After the War

by Hervé Le Corre

  Carrère smiles slyly. With the back of his hand, he dusts his jacket where Darlac grabbed him.

  “I get it, Darlac. Everyone gets it, cos everyone knows you. Your friends, and now your family, are off limits. We know. But you better be careful all the same: you think you’re safe in your fortress cos you’ve got the gangsters by the balls, but your castle’s built on sand. And your cousin probably wasn’t much better than you, so I couldn’t care less if him and his wife got roasted alive. But I don’t think that kid had anything to with them. I think there’s something going on here, and either I or someone else is going to find out what it is. So maybe we’ll talk about this later. Now go. Adichats, as they say where I’m from. I’ve got work to do.”

  He turns his back on Darlac and walks quickly across the square. He talks with two firemen, greets the photographer who’s rewinding his film, then disappears behind a red lorry.

  Darlac is stunned. That quiet, slender little man with his calm teacher’s voice packs quite a punch, gently informing you that you’re the class shit and you’re going to fail your exams and there’s nothing you can do about it. He checks his watch and sees it’s nearly 5 a.m. Then, gradually, he gathers his wits, regains some lucidity. His senses put him back in contact with the darkness, the damp air, the cold wind that makes him shiver.

  He decides to walk to his car. Runs, almost. It makes him look like a fugitive. Not a good idea. He has to pull himself together. So he turns around and stares back at where he’s just come from, the square invaded by vehicles, an ambulance approaching, and little by little, very slowly, he distances himself from all this shit, contempt taking the place of fear that he might get sucked into it.

  He opens the door and collapses on the seat of this silent car, its windows tinted with mud. He’s sickened by the mere thought of going home and facing the questioning gaze and hostile pout of madame and the silent, swaying provocation of her hips. So he drives towards the Marché des Capucins to drink something hot or strong, and maybe eat something heavy and salted. He feels this desire in his gut. Violent. After that, he’ll go to see Francis, his brother-in-arms, the toughest and most faithful of all, to put together a plan of action, a strategy, to try to eliminate this dangerous ghost, this invisible killer. Make the best of a shitty situation.

  14Fantomas was a famous fictional French serial killer, masked and mysterious. Judex was similarly mysterious and powerful, but fought on the side of good, avenging evil.

  12

  André puts down the newspaper and looks for something on his desk that he can grab to keep his hands busy. He finds an eraser and starts crushing and kneading it between his fingers then pulls it apart into tiny fragments, each of which he picks up and reduces to a soft pinkish dust that scatters over the pages of his accounts book. The kid was only fifteen or sixteen. She was found under the bed, in the ruins of the building that had housed a little wine bar. She had probably been hidden away in a first-floor bedroom, the window and door both bolted.

  The newspaper lies in front of him, its pages open, and in the blur of his vacant gaze André sees an immense army there, arranged in perfectly straight rows, ready to invade the world and kill anything that moves. An infestation of insects governed by a perverse will. Each time his eyes stray back to the article, he sees again this armed quadrilateral, every word smashing him over the head with the butt of its rifle, pushing him back and stabbing him with a bayonet; each time, he is beaten by gloved fists and thrown to the ground where boots assail him. He is lynched by the fury of those words that he himself provoked and he has the feeling that these executioners lined up in columns are claiming him as one of them.

  He feels submerged, drawn inch by inch towards the bottom, caught in a quagmire that is slowly sucking him down, and he looks around him at the gray décor, the shelves, the rolls of fabric piled up to the dirty ceiling, all this reassuring dreary sadness that is moving away from him. At the end of the counter, hunched over an order, old Bessière looks like a fading memory. He is seized by the desire to stretch out his hand and scream for help, beg someone to drag him out of this quicksand, pull him onto dry land so he can get his breath back and climb far from the edge of the abyss.

  But he can tell now that he no longer belongs to this world because everything seems to be darkening around him, losing its shape and color. He has known it since the day he died, but the illusion in which he has been floating all these years vanishes again. He tries to concentrate on the photograph of Venice, but it no longer evokes anything: no face, no voice, no regret. Suddenly he has nothing. Past and future are gone. He tries to stand up, but dizziness grabs him and knocks him down. He falls to his knees, hanging on to the table, and the boss looks alarmed and asks him what’s wrong, his voice sounding muffled, echoing as if inside a cathedral. He pulls himself to his feet and meets Raymond’s fearful stare—jaw hanging, a pair of scissors immobile in his hand—then grabs his coat and walks to the exit amid a fog of voices and images blurred by his tears. He hears himself say, “I need to go out. I’ll be back,” and walks down the street, along the narrow sidewalk, obliged to step aside for people coming the other way, to meander between cars and delivery vans, under changeable skies that smell of rain and the rising tide.

  He enters the first café he comes to, the warmth and noise of voices cradling him as if he’s crashed into a padded wall, his head sinking into this paralysing softness.

  Coffee with rum. Telephone.

  The taste of the alcohol sickens him and the too-hot liquid burns his mouth.

  “I would like to speak to Inspecteur Mazeau. Tell him it’s André.” He waits. In the receiver he hears vague office sounds, voices calling. The world grows clear around him. Behind the bar, he can see the details on the wine-bottle labels, the glass gleaming under lamplight, the dimness of the mirror behind the shelves.

  “Yes. Fuck, what have you done?”

  Mazeau’s voice low, embarrassed.

  “I need to see you.”

  “Yeah, I need to see you too. I have one or two things to tell you, you fucking idiot. Couldn’t you have waited a bit?”

  “Waited for what? I can’t wait because I don’t have much time. I won’t always have the strength for this. Maybe I don’t have it now, anymore.”

  “You’ve really fucked this up, you know that? Be very careful. I’ll see you tomorrow. Call me tonight.”

  “No. Today. You have to explain what happened. If not, I’ll hand myself in. In one hour. I can’t bear this anymore, I—”

  “Alright, alright. Calm down. Tonight, at the Concorde, about eight o’clock. I can’t before then.”

  A click in his ear. André hangs up too, pushes away the half empty cup and pays and leaves without hearing the waiter calling him back so he can give him his change.

  All day long he walks around town with his quick, almost athletic stride. All day long he tires out his body so he doesn’t have to think about that kid he burned alive, so he can empty his mind of the haunting vision of her charred body, the hallucination filling his nostrils with that terrible stench. But other images come to him, all mixing together, the shapes he saw with comrades in a corner of the crematorium, like a huge insect with a rough, excoriated shell, which they had first not even realized was a pile of human bodies, perhaps refusing to accept that what remained there could once have been creatures of flesh and blood. He tries to fill his eyes with glimpsed faces, pretty women in elegant hats and coats in the cours de l’Intendance; he attempts to ward off the horror by stopping outside the shop windows on rue Sainte-Catherine with their bright lights and their elegant newness; women, as always, with painted lips and light-hearted smiles, and he thinks, maybe because he’s crazy, that one of these angels will touch his finger and save him from hell by sending him to a world of silence and softness, but nothing happens, of course, so he wastes time in the labyrinth of streets in the old town and hears the sadness of
the day pouring into gutters down dark back-alleys.

  He hurries, covered in sweat, eyes full of tears, running without knowing how he came here, through empty streets he knew as a child and stops, panting, outside the house where he grew up, waiting for someone to come out. His heart stops when a kid emerges with a dog on a leash, his cap pulled down to his ears, and he sees himself again haring over the big, loose cobblestones or sitting and playing in the angle of a door frame. So he leaves this neighborhood of dark houses, almost at a run, before anyone else comes out, and ends up on the quai des Chartrons, drowning in the din of traffic. He looks up at the ships’ bows and chimneys and white forecastles lifted by the high tide under a remorseless sun that holds the clouds apart and makes the city’s colors and puddles all shine.

  Suddenly, as he starts walking again, they are all there, around him, staring at him, whispering, and he sees them, all those that his raw memory cannot stop bobbing to the surface like drowned bodies rising from the bottom of a pond.

  They follow him relentlessly. Remember, remember, you haven’t forgotten, have you? Their voices echo in his very footsteps, the dead and the living, and every street corner, every square, is a theater of shadows and regrets where a vague pantomime plays, and he sees them both again crossing the place des Quinconces, holding hands, the little boy in short trousers and a sky-blue short-sleeved shirt, her in a mauve lace dress with a red belt. My God, he mutters, walking towards this mirage, knowing perfectly well that no magical being is listening to him and that no-one will turn to him and exclaim: “Look, Daniel, it’s your papa!”

  My son.

  He thinks of Daniel, in that garage, the day he finally decided to approach him; Daniel who had not recognized him and yet who stared at him so intensely. And who thinks he’s dead, or knows it. He sought the child’s face in his young man’s features, but did not manage to superimpose the two images. All day and all night afterwards, he trembled. How to tell him? What to tell him?

  He thinks again about the light body he lifted up onto the roof. “Wait here. And whatever you do, don’t move. Maurice will come to fetch you. Now hide!” He sees the eyes wide with fear, the tears welling there but not falling. He remembers the bang the bolt made when he shut the skylight.

  Again he starts walking like a fugitive, occasionally looking behind him, and little by little his shadows leave him alone with his remorse and he trudges on under the changing sky, blinded by the light or hurrying back bent under vast rainclouds that force him to take shelter beneath shop awnings, in the murmur of conversations and the loud hammering of rain on canvas.

  On this sidewalk, across from the Saint-André hospital, he had been happy, holding them both by the hand. He tries to recapture this sensation, remembers a Sunday—yes, it must have been a Sunday because that was the day he went with them to the house most often: the rest of the week he was slouched round card tables or lying in girls’ beds—and that Sunday they were going for a ride on a merry-go-round or going to see a puppet show in the public gardens, and the boy was jumping around, talking constantly, amazed by everything, falling silent when they passed groups of laughing German soldiers, holding tight to his mother’s legs. He wishes he had some real memories, the kind you can date and savour and relive by embellishing them, but all that remains in his mind are blue skies deepening between clouds heavy with rain, the babbling of a little boy, the beauty of a woman whose face he sometimes struggles to recall. He has lived through so much since then, and been so far from life, sunk to the edge of nothingness, that his memory is an archipelago where only a few jagged rocky islands show through the surface. Reefs where, in nightmares, he crashes and is torn to pieces.

  He has come here for the second time since his return to the city. The first time, he fell to his knees between two cars to vomit, his head exploding with pain as if he’d been clubbed. Groggy. Breathless. A man had come over from the other side of the street to help him, holding out his hand and asking if he should call for an ambulance. André had sat up and seen the worried face leaning down over him, but had let go of the hand that was holding him and had fallen against the side of a car. He’d asked to be left alone, said it would pass, had thanked the man. “Are you sure? I can call someone, you know. I can’t leave you like this in the street.”

  So there were still men capable of helping someone who’d fallen to the ground even if they didn’t know them, even if there was no-one around to see, moved only by a deep instinct. So that, too, must have survived?

  Seeing him on his feet, and more or less steady, the man had walked away, sombre and unremarkable, and André had watched him disappear into the crowd of other passers-by before starting to walk, himself, on that same sidewalk.

  It’s the two-story house, with its white-painted, peeling shutters, in this street: rue Desfourniel. There are the second-floor windows, with the attic where they stored junk, the ceiling so low you couldn’t even stand up. With that skylight, invisible from the street, opening on the roof that sloped down over the little garden. The kid was well hidden, pressed tight against the chimney. With Olga, as they were led to the cars, he hadn’t dared turn around, never mind look up. And then the convoy had started up and rounded the street corner and everything had disappeared.

  André remains there, standing on the sidewalk, staring at the closed windows, the broken line of the rooftops against the pure blue sky. He feels as if he can no longer move from here, as if he were a prisoner of this place and the block of time in which he is now rooted, like those prehistoric monsters discovered in the frozen earth, intact but dead. He wishes he could summon the ghosts and walk with them back the way he came, venting all his wretched guilt to them. It would be enough to feel them close to him, vibrating gently as they know how to do, to walk towards the house and climb up the pale stone staircase to the apartment and push open the door, so he could perhaps hold him close again and start all over the way it was before the catastrophe, except this time he would stay with them and warn them and get them both out of there, my love, my little boy . . . He whispers these pathetic words and nothing happens, of course, only a breath of air that makes him shudder and quake. And anyway, he knows that the ghosts come when they want to, a little humming crowd or a solitary shadow; they were there earlier, urgent, distressed, absorbing all the air around him so he could hardly breathe, and now they are leaving him in his absolute solitude, trembling with cold, incapable of tearing himself from this street corner.

  In the afternoon he goes into cafés and attempts several times to get drunk, but the cognacs he tries to swallow come back up, choking him, burning his throat, or he vomits the glasses of wine he’s drunk as soon as he gets outside. It’s been this way for a while: he can’t drink alcohol anymore. A feeling of disgust takes hold of him and nausea grips his stomach, or his throat swells up and he suffocates and has to spit it out again. Doesn’t matter how the drink smells in its glass, grand cru or cheap plonk, fine whisky or homemade hooch. The waiters watch him from behind their counters, sometimes laughing at this nobody who can’t handle his booze, often suspicious or concerned because he could choke to death there or puke in the middle of the bar, teary-eyed, greenish-faced, staggering as if he were already pissed.

  The smell of burned bodies, stuck at the back of his throat. He has the impression he can smell it on his clothes. As if he’s wearing it. Or maybe it’s even inside him, as if he himself stinks of the flesh from all those pyres.

  Finally he manages to get a little bit drunk. In a bar close to the university, full of loud students angrily denouncing Algeria, he drinks three kirs, which add to what he’s been able to hold down from the previous attempts. He feels the world grow softer around him, the floor more yielding beneath his feet. The yells and laughs of the young people become muffled and the air turns to cotton wool, and when he looks around him everything seems fresh and curious, distant and flat like a cinema screen. Hazy, interchangeable faces. Phoney beings. />
  By the time he gets out of there, night has fallen. He’s shocked to realize he’s spent nearly two hours sitting at that table and now has no idea what he was thinking about all that time, because it wasn’t even about the young girl he killed. He starts walking quickly, to sober himself up, because this drunkenness is no help to him and it’s drowning his brain in a mist that suddenly worries him. He walks for a while before arriving at the place de la République, where the café de la Concorde is located, the scene for his meeting with Mazeau. He is more than an hour early, so he walks past the bar twice, observes his surroundings—parked cars, motionless figures—and looks through the window at customers sitting at tables or standing at the counter. He senses a trap—a dragnet, as they call it in the papers. He thinks that the cop might well want to catch the arsonist of place Nansouty because it would be good for his promotion prospects. Because we are always betrayed, by ourselves as well as others.

  So he turns, goes, comes back, stops at a bus shelter to observe any suspicious movements. He decides to intercept Mazeau before he goes in so they can talk while they’re walking and he won’t be cornered in the café. He feels fatigue rising through his legs, a burning venom mixed with the alcohol. He would like to go to bed. To sleep, perhaps.

  André leans on the post of the bus shelter and closes his eyes but opens them almost instantly because he’s afraid of nodding off while standing and falling to the ground, the way he does sometimes. He rubs his eyes like a sleepy kid and that’s when he sees them: there are three of them, walking briskly up the street, almost running, shoulders hunched, faces hidden under hats. Mazeau is in the lead. It’s started to drizzle so they keep their heads down and don’t look around. Mazeau and another cop enter the Concorde while the third crosses the street and stands opposite the café, lighting a cigarette then melting into the darkness, leaning against the trunk of a plane tree. All André can see of him is the glow of his cigarette whenever he takes a drag. His heart speeds up, hurting him. His entire thoracic cage hardens with this pain and his breath shortens.