After the War

by Hervé Le Corre

  “You’re not going to wait for the others?”

  “What others? They’re coming, the others. Don’t worry. Our orders are to comb the ground. There are choppers coming.”

  They run in zigzags through a dense thicket of low bushes that cling to the canvas of their trousers as they go, hundreds of skeletal fingers trying to hold them back. The sun is ahead of them, laying a burning hand on their chests, licking their faces like a furnace. Lower down, the platoon has split into three groups and is climbing towards them. Daniel is distracted by the clinking of his straps as he runs. He does not feel anything, neither fatigue nor fear. He has probably just killed a man and he is running towards his corpse without thinking about anything. Least of all death.

  “Look up there!” the sergent shouts. “Look at those cunts running away!”

  Daniel notices bushes shaking in all directions near the ridge line. Castel empties a magazine at this movement while yelling insults at the retreating rebels. He kneels down to reload his submachine gun.

  “Come over here,” he says. “Let’s see what you got.”

  They enter the undergrowth, training their guns all around in the hot darkness that surrounds them and Daniel sees the man’s body, lying on its side. The top of his jacket is soaked with blood. Daniel slowly approaches to see where he hit him. He has no cheek or jaw left. Something twisted and bloody is hanging from his face.

  “Watch it,” Castel whispers. “They might have booby-trapped it.”

  Daniel turns towards him, incredulous.

  “With a grenade underneath. Pin out, just the lever supported. You move the body and it blows your head off. I’ll go. Follow me.”

  Castel straddles the man, crouching down and slowly passing his hand under his legs, under his torso. Just as he stands up to say something, the gunner makes a rattling noise and his legs move. Castel jumps backwards, catching hold of a branch and swearing.

  “Fuck, he’s not dead!”

  Daniel starts to tremble. He points his gun at the wounded man’s head, but he feels as if his arms are incapable of any movement except for this trembling that runs from his shoulders to his hands.

  The sergent grabs the man’s shirt and lifts him up, leaning his back against a tree trunk. The man half opens his eyes, moves his head slightly. The torn-away part of his face drips blood. He groans, tries to speak.

  Daniel moves closer.

  “Will he make it?”

  Castel looks up at him, surprised, then shrugs.

  “No. Impossible. Have you seen him? It took off half his face.”

  “You can repair that kind of thing though, can’t you?”

  “Yeah, right. I’ll call the surgeon and we’ll book him a nice room in a hospital, with a pretty nurse to jerk him off. Give me a fucking break! He’s going to die, simple as. One of our men got killed back there, for fuck’s sake. What more do you need? What if it turns out this guy shot him? You’re not going to pin a medal to his rotting corpse, are you? This is war, lad, you don’t seem to have figured that out yet. We didn’t do all this just so he could pull through. He doesn’t even know he’s dead already. He’s trying to speak. Maybe cos he can’t shut his mouth anymore.”

  Castel laughs silently at his own witticism. Then he says nothing and stares at the man, who is breathing feebly, head leaning to the side, eyes half closed. They hear the tramping of the patrol moving closer and the voice of the lieutenant asking: “So? Where are we?”

  The sergent loads his sub-machine gun and fires three bullets into the man on the ground. His body jumps at each impact and rolls over onto its side. Daniel would like to scream in this racket and then in the silence that follows, but his throat remains knotted, rough as rope.

  “Any other stupid ideas you want to share? You started the work, I finished it. Don’t tell me you only shot at him earlier to scare him off, right? Don’t tell me you practice shooting every day to impress the birds at the fair when you’ve gone back to your miserable hometown. No-one forced you to do that. You were really happy when the lieutenant gave you the Garand, and you looked after it the way you look after your own balls. So? I’m not interested in your fucking moods. You understand?”

  A caporal arrives, along with a dozen men, all out of breath, while the others continue climbing the slope. He glances casually at the corpse then leans over the machine gun to examine it.

  “Russki-made,” says the sergent. “Serious shit. This thing never jams and it’s accurate. The Vietnamese nailed us easily with those. But they knew how to fight, not like these fellouze bastards.”

  The men push the corpse with their feet or with the barrels of their guns like a bunch of monkeys who don’t understand what death is. Some of them hiss insults then stand around, without moving, perhaps taking advantage of the shade.

  “It was Delbos who got him,” says the sergent. “He’ll pay for his round when we get back.”

  The others congratulate him. Pat him on the back, tell him well done for avenging Declerck.

  “You see? In war we’re all the same, when it comes down to it . . . Yesterday you almost got into a scrap with him, and today you shoot the son of a bitch who killed him.”

  The man who says this, his face close to Daniel’s, eyes staring into his eyes, is called Dumas, or Duprat—Daniel can’t remember. He stinks of sweat and rotten teeth, and his eyes appear by turns battered and wide open, which Daniel thinks gives him the twisted, unpredictable look of a dangerous madman, so he wrestles free from his grip and promises everyone a drink, and the mere idea that cold liquid might fill his mouth and flow down his throat suddenly feels like a daydream, confusing his mind so completely that he has to walk out into the sunlight to rid himself of it. He wipes the sweat and dust from his face and looks up at the summit of the hill, where the men are traipsing, and above it the sky is so blue it looks hard, like the bottom of a plate that has just come out of a kiln.

  He joins the others as they travel across the ridge line, looking out for Giovanni without finding him. One of the Parisians, Gérard, tells him that the lieutenant ordered Giovanni and another soldier to stay behind with Declerck’s body, and to look after the bags too, because they were just carrying out a quick reconnaissance mission before going back. The ambush mission was cancelled. Choppers cancelled too, so no combing of the area. Apparently there was going to be a big operation in the coming days.

  “So I heard you got the shooter?”

  “Yeah, I got him. I didn’t kill him, but I got him.”

  The Parisian doesn’t understand.

  “He was still alive when we got there. A bit of a mess, but alive. It was Castel who finished him off.”

  “He did that?”

  “I started, he finished.”

  “Fuck. But all the same . . .”

  Daniel stops to light a cigarette, letting the column leave him behind, and as he starts walking again he tries to put his mind back in working order. Eyes to the ground, he does not notice the red-soiled valley that stretches out below him to the east, studded with rocky outcrops like teeth in the mouth of a monster. He tries to recollect the face of the man he shot, but the memory fades as soon as the image forms in his mind and he is left with only the vision of the corpse on the ground and the men prodding it with their boots.

  For two hours they patrol the other side of the hill and find nothing, vainly scanning the horizon from various high points and searching bushes, but all that ever emerges is the odd snake, which they crush with the butt of a rifle. And when the lieutenant yells at them to be quiet, the silence covers them like a veil, heavy and oppressive, and they find themselves alone, guns hanging from their hands in this empty land where even the southerly wind seems to have fled.

  In the trucks, on the way back to their quarters, they say nothing, worn out, heat-dazed, suffocated by the exhaust fumes from the vehicle jolting along in front
of them, black smoke pouring from its asshole in an endless flood of diarrhea, wheels raising tons of dust. They protect themselves by wrapping their large scarves around their faces, which makes them look like Tuaregs or the Mujahideen, as if this war were forcing them to resemble their enemy.

  Night falls almost as soon as they enter the command post. They jump heavily from the trucks, then drag themselves over to their quarters, shaking the dust from their clothes with exaggerated exclamations.

  Daniel looks everywhere for Giovanni, finally finding him in the shack that serves as an infirmary, helping to wash Declerck’s barechested corpse, which lies, imposingly, on a trestle table. It seems to Daniel that, at this moment, the dead man occupies all the space in the room, making it hard for anyone to move around him. The corpse is supposed to be taken to town by jeep tomorrow morning. It will need an escort—half-track and all that crap—because the thirty-kilometer trip there is infamously hairy. The nurse speaks to him without looking up from what he’s doing, softly wiping the ragged edges of the bullet’s exit wound with a cloth.

  “Before he starts stinking,” the man explains. “In this heat.”

  Daniel seeks out Giovanni’s eyes, but his friend remains focused on his task, holding a bowl full of brownish, muddy water with blood clots floating in it. So he watches Giovanni taking care of the corpse, the same man he wanted to kill just yesterday, removing his dirty shirt, delicately cleaning his white, marbled skin with a flannel, smoothing back his dust-grey hair. He watches this dead man, whose ignorant hatred had seemed to drive him through life, this brute whose family could say, as they mourned, that he was shot in the back by those Arab dogs when he wasn’t hurting anyone. His view of this pale, muscular body is strangely superimposed on the image of the scrawny, copper-skinned machine-gunner he shot that afternoon, and he feels as if he has walked on one of those landmines they’re always warning you about, that explodes only when you remove your foot from it to take the next step. And he thinks the only way of escaping it is to jump as far ahead as possible. To end up in pieces rather than dying on the spot.

  21Slang term for fellaghas, another word for the armed Algerian nationalists.

  22“J’attendrai” was a popular French song recorded by Rina Ketty in 1938. The quoted lyric means “I will always wait for your return.”

  23A toast to the 1905 French law separating church and state.

  24The F.L.N. is the Algerian National Liberation Front. Katiba is the Arab word for a battalion or company of rebel soldiers.

  25“Man is at sea. A sailor since childhood, / He’s been battling hard against dark chance. / In rain or squalls he must go out, he must leave . . .”

  26From Louis Aragon’s poem, “Est-ce ainsi que les hommes vivent?” (“Is This How Men Live?”). These lines can be translated as: “It was an unreasonable time / We had put the dead on the table / We saw wolves as dogs / Everything changed pole and shoulder / Was the play funny or not? / If I didn’t play my role well / That’s because I didn’t understand it at all.”

  27The Communist Party newspaper in France, at the time.

  28American-made rifle, equipped with a scope, sometimes used by snipers during the Algerian war.

  16

  Mazeau has not shown up in the department for the last week. Rumor is that he caught it while he was arresting someone, that he had to stop by the Saint-André hospital to check that, apart from the two broken ribs and the dislocated jaw, he was fine. His men don’t know who did that to him. He went in there solo. An informer, apparently, whom he tried catching with his team one evening, and then met face to face the next day. A big, tough man who knocked three detectives to the ground outside the prison. A giant, some say. Think about it: he scattered cops like pins in a bowling alley. Unafraid of anything or anyone. And there’s no way they can shoot the bastard, because they need him to talk. There are a few theories about the fugitive’s identity—they know a few massive bad men who hang around in the area—but after double-checking, it turns out these crackpots all have iron-clad alibis.

  Darlac wanted to know what scent that joker had picked up. He ferreted about, buying drinks for the pimps in the Vice Squad who kept checking their tie knots in the bar mirrors every five minutes or eyeing the time on their gold-plated watches or just smiling slyly at him as if to say: “What are you after, pal? We don’t know anything, unlike you. The kid who burned, we didn’t know her, and we left Crabos in peace cos he wasn’t bothering anyone.” He soft-soaped novice detectives, buying them a coffee to get them to talk, handing them the sugar bowl, offering them his cigarettes, but those morons didn’t know anything either, nada, fuck-all, they just stared at him surprised and suspicious, their eyes shining in the flame of the lighter held by the commissaire, and the worst thing was that it was true: they really didn’t know anything, didn’t understand anything, like kids in a nursery school, like fucking honest cops.

  He hung around the other departments, listening patiently to the songs they sang him; he detected false notes, let them hum their old refrains. He has a musical ear. He almost wanted to applaud this choir of voices, all sworn to sing the same tune, cross my heart and hope to die . . .

  Commissaire Divisionnaire Laborde grabbed hold of him in a corridor to ask him what his problem was with Mazeau, what possible connection the detective might have to the arson investigation.

  Darlac hesitated. He looked at the slicked-back hair, the English tie, the impeccable suit with its black silk pocket handkerchief, the blue eyes behind elegant round gold-framed glasses; he weighed up the physiognomy of this cerebral politico, searching for the honest man that everyone talked about but finding only a wily schemer, and decided to raise the stakes. Laborde would be the best cover possible if things turned sour.

  “I’m trying to find Mazeau before this guy gets to him. He’s a dangerous man. We really need to give him some protection.”

  Laborde blinked behind his intellectual’s specs.

  “Protect him? You’d give him about as much protection as the blade of a guillotine! Do you think I’m stupid, or what? Who’s supposed to have threatened him? He never said anything about that to me.”

  “I was tipped off. The guy he’s looking for is some loon he was in business with. He’s going round telling everyone that he wants Mazeau dead.”

  “And who told you this?”

  “Le Veau. Mazeau told him he wanted to find this guy before the guy found him. I’m going to help him.”

  “Le Veau? Lucien Lavaud?”

  Laborde burst out laughing, there in the middle of the corridor. The hilarity shook his entire body, obliging him to hold on to the wall, to take off his specs so he could wipe the tears from his eyes.

  “Jesus, Darlac, not him! Not to me! Le Veau is a small-time crook! He cleans glasses in a café for his fat missus! How could you believe such a pathetic clown? Anyway, the idea that you are Mazeau’s white knight is completely ludicrous. Tell me a proper fairy tale instead—at least they’re a bit more believable!”

  Darlac did have a good story to tell him—about a knight accused of treachery who beheads an evil duke and shits on his grave—but he preferred to shrug it off and beat a retreat. In a way, just by talking to him about it, he had implicated the commissaire divisionnaire in the plan he had in his head. So, Sleeping Beauty or Little Red Riding-Hood, he was prepared to spend sleepless nights getting it ready. He was going to set the wolves on him. He couldn’t wait to hear their teeth tearing into Laborde’s ass cheeks.

  “Think what you like,” he said. “You’ll see who’s right about this case.”

  He heard Laborde cackling sarcastically, then walked off past the curious stares of the uncomprehending guards with a shrug. He put his hand to the pistol under his armpit, nestled safely in its shoulder holster. A shiver ran down his spine. It was a shiver of pleasure.

  Mazeau lives p
ractically in the countryside, in Mérignac, in a house surrounded by meadows where cattle and horses graze, enclosed by hedges and copses of oaks, less than a kilometer from the place de l’Eglise, on the road to the airfield and the American base. It is a single-storey stone house, built at the beginning of the century, perhaps the former residence of a lawyer or a doctor. Tall trees all around it. The sound of birdsong. A dirt driveway bordered with fruit trees leads to the house. A hint of spring shows soft and green in the budding trees. Mazeau lives there with his wife, a former court clerk who quit her job to bring up their three children. Today is Tuesday; the children are at school. Darlac saw the youngest two leave earlier. The oldest is at school in Bordeaux and won’t be back until late that evening.

  Better that the children should not be there.

  It is half past nine. Darlac leaves his car outside the gate and walks down the driveway, rutted in places, the grooves filled with water. The earth sticks to his shoes, making a sound like a wet mouth. When a French window opens onto the terrace and Mazeau appears, in a burgundy dressing gown, head bandaged like a walking mummy, Darlac stops dead and suddenly finds himself wondering what to do with his hands: shove them in his pockets to show his resolution, or leave them hanging, signifying his peaceful intentions. In the end, he keeps his hands out of his pockets and waves vaguely in greeting. He takes a few steps further, then stops again.

  All he can see of Mazeau are his dark eyes trained unblinkingly on him. For the rest, with the yards of bandages that cover his face, it could almost be anyone.

  “What the fuck are you doing here? I’ve heard you’re looking for me?”

  He says this as best he can given his blocked jaw, which makes him sound like a congenital idiot.

  “You’re not hard to find. We need to have a quiet talk.”

  Mazeau does not move or speak, mouth half open. Then he sighs noisily.