A Winter's Promise Read online

  This time it was the great-uncle who broke the crockery he was busy putting away. He swore in his old dialect.

  A clear light was now coming through the flat’s window. It cleansed the atmosphere like pure water and cast little glimmers on the bedstead, the stopper of a decanter, and the gramophone’s horn. Ophelia couldn’t understand what all that sun was doing there. It felt wrong in the middle of that particular conversation. And it made the snow of the Pole feel so distant, so unreal that she no longer really believed in it herself. She took off her glasses, gave them a polish with her apron, and put them back on her nose—as a reflex, as though doing that could help her see things more clearly. The lenses, which had lost any color when removed, soon regained their gray tint. These old spectacles were an extension of Ophelia; the color they took on matched her moods.

  “I notice that Mom forgot to tell you the most important thing. It’s the Doyennes who betrothed me to this man. For now, they alone are privy to the details of the marriage contract.”

  “The Doyennes?” gulped the great-uncle. His face, along with all its wrinkles, was contorted. He was finally understanding the scenario in which his great-niece found herself involved. “A diplomatic marriage,” he whispered, flatly. “Poor soul . . . ” He stuffed two fresh pinches of snuff into his nose and sneezed so hard he had to push his dentures back in place. “My poor child, if the Doyennes have got involved, there’s no longer any conceivable way out. But why?” he asked, making his moustache quiver. “Why you? Why over there?”

  Ophelia washed her hands under the tap and rebuttoned her gloves. She had broken enough china for today. “It would seem that this man’s family made direct contact with the Doyennes to arrange the marriage. I have no idea what made them target me rather than someone else. I’d like to believe it was a misunderstanding, really.”

  “And your mother?”

  “Delighted,” muttered Ophelia, bitterly. “She’s been promised a good match for me, which is much more than she was hoping for.” In the shadow of her hair and her glasses, she set her lips. “It’s not in my power to reject this offer. I’ll follow my future husband wherever duty and honor oblige me to. But that’s as far as things will go,” she concluded, pulling at her gloves with determination. “This marriage isn’t about to be consummated.”

  Looking upset, the great-uncle stared at her. “No, dear girl, no, forget that. Look at yourself. You’re the height of a stool and the weight of a bolster . . . However he makes you feel, I advise you never to set your will against that of your husband. You’ll end up with broken bones.”

  Ophelia turned the handle of the gramophone to get the deck moving again and clumsily placed the needle on the record’s first groove. The little opera aria rang out once again from the horn. With arms behind her back, she looked at him with a vacant expression and said nothing more. This is what Ophelia was like: in situations where any young girl would have cried, moaned, shouted, implored, she usually just observed in silence. Her cousins liked to say that she was a bit simple.

  “Listen,” muttered the great-uncle while scratching his ill-shaven neck, “let’s not overdramatize, either. I doubtless went over the top when telling you about this family earlier on. Who knows? Maybe you’ll like your guy?”

  Ophelia looked closely at her great-uncle. The strong sunlight seemed to accentuate the features on his face and deepen each wrinkle. With a twinge of sorrow, she suddenly realized that this man, whom she had always thought to be solid as a rock and impervious to the passing of time, was today a tired old man. And she had just, unintentionally, aged him even more. She forced herself to smile. “What I need is some good documentation.”

  The great-uncle’s eyes regained a little of their sparkle. “Put your coat back on, dear girl, we’re going down!”

  The Rupture

  Ophelia’s great-uncle dived into the entrance of a stairway barely lit by safety lamps. With hands deep in her coat and nose in her scarf, Ophelia followed him down. The temperature fell from one step to the next. Her eyes were still full of sunlight and she truly felt as if she were plunging into icy black water.

  She jumped when the gruff voice of her great-uncle reverberated from wall to wall: “I can’t get used to the idea that you’re going to leave. The Pole really is the other end of the world!”

  He stopped on the stairs to turn to Ophelia. Still not accustomed to the darkness, she bumped right into him. “Say, you’re pretty skilled when it comes to mirror-traveling. Couldn’t you do those little journeys of yours from the Pole to here, every now and then?”

  “I’m unable to do that, uncle. Mirror-traveling only works over small distances; covering the void between two arks is unthinkable.”

  The great-uncle swore in old dialect and continued down the stairs. Ophelia felt guilty for not being as skilled as he thought. “I’ll try to come and see you often,” she promised in a small voice.

  “When are you off, exactly?”

  “December, if I can believe the Doyennes.”

  The great-uncle swore again. Ophelia was grateful not to understand a word of his dialect.

  “And who’ll take over from you at the museum?” he grumbled. “No one else can evaluate antiquities like you!”

  To that, Ophelia could find no reply. That she would be wrenched from her family was bad enough, but being torn from her museum, the only place where she felt totally herself, that was tantamount to losing her identity. Reading was all that Ophelia was good at. If that were taken from her, all that would remain of her would be a clumsy lump. She didn’t know how to keep house, or make conversation, or finish a household chore without doing herself an injury. “Apparently, I’m not as irreplaceable as all that,” she muttered into her scarf.

  In the first basement, the great-uncle swapped his usual gloves for clean ones. By the light of the electric safety lamps, he slid open his filing cabinets to trawl through the archives that had been deposited, generation after generation, beneath the cold vault of the cellars. He expelled condensation, mid-moustache, with every breath.

  “Right, these are the family archives, so don’t expect miracles. I know that one or two of our ancestors did set foot in the Great North, but it was a dashed long time ago.”

  Ophelia wiped away a drop hanging from her nose. It couldn’t be more than 40 degrees here. She wondered whether her future husband’s house would be even colder than this archives room. “I’d like to see Augustus,” she said. This was clearly shorthand—Augustus had died long before Ophelia’s birth. “Seeing Augustus” meant looking at his sketches. Augustus had been the great explorer of the family, a legend in his own right. At school, geography was taught based on his travel journals. He had never written a sentence—he didn’t know his alphabet—but his drawings were a mine of information.

  Since the great-uncle, deep in his filing cabinets, didn’t reply, Ophelia presumed he hadn’t heard. She tugged at the scarf that was wrapped round his face and repeated in a louder voice: “I’d like to see Augustus.”

  “Augustus?” he chomped, without looking at her. “Of no interest. Insignificant. Just old scribbles.”

  Ophelia raised her eyebrows. Her great-uncle never denigrated his archives. “Oh,” she blurted, “really that terrifying?”

  With a sigh, the great-uncle emerged from the fully extended drawer in front of him. The loupe he’d wedged under his brow made that eye double the size of the other one. “Bay number four, to your left, bottom shelf. Handle with care, please, and put clean gloves on.”

  Ophelia moved along the filing cabinets and knelt down at the specified location. There she found all of Augustus’s original sketchbooks, classified by ark. She found three at “Al-Andaloose,” seven at “City,” and around twenty at “Serenissima.” At “Pole” she found only one. Ophelia couldn’t afford to be clumsy with such precious archives. She placed the sketchbook on a consulting lectern and, with
the utmost care, turned the pages of drawings.

  Pale plains, just above the rock, a fjord imprisoned in ice, forests of great firs, houses encased in snow . . . These landscapes were austere, yes, but less daunting than Ophelia had imagined the Pole to be. She even found them quite beautiful, in a way. She wondered where her fiancé lived, in the midst of all this whiteness. Close to this river edged with pebbles? In this fishing port lost in the night? On this plain invaded by tundra? This ark looked so poor, so wild! How could her fiancé be such a good match?

  Ophelia fell on a drawing that she didn’t understand: it looked like a beehive suspended in the sky. Probably the outline of an idea. She turned a few more pages and saw a hunting portrait. A man was posing proudly in front of a huge pile of pelts. Hands on hips, he had rolled up his sleeves to show off his powerfully muscled arms, which were tattooed up to the elbows. His look was hard, his hair fair.

  Ophelia’s glasses turned blue when she realized that the pile of pelts behind him was in fact but a single pelt—that of a dead wolf. It was as big as a bear. She turned the page. This time the hunter was standing in the middle of a group. They were posing together in front of a heap of antlers. Elk antlers, no doubt, except that each skull was the size of a man. The hunters all had the same hard look, the same fair hair, the same tattoos on their arms, but not a single weapon between them, as though they had killed the animals with their bare hands.

  Ophelia leafed through the sketchbook and found those same hunters posing in front of different carcasses—walruses, mammoths, and bears, all of an unbelievable size. She slowly closed the book and put it back in its place. “Beasts” . . . These animals afflicted with gigantism, she’d already seen them in children’s picture books, but they bore no relation to Augustus’s sketches. Her little museum hadn’t prepared her for that kind of life. What shocked her more than anything was the look in the hunters’ eyes. A look that was brutal, arrogant, accustomed to the sight of blood. Ophelia hoped her fiancé wouldn’t have that look.

  “So?” asked her great-uncle as she returned to him.

  “I understand your reluctance a bit more now,” she said.

  He returned to his research with renewed vigor. “I’m going to find you something else,” he muttered. “Those sketches, they must be a hundred and fifty years old. And they don’t show everything!”

  That was precisely what was worrying Ophelia: what Augustus didn’t show. She said nothing, however, merely shrugging her shoulders. Anyone other than her great-uncle would have misread her nonchalance, confusing it with a certain weakness of character. Ophelia seemed so calm, behind her rectangular glasses and half-closed eyelids, that it was almost impossible to imagine that waves of emotion were crashing violently in her chest.

  The hunting sketches had scared her. Ophelia wondered whether that was really what she had come to find here, in the archives. A draft blew between her ankles, lightly raising her dress. This breeze came from the entrance to the stairway that led down to the second basement. Ophelia stared for a moment at the passage barred with a chain on which swung a warning sign: “PUBLIC ACCESS PROHIBITED.”

  There was always a draft lingering in the archive rooms, but Ophelia couldn’t resist interpreting this one as an invitation. The second basement was calling for her presence, now.

  She tugged on her great-uncle’s coat, as he was lost in his reports, perched on his library steps. “Would you allow me to go down?”

  “You know very well that I’m not normally authorized to do that,” the great-uncle muttered, with a bristling of his moustache. “It’s Artemis’s private collection—only archivists have access to it. She honors us with her trust; we must not abuse it.”

  “I’m not intending to read with bare hands, rest assured,” Ophelia promised, showing him her gloves. “And I’m not requesting your permission as your great-niece, I’m requesting it as curator of the family museum.”

  “Yes, yes, that old chestnut,” he sighed. “It’s partly my fault. Too much of me has rubbed off on you.”

  Ophelia unhooked the chain and went down the stairs, but the safety lamps didn’t come on. “Light, please,” she requested, plunged in darkness. She had to repeat the request several times. The Archives building disapproved of this latest bending of the rules. Finally, and reluctantly, it turned the lamps on; Ophelia had to put up with their flickering light.

  Her great-uncle’s voice reverberated from wall to wall, down to the second basement: “Only touch with your eyes, yes! I’m as wary of your clumsiness as of the smallpox!”

  With her hands deep in her pockets, Ophelia advanced through the rib-vaulted room. She passed beneath a pediment on which the archivists’ motto was carved: Artemis, we are the respectful keepers of your memory. There were Reliquaries, well protected under their glass cloches, as far as the eye could see.

  If Ophelia sometimes seemed like an awkward adolescent, with her long untamed locks, her clumsy movements, and her shyness hiding behind her glasses, she became a different person when in the presence of history. Her cousins all loved pretty tearooms, strolls along the river, trips to the zoo and ballrooms. For Ophelia, the second basement of the Archives was the most fascinating place in the world. That’s where, safe and sound under those protective cloches, the shared heritage of the whole family was jealously preserved. Where the documents of the very first generation of the ark resided. Where all the repercussions of year zero had ended up. Where Ophelia got closest to the Rupture.

  The Rupture was her professional obsession. She dreamt sometimes that she was running after a skyline that was forever eluding her. Night after night, she went further and further, but it was a world without end, without a crack, round and smooth as an apple; that first world whose objects she collected in her museum: sewing machines, internal combustion engines, cylinder presses, metronomes . . . Ophelia wasn’t remotely drawn to boys of her own age, but she could spend hours in the company of a barometer from the old world.

  She took stock in front of an ancient parchment under protective glass. It was the founding text of the ark, the one that had linked Artemis and her descendants to Anima. The next Reliquary contained the first draft of their judicial arsenal. On it could already be found the laws that had endowed mothers and matriarchs with a decisive power over the whole community. Under the cloche of a third Reliquary, a manuscript book of statutes continued with the fundamental duties of Artemis toward her descendants: ensuring that everyone got enough to eat, had a roof over their head, received an education, learnt to put their power to good use. Written in capital letters, a clause specified that she must neither abandon her family nor leave her ark. Had Artemis imposed this line of conduct upon herself, so as not to become lax with the passing of the centuries?

  Ophelia wandered like this, from Reliquary to Reliquary. The more she delved into the past, the more she felt a great calm descend upon her. She briefly lost sight of the future. She forgot that she was being betrothed against her will; she forgot the look of those hunters; she forgot that she would soon be sent to live far away from all that was dear to her.

  Usually, the Reliquaries contained handwritten documents of great value, such as mappings of the new world or the birth certificate of Artemis’s first child, the eldest of all the Animists. However, some of them contained the banal artifacts of everyday life: hair scissors that clicked in the air; a crude pair of spectacles that changed hue; a little storybook whose pages turned themselves. They weren’t from the same era, but Artemis wanted them to be part of her collection in a symbolic capacity. Symbolic of what? Even she could no longer remember.

  Ophelia’s steps led her instinctively towards a particular cloche, on which she respectfully laid her hand. Beneath it a register was starting to disintegrate, its ink faded by time. It was a record of the men and women who had rallied to the family spirit to create a new society. It was in fact but an impersonal list of names and numbers, but n
ot insignificant ones: those of the survivors of the Rupture. These people had witnessed the end of the old world.

  It was at this moment that Ophelia understood, with a little twinge in her chest, the nature of the call that had drawn her to her great-uncle’s archives, deep in the second basement, in front of this old register. It wasn’t the simple need to gather information; it was returning to one’s roots. Her distant ancestors had witnessed the breaking up of their world. But had they just lain down and died, for all that? No, they had invented a different life for themselves.

  Ophelia tucked the locks of hair flopping over her forehead behind her ears, to uncover her face. The glasses on her nose grew clearer, shedding the grayness that had been building up for hours. She was experiencing her very own Rupture. She still felt sick with fear, but she knew now what she still had to do. She had to take up the challenge.

  On her shoulders, the scarf started to move. “You’re waking up at last?” Ophelia teased it. The scarf rolled sluggishly along her coat, changed position, retightened its loops around her neck, and stopped still. A very old scarf, it spent all its time sleeping.

  “We’re going back up,” Ophelia told it. “I’ve found what I was looking for.”

  Just as she was about to turn back, she came across the most dusty, most enigmatic, and most disturbing Reliquary in Artemis’s whole collection. She couldn’t leave without bidding it farewell. She turned a handle and the two panels of the protective dome slid apart. She laid her gloved palm on the binding of a book, the Book, and was overcome by the same frustration she’d felt the first time she’d made contact with it like this. She couldn’t read a trace of any emotion, any thought, any intent. Of any origin whatsoever. And it wasn’t just due to her gloves, whose special weave acted as a barrier between her gifts as a reader and the world of objects. No, Ophelia had already touched the Book once with bare hands, like other readers before her, but, quite simply, it refused to reveal itself.