From The Annual Banquet of the Gravediggers’ Guild, which will be published this month by New Directions. Translated from the French by Frank Wynne.

Esther was weeping. She tried to stifle her sobs. In late November 1951, when after seven years she finally found the strength to make the journey, she visited the churches of Melle: Saint-Hilaire with its beautiful horseman, Saint-Pierre with its twin apse, and the more modest Saint-Savinien, and in each of the three she prayed, she prayed to Christ, prayed to the Virgin, prayed to the saints that she might find some cure for her grief. Esther was not a Christian, but she found brief moments of consolation in these presences, these images, these accounts of miracles. Esther headed south to Tillou, the place where the three children had been hidden, the place where they had spent three years of the war. The names of the villages were strange and ominous: Paizay-le-Tort, Sompt, Gournay-Loizé; the countryside seemed suddenly to lurch into winter; hilltops crowned with leafless trees, barren meadows. The road slashed deep into the flesh of the hills. The farmhouse was an old mill that stood on the banks of a river called the Somptueuse; there was a shed, a barn, some ducks; she was greeted by a man with a flowing beard and pale eyes whose wife was sitting in the farmyard with a duck in her lap; she was force-feeding the animal using a funnel whose endless, threaded tube was stuffed into the bird’s beak; she was massaging the duck’s throat to push the food down; Esther averted her eyes. The man said, We didn’t touch anything.

He showed her an attic room with three small beds and Esther collapsed, the breath drained from her. Warily and respectfully, the man lifted her up like some fragile object; she thought she saw his pale eyes quiver slightly, a tear trickling down his black beard. Esther could not breathe, an overwhelming pain obstructed the cycle of air in her lungs, she longed for death to take her here and now, for the Everlasting to abjure his pity and destroy her in an instant, as a house is wiped out by a bomb, as the three children had been shot at point-blank range.

The man led her back out to the yard where the woman had just caught another duck and was stuffing the feeding tube down its throat.

We only do it in winter, the man said seemingly inadvertently. Come summer, it’s too hot, the ducks croak if you feed ’em in summer.

Esther’s mind was blank, she stared down at her patent leather shoes, spattered with the white mud of the farmyard; it looked to her like white blood. She shook her feet absurdly to shake it off.

It’s only juice from a stone. It ain’t nothing.

The man was trying to reassure her. He too was staring at the ground.

Offer the lady a cup of chicory, said the woman with the duck.

Would you . . . would you like a cup of hot chicory? With milk?

Esther glanced around; here the river split in two, circling the farm. A weeping willow dipped its mane into the water. She pictured the children playing by the stream and started to shudder.

Or a verbena, maybe? It’s not all that warm, is it?

She had no need to answer.

She could feel the children’s hands, their cheeks against her belly. Seven years and still the presence persisted. She could not consign them to the past. Make them disappear. As she stared at the woman with the ducks, she wondered why she had made the long journey back to Tillou in Poitou. In 1941, the demarcation line was just a few kilometers south, in the Charente. In 1944, Nazi troops looted and murdered as they retreated. That was seven years ago. For a moment, Esther wondered why these people had never touched the attic room. They had returned the suitcase to her. In it, she had found a photograph of herself—an image that had forever sundered her heart. What the children had written on the back of their mother’s portrait. To keep her close to them while she was absent. Now there was no one close to her, excepting this image of herself. Esther once again began to sob. The woman released the duck, which waddled away as through drunk, and grabbed another.

The man looked at Esther, not knowing what to say.

D’you . . . d’you want to go see the spot?

She had to go and see the place. After all, this was why she had come. To see the place, to see death. The man was not used to cars.

And you really drive that thing yourself?

Esther started the engine of the Peugeot 203. The farmer was reluctant to get in but eventually sat down next to Esther. They left the valley and headed toward the village; Esther noticed an isolated four-square chapel that looked like an ancient temple. The line of houses ran parallel to the river. The farmer told Esther to take the road toward Brioux—he found it hard to believe that she had no idea which direction he meant. He jabbed his finger; there, that way. They drove between hedgerows on a narrow, flinty road like the one by which she had come. Esther tried to concentrate—had the landscape changed in seven years? The fields were tilled; the slightly orange soil, it seemed to her, was lined with furrows, scattered here and there with clods; she asked her passenger if it was the sowing season; the farmer gaped at her as though she were an American, or someone from another world. Nope, red lands like this, you got to till the ground early. Winter ploughing. If there’s too much rain or there’s a hard frost, you can’t, you need a tractor. You don’t sow ’til February.

The red lands. Esther felt a sudden wave of nausea and tears once again rolled down her cheeks. You can’t be driving while you’re crying. The road is too narrow. Suddenly Esther panics, swerves, a great chestnut tree like a giant almost catches the car, the farmer screams, Esther’s mind goes blank, she is absent, but she rights the vehicle and shifts down a gear; in spite of everything the Peugeot 203 continues on its way.

It’s over there. There on the right. The farmer’s voice is suddenly hoarse.

Esther flips down the right indicator and stops. It’s a flagstone courtyard with a brick building to the rear. The farmer looks relieved to be getting out. He is very pale.

’Tis the old slaughterhouse, he says.

The place is every bit as grim as she imagined. Cracked red bricks, rusty metal gates; rotting wooden crates and an abandoned cistern cluttering up the yard. She wonders whether she will have the courage.

A young man wearing a cloak and cassock appears as if by magic from a house to the left of the gate. He is wearing a clerical collar whose whiteness sharply contrasts with the black of his clothes, the gray of the sky, the red brick of the building. Esther nods at him. He shakes the farmer’s hand. Nicolas, he says. I’m the parish priest. I’m the one who wrote to you.

Esther wipes away her tears with her coat sleeve. She does not want to go inside this building. She does not want to know another thing. Coming here was a terrible mistake. She is cold—shivering. Nicolas warms her a little with his smile. He has a strong, reassuring voice, a priestly voice, she thinks. Come in. Come in.

Esther cannot help but follow the young man into the slaughterhouse. Old, grimy tiles, a sloping concrete floor inset with drainage channels and a low railing. Metal railings, like the barriers you might find at a circus or in a stadium. She has seen enough. She wants to leave. She feels herself choking. There is no air. No light. Nothing but children’s cries. Not cries of pain. Cries of joy. Howls of joy, Mama, Mama, and suddenly her body is being kneaded by six hands, six arms, three faces are pressed against her, the suffocating warmth of happiness, the simple pleasure of the impossible in the evidence of the miracle, the first child says, I had a good sleep Mama, the second adds, me too, the third whispers, I thought I was in heaven, and they are so beautiful, and Esther cries, she cries with joy, her whole being cries out with joy in this slaughterhouse transfigured by the presence of Nicolas, by the dazzling light of the present. Of course, she hears nothing else, she no longer hears the outside world, she does not hear the doctor, her head was slammed so hard against the chestnut tree that she died instantly, she does not hear the gendarme, you were lucky you landed up in the long grass, she does not hear the farmer, all torn up by the windscreen, stammering, yes, I was lucky, she cannot hear, she cannot speak; in the pocket of her blouse they found a small scallop-edged photograph about two square inches, with writing on the back scrawled by childish hands.