Silk Read Online Free PDF Page B

ounce, all covered by insurance. They are serious people, with an organisation behind them – they sell eggs to half of Europe. Serious people, I tell you.’
    Pause.
    ‘I don’t know. Perhaps we could manage. With our eggs, with the work of Pasteur, and then what we can buy from the two Italians … we could manage. The others in the town say it’s madness to send you out there again … with all that it costs … they say it’s too risky, and in this they are right, the other times it was different, but now … now it’s difficult to get back from there alive.’
    Pause.
    ‘The fact is that they don’t want to lose the eggs. And I don’t want to lose you.’
    Hervé Joncour sat for a while gazing at the park that wasn’t there. Then he did something he had never done.
    ‘I will go to Japan, Baldabiou.’
    He said.
    ‘I will buy those eggs, and if necessary I’ll do it with my own money. You must only decide if I sell them to you or to someone else.’
    Baldabiou hadn’t expected this. It was like seeing the one-armed man win on the last play, four cushions, impossible angles.

42.
    B ALDABIOU told the breeders of Lavilledieu that Pasteur was undependable, that those Italians had already scammed half of Europe, that in Japan the war would end before winter, and that St Agnes, in a dream, had asked him if they weren’t a pack of chickenshits. Only to Hélène he couldn’t lie.
    ‘Is it really necessary for him to go, Baldabiou?’
    ‘No.’
    ‘Then why?’
    ‘I can’t stop him. And if he wants to go, I can only give him one more reason to return.’
    All the breeders of Lavilledieu contributed, although reluctantly, their quota to finance the expedition. Hervé Joncour began his preparations, and in early October he was ready to leave. Hélène, as she did every year, helped him, without asking questions, and hiding from him any worry she had. Only the last night, after turning off the lamp, did she find the strength to say to him
    ‘Promise me that you will return.’
    In a firm voice, without tenderness.
    ‘Promise me that you will return.’
    In the darkness Hervé Joncour answered
    ‘I promise.’

43.
    O N October 10, 1864, Hervé Joncour left on his fourth trip to Japan. He crossed the French border near Metz, travelled through Württemberg and Bavaria, entered Austria, reached Vienna and Budapest by train, and continued to Kiev. On horseback he traversed two thousand kilometres of the Russian steppe, crossed the Urals into Siberia, and travelled for forty days to reach Lake Baikal, which the people of the place called: the saint. He followed the course of the River Amur, skirting the Chinese border, to the Ocean, and when he arrived at the Ocean he stopped in the port of Sabirk for eight days, until a Dutch smugglers’ ship carried him to Cape Teraya, on the western coast of Japan. On horseback, taking secondary roads, he crossed the provinces of Ishikawa, Toyama, Niigata, and entered Fukushima. When he reached Shirakawa he found the city half destroyed, and a garrison of government soldiers camped among the ruins. He circled the city to the east, and waited for the emissary from Hara Kei for five days, in vain. At dawn on the sixth day he left for the hills, to the north. He had a few rough maps, and what was left of his memories. He wandered for days, until he recognised a river, and then a forest, and then a road. At the end of the road he found the village of Hara Kei: burned to the ground – houses, trees, everything.
    There was nothing.
    Not a living soul.
    Hervé Joncour stood motionless, looking at the enormous spent brazier. Behind him was a road eight thousand kilometres long. And in front of him nothing. Suddenly he saw what he had thought was invisible.
    The end of the world.

44.
    H ERVÉ Joncour stayed for hours among the ruins of the village. He couldn’t leave, although he knew that every hour lost there could signify disaster for him, and for all Lavilledieu: he had no