“Beg your pardon?”

“I’m looking for my brother.”

“He lives there?”

“I don’t know.”

“Maybe yes, maybe no,” said the girl.

The Nobel laureate gave them a curious look, then in a mock-solemn tone he declared, “When you’re looking for your brother, you’re looking for everybody!”

He translated the sentence himself into hesitant French,

“Quand vous cherchez votrè, vous cherchez tout le monde!”

He burst out laughing and they laughed with him, then he walked away, waving goodbye.

XI

Starved Rock

Before they left Chicago, around five p.m., they went to a library because La Grande Sauterelle wanted to “borrow” a book. Jack found a Petit Robert dictionary of proper names, and in the entry for Saul Bellow he read the following excerpt from The Adventures of Augie March:

I am a sort of Columbus of those near-at-hand and believe you can come to them in this immediate terra incognita that spreads out in every gaze. I may well be a flop at this line of endeavor. Columbus too thought he was a flop, probably, when they sent him back in chains. Which didn’t prove there was no America.

LATER, ON INTERSTATE 80, he recited the quotation to the girl while she was driving.

“It gives you a funny feeling,” she said.

“What do you mean?” he asked.

He was sitting in the back seat.

“It’s as if Saul Bellow is telling us we’re on the right path and that he’s wishing us good luck,” she said.

He slowly got out of his seat and, approaching her from behind, gave her a kiss on the neck; she started and veered slightly to the right, which landed two wheels on the soft shoulder for a second, then she got the Volks back on the road.

He apologized.

“It doesn’t matter,” she said. “Maybe I’m a little tired.”

“Want me to drive?”

“No, no. We’re nearly at the Starved Rock State Park.”

He took the navigator’s seat and began to study the road maps.

“We’re very close,” he said. “Twenty kilometres at most.”

“ It’s a very special place,” she said. “Do you know the history of the Illinois?”

“No.”

“The Illinois don’t exist anymore; they’re a vanished tribe . . . Do you know the history of the Mississippi?”

“I know about the expedition of Louis Jolliet and Père Marquette.”

“Okay,” said the girl, “but they stopped at the Arkansas River. The final part of the Mississippi was explored by Robert Cavelier de La Salle. La Salle’s lieutenant, Henri de Tonti, built a fort — Fort St. Louis — at the peak of a rock, and that’s the rock we’ll see at Starved Rock State Park.”

For some years, Fort St. Louis had been New France’s main trading post in the Mississippi Valley. La Grande Sauterelle knew a number of the figures who had left their mark in the region: Lamothe-Cadillac, Henri de Tonti (known as the man with the iron hand because he had a hook in place of the hand he had lost in a war), Nicolas Perrot, Pierre-Charles Le Sueur, Greysolon du Lhut, Père Louis Hennepin, Pierre Pépin, Radisson and Des Groseilliers: she knew these people and a number of others, but she was more interested in the fate of a tribe that used to live around the rock: the Illinois.