Les Noyades

10: The Witch of the Atlas

Rumi hoped that his father was taking into account the precise nature into which Sédar had structured his papers. Everything was dated, prioritised, labelled, and filed away in cases of organisation. As Sédar prattled on about his many essays and Declan interjected intermittently with memories of the man's earlier work, Rumi dropped into the swivel chair and wheeled himself across the creaking wooden floor to marvel at the extent of Sédar's organisation. The desk was dusted and undecorated by copious amounts of paperwork and unmarked essays; the floor was clear to move the chair across without bumping into ruts of cardboard boxes filled with unused notes; the shelves were stacked to fullness and not beyond.

He slid from the shelf a sleek volume of poetry; Catullus. He remembered learning some with his father. The addresses had made them laugh, he recalled— they had always laughed together at Catullus. That was before his father had been promoted to the head of department and had promptly forgotten to teach his son any Latin poetry.

Of course he had never looked obscenely with his father at Catullus 16, which he hesitantly opened the anthology to— he had never read it without ream upon ream of redacted text. For good reason, he saw. He glanced over his shoulder to ensure that the others were distracted and slid the text into his shirt, tucking it neatly into his waistband. That was a read for later. He shuffled about the rest of the books so as to leave no trace of his siphoning.

§§§§§

Yves and Sédar were getting on like rats in a sewer. Rumi would use no other expression for it; they were just rolling together. They were sat all together out in Sédar's garden, which essentially consisted of the hillocks tiding away for miles behind them, thus had they confined themselves to a large picnic table out the back.

The pair were sat opposite each other with their heads dipped down to scrutinise the papers categorised into sections beneath them. Every so often they would come up from their discussions to check that Rumi and Declan were even there at all— besides that, it was constant rapid talk in French. It infuriated Rumi that he could not understand, but then why would he need to? They were discussing the poetry in which he had no interest. Still, he could listen in despite not knowing a word of it.

"Mais non, il me paye bien," Yves was saying as Sédar slid a piece of paper across for him to inspect. The tone was conversational and light.

"Et si je vous paie?"

Yves passed the paper back and shook his head— Rumi assumed that it was the piece of paper itself rather than whatever question Sédar had asked him, although he hardly knew enough to be sure. He watched on as their talk stilted somewhat and their concentration returned to the essays and manuscripts before them. In amongst them would be the missing thesis they had come all the way for, and Rumi realised in himself a desperate wish to retrieve the damned thing already and be on their way. He had grown tired of watching Yves warming to the glow of Sédar's evident genius, and he saw that his father was growing ever the slightest part bored.

Rumi slipped away from the table and whispered to his father, afraid to break up the good party of intellectual glee, that he was going to walk across the hills for some time, and he would be back before the sun dropped— he assumed, by the way things were going, that Yves and Sédar would make their talk last beyond that. He set off at a glacial pace and, as he made the first small peak, took on a run that pulled him down to the bottom in half the time as he had walked up. The world felt smaller from where he cast himself down into tufts of thick, throaty grass that soaked cool water into his clothes until he shivered for the cold as he had that morning. He turned about onto his back and untucked his shirt to bring out the poetry. He creased the first cover in doing so and rued that he would not be able to return it to its rightful home back on that shelf that, in its militaristic precision, would want forever a stop for the loose space it now held.

He crouched up over his knees and pulled open the book to consume the cleaner content of Catullus' mind— what he left untouched he would read over at Culshawe's and cast to him any curiosities cast by the text. It was not in translation, but then his Latin was just good enough to cover it; the one talent bequeathed to him by his father was a proficiency for languages, although he wished it had spilled over to French, or that he had at least been taught some, since he wanted very much to listen in on Yves' conversation with Sédar and know what was being said. He had caught the feeling somehow just before he left that they had not been discussing only poetry, and that they were hiding their words in French for some unspoken reason.

"Odi et amo, quare id faciam, fortasse requiris?" he quoted aloud to himself. "I hate and I love... Odi et amo."

The sentiment was a strong one to him. He lay the book open and face-down with those pages clutched against his chest.

"Odi et amo," he repeated finally. "Nescio, sed fieri sentio et excrucior."