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| Nella Bielski, to whom Berger dedicated "Once in Europa" |
Achille
Blanc hates the factory, the furnaces of which are always kept burning, and
which spews fumes and leaves ever-growing mountains of red dust slag. Though
the company keeps increasing the price it will pay for his farm, Odile’s father
will not sell. He does not want his son working there, but eventually Odile’s
older brother does.
Despite
the factory, Odile grows up feeding rabbits, helping shovel out the stable and
going to school. She is very close to her father. At 14, the schoolmistress
comes to tell Odile’s parents that she is doing so well she should be sent to
further schooling. She boards in the nearby town of Cluses, lonely, but
obedient. Odile’s father dies and the village brass band he had been a member
of comes to play “Amazing Grace” at the farm.
One
day Odile’s mother asks her to take a loaf to her brother at the factory.
Michel, one of her brother’s friends, offers to take her for a ride on his
motor-bike. At first she refuses, but then accepts. They pack a picnic and ride
over the mountains down into Italy. Odile is thrilled, but only a few weeks
later she hears Michel has been badly burned at the factory when a furnace wall
broke. He spends a long time in hospital, losing both his legs.
On
New Year’s Eve, when Odile is 17, she hears music coming from the barracks
where the foreign workers for the factory live. She puts on an old coat and
goes to look in the window, watching Russians dancing and many other people she
doesn’t know. A man comes up behind her and asks her in. He is Stepan, an
orphan Ukranian who grew up in Sweden. He asks Odile to dance: “What’s so
surprising about music is that it comes from the outside. It feels as if it
comes from the inside. The man who had clicked his heels and announced his name
as Stepan Pirogov was dancing with Odile Blanc. Yet inside the music, which was
inside me, Odile and Stepan were the same thing.”
Odile’s
family is horrified. Her mother won’t speak to her. Odile often walks into the
mountains with Stepan and, when they have slept together, quits school and
takes a job in town at a components factory. Stepan is patient, thinking they
will win over Odile’s family. He builds an amazing bed and a separate room in
the barracks which goes by the name ‘In Europa,’ and Odile often stays there.
One day, however, as she is preparing for work, her brother calls to say Stepan
has been killed at the factory. Asphyxiated, he fell into the furnace and was
incinerated.
Devastated,
Odile does not know what to do. She is only 18 and pregnant. She stays at the
barracks until she can bear to leave and then moves to Cluses where she works
in the components factory and raises her son Christian, who looks much like
Stepan. As a kid, Christian is deeply interested in flight and, in a framing
story, takes his mother hang gliding over the mountains of the Haute-Savoie.
When
Christian goes to camp one summer, Odile meets Michel again. He runs a tobacco
and newspaper shop in a nearby town and has prosthetic legs. He offers to take
Odile to Paris, but as they stop to have a sandwich, someone runs into their
car. They put up at a hotel and never get to Paris. Michel, Odile finds, has
been to hell and back: “Who says hell has to stay the same? Hell begins with
hope. If we didn’t have any hopes we wouldn’t suffer. We’d be like those rocks
against the sky.” But he offers himself to Odile. She and her son go to live
with him over the shop. Michel and Odile have a daughter together.
Thinking
over her life, Odile wants to say to her daughter: “I will tell you which men
deserve our respect. Men who give themselves to hard labour so that those close
to them can eat. Men who are generous with everything they own. And men who
spend their lives looking for God.” She thinks of the men in her rich life with
much tenderness.
