The capitaine starts talking again, thumbs wedged in his belt.
“No? Nobody knows them? Are you sure?”
The people massed in front of the bullet-pocked wall stare at him, terrified. Daniel observes their faces, searching for the woman and children that he brought to this place. Suddenly he thinks about the girl, with Baltard and Meyran. He turns to looks at the soldiers, trying to spot them. Baltard is chatting with the machine-gunner. Smoking a cigarette. Laughing.
The pistol shot, fired in the back of the neck at point blank range, sends one of the fells to the ground. He falls like a heavy bag dropped from the back of a truck. Instantly his blood flows, meandering between pebbles, thick and bright. A woman throws herself on the corpse and screams, insulting or cursing the lieutenant in her language. The capitaine, still holding his pistol, leans over the woman:
“Why didn’t you say anything, eh? Why? You think we’ve got time to waste? You think we’re just messing around here? Your husband wasn’t messing around when he fired at our men though, was he? Tell me whatever you want, I don’t give a shit. You’re the one in hell, you bitch!”
He stands up and points his gun at the other villagers, who are bunched tightly together, their eyes huge with terror.
“This is what happens when you don’t obey, when you lie. When you kill French soldiers who are here to protect you from bandits and cut-throats. The men of this village killed three soldiers, so we’re going to blow up twelve houses. Maybe you’ll understand then. Maybe you can ask your husbands to rebuild them instead of hanging around with rebels!”
The old man shakes his head and speaks. Then he sits down and starts to weep. The woman is lying on the corpse and sobbing in silence.
“Over to you,” says the capitaine to Caunègre. “We’ve still got work to do up there.”
He waves his hand vaguely at the mountains to the east, then puts two fingers to his mouth and whistles. His men load the prisoner in the back of the truck and return to their vehicles. The convoy starts up and disappears in a cloud of dust before turning onto the main road.
Caunègre gathers the sergents and caporals while the men close ranks around the villagers. They need volunteers to blow up the houses. Twenty men step forward, pushing each other out of the way to be part of this mission. Daniel is one of them. He is chosen, with eleven others. A group of protectors will lock down the village just in case. Grenades, then fire. Just make sure it burns. No flamethrowers, unfortunately, but we’ll manage. Sergent Castel reminds them of the safety instructions. Demonstration. Cover your asses until it explodes.
They are handed equipment, plenty of grenades. They joke around, talk about fireworks. A few of them weigh the dense, chequered objects in their hands, pretending to juggle them. Others check the pin, put their finger through the ring. They leave in groups of two or three. Daniel gets rid of the caporal by explaining that he needs to check something in one of the houses they visited earlier. The caporal shrugs. Whatever you want. Just be careful. He turns this way and that in the labyrinth of alleys before finding the shack where the young girl was raped. He dives into the darkness and the silence that suddenly chokes him and stands for a moment in the middle of the room, waiting for his eyes to adjust. Then he moves cautiously towards the place where the other two fucked the girl, and he shoots a look above the overturned table.
There she is. Eyes open, arms crossed. A corolla of black hair around her head. One breast is visible through a tear in her blouse. Her skirt has been hitched up her thighs. Her lips are cut and swollen. There’s a bit of blood congealed at the corner of her mouth. Daniel walks up to her. He is covered with sweat, panting slightly. He crouches down next to her. She’s not breathing. At first he doesn’t dare touch her, then he places his fingertips on her neck to make sure she has no pulse. With the back of his hand he strokes her forehead, then closes her eyes, feeling the softness of her lashes on his skin. Nausea forces him to his feet and he runs outside to heave and spit up bile. The sun is up now, its horrific light filling the street.
He takes a few steps forward, staggering, and catches his breath, wiping away the tears that the vomiting forced from his eyes. Alone in the world, with orders to destroy it. The heat beats down on him and he shakes like an animal to rid himself of its weight. He tosses a grenade through the door of the neighboring house. Hears it roll along the ground, hit a wall, feels the vibration in his back when it explodes, and sees scraps of cloth, bits of wood, a saucepan go flying. The thick dust falls quickly, and in the darkness he makes out a fireplace. He throws the second grenade like a pétanque ball, aiming it with a flick of the wrist, and it rebounds against some tools piled up in the hearth and gets stuck in the middle. The chimney pipe explodes and the roof collapses. He runs away and hears the fire roaring in the fallen thatch, and when he finds a shady corner where he can rest, he drinks long mouthfuls of lukewarm water from his flask and suddenly feels better. He is no longer trembling, and can finally breathe easily amid this smell of burning that rolls through the narrow streets in clouds of black smoke.
Gunshots. The howls of beaten dogs.
Further off, he hears men shouting. He turns around. The sounds are coming from a shack at the end of the street, one even more rickety-looking than the others, listing to one side, still vibrating from the kicks that have smashed down the door.
“Fuck me! There’s more of ’em in here!”
Daniel rushes over, loading his rifle. It’s the two Parisians, Olivier and Gérard. He asks them what they’ve seen, but they don’t hear, and each of them unpins a grenade and throws it—the two grenades arcing in unison—into the shack. The Parisians dive for shelter, crouching behind a low mud-brick wall.
They hear shouts, a sudden commotion, and then the explosion, which blows out a wall and propels it into the middle of the street in jagged blocks. The roof slumps and the joists creak, on the verge of collapse, and it’s almost as if the cloud of smoke and dust, thick and dense, even doughy, holds the roof up a few seconds longer.
The two soldiers, aiming their sub-machine guns at the shack, watch this happen with an air of surprise, as curious as naughty kids who have thrown a cat down a well and are waiting for it to climb back up. They are retreating, tripping over bits of rubble, when a figure suddenly bursts, groaning, from the black fog, then falls flat on its belly at their feet.
A woman. Her hair burns down to her scalp, which is blackened and covered with bloody swellings. She tries to crawl and the two soldiers recoil as if she might give them some vile disease, plague or leprosy, and continue pointing their weapons at this smoking body clothed in charred tatters.
Daniel takes aim at them, ordering them to walk backwards and put their guns down, and the Parisians stare at him uncomprehendingly. They don’t move, but all three men turn their gaze back to the inside of the blasted shack where another woman can now be seen through the falling dust, collapsed against the back wall. Daniel can’t see her face; at first he thinks her hair has fallen forward and is hanging over chin. So he moves closer but still sees no face, only something that resembles a scrunched-up ball of newspaper soaked with blood and other fluids. The woman’s chest rises and falls in convulsive breaths. She hugs herself mechanically, as if she were cold. She does not scream. The only sound she makes is that wheezing, asthmatic rattle.
Lying on her lap is a little girl, possibly dead.
Daniel tightens his grip on the rifle and keeps the two frightened bastards in his line of fire, blurred figures in his scope. He has to tell them something, at least insult them, humiliate them, but no words come. All he knows is that he has five cartridges in the magazine of his gun so he’s going to give them two each—the first in the belly, so they suffer, so they can still see what they’ve done, so they’ll be capable of hearing anything he might try to tell them, if he can think of anything to say before he pulls the trigger again.
“Don’t do that
. Lower your rifle.”
Sergent Castel’s voice, behind him. And between his shoulder blades, something hard, prodding him gently.
“Lower your rifle. Don’t force me to . . .”
Daniel lowers his gun, then throws it on the ground. He waits, arms dangling. The sun blazes down on him; he can feel it burning through his combat jacket, his cap.
Castel approaches the two Parisians and smashes each of them in the belly with the butt of his rifle.
“Pricks. Fuck off out of here.”
He says this without raising his voice. Then he kneels down next to the woman stretched out in the middle of the street. The Parisians flee, breathing heavily and groaning, both bent double. Olivier stops and pukes. His friend grabs him by the collar and they move shakily away.
The sergent examines the woman.
“Help me.”
He and Daniel lay her on her side. One of her arms, stuck beneath her, is torn off at the elbow. Her blood is soaking the arid earth. Daniel can feel sweat running down his face, dripping from his nose and his chin. He has trouble sucking in the hot air that rises from the stony ground.
“What are we going to do?”
“Nothing. She’s practically dead. Lost too much blood.”
“What about the others?”
He follows Castel, who cautiously enters the ruined shack. The sergent stands still and silent in front of the woman with the destroyed face. Daniel sees his shoulders rise, his uniform soaked with sweat. Tears fill Daniel’s eyes. At this moment, he wishes he could beg someone or something: a magician, a god. But there is nothing but the stench of burned gunpowder and the sound of the woman’s wheezing.
“The kid’s dead. As for the woman . . .”
“Can’t we heal them?”
“Who? Her? Have you seen the state of her face? Do you want to save her life, or soothe your conscience? And if she survived, what would you tell her? That France was generous enough to let her live like this? You want to use your rifle, go ahead. Maybe she’ll go to their heaven, cos they believe in that too, you know.”
He glances up at the collapsed roof.
“Come on, let’s get out of here, before this fucking thing falls on us.”
He leaves, picks up Daniel’s rifle, hands it to him, and then walks slowly back up the street. Daniel turns back to the faceless woman. He stops, loads a cartridge, shoulders his rifle. The devastated face trembles in his scope. Her chest is still moving. He can see a gold medallion glittering with each breath. A pearl necklace. Thirty meters. The woman’s torso, topped by that mangled face, fills his viewfinder.
“Leave it,” says Castel, who has come to a halt further up the road. “It’s not your problem. Come on, let’s go.”
Daniel pulls the trigger. He watches the woman crumple, then fall to the side. The sergent has turned around and is waiting for him. Daniel jogs after him. Castel shakes his head.
“What was the point of that?”
Daniel does not reply. He doesn’t know the answer. The tears that had risen to his eyes earlier now overflow. They reach the square, where the men are gathering. The caporals are calling out names; everyone is there. They leave the village amid the acrid smell of fire. Cocks crow, perhaps encircled by flames. Dogs bark or howl. As they move away, some of them turn around to stare at the columns of smoke that rise straight up into the peaceful sky. Daniel tries to work out the location of the raped girl’s house, then the one where the corpses of the little girl and the faceless woman are lying. Ten meters ahead, he spots the two Parisians marching, heads down. He’d like to know what they’re thinking at that moment. Maybe just about their girlfriends, or their parents. Friends from work. About their civilian life, so peaceful and sweet. Or maybe they’re trying not to think about anything. He is connected to them. By the hatred and contempt he feels for them, by the blood that was spilled. He does not see Meyran or Baltard. Doesn’t even turn around to look for them. He let them do it, after all. He didn’t do anything to stop them, so what’s the point?
When they reach the trucks, the men collapse onto the benches and drink water, sighing. All you can hear are flask lids being unscrewed. Afterwards they’re on the road, dust flying, jolting along, backs aching, the heat, and the silence of these stunned, dazed men. The daily routine of war, stultifying and speechless.
Daniel tries to think. In fact, he goes through all the names and faces of the people he loves, remembering voices, the places where he lives and works. He thinks about the cold of the garage, about numb fingers, clumsy gestures. He clings to these mental buoys to stop himself sinking. Irène’s face, her laugh. Knights climbing a steep path in a film. The shapes of their bodies, shot from behind, shaken by the jerky movements of their horses. For a few moments he is not there, and he feels himself existing again.
28
It’s between Trensacq and Sabres, in the Landes. I don’t remember which département, but there’s only one road, so you can only go straight anyway. You’ll see the gendarmerie vans. Be quick. I’ll wait for you there.”
Commissaire Divisionnaire Laborde hangs up without adding anything and Darlac holds the phone to his ear as he stares at the arabesques on the living-room carpet beneath his feet as if trying to decipher the twisted, almost painful tangles of his thoughts. Finally he replaces the receiver on its cradle, then takes a few steps towards the sofa and strokes the leather seatback and looks all around the room’s utterly familiar layout, the solid furniture, the antique lamps, the paintings on the walls: all these things he never takes any time to consider with any attention. And this bourgeois banality, in which he so often feels bored or enraged, suddenly appears to him as something priceless, and he is gripped with terror at the thought that all this might disappear as part of a general collapse or in a bottomless chasm that will open up, there, suddenly, without warning, between the divan and the matching chairs. For a moment he fears that the earthquake that is shaking him to his very core will spread throughout the entire house and swallow the little world of which he thinks himself the center, everything he has accumulated, built, and fought to acquire in the course of his bitch of a life.
He is shaken from his frightened daze by the sound of a creak on the stairs, as Elise comes down to give him a quick peck on the cheek. The impalpable caress of her perfume washes over him and he watches her walk away with that same slight pang in his heart that he always feels. Then he grabs his hat, goes out into the rain without bothering to put it on, runs over to the car and throws everything onto the passenger seat before sitting down heavily behind the wheel.
He extricates himself from the slow-moving traffic, which seems somehow glued to the roads by the rain, and drives as fast as he can, sometimes bumper to bumper with stinking trucks that drown everything behind them in a cloud of filthy steam that obscures his windscreen in a gray haze, preventing him from seeing what is coming the other way and forcing him sometimes to make risky overtaking manoeuvres in the water-saturated air where distances and dimensions are obliterated.
He insults other vehicles and drivers, of course, thinking if only he had some heavy weaponry he could rid himself of these monstrous pests that block his way. Sometimes he yells in the car’s dark interior, the enclosed space swallowing all echoes of the rage that submerges him just as the rain is flooding the earth, and he advances, deaf and blind, following Laborde’s meticulous directions.
Not that he needs them. He could have gone back there just by retracing the grey paths engraved in his memory.
Because he cannot believe that a rubber-tapper found the bodies of Jeff and Inspecteur Mazeau in that hole, beneath that pine tree uprooted by a storm. Because it is impossible for him to believe that the rubber-tapper in question made an anonymous call to the gendarmerie to signal the discovery. Nor can he imagine that they would have been identified this quickly, since he and Francis had relieved the corpses of their papers.
<
br /> Commissaire Albert Darlac does not believe in chance, never mind disturbing coincidences.
Francis, you son of a bitch. You betrayed me.
He realizes he’s arrived when the bitter fog that his hatred has generated around him suddenly dissolves.
Here, it is no longer raining. Some patches of blue sky, the June sunlight shining from the south. He sees the gendarmerie vans in the distance and forces himself to take deep breaths in order to calm the pounding of his heart, gripping more tightly to the steering wheel to control the trembling of his hands. There are five or six other cars parked there. You’d think it was some high-ranking politician, out on a jaunt. He pulls over on a steep verge, in high grass, and walks quickly along the cambered road towards a cop having a smoke, leaning on a 403 estate. He introduces himself, and the cop stands up straight and stubs out his cigarette then gives him a vague military salute and tells Darlac to follow him. “It’s not far,” he says. “Over there, at the end of the firebreak.”
Darlac bites his tongue to prevent himself saying that he knows. Always this reflex to put down underlings for their ignorance or their mediocrity.
Commissaire Divisionnaire Laborde sees him coming, but makes a show of continuing his discussion with a gendarmerie officer and two others in plain clothes. A bit further off, an orderly is guarding the hole. In the woods, other gendarmes are combing the ground as if searching for mushrooms.
After the War Page 39