Time: The Present
The director of the Lascaux cave was waiting to greet them. He seemed to have been waiting some time. Awed by the eminence of his visitor, he had a fresh haircut and wore an obviously new shirt and tie. Alongside him stood half a dozen members of the staff, some of them from the duplicate cave for the tourists that lay farther along the hillside. There were guides and a gardener, an electrician and a woman who ran the refreshment kiosk. Malrand solemnly shook each of them by the hand, and Clothilde kissed cheeks with the guides. The director gave them each white coats, new hard hats, and plastic overshoes.
“Much of the damage was done not just by the breath of the visitors, as you sometimes hear, but from the microorganisms carried in on their shoes,” the director explained. He bent obsequiously to tie his President’s overshoes, and rose to hand him a small face mask. Lydia, who had begun to presume this was almost a customary postprandial treat for Malrand’s guests, suddenly realized the director had never met his President before. This was a rare occasion. She felt honored, but inquisitive as ever.
“But were not the microorganisms similar to those already here?” Lydia asked.
“They have changed. Benzene, fertilizers-the very air we breathe is infused with our own modernity. We must protect the cave against it. The first problem we suffered was the green disease, a kind of plant growth that was probably helped by the warmth of the lighting system in the damp air. The second problem was the white disease, the tendency of the calcite crystals to grow in such conditions, helped by the carbon dioxide breathed out by more than a million visitors.” It had the sound of a prepared speech, Lydia thought. He’s probably said it a hundred times. “Remember that the cave had been sealed in its pristine environment for seventeen thousand years, until a tree fell in a storm in September 1940, and young Marcel Ravidat took his dog for a walk. The dog fell down the hole left by the tree, and Marcel went down to rescue it. He came back with some school friends, and they explored the cave and found the paintings. They told their teacher, a Monsieur Leon Laval, and he contacted the greatest living expert on prehistoric art, the Abbe Henri Breuil, who came almost at once and stayed to marvel.”
He unlocked an iron door and led them into a dark tunnel, lit only by a dim blue light, which gave way to a chamber with smoothed walls, and then a flight of steps downward. It smelled quite dry, and not in the least musty. He opened another door, and guided them into pitch darkness. Lydia, recalling her visit to the copy of the cave and telling herself to expect a rather less impressive sight of slightly faded paintings, despite the undeniable thrill of the original, braced herself for a mild disappointment.
Then the director threw a switch, and a long, deep chamber, perhaps fifty yards long and ten yards wide, flooded with a cold, bright halogen light. Lydia heard the others gasp, and Manners cry out and protectively clutch her arm, as a great herd seemed almost to leap upon them.
Bulls, she thought. Giants from another age. The great bulls of Lascaux, on each side of her, rising. No, towering into the ceiling, and given depth and mass by the other beasts around them. She saw horses and great deer with monstrous antlers, and then what seemed almost a unicorn. My God, she thought, all sense of fear gone, her instant reaction of alarm replaced by a sense of enchanted wonder, the bulls are dancing.
Manners released her arm and stepped two paces forward, and began to spin slowly, taking in the great painted arc of roof above their heads, the beasts before them and behind, spinning and moving as if he were dancing too. His arms stretched out dreamily, his trunk swayed, his glowing face seemed at sublime peace. And realizing that she had suppressed this thought too long, Lydia knew that she wanted to bed this man.
She sensed her own feet follow unbidden, unable to stay still, unable to focus upon any one image as the animals seemed to swirl and lumber around her. She heard Manners laugh with pure joy, and her own delight surged too. She could not be silent and laughed exultantly in turn as she stepped forward. Manners, his face beaming at her, took her hand, raised it high, and twirled her as if on a dance floor. She heard Clothilde join the laughter, and Malrand start to clap his hands together, half-mockery, half-salute.
And then the darkness fell once more as the director turned off the lamps. An utter blackness, freezing her, chilling her, holding her in place as the sense of the still-looming bulls began to invade her joy. A spark, as rude as lightning, and then a tiny glow, like a feeble candle, was in the director’s hand. He moved forward, taking the dim light to a great black bull with a speckled face, two horses seeming to race beneath it, and another red horse with a black mane running at its shoulder.
“This is one of the lamps they used,” came the director’s voice, soft and low, almost sepulchral. “It is made of stone, a small bowl hollowed out to hold tallow and a juniper wick. It reaches but one image at a time, one beast at a time, each taking its place in this pantheon of prehistory.”
A complete silence fell as they all stood immobile in place, Lydia and Manners still joined by their raised hands, frozen in minuet. The director flicked on a small but very powerful torch, and played it deliberately from beast to beast, picking out faces that became distinct personalities. A big black bull to the right, its horns raised as if in challenge. Two to her left seemed to face each other almost genially, one almost jaunty with the cock of its forward legs, the other placidly bovine, looking almost surprised.
“When I first saw it by the light of a small electric torch, I thought they would devour me,” said Malrand. “Then I looked at their faces, and they seemed almost friendly.”
“When I first saw this, I wanted to dance too, dance and sing,” Clothilde said. “This is a joyous place, solemn but filled with delights. The whiteness of the chalk makes it so light, even with a feeble candle. Even in total darkness, you know that it but waits for the smallest glow of light. This is how churches should be. If they were, perhaps I might attend them.”
“Perhaps that is why Abbe Breuil called it the Sistine Chapel of prehistoric man,” said Malrand. “Their God might not have borne much resemblance to our own, but their sense of worship seems very close to us. A little happier, perhaps, more at ease with the life around them. I think I understand your teacher, Clothilde, your Leroi-Gourhan, who felt it was all a balance between the male and female principle. This is a sensual place. There is sexuality here.”
“There is movement, too, Monsieur le President,” said the director, shifting his torch to the right. “See the great black bull. Is he guarding or is he challenging, about to charge? But look where he points.” The torch flicked to an opening at the end of the cave, an opening half-blocked by more paintings. He led them toward it.
“This great room is the Hall of the Bulls. Now we are entering the Axial Gallery. There is a turn to the right and a descent. Wait while I turn on the light.” The director brushed past them, heading for the passage. As he passed, he handed the small stone lamp to Lydia. “You see the grooves and patterns scored into the handle of the lamp, mademoiselle? There are many such signs cut into the rock here. They may have been a kind of signature of individual artists, saying this is my lamp, this is my stretch of wall. We don’t know.”
He turned on the halogen lamps again, and behind them the whole chamber exploded into view once more, a great tumble of life.
“I made an official visit to Africa,” said Malrand. “They took me to one of the game reserves at dawn, to a guest house in the trees that overlooked a water hole. It was like this, all animals jostling together. Perhaps that is how it was then, a great tumult of life.”
“I spent months as a student pursuing a theory I had,” said Clothilde. “I had been struck by the way this chamber reminded me of those maps the ancient Greeks made of the night sky, tracing the shapes of hunters and bears and beasts from star to star. I tried to make the beasts of the chamber fit the various models of the night sky over Peri gord seventeen thousand years ago. Each time I seemed to be on the brink of success in one section, another frustrated me. But I still have that feeling of being beneath a vast vault of stars.”
“A tumult of life, you said, Monsieur le President-but also of death,” intoned the director. “Look here, where we turn into the Axial Gallery-the falling horse. We are sure that it is falling, rather than simply being painted at this angle, when we look at the ears, the way they suggest the horse is tumbling backward. Perhaps this represents one of the ways they hunted, driving beasts over a cliff to fall to their deaths. And then here there is battle. See these two ibex, poised to hurl their horns against each other.”
“What is that grid sign between them? asked Lydia. “Almost like a window with bars.”
“Who knows, mademoiselle? There is much here we cannot comprehend. Perhaps the mark of an artist, perhaps some hieroglyph that had meaning to them, if not to us. Perhaps the indication of some kind of fence. They may not have domesticated their animals, as farming communities were to do ten thousand and more years in the future. But they may have used some kind of fence in their hunts.”
One red beast, with a black face and neck that seemed slightly too small and even delicate for its bulk, caught Lydia’s attention. Bull or cow? She could not tell. It carried light and slender horns, sinuous yet lethal as rapiers, and its expression looked for a moment mean and angry, and then just bewildered.
“This beast is extraordinary. It has character and expression-almost like a portrait,” she exclaimed.
“I am so glad you said that,” said Clothilde. “That is my theory, that these were not just generic animals, a standard bull or horse, but individual representations. I have this wild hope-that hardly anyone shares-that one day we might find a portrait of a person. There are some rough caricatures of human faces that have been found at La Marche, but I have this feeling that artists such as these not only could have produced recognizable human faces, but would almost have been impelled to do so.”
“Madame is known for the daring of her imagination,” said the director.
“I’m full of wild theories, you mean,” laughed Clothilde.
“Your President respects your intuition, and shares your hopes,” said Malrand.
“Then my President will want to find the money to finance my research project to discover new caves,” retorted Clothilde. “With echo sounders and access to satellite mapping and help from the Air Force, we could identify caves all across this region. There may be more caves like Lascaux, perhaps even finer. Perhaps we could find portraits of the first French people. The Ministry of Culture supports it, but the project always dies in the Council of Ministers. If you were to adopt it as the Projet Malrand …
“No politics, please, madame. I am taking a day off from affairs of state and budget battles,” said Malrand lightly.
“But you are the only man in power who loves this art as I do, the only man who could make the difference,” she protested.
“Madame, enough,” he snapped, in a tone so harsh and abrupt that Clothilde bowed her head and Lydia and Manners stared at the suddenly furious President. “I am not here to be badgered. You tried in the car and now you try again here. Just leave me in peace, if you please.”
“These horses,” Lydia exclaimed, by trying to smooth over the sudden row. “They look like the horses of ancient Chinese pottery, the same coloring and proportions.”
“We call them the Chinese horses,” said the director quickly, desperate to have his moment with the President unspoiled. “The parallels are striking-and horses are by far the most common animals here, four times more common than the cattle or the deer. But from the bones we found, they did not eat them. Reindeer was their main diet, and yet reindeer are very rare in the cave-there is only one, among some six hundred paintings and fifteen hundred engravings. And it is not even clear that it is meant to be a reindeer. That is why we doubt that there was a hunting ritual here, picturing the beasts they intended to hunt. Some scholars think that this painting was a work of the winter, when there was little else to do in the long nights. But they did not live in the caves, and from the tent sites we have found, there are signs that they were migrants, traveling with the reindeer herds. Allowing for the lack of domesticated animals and agriculture, they lived a little like the Evenk tribes of Siberia, a little like the Indians of North America.”
“Perhaps we should move on to the Nave,” said the director. “Back down this Axial Gallery, and through the narrow passage to your left. You now will see treasures that are unique. These parts of the cave have not been copied for the tourist exhibit. These can be seen only here, in the place where they were made. You will see on the ceiling above a mass of horses engraved into the rock. And now farther, into what we call the Nave. To your left, the famous panel of the black cow. And look beneath its rear feet, the checkerboards of black and red and yellow squares. Another mystery.”
Lydia could feel Clothilde fuming behind her, and reached back to squeeze her hand in solidarity. Dismayed that the joyful mood that gripped their small party in the Hall of the Bulls should now have become icy, she wondered why Malrand had reacted so furiously. He was probably sick and tired of people constantly asking him for favors. But there had been a distinctly personal note in his curt silencing of Clothilde, almost as if the two of them had been involved at some time in the past. Hmm, there was a thought. But surely a presidential mistress, even if the affair were long in the past, would know better than to appeal to him in public? No, Malrand said she had tried the same gambit in the car. Perhaps that was Clothilde’s point, to get some kind of public commitment.
“Behind us is my own favorite,” said Malrand, his voice normal, his mood apparently equable again. “Am I right, Monsieur le Directeur, that we now see the swimming stags?”
“Indeed so, Monsieur le President. A great work, its scale matched by its ambition.” The five stags’ heads stretched almost the full remaining length of the cavern, twelve or fifteen feet. Their antlers were far less ornate than those in the Hall of the Bulls, but somehow more real, emerging from a darker outcropping of rock that seemed to represent a river. Each stag’s head was cocked at a different angle, giving movement and continuity almost like a strip cartoon.
“How far does this cavern stretch back?” asked Manners.
“The Nave behind you goes on, ever narrower, and then dropping sharply, for some fifty meters, into a small chamber we call the Hall of the Cats, but they are very hard to see and it is not easy to reach. Down this way, we drop into what we call the pits, and then down a steep drop of stones into a kind of well, probably scooped out by swirling waters from the times when this was the course of an underground stream. It goes on another twenty meters or so, through a gap too narrow for anyone but a devoted cave explorer. But if we are careful here as we descend, we come to something quite unique.”
He played his light into a small gallery, picking out to their right the unfinished drawing of a horse; he swiveled the torch to the left, to the outline of a beast like a rhinoceros. Then he brought the light back toward them, and Manners reacted as if he had been punched.
“My God, it’s a killing!”
“More than that, a combat,” said Malrand. “Which leaves both participants dead.”
A crude drawing of a man, almost a stick figure, lay on the ground, arms outstretched. His head had either been very crudely drawn, or had been given a long, birdlike beak. His penis was erect, and in the shape of a spike. Below him lay a stick with a bird perched on one end. Towering over the fallen men was a great bison, some four feet long, its horns aiming down to gore at its victim. But a stick, perhaps a spear, was in the doomed beast’s belly, and its entrails spilled in great loops on the ground.
“There are many theories about this, but only some elements I think we can be sure of,” said the director. “That stick with the bird on top seems to me to be a decoy. A hunter could lie in wait in a pit with that stick poking above it. I have seen some local people hunt small birds this way. Possibly the fallen man is wearing a bird mask for the same reason. Some people call him the shaman, or magician, since we know that bird and animal masks are worn during rituals by the shamans of many Native American and Siberian tribes. And then there is another stick on the ground, with a diagonal line running from it. I think that is a spear thrower, a stick onto which a spear was placed, and which greatly increased the force and range of the spear’s flight. Beyond that, I cannot usefully speculate.”
“You certainly have Leroi-Gourhan’s male principle there,” said Malrand. “But then men do sometimes experience that phenomenon of erection in violent death.”
“Do you have any personal theories about this drawing?” Lydia asked. “Not a scholar’s hypothesis, but your own view.”
“I think it is more than the simple portrayal of the tragic end of a hunt, mademoiselle,” he said. “He may well be a shaman, but certainly I think there is ritual and magic involved, beyond the prosaic explanation of the bird as a hunter’s decoy. It is the only image of violence in the whole cave, and it is a double violence, depicting the death of the shaman and the death of the beast, as if one somehow caused the other. Given the love and celebration of life that we see elsewhere in the cave, to me it does not truly fit.”
“There’s the portrait of early man you wanted, Clothilde,” said Manners. “Killing and being killed. An artistic and philosophical statement on human nature.”
“But incomplete,” replied Clothilde, amiably. “There is more to humankind than that-as we see and as we know from the rest of the cave. If these artists wanted to depict our dark side, then they have overwhelmed it with images of our better nature. So if they are showing man killed and killing, I choose to believe that they have also made art which shows human beings doing better things.”
“There is room for many faiths in this cave, Clothilde,” said Malrand pensively. He had called her Clothilde at last, noted Lydia. “And yours is a noble one. I like to think that you are right.”
Malrand left in his car alone, driven by Lespinasse, and with the escort of security men. His farewells had been charming, his parting kisses to Lydia’s cheeks lingering almost as long as her flood of excitement when he whispered, “You can be assured that the art tax is dead.”
“I wish I could stay longer, but I must be in Paris tonight,” he called as he left for the military airport where his jet waited to whisk him back. Lespinasse exchanged a hearty handshake with Manners. And Lydia was almost convinced she had heard Clothilde whisper “Sorry, Francois,” as he had kissed her farewell.
“Anything after this would be an anticlimax,” said Manners as they clambered into the remaining limousine for the ride back to Malrand’s house.
“I remember the first time I saw it, I felt the same. I still do, a little. It keeps its magic, Lascaux,” said Clothilde. “Let me apologize for imposing that scene on you. I thought it was worth a try, while Malrand was under the spell, but I handled it badly. Let me make amends. Come home with me and I’ll cook us all a meal.”
“I’d love to, Clothilde. I’m full of questions,” he said, and turned to Lydia. “O.K. with you?” She nodded. She didn’t feel like being alone with Manners just yet. Perhaps that flood of lust for him had just been the effect of the cave. She liked him a great deal, but she had never been comfortable with holiday flirtations.
“I wonder when he will announce the new reward?” she asked.
“Very soon, I imagine. No point in delaying. But I suppose he’ll have to talk to the police and culture ministers, probably the finance people.”
“Ah no, my dear Major. Malrand does not work like that. In France, the presidency has its own funds, to be used at the President’s discretion. He will not tell the culture ministry, since the minister would try to steal the credit. He will find some moment when he needs a useful distraction and make the announcement. It should bring results very fast, I imagine.”
“Well, that looks like the end of our adventure, Lydia.”
“Why on earth so? The painting may be recovered, which would be a good thing. But that still leaves the mystery of where it’s from, let alone how your father got hold of it. And it looks as if Clothilde’s cavehunting project is not getting the presidential seal of approval, so we might as well continue our inquiries among the old Resistance types.”
“I have some names for you, and some information,” said Clothilde. “Not very exciting, but one friend of my father-my real father, that is-said he knew of two caves where guns were stored. The big one at Rouffignac, which goes back for miles, and Bara-Bahau. Rouffignac is a possibility. It has been fully explored, but by speleologists, not by modern experts. It’s a small painting, and it’s possible that some great scar on the wall was not noticed.”
“But the lines continue beyond the edge of the rock, and in the background is that clear white calcite,” Lydia objected. “The lines would have been noticed.”
“I know, it’s just a faint possibility. Bara-Bahau is out. It’s too well known, and not much calcite there. I feel sure that Horst was on the right track when he talked of a cave that lay waiting to be discovered, like Lascaux in 1940, and somehow the painting came out and then the cave was sealed again.”
“So your idea of the echo-sounding project would probably be a sure-fire way of finding it again,” said Manners thoughtfully. “Odd that Malrand seemed to be set against it.”
“I think he was set against the idea of being bullied into a commitment, rather than the idea itself,” said Lydia.
“It’s curious,” said Clothilde. “The project seemed guaranteed of success when I first proposed it, long before we heard of your new rock. The Air Force was quite happy, saying it could fit into its training schedule. The Ministry of Culture was in favor, and we had a university and a research institute eager to help. But then it got squashed somewhere in the hierarchy, and I was given different explanations why. The culture officials said they thought it was the finance ministry. The research people said they thought it was political, the Prime Minister’s office muttering that too many funds were being steered to Malrand’s Peri gord. And one of Malrand’s people told me it was because they thought that in a year or so we could get half the project financed by Brussels, from the European fund.”
“There couldn’t be any-well-sinister reason for someone trying to block it, could there?” mused Manners, almost to himself. “Somebody who may have a good reason to make sure the undiscovered cave remained unfound.”
“What do you mean?” said Clothilde, glancing meaningfully from Manners to the impervious security man who was driving them. Almost imperceptibly, she shook her head warningly.
“Oh, nothing. Just a fancy,” he said lightly. “Your scientific search is a good idea, and good ideas have a way of getting carried out. The European fund will probably come through from Brussels. I’m sure it will happen someday, Clothilde, and after a hundred and seventy centuries another few years won’t hurt.
“I’m still awed by that place,” he went on. “It opened my eyes rather. I don’t know much about art, just sort of assumed there were these high points, like the ancient Greeks and the medieval cathedrals, and then Michelangelo and Leonardo at the Renaissance, and then Van Gogh and Cezanne. Just a few high points. Now I know that I’ve seen another, from a time long before I thought there was any civilization at all.” The conversation had now been steered to safer ground. Lydia noticed it was deftly done.
“Time to add a second postcard,” he went on, drawing his wallet from inside his jacket. He opened it and withdrew a small and much-worn postcard of a Vermeer. Lydia recognized it at once, the Girl with the Pearl Earring, a winsome portrait of deep charm.
“I was in Appeldorn, one of the Dutch military bases, on a NATO course and we took a weekend off to go to Amsterdam. They had this Vermeer exhibition. Just by chance, since I had nothing better to do that morning, I went along, and fell in love with this girl. Carried this with me ever since. In Northern Ireland sometimes, when it was really bad, I’d take her out and look at her and feel better.”
“Why not a photo of your children?” asked Lydia.
“Your own children are the kind of distraction that can get you killed-the last thing you want to think about at times like that,” he said grimly. “Believe me.”
“So which souvenir image do you want from Lascaux?” Clothilde asked. “The falling horse, the two bison, the great bull?”
“No, I think I’d take the swimming deer, except that now I’ve seen Lascaux, I already know the one I want.” He pulled out one of Lydia’s Polaroids of the small bull he had brought to her the day they met. “All the others from Lascaux go together, and I don’t want to select just one. I would feel happier just with this one that was mine, at least for a while, even if we never see it again.”
When they got back into their own cars at Malrand’s place, Clothilde steered Lydia into her own car and told Manners to follow. As her little convertible roared up Malrand’s drive, Lydia realized nervously that she was in for a woman-to-woman chat. Never a prospect she much relished, she felt at a disadvantage. Despite her liking for the woman, Clothilde was formidable, and Lydia was not ready to question herself about her feelings toward Manners, let alone face an inquisition.
“You aren’t sleeping with him yet, are you?” Clothilde began.
“I was thinking of a similar question about you and Malrand.”
“We had a very pleasant spring and summer a long time ago, when I had just got my doctorate and just before he went into politics.”
“Wasn’t he married then?”
“Yes, she was one of those Parisian literary ladies. Preferred to stay in St-Germain. We had the Perigord to ourselves. But you’re changing the subject. You’re falling for the handsome major, no?”
“Falling in love? I don’t think so. Attracted, certainly. Interested, yes. He’s an entertaining companion, but quite a private one. There are lots of depths to him, parts I haven’t been allowed anywhere near. I don’t mean the military stuff. More the way his mind works. That question he raised in the car, about whether somebody might have been blocking your project deliberately. I didn’t think his mind worked that way.”
“Suspicious, you mean, or intuitive?”
“Both. He presents himself as a simple soldier, very straightforward, everything on the surface. Then suddenly you see a hint of something much deeper. Looking back at how he maneuvered me into coming to Perigord with him, I think I first saw it then.”
“Some of his depths are charming. Like his little Vermeer girl. Any woman would feel challenged by that, to replace that work of oil with an image of herself next to his heart. But it is very flattering that he went to such trouble to get you here, no? And if you want to satisfy your curiosity, there’s only one way.”
“Take him to bed, you mean?”
“Why not? At the worst, you’d have fun. He moves like a capable lover. Did you see him start to dance in the cave?”
“That was the moment I was most attracted to him. It seemed so natural, like the real him, wide open to joy.”
“You’ll never know until you try him out,” said Clothilde. “I bought one of those silly souvenir ashtrays when I was a young girl, which carried an old saying on the base-‘Men are like melons, you have to squeeze a thousand before you find a really good one.’ My mother was very shocked.”
They drove through the town to Clothilde’s surprisingly modern house on a hill overlooking a great bend of the river. They parked, and Clothilde led them through a narrow front door into a long, wide room filled with light from the sliding glass door that overlooked her terrace and the river. At the terrace table, a man was sitting and smoking, a bottle of still sealed champagne and a bunch of roses beside him.
“Horst,” cried Clothilde. “What a lovely surprise.”