LITMIR.BIZ

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time since they had come back into each other’s lives, managed to fix on that thrilling green light in her eyes.

      “You shouldn’t have,” he insisted, reaching out his hands in such a way that she could have grabbed them and brought them to her. “You know very well you shouldn’t have . . .”

      He turned around and left.

      Holmes and Grimod had become railway sponges. From the moment they had left Martial to his paternal obligations, the two of them had been wandering through the train with an easy-going porosity that attracted all kinds of encounters. There is hardly any place that speaks to the smallness of the world so well as the corridors of a train, and our two comrades rubbed up against a number of individuals whose existence they had until then merely imagined, like the savages who were said to populate remote islands.

      Our readers must follow us into these cars and let themselves be dragged—in sympathy, or friendship, we hope—through the series of chats that brought these men to dinner.

      Between Vladimir and Nizhny Novgorod, Holmes spent some time in the company of a Haitian priest who claimed to be raising funds for his martyred bit of island from the tartar chief of Ulan Bator. It seemed to Holmes that Brother Célestin, as he had introduced himself with commendable sobriety, was drinking too many fine vintages for a man driven by such a noble cause, and that whatever money he might bring back from Mongolia would hardly cover his travel expenses.

      For his part, Grimod had to endure the pompous chitchat of a merchant from Manchester who was transporting sixteen cases of anal probes meant for the dignitaries of the “yellow chamber,” which was his personal nickname for the Chinese People’s Congress. Just from a man’s excrement, he swore, it was possible to learn whether he had ever gone beyond the borders of England: it takes 45 cm³ of an Englishman’s urine to kill a one-kilo rabbit, but only 30 cm³ of a Frenchman’s, and even less if he’s from the Bas-Rhin. During their conversation, he decided to call out to two German officers who were laughing loudly, drunk on vodka.

      “You there, if you were lucky enough to be English, imagine how much happier you’d be!”

      “England was founded by barbarians,” replied one of the Germans, sounding hostile, “and among those barbarians were your ancestors: the Angles!”

      Grimod left him in the unhappy situation he had gotten himself into.

      In the next car, he made the acquaintance of Achille Fournier, the humble designer of the national bicolored hat of the Sixth Republic. This young man was walking around with a large, shabby leather satchel overflowing with all the patents that he was going broke trying to maintain to protect his inventions. He was proud of them, and brandished them like weapons from the first moments of their meeting. Grimod was given the rights to a patent “to change the face of the world a little using long range siphons,” to “an aquarium that automatically supplies live flies,” and to “pigs suspended from the ceiling or raised in some other way, in order to nourish and then slaughter swine without letting those unclean animals ever touch the floor,” a system that was meant to respect Talmudic taboos and that would secure his fortune among Jewish communities.

      “Had I the necessary funds,” he confided, “I would make a bicycle that runs on grain alcohol, which would prevent the friction caused by pedaling, which is very overstimulating, especially for the fair sex, who have sensitive membranes and delicate pelvises. I would ventilate the Chamber of Deputies using disc wheels, I would replace all bridges with tunnels, I would drain Lake Geneva to provide arable land for Turkish immigrants in Switzerland! But, oh well, I’m from Marseille, I’m only thirty, so I’m wrong.”

      In his defense, he was born in Vitrolles, and he augmented his Southern exuberance with the nervous irritability shared by all young provincial poets.

      After Brother Célestin, Holmes was kept quite busy with Prince Sergei Svechin, the official waltzer to the Empress of Luxembourg and grand champagne-uncorker before the Lord. The gentleman was nearly two meters tall, a height ungraciously close to his royal partner’s. Helped along by some Dom Pérignon, Holmes managed to get from him a blurred impression and three axioms that plunged him into the depths of long-term bewilderment. These were that the empress was nothing more than a pleasure machine, a jubilant battery that released copious fluids; that the woman had to be acknowledged as a hedonist concerned solely with the pleasures of the mouth—“the Brillat-Savarin of irrumation,” Prince Svechin had said, rolling his Rs; and that her mouth, like that of all her peers, had something of the baseness that turns litmus paper blue.

      As the prince believed in magnetism and boasted that he possessed the “gift,” Holmes even had to suffer through the prince laying hands on his neck, an experience that, several years later, he claimed as the moment he had lost his last tuft of hair.

      In Car 5, Grimod was approached by a sickly-looking Russian who charitably began to comfort him about his race by sharing with him a mathematical proof of the non-existence of Hell. Having established that mankind had appeared in the year 200,000 B.C., approximately, he calculated the number of humans who had lived on Earth up to our time.

      “By applying to these givens the rule of compound interest,” he explained, “I have reached the figure of 75 billion deceased. If we grant, with some indulgence, that all white Christians have been saved, maybe 5% of this number, there are 71 billion 250 million of the damned currently burning in Hell. Knowing that the average volume of a human, counting everyone from newborns to adults, is about a twentieth of a cubic meter, the weight of the damned would constitute a volume seven times greater than the Earth itself! It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that this means Hell is a mathematical impossibility. As for the resurrection of the body, for the same reasons, allow me to laugh for a moment . . .”

      Which he did, with his lips pursed, exhaling in short bursts of air that made his nose run.

      “Admit it,” he continued, having blown his nose, “admit it’s enough to make you chuckle! Let’s be serious: the soul is made of a colorless, etheric gas, that’s as far as I’m willing to go. As for the Bible, it contains the most perfect treatise on gasometry there is, but nothing more, we agree, don’t we?”

      Grimod readily agreed, while the Russian shook his hand with the enthusiasm of someone who had just saved a man’s life. Grimod took his leave, happy to see Shylock approaching. Together again, they were going into the bar car when they nearly walked into a person who froze at the sight of them, seeming to hesitate, then slipped past them into the corridor without even acknowledging them. Holmes only had time to take in his bowler hat and the black beard that was eating his face; Grimod noted his short stature and his detachable collar, glossy with use; but both of them noticed his tacky glasses with blue lenses. This incongruity, they noted admiringly, had prevented them from studying other, more significant details. As they sat down, they vowed to find out more about this gentleman.

      The waitress who came to take their order left them speechless, a twenty-two-year-old Ukrainian whose name, Yva, was embroidered in red italics at the top of her apron. Her maid outfit, though spartan, could hide neither the military at-attention of her bosom nor the profile of her rear. One of those young women so instinctively seductive, thought Holmes, that every man who saw her walk by had no choice but to fix himself to her heels the way one dog sticks to another’s asshole. The end of what looked like a tendril of bindweed was poking up from her blouse, rising up her neck to just below her ear.

      “Did you see?” said Holmes when she had left.

      “The tattoo?”

      “Yes. It’s rather unusual . . . I would be willing to give my whole body to see the rest of it!”

      “It’s not all that impressive,” came Canterel’s voice from behind them.

      A towel over his shoulders, his hair wet, he was sweating in a mauve silk robe.

      “Martial! Where were you?”

      “In the fitness room. I needed to unwind a bit.”

      The waitress passed by, tray in hand.

      “Ah! Yva,

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