After the War

by Hervé Le Corre

  “What’s happened to you? You know he doesn’t want to see you anymore.”

  He sits down heavily on a chair that creaks beneath him.

  “I’m in trouble. Nowhere to go. I have to talk to him.”

  Violette says nothing. She puts the cups on the table, along with the sugar bowl, then lights a cigarette. She doesn’t look at him, watching the coffee in the saucepan instead.

  “What do you want?”

  His voice makes them both jump. André turns towards Abel, who is leaning in the doorway, breathless and unsteady. His dark eyes shine deep in their sockets; the skin of his face, stretched tightly over his death’s head, glistens grayly.

  Violette pushes a chair towards him and he sits down, holding on to the table as he lowers himself. He closes his eyes for a long moment, and slowly gets his breath back. His face is waxy.

  “It’s you in the paper, isn’t it? Darlac’s trying to frame you for his own dirty business, right? So what do you plan to do now? Hide here? You’re up shit creek, and you want me and Violette to join you for a paddle? Is that it?”

  “Just for a few days. Just enough time to . . .”

  “Enough time to what?”

  Abel makes a hand gesture to Violette. She gets up, grabs a cup, and pours him some coffee. He takes small mouthfuls, coughs a bit, pulls a face, then blows on the cup. He shrugs, and looks André in the eye.

  “I’m all out of time. I’ll soon be finished with all this. Anyway, you know what I think about you, about what you’ve done. But I’m not going to die leaving a guy on the run to the mercy of the streets, especially not when it’s Darlac who’s hunting him. There’s a spare room upstairs. Move your stuff in. You don’t owe me anything. I’ll still have plenty of cash left when I’m dead. You can even take the car if you want.”

  “Thank you, Abel. I—”

  “Skip the pleasantries. I don’t even know why I’m doing it. Maybe just as a way of hanging on a bit longer. Because the past is all I have. Anyway, I think it’ll make Violette happy.”

  The woman offers a tired smile. She puts her hand on André’s forearm. The silence holds the three of them together, punctuated by Abel’s ragged breathing. André jumps when Abel’s chair legs scrape the tiles and he stands up, remaining immobile for a moment, leaning on the table, blinking and shaking his head, as if he were having a dizzy spell. Then he turns slowly to the door and sets off unsteadily, holding on until he reaches the table. They hear his feet shuffling through the hallway then the soft creak of a leather chair. André shoots a concerned glance at Violette, who reassures him with a pout and a flurry of batted eyelashes.

  “He’s going to read a bit, then he’ll fall asleep.”

  “And you?”

  “What about me?”

  “What are you doing?”

  “I’m with him. It’s my life. I was always with him. What I went through before doesn’t count. That wasn’t living.”

  “Can you really do that? Cut your life in two, I mean, and get rid of the bad bits? Forget them completely?”

  The woman picks up a sugar cube and soaks it in the bottom of her cup, then nibbles it.

  “I don’t think you ever forget anything. You just end up not thinking about it anymore . . . Well . . . Let’s just say that it no longer weighs so much in the bag you carry around. I don’t know how to put it. I think you have to put something else in the bag. Or maybe it’s like salt: you have to soak the bag in water so the salt that burns you is slowly dissolved.”

  She falls silent, watches him. André can’t bear the intensity of her gaze and looks away. He tries to think about what she’s said. He wonders what river might be able to absorb the salt that inflames his wounds.

  “It’s as if I was dead and I came back to life. I remember the evening when I came back to myself. I didn’t know where I was. There was Abel sleeping on a chair, and I was scared because I thought they were the ones who had . . . And then I recognized him and it all came back to me: the doctor, the pain in my stomach . . . Abel woke up and he said, ‘How are you feeling? Are you hungry?’ I replied, ‘Yes, a little bit.’ ‘Don’t move. I’ll be back,’ he said, as if I might be about to escape through the window or start cleaning the house. He got up and I heard him fiddling about somewhere in the kitchen. He came back soon afterwards with a tray containing two plates of overcooked noodles and some cold roast pork. And he spread some pâté on bread for me. I cried so much, I felt better. And that was it—everything started again that day. We never spoke about it after that.”

  She smiles and nods. Her eyes gleam. She stands up suddenly, rubbing her hands on her apron.

  “I’ll show you to your room and give you some sheets.”

  In the living room, Abel is asleep, mouth open, a detective novel open in his lap. His chest rises softly, at peace. André can’t help seeing a dead man, despite the small patches of color that have returned to his face.

  The room smells of lavender and polish. It overlooks the small green garden, which is starting to turn blue in the twilight. He and Violette make the bed and André sniffs deeply at the scent of the clean sheets as he always has since he first slept in a real bed again, in Paris, after his return. Sleeping in this smell is one of the best moments of the day. He says this to Violette. She felt something similar after Abel removed the sheets in which she’d sweated, bled and slept like a corpse and replaced them with clean ones. These little things that no-one pays attention to in everyday life. Little scraps of happiness.

  During dinner, Abel asks André: “What was it like, over there?” Violette stares reprovingly at him, sighs, stands up and clears away the bread and the bowl of vegetables to show her disagreement, then sits down again, putting a pack of cigarettes on the table and leaning forward to listen to André.

  So André tells them. Sitting up straight against the back of his chair. For more than two hours, he tells them what he has never told anyone before. What no-one has ever asked him before. The things he has only ever confided to his notebooks. The things that fill his nightmares and his memories. And then Paris, his comrades, the need to live, to learn how to do it again. And also, sometimes—often—his tiredness with life. Hélène, who danced in the ruins. He talks about Olga and how he was unworthy of her. Olga lying sick in his arms and then dying in the terror of the gas chambers.

  He stops speaking. Waits for the screaming to stop, the images to leave his mind. Violette holds a hand to her mouth.

  Olga: he should have loved her better than he did. Maybe he didn’t love her at all. He lives with the pain of this deficient love. He uses words like love and cherish, words that people usually only speak out loud cautiously, almost apologetically, as if they were saying something embarrassing.

  He talks about Daniel, whom he didn’t recognize at first when he went to see him at the garage to get that motorbike fixed. He remembers the little boy’s hand in his when they would walk through the streets every day. He opens his hand and shows it to Violette and Abel as if a trace of the child might have remained there, like a mark.

  Violette and Abel listen in silence. She gets up once to make coffee, but returns to sit down while the coffee pot burbles quietly beside her. Abel does not move, does not even blink. Sometimes he nods or shakes his head gently, to show his horror or his dismay. Exhaustion, it seems, does not dare drag him away from André’s story.

  “It’s late, isn’t it?” says André after a moment. “I keep talking and talking . . .”

  “No, it’s fine,” says Abel. “It’s not that late.”

  André pours himself a large glass of water. He cannot remember ever having talked this much.

  Abel stands up. He holds out his hand to him.

  “Can you help me?”

  André holds him up. They walk through the hallway. The bedroom is at the end. Abel weighs nothing. Close to him like this, André can hea
r his rapid, whistling breath. He helps him to sit down in a wicker chair.

  “You O.K.?”

  Abel nods, sucking air through his mouth, trying to get his breath back.

  “I misjudged you,” he says. “What I said was unfair. Everything has changed so much. And you and I have changed too . . .”

  “Don’t worry about that. You should get some rest. We’ll talk about it later, if you want.”

  Abel nods, then closes his eyes. He leans back against the seat of his chair, which creaks softly. André goes back to say goodnight to Violette. He finds her sitting at the table. Her cup of coffee has grown cold. She looks up at him with red eyes and smiles and gives a little wave.

  “Everything alright?” he asks.

  “No, but we’ll muddle through anyway. See you tomorrow.”

  34The French equivalent of 911 at the time.

  26

  Madame is lying on the sofa. Bare feet, houndstooth jodhpurs, goldbuttoned blouse. She is reading a magazine and does not look up when Darlac enters the living room without a word and walks over to the sideboard, where he puts away his pistol, as he does every evening. He eyeballs his wife, who stretches out her arm to take a cigarette and light it, and he goes out to the entrance hall to take off his jacket then returns and loosens his tie and unbuttons his waistcoat. He cannot smell anything cooking, so he goes to look in the kitchen. Everything there is in its place, gleaming cleanly, and he sighs with pleasure at this reassuring display of order.

  “Aren’t we eating tonight?”

  “It’s already cooked. I did it yesterday. Salmis de palombes.”

  The voice rises from behind the magazine and those Sophia Loren cat-eyes.

  “Where’s Elise?”

  “At a friend’s house. They’re revising for their history exam.”

  “Which friend?”

  Madame sighs.

  “Hélène. De Taillac. The judge, you know?”

  “What time is she coming home?”

  He sits in a chair opposite her. She is still lying down, still reading the magazine, so still that he can barely even see her chest move as she breathes.

  “How long have you had me followed?”

  She tosses the magazine on the coffee table and stubs out her cigarette. Stares at him. Green eyes, or golden. Lips slightly parted. In the space below the collar of her blouse, he glimpses the slender joint of her clavicle, a strap of her bra. No make-up. Darlac is suddenly reminded how beautiful this woman is. He tries to remember how long he has hated her this much.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I was followed, last Tuesday. Some guy on a motorbike.”

  She continues staring at him while she sits up and folds her arms.

  Darlac feels connections clicking into place. The air around him seems to thicken and it costs him an effort to keep breathing, not to rush at her and force her to speak.

  “I have not had you followed.”

  “You’ve had Elise followed since she was attacked by that man.”

  “That’s different. I never gave an order to have you followed or protected.”

  All of a sudden, he thinks that Laborde might have put in place extra surveillance in an attempt to catch him out, but he rejects this idea. A cop on a motorbike: he doesn’t believe it. Particularly for this case.

  “And why don’t I have the right to any protection? After all, this man could attack me, couldn’t he?”

  “Where did he follow you to?”

  “The cemetery. I went to lay flowers on Mother’s grave.”

  “What was he like?”

  “He was wearing a helmet, goggles, a gray jacket. Does that help? Could you stop treating me like an idiot? I saw he was a cop at first glance.”

  “He’s not a cop.”

  She leaps to her feet and is about to storm from the room. “Oh, stop being such a drama queen. Sit down. Let me explain.”

  He speaks without raising his voice. Without moving. Without anger. Madame turns to look at him, surprised. She sits down, lights another cigarette, exhales the smoke nervously. Her eyes look gray now and she blinks furiously.

  “How’s Willy?”

  Annette Darlac looks away. Her eyes roam the room like a frightened sparrow, unsure where to land, then return, trembling, to her husband’s steady gaze. She cannot think of anything to say. Apart from “Please, have mercy!” But she cannot even summon the courage to say that.

  “Why are . . . ?”

  She leans back in her seat and lifts her hand to her mouth.

  “Why what? What do you think? I’ve known for a long time. Ever since he came back with his mother in ’51 and you found him that house in Blanquefort. I was wondering why you were so determined to get your driving licence, and then to have your own car . . . So, I dug around, and I found out the truth. Hauptmann Wilhelm Müller left half his face and body in Stalingrad. In ’49, his father died and left him everything; he liquidated his assets, then came here so he could grow old close to his daughter. And as he doesn’t want her to see him in the state he’s in, I know that two or three times a year you take him with you in the car and park on the street so he can watch her walk past on her way home from school. That’s all I know. And that’s why I’m sure that the guy who followed you was not one of ours. Cos I don’t want every cop in town to know that my wife—that Kraut whore—is cheating on me with a fairground freak. You understand now?”

  “And you said nothing about it all this time?”

  Her eyes brimming with tears, her voice choked.

  “I wanted to see how you’d react. Caught in the trap. Cornered. Like a rat in a cage. I watch you all the time, you know that? Playing your role of the perfect wife, the cordon-bleu cook, the irreproachable housewife, the attentive mother. I don’t know how you keep it up. Maybe you think you’re resisting me . . . But it must hurt like hell, and that’s enough for me. I know you’re paying for what you’ve done, that you’re punishing yourself more than I ever could. It amused me to watch you acting in this farce, imagining that I believed it all.”

  He speaks to her in a confidential tone, sitting comfortably in his chair, never taking his eyes off her, almost smiling. She turns her head to right and left, slowly, as if she were watching the slowmotion collapse of a building or the interminable fall of a figure thrown from an airplane.

  “And now?”

  “I’m going to catch the bastard who attacked Elise, who burned Odette and Emile alive, not to mention the girl who was staying with them. That’s the man who followed you. The same one who killed Inspecteur Mazeau and his wife. His name is Jean Delbos. Tomorrow you’re going to look at photos of motorbikes so you can identify his. As soon as we’ve located him, we’ll arrest him. I’ll arrest him.”

  “I wasn’t talking about that.”

  “So what do you want to talk about? Tell me . . .”

  The sound of the front door opening. Elise. Soon she will call out “Hello! It’s me!” and throw her satchel on the floor. Darlac listens to the usual noises of her arrival and his heart beats a little harder, as it always does when she comes home. He knows that there will be a brief interlude in the dreary shit of his daily life; a few minutes’ respite, before the girl falls into line with the routine order of family life, before her bitch of a mother catches her in her net once again and puts out that little flame. In this moment he feels capable of love and tenderness, even compassion. It seems to him—Albert Darlac—that a window is opening in his life, making such a transformation possible. He has moments of grace, the commissaire, during which he feels he might rise above it all, weightless and radiant.

  The girl’s voice pronounces the ritual phrase and he gets up to kiss her and to hold her body against his for a few seconds, to steal that little pleasure, the secret that makes him shiver.

  She accepts
his embrace, then pushes him gently away without answering his questions about her history revision so she can kiss her mother too. The two of them share tender words, their voices smiling. Quiet, complicit laughter.

  Darlac watches them, sick with jealousy. The spell is broken. He tastes that familiar bitter flavor again—that vile snot coating the back of his throat—and when they both look over at him with the same strange smile, he is struck by their resemblance, by the identical masks of beauty and irony turned towards him, a double vision that disturbs him because he no longer knows what he should love or hate. So he picks up his jacket and goes outside for a moment, standing on the pavement in front of the door to catch his breath, as if he had been diving without a snorkel to the depths of the sea, lured by sirens.

  Later, after eating in a noisy, filthy café on place Saint-Michel full of chatty Spaniards and vagabonds, each slumped amid breadcrumbs with a bottle of red, he hangs around in the bars where Francis is a regular, but none of the barmen have seen him in the last three days and some of the owners seem hardly to remember his existence. As most of them don’t know who is asking about him, they prefer not to say anything. Francis Gelos is not the sort of man you talk about behind his back, because everyone knows that, however pleasant and affable he seems, he can quickly be transformed into a vile bastard, a living nightmare. As for the few who recognize Commissaire Darlac, they offer him a little pick-me-up and grimace helplessly: “Sorry, I haven’t seen him. Actually, I was just thinking that it was unusual.” They do not want to hurt anyone, remaining polite and jovial, the two-faced smart-asses. Chatting about the weather, Darlac feels women rub themselves against him, feels the pressure of their breasts on his back as they sidle their way through the crowd at the bar to place an order. Sometimes the owner will wink at him: “A new one, Monsieur Darlac. Not bad, is she? She’s one of Untel’s.” So the cop turns to look at the woman as she moves away, ogling her body, waiting for her to sit down so he can check out her face, then sighing. No, definitely not. None of them. Whores or otherwise—not that he sees what difference it makes—none of them have been able to entrance him the way Annette did in ’44, the first time he saw her. He is filled with rage at the idea of this irreplaceable illumination. A star, now dead, that had outshone every other celestial body forever, leaving the universe a black void. He drains his glass and leaves without a word.