Above them, suddenly, the cries of swifts scratch the silence. Daniel looks up, heart pounding, mouth dry. He sees them trace their crazy geometry on the small patch of sky. Giovanni looks at his watch and stands up.
“We have to go.”
Autin leads them back to the door, glances both ways into the street, then pushes them outside. He wishes them good luck and the bolt snaps in place immediately afterwards. They practically run through the streets, which are gradually filling with children and women. Old men sit outside their front doors smoking, and the sweet smell of tobacco sometimes accompanies the two soldiers for a few paces. Daniel feels dozens of eyes staring at him, hears discreet laughter and words he does not understand. Algeria. They sprint, heads down. It’s gone four, and they’re due to leave at half past. In the European part of the city, they melt into the crowds wandering past shop windows as the shopkeepers lift up the metal shutters, they pass café terraces filled with customers, overhear the hum of conversations.
They find the others waiting in the shade, near the vehicles. The drivers, who have not had any time off, sit further off, talking to a mechanic with greasy hands, his uniform stained with engine oil in a sort of customised camouflage. Baltard and Bernier, the caporal, are still joking about their visit to the brothel. They say they were thrown out in the end because they kept wanting more and more, dicks still hard as rocks. They could have screwed every fatma32 in the whorehouse. They were ready to spend all their savings just to see if their cocks could hold out long enough for them to try them all. They make gestures as they speak, and it looks as if they’re getting their hard-ons mixed up with machine guns. “You should have come with us,” they tell Daniel, “instead of going off with him like a pair of fags.” Daniel says nothing. Some others, listening to all this, start to sulk: they got lost in the Arab part of the city and never found the bordello they’d been recommended.
“Fucking hell,” says Meyran, an old man, only six months from the end of his service. “So we finally sat down on this terrace and started boozing, so we could cool off our balls. I feel like the head of my cock is a helmet and I’m shooting jizz all over my insides! And Peyrou, he’s had so many beers that he has to stop every fifty meters so he can piss. He’s like a dog, spraying it on lamp posts. He’d better leave his dick hanging out his pants on the way back, just in case! He could flood a wadi, that fucker! Ah, I bet that fucking whorehouse doesn’t even exist! It was this Polish guy from the Foreign Legion who gave me the address when I was in Ghrib, last January, on my way back from a mission. I bet that bastard was just having a laugh.”
“How is that even fucking possible?” the caporal asks.
Everyone laughs. Meyran leans back against a jeep and grips the bridge of his nose between a finger and thumb.
“Oh, fuck,” he says. “I’m going to crash out in the back of the truck. I hope I don’t shit myself!”
His two buddies nod their agreement so slowly it looks as if their skulls are filled with molten lead. The lieutenant crosses the courtyard and they all stand a little taller, smoothing the creases in their uniforms, pinching their cheeks to sober themselves up.
They climb into the vehicles more slowly than they did this morning, holding their kit bags, their weapons, and leaning on them as they sit down, bending over and collapsing, dazed, practically falling asleep already, and Daniel and Giovanni grit their teeth and smile as the yellowing sky moves past above them, filled with the screams of swifts flying through the hot air.
32Slang French term for an Arab woman.
22
I watched Bordeaux grow larger through the iron girders of the railway bridge and my heart sped up. Crouching darkly by the Garonne under its pinkish scab of roofs. A bitter sob got stuck in my throat when I saw the perfect line of black façades, the watery gap of place de la Bourse, the dark trenches of streets sinking into the city. The river, still muddy, made motionless by high tide under the gray sky, looked like a monstrous dirt road. And the port. The boats moored along the docks, near the warehouses, bristling with masts, below cranes that leaned over or stood up straight like flick-knives. I watched all this with my face stuck to the glass like a curious kid, desperate to guess what he’ll see next.
A woman sitting opposite me watched me, surprised, and when our eyes met she gave me a brief smile, perhaps amused by the stupefied, dazed expression on my face and the ghostly pallor of my skin, because I felt as if all the blood had suddenly drained from my body, leaving me empty and frozen on that leatherette seat.
The train braked and I felt the force pushing against my back. The screech of steel made the people on the platform turn away. One kid put his hands over his ears and his mother leaned towards him, laughing. The people around me stood up and began picking up their things from the luggage racks. They got in each other’s way, muttered apologies. I helped the woman who had smiled at me to get down her enormous suitcase and I wondered how someone so frail could lug such a massive weight around. When I put it down, she lifted up the bag without any apparent effort and breathed a quick thank-you before leaving the carriage. I waited until I was alone to grab the large sailor bag that a friend had given me in Paris. Inside I had crammed everything I owned: some clothes, three books, my notebooks and a brand-new toilet bag that I’d bought just before leaving. I had left the key to my apartment on rue Beccaria with a neighbor, Gaston—a sad, sweet old man who lived alone with two cats and a few memories—and a month’s rent in cash on the kitchen table. He had promised me he would take care of everything. I had given him my radio, along with about a hundred detective novels that lined the wobbly bookshelves in the entrance hall. He said he would read them and think about me, because he thought I looked a bit like those men you sometimes see in those kinds of stories about gangsters and cops.
He held me in his thin arms and then I left. I walked to the station so I could see and feel Paris around me once again, probably for the last time, and I stopped on the pont d’Austerlitz in spite of the north wind blowing over the Seine that whistled in my ears. I looked out at the two banks, the Ile Saint-Louis and the two arms of the river, and I went over the map in my head, working out the places where my friends lived, the places I had been happy, almost despite myself, when I’d had to start living again. I let the faces stream past. The smiles. The voices, mingling. Hélène. Suzanne. A woman came over from the other end of the bridge, tall and slender, and the wind blew her dress and her badly buttoned raincoat around her.
I fled towards the station before she could start dancing.
“Me? I dance.”
As soon as the train set off, I closed my eyes. I did not want to watch this city disappear behind me, sucked inexorably backwards by our speed. I listened to the wheels hammering against the rails, more and more quickly. I let myself be rocked by the abrupt jolts as we went over the points, and I imagined the landscape of roads, the greyness of the ballast and iron, the handcars stopped against the bumpers, the rusting, abandoned freight cars at the end of a siding.
Once, when we were first getting to know each other, Suzanne had arranged to meet me on a bridge above the railway tracks of the gare du Nord, without telling me why. And, as it was very close to a dance where we were headed, I had not asked. She arrived carrying a bouquet of flowers and we watched the trains go past, and I’d started messing around, mooing like a cow, so she put her hand on my arm to make me shut up and then told me that her father, a railway worker, used to take her on his train sometimes, before the war, when he was coming here. He was arrested in ’43. Died during a Gestapo interrogation. Then she stopped talking, and we stayed there for a while, shoulder to shoulder, not saying anything, watching the converging lines of the rails shining in the sun, all that grey or reddish gravel where nothing grew, and I found it all so horribly sad. “You might have come to terms with all that and be able to laugh about it, but not me,” she said softly. Then she threw her bouquet on the em
pty flatbed of a slowly moving freight car and we went, hand in hand, to meet our friends.
“We left from the gare de l’Est,” I told her after a moment. “And I haven’t come to terms with anything.”
I walked more quickly, leaving her behind me. I walked around Paris for two hours, in tears. I don’t know how I ended up on the pont au Change, dripping with sweat, my teeth chattering. She and I never talked about that again, afterwards.
When I looked through the window again, I saw a whole host of houses and shacks, gardens with drooping fences and listing huts, meagre hovels with crooked chimneys blowing threads of black smoke into the air, and further off the broken line of factory roofs. It was April, and everywhere this gray misery was disguised and brightened by pale green bushes and hedges.
Paris did not want to let me go; it clung to my legs, it pulled at my arms. Familiar, friendly voices whispered inside my head: “We’re still there and we’ll live for a long time. Don’t leave us—you’ll forget us!” But I forgot nothing, forgot no-one. That was my torture, perhaps my punishment. My life was behind me, overcrowded with shadows I had abandoned, always fleeing, eluding, out of indecisiveness and cowardice. For the first time, I was consciously moving towards something; I had made a choice; I had a plan that I would see through to the end, an objective that I would destroy once I had achieved it. So perhaps the tormented shadows that pursued me would melt away, sated or appeased. Or I would have to disappear in order to see them again, though I did not believe in heaven or anykind of redemption. I did not believe in anything that might console me.
I tried to sleep, to read. Most of the time I watched the landscape rush past, flat and colorless beneath rainy skies. The cities horrified me, impenetrable and ugly. Hostile. Slouching beasts digesting their ration of human flesh. I wondered if Bordeaux would inspire me with the same fear, if my memories would be enough to guide me through its labyrinth.
I lifted my bag onto my shoulder and it seemed heavier than before. Locomotives snorted under the high steel framework, and trains braked with metallic shrieks. I walked towards the exit amid the small silent herd of hurrying travelers, weaving between reunited families and lovers, kissing and holding hands. Outside, I stopped under the glass roof to look around and sniff the air. The sky was heavy with charcoal gray rain clouds, patches of deep blue showing through in between. Westerly wind. Gusts of lukewarm rain. I braced myself and began to walk blindly through the streets.
I didn’t sleep that night. I had found a reasonably well-kept hotel near the place de la Victoire. The ground-floor room was tiny and its window looked out onto a narrow courtyard sunk in permanent darkness. I went to bed straight away, fully dressed, and lay there in the blackness listening to the rumble of pipes, the sly creaking of doors opening and closing very softly, as if people were sneaking around. It wasn’t late; I could have gone for a walk up rue Sainte-Catherine, sharing the sidewalks with the crowd that was still undoubtedly meandering past the shop windows; I could have had a drink in the place de la Comédie, wandered over to the docks, but I felt a fugitive’s fear and didn’t even dare go out for a snack in the café across the road. I felt sure that everyone would recognize me, that all eyes would turn to me as towards an intruder, an outcast. Like in those stories where an ill-fated son or a disgraced husband, whom everyone thought dead, returns to the village years later and feels the eyes of everyone he used to know planted in him like pins.
But who would know me now? Who would remember me? And anyway, so many of us had been sent over there to die that no-one would pay any attention to this belated homecoming. People’s memories were already haunted by too many ghosts: who would believe in a revenant?
I devised strategies. I imagined all the sufferings I could inflict on Albert Darlac. I could kidnap him—how, I didn’t know yet—and take him to a remote place where I could torture him for a long time before letting him die of hunger and thirst, tied to a tree, or nailed to a table. Where I could stare into his terror-crazed eyes before abandoning him there. I could simply shoot him in the middle of the street or in his car. Blow his head off with a shotgun after approaching him and saying, “Hello, remember me? And remember Olga too?” My mind spun with images of horror. Blood, flesh and brains. Screams and supplications.
But other images became mixed up with the ones I was inventing. I had seen everything it was possible to do to a human being. I had seen the executioners at work. That tranquil hatred, as natural as breathing.
I was not tranquil at all, and sometimes even breathing was hard.
Around six in the morning, I went out. I would have liked to feel out of place, surprised. But all I saw were the same sidewalks cluttered with trashcans, the same blackish cobblestones, barely even gleaming in the feeble glow of the street lights. This city has always been so sad. My footsteps led me to the Marché des Capucins, already swarming with people at that hour, the air filled with cries and complaints. Nothing had changed. The same smells, the same voices. I went into a café where I often used to go with Abel before the war to eat something before we went home, and I ordered breakfast from the owner: still the same man, tall and broad-shouldered, but fatter and older now, though still lively and supple like a boxer, his eyes alert, watching over the waiter, looking out for new faces amid the crush of regulars. As he brought me my meal, he smiled at me, and I responded with a nod and a smile of my own, and I thought in that moment that he had recognized me. But no: he asked me to pay straight away, and he joked around with a man at the other end of the room while he waited for me to find the right change. Then he turned his back on me without another word.
It was daylight outside by the time I left. I walked the streets like a foreigner in a city that I knew by heart and that towered over me, silent and grey and indifferent. Everywhere I went I was assailed with visions, memories, voices. I thought I would gradually go mad, that in the end I would talk only to the dead or to the shadows that accompanied me, but I continued wandering the streets and courtyards, looking into eyes that didn’t see me, glimpsing figures that seemed familiar to me. The places I had lived, the bars I’d haunted for nights on end, where I’d wasted all that time . . . they were all there, almost unchanged, and my memory was now just a constant buzzing. It built into a migraine, and I entered a café at random, practically collapsing onto a seat and ordering a mineral water.
It was nearly noon. A shiver ran right through my body. I felt as if I was drowning in myself. So I did what people usually do when they’re drowning: I struggled for air.
There was a telephone directory next to the phone, on the counter. I opened it and halfway down a page found Abel’s number. I hadn’t dared call him from Paris. I had always been afraid to hear his voice—or worse, to hear nothing at the other end of the line but an oppressive silence filled with bitterness and reproach.
“Jean” was all he said, after I called him. His voice sounded breathless and distant, half lost in static crackle. “Of course, come.”
He lived in a bungalow in the Saint-Augustin quarter. I heard a limping footstep coming towards the door and then a small, pale, thin man, eyes sunk deep in their sockets, his few grey hairs slicked backwards, was staring at me from the doorway. I must have looked stupid or frightened, standing there in front of that tottering figure, that absent gaze, because he said to me, “Hard to recognize each other, isn’t it? But I know where you’ve been and you already know where I’m going.”
He invited me into the hallway and said, “At the end, on the right.” I heard his felt slippers shuffling over the tiled floor. I entered a living room that gave on to a jardin de curé33 where the sun was enlivening a few spring colors. He asked me if I wanted anything to drink and, without waiting for a response, he disappeared into what must have been the kitchen and came back holding a bottle of white and two glasses.
“Sauternes, 1933. I opened it last night.”
He poured the wine and finally look
ed at me. He smiled and I tried to see the face I remembered in his drawn features, the skin so tight to his protruding bones that it looked in danger of tearing.
“What should we drink to?”
“Your health?” I suggested.
He shrugged.
“Christ, no. Too bitter. To your return . . .”
“What’s the matter with you?”
“Cancer,” he said, tapping his chest. I’m falling to pieces in here. But don’t worry about me . . .”
We drank in silence, glancing at each other over our glasses. Abel clicked his tongue.
“Not bad, is it?”
I nodded. I didn’t care about his wine. We could hear birds chirping through the half-open French window. I stared at Abel, eaten alive by disease, and I still couldn’t remember his full face, his lively eyes, the vivacity of his gestures. Then he leaned towards me and looked straight in my eyes and the hardness of that stare was painful.
“And Olga?”
After the War Page 33