, and together they folded the tarp, pulling backward until the heavy, wet mass in the middle rolled over. They began threading the underside, now on top.

  “Neat,” he said. “Clever low-tech solution.”

  “Yes,” said Edith, panting. “Van says tarps are the cleverest thing cobbers have discovered in the last thousand years.” She giggled. “We can add straw now. And a little water maybe.”

  “Have you done this before?” asked Armin, impressed by Edith’s competence.

  “Lord, no. Not until yesterday. You weren’t here yesterday, were you?”

  “No, I was sick. Had to postpone my train trip, and I missed the first day.”

  “It was very interesting,” said Edith. “We talked about choosing and respecting the site and the foundations, which were already here, so
Van explained how they are done and in general about natural materials, cob do’s and don’ts, and energy-efficient buildings and passive solar principles… oh, lots of stuff. But mostly we just jumped right in and started making cob and then building. Nothing like a class in school, you know? Totally hands-on. And feet-in, I should say. Amazing.”

  Later, as they all took a pause, Van introduced Armin to the whole gathering. Armin had a general impression of a dozen or so filthy people of all colors, shapes, and sizes, ranging from infancy to gray elderly age. Allie and Michel he knew already, although Michel was almost unrecognizable, caked in mud from top to toe. The rest of the names just flew over his head, and he resigned himself to piece them back together again over the next few conversations. There were three elderly ladies, which seemed to Armin a ridiculous number of seriously unlikely candidates for a building workshop. A tall lanky American gentleman, Edith’s husband, he gathered, in his sixties or seventies, almost equally improbable, considering. A redheaded woman of about thirty, very handsome but with an expression like a bitten lemon. And a family of five, a lone father surrounded by a gaggle of beautiful long-legged females, among which stood a little girl of maybe seven or eight years who, to Armin’s absolute bewilderment, stepped forward, hugged him tight around the middle, and didn’t let go.

  He stood rooted on the spot, bewildered, and finally patted her awkwardly on the head, very conscious that his hands were muddy. But then, so was she, from top to bottom, as if she had been rolling in the stuff. She probably had, he decided, she and Michel both.

  “Ehm… yes,” he stammered, “nice to meet you too.”

  “Isn’t this just so, so, so cool?” she blurted out in perfect English, looking up at him with an irresistibly goofy grin. He could only grin back.

  “Yeah. Pretty cool,” he said.

  This was definitely not the crowd he had expected to meet.

  He had imagined a class of burly, hairy, rugged dudes in their thirties, wielding power tools with one hand and chugging beer with the other while telling stories of dirty Amelia back home who could blow you six times a night and still be up at five to make eggs and bacon for your breakfast. In short he had been expecting the sort of crowd who would call him a soft city nancy and make his life hell on earth, the sort of men he had spent a lifetime avoiding.