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XIII

I Survived the Terror of Russian Sex

After lunch, Canterel easily secured permission to visit his daughter. Clawdia accompanied him to the girl’s apartment and left him alone with her for a quarter of an hour.

The girl was laid out on a sofa bed, her head resting on a fat pillow, her arms beside her body beneath the sheets. Two belts, one across her chest, the other across the middle of her thighs, kept her secured. Canterel took her hand and said her name several times, as if to wake her gently, watching her face, on the lookout for the least sign of a reaction. She must have looked more like Clawdia than him; he recognized the thick set of her eyebrows, her almond eyes, even the four beauty marks that formed a southern cross on her left cheek. But her gauntness, her skin tinged the color of germinated grain, the too pronounced tilt of her neck, the lace bonnet, knotted under her chin, from which transparent blonde locks peeked out, the claw-like stiffness of her fingers . . . it all indicated a slow death. He imagined the movements and rubdowns necessary to stave off bedsores, the nourishing enemas, the manipulations of basic hygiene that all resulted from this, and reflected in turn that it was foolish to have brought this poor child to a place where it would be so difficult to care for her.

He planted a kiss on her forehead and left the compartment, feeling helpless, as if her immobility were contagious.

Madame Chauchat was waiting for him in the passageway.

“How’s the happy father?” she asked, looking out at a bleak landscape of wastelands and abandoned factories. “Not so easy, is it?”

“You shouldn’t have,” he said, after a period of reflection that went on slightly too long.

“Shouldn’t have what? Left you alone, while I was married and pregnant with your child? Spared you the droning of a little girl who was intelligent, but hypersensitive, temperamental, and prone to morbid sulking? My late husband worshipped her, he passed his whimsies on to her . . . Spared you the tragedy of her illness, her indefinite distance?”

Canterel looked at her, and for the first time since they had come back into each other’s lives, managed to fix on that thrilling green light in her eyes.

“You shouldn’t have,” he insisted, reaching out his hands in such a way that she could have grabbed them and brought them to her. “You know very well you shouldn’t have . . .”

He turned around and left.

Holmes and Grimod had become railway sponges. From the moment they had left Martial to his paternal obligations, the two of them had been wandering through the train with an easy-going porosity that attracted all kinds of encounters. There is hardly any place that speaks to the smallness of the world so well as the corridors of a train, and our two comrades rubbed up against a number of individuals whose existence they had until then merely imagined, like the savages who were said to populate remote islands.

Our readers must follow us into these cars and let themselves be dragged—in sympathy, or friendship, we hope—through the series of chats that brought these men to dinner.

Between Vladimir and Nizhny Novgorod, Holmes spent some time in the company of a Haitian priest who claimed to be raising funds for his martyred bit of island from the tartar chief of Ulan Bator. It seemed to Holmes that Brother Célestin, as he had introduced himself with commendable sobriety, was drinking too many fine vintages for a man driven by such a noble cause, and that whatever money he might bring back from Mongolia would hardly cover his travel expenses.

For his part, Grimod had to endure the pompous chitchat of a merchant from Manchester who was transporting sixteen cases of anal probes meant for the dignitaries of the “yellow chamber,” which was his personal nickname for the Chinese People’s Congress. Just from a man’s excrement, he swore, it was possible to learn whether he had ever gone beyond the borders of England: it takes 45 cm³ of an Englishman’s urine to kill a one-kilo rabbit, but only 30 cm³ of a Frenchman’s, and even less if he’s from the Bas-Rhin. During their conversation, he decided to call out to two German officers who were laughing loudly, drunk on vodka.

“You there, if you were lucky enough to be English, imagine how much happier you’d be!”

“England was founded by barbarians,” replied one of the Germans, sounding hostile, “and among those barbarians were your ancestors: the Angles!”

Grimod left him in the unhappy situation he had gotten himself into.

In the next car, he made the acquaintance of Achille Fournier, the humble designer of the national bicolored hat of the Sixth Republic. This young man was walking around with a large, shabby leather satchel overflowing with all the patents that he was going broke trying to maintain to protect his inventions. He was proud of them, and brandished them like weapons from the first moments of their meeting. Grimod was given the rights to a patent “to change the face of the world a little using long range siphons,” to “an aquarium that automatically supplies live flies,” and to “pigs suspended from the ceiling or raised in some other way, in order to nourish and then slaughter swine without letting those unclean animals ever touch the floor,” a system that was meant to respect Talmudic taboos and that would secure his fortune among Jewish communities.

“Had I the necessary funds,” he confided, “I would make a bicycle that runs on grain alcohol, which would prevent the friction caused by pedaling, which is very overstimulating, especially for the fair sex, who have sensitive membranes and delicate pelvises. I would ventilate the Chamber of Deputies using disc wheels, I would replace all bridges with tunnels, I would drain Lake Geneva to provide arable land for Turkish immigrants in Switzerland! But, oh well, I’m from Marseille, I’m only thirty, so I’m wrong.”

In his defense, he was born in Vitrolles, and he augmented his Southern exuberance with the nervous irritability shared by all young provincial poets.

After Brother Célestin, Holmes was kept quite busy with Prince Sergei Svechin, the official waltzer to the Empress of Luxembourg and grand champagne-uncorker before the Lord. The gentleman was nearly two meters tall, a height ungraciously close to his royal partner’s. Helped along by some Dom Pérignon, Holmes managed to get from him a blurred impression and three axioms that plunged him into the depths of long-term bewilderment. These were that the empress was nothing more than a pleasure machine, a jubilant battery that released copious fluids; that the woman had to be acknowledged as a hedonist concerned solely with the pleasures of the mouth—“the Brillat-Savarin of irrumation,” Prince Svechin had said, rolling his Rs; and that her mouth, like that of all her peers, had something of the baseness that turns litmus paper blue.

As the prince believed in magnetism and boasted that he possessed the “gift,” Holmes even had to suffer through the prince laying hands on his neck, an experience that, several years later, he claimed as the moment he had lost his last tuft of hair.

In Car 5, Grimod was approached by a sickly-looking Russian who charitably began to comfort him about his race by sharing with him a mathematical proof of the non-existence of Hell. Having established that mankind had appeared in the year 200,000 B.C., approximately, he calculated the number of humans who had lived on Earth up to our time.

“By applying to these givens the rule of compound interest,” he explained, “I have reached the figure of 75 billion deceased. If we grant, with some indulgence, that all white Christians have been saved, maybe 5% of this number, there are 71 billion 250 million of the damned currently burning in Hell. Knowing that the average volume of a human, counting everyone from newborns to adults, is about a twentieth of a cubic meter, the weight of the damned would constitute a volume seven times greater than the Earth itself! It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that this means Hell is a mathematical impossibility. As for the resurrection of the body, for the same reasons, allow me to laugh for a moment . . .”

Which he did, with his lips pursed, exhaling in short bursts of air that made his nose run.

“Admit it,” he continued, having blown his nose, “admit it’s enough to make you chuckle! Let’s be serious: the soul is made of a colorless, etheric gas, that’s as far as I’m willing to go. As for the Bible, it contains the most perfect treatise on gasometry there is, but nothing more, we agree, don’t we?”

Grimod readily agreed, while the Russian shook his hand with the enthusiasm of someone who had just saved a man’s life. Grimod took his leave, happy to see Shylock approaching. Together again, they were going into the bar car when they nearly walked into a person who froze at the sight of them, seeming to hesitate, then slipped past them into the corridor without even acknowledging them. Holmes only had time to take in his bowler hat and the black beard that was eating his face; Grimod noted his short stature and his detachable collar, glossy with use; but both of them noticed his tacky glasses with blue lenses. This incongruity, they noted admiringly, had prevented them from studying other, more significant details. As they sat down, they vowed to find out more about this gentleman.

The waitress who came to take their order left them speechless, a twenty-two-year-old Ukrainian whose name, Yva, was embroidered in red italics at the top of her apron. Her maid outfit, though spartan, could hide neither the military at-attention of her bosom nor the profile of her rear. One of those young women so instinctively seductive, thought Holmes, that every man who saw her walk by had no choice but to fix himself to her heels the way one dog sticks to another’s asshole. The end of what looked like a tendril of bindweed was poking up from her blouse, rising up her neck to just below her ear.

“Did you see?” said Holmes when she had left.

“The tattoo?”

“Yes. It’s rather unusual . . . I would be willing to give my whole body to see the rest of it!”

“It’s not all that impressive,” came Canterel’s voice from behind them.

A towel over his shoulders, his hair wet, he was sweating in a mauve silk robe.

“Martial! Where were you?”

“In the fitness room. I needed to unwind a bit.”

The waitress passed by, tray in hand.

“Ah! Yva, Yva!” said Canterel in a low voice.

She turned her head and gave him a quick wink.

Holmes was staring, open-mouthed.

“Don’t tell me you . . .”

“Yes, my dear. But as you see, I survived the terror of Russian sex!”

“How the devil did you manage that?”

“Let us say that I gave my whole body. And added a little from my pocket, to be honest. Two hundred rubles; I have no idea how many ducats that is.”

“The tattoo?” asked Grimod, smiling.

“A giant octopus whose tentacles are curled suggestively around her body. The work of a Japanese artist. Very frightening, I must confess, especially around its beak . . .”

Holmes forced himself to swallow.

“And what did you do with her?”

“What one normally does with an octopus: I harpooned her. And now, you’ll excuse me, but I must change for dinner.”

At this moment, a man sitting near them stood up.

“If I may, you did well: the octopus is a sucking monster, a favorite of the Demon! Allow me to introduce myself: Hégésippe Petiot, Belgian by birth, municipal official by profession, missionary by calling, prophet and Russian Orthodox by divine revelation.”

“Good lord!” Canterel exclaimed, taking a step back. “Good evening to you all, I’m going to take a shower.”

It did not take long for Holmes and Grimod, trapped by Yva returning with their scotches, to envy him for escaping so quickly. This fellow was dreadful! He was explaining how, while walking down Rue de Rome in Paris one November day, he had seen in the distance a terrible black cloud that had appeared to be announcing great wonders.

“And thus an unknown force,” he said, “instructed me in a terrible voice: Look, Petiot, look! Turn your face toward the celestial machine!”

Petrified in the rain that had begun to fall, he had seen the cloud open up with a great crash; out of it came a dry, pale figure, flanked by a blazing squid and a hedgehog on which were speared a multitude of appetizing olives stuffed with pimentos.

“The apparition spoke to me: ‘Tremble, Petiot, and quake! I died over six months ago, and am now resurrected!’”

Unaccustomed to seeing the dead resurrected in the clouds, our man indeed shuddered from his head to his toes and found the courage to ask his name: “Don’t question me, you wretch!” the phantom had responded. “You already know me. I am . . . Bournissac! The accountant-god brought unjustly to court, but now aided by Saint Joan of France, patron of bad poets, who will return all this to order.”

This Bournissac had been caught in the act of embezzling six months earlier and had committed suicide to spare his family the disgrace of a trial.

“Then,” continued Petiot, “Bournissac and Joan of Arc informed me that, in my capacity as a prophet inspired by them, and as a moral Mamluk, I would one day be allowed to advise and guide the future Archimandrake of all the Russias.”

The theophany was then reabsorbed and compressed into a white rhinoceros that had touched down lightly on the Rue de Rome before running off down the pavement. Hégésippe Petiot had thus developed a calling as an apostle that displeased his dear wife, but which overshadowed everything regardless.

“As for my wife’s unthinkable opposition, Bournissac and Joan of Arc ordered me not to bother with it; they tell me constantly: ‘Resist the bourgeois woman, Petiot, resist the bourgeois woman!’ Which I did, by leaving her at her mother’s house so I could devote myself fully to the spreading of the new faith.”

Holmes and Grimod were glad to see him put on his hat and bow in farewell.

“If you run into a white rhino one day,” he whispered, moving away, “let it come to you without fear: praise God and tell yourself that it is Bournissac resurrected!”