Etchebar
Hannah Stern sat at a café table under the arcade surrounding the central place of Tardets. She stared numbly into the lees of her coffee, thick and granular. Sunlight was dazzling on the white buildings of the square; the shadows under the arcade were black and chill. From within the café behind her came the voices of four old Basque men playing mousse, to the accompaniment of a litany of bai… passo… passo… alla Jainkoa!… passo… alla Jainkoa… this last phrase passing through all conceivable permutations of stress and accent as the players bluffed, signaled, lied, and called upon God to witness this shit they had been dealt, or to punish this fool of a partner with whom God had punished them.
For the last seven hours, Hannah Stern had alternated between clawing through nightmare reality and floating upon escapist fantasy, between confusion and vertigo. She was stunned by emotional shock, spiritually evacuated. And now, teetering on the verge of nervous disintegration, she felt infinitely calm… even a little sleepy.
The real, the unreal; the important, the insignificant; the Now, the Then; the cool of her arcade, the rippling heat of the empty public square; these voices chanting in Europe’s most ancient language… it was all indifferently tangled. It was all happening to someone else, someone for whom she felt great pity and sympathy, but whom she could not help. Someone past help.
After the massacre in Rome International, she had somehow got all the way from Italy to this café in a Basque market town. Dazed and mentally staggering, she had traveled fifteen hundred kilometers in nine hours. But now, with only another four or five kilometers to go, she had used up the last of her nervous energy. Her adrenaline well was empty, and it appeared that she was going to be defeated at the last moment by the caprice of a bumbling café owner.
First there had been terror and confusion at seeing her comrades shot down, neurasthenic incredulity during which she stood frozen as people rushed past her, knocking against her. More gunshots. Loud wailing from the family of Italians who had been awaiting a relative. Then panic clutched her; she walked blindly ahead, toward the main entrance of the terminal, toward the sunlight. She was breathing orally, shallow pants. Policemen rushed past her. She told herself to keep walking. Then she realized that the muscles in the small of her back were knotted painfully in anticipation of the bullet that never came. She passed an old man with a white goatee, sitting on the floor with his legs straight out before him, like a child at play. She could see no wound, but the pool of dark blood in which he sat was growing slowly wider. He did not seem to be in pain. He looked up at her interrogatively. She couldn’t make herself stop. Their eyes locked together as she walked by. She muttered stupidly, “I’m sorry. I’m really sorry.”
A fat woman in the group of waiting relatives was hysterical, wailing and choking. More attention was being paid to her than to the fallen members of the family. She was, after all, Mama.
Over the confusion, the running and shouting, a calm, singsong voice announced the first call for passengers on Air France flight 470 for Toulouse, Tarbes, and Pau. The recorded voice was ignorant of the chaos beneath its loudspeakers. When the announcement was repeated in French, the last fragment stuck to Hannah’s consciousness. Gate Eleven. Gate Eleven.
The stewardess reminded Hannah to put up her seat back. “Yes. Yes. I’m sorry.” A minute later, on her return down the aisle, the hostess reminded her to buckle her seat belt. “What? Oh, yes. I’m sorry.”
The plane rose into thin cloud, then into crisp infinite blue. The drone of engines; the vibration of the fuselage. Hannah shivered with vulnerability and aloneness. There was a middle-aged man seated beside her, reading a magazine. From time to time his eyes slipped over the top of the page and glanced quickly at her suntanned legs below the khaki shorts. She could feel his eyes on her, and she buttoned one of the top two buttons of her shirt. The man smiled and cleared his throat. He was going to speak to her! The stupid son of a bitch was going to try to pick her up! My God!
And suddenly she was sick.
She made it to the toilet, where she knelt in the cramped space and vomited into the bowl. When she emerged, pale and fragile, the imprint of floor tile on her knees, the stewardess was solicitous but slightly superior, imagining that a short flight like this had made her airsick.
The plane banked on its approach to Pau, and Hannah looked out the window at the panorama of the Pyrenees, snow-tipped and sharp in the crystalline air, like a sea of whitecaps frozen in midstorm. Beautiful and awful.
Somewhere there, at the Basque end of the range, Nicholai Hel lived. If she could only get to Mr. Hel…
It was not until she was out of the terminal and standing in the chill sunlight of the Pyrenees that it occurred to her that she had no money. Avrim had carried all their money. She would have to hitchhike, and she didn’t know the route. Well, she could ask the drivers. She knew that she would have no trouble getting rides. When you’re pretty and young… and big-busted…
Her first ride took her into Pau, and the driver offered to find her a place to stay for the night. Instead, she talked him into taking her to the outskirts and directing her to Tardets. It must have been a hard car to shift, because his hand twice slipped off the lever and brushed her leg.
She got her next ride almost immediately. No, he wasn’t going to Tardets. Only as far as Oléron. But he could find her a place to stay for the night…
One more car, one more suggestive driver, and Hannah reached the little village of Tardets, where she sought further directions at the café. The first barrier she met was the local accent, langue d’oc with heavy overlays of Soultine Basque in which une petite cuillè has eight syllables.
“What are you looking for?” the café owner asked, his eyes leaving her breasts only to stray to her legs.
“I’m trying to find the Château of Etchebar. The house of M. Nicholai Hel.”
The proprietor frowned, squinted at the arches overhead, and scratched with one finger under the beret that Basque men take off only in bed, in coffin, or when adjudicating the game of rebot. No, he did not believe he had ever heard the name. Hel, you say? (He could pronounce the h because it is a Basque sound.) Perhaps his wife knew. He would ask. Would the Mademoiselle take something while she waited? She ordered coffee which came, thick, bitter, and often reheated, in a tin pot half the weight of which was tinker’s solder, but which leaked nevertheless. The proprietor seemed to regret the leak, but to accept it with heavy fatalism. He hoped the coffee that dripped on her leg had not burned her. It was not hot enough to burn? Good. Good. He disappeared into the back of the café, ostensibly to inquire after M. Hel.
And that had been fifteen minutes ago.
Hannah’s eyes dilated painfully as she looked out toward the bright square, deserted save for a litter of cars, mostly Deu’ches bearing ‘64 plates, parked at random angles, wherever their peasant drivers had managed to stop them.
With deafening roar of motor, grinding of gears, and outspewing of filthy exhaust, a German juggernaut lorry painfully navigated the corner with not ten centimeters to spare between vehicle and the crepi facades of the buildings. Sweating, cranking the wheel, and hiss-popping his air brakes, the German driver managed to introduce the monster into the ancient square, only to be met by the most formidable of barriers. Waddling side by side down the middle of the street, two Basque women with blank, coarse faces exchanged gossip out of the corners of their mouths. Middle-aged, dour, and vast, they plodded along on great barrel legs, indifferent to the frustration and fury of the truck driver, who crawled behind them muttering earnest imprecations and beating his fist against the steering wheel.