David Mitchell - The Book of Other People

She got up from the rocker, pulled the louver doors shut, considerably dimming the room.

‘I don’t want to talk about it,’ she said, plopping herself down on one of the old divans by the closed fireplace.

‘Is he cheating on you?’ I asked. ‘If he is, I can find some way to have him thrown in jail.’

‘He’s not cheating,’ she said.

‘Are you cheating?’

She popped her eyes real wide in response, then pointed at her belly.

‘Is it his baby?’ I said, sitting down on the floor at her feet.

‘You fool,’ she said.

Placing my head on her knee, I felt like I did when I was a boy and would run home, devastated, after going with my father to record a death.

‘You can’t do this type of work if you cry at the scene,’ my father had said, slapping the back of my head in front of his witnesses. Once, even after I had seen the severed body of a beheaded man. The man’s own brother had taken a machete to his neck during a dispute over a plot of land. That night, Lélé had let me sleep in her bed, but most importantly she’d let me cry.

‘You sure you don’t want to tell me?’ I asked.

‘Maybe in good time,’ she said.

‘Have we ever used this fireplace?’ I said, pointing to the only concrete part of the house, a square cave that Lélé had recently filled with giant decorative candles.

‘Marthe would know better,’ she said, ‘but I only remember us using it once, the night you were born. It filled the whole place with smoke and nearly burned down the house.’

The next day I was taking an affidavit for an actual divorce when it began to rain. I was nervous about the river overflowing again, this time pushing past the vetiver fields and the almond trees. Ours was now the only place that close to the river. The others, newer and shabbier, had been taken downstream in flash floods, many with entire families inside. I had been meaning to tell Lélé that we should do something about the house. I had refrained from discussing it with her only because I hadn’t decided myself what to do. Should we sell it to someone to whom we would be passing on the same problem we now faced? Should we destroy it and rebuild on higher ground? Should I move somewhere else and use it only during the dry season? I was sure Lélé would already have a solution, about which she felt a hundred per cent sure, so I wanted to make up my mind before speaking to her. Still, as it continued to rain and more passers-by sought shelter on the front gallery outside my office, I saw myself becoming more and more walled off from Lélé.

For years now, I had been holding quarterly meetings with the peasants in the villages, especially the villages upriver from us, telling them that the river was raging in response to the lack of trees, land erosion, the dying topsoil.

‘What do you want us to do?’ they’d ask me in return. ‘Give us something to replace the charcoal and we’ll stop.’

Sometimes in my attempts to get them to not cut down young trees, I’d reach for the basest metaphors, the most melodramatic pleas. ‘It’s like killing a child,’ I’d say.

‘If I have to kill a tree child to save my own child, I’ll kill the tree child,’ they’d say.

Now, thanks to their stupidity, or rather the stupidity of their needs, our parents’ house might soon be under water. We might wake up floating above our beds and have to climb on top of a roof to wait for the current to die down. My sister might give birth in a tree.

‘ Merde ,’ I said to the complainant in front of me. ‘Why do you want to divorce your wife anyway?’

‘Because she’s ugly,’ he said, his face looking as deadly serious, though perhaps not as anxious, as mine.

‘When did she get so ugly?’ I was shouting at him, but he didn’t even seem to notice.

‘After the children,’ he said. ‘She lost some teeth and she’s no longer kind.’

‘What type of kindness are you expecting from her?’ I asked.

‘All kinds,’ he said, winking. ‘You know.

‘How many children do you have?’

‘Ten,’ he said.

I lowered my pen and stopped taking notes. I felt like hitting him the way my father had hit me.

‘Be a man,’ I wanted to say. ‘This is your life.’

I wanted to have with him the talk I might soon need to have with my sister, convince him that, in abandoning his family, he was acting like a coward. However, when I looked up, it was perfectly sunny outside again. Those who had sought shelter from the rain on the front gallery outside my office were now making their way back into the street. The cars were circulating again too, splashing muddy water everywhere.

‘Come back tomorrow,’ I told the unhappy husband. I planned to make him come to see me at least ten times before I would type his statement, as the law required me to do, and file it for him.

It turned out that it had not rained near the house and the river had not overflowed. It was rare that it overflowed in the daytime anyway, which made me all the more anxious. All the deadly flash floods had taken place at night. Perhaps my fear was slightly irrational. Yet, the previous summer, the country’s fourth largest city had been submerged under water for weeks. I could no longer chance it.

When I got home, I immediately wanted to approach the question of the house with Lélé. I found her in her old room sitting in the middle of a large mahogany canopy bed that our parents had had constructed for her when she was a teenager. From the house she and Gaspard had shared for the last twenty years, she had brought a large mosquito net, which she’d draped over the canopy, making her appear as though she were trapped in a colorless dream. Our father’s notebooks were spread out, open, all around her. On her lap was her own composition notebook. She was scribbling furiously, flipping through page after page while jotting things down.

I walked out to her terrace, where she kept, among her many potted plants, a wicker chair on which she sat out every morning, draped in one of her bed sheets, watching the sun rise over the mountains. I pulled the chair inside and propped it in front of the armoire across from her. As I sat down, she looked up, momentarily acknowledging me, then turned her attention back to the notebooks.

‘Do you work the same way they did?’ she asked.

‘What do you mean?’ I said.

I was speaking to her through a veil, but neither of us made any effort to change that. If anything, it made me feel a bit more comfortable, braver.

‘Do you keep your notes like Grand-père and Papa did?’ she asked.

‘Sure,’ I said. ‘They’re all in the archives in town, which is where these should also be. We kept them much too long. They don’t belong only to us. They belong to Léogâne.’

‘They do belong to us,’ she said. ‘Listen.’

Leaning over, she stretched out her arm and grabbed one of the notebooks by her knees. She must have pressed too far down on her belly, for she snapped her head back, dropped the notebook and began rubbing her stomach.

‘Are you all right?’ I asked.

‘Give me a minute,’ she said. She went on rubbing her stomach, closing her eyes, whispering to herself.

‘Did you hurt yourself?’ I asked.

‘I’m fine,’ she said, opening her eyes again. ‘Let me read this to you.’

She seemed composed, nearly herself again, when she raised one of my father’s notebooks to her face.

‘Here, he has some notes about the theft of a cow. Livestock stolen, etc… it said, but in the margin, he wrote, “Lélé born today. We named her Léogâne. Hope she doesn’t think entire town belongs to her.” ’

Reaching over, she picked up another notebook. ‘ “Lélé first in school,” ’ she read. ‘ “Told me in my ear after dinner that she wants to follow me in work as justice of the peace.” ’