Even Days

Provence · July · Told by Yan Ardatovskiy

The lavender on the plateau above Valensole is not the lavender on the postcards. Most of it is lavandin, a tougher hybrid, planted in rows so straight they look ruled in pencil, and in early July it smells less like a grandmother’s drawer and more like a chemist’s shop on fire. I had driven up from the coast because it was July and I had never seen it. On a stretch of road that runs dead straight between two farms I found two stalls facing each other across the tarmac like duellists: a trestle table each, a faded parasol each, a hand-painted sign each. The one on the left said HUILE ESSENTIELLE, MIEL, 12 €. The one on the right said HUILE ESSENTIELLE, MIEL, 11 €.

I went to the dearer one. I wanted to know what the extra euro was for. The man behind the table was somewhere in his late seventies, in a straw hat and a vest that had once been white, with forearms the colour of a saddle. The bottles were identical to the bottles across the road, down to the little raffia bows. I asked him about the euro. “It’s for not being him,” he said, and nodded at the other stall, where there was nobody at all, only a tin box with a slot in the lid and a stone on the banknotes. “My brother Rémy. I’m Fernand. We haven’t spoken since the summer of 1987.” He said it the way other men give you the football score.

It came out slowly, between customers, of whom there were three all afternoon. Their father had died in the August of 1987, in the front bedroom of the farmhouse, and his last words had been: “Look after the still.” Both sons had been in the room. Each of them knew, with total certainty, that the old man had been looking at him. A notary from Manosque divided the land with a ruler: the road down the middle, a line of almond trees for a border, a new house built by Rémy on his side within the year so that nobody had to share a kitchen. The one thing the notary could not cut in half was the copper still, which lived in a stone shed exactly on the line. So it stayed in both their names. Fernand distilled on odd days. Rémy distilled on even days. When something needed saying, a note was taped to the copper and collected by the other man in the morning. “Thirty-eight years,” said Fernand. “Never a problem. It’s the best relationship I’ve ever had.”

At about four he offered to take my photograph. Everybody wants the same one, he said, a person standing between two rows with the purple going away behind them to the horizon, and across the road his brother charged two euros for it. Fernand did it for free and took it very seriously. He made me step left, then back, then take off my sunglasses, then put them on again. The bees in the rows were so loud it sounded like faulty wiring. “Don’t smile,” he said. “People who smile in lavender look like they’re selling it.” I did not smile. It is a good photograph.

When we came back to the stall he stopped with the phone still in his hand and looked north across the plateau, at a low stone roof a couple of kilometres away with a chimney on it. There was nothing coming out of the chimney. Rémy’s lavender had been cut on Saturday and left in the rows to wilt, which is how it is done, and today was the eighth. An even day. “He’s late,” Fernand said. “He’s never late. He has been early out of spite since the Mitterrand years.” He rearranged the bottles on his table so that their labels faced exactly outwards. Then he looked at the chimney again and asked if I had a car, because his van was at his nephew’s in Riez, and it was thirty-six degrees, and his knees had been against the whole idea of knees for some time.

The track to the shed was white stone and it rang under the tyres. Up close the cut lavender lay in long grey-violet rows and was already going pale at the edges, like a photograph left on a dashboard. The shed was locked. The fire under the copper was cold. Two hundred metres further on, past the almond trees, was Rémy’s house, with its shutters half closed and a radio going somewhere inside. Fernand stopped at the first almond tree as if it were a wall. “I don’t go there,” he said. It was not a figure of speech. I left him standing in the shade and walked on alone.

The kitchen door was open. Rémy Garcin was on the tiled floor beside a fallen chair, with a light bulb still in its box on the table above him, and he had clearly been there since the morning. He was conscious, very pale and absolutely furious. He had his brother’s face exactly, the same nose, the same hat hanging on a nail by the door, and the effect was of meeting the same man at a slight discount. “Who are you?” he said. I told him, and fetched him water, and said I would call for help. He drank, and then he looked past me at the door and asked, in a completely different voice, “Is he out there?” I said he was at the trees. “Then tell him nothing.”

I told him everything. Fernand crossed the almond trees at something that was not quite a run, for the first time since 1987, and stopped in the kitchen doorway with his hat in his hand. The two of them looked at each other for a long moment, one on the floor and one in the door, and I understood that I was watching the longest conversation either of them had had in thirty-eight years. “Don’t touch anything,” said Rémy. “I wasn’t going to,” said Fernand. That was all. The pompiers came up from Valensole in twenty minutes, very kind and very large, and when they lifted Rémy onto the stretcher he did not complain about the hip. He complained about the lavender. It had been lying for three days. By tomorrow it would be straw. Fernand, looking at the ceiling, said: “Tomorrow is mine.”

When the ambulance had gone he walked back to the shed without a word, took a key from a crack in the wall that he must have known about for decades, and lit the fire. Then, on an even day, he began to distil his brother’s lavender. I took off my watch and helped. We forked the cut stems into the great vat and trod them down, and he sealed the lid, and the steam went through the flowers and up into the copper and came down again through a coil sunk in cold water, and after a while a thin gold oil began to gather on the surface of the glass flask at the end, floating on the water like something that had been waiting underneath all along. The shed smelled so strongly of lavender that it stopped smelling of anything. Fernand did not speak for two hours, except to say “Again” when the vat was spent.

By dusk there were four dark bottles of oil on the bench, in Rémy’s bottles, with Rémy’s bows. The copper still ticked as it cooled. Close up, it was covered in small scars: marks from thousands of pieces of tape, layer on layer, one note at a time, going back to roughly the year I learned to walk. Fernand tore a strip from a cardboard box and took a pencil stub out of his vest. Then he stood there with it for a very long time. “I don’t know what to write,” he said at last. “I have never had to write a nice one.” He put his hand flat on the warm copper, the way you would steady a horse, and then he went to a cupboard at the back of the shed and came out with a biscuit tin, and asked me if I would like to see what he and his brother had been saying to each other all these years.

What were the Garcin brothers never able to divide?

Names have been changed to protect the privacy of the people in these stories. So have some of the stories. Not all of them, and not everything that sounds invented is. Please do not treat it as a fair coin.