Sobran gestured for the angel to sit and began to work on the waxed cork of the Palestine wine. The bottle was slippery and dewed, as though it had remained chilled while the angel held it. ‘I don’t suppose you have glasses too?’
‘We drank out of the same bottle that first night.’
‘Yes.’ Sobran pulled the cork and offered the bottle. Xas swigged then passed it back. The wine was very dry, but perfumed, potent and reflective, its stored power as affecting as memory. But Sobran could recognise nothing, no remembered summer or familiar sensation of a known landscape. He did remember the moist sensation of warmth on the bottle neck – the touch of the angel’s mouth. He said, ‘I confessed my sins. I told Father Lesy, so I’ve told God. There are some things I can’t tell Céleste and won’t tell you. But I’ll say this – I saw what I believe you showed me. For example, when I put the money in the bowl by the Russian woman’s bed, the withered pears and dead wasps. I took note of that.’
‘It’s a memory, not a sign, Sobran.’
‘You were with me.’
Xas shook his head. Then he said, ‘Tell me what you remember, whatever you care to.’
1814 Vin capiteux (a spirited, heady wine)
Sobran was excited by what the angel knew. It seemed he had read everything. Each thread of his conversation was strong and sinuous – Sobran had only to tease it out. For hours Sobran questioned Xas about viticulture – then, sated with learning, began to wonder when and why the angel read. Did Xas read in flight, by the light of the moon, while carrying a rose bush under his arm? For that matter, how did Xas fly to Heaven? How could he carry something there? Where was Heaven?
The angel said, ‘Souls go straight there, Sobran, and immediately. An angel isn’t earthly, but is a kind of animal – as you must have realised. Roses and angels aren’t souls and have to move through space. There’s one way I know to get to Heaven. Have you seen lime in water – if it’s deep, how blue it is? Like turquoise turned to gas. There’s a place that scalds and presses and corrodes – and decontaminates. A gate through which bodies can come and go to Heaven.’
‘And where is this gate – some far reach of the world, where people have never been?’
The angel changed the subject. He wanted to be told about this stonemason Sobran drank with, Antoine Laudel, his sister’s husband. ‘Tell me about Léon’s vocation – what happened there? What does he do now? Tell me how your daughters are. And about the cellar, have you made a start on it?’
1815 Vin brulé (burnt wine)
Xas said he had flown over the battle near Waterloo.
‘Since Napoléon entered Paris earlier this year, I’ve taken an interest. I thought you might have joined him. I wasn’t sure I’d find you here.’
The angel seemed quite settled, if posed somewhat unpoetically, his body inclined against his wings, which were crossed before him on the ground. He looked a little like someone leaning across a hedge to gossip.
Sobran asked how Xas had felt, flying over the battle and imagining that he might be in the midst of it.
‘I didn’t plan to swoop down and save you. I wasn’t darting about above the field like the dove who sees a snake crawling into its nest. I was far above the battle. I watched the cannons fire in volleys. And at each volley the smoke bloomed along their lines like brushstrokes, in simple lines and curves like the Roman alphabet. The thunder came well after the smoke. The smoke was silent. It was like watching a calligrapher at work with an invisible brush, in white ink on green paper.’
Sobran wanted to know whether Xas had made any sense of what he had seen. If he could see that Napoléon was losing.
‘Yes, I could see that, though not at first. I’ve watched battles. This was the second greatest engagement I’ve seen – after the final battle of the war in Heaven, which took place on several planes and was protracted but immensely fast. By comparison this battle looked stately. At least from the air. I couldn’t let myself be seen. I imagine that, on the ground, it was all din and butchery.’
The angel fell silent and watched Sobran.
Sobran shrugged. He realised that the gesture wasn’t sufficiently polite or discouraging. ‘I didn’t think of joining Napoléon. My life’s here. There are problems with the cellar. The cooper is waiting on our order – as though the news from Paris has some bearing on our yield. A rumour went around that I would leave to join the Emperor. After all, I hadn’t bought out and wasn’t discharged – you’d think people would know what that meant. But instead they choose to remember that I stayed with Napoléon when he marched on Leipzig – didn’t just walk out of Russia and keep on walking. I should have, because when I got back here the Bourbon was on the throne and only Comte Armand was able to uphold Baptiste’s will so that I could inherit Kalmann. I know that now because Father Lesy told me. I know how near I came to losing Baptiste’s gift. I couldn’t have followed Napoléon. That would have been to dishonour the Comte.’
Xas listened.
‘Though I would have liked to be among that first thousand, to wear a little square of the flag they cut upon the deck of his ship before he landed. But I’m not much of a soldier. The battle of Lutzen finished that for me.’ Then Sobran shook his head. ‘None of this excuses me. It’s all just treacherous self-interest.’
Xas listened.
‘Napoléon will abdicate again, then the English will take him. And this time they’ll put him away, far away.’ Sobran was quiet for a moment then he said, ‘You could visit him, have you thought of that? Wherever they take him. That would console me. I think I’m asking you to visit him.’
Xas shook his head. ‘I have nothing to say to Napoléon for myself. I could only carry the regards, apologies and excuses of a gunner from his Grand Army.’
1816 Le broyage (the crushing of the grapes)
The house was asleep and Sobran wanted the angel to look at his infant son. Besides, it was raining and he had a cold. Sobran carried a light to the cradle, his heart on the boil, so loud that he couldn’t have heard if Céleste had stirred and turned in the bed.
Xas crouched, flexed his wings slowly to permit him to do so. They spanned the room, the lower pinions of the left a centimetre from the water jug, the other wing tip out in the hall, pinions as black as iron fretwork. The angel stood, stiller than a heron standing out to dry on a tree by the river. He admired the child, then looked behind him, under his arm, at Céleste’s dimpled shoulder and long fringed plait. He stood to his full height again, closing his wings, and walked out of the room.
On the narrow stair Sobran heard, behind him, the harsh wash of feathers scrubbing the plaster. For a moment he worried that his angel might panic like a bird flown in to a room. He looked back as Xas came into the kitchen. The angel appeared cheerful and curious.
Sobran stoked the fire, swung the full kettle out over the flames.
He lit another candle. Of course he couldn’t offer the angel a chair at the table, or even his mother’s rocker … He hesitated, then asked, ‘Can you sit?’ And was surprised to see Xas look about, then choose the rocker, sit and rearrange his wings so that their joints were above his head, like the high shoulders of a perching vulture. Xas folded his wing tips about his feet, pushed with both so that the rocker swayed.
Sobran said, ‘I’ll make an infusion of my mother’s catarrh tea. Is there something I can offer you?’
‘I’ll have the tea too.’
Sobran, trying to hide his excitement, took the glass tower from the lamp and lit three candle ends, then replaced the brass box with its bull’s-eye glass and filled the room with lamplight. Then he looked at the angel.
Xas was white-skinned, smooth. Even his mouth was pale, more blurred than coloured, like a wine stain wiped on the mouth of a statue. But Xas was no statue. Sobran could see his blood moving, a vein in the angel’s neck that pulsed, and with each pulse variations of brightness in his skin, like cloud shadows passing across a wheat field, each pass of light a surprise. Where his skin was wor
ked, the calluses on his hands, it was the same fleshy rose as the nipples of a dark-haired girl who has never suckled a child.
Xas looked amused and expectant. He turned his face to the light and Sobran’s scrutiny. As Sobran stepped closer Xas said, ‘The deficiencies of human eyesight – you’ve never had a good look at me, have you? Bring the lamp over here.’
His eyes – as it turned out – were dark blue. He sat, relaxed, open, not settling into ordinariness however long Sobran stared. ‘Something seems to be moving over you, like cloud shadows across a meadow.’
Xas thought hard, then said that people were hosts to other creatures – no, he didn’t mean vermin, though that too. He meant the flor in the human gut. The same kind of thing made yellow wine yellow. People are colonies, Xas said, and time touches them, they are in so many places permeable. Angels are inviolate. Some even seem block-headed, like armour closed in armour.
It worried Sobran, criticism of celestial beings. Xas noticed Sobran’s worry and said, ‘I mean, angels are unresponsive. They mind their business – which is as it should be.’
‘What God intends.’
‘I don’t know what God intends, Sobran.’
Sobran sneezed and Xas told him to make the cold remedy. Sobran fetched the mixed herbs, spooned them into the pot and poured the water. He put the pot and two bowls on the hearth and brought another chair to the fire.
‘The alterations – cloud shadows – I think have something to do with this.’ Xas raised his arm and touched his side. He wasn’t wearing a shirt and, Sobran thought, couldn’t with those wings so complicating any possible cut. The mark on the angel’s side was more tattoo than brand, but filled-in, coloured, without grain or blurring. Two twisted lines, one over the other, the vermilion one partly eclipsed the blue-green. Sobran looked away – something had frightened him. He poured the tea, passed a bowl to the angel, then had to warn, ‘Careful, it’s hot!’ But Xas had already taken a scalding mouthful, and showed no pain.
‘It tastes like dry grass.’
Sobran pointed at the mark, asked what it was.
Xas shook his head. Then he made a very unangelic gesture – bit his lip as if to check his talk and avoid trouble. ‘I’m signed. I’m a signed treaty. I think what I do supplies the treaty’s contents. So far its only terms are: “Xas can go freely.” Not “will” or “shall” but “can”. I’m a treaty signed by the leaders of both camps.’ The angel said that he knew he was being coy, but he’d had a long time to think about the signatures and he remained perplexed. He spoke diffidently, but still managed to sound maddened and troubled. For a moment he was silent, sipping the tea, his face bent into the plumes of steam. ‘A friend of mine – a monk and beekeeper, long since gone from the earth – said to me, concerning this –’ Xas paused, then explained that he was relinquishing his friend’s very own words, which were in Gaelic, and therefore certainly incomprehensible to Sobran. ‘My friend said he thought the agreement was rather more than a piece of whimsy. That’s how he put it, very gentle, but telling me off. I must stop thinking of it as whimsical, he said. If it wasn’t whimsy, it was a pact. He thought that what I did – “you curious creature”, he called me – in going freely, would gradually fill up the only space between those two parties not already polluted by prophesy, policy and stony laws.’
Sobran felt thick-headed – that was the cold – but his heart seemed to be charging up and down inside him, like a dog greeting a master who has been off without it. ‘But – doesn’t God have everything planned?’
‘You mean everything that my latitude, my “going freely”, can possibly contain? Well, yes, God knows what God will make happen.’
Sobran frowned. ‘Are you saying that God can change his mind?’
Xas smiled faintly. ‘I might have just suggested that God’s knowledge was confined to what He will have happen – if you are going to go over my words like a lawyer.’
Sobran had begun to shiver, but didn’t feel afraid. ‘Xas,’ he said, for the first time using his angel’s name, ‘if your friend was right in his thinking, then what you do could change the last days, God’s promises.’
Xas shook his head. ‘How? I have harmless pursuits. It’s been thousands of years since I put out my hand to catch a sword blade – and did no good. I go freely and, in the terms of the agreement, God shares my pains. So I try not to suffer.’
‘Did it cause you pain when I didn’t come for two years?’
Xas looked at Sobran for a moment then admitted, ‘Some.’
Sobran raised his eyebrows and the angel looked impatient. ‘Now you have the idea that even you can influence the final outcomes. But I know mortals are liable to false thinking. For example, you never think you’ll leave the world until you can’t get another breath or – very old – you shrink away from it like a seed dried in its pod. My friend the monk sat around saying goodbye to everything. A thin old man with thistledown hair, saying, “I’ll be gone this winter.” “I”, he said, “I”. He had humility, but the world, with its brute complacencies, had soaked him through and through, and he didn’t believe he would ever leave it.’
Sobran watched the angel, his quiet vehemence. His head hurt and he felt that he was sinking slowly through warm water. ‘I can change your life,’ he said, ‘and you could change God’s mind.’
‘See what I mean? What you believe in is reprieve. Why would anyone want to change God’s mind? God is just and merciful. And time is long. Imagine ten thousand vintage years. Enough is enough. The world need not endure. And you can’t change my life.’
‘I think I have a fever,’ Sobran said.
Xas stood up and over him, laid a hand on Sobran’s forehead. ‘Go to bed and rest.’
Sobran got up.
‘I’ll empty the teapot and wash both the bowls so no one will know you’ve been taking tea with a night visitor.’ Xas stooped, took up the pot in one hand and cradled the bowls in the other.
Sobran called out to him from the foot of the stairs. Xas stopped, a silhouette in the doorway, the house wall behind him. ‘What would you do if I fell sick and died?’ Sobran asked.
Xas didn’t answer. He turned and walked out of the house.
When Sobran had rolled himself up in a quilt beside Céleste he realised he’d just asked an absurd question. If Sobran died, Xas would find him in Heaven. Asleep, Sobran dreamed Xas was looking for him in Heaven, while he hid in a cherry tree and peered through its branches.
First came the rain, not too late, then mild weather in which the grapes ripened slowly and took in all the summer had to offer. It rained again the day after the last of Clos Jodeau’s grapes were harvested, and the weather cooled. It was cool in the cuverie and the fruit fermented slowly.
The following winter when the vintner, his wife and brother transferred the wine from barrel to bottle they knew they had secured a fine vintage.
On the day of the bottling, at noon, they sat down in the cuverie to dine on bread and cheese. They sat on the pressoir and a jug of wine stood between them.
Sobran told them he was wondering how they could make it happen again, or even how to improve on this vintage.
‘When the girls are bigger we can have them help cut off some of the stems,’ Céleste said. ‘Make a wine that comes to its best more slowly. And a better best.’ She stretched out a leg to push the cradle in which the infant, Baptiste, lay with only his face visible in a bonnet and a nest of shawls. Sabine and Nicolette were out in the yard splashing back and forth in their pattens and trying to sweep together enough snow to build a snowman.
Léon said, ‘Father used to say it was all in the fruit.’
‘To press the south slope separately we would need another vat.’ Sobran anticipated his brother’s argument. ‘But the cuverie is too small for that.’
Céleste said, ‘That cool spell following the harvest was a godsend.’
‘We can’t reproduce those things,’ Léon said. He said he thought they spent too much time n
ursing the vines of Kalmann. Of course Kalmann’s vines should be saved, but they should sell Kalmann’s grapes and concentrate on pressing only Jodeau’s south slope. Why was Sobran talking about pressing Jodeau and Kalmann together? That would be like mixing wine and water and the results could hardly honour Sobran’s dead friend – if that was his intention.
‘There’s a better income in wine. If we are taking the trouble to make wine we have to produce it in volume. That’s why we are building a cellar, because we will press the crops of both vineyards.’
Léon picked up the jug. The wine flashed as it moved. ‘Then why are we talking about quality? This is quality. This is the mist clearing and a mountain in our path. You can’t really mean to contaminate this with Kalmann?’
Céleste laughed at her brother-in-law. She had taken off her scarf and unfastened her hair. Before putting the scarf back on again she wound her thick gold plait twice around her neck to add to the warmth of the wool. Léon watched this, distracted. Céleste looked at him as she spoke to Sobran. ‘Léon is saying that we can’t make a good wine by an act of will.’
Concord between his wife and brother was unusual, and annoyed Sobran. ‘Do you think it’s impossible to reproduce the work of luck?’
‘It’s either luck that makes wine like this, or the luxury of large cellars and plenty of hands,’ Léon said. ‘Pressing Jodeau and Kalmann together will push our luck.’
Sobran told Léon that Kalman would come right. And there was something they could do. They could ensure slower fermentation every year by having their sister’s husband, Antoine Laudel the stonemason, build Jodeau a stone vat. ‘Do away with the wood.’
Céleste took Sobran’s hand, pleased with him and his idea. She said to Léon sweetly, ‘Perhaps fine wine is too fine for us. And remember, Baptiste sold his grapes to Vully every year and never made enough to cover his expenses.’