The Convert Page 7
For days they are surrounded by lush forests, pools and cascades, herons by the waterside, fish in abundance. They eat currants, wild strawberries sweet as honey, hard wild cherries. She has learned how to bake flatbread on hot stones. She guts fish with her coarsened hands; she is starting to look like a young peasant woman. Her face is sunburned, she sometimes falls asleep standing up, and one day she vomits out everything in her body.
Afterwards, her clothes spattered with sour slime, she hiccups, has to pee, and vomits again. David lowers her onto the grass by the road and covers her with a light sheet. She sleeps until she feels the first cool breeze of the late afternoon. Then comes a thunderstorm: in the wink of an eye, the rain begins gushing and spewing down from the dark black cloud bank; lightning flashes all around them. She shrieks, makes the sign of the cross, reminds herself she can’t expect help from that God any more, and clings to David. The mule bucks and tugs at its leads, pulls loose, and runs off through the torrent. The rain is tepid and so torrential that it’s like being underwater. She has the feeling she can’t breathe, lightning strikes nearby, there’s no shelter in sight. They huddle together, waiting for the storm to end. God, Vigdis thinks, God of my childhood, how much I miss prayer. She prays in silent Latin as David murmurs Hebrew phrases.
As the storm drifts away to the east, they see an iridescent mist rise from the empty landscape. Which God has sent this sign? she thinks. She pinches the arm of the young man next to her so hard he jumps and raises his hand in anger – and then, shocked at his own reaction, takes her in his arms. There is nothing to say. The first stars appear in the pale blue sky. They are all alone in the world, somewhere north of present-day Vierzon, nothing more in their time than a clump of houses. As vapour rises from their clothes, they reach an inn with a worn thatched roof, where they drink verjuice at a dark table and eat hard bread with sheep’s cheese served by the innkeeper. The room where they sleep that night, on a sack of straw, stirs and whispers with mice, rats and dormice.
Following their trail, I leave Rouen – after an hour of studying road-maps and consulting Google. It seems I may as well head straight south towards Évreux on the smallest country roads. Rural France rolls out ahead of me in all its early-summer sweetness. Bunches of wild roses on weathered fences, stately swans drifting over ponds, market day under flowering lime trees, bluebottles dotting the fields of grain, fruit trees in blossom, distant views, kitchen gardens and old greenhouses. Endless concrete lanes without any opposing traffic. Once every ten kilometres, I take note of the changes in the landscape, keenly aware that almost nothing has stayed the same. Near Montigny-le-Chartif, I wander what’s left of the forest where David and Vigdis made love for the first time. A motorcyclist zooms past, so loud in the quiet summer grove that my heart skips a beat. There are still bilberries in the woods today; I picture what they ate, wonder whether they walked fast or took their time.
In the early afternoon, I roam the quiet streets of Illiers-Combray, a place I first visited twenty years ago. Again, I nose around the home of Proust’s Aunt Léonie. Out in the garden, I find a few moments of stillness. I remember how captivated I was, the first time I came here, by the patches of colour cast by the sun through the stained-glass windows on the tiles of the old floor, which inspired Proust’s musings on light and time. Now I am searching for a different light and a different time, but some hint of his hunger for intimate sensations vibrates in the midday sun as I walk to my car. I drive on to Orléans as slowly as possible.
In the evening sun, I stand on the bank of the Loire myself, watching the flat-bottomed boats, the beautiful girls showering passionate kisses on ugly boys, the peace of this hectic age. In my head David Crosby sings, Orléans, Beaugency, Notre-Dame de Cléry, Vendôme …
After that, I face three hundred kilometres of black, deserted highway, staring into passing headlights as if a film’s opening credits were going on forever – soundtrack by Gregorio Allegri and the divine Josquin. I peer out at time as I imagine it: dark distance, a patch of light gliding out ahead. Arriving home under northern skies at 2 a.m., I wonder, did I learn or see anything more in the past few days than I have just now, in the dark, on this nocturnal trip through my inner world? My delusive longing to sense some genuine vestige of this woman has culminated in the awareness that she’s no longer present anywhere, except in my imagination.
A summer morning in central France. The clop of horses’ hooves, rolling barrels, hammers striking in a smithy, tolling bells, yellow pennants by a crude fort. David and Vigdis stand and watch a watermill for a while. Water gurgles and tinkles and gushes and drips and runs beneath their feet through the muddy streets, which are steaming in the sun. David buys a mule, a small, fierce mount, Asiatic in appearance. The man claims someone brought it back from Jerusalem. ‘Yerushalayim,’ David says with a dreamy look.
Vigdis tells him about her brother Arvid in Rouen, who danced up and down the courtyard, shouting, One day I’ll go to Jesusalem! Jesusalem! and her mother who corrected him with a smile: Yes, one day you will go to Jerusalem, Holy City of the Christians, and I will go with you.
And David says, Your Church of the Holy Sepulchre wasn’t the only thing destroyed there. So was our Temple, centuries earlier. To hear him, without warning, address her as a stranger, as one of ‘you’, consigning her in an unguarded moment to her father’s world … She is silent and thinks, I have never been so alone.
The world through which they fled was embroiled in sweeping, revolutionary change, with new ideas springing up at a furious pace. I have no idea how much they knew about all that. Had David learned, in his studies, that the great philosopher Avicenna was the first to describe the nature of infectious disease? Had he heard about the innovations in dentistry by the Arabic surgeon Abu al-Qasim al-Zahrawi? And would he ever discuss such things with her? The poetry of Omar Khayyám had not yet reached the West, the songs of courtly love had not yet been written, but the cultured young men of the Rouen yeshiva may well have discussed poetry together. And it does not seem unlikely that Vigdis had learned how to read music, using the notation invented by Guido d’Arezzo some half a century earlier. The churches of her childhood resounded with the first contrapuntal songs; polyphony was on its way. Architecture was on the cusp between Romanesque and Gothic; the construction of ever-taller churches was in full swing; the world was arraying itself, as the monk Raoul Glaber had written, in a white mantle of churches.
5
After Orléans they may have made swift progress, though the Loiret was trickier to cross than the Loire – narrower, yes, but faster-flowing, with eddies here and there. I pass through the forests of Sologne, where the insects buzz around the ponds. Many stands of young trees have shot up recently; they alternate with pools and open fields. On the bank of the Ardoux, I eat a sandwich and doze by the water. Over the centuries, the area has been drained; the terrain must have been much marshier in their day and difficult for travellers. The next stream, the Cosson, now runs just behind the seventeenth-century Château de la Ferté Saint-Aubin. It is a castle fit for a king, bright and very comfortable. In the capacious cellars, a portly woman gives a cooking class once every two hours in a kitchen with period furnishings and a stuffed boar on a hook. I linger in the large chambers, the entrance hall, the classical gardens, the tranquil and somewhat infuriating setting where aristocrats once enjoyed the fruits of all the underground labour in the souterrain.
On days when Vigdis and David could stay in cities with Jewish families, they may have eaten very well. When they stayed with peasants, David must have explained to Vigdis what she was no longer allowed to eat as a convert. In the Middle Ages, all social classes ate small birds of almost every kind, mostly in pies or roasted whole until even the bones were soft and edible. Pheasant, quail and thrush were served regularly. Haute cuisine included dishes like swallow tongue consommé. Copious meals were consumed by those who could afford them – a one-pan recipe for an aristocratic family might well have called for te
n eggs per person. A well-to-do family had their pick of the produce of the tenant farmers and serfs living on their estate. The same is true of the feudal lords, but they collected many times more tribute. A great deal of pork was served, but David would not have touched that. Vigdis changed her diet to match her new faith. When they journeyed through fields and woods from one city or refuge to another, they brought provisions – watertight leather skins of wine and water, dried meat, matzos, hard bread and cheese. They found fruit everywhere; it was summer, and bilberries, blackberries and raspberries grew in profusion, along with early apples and pears, though these were often the hard fruit of wild, still-uncultivated trees. They also ate vegetables: carrots, peas, a lot of beans and beets, shallots, garlic and chives, and even leeks and watercress were on the eleventh-century menu. They could catch freshwater fish in ponds and streams.
All sorts of herbs were gathered for medical use. Almost every herb was good for something; there were large albums of dried medicinal plants, and a wide variety of extracts were recommended, and taken, for complaints of the most diverse kinds. Hildegard of Bingen – born in 1098, the year Vigdis Adelaïs returned from Egypt – later became the first to write a detailed medicinal manual. They may have had a small supply of medicines with them, ointments and sachets of herbs and grains.
For a while, they follow the Rère on its winding course through the Arcadian forest. They bathe in it, rest, catch a little sleep. He teaches her the Shema Yisrael. She sings old Flemish songs to him that she learned from her mother.
They’re in the Berry region, which for me is associated with George Sand and Chopin. They travel on to France’s oldest known vineyard, in Menetou-Salon, mentioned in chronicles as early as 1063. When David produces a silver coin from his wallet, they are welcomed by the Seigneur de Menetou. He is mentioned in the archives of the nobility: a generous, big-hearted man, devout but broad-minded. He often donated wine to religious orders in the region, most often to Saint-Sulpice Abbey near Bourges. He gives the young couple everything they need to recover their strength; his cruciform garden, in full bloom, is a joy to behold, a private little paradise with square beds of herbs, flowers and vegetables. They stay there for five days, and in the evenings they chat with the seigneur, who wishes them only the best and gives them advice for their journey. When they leave, he returns the silver coin with a friendly nod.
Like a hasty pursuer, I stay there only one night. Just before midnight, I am still out wandering around the garden. The moon is full and shines in the brackish water of a pond fringed with tall bamboo. Light glows from the windows of today’s château as in a painting by René Magritte.
To reach the city of Bourges from the north, they must have crossed three rivers: the Moulon, the Yèvre and the Yévrette. There were bridges over the first two even in their time; the third had none until almost a century later, but there must have been some kind of ferry.
I don’t know who they stayed with; all traces of the medieval Jewish community have been wiped out. But the safe, civilised life of the city surrounded them. It would be another ten years before Bourges became a royal domain. Bells were ringing all around, reverberating from small churches, pealing from high in the cathedral, clanging in a cloistered courtyard. The cathedral was still a Romanesque, early-medieval building. The sculptures of saints must have been painted in vivid colours, the usual practice in those days. It made the church entrance look almost Oriental – a motley beauty that surprised even David.
There in Bourges, I recognise her at once in a double sculpture in the Saint-Étienne cathedral of a couple seated face-to-face, praying in utmost concentration like two figures engaged in performance art. The female figure on the left, executed in several kinds of marble, seems to me the perfect likeness of the girl from Rouen – even though I know it’s a portrait of Jeanne de Boulogne, the fifteenth-century Duchess of Berry. This is the face, the expression, I had in mind in Rouen – no, even earlier, when I saw her limping down the slope to my mountain village in Provence. She too must have worn rich robes like this one in her younger years in Rouen – although the suggestion of rich brocade is more appropriate to the married noblewoman I have here before me. The marble of her outer garment is painted with intricate motifs; her small breasts are gracefully accentuated by the delicate pleating; and the unpainted marble that includes the cuffs of her lace undergarment reflects the great refinement of the artist’s culture. Her hands are folded with serene precision, and the delicate thumbs pressed together suggest concentration in prayer. The pointed fingertips gleam. The high collar around her neck, emerging from under her robe to cover her up to her earlobes, conceals and emphasises the frail power of her neck and head, the force of her will and complete repose of all her hope in prayer. The back of her large belt sports a broad clasp, its leather strap dangling decoratively into the train of her robe.
I am not the first visitor to be smitten by the realism of this sculpture. When Hans Holbein visited this church in 1524, he made a meticulous sketch of the likeness of Jeanne in prayer. He too felt the intensity of this figure, just as I feel the urge to touch her, to lay my hand on her narrow shoulder. Vigdis Adelaïs must have kneeled the same way in the church in Rouen; these are the near-aristocratic hues she exchanged for modest Jewish garb, entering the world of a different nobility.
I take in the play of morning light and shadow in this immense space with its double aisles, the intense serenity of the perspectival patterns created by the huge pillars, the way the colossal scale of this architecture evokes the light, silent life of her inly muttered prayer. Through a high stained-glass window, an oval shaft of light falls, sparkling with bright dust on the old floor. In my head, Hildegard of Bingen’s ethereal music.
6
They are sad to leave Bourges. Their hostess urges them to be careful. They nod and assure her they’ll look out for danger. They follow a sandy, winding path, breathing in the summer air; they are almost halfway to Narbonne.
But this time, along the edge of a forest south of Bourges with impenetrable underbrush, things go badly wrong. An unbelievable creature leaps out from the brambles and stinging nettles and blocks their way. A scruffy farm boy, somehow grown gigantic, a large, impressive savage in a bunch of stinking rags, with a cap on his lumpish head, he swings his heavy fists, stammering, gurgling and raging. Samule, he growls, heh heh, Samule, he grins and draws a rough serrated knife, Samule, ay-oh, ay-oh, Samule. What in God’s name does he mean? He cackles like a man possessed. Under the cap, his eyes have a lunatic gleam. The Devil, Vigdis thinks. It is the serpent from hell come to take me. She sees his feet, great, gross and bare in the furrows of the blocked road. They stand as if paralysed. Vigdis grabs David’s arm, and he jerks it away, reaching for his dagger. Samule, ay-oh, ay-oh, the man howls, like an animal in pain. He throws himself at David, who kneels low and jumps at his attacker’s belly, giving him the chance to plant his knife in David’s shoulder. As Vigdis screams, two other men leap out of the bushes and grab her, tearing open her clothes and reaching between her legs. Their breath smells like rotten fish, she thinks as a fist hits her face, everything reels, she is lying on the ground, her nose bleeding, her clothes tugged and torn off her, burning pain, she doesn’t know quite where, she hears the giant roaring, he falls back with his hands on his belly, blood running from under his heap of rags. Then the ravisher writhing over her topples forward like a log, his skull half shattered. The third man flees. She sees the panic in David’s eyes as he stands over her, stabbing his dagger deep into her violator’s back, twice, as he lies dying on top of her, beside her the giant’s death-rattle, Samule, he moans, ay-oh, ay-oh, Samule, thick blood runs from his mouth, he regains his feet, rushes at David, misses, stumbles. David swipes at his throat, slicing it open in one stroke. The giant collapses on Vigdis and the man whose limbs are still twitching on top of her. She feels her breath cut off by the enormous weight. David tugs at the giant, who is choking on his own blood, a gulp of dark fluid welling up
from his slit throat. He doesn’t have the strength left to pull away that colossal body. Vigdis is being slowly crushed, she passes out. David pulls and yanks till at last the giant rolls off her with a final spasm. Underneath is the dying man, the rapist, still rolling his eyes. Vigdis wakes up again, tries to scream, can’t. With a lurch of her hips, she pushes the man off her at last. He rolls into the dry grass beside her, spreading a stench of shit. David, bleeding from three stab wounds, his face bone-white and blood-smeared, his whole body trembling, tumbles to the ground. She cannot stand up to help him. There they remain, lying less than a metre and a half from each other. She sobs, he pants. Above them, a thrush sings in a tree, leaves blow, a church bell rings not far away, then she knows nothing.