The man moves the bottle in a circle in front of him, the neck held tightly in his fist. He’s still smiling, sturdily set on his short legs. Silence in the bar. Hard to tell if anyone’s even breathing anymore. The two girls and their giant have moved back towards the jukebox, behind the wide leaves of a big ficus plant.
When the glass explodes on the corner of the bar, a sort of gulp tightens every throat in the room. The blonde walks up, dishcloth in hand.
“Come on, Christian. Let those jerk-offs leave.”
“No, they’re not leaving like that. What do you think? Did you hear the way they talked about me? Look at them trying to act tough, those fucking queers! I’m just going to take care of them nicely. Those little shits will remember Christian Penot. They’ll go home crying to their whore of a mother, begging her to sew up their faces.”
Then a man walks in and leans on the bar between the threatening dwarf and the two boys, saying excuse me to all three without looking at any of them. Straight away, he orders a double whisky. He’s dressed in a grey wool coat and he places his hat on the bar, after first, with a very absorbed air, pushing away a few shards of glass with his fingertips. Jayne Mansfield watches him, openmouthed, mechanically wiping a glass, chest swelled with surprise. Her eyes seek out Penot’s, but he is sticking out his neck and standing on tiptoes as he addresses the intruder.
“Hey, what’s-yer-face, can’t you tell you’re in the way? We’re in the middle of a discussion here.”
The man ignores him. He asks again for his whisky.
“Fuck off somewhere else, you asshole. Do you understand or do I need to draw you a picture?”
Without turning round, almost without moving, the man elbows him in the face. Penot takes three steps back, staggering on his heels, then crouches down, his face covered by his hand, blood pissing between his fingers. The blonde starts yelling. She’s waving a crank over the beer pumps and around her neck fake gemstones rattle as they clatter into each other. She says she’s going to call the cops but doesn’t, then starts uttering insults, her big mouth flapping. Around the room, people are getting to their feet. Chair legs scrape on the floor, glasses are knocked over. The stranger walks up to Penot, who’s still holding his broken bottle, and crushes his wrist underfoot. The dwarf lets go of the bottleneck, and the man kicks it away.
“You know who I am?” the man asks, leaning over him.
Penot shakes his head. He’s holding his nose, and above his cupped hand his eyes roll, wide-eyed with panic. A kick in the ribs forces a squeal from him.
“So you don’t know who I am, huh? But I know you. I even know where you live. I know about the little girls too. See? I know. There are loads of people who know. Once they get past ten or eleven, you think they’re too old, don’t you?”
Penot closes his eyes. His face is covered with blood.
“But the cops turn a blind eye because you’re a snitch, right? And then there’s your brother, who was a pig, and a right bastard too, during the Occupation. So they don’t care, do they? They let you get away with the shit you do to little kids. But now your brother’s had his throat slit, they won’t have so many reasons to cover for you, will they?”
The man kicks him in the ribs with the point of his boot.
“Now fuck off. And you’d better take care, if you don’t want to end up like your asshole of a brother.”
Penot starts to get up as the blonde hands him a wet dishcloth to wipe his face. She helps him to his feet and accompanies him to the door, murmuring a few words of consolation. She is taller than him in her high heels, and looks like an adult cuddling a child who’s banged his head into a door.
“It’s alright, it’s over. There’ll be no scrap tonight,” the man tells the other customers. “That piece of shit just needed calming down. The next round’s on me.”
He rummages in his pocket and pulls out a wad of banknotes that he drops on the counter. People start chatting again, mezza voce. No-one dares move very much. And yet there are some big, strapping lads in here, their coat sleeves bulging with muscle, men with chests like percherons. Dockers, sailors, tough bastards. But all of them know a fight between gangsters when they see it: it’s as dangerous as a nest of snakes. You’d have to be mad to get mixed up in it.
Daniel’s hand is still draped on his friend’s shoulder. He does not move. He’s wondering who this man is with his greying hair and his impassive violence. Constructing theories, searching his memory. Nothing. The man turns towards them, with a smile of fake friendliness. You can tell he’s not the type of man who’s often in a good mood, with his long face, his broken nose, his dark thick brows, and those of eyes of his, sunk deep in his face, maybe grey, or blue. Not the kind of man you’d invite for a drink after hitting him in the belly. Above all, he is big, and his shoulders move with the supple solidity of a boxer.
“What are you drinking, lads?”
The blonde picks up the cash without a word then starts pouring. Three whiskies for these gentlemen. After that, she rushes between tables to water the troops.
“Thanks,” says Alain, lifting his glass. “We were up shit creek there.”
“He’d have slashed your faces. He’s a vicious bastard.”
“Why did you help us?” Daniel asks. “I mean . . .”
The man squints as he looks Alain up and down.
“You’re Auguste’s nephew, aren’t you? He told me you’d be here. And you must have come here to see me. Anyway, I wasn’t going to let that piece of shit shine up his ego by cutting you two to pieces. We all know that cunt here. He’s pure poison.”
“Is it true what you said about him?”
“What? The little girls? Course it’s true. He’s already been in the nick for that. It runs in the Penot family, that sort of shit. His brother was one of Poinsot’s henchmen here—you know, the French Gestapo. They had their torture chamber on the cours du Chapeau-Rouge. And that one, he used to get girls for the Krauts, and he’d have them himself beforehand. He’s the kind of man who indulges his vices fully when circumstances permit. And during the Occupation, all sorts of filth was permitted. Those bastards were like flowers growing in horseshit.”
Daniel tries to remember if Maurice has already told him about this. Poinsot? No, there’s nothing. He asks the man how he knows all this.
Jayne Mansfield is back behind the counter, listening as she pours drinks. The man shoots a look in her direction.
“Because I was there. Besides, loads of people know. They just keep their mouths shut.”
“Where were you?”
“Never you mind about that.”
They drink in silence. Daniel feels himself losing it a bit. Esophagus burning, eyes blurred with tears. He watches Alain, who’s squinting into the bottom of his glass, back hunched, almost slumped on the counter. Behind him, the conversations and the laughter are now nothing more than a murmur buzzing in his head. He feels hot, and he starts sweating in this sticky atmosphere, the air thick with smoke and warmth.
“What about you?” the man says. “What are you doing here? Oh yeah, I forgot: Algeria, huh?”
Alain drains his whisky and takes a deep breath before replying.
“Yeah. We’re trying to find a bit of courage before they send us to the slaughter. In three weeks.”
The man nods.
“What a pile of shit.”
“He told you, my uncle?”
“Yes. But it won’t be easy. I know a quartermaster on a Norwegian ship who owes me. He’s coming in tomorrow—it’s good timing. I’ll go and see him. He’ll be here three days, the time it takes to unload. Sometimes he takes an apprentice, for a month or two. You’ll be peeling potatoes and cleaning the bogs, but at least you won’t get your bollocks cut off. They’re going to Germany, Poland, Denmark, and England too. No-one will bother asking for your papers there, except in Poland, where you
should stay on board. I’ll need a photo and thirty thousand francs. That’s how much it costs for fake I.D.”
Alain turns his back on Daniel and rummages in his pocket for his wallet. Photo, money. He counts the notes. Daniel moves between them so he can hear and see better and maybe be noticed, but neither of them pays any attention to his presence.
“That’s quite a bit,” he says.
“Don’t worry, I’ve been saving. I wanted to buy a motorbike, but I think that can wait.”
The photos and the money vanish into the man’s trouser pocket. He checks his watch.
“I’d better get going. The day after tomorrow is Thursday. I’ll meet you at six in the evening at the Bambi Bar, a bit further on, near the cours du Médoc. I’ll introduce you to that guy. It’s a prossie bar, you’ll see, but he likes it, he’s a regular there. I’m Jacky, by the way.”
He gets up, shakes hands with them both and leaves. Daniel looks around. A panoramic sweep. Surely all this is just a backdrop, with a few extras waiting for the director to shout “Cut!” so they can leave the set and go home? He wishes he had his frame with him so he could contain the scene and give himself the illusion that he is controlling it, but he can more or less imagine what it would look like: a desolate vision, under a wan light. Alain remains motionless, staring vacantly at the mirror behind the bar, where the bottles are multiplied. Further off, Jayne Mansfield is smoking a cigarette and sipping at a glass of port, heavy-lidded, her mascara damp.
Daniel pushes his glass away and turns up his collar.
“I think I’ve seen enough for tonight. I’m going home.”
Outside, the wind blows into his face. It has stopped raining but he shrinks inside himself, hands in pockets, and does not see the sodden city glowing weakly around him, its lights almost extinguished. Alain is running behind him but he does not slow down to wait for him.
“Shit, what’s up with you?”
“Nothing. You’re not taking the same boat as me. Much good may it do you.”
“I’m not going to Algeria. There’s no way I’m going to risk my neck for those colonialist assholes.”
“You’ve spent too long listening to Sara. You’ll be a deserter.”
“No. A conscientious objector it’s called. I wouldn’t even set foot in that hell. Anyway, Sara’s right. We’re just cannon fodder, for the government. All wars are the same. What about you? Are you really going? Just like that, unquestioningly? Didn’t Irène say anything?”
“We’ve already talked this to death. You know perfectly well what I think about all that. But what you’re doing is pointless. Better just to go there and do what we can.”
“Oh yeah? And what exactly do you think we can do, over there? Sabotage the trucks? Block up the missile launchers with pamphlets? Or maybe you’re going to gun down your own officers? In three months you’ll be like they are. You’ve seen the others, you know what they say. Either that or you’ll go to jail, and you’ll be no use to anyone then.”
“We can make the others aware that—”
“No. The war—this war—when it gets hold of you, it’s as if you’ve gone mad. It eats you alive. Have you seen the men who came back? Perez? Bernard? You remember what he was saying, Perez, before he left, with that big gob of his? And the blocked trains, and the C.R.S.8? What was the point of all that?”
Daniel cannot think of a reply. Perez, a tough man and a supporter of both the C.G.T.9 and the Party, had wanted to foment rebellion among the conscripts in order to bring the war to an end. He found himself trekking through the jebel, setting fire to villages, plus other things that he refused to talk about. In fact, he didn’t talk much at all anymore, and slept even less, or so it was said.
“I don’t know.”
Alain grabs his shoulder and shakes him.
“Let’s talk about it another time. We’re not going to fall out, are we?”
Daniel shoves him away. They burst out laughing then start walking again without speaking. When they cross the swing bridge, Daniel looks over at the ships berthed in the wet docks.
“I hope it works out, your ship. I want to hear all about the ports and the sea. And the girls . . .”
After the swing bridge, they are swallowed up by the darker street and they begin speaking and laughing more quietly, as if in this gloom they dare not make any noise for fear of extinguishing the few sad lamps suspended above the cobblestones.
7Maurice Thorez, leader of the French Communist Party from 1930 until his death in 1964.
8The Compagnies Républicaines de Sécurité is the riot control division and general reserve of the French National Police. It was infiltrated by Communists in the late 1940s, just after its inception, but their influence was reduced thereafter.
9Confédération Générale du Travail, a major French trade union, affiliated to the Communist Party. During the Algerian war, it supported Algerian aspirations for independence.
8
Do you love me?” She always asked me that, Suzanne, on Sunday mornings when we were lazing in bed in my room on rue Beccaria. “You never say it to me,” she would insist. “You’re supposed to say things like that, you know.” I asked her to shut up and go back to sleep, and afterwards we would go and have a bite at Hortense, a greasy spoon behind the place d’Aligre which on Sunday lunchtimes served the best blanquette in Paris. After that, we would take a walk down to the canal and then come back to bed and make the springs creak again because she liked that, Suzanne, she was always asking for it and she knew what to do to put lead in my pencil. She told me that she learned all that with an American soldier she fell for in August ’44 and who, for about ten days, had made her see all the colors, as she put it. “It weren’t only Paris what was liberated, I’ll tell you that for nothing!” she recalled enthusiastically.
So we fucked until exhaustion set in and about six in the evening she’d have her hand between her thighs pretending she was in pain because we’d been going at it too hard, simpering as she whined, and then she’d get up to wash herself at the little sink, giving me a good look at what she was doing. Sometimes that got me going again in spite of the fatigue, but she had to go back to her place in the 19th, where she lived with her mother who’d been sent half-mental by the death of her husband in captivity and was constantly threatening to throw herself out of the window and lived like a hermit most of the time in a room with the shutters closed because daylight gave her migraines, or so she claimed. Suzanne looked after this poor woman, terrified by her suicide threats even though, deep down, she didn’t really believe them. “Well, I’d better go see if she’s jumped,” she’d say sometimes in a casual voice as she was leaving, but she didn’t hang around all the same, and nothing, not even her insatiable desire for romping in the sheets, would have kept her back a single minute longer.
She worked in a foundry in Aubervilliers, making aluminium saucepans. She spent the whole day in front of a metal-stamping press and at twenty-five she was already half-deaf and she talked really loud just like she screamed really loud when she was coming, and on sunny days, when the window was open, the whole building must have heard her. In fact, I’m pretty sure they must have heard her on the other side of the boulevard, even over the traffic.
We didn’t feel anything for each other except a sort of camaraderie, but that did mean we had stuff to talk about and we would discuss politics as we walked through Paris and she would take me to Galeries Lafayette to daydream among the aisles, trying on hats or feeling up lingerie. Sometimes, in a little bistro where we’d go to eat and dance a bit on Saturday nights, we would meet up with her friends from the Communist Party, among them a woman of my age who’d come back from Ravensbrück. Her name was Hélène and she smiled all the time and had a lovely clear laugh, huge dark eyes and brown hair that fell down in waves over her shoulders. She was maybe the prettiest woman in Paris. She should have been
in the movies, she’d have shown the stars of the era a thing or two. I didn’t dare speak in her presence. I watched her on the sly, trying to understand what made her gaze so sweet, and sometimes our eyes would meet and what I saw then would take my breath away: in those depths, all I could see was pain. Absolute misery.
She knew, about me. The others had told each of us about the other. But we never talked about it. Sometimes an allusion, a news item read in the paper, would bring the monster rising to the surface, but straight away a rush of frivolity would shove its mouth back below the water and once again we’d start to laugh, drink, dance. Life went on, and we had to live.
And in moments like that I desired all women and I wanted to eat everything and drink everything, forgetting myself in this noisy jubilation, letting myself be swept away by this whirlwind in the hope perhaps that it would tear me up from the depths where I’d been thrown years before.
I remember the evening when Hélène asked me to dance. She was a really good dancer. Her long legs lifted her up, sent her spinning with so much grace and power that she never seemed to feel tired. Her partner was a man who must have been her boyfriend at the time, Jacques, a teacher who’d fought in the Resistance in Limousin. He was younger than her and he joked around all the time, a warm and friendly man, and also a skilled dancer. When they took the floor together, people would often move to the sides to watch them. I can see them now in that cellar with an orchestra playing jazz, the crowd clapping their hands in rhythm, the two of them alone in the world and me in mycorner unable to stop myself loving that woman and drinking like a fish to drown out the feelings that scared me.
One evening, she came up to me and held out her hand. It was the outdoors dance near the Bastille, and the musicians onstage had embarked on a series of slow waltzes to give the dancers a rest after the javas and tangos. Hélène held me tight to her with her hand on my waist and I let her lead me because I danced like a lump of wood, especially when I’d been drinking. And especially if I was dancing with her. I could feel the fabric of her dress under my fingers, soaked with sweat because she’d been dancing non-stop for nearly an hour. Her hair flew into my nose, my mouth. From time to time, as we spun, I saw Suzanne wagging her finger at us warningly, smilingly, and I responded with exaggerated winks or grimaces. We danced. Hélène’s ankles and thighs sometimes touched mine, pushing me and leading me and, furtively, her belly was brushing against my crotch. All I could think about was that body against mine, that skin a few millimeters from mine, damp and warm, and now and then I would look down to glimpse her face with her eyes almost closed and I could think of nothing to say to her, not even a remark about my dancing or some gallant nonsense, the kind of platitudes that usually came so easily to me.
After the War Page 10