After the War

by Hervé Le Corre

  Autin sighs. Shakes his head. He regards Daniel sadly.

  “Did you come here to tell me that? And anyway, how did you get here? You’re not dressed properly, are you?”

  “I ran away. Stole a jeep. I’m not going back there. That’s it.”

  “What do you mean, that’s it? Just like that, on a sudden impulse? You decide you’ve had enough so you run away?”

  “Yes, monsieur. I’m deserting. Giovanni was going to. He realized a long time ago.”

  “It was different, with Giovanni.”

  “I know. He’d been instructed. He was intelligent. And he had ideas, the right ones. Not like me. I thought it’d be like . . . I don’t know . . . a sort of adventure. I didn’t want to hear what they told me at home, I just let them talk, thinking I had to go and see it for myself.”

  “And what did you see?”

  Daniel thinks of a verse that Giovanni often cited: And at times I have seen what man thought he saw. He can’t remember who wrote that. He wouldn’t be able to explain it, but he thinks now he can understand it.

  “It’s difficult to describe. It’s . . .”

  “It’s war. What did you expect when you came here?”

  “Nothing. I didn’t expect anything. But I didn’t think I’d do what I’ve done. I could never have imagined that.”

  He’s short of breath. His chest is being crushed by a giant hand.

  “Come on. You should eat something. You’ll think more clearly afterwards.”

  They cross the patio and enter the kitchen. Autin goes into a pantry and emerges with a plate full of dates, a loaf of bread, a bowl of black olives. From a cool box he takes a piece of cheese and a bottle of water. He grabs a glass and a plate from the stone sink.

  “Help yourself. I’ve already eaten.”

  Daniel sits at the end of the table and Autin sits facing him and lights a cigarette. He eats a few dates, two or three olives. Autin picks up the bread and cuts a thick slice, then pushes the cheese towards him.

  “Eat, I said. You have to eat.”

  Daniel fills his glass with water and drinks it straight down. He takes some cheese, chews a bit of bread, swallows it with difficulty.

  “So?” Autin says.

  “So, I can’t take it anymore. I have to get out of here.”

  “Do you understand what you’re saying?”

  Daniel takes the pack of army cigarettes from his pocket and lights one. Autin hands him a pack of American cigarettes.

  “Have one of these. Stop smoking that shit.”

  Daniel stubs out his Gauloise and lights one of Autin’s cigarettes.

  “Yes,” he says, blowing smoke up at the ceiling. “I understand. I’ve become a murderer. I don’t know where I am anymore, who I am. We slaughter people. All these poor grunts getting shot to bits, and for what? For those fucking colonists? For all those pied-noir bastards who treat Arabs like dogs? To keep Algeria? My parents and my sister were right. They told me to stay right out of it, to hide in an office somewhere because it wasn’t my war, because you don’t make war against a people. And yet I did everything I could to see combat.”

  “And what did you do, in combat?”

  “As soon as they put a rifle in my hands, I loved it. I put my heart into it. The instructors couldn’t believe it. And when they gave me a rifle with a scope, I thought it was amazing.”

  “When you’re shooting at cardboard targets, why not? It’s just like a funfair, I suppose. Except that, one day, you have a human being in your crosshairs.”

  Daniel tells him. About the first ambush, the death of Declerck, the terrified men, lying on the ground to escape the machine-gun fire. Then the stampede up the hill with the sergent, then the fell hidden in bushes taking potshots at his friends. The pleasure of framing him in his scope, the electric charge that ran through his body as he squeezed the trigger. The badly wounded man, the sergeant finishing him off. The congratulations of the others, and the condemnation of Giovanni. The sensation that he was becoming someone important. The lieutenant’s handshake.

  Daniel speaks in a hollow voice, staring down at the table. Autin listens without moving. He holds a cigarette between his fingers, unlit.

  The water-truck convoy and the second ambush and the lieutenant dying with his leg ripped off, Giovanni lying in a pool of his own blood in the back of the half-track, the fear, the fell’s corpse almost cut in two by a burst of .50-calibre gunfire, the hatred and the nausea when faced with this display of guts and the man’s wide-eyed expression: Daniel tells him everything. The retaliatory operation against the village suspected of harboring rebels who’d killed three of our men. He tells him about the grenades tossed into the houses, the girl raped and killed by those two bastards, the desire he felt to put a bullet in each of their heads because killing was becoming a sort of reflex, a solution worth considering. He also tells him about the woman with the destroyed face and how he finished her off, that head without any eyes or nose or mouth, only blood and scraps of hanging skin, and that death rattle rising from the back of her throat as if the flesh itself were groaning. He doesn’t stop talking, doesn’t even pause for breath, his face covered with sweat, dripping down onto his thighs, staring emptily, blindly, his gaze turned inwards, to his remembrances, to the pitiless darkness where the film of his memory is projected: yes, I pressed the trigger and I saw her fall sideways, and in that moment it seemed like the right thing to do because the harm was already done, but the problem is that in war the harm is always already done. It’s like when a fence around a pillaged garden has been smashed down—from then on, it enables anyone to enter and to continue the theft and destruction. In war, everything is permitted, and I don’t want to permit myself everything. I can’t. Do you understand?

  He sneaks a glance at Autin, but sees only the glistening stupefaction in his eyes and instantly dives back into his vision and his monologue, realizing that it is the first time he has talked about all this and that it’s doing him good, even as it tears at his soul and his guts, a bit like in the films when a man rips out an arrow that’s stuck in his own chest: you see him suffering, gritting his teeth, sweat streaming down his face, then suddenly relaxing when the Apache dart is removed and almost fainting before rediscovering his indestructible heroic calm. This is the first time he’s been able to find the words to describe this fuck-up, this hornet’s nest . . . yes, that’s it, a hornet’s nest: the more you struggle, the more it injects its venom, to the point that your body and soul are saturated with pain and they become anaesthetised. He feels as if he is emptying himself, and little by little he slumps deeper into his chair, until he is slouching like an old man under the initially impassive eyes of this cold man who seems to have seen and heard everything before but whose gaze now is wavering, turning away from this young soldier to search for some mysterious reference point on the white wall across from him, a sign perhaps, and finally he lifts the cigarette to his mouth and lights it.

  He smokes for a moment in silence, observing Daniel through narrowed eyes, perhaps because of the smoke or perhaps because of some instinctive mistrust. Either way, it is clear that he’s thinking, calculating, and when Daniel fills a glass with water he holds out his own so that Daniel can fill that too, then he stubs out his cigarette in the ashtray, blowing smoke through his nostrils in two plumes that disperse instantly.

  “I’ll see what I can do. You can start by washing because you stink, then I’ll give you some civilian clothes. Tonight Chadia will take you to some people. You can’t stay here. From now on, you do not go out in the street without permission. You want to desert: I don’t know how we’re going to manage this, but from this point on you are under our protection and you have to obey our orders. It could take days or weeks before we find a way of getting you out of here. It’s very rare that soldiers decide to do this. It would have been difficult even for Giovanni, who was a comrad
e, but we’d started to test out a network, so we’ll see. Remember, if you fuck up, dozens of comrades will die. You do not have the right to put their lives in danger. When an Algerian militant is arrested, he’s tortured. Did you know that? Here, the Gestapo is in power. So stay calm or we’ll leave you outside a gendarmerie. Got it?”

  Daniel nods. He says thank you, thank you, in a hoarse voice, his throat tight.

  “Don’t worry,” says Autin. “It’ll be O.K. It takes a lot of courage to do what you’ve done. And to talk like that.”

  The man smiles. This is the first time Daniel has seen him smile. Suddenly he feels as if he can breathe more easily.

  35A French military unit created during the Algerian War to carry out counter-guerrilla operations, each unit consisting of about a hundred harkis—Muslim Algerian loyalists—commanded by about twenty officers and N.C.O.s from the French gendarmerie.

  30

  Within a week, I had found a job and a place to live. My savings wouldn’t have lasted long anyway, and I needed a quiet place where I could take refuge and an occupation to prevent me going mad by thinking constantly about the sole reason I had returned to Bordeaux: to make Darlac suffer as I had suffered. I knew it was impossible, but I thought if I went over every conceivable way of torturing a human being, I would eventually find one that seemed more or less appropriate.

  The apartment was tiny and dark but clean. It was a second-floor flat, overlooking the cours de l’Yser. On the floor below me was a sad, pale Spanish washerwoman who worked all day, constantly coming and going from her home to the cellar where she boiled water in the washtubs that filled the stairwell with the odors of soap and bleach from morning to night. We were the only ones in that damp, leprous building. On the first day—because she was the one who had the keys and who opened the apartment up for me—she offered to clean and iron my laundry. She proposed a price so low that I wondered how many tons of laundry she must have to wash in a week in order to scrape a living. Her name was Madame Mendez; her husband had died during the Civil War and she’d had to take refuge in France with her sister. Her black hair, held back by a headband, was always gathered up in a compact little bun. She wore black from head to foot. The only color she allowed herself was a violet shawl that she wore over her shoulders when it was cold in the mornings, when I would see her sometimes dragging her feet as she transported the day’s first load of dirty laundry.

  Mazeau almost choked at the other end of the line when I told him who I was and he finally accepted the proof of my identity that I provided. Oh yes, he remembered me. He had a good memory for names and faces, which was a useful quality in a cop. He too thought I had disappeared in the camps. That was the word he used: disappeared. Then he stopped talking and there was an embarrassed silence during which I imagine he thought about the long procession of the dead that I had, to his amazement, somehow escaped. Behind him though, I could hear the usual hum of an office: voices speaking, doors creaking, typewriters clattering.

  When I told him I was calling on behalf of Abel, he cleared his throat. “We have to talk somewhere private,” he said. I imagined him peering left and right in case one of his colleagues was spying on the conversation and already calculating what he might gain from this new source of trouble. He seemed about as safe to me as a steep, shaky old staircase.

  We met in a packed café opposite the station. I recognized him easily amid the crowd of departing travelers, civilians and soldiers, the roar of conversations and the fog of cigarette smoke. He was pretending to read a newspaper and kept staring around with his suspicious, shifty light blue eyes, and he looked almost exactly as I remembered him: a pale, almost transparent man, his chestnut hair parted to the left in a rulerstraight line. When I approached his table and pulled the chair towards me so I could sit down, he lowered his newspaper and looked at me with surprise, maybe with hostility. I introduced myself, but the stupor did not leave his face even as he gave me his damp, warm hand to shake. He stammered that he hadn’t recognized me, apologizing as he stared at me, perhaps trying to determine what exactly it was about me that had changed. Then he relaxed and leaned back in his seat.

  He asked me how I was, what I’d been doing all these years, since ’45. I gave him the short version. I’d started living again, and that had taken a while. He nodded. He could understand that, after what I’d been through. He mentioned two or three people he knew who’d come back from the camps and were still unable to forget all that.

  “Who said anything about forgetting?” I asked. “Who would want to? Who would be capable of it?”

  From the empty way he stared at me, I realized that he did not understand. I ordered a coffee from the waiter who was walking past us, while Mazeau recovered his composure.

  Unsure how to broach the subject, I began by talking about Abel: the man he had been and the one he’d become, sick and exhausted and bitter. About my sadness at seeing him in that state. Mazeau just nodded and made a few mournful comments: the usual clichés about the passing of time, which he must have thought were quite profound because he pronounced them in a croaky voice, staring vaguely into space and concluding with a hand gesture filled with fatalism.

  Then he kept his silence, pretending to look around at the hustle and bustle of the café. He avoided my eye, concentrating instead on his empty cup or the little spoon that he turned in his fingers. I could tell he was afraid of what I was about to say. I’m sure he would have given almost anything to have me change my mind and suddenly leave, or for some unexpected incident—a train crash, a car accident—that would oblige him to run off.

  “I came back to settle a few old scores,” I told him.

  I talked like the pen-pusher I was.

  Mazeau looked up at me, round-eyed and frowning. He slowly rubbed his hands together.

  “What scores? With who?”

  When I pronounced Darlac’s name, he glanced over at the next table, as if frightened that the three soldiers practically falling asleep over their beers might have heard, and he signaled me to shut up. I spoke more quietly so he would calm down and listen to me, and I explained that I wanted to know where to find him, but that I also wanted to know about all his friends, his relatives, about anything that might have helped him survive the great purge. I didn’t tell him what I planned to do, because at that moment I didn’t know myself. I merely led him to believe that I wanted to bring charges against Darlac, denounce this collaborator who had ended up as a commissaire.

  He smiled and finally met my gaze.

  “All cops were collaborators, for the simple reason that they were obeying orders and they were scared, just like everyone else. Scared of their bosses, of the Krauts, of some colleagues. Some were more zealous than others; some hated the Jews and communists, even if they didn’t really know why, and wanted to eliminate them, and that was enough to motivate them. There was Poinsot and his team, the S.A.P.,36 but they got what was coming to them during the Liberation. And then there was the majority of cops, who just did what they were told to do, without asking too many questions. A few others, like Darlac, used the situation to make money. He was in cahoots with the gangs back then, and they’d plunder apartments left empty after the round-ups. He was also in league with the Kraut officers who took care of all that. Everyone knew, but no-one said anything. That’s what it was like. There were only a few of us who tried to do good, to save our honor, if that was possible. Commissaire Laborde was another. But there were only about twenty of us at most. Most of the cops in authority now were also in authority during the Occupation. They’d have had to fire three-quarters of the Bordeaux police to purge all those shits. And that’s what you want to hit out at? They’ll come down on you like a ton of bricks. Forget it. You’re too small and too weak to take them on, and anyway you’ve already suffered enough.”

  “Yeah, but they haven’t. That’s the whole problem.”

  He shrugged. He seemed g
enuinely saddened by my obstinacy.

  “If you insist . . . I’ll get your information for you. After all, if you manage to bring down Darlac, I certainly won’t be complaining.”

  We agreed to meet in the same place the following week. He left first and I saw him watch the street before opening the door. I thought he was exaggerating a bit, but what he’d told me about the police corresponded to what I already knew, and to what I’d suspected at the time, back when I didn’t want to face the truth, when I felt protected by Darlac, who told me not to move, to stay aloof from all that so me and my wife and kid would remain sheltered from the coming storm.

  I sat there for a while thinking again about my blindness, my cowardice. Wondering if the fact of looking evil in its face was going to give me my sight back, now it was too late.

  When we next saw each other, Mazeau gave me a rundown of the powers at play, as he put it. Cops and gangsters. Rival groups in the underworld, enemy factions in the police force. Prostitution, gambling, fencing stolen goods. A few armed robberies, a bit of drug-dealing. Simmering post-war resentments among the cops. With Darlac, the city’s best policeman, as a dishonest peacemaker, the puppeteer-in-chief. Holding some by their balls, others by the throat. One name kept recurring: Penot. Gabriel Penot. Gaby to his friends. He had been assistant detective in Poinsot’s special unit, the jobless cousin of one of his deputies. One of those losers who do a bit of black-market dealing and have their fingers stuck in various pies, and whose parents had fixed him up with his cop cousin in order to keep him out of prison. So lazy and incompetent that even his cousin kept him away from any important missions. He acted as a messenger boy between the department and the Germans. Maybe he doled out a few beatings during interrogations: he was capable of that and, like the other thugs, took a certain pleasure from it. He almost enrolled in the militia, but must have decided that was too risky, given that, by late ’43, the tide was starting to turn. He did help them out though, offloading seizures of food intended for the black market, or anything he could get his hands on during arrests: money, jewellery, objects of value. But he covered his ass by acting discreetly and using fake identities. So much so that when the Liberation came, the investigators in charge of purging the police had passed him over due to a lack of evidence: after all, there were tens of thousands of low-ranking stooges like him all over the country. He did six months in prison, then had his case dismissed. The rumor was that, in ’47, in exchange for certain services rendered during the Occupation, Darlac had put money into the bar on rue de Pas-Saint-Georges that Penot had bought on the cheap, and that the two had remained on good terms ever since. It was also said that Penot’s brother, a creep who fucked kids, had been rescued from some very deep shit in ’50, by the good graces of Albert Darlac.