One Deadly Summer by Sébastien Japrisot

Author:Sébastien Japrisot
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Dover Publications
Published: 2019-06-12T04:00:00+00:00

The Execution

It was a summer of fires.

At night I couldn’t sleep. I kept thinking of the pine trees burning on the hillsides, the planes flying low over the fires, the sheets of water beating down against the ground like cannonballs, then glittering in sunlit clearings through the smoke.

I remembered the wedding, too. Elle in her long white dress, altered with so much loving care by her mother that it looked like a second skin. The veil she took off in the yard, and tore up to give a piece to everyone. Her smile that day. In the church, as I was putting the ring on her finger, I saw in her those same shadows I’d seen before. It reminded me of lost birds in autumn, when they fly between the mountains. Her smile, just at the corners of her lips, was so unsure, so fragile, I felt sorry for her, yes, sorry for her. I’d have given anything to understand her and help her. Or maybe I’m making it all up now, I don’t know.

There were thirty-five or forty of us at the meal. Then more people came, then more, from the village and other places, and by the middle of the afternoon, when we were dancing, there were maybe twice as many of us or more. I opened the dancing with Elle, a waltz, to please her mother – and mine. She held her dress in one hand, so as not to get it dirty, and she kept turning and turning, and finally she let herself fall against me, laughing, and lost her balance. She hadn’t spoken much to me during the morning, but once she said, “Isn’t it wonderful, isn’t it wonderful . . . ?” I hugged her to me. I had my arm around her waist as we went back to the tables, through all the guests, who were giving me big slaps on the back. Even now I only have to think of it and I can feel the softness of her body through her dress.

Later I watched her dance with Mickey. He was best man, and at lunch he had gone under the table and removed from Elle one of my grandmother’s blue garters, the only one we could find to keep up the custom. All the men had taken off their jackets and ties, and even in shirtsleeves my would-be racer brother looked like a prince, because he was dancing with a princess. “Just look at them!” I said to Boo-Boo, who was sitting next to me. He put his arm around my shoulders and gave me a big kiss on my cheek for the first time since he’d decided that brothers shouldn’t kiss each other. He said, “It’s a fantastic day!”

It was. The sun on the mountains around us, people laughing at Henri IV’s jokes, the wine flowing freely, the choice of records to get the different generations dancing – everything was just right. Eva Braun was there; I’d found a nurse in town to look after my paralysed father-in-law until eight o’clock.

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