“Yet, I also began to have the sense, fostered in part by the cross-contamination of research, that around the world enclaves that never knew one another—writers who could not have read each other—still had communicated across decades and across vast distances, had stared up at the same shared unfamiliar constellations in the night sky, heard the same unearthly music: a gorgeous choir of unique yet interlocking imaginations and visions and phantoms. At such times, you wonder as both a writer and an editor if you are creating narrative or merely serving as a conduit for what was already there.”

So writes Jeff VanderMeer in a searching, enlightening recent article at The Atlantic. Happily, he and his wife the amazing editor Ann, co-founded this site, Weird Fiction Review, for this very purpose: to explore enclaves of Weirdness around the world, Weirdness that may have developed outside of other influences, or braided garbled versions of such influences into its own traditions, or responded to reigning forms of Weirdness but not been heard in return—putting all these in conversation with each other. WFR is a showcase for the Weird in all its international glory, adding far flung members to the “gorgeous choir.” Here the Weird—its ancient and evolving records of encounters with radical alterities—dovetails with the very contemporary project of exploring the earthly alterities of other cultures, at once refuting and embracing universality, or else fractally complicating its older, easier models with new particulars.

A brief index, then, of my selected contributions to WFR since its inception in 2011: authors translated or profiled in the rich field of the French and Belgian Weird, to point your way to some of the rich reading to be found on this site. After all, there’s something of a love affair between French and English literatures, especially where the fantastic is concerned. French Decadents were reflected in the dark mirror of their British brethren and in the American “weird tale,” somber hybrid of fantasy and horror. Even contemporary genrebending movements of literary fantasy like the New Weird (China Miéville, Jeff VanderMeer) and New Wave Fabulism (Kelly Link, Jonathan Lethem) cite the contes cruels and fantastique as forerunners. But why should the last communiqués from French shores date more than a century back, or to the Surrealists at best? Consider this effort an overdue letter between two long-divided lovers once close, but fallen largely out of touch, a billet doux to rekindle the relationship between the French and English fantastic.

These traditions, twinned at birth, have as much to learn from their independent evolutions as from their history of mutual influence. Seeing where they vary and diverge can only fertilize, diversify the conversation, and seed the ground for future exchange. The postwar fantastique, steeped in decades of surrealism, drew new life from continental fabulism (Calvino, Kafka, Schulz), which married folklore with experimental form; the South American magic realism of cosmopolitan expatriates (Paz, Borges, Cortázar); and the frenetic inventiveness of a new field, genre fantasy. Contemporary French fantastical movements like La Nouvelle Fiction seek to rouse French writing from “the slumber of psychological realism,” and have much to offer recently renewed interest in the metafictions of Coover, Barth, and Barthelme. The Belgian School of the Strange is another domestically vibrant but internationally overlooked tradition on display here.

Francophonia features writers and styles, from classical to experimental, clever to vengeful, understated to outrageous, wistful to wicked. Here are Académie mandarins and contemporary hopefuls, one-hit wonders and the unjustly forgotten, bestsellers and writer’s writers, scholars and dabblers, outsiders and literati. Some are sui generis, some descended from long tradition; all are united in their use of the unreal. Together, they have won every major literary prize in France and Belgium, and many minor ones, several times over: the Goncourt (in the novel and short story categories), the Femina, the Renaudot, the Rossel, the Grand Prix de l’Académie française (for a single work and for lifetime achievement),  the Grand Prix National des Lettres. Six are Chevaliers of the Order of Arts and Letters (and four of the Legion of Honor). Most of these authors have never been translated into English, while translations of the others are outdated, out-of-print, or obscure to begin with (tiny print runs from tinier presses).

Given the breadth of historical span, the variety of theme and subject, the diversity of form, you’ll find: refashioned fairy tales, insinuating fables, absurdist prose poems, macabre parables, mocking twists, haunting ambiguities, austere mysteries, gory histories, cunning disappearances, unforgiving metamorphoses, unbidden malice, crippling rue, singular creatures, terrible decisions, vertiginous terrors, glorious paradox (cerebrally Borgesian and playfully Lewis-Carrolingian alike), lonely reverie, outlandish ribaldry, radical subjectivities, subtle slippage, sudden madness.

“We like to think that we understand our universe,” writes VanderMeer, “but I came away from these readings with a sense of weird fiction as a potentially powerful way in which to find the distance and the universality to grapple with the negation of that idea.” There are more things in heaven and earth, dear reader, than are dreamt of in our anthologies.

Some Belgians:

• Thomas Owen (1910 – 2002): with Jean Ray, regularly cited as a pillar of Belgian fantastical fiction, and the nom de plume of Gérald Bertot: criminal lawyer, art critic, mystery writer, and career manager of a flour plant. In more than 300 stories over the course of his lifetime, Owen refined the tale of supernatural horror to an almost anachronistic degree of economy and purity. His unsettling work has been compared to that of Poe and Buzzati. A consistency of worldview emanates from Owen’s oeuvre: an existential dread, one that Thomas Ligotti correctly identified (in a blurb where he name-checked Owen) as “the nightmare of being alive.” His story “Kavar the Rat”  and a nonfiction appreciation of Lovecraft are available here at Weird Fiction Review; his story “The Women Who Watch” is available at The Dr. T.J. Eckleburg Review. Audio versions of both stories are at Pseudopod.
• The only child of writer parents, Jean Muno was born in a Brussels suburb in 1924 — the year André Breton published the first Surrealist Manifesto, as Muno is fond of pointing out. A schoolteacher for much of his early life, in 1955 he settled with his family in Malaise (Flemish: Maleizen), a hamlet of Walloon Brabant near Belgium’s linguistic border. For the rest of his life, Muno could not resist making jokes about where he lived, especially given the unsettling fantastical nature of his fiction. Consistent in these tales is a scorn for suburbia, its stagnant mores. Muno is adept at dissecting that morally bankrupt land of the averted gaze, and ventriloquizing the puffed-up bluster of its hypocritically indignant inhabitants. These days, the corruption of the suburbs has been done to death, but Muno was writing at the height of suburban social critique and expression of ennui. The plots kick off with some Cheeveresque trifle over stubbed pride, and yet beneath these one senses an abyss always yawning, of which sudden swerves of phrase or story make us abruptly aware. The good citizens — nosy neighbors in prudish provincial towns ruled by fear and vestigial Christianity — waver between ignorance and precarious comprehension. How paltry are things on which they stake their identity: front steps that “had the clean distinctness of a set of false teeth.” His tale “The Ghoul” is available at Weird Fiction Review.
• Anne Richter (1939 — ): anthologist, scholar, and formidable writer of fantastical short fiction, editor of the groundbreaking anthology Le fantastique féminin, named for her 1984 monograph on female contributions to the fantastical corpus, in which she asserted: “Women move at the heart of magic realism in a more spontaneous and concrete way than men; they do not reflect on it, they reflect it as though it were their natural and daily element… With neither argument nor pride, women enter easily into the supernatural, whose existence seems, a priori, indisputably obvious to them.” Her work has appeared online at The Collagist and is forthcoming in Ann and Jeff VanderMeer’s anthology of feminist speculative fiction, Sisters of the Revolution.
• Eugène Savitzkaya (1955 — ) is a creature of limens, spaces of detente, unlikely juxtapositions. Belgian by birth of Ukranian descent, long admired but little known, Savitzkaya is generally classed as a poet despite having penned plays, essays, and more than twelve novels. And these novels — plotless, impressionistic, glories of language and consciousness, brief unchaptered bursts all from France’s leading avant-garde publisher, Minuit — surely they partake more of poetry than prose? Savitzkaya stands at the consciousness-expanding intersection of Weird and experiment. His work is available online at Drunken Boat and Anomalous, and forthcoming in Gigantic.
• Bernard Quiriny (1978 — ): heir to the Belgian School of the Strange, contemporary critical darling Quiriny synthesizes disparate fantastical influences from Borges to Calvino, Robert Louis Stevenson to Enrique Vila-Matas in his playful, prizewinning, postmodern takes on classically fantastic themes. He has also written two novels: Les assoiffés (Seuil, 2010), a satirical dystopian alternate history of Belgium as a feminist totalitarian state, and most recently Le village évanoui (Flammarion, 2014). A profile of the author can be found at the NEA Writer’s Corner. His work has appeared in English at Subtropics (with author interviews in English and the French), The Coffin Factory, World Literature Today, here at Weird Fiction Review, and Dalkey Archive’s Best European Fiction 2012. New work is forthcoming in Bengal Lights and Subtropics.

Some French:

• The early work of Pierrette Fleutiaux (1941 — ) was exclusively fantastical, and drew the admiration of Julio Cortazar. Her 1984 collection Les Métamorphoses de la reine, contemporary subversions of Perrault, won the Prix Goncourt for short stories. The first story from this collection, “The Ogre’s Wife,” was published in Grand Street (trans. Leigh Hafrey), selected for inclusion in Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror 1992 by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling, and also adapted into an opera.
• There’s something oddly joyous in the stories of Jehanne Jean-Charles, even at their most malicious. She’s been compared to Saki, Bradbury, and Matheson, but the wink of her trick endings is one not of smugness but of merry complicity — a wink from your stylish, daffy aunt, the absent-minded one who wears galoshes, knows magic, and has unmanageable hair. “Isn’t life grand?” she’s apt to exclaim, giddy in the face of blackest misfortune, as if the universe had in causing suffering merely proved its infinite variety and capacity for surprise. Which is not to say that tragedy in her tales lacks suitable solemnity, that moving moments don’t get their due gravity. But bad things do befall the bulk of her characters, without apology or redress, sometimes even without explanation. The famously taboo-breaking Jean-Jacques Pauvert, her editor, said of her, “If she were English, she’d be read the world over.”
• If Serge Brussolo (1951- ) is often called France’s answer to Stephen King, it is largely because of how consistently his countless titles (almost 200, sometimes at a pace of five or six a year) have become bestsellers. One of France’s most prolific authors, he has has worked with almost every major publisher in almost every genre: science fiction, fantasy, historical (WWII, Egypt, Middle Ages), suspense/thriller, horror, crime, and YA. Brussolo is most noted for his violent originality, the seemingly bottomless fecundity of his imagination, and the breathless sense of dread, a visceral fatalism, that pervades the worlds he creates. Brussolo’s protagonists, sometimes even entire communities, are often cut off from the larger world. Among his recurrent themes are the decay of social order, the illusory consolation of religion, imprisonment, and madness. His prose is marked by a density of playful neologisms, and an energy from feverish riffing on images and ideas that concretizes dreamscapes. His novel The Deep Sea Diver’s Syndrome, forthcoming in 2016, will mark his English-language debut.
• André Pieyre de Mandiargues (1909–1991) was a French writer of the fantastic whose prolific output included poems, plays, essays, novels, and short stories. He also translated works by Yeats, Mishima, and Paz. Initially affiliated with Surrealism, he went on to be known for his flamboyant style and fascination with the erotic and macabre. His 1967 Goncourt-winning novel La marge was translated as The Margin (Calder & Boyars, 1969) by Richard Howard, and his novel La motocyclette (Gallimard, 1963) made into the film The Girl on a Motorcyle (1968) by Jack Cardiff. His story “The Red Loaf” is available at Words Without Borders.
• Noël Devaulx (1905–1995) is the secret master of the 20th century French fantastique. His prose has the shimmer of Mérimée and the seemliness of Flaubert; clearly, he keeps Nerval by his bedside, the better to read it by the light of a Baudelairean lunacy. In his hands, the Kunstmärchen—nine collections’ worth, over nine decades—is reinvented as the vessel of a personal metaphysics; evident in every one is his mandarin mastery of narration. Jean Paulhan, an early champion, famously called his hermetic, exquisite tales, oft-featured in the Nouvelle Revue Française, “parables without keys”: spellbinding, even when perfectly obscure, for the secret to his prose is promise.
• Writer, poet, and painter Pierre Bettencourt (1917–2006) was, despite coming from a prominent family, a retiring figure and lifelong outsider artist. He self-published his first works on a family-owned press during the Nazi occupation. He later published Antonin Artaud, Francis Ponge, Henri Michaux, and Jean Dubuffet. In the 1950s and 60s he was a frequent contributor to the Nouvelle revue française, and Gallimard later put out a volume of his selected works. He can be read online at Weird Fiction Review, The Collagist, and Anomalous.
• Marcel Béalu (1908–1993) was best known for the delicacy with which he explored dreams and the unreal in poetry, prose, and painting. A retiring figure, he ran a Paris bookstore by the Jardin du Luxembourg named Le Pont Traversé after a novel by his friend, critic and editor Jean Paulhan. There he held readings for a small circle of surrealist and fantastical writers; it is said Lacan, among his first customers, purchased Shakespeare’s complete works and forgot to pay for them. His 1945 novel L’Expérience de la nuit was translated by Christine Donougher as The Experience of Night (Dedalus, 1997). My translations of his work have appeared in Joyland, Anomalous, Unstuck, and The Café Irreal.
• Jean Ferry (1906–1974) was primarily a screenwriter, best known for his collaborations with Clouzot, Buñuel, Louis Malle, and Georges Franju. A satrap of the College of ‘Pataphysics, he was known in his time as the greatest specialist in the works of Proust’s neighbor, Raymond Roussel. His only book of fantastical tales, The Conductor, was first published in 1953 and reprinted three times by various publishers, most recently in 2011 by Éditions Finitude.  Andre Breton called Ferry’s story “The Society Tiger” “the most sensationally new poetical text I have read in a long time.” I received a PEN America grant to translate his work, which has appeared in Subtropics, Weird Fiction Review, PEN America, Sentence, Anomalous, The Coffin Factory, Birkensnake, Gigantic, and The Café Irreal. In November 2013, Wakefield Press published my translation of The Conductor.

The post Weird France and Belgium: A Best Of appeared first on Weird Fiction Review.

Nadine Monfils was born in Etterbeek, Belgium in 1953. A novelist, short story writer, film director and producer, for many years she taught screenwriting at the Université Européenne d’Ecriture in Brussels and in prisons throughout France. As a journalist and film critic, she has been a regular contributor to Père Ubu, Focus, and Tels Quels. Her first book of stories, Laura Colombe, Contes pour petites filles perverses, was published in 1981 with illustrations by Léonor Fini and a postface by Thomas Owen, who was a champion of her work. Since then, Monfils has written over thirty novels and directed several films. She lives in Montmartre.

Katie Assef studied French literature at Sarah Lawrence College and recently completed an M.F.A. in creative writing at Brooklyn College. Her prose and translations have appeared in journals such as Whole Beast Rag, PANK, Alchemy: a Journal of Translation, Cerise Press, and Three Percent. She lives in Berkeley and is currently an apprentice with Open Letter Books in Rochester, NY.

Venice was my last island. A dream outside of time. It was the only place where I felt the waters formed a barrier between me and the world, protecting me from human stupidity.

Something in me was broken. I’d lost my appetite for love, along with all the rest. Sometimes when you can’t change your life, you try to change your look: I swapped my black dresses for colorful clothes and hacked off my long dark curls.

I was another person on the outside–only on the outside. Walking past a mirror, I found my reflection strange, but on the inside I still wore black and would often smooth my phantom curls.

Life had made me more and more withdrawn.

I had come here to escape my demons.

My short hair, jeans and boyish suspenders stood out against the ancient, forbidding scenery like a keepsake box floating amid ominous waves. I had the insolent gaze of those with nothing left to lose; only my reflection in the water could still make me lower my eyes.

I strolled down the narrow passageways around Piazza San Marco, and it took a few days before I felt the effect of the strange atmosphere, like a shadow’s veil that falls gently upon you and never lifts.

To love Venice, you have to cast off your old self, to overcome your disgust of the filthy waters, dive in and let them wash away your dead skin.

Despite my horrible fear of rats, I was convinced the greyish water would help me recover the little girl I had once been. Her laugh and naïve gaze–what ingenious armor! I left my clothes on some pier and began to swim. I didn’t leave the water until I was exhausted, my mind empty.

Someone had stolen my goddamn pants. The thief must not have liked my blouse, for it pined away on the embankment, its heart torn to shreds. Instead of panicking, I took this as a sign and sat calmly beneath the Rialto bridge, waiting for an angel to come along…

A bum approached me. His sour breath made me want to vomit. I tried to fight him off, but he had that madness that gives rise to strength. He pinned me up against the cold, damp wall, gripping my wrists in his right hand, and dug his knee into my stomach to keep me still. With the other hand, he unbuttoned his pants and tried to take out his soft penis. He grumbled. Suddenly, he grabbed a bottle of red wine that lay on the ground and shoved the neck up into me. It was the only skill he had left…

I experienced a strange, repulsive pleasure, something violent rising in my throat. He crushed my breasts and tried to kiss me, but I bit him. He yelled and slapped me, and the taste of blood filled my mouth. After kicking me in the shins, he let me go. I felt a little piece of meat stuck between my teeth! I should have bit his tongue.

He walked off, cursing. The bottle rolled on the cobblestone and the sound echoed like an empty cry. If I had to have been raped by a bottle of wine, I would have preferred it to be a grand cru! But it had no label.

A hand came down on my shoulder. I turned and saw an old lady smiling at me. She motioned for me to follow her. Her hair was tied up in a black scarf, and she walked with a limp. Her coat was the color of water, a stormy grey. She took it off to cover me and brought me into her house, a gloomy old place isolated at the end of a blind alley. The rez-de-chaussee resembled a warehouse filled with useless objects. Mismatched chairs were piled on top of one another between moldy crates. A paradise for vermin. We climbed a wobbly staircase to the poorly lit first floor. On a bare table, an oil lamp burned. An old magazine crumbled into dust on the floor beside a broken doll.

That was when I saw her, a tiny figure crouching in the corner.

The old lady murmured a few words in Italian, and the little girl stood. She wore a red dress, a red so intense it seemed unreal. Oddly, when she walked, blood seemed to trickle from its hem. She took my hand and led me into a windowless room. A large candle was all that illuminated the rusty iron crib, half-hidden by dirty curtains. She asked me to sit on the bed. The sheets smelled of urine. And not only that—a strong scent of men, too.

Exhausted, I finally fell asleep despite my nausea. When I woke the next morning, I found the little girl seated at my feet. She was watching me with her little marten’s eyes. I felt as if she was searching through my mind like an old scrapbook, trying to unravel some mystery.  She wore the same red dress as the day before, and I was still wrapped in the old coat.

The old lady came in and gave me a night-blue silk dress. The little girl watched as I slipped it on. I hadn’t seen her smile yet, but maybe she didn’t know how.

“It’s my mother’s,” she said.

“What’s your name?”

“Camarde,” she answered, with a strange glimmer in her eyes.

“You have a pretty red dress.”

She jumped off the foot of the bed and twirled several times like a music-box ballerina. Blood splattered my face and the walls.

The child stopped twirling and began to laugh wildly.

“You’ve got your period?”

“No. It’s my dress that’s bleeding. It bleeds all the time. Ever since I killed the first man.”

“What are you talking about?”

Just then, the old woman called for her in a harsh voice. I heard the Moors of the clock-tower strike their hammers nine times on the bell.

“Come on. My grandmother is waiting for us with hot coffee. We can’t dawdle or she’ll beat my legs with her cane, and that’s the worst!”

“Why do you stay with that mean old hag?”

“And where else should I go, in your opinion? Come on, hurry up!”

The old lady drummed her slug-like fingers on the table. She had a fat nose and the shadow of a mustache. She smelled like rancid butter. A true marvel of nature.

She explained that I’d have to put on some makeup and walk the street to bring clients into her establishment.

“The child’s mother used to do it, but that whore took off overnight. Providence sent you to us!”

What luck! I’d walked right into a mouse trap—the old crone and her bleeding granddaughter ran a brothel worthy of Madame Claude herself.

Well, I needed food and a place to sleep. And anyway, it would be fun to try.

Swaying my round derriere, my mouth painted like a porcelain doll’s, I transformed into a baited hook for dumbfish.

The catch was not miraculous, but I did reel a little something in. Rather pudgy, sallow-eyed, in a clerk’s suit. Garden-variety. Never mind, his shirt pocket was stuffed with bills.

I didn’t want to have sex with this guy, but if I had to, I wouldn’t make myself sick over it. All I had to do was close my eyes to be somewhere else.

The fat fish followed me to the house of the witch and Little Red Riding Hood. The old lady made him pay before going any further. She took the bundle of bills and slid a few into my cleavage. Then she motioned for me to lead the wolf into the sheepfold.

The child sat huddled in the darkest corner of the room. I could tell she was there because of the broken doll on the floor beside her. The man didn’t even notice. He undressed, murmuring some dirty talk to rile himself up. He had the bulbous nose of a wino and a pink stomach the color of vacuum-packed ham. Real appetizing. Beneath this jumble of folds was a little rod to distract from the rest. I let my dress fall to the floor and lay down, obedient, eyes closed. I was already on the islands of the Rising Sun, there where flowers are blown apart by a gentle breeze. I spread my legs and waited like I did at the dentist’s.

The fat man collapsed on me with a gasp.

Did he like me that much?

When I opened my eyes, I saw a large knife planted in his back. The little girl in red stood behind him. This time, she was smiling.

“My mum and I always did that together.”

Afterwards, she helped me drag him to the trapdoor.

“Here it is!”

She pointed to a latch in the flooring. The john was heavy, but the girl was surprisingly strong and together we managed to throw him into the hole. I watched him sink into the waters of Venice.

“The canal passes underneath. No one will ever know. It’s black as hell,” said the child.

“You’ve killed many like this?”

“Only the first one counted. The others, we forget.”

“And the old lady – she knows?”

“We told her they left by the back alley. But I think she knows and doesn’t care. As long as it doesn’t mess with her life…”

She began to twirl, projecting tiny stars of blood onto the walls. Then she took me in her arms and led me in a wild dance.

She roared with laughter.

The post The Red Dress appeared first on Weird Fiction Review.

Thomas Owen (1910–2002) is the one name regularly cited with Jean Ray as a pillar of Belgian supernatural horror, and the nom de plume of Gérald Bertot: criminal lawyer, art critic, mystery writer, and career manager of a flour plant. Thomas Ligotti has praised Owen’s “meditative and intimate prose works” as part of a European “tradition of poetic horror.” The author of more than 300 stories over the course of his lifetime, Owen is an exceedingly well-kept secret in the English-speaking world, known only to a handful of dedicated fans on the basis of a single collection, The Desolate Presence (William Kimber, 1984). His unsettling work has been compared to that of Poe and Buzzati.

Click here for audio version.

“I hear something like music,” thought Kavar the Rat.

Of course he heard nothing, and was only following a dream within.

An old man sitting on a doorstep, he had a thin pointed face pierced by little black eyes, worried and roving.

Before making a move, he looked swiftly around him several times over, like a rodent poking its nose from its hole. He really did remind you of a rat.

There he was, slumped in a low chair, hands between his legs, eyes on the ground, preoccupied, straining his ears. But really, he heard nothing.

A high flaking wall rose before him. The backside of a tannery. Sinister, blocking out the view. Kavar the Rat nevertheless derived a certain satisfaction from gazing on it. It was a windowless wall that hadn’t been whitewashed for years, peeling with moisture and age. But the mildew took such seductive shapes, made so many mysteries there that with a little imagination, Kavar the Rat could pick out trees, mountains, monstrous plants, fantastical profiles. By narrowing his eyes, he produced at whim a winged lion, a witch, a hanged man, a cactus with terrifying protuberances… Loads of things that caused him fear and pleasure.

He remained there, unmoving, worrying something between his teeth, a hard candy, a bit of string, or maybe part of a match.

“Hey Kavar!” suddenly came a voice from behind him.

Kavar the Rat started, turned quickly, and got up. “Hey, hey.”

It was the lodger Kirchenbaum, gruff and important, on his way out. Kavar was afraid of the man. He tried to make himself disappear.

“Having fun?” said Kirchenbaum, giving him a suspicious look.

“Taking a rest,” said Kavar plaintively. “I thought I heard music—imagine that.”

“Music!” Kirchenbaum shrugged. “Who’d be making music at this hour? You’d do better fixing my clock, Kavar, than daydreaming the hours away.”

“On my list,” said Kavar ingratiatingly, “It’s on my list.”

He smiled a poor, worried little smile. “Is that old clock really worth repairing? What an unrewarding chore, Mr. Kirchenbaum, and long too.”

Kirchenbaum didn’t deign to reply. He was already moving away, limping on his bad leg, indifferent to the silent curse that followed him.

Kavar was a watchmaker. His real name was Cyril Kavarnaliev. But everyone called him “Kavar” or “Kavar the Rat” and he didn’t seem the worse for it. Nor the better, either. For a few months now—it had to be said—his health had been declining.

Like all the elderly, the poor man had his quirks, but really, for some time now, he’d been growing quite tedious. Always lost in thought, dreamy, surprised by everything, jostled from the skies. Or else garrulous and tiresome, with endless insipid youthful memories that interested no one. Impossible, had you the bad luck to fall into conversation with him, to escape his commentary on the excellence of all things in days gone by, in his distant, unhappy homeland.

“In my day, they made pitchforks with handles like this!” or “That was how they fattened geese! You should’ve seen it!” and “Whistles! Harnesses! Cabbage soup!”

Despite the respect due age, sometimes you wanted to smack him on the head to shut him up.

But he’d been a skillful artisan, and remained so. At the beginning of his career, his real specialty had been locksmithing. Ah! Nothing to do with today’s dumb little locks, all identical, with grooved keys and four screws to be slapped up any old where, which came apart with a blow of your fist. No. Real locks, ingenious, intelligent, personal, custom-made. He’d built all kinds! Secrets, thief-proof, devilishly clever. But also screaming padlocks that wouldn’t let themselves be violated, latches that struck back, a stack of sneaky, perplexing little mechanisms to turn the most sensible engineer pale.

Of course all that was in the past. Now everything was simple. People had become poor. They no longer needed locks or safes. What would they put in them? They thought only of their bellies, nothing else. The era of treasures had past. And so for want of customers, Kavar the Rat had had to find another line of work.

Nimble and diligent, he had soon become a deft watchmaker. But out of resignation. Without faith. Clocks and watches—it had to be said—were unutterably dumb. Round in circles they went, endlessly, eternally, unimaginatively, like an animal in a cage. A watch had never blinded anyone. But a good spring lock! A hedgehog lock! A firing safe! Gods above, now those were machines!

All this to come to the good man’s masterpiece. A doll-bank. That played music, if you please! Built what would soon be twenty years ago. A porcelain face on a body lovingly sewn from the skin of a young pig, stuffed with horsehair where needed and, in back, a little door of tarnished silver that opened on a complicated mechanism. Little columns of smooth brass, iron cylinders multiply notched, perforated rollers, steel blades making a spring… A gem, I say! A veritable little marvel!

This doll-bank, which was to have been a music box if not an automaton, was dressed like a little girl, in a quaint fashion, with a dress of dark red velour, a shawl of yellowed lace, and little shoes buttoned high on shapely calves.

When the hundredth coin—not one less, not one more, and naturally, a sizable slug—was slipped, as you’d expect, beneath lifted skirts and into the doll’s belly, the bank would start humming a little tune Kavar the Rat had made up himself.

I say “would.” For the thing had never yet happened, and the old man never cheated with himself. This was his elegance. The mechanism was well designed. There was no reason to doubt it. The only things missing were the hundred coins. Despite his efforts, the poor inventor, always short of money, had not yet managed to realize his dream: to fill the bank and hear it sing…

A strange ambition, a bit mad as a thought, in which one might have detected the temptations of both pride and greed. Perhaps a psychoanalyst might even have found a senile manifestation of libido.

The fact remains that the curious music box remained mute, and with good reason. Yet he cajoled it, caressed it, spoke to it, comforted it, begged it to be patient. Now there was fetishism, a manner of sin, but almost a reason to live.

Sometimes, cutting back on his meager expenses with more-than-usual bitterness, Kavar the Rat managed to fill the secret conduits of the doll-bank more than halfway. This would take months of perseverance, deprivations, sacrifices. But far along as he was toward the realization of his hopes, some unfortunate event always arose to disrupt his slow, methodical savings.

The poor Kavar had had to pay the doctor, buy new glasses, satisfy a debtor he’d believed long dead… the poor and elderly were never at peace!

There was his son, to boot. His cross. His life’s misfortune. A great sly and careless devil who occasionally stopped by in passing, just to say hello and steal a little something. Anything. A scarf. A bit of money. A sausage, a tin of sardines. He had to steal; he couldn’t help it. Thankfully, he’d never touched the doll, whose presence he seemed unaware of.

These days, Kavar the Rat wanted to strangle him. But he was too weak, too worn. He’d surrendered so often already. Timid by nature, he feared being struck. And his son might easily have struck him. Hear me well: what paralyzed him wasn’t so much the fear of waking up in the corner where he’d been knocked out, but the worry of being the indirect cause of a terrible curse on top of the threats already heaped on his unlucky child’s head. Everyone knew that whoever raised a hand to his father would suffer the same punishment in this world. And Kavar the Rat dreaded his son’s misfortune.

But right now the old man wasn’t dwelling on such things. All through his drunk, he’d contemplated the familiar shapes on tannery wall, and as usual, it had taken his mind off. He rose slowly, stretched out his legs, and off he went with a clumsy step, a bit like a fakir after a few months of immobility.

Not far away, he ran into his neighbor Hertler, utterly delighted.

“My daughter isn’t well,” said Hertler. “It’s serious!”

He was a jealous old man with the face of a century-old Sioux, who hoped to bury his whole family soon. Some old men have wicked hopes.

“What’s she got?” asked Kavar.

“It’s her stomach,” Hertler said.

He sank the tip of his pinky into his ear, seemed to want to drive it all the way into his brain, then pulled it out again and gazed pensively at the hollow of his nail.

“They’ll have to operate,” he said, a twinkle in his eye. “Dirty business!”

He had the delighted face of someone who’d just hit the jackpot.

His cynicism horrified the watchmaker. Sadly, Kavar waved his disapproval, but preferred to remain silent.

At that moment, savage shouts burst out from the end of the street. Kids showed up, pushing and shoving. A pale, ugly child with the face of a murderer led the pack. His eyes were ringed and his lips cruel.

“Where is he?” said the boy in a trembling voice, quickly bringing his hand to his forehead in a vague military salute.

“Who?” stammered Kavar. But he already knew.

“Look! It’s your son!” said Hertler, elated.

Of course—had it been a stupid question, then?

“Oh!” said Kavar.

“He just went into your place,” reported Hertler.

Satisfied with this information, the brat raised his hand in a rallying wave and led his howling band after Kavar’s son.

“The rascal!” whined Kavar.

Already he was hurrying on his weak legs, sure he’d arrive too late to stop a new offense.

With a quietly ironic air, Hertler watched him go. A good day for the wicked! He rubbed his hands together, then started fiddling with his ear.

Kavar the Rat scurried along with difficulty. Gathered in a semicircle before the door to his house, the brats beckoned him from far off to hurry. And the poor man, hopping oddly along, did his best, tense, regretful, dreadfully humiliated.

As soon as he arrived, the kids backed away from the entrance to the hallway. Kavar passed before them, head down, not daring to look. Then he turned on the threshold and waved impatiently for them to leave. As if he were shooing away sparrows. But none budged. All Kavar could do was stare. He spat at them, then entered the house. At the end of the hall, in the shadows, he stumbled on the first step of the staircase.

His vision clouded. He began to cry. It was really such a shame! He wept because up there, his son was in the middle of robbing him. To think there were fathers who wept for the deaths of their sons!

On the first landing, out of breath, he let himself fall into Kirchenbaum’s broken wicker armchair. Every night, the lodger collapsed into it like a pig and took off his shoes.  Kavar hoped Kirchenbaum would never find out. How unlucky, to be so unlucky!

Kavar the Rat had lost all sense of time. His chest hurt so much. He breathed with difficulty. A creaking sound in the stairwell brought him back to himself. His son was coming down. He hadn’t time to pull himself together for the meeting. The thin form of his son was already there, swift and furtive.

“Thief! Lout! Father killer!” Kavar the Rat whimpered, his hands on the arms of the chair like a paralyzed king cursing his dynasty.

“Hey, pops!” Quick and catlike, the son passed mockingly, without bothering to stop. He was in the street two seconds later. The kids could be heard bolting off. Then a bit later, booing and whistles.

Kavar the Rat rose painfully from his seat. He felt definitively broken. Step after step, by dint of horrendous effort, he went up…

The door to his bedroom was open. No lock stood up to his son. Hauled to the middle of the room, his great trunk had been forced open and now stood open-mouthed, gaping. A dreadful sight!

The old man fell to his knees among his old rags tossed pell-mell on the floorboards. He rummaged through the poor useless things, so mistreated, and soon set hands on his precious doll.

She had been savagely gutted and springs, metal wires, horsehair spilled out like strange viscera. O vanished hopes, o long hours of work lost! Never again would he have the courage to repair such damage, nor the time to save up the coins he needed again. In despair, his heart swollen with boundless sadness, he shook the pillaged doll, fussed over her tenderly, like someone trying to resurrect a child.

Such feelings would wind up the death of him. Gently, he set the bank with its porcelain face down on the floorboards and took out a filthy handkerchief to wipe his eyes. Now he could see better.

Without thinking, he slipped two fingers into his fob and felt a coin. The one he’d meant to save today. The idea came to him, despite the pathetic pointlessness of the gesture, to insert it into the doll. He contemplated the thaler, brought it to his lips, kissed it in honor. Thus despite his wretchedness, there was something sacred about him. Something made him picture a priest, a prophet. All this smacked a bit of miracles, of sacrilege and sorcery. Such tension, in that moment!

He slipped his hand beneath the skirt of dark red velours, inserted the coin, and was utterly surprised to see his fingers stained with blood. He took a closer look. The skin of the stomach was bleeding.

With his now-sticky hands he stroked the impassive face. The long-lashed eyelids seemed to open and close on beautiful fixed blue eyes. Now there were traces of red on the too-white cheeks. He sat down, leaned back on the trunk, and cradled the doll with metal entrails where something alive was now in the process of dying.

That was when he heard the music. There was something like a sob, which caused a kind of hemorrhagic spasm. Then a series of frail and moving sounds of unspeakable beauty.

Kavar the Rat rejoiced. He recognized the song he’d planted in the heart of the doll long ago, now suddenly flowering in blood.

He hummed a few bars in unison with the beautiful, obedient toy he rocked in his arms. Then his head slumped against his chest and, quite stupidly, like the old thing he was, he collapsed. His thin little body rolled almost soundlessly to one side, among the old clothes and the moth-eaten curtains from the trunk.

Kavar the Rat smiled. His dream had been realized. He no longer had to fear disappointment or humiliation. His mouth was skewed a little to one side. There was saliva at the corners of his lips. Sugary saliva, probably, since he liked to suck on hard candies.

A fly alighted there joyfully. How long it had waited for this moment! It rubbed its legs together under its wings.

Kirchenbaum’s cat came over too. Very carefully, it lapped at the blood from the silent doll.

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