Year of the Drought Read online

  Year

  of the

  Drought

  ROLAND BUTI

  TRANSLATED BY CHARLOTTE MANDELL

  To my parents

  Year

  of the

  Drought

  “Every sunny day that goes by is another step towards catastrophe.”

  A spokesperson for the Ministry of Agriculture, June 26, 1976.

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  I

  II

  III

  IV

  V

  VI

  VII

  VIII

  Copyright

  I

  It was the month of June, in the year 1976. I was thirteen. It was the start of the summer holidays. It was the year of the drought.

  Tankers were bringing water from the lakes to the villages. Beneath a sky as yellow as corn, soldiers with their trucks and engine pumps were trying to save whatever crops could still be saved. The government had activated its emergency plan.

  It hadn’t rained in weeks. It hadn’t snowed in the mountains during the winter, either, so the water table hadn’t risen in the spring. Everything below was dry, everything on the surface was dry, and our land looked like a hard, stale cracker. Some said the sun had suddenly moved closer to the earth; others that the earth had shifted its axis and drawn nearer to the sun. I myself was of the opinion that an asteroid had fallen somewhere in the area, a huge heavenly body composed of an unknown metal, and giving off invisible toxic vapours. What explanation could there be, other than gases spreading slowly towards the village and poisoning us all without our realising it, insidiously transforming my mother into another person, making us all lose control of our lives during that summer, and bringing an end to my childhood?

  For days, Rudy had been telling me that the grass smelled bad. When I asked him why, he replied, sadly and seriously, that it was suffering. This was just like Rudy, to imagine that vegetable matter could manifest its discomfort by giving off a malodorous sweat. A stench of celery and sulphur floated in the air of our back garden, above its scattered tufts of sickly grass trampled by cattle. The ivy that clung to the kitchen garden wall had turned almost black. The sun heated the stone, crumpled the leaves and twisted its shrivelled stems as they made one last effort not to break off from their branches and fall to the sandy ground. When I examined the plant’s tendrils, they looked like tiny fists squeezed in despair. I had to admit that everything stank.

  My favourite hiding place was between the barn and the kitchen garden, far from all work and fuss. From there, I could see the rounded fields beyond the wall that protected our vegetables; beyond them, you could just make out the curve of other fields stretching all the way to the edge of the forest, which cast its shadow on the purple mountains beyond. By chance, the hollows and humps of the landscape concealed the electric pylons, buildings and roads. Alone in the world, I would spend hours on end reading comics bought in the village shop.

  Along with all the staples, the shop displayed objects for which no use had yet been found. Victims of the cruel laws of the market, they slowly gathered dust on the floor-level shelves. I had an enormous respect for Mr Florian and his wife, believing everything in the shop to be their personal property, that they could take whatever they liked from the sweet jars – open a bar of chocolate or screw the cap off a little bottle of Orangina whenever they fancied. Each week, when they handed me my comic book, Journal de Spirou, carefully rolled up and bound by a rubber band to make it easier to carry, I felt grateful to them for granting me the pleasure of so precious an item.

  The comics invariably finished with “TO BE CONTINUED”, their adventures halted in mid-action. Above the hero – the knight, the young Roman or the cowboy; the reporter, the scout or the paranormal investigator – would be a huge speech bubble containing an “AH!” or an “OH!” or a “DRAT!” They could all see some danger, some extraordinary event, perhaps the solution to their problems, only to be revealed in the next instalment, a week later. Each adventure suspended the course of time, the hero remaining open-mouthed for days, frozen in a state of uncertainty, fear or curiosity.

  In the hope that something astounding might happen to me, I had acquired the habit of remaining still for very long periods of time. Motionless on the narrow path that climbed to the forest behind our house, motionless and hidden in the tall grass of the meadow, motionless in the yard in front of the stable – I was waiting. But nothing changed. Our countryside stayed just our countryside. No mysterious stranger, having floated down from the sky in a basket after an immense voyage through space and time, was ever threading his way towards us through the woods. No convertible sports car – complete with cargo of beautiful girls – was ever racing around the corner, pursued by sinister gangsters. No friendly groom ever materialised at the bend in the path, in the company of an exotic animal with extraordinary powers. I might spot a squirrel scampering around a tree trunk, watching me, but, alas, it never exhibited any gift of speech. In the end, I would see my father on his tractor, waving me over to come and help him. Or Sheriff, our dog, dragging his old carcass towards me, wanting to be petted.

  That day, I didn’t notice Rudy right away, when he came over to show me what he had found on the ground. Rudy spent a lot of time working, and he spent a lot of time doing nothing. During the day, he looked after the animals, refreshing their hay, cleaning the barn, feeding the pigs, repairing the chicken coop and carrying out all the little chores my dad gave him. If he had nothing to do, he observed what was around him with an all-consuming intensity, as though he were straining to impose a little order on the hurried jumble of his thoughts. You could walk in front of him ten times, as he stood there, abnormally static and with his eyes wide open. You could tap him on the shoulder or call out his name, all without him so much as batting an eyelid. Visitors who didn’t know Rudy were often seized with panic when they found themselves in the presence of this blankfaced being.

  Rudy was the son of a distant cousin in Seeland. He had come to live in our house before I was born. For me he had no age, as if he had never been a child, and would never grow old. His ruddy, thick skin was a barrier that kept him separate from the outside world, and this seemed to me part of a very particular form of beatitude that was his alone.

  When I was around eight, I learned that he had Down’s Syndrome. By then, I had realised that Rudy’s status in our family was different from mine and my sister’s. I had already asked our mother why he slept in a bedroom apart from ours, near the pigsty; why he never came anywhere with us except for church on certain Sundays; why he never cried or laughed. She had explained that Rudy possessed, somewhere within his body, an extra something which made him function differently from other people. This careful answer bothered me for years.

  Though Rudy had grown into a strong young man, no one in Seeland had wanted to take him on as an apprentice. When my father learned that his cousins were planning to place him in an institution, he decided to bring him back to our farm. Simpletons, idiots, imbeciles and cretins of all kinds made excellent farmhands, he said; it was in their nature to care about animals and vegetables. In hospitals, they just went crazy. But on farms, claimed my father, as the cousins settled the matter over several glasses of plum brandy, they thrived as labourers – had done since the beginning of time.

  I was reading a Gil Jourdan detective story when I looked up to see Rudy standing in front of me, busy just watching his hands clasped against his stomach. This was one of his most frequent postures. He would scrutinise his hands for hours, as if these things capable of grasping and manipulating the smallest objects, as well as performing a wide array of other actions, co
uld not be part of his own stiff and stocky person. When he finally noticed that I was looking at him, he showed me the bird he had picked up.

  “It’s a white pigeon,” he said.

  I put my book on the ground. “It looks more like a dove. A small dove.”

  “Dove?”

  “Yes. It’s a dove.”

  Rudy had never heard this word. He smiled, happy to have laid hands on something so extraordinary. He was renowned for the tender care he lavished upon our golden leghorn chickens, for whom he was responsible, and for whose comfort he would think up all kinds of fanciful treats. Now, it seemed to disturb him to hold in the hollow of his palms a bird not so different from those in his coop. Incredibly mobile, the bird’s tiny head turned 270 degrees. It had immense, protruding eyes, like the two buttons on a stuffed animal. The image of us, projected onto all four corners of its field of vision, no doubt increased the creature’s terror. We remained silent for a while. Rudy had immobilised the bird’s wings with his thumbs.

  “His heart is pounding.”

  “It’s not an animal from around here. It’s not a wild bird,” I said.

  “It’s not a wild bird.”

  These repetitions were a sign of stress, a way for Rudy to lay hold of information and give himself time to think. Usually, though, the repeated words sounded empty in his head, and he understood no more clearly than he had before.

  “Sometimes they release white doves for weddings. They put them in a crate, lift the lid, and they fly away all of a sudden.”

  “… all of a sudden.”

  “They bring happiness. Or… maybe it’s a magician’s bird that escaped after his trick went wrong…”

  “A magician… yes, a magician,” he murmured.

  Rudy stared at the dove, as if its proximity to a conjuror might have given it supernatural powers. He opened his hands a little, then quickly raised his arms to throw it into the sky. It should have lifted itself up towards the light, dissolved into the warm mass of air above our heads in a soft whirr of feathers. But, though it unfolded its wings and beat them in the normal way, it gained no height, falling like a stone into the yellow grass.

  “Don’t do that, Rudy! You’ll hurt it!”

  As I gathered it up and brushed it off, I felt beneath my fingers the workings of a heart that had gone mad, the bird’s palpitating flesh wholly taken over by that one organ and its endless pumping of blood. How terrifying it must have been suddenly to find that it could no longer fly! I noticed its bare rump, sagging a bit obscenely, pink with lots of tiny holes. How could its minuscule brain understand that, without tail feathers, it would never manage more than a pitiful hop?

  “No wonder! Look, Rudy,” I said, showing him the dove from behind. “It must have been caught by a cat!”

  Rudy’s eyebrows met in the middle of his forehead in a grimace of concentration. “A cat!” he repeated anxiously, as he made a fruitless inventory of the felines of his acquaintance to try to determine the guilty party.

  In my hands, the bird had slowly calmed down. This was a tame dove. It stood up on my palm, and by giving a small, downward jerk, I got it to move onto the other. I repeated the trick several times. It was a skilful creature. No doubt it had often had to find its way through a tube from a tiny cage secreted in a big top hat, to emerge at just the right moment, wreathed in applause, onto a magician’s finger. I let it climb onto my shoulder, a rather dominating position that it seemed to enjoy.

  “I’m going to keep it.”

  Rudy reacted by pursing and pouting his always slightly-too-wet lips. Roughly translated, this familiar gesture meant: “Okay. Everything’s been said. Let’s move on to something else.” He turned on his heels and headed purposefully toward the barn, the upper half of his body angled sharply forward. As far as he was concerned, the matter of the bird was over and done with. His attention had been drawn elsewhere, by the noisy arrival in the yard of a woman, carrying a big suitcase.

  Under the big elm tree, Sheriff suddenly lifted his tail and ran up barking, as he did when any living being crossed a precise perimeter known only to him. Our dog was named Sheriff because his role was to defend the farm against intruders, a role he played to perfection when we were there to observe him. When none of us was around to admire his expertise, he made no effort at all, and anyone could come and go unmolested. To make Sheriff’s status official, we had attached to his collar a marshal’s star, with each of its five rays ending in a little round ball. He was an Appenzell sheepdog, in whose coat white was progressively gaining on the black and the brown. He seemed destined to end his old dog’s existence with a colourless, monochrome pelt.

  Evidently the woman was not familiar with the welcome traditionally extended to strangers arriving at farms. She stood frozen, arms at her side. As soon as Rudy approached, Sheriff ceased his racket and begged for his reward – a rough pat on his head – before returning to his corner of shade, freed from further obligations.

  “He… hello! I wanted to speak to the lady of the house. I am…”

  From my discreet observation post, I could see that the young woman had just realised she was dealing with a simple-minded person. Rudy was looking straight into her eyes with discomforting intensity, his lower lip overflowing with saliva. She smiled, then continued more quietly and slowly, breaking each word into distinct syllables, as if helping a small child with its spelling.

  “My name is Su–zy. Is the la–dy of the house in? I want to speak to her.”

  Without taking his eyes off her, Rudy removed his cap, carefully smoothed his hair, wet with sweat, to one side, and bowed.

  “I…” stammered the woman, increasingly ill-at-ease.

  “My name is Rudy.”

  “Good. Good. Mine is Su–zy.”

  “Hello, Suzy.”

  “Hel–lo, Ru–dy.”

  The introductions were over. The young woman glanced to the right and left in the hope of finding a sensible soul nearby, but she didn’t see me. She smiled, but otherwise didn’t dare to move. For Rudy, her immobility was merely part of the charm she was weaving over him, which only a magic spell could now break.

  Every woman Rudy met, whether young or old, beautiful or ugly, was the one who had been long destined for him, yet tragically withheld until just that moment. He often spoke of his future marriage, his eyes wet with happiness. We would tell him reassuringly that he must be patient, but that it would happen, that one day there would be a Mrs Rudy. Meanwhile, he paid court to all the women of the village. They would greet him very politely, never failing to enquire solicitously about his health or his work. These encounters served to convince Rudy of his chances with the opposite sex.

  He held out his arm and grasped the free hand of the woman, who was stunned by this sudden gesture of familiarity.

  “My name is Rudy.”

  “That’s… that’s good! O–kay, Ru–dy. I am go–ing to leave now.”

  He moved towards her, in search of closer physical contact. The young woman recoiled. If Rudy’s hand had not been very firmly gripping her own, she would undoubtedly have fled at top speed.

  “Rudy! Leave her alone!” shouted my mother from the doorway. She turned to the woman. “I’m so sorry. He doesn’t mean any harm. He’s a good boy.” Then, addressing Rudy again, she commanded: “Be good! Let the lady go!”

  He did so, without taking his eyes off his conquest.

  “He can’t help touching people for no reason. It’s just the way he is,” said my mother.

  “Yes… Of course.”

  “I’m so sorry.”

  “I’m traveling from village to village. I sell plastic containers that can be hermetically sealed. To preserve food. All sizes. They’re new. They come from America. Do you…?”

  “Why don’t you come inside? We’ll be more comfortable there. It’s cooler.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Go right in.”

  Mum whispered something into Rudy’s ear, who obediently replace
d his hat on his head. He watched the pair move away with a knowing air. I knew that Mum would have told him, for the hundredth time, that he had to be patient, that someday he would find his soulmate, and that if he wanted it to happen, he had to remain a gentleman and keep a respectful distance from women.

  * * *

  That night, I went outside to escape the stifling heat in my bedroom. I took my dove, which I had set up on a makeshift perch, an old parrot stand rescued from the back of a shed. The bird had quickly adapted to it, taking turns to perch on each of its six brackets. Its brain held no more than the minimum quantity of necessary information, so that it functioned efficiently, like all of nature’s simple mechanisms.

  The heat that had accumulated during the day now rose freely up to the sky. A warm wind, sequinned with burning particles, swooped down from the mountains, like the breath of a huge animal crouching in the shadows. The distant stars offered no comfort. They looked like tiny fires.

  A window shutter on the ground floor banged. The dove immediately carried out a quick inspection of itself on my shoulder, stretching its head in every direction. The dance appeared to be part of a mating display. I clapped my hands, and it automatically repeated the sequence, with gusto, as if spurred on by hundreds of invisible encouragements. I clapped again, then again and again. Each time, the dove performed several rotations of its head, with an accompanying sound of tiny gears being shifted.

  No doubt it had no special attachment to me personally. Perhaps it even took me for its former master, the magician, now magically transformed into a thirteen-year-old boy. Still, I was pleased to discover that it had been trained to do these circus movements.

  “Is anyone out there?”

  It was Mum’s voice. I stepped back to hide in the shadow of the eaves. She leaned out of the window and gave the yard a quick survey. From my position, I could make out a part of the inside of my parents’ bedroom. Mum was getting ready to go to bed; Dad must have been asleep already.