Almost True Read online

  ALMOST TRUE

  Copyright © 2018 Jan Rehner

  Except for the use of short passages for review purposes, no part of this book may be reproduced, in part or in whole, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronically or mechanically, including photocopying, recording, or any information or storage retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher or a licence from the Canadian Copyright Collective Agency (Access Copyright).

  We gratefully acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund.

  Cover artwork: Anne Virlange, “Un jour, par la fenêtre,” 2014, oil on wood, 20cm x 50 cm. Website: annevirlange.com

  Cover design: Val Fullard

  eBook: tikaebooks.com

  Almost True is a work of fiction. All the characters and situations portrayed in this book are fictitious and any resemblance to persons living or dead is purely coincidental.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Rehner, Jan, author

  Almost true / Jan Rehner.

  (Inanna poetry & fiction series)

  Issued in print and electronic formats.

  ISBN 978-1-77133-505-8 (softcover).— ISBN 978-1-77133-506-5 (epub).—ISBN 978-1-77133-507-2 (Kindle).— ISBN 978-1-77133-508-9 (pdf)

  I. Title. II. Series: Inanna poetry and fiction series

  PS8585.E4473A66 2018 C813’.6 C2018-901531-4

  C2018-901532-2

  Inanna Publications and Education Inc.

  210 Founders College, York University

  4700 Keele Street, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M3J 1P3

  Telephone: (416) 736-5356 Fax: (416) 736-5765

  Email: [email protected] Website: www.inanna.ca

  ALMOST TRUE

  a novel

  JAN REHNER

  INANNA PUBLICATIONS AND EDUCATION INC.

  TORONTO, CANADA

  For the gift of friendship:

  Margaret, Dianne, Fran, Ms. Leigh, Merlin, Marla, Vicky, Heather, Barbara.

  And in loving memory of Trish Swanson.

  MADELEINE

  OF ALL THE STORIES IN THE VERNOUX FAMILY, Madeleine’s favourite was of her great grandmother Marie, who was so extraordinarily ugly that her face made painters weep and dogs slink away as if they’d been threatened with a stick. Her eyes were misaligned, her mouth askew, her skin chalky, and her hair as thin and pale as cobwebs.

  Doomed to wretched loneliness, Marie wandered the shadows of the forest, while other girls her age danced in circles of bright light, amusing themselves with waltzes and handsome, clumsy boys. By the time she was sixteen, Marie knew that owls would never nest in a tree that had been struck by lightning, that stinging nettles grew best on waste ground, and that she would never marry. Eventually, her grieving father built her a rough cottage in the forest on the ridge high over the vineyards and far from the cruel tongues of the village. Her mother fashioned a thick veil, layer upon layer of delicate lace, violet-grey, the colour of sorrow, to hide her daughter’s ghastly features and Marie fell under the spell of dark forest magic.

  From the deer, she learned how best to hide, venturing near the fringes of the village for food only when the light melted from the sky. She learned that the pale lemon flowers of evening primrose could soothe her dry, flaking skin, and that marigold petals could cure headaches and hasten the healing of cuts and bruises. She knew every tree, even at midnight, just by touching its bark, and every plant by its colour and smell.

  As time passed, she visited the edges of the village less and less, slipping easily out of people’s minds and into their stories. Sometimes a hunter would glimpse her in the dusk and return with tales of an unearthly ghoul floating among the trees. Some whispered Marie had become a witch, carrying bouquets of curses in her flower basket.

  And the story might have ended there but for fate, both undeniable and strange. One lonesome night, as Marie wandered her favourite paths in the forest, she saw a white horse standing perfectly still, flanks gleaming in the moonlight. And beside the shining horse, one broken man lying on the path, scarcely breathing.

  Marie approached him quietly, seeming barely to touch the earth. She listened to his laboured breathing. With her small hands, she felt the pain pulsing inside him. Then she retreated into the scented darkness to gather her herbs. She prepared a poultice of comfrey to heal his wounds and knit his bones. She brewed a sedative from the dried leaves of jimson weed to ease his pain and stuffed a pillow with the dried flowers of Lady’s bedstraw to mend his aching head. She gave him everything the forest had taught her, every secret, every tonic, every boon. If fate chose to give her a man, she would let him be given.

  A year passed, three hundred and sixty-five midnights, while the man grew stronger and grew to love the woman in the veil with her kind hands and hushed voice that spoke to him so tenderly. He learned how to touch her and one night while he slept, she slipped away to the meadow where the deer nested and birthed a child, a little boy as soft and light as a baby bird.

  Marie had lived for many years without once seeing her own face. Now she trembled in every limb for fear that she would see it replicated in her infant son. But fear surrendered to tenderness. She reached for him and turned him gently to her breast. She stared into his eyes, transfixed, until a fog clouded her gaze and life faded from her body without a sound.

  The man found her the next morning with the child still cradled in her arms. An early rain had left the forest dripping and shining, a pale mist rising from its floor. But the man believed the trees themselves were crying. No birds sang and not a creature stirred, as he mounted his horse, his son folded under one arm, his lost love in the other. As he rode to the village, masses of dog roses bloomed all along the forest paths.

  The villagers stared. They dropped their tools and their jaws. Little children pointed and cried aloud to see the witch of their bedtime stories abroad in the daylight. By the time the man reached the church, he was surrounded. Marie’s parents, old and crooked now, pushed forward, terrified that their poor daughter’s body would be ripped apart by the agitation of the pressing crowd.

  “Take her away,” the people shouted. “She will curse the land. She’s a monster, not one of us.”

  “Here is your monster,” the man shouted back, and with one swift gesture he ripped away the violet-grey veil.

  The villagers cried out and fell back as if blinded by a brutal light.

  They rubbed their eyes and couldn’t believe what they saw, and rubbed their eyes again. The lustrous hair, the delicate arch of the eyebrows, the symmetry of facial bones, the soft fullness of the rose-red lips: Marie’s beauty filled the square and resonated through the bright air like bells on Christmas morning.

  From that day forward, all the villagers swore they had been touched by a miracle and when they prayed to the statue of Our Lady of the Vines who watched over them from high on the ridge of the forest, they swore that the Madonna’s eyes were the eyes of Marie, that her pearl skin was Marie’s skin, and that the perfection of the Madonna’s features was duplicated in every way in the face of Marie.

  “Is it true, Papa?” Madeleine always asked.

  “Even untrue stories hold a hidden truth, if you are willing to hear it.”

  “Like a miracle, right Papa?”

  “Something like that, if you believe enough.”

  AFTER MANY DAYS OF PRAYING, Madame Vernoux gave birth to Madeleine in the fickle month of March in the year 1923, when storm winds rattled the window
s. Some of the oldest villagers distrusted March as the most perilous, most unpredictable season. Children born in March, they claimed, shared the same curious and unsettling traits as that liminal month caught between the snowy white of February and the pale green of April.

  As a child, Madeleine was a March lamb. She was full of light and smiles, never sulky and seldom disobedient. She set about her chores dutifully, said her prayers, and went to mass every Sunday, though she was more likely to find godliness amid the wild roses, or drifting in on a spring breeze. She was kind, caring of others, and slow to take offence. Yet, even then, her parents despaired for their daughter’s future, for Madeleine Vernoux was a perpetual daydreamer. She simply was not grounded in the real world.

  She would spend hours in the family garden perched among the branches of one of the fruit trees, listening to the leaves murmuring in the breeze, imagining how apples or cherries might sound if only they could talk. Her brain refused to follow the straight lines of logic, but wandered instead among the twists and turns of wonder.

  At bedtimes, her mama never bothered to read her stories, for Madeleine would imagine her own worlds, bright landscapes filled with stars and birds, or vast underwater cities that seemed to dissolve the bedroom walls and invite in the sky. When Madeleine’s mother tried to describe her daughter, she would think of clouds, something far away and inaccessible.

  “I don’t know what to do with her,” Mama said.

  “Send her to school,” Papa said.

  But in the schoolhouse in the tiny village of Volnay in Burgundy, Madeleine drew beautiful pictures of plumed birds and winged dragons in her workbooks. Numbers and dates tumbled about aimlessly in her head. Countries shifted position and slid around the globe before her eyes. Asia traded places with Africa. Canada was another world, as fabulous as Atlantis. Rivers were blue hair ribbons, and Germany was the shape of a cauliflower. Words somersaulted across the page when she tried to read.

  The teacher tried to scold her, but could never stay cross with her for long because Madeleine always did her best to please. Some of the village children taunted her, some of them relentlessly, but Madeleine would just shake her head and forgive them. Soon she had a circle of protectors, and eventually even the bullies were shamed by Madeleine’s goodness.

  But in the spring of 1942, in the dark days of France’s humiliation and occupation, Madeleine was brimming with impossible questions: Why are the German soldiers cross all the time? Why don’t they bend their knees when they march? Why do they steal our food? Why don’t they go home?

  “She’s going to get into trouble,” the teacher said. “I don’t know what to do with her.”

  Papa knew the teacher was right. Madeleine loved walking in the forest or the fields at twilight and had little sense of passing time. When the Germans decreed a curfew in Volnay, she thought it a brutal act against the tranquility of the night. More than once, she wandered off and Papa had to sneak her home.

  “Let’s put her to work,” Papa said.

  So Madeleine went to work in her Papa’s laundry that faced the village square, ironing sheets because they were the easiest to manage. But as she pushed and pulled the heavy iron across swathes of white linen, she dreamed of distant snow-covered fields or gliding swans, sprays of mimosa or frozen rivers that might lead anywhere, perhaps all the way to Paris. After only a few weeks, the unmistakable odour of scorched material alarmed customers entering the laundry.

  “I don’t know what to do with her,” Papa said.

  “Marry her off,” Mama said.

  “She’s only seventeen.”

  “So? I married you at nineteen, and there’ll be time for courting.”

  Two suitors immediately came forward. Gaston Latour shared a small but fine vineyard with an older brother and sister, not on the fabled slopes of the Burgundy grands crus, but on the lower slopes close by. Once one of the bullies Madeleine had shamed in the schoolyard, Gaston Latour had long admired her beauty. Her appearance set her apart from her dark-eyed, dark-haired playmates. Madeleine was tall and slim, pale-skinned, with delicate, slightly angular features. Her eyes were a startling green, and her long hair, which curled in the steam of the laundry, had the golden-red sheen of ripe peaches. Gaston was handsome and hungry for her. Madeleine scarcely noticed him. She floated by him like a breath of air, impervious to his presence.

  Armand Valleray was as poor as the proverbial mice. His father had died too young, his lungs choked and scarred by the trench gases of the last war that had ravaged the countryside, leaving a million and a half Frenchmen dead and leaving Armand’s mother bereft and alone, working long hours in the laundry of Madeleine’s papa to feed her small son. Armand was devoted to his mother, determined to become a great man she could point to as the shining worth of all her sacrifices. He watched her carefully from the corner of his eyes, rushing to bring her a glass of water before she knew she was thirsty, and brushing her hair for her when her arms were too weary to lift a comb. He often visited his mother in the laundry at lunchtime, and it was there he first saw Madeleine.

  He was transfixed by her. Amid the steam hissing from the irons, her skin glowed. Her skin was so translucent he felt he could see right through to her heart. He was awash with desire.

  Armand Valleray was nineteen and had never been in love. He studied hard at school, reading the French classics: Voltaire, Rousseau, Balzac, and Proust. For now, he tried to curb his restlessness by working in the vineyards that defined Burgundy, but when the war ended, as surely it must someday, he meant to make something of himself. He never bothered with girls. He was solitary, dedicated to ideas, to poetry, and to God. His thin, narrow face under dark brows had a natural intensity to it. He was utterly unprepared for Madeleine.

  After seeing her for the first time, he forgot all about God and the vineyard, lingered in the village square, and followed her home. He hoped she might turn around and notice him. When the green door of her stone house closed behind her and she disappeared from his view, he felt a door had slammed shut on his future.

  Dejected and miserable, he wandered back to the village café and tried to forget his foolishness in a glass of red wine. He reproached himself for failing Monsieur Drouhin at the Château de Pommard. The next day, he would work twice as hard in the vineyard and beg his pardon. What would happen to his mother if he lost his job? Already Maréchal Pétain and his collaborationist government in Vichy had decreed that married women could not work, and even widows were at risk of being banned from employment. He, Armand Valleray, had grave responsibilities.

  “Pardon me, Monsieur.”

  Armand lifted his head, certain he had heard music. He gazed into Madeleine’s green eyes, unable to speak.

  “Why did you follow me home? Is it something to do with your mother?”

  “No, I mean, yes, I followed you. Nothing to do with my mother.”

  “I see,” Madeleine paused for a moment, taking in the tumble of dark curls falling across Armand’s forehead, the tremble in his voice, the blue workman’s jacket threadbare at the elbows. “Would you like to go for a walk?” she asked finally.

  Armand leapt to his feet almost toppling over his wooden chair. His back was as straight as a sword as, without thinking, he held out his hand. Madeleine took it in hers, her fingers sliding between his, remarking how neatly their two hands fit together.

  That afternoon, and the following afternoons for two weeks, rain or shine, Madeleine and Armand walked in the forest or fields around Volnay. The blossoms of the fruit trees fell about them like a white curtain. They waded in the clean, green water of rushing streams and let their bare feet dry in the sun. They traded the triumphant and ignominious exploits of their childhoods and the emerging shapes of their futures.

  “What will you become?” Madeleine asked.

  “Someone important. Someone to be respected.”

  Madeleine laughed and
leaned back on the grassy bank of the stream with all the languor of a relaxed cat.

  “You could become a famous general,” she teased, “and use all your power to rid us of these Germans. Or you could be a masked bandit terrorizing the countryside, like the wolves of Burgundy in olden times. The old folk say that when the wind howls down the chimney, the wolves are on the prowl again.”

  Armand smiled at her stories and kissed the inside of her wrist. Light shining through the leaves of the trees dappled her with sparks of gold. He didn’t know how to explain to this dazzling blaze of a girl that his ambitions, however insubstantial, were still serious. For her part, Madeleine believed he would always know her completely, even if no other man ever did.

  One especially warm and soft evening when the light was golden, they lingered in the forest long past curfew. When they were together there was no one else in the world. They shared the carelessness of young lovers, the intensity of not caring what happens next. They leaned against each other and watched the sky change colour, while fireflies careened through the dusk.

  Later, in the deep dark woods, they undressed each other, touched each other everywhere, memorized each other’s skin. Madeleine held Armand’s dark head against her breast, felt the heat of his tongue on her nipples, felt her bones melt as his mouth travelled across her stomach, down to the wetness between her legs. They sank to their knees together. Armand stretched her out in the moonlight, fearing he would crush her under his weight. She pulled him closer, arched her back and pulled him inside, kissing his shoulders, strong from his work in the fields, kissing his neck, and whispering into his ear. “Marry me,” she said.

  “I will love you all the days of my life,” he promised.

  They felt their spirits were expanding, that they had given themselves to each other in some mysterious dimension. They stayed out all night, holding tight to their vows and each other, until the sun began to rise through the morning mist. They walked straight to Madeleine’s house, pure of heart, their steps light, their faces aglow with glad news to share.