After the War

by Hervé Le Corre

  I listened as Mazeau told me all this in a monotone voice, and I suspected that he was enjoying the picture he was painting of the city transformed into a jungle ruled by predators, a permanent twilight where human filth was given free rein. He talked to me like a biology teacher during a dissection: blasé, effortlessly superior to their naïve students, all sickened by the sight of the gaping corpse. But he was forgetting where I’d come back from. The depths of night I had journeyed to. He couldn’t possibly know or even imagine the ghost-filled darkness I carried around with me. Listening to him, I saw it again: Olga walking down the platform, swept along by the crowd, supported by an old woman. I saw her turn around, trying to see me one last time, before she vanished out of sight and everything was lost.

  It was then, at that very moment, that I knew what I was going to do. I was going to eliminate a few of these bastards who’d been his friends or simply his acquaintances and wait for his cop’s brain to realize that something was circling him, drawing closer. I had to attack his kid, who had nothing to do with any of this, because I wanted to scare him. I wanted him to be frightened every time he walked in the street. I wanted him to sleep badly, to look under his bed before he got in it. It was a good plan, but I didn’t know if I’d be able to execute it; at times I felt as if I were a silly little kid, dreaming up a simplistic film script.

  Gaby Penot. I managed to gather my thoughts and my will around this name. I didn’t know how to go after him. He would be the first. I had to find a way to approach him. I hoped an idea would come to me, that my resolve would help me to act.

  I became a regular in his café. It was large, dark, old-fashioned. Penot had kept the décor and furniture as they were, changing only a few windows and giving the walls a fresh coat of paint. The benches sagged, the chairs were often rickety, the large wall mirrors were spotted in places. I would go there for a drink after work, about one o’clock; it was close to my office. The local craftsmen went there to eat lunch, and there were a few dazed-looking drunkards hanging around. Penot presided behind his cash register, a cigarette permanently planted in the corner of his mouth, while a waitress did all the work. During the afternoons I never saw him wipe a glass or pour a beer or make a coffee. He would chat with a customer or read Sud-Ouest or Ciné Revue or Match or stare through the windows at people passing in the street.

  He was a short man with very dark hair, swept back and held in place with Brylcreem. His eyes, ever alert, burned feverishly in that bony face. The first time I went, I felt his eyes follow me until I sat down then return to me at regular intervals during the hour I remained there.

  In the evenings, the clientele changed. Two or three girls would sit on bar stools, drinking Cinzano and smoking. Men would go up to them and have whispered conversations which were sometimes brief and sometimes slightly longer—here, this is for mademoiselle—and which would end with the two of them leaving together. Often, the woman went first, the man following three meters behind in case they were seen together. I enjoyed watching the goings-on of all these johns, some of them straightforward, approaching the girl directly, others trying to be more discreet or cunning and leaning on the bar to order something first. Then they would greet the girl with a nod and sip their wine while pretending to stare vacantly into the large mirror behind the shelves filled with bottles, before finally deciding to make their approach, smiling smarmily. The girls didn’t bat an eyelid. They would look at their clients indifferently, even though you had the sense that they were weighing the man up while he chatted them up. Other than that, when there were no men there to bother them, they talked among themselves or chatted with the waiter, a skinny young man that everyone called Jeannot. Sometimes they would greet a new arrival, often one of those men in a raincoat and fedora straight out of a Hollywood film, or a tough guy in a cap and sheepskin coat who would enter with a “good evening” for the whole bar.

  All these people seemed to know each other. Sometimes they pretended not to greet each other, just exchanging looks, or signals, talking around a table for ten minutes then suddenly separating and ignoring each other for the rest of the evening, or abruptly leaving the café.

  One night, Darlac came in. My heart stopped beating for several endless seconds, then started banging so hard that I could hardly breathe. He was with a broad-shouldered guy, built like a docker, whom Penot called Francis. They congratulated each other and had a drink, joking in lowered voices. Darlac casually observed the room, as cops always do. I felt his gaze on me and looked up, my heart in my throat, but he had already moved on and was helping himself to water from a carafe on the table. I realized the mistake I had made, coming here: if he recognized me, my whole stupid plan would be screwed. I had changed, of course. Violette had had difficulty placing me. Mazeau would never have identified me if I hadn’t introduced myself to him after first talking to him on the phone. But Darlac was another breed altogether: a bloodhound, or maybe a wolf, whose senses are all sharpened by the hunt for their prey, because their survival depends upon it. And then there were all the nights we had spent together, staying up until we were exhausted. That intimacy between us that marks familiar memories. If he didn’t recognize me, it was probably because I was dead and only a few of my companions in purgatory could see me.

  When he left, half an hour later, he said goodbye only to a girl who was being chatted up by a guy near the door, and when he walked out onto the street, without turning around, I breathed in and felt as if my lungs were filled with pure oxygen.

  I couldn’t go on like that. I would go there at lunchtimes mostly and would sometimes order the plat du jour, and Penot ended up replying to my “hello” when I went in. In the evenings I would go in for an aperitif, but I could tell that my presence was out of place, could feel the boss’s eyes resting heavily on me. I was going to end up making them suspicious; he might talk to Darlac about me, and then I would have no chance of remaining invisible in his eyes. So I had to find a way to justify my regular visits to the bar.

  From that day on, I got into the habit of always carrying a knife. It was a flick-knife and, when the blade opened, the noise it made gave me a shudder of cruel pleasure. It had been a present from a man I knew in Paris. Maybe I’ll tell that story another day. Anyway, I knew I couldn’t afford to hesitate any longer. I couldn’t keep postponing it.

  One evening I stayed until closing. I got there later than usual and left about eleven, with the last customers. Then I hid in a doorway to watch, and I saw Penot and Jeannot, the waiter, switch off the lights and lower the metal shutter. They went their separate ways without a word and Penot walked off down the street. He stopped to light a cigarette, then walked more quickly towards the cours d’Alsace-et-Lorraine. I gripped the knife in my hand at the bottom of my pocket, and I followed him, almost staggering. The two coffees I’d drunk were sloshing around in my belly and I’m not sure how I managed to avoid puking between two parked cars, because I could feel my blood beating in my stomach as if someone was repeatedly punching me. It was raining, and the splashing of the water drowned out the sounds of our footsteps in the empty streets. He turned into rue de la Rousselle and it was so dark there that I almost lost him from view. I heard the click of a key in a lock and I saw his figure illuminated by the light from a corridor before it disappeared. I kept walking until I reached that door so I could see what number it was: 30.

  Suddenly I was no longer afraid. I noticed that the rain was streaming over me, icy on my neck, and that my shoes were soaked like mops. I savored all that cold water as if it was washing away my cowardice.

  I killed him the next day.

  I didn’t sleep that night. I thought about my whole life, about those I thought I loved, and those I should have cherished. Faces, voices, paraded through my mind. The dead and the living. But mostly the dead. They crowded into my room. Devastated faces, corpselike shadows, friends from long ago smiling and laughing. I felt possessed by a fever that made me
shiver with cold in my bed. Once, in Paris, I smoked opium, and I believe the sensation was almost identical: a flood of images and sounds experienced in a half-sleep that was by turns oppressive and weightlessly floating. I wished Olga could come and sit on the bed with me; I wished I could take her hand, speak to her again. I searched the darkness for Hélène’s figure, wanting to know if she was still strong enough to dance. I spoke to the shadows I thought I could see with a very clear sensation of going insane.

  I waited half an hour opposite his house, hidden in the shadows of a porch. I was trembling with cold and exhaustion. Maybe with fear. I saw Penot arrive, a black, hunched figure, the collar of his raincoat pulled up. I let him open the door of his building and turn on the light.

  “Gaby?”

  He turned around, startled, but I couldn’t see his face. Only the steam of his breath in the pale brightness of the corridor. Grabbing him by the collar, I pushed him backwards and stabbed the knife into his belly through the thick layers of his clothing, not knowing if the blade had entered his flesh or become embedded in wool and cotton. So I pulled the knife out and Penot took advantage of this to grab my throat. He started to squeeze it with his sharp fingers, but I managed to get him in the face. I saw the blade slice through almost his entire cheek and felt it hit something hard. I pushed harder and Penot fell back so suddenly, arms flapping, that I let go of the knife and saw it planted under his cheekbone. He fell on his ass and screamed. I don’t know if he only started screaming then, but that was when I first heard it. Dark, glistening blood was pouring from his wound and I could see his eyes, open wide and trying desperately to see me—to recognize me, I suppose. He fell onto his side, holding his stomach, then his hand rose to his face and I was afraid he would take the knife and use it against me, so I rushed at him, grabbing my flick-knife in spite of his hand gripping my arm, and I stabbed the blade into his throat and felt the warmth of blood on my hand. I saw it spray out and tried to avoid it by leaping to the side, then I stepped back towards the door, watching Penot as he tried to stop the bleeding as he lay back on the first few steps of the staircase. From upstairs someone yelled, threatening to call the police. “Gaby, is that you?”

  I went out into the street and I ran to the cours Victor-Hugo, then I slowed down to a walk in case a patrolling cop should happen to notice some guy running alone on an empty street, particularly as I still had the knife on me and as, in the gleam of the street lights, I could see that I was covered with blood up to my elbows.

  Only when I got back home did I wonder whether Penot was actually dead. I’d heard about neck wounds before and I knew that you would normally die from them in a matter of minutes, but there are always exceptional cases, strange miracles: men who survive after losing half the blood in their body—because it just wasn’t their time, as people say—or whose wound stops bleeding, for one reason or another. For a brief moment I hoped that the neighbor I had heard yelling from upstairs had managed to save his life while they waited for the ambulance to arrive. I felt relieved at the idea that I had not really killed him after all, since he was still alive when I left. I was reasoning like a four-year-old kid who thinks he can repair the broken vase by sticking it back together with his spit or can erase what he’s done by hiding the shattered pieces at the bottom of a rubbish bin.

  I had killed a man. His blood had stained my sleeves, it was clotting between my fingers. I had seen the terror and surprise in his eyes. I got completely undressed and began to wash myself in cold water, shivering in a daze. I no longer knew why I had done it. I felt neither guilt nor pride, only a sort of self-disgust and such contempt for the man I had killed that he no longer existed to me except as a bled corpse, a carcass. Even his past as an evil, torturing bastard no longer mattered, as if he’d been purged of it by the fatal hemorrhage. As I rubbed soap on my skin, I tried to convince myself that this murder was part of a methodical plan intended to worry and then terrify Darlac, to make him lose his mind, but the truth was I could no longer find any logic in my act. I had no explanation for it at all.

  So I lay down on my bed and fell straight asleep, crushed by the weight of all these questions.

  The next morning, I felt peaceful and well-rested. No nightmare had woken me. Perhaps because, from that point on, I was doomed to flounder in a bad dream that never ended.

  36The S.A.P.: Section des Affaires Politiques (Political Affairs Section). The Bordeaux equivalent of the Gestapo, led by Commissaire Poinsot.

  31

  He waited eight days in that apartment in the company of a widow, Lydia Mourgues, who put him up in a sort of white-walled cell, lit by a dormer window that overlooked an alleyway, though all he could see of it was the bare-brick wall of the house opposite. A man who introduced himself as Ahmed had brought him here after a long confab with Robert Autin. It was the hour of the siesta, the streets were empty and the man walked quickly, without a word, without looking at him, Daniel five meters behind him in line with the instructions Autin gave him before his departure. Ahmed seemed unconcerned whether the young Frenchman was following him or not. Sometimes he would suddenly disappear around a street corner or would vanish from sight in a narrow, meandering passage between two houses and Daniel was surprised to spot his slender figure, absorbed by the shadows, creeping along the walls like a large cat.

  Ahmed had knocked at a large studded door and had then slipped away without a goodbye or a backwards glance.

  The widow Mourgues had welcomed him warmly, planting two loud kisses on his cheeks, holding him tight to her large chest, then had led him to what was to be his room: an iron bed, a small table, a chair. It smelt of bleach and lavender. Toilets are here. Bathroom next to it. My husband fitted it just before his heart attack. Here’s the kitchen. And that’s the living room.

  Don’t look out of the window. Don’t sing. Don’t speak loudly, in case the neighbors hear you. They’re not here this afternoon, but they’ll be back in the evening. In the absence of the mistress of the house, don’t move about. Stay sitting or lying so the floorboards don’t creak. Two hours, no more than that: I just have to do the shopping. She gave him these safety instructions while pouring him mint tea and a large glass of water so cold that he thought his teeth might shatter when they came in contact with it. She spoke softly, as if someone were listening with an ear to the wall. Then she turned on the radio and songs filled the kitchen, waking the five canaries in their cage near the window, who immediately started trilling loudly.

  “I hope I won’t have to keep you here too long because it’s dangerous, having a deserter in the house like this. And the neighbors are bound to notice something eventually. They were Pétainists during the war, those scum . . . and they’re even worse now. Always listening at doors, following me around. Thankfully she’s a bit deaf and he’s a boozer. It sends him to sleep about eight every night, unless they start a shouting match. He hits her sometimes. He knows my husband was a communist, and that I agreed with him of course. So we despise each other, especially with what’s happening at the moment. And as neither of us is going anywhere . . .”

  Eight days, and he counted every hour. He watched each day pass through the window in the imperceptible movements of light and shadow on the façades of the buildings on the other side of the narrow street, the movement of the splashes of sunlight that fell on the floorboards then slid furtively up the walls until they faded and then died away, returning the wallpaper to its naturally dull grey color. He watched the sky pale in the cool of the morning then turn a harsher blue in the siesta hour when the widow went into her bedroom to sleep. Daniel rediscovered his mania for framing everything in his iron rectangle. Masses, volumes, colors. He examined with surprise these abstract fragments of his daily life, which was diminished by boredom. He yearned to draw, to take photographs.

  Eight days spent trying to kill time. One morning, before going out to the market, Madame Mourgues had handed him a worn old book t
hat smelt of dust and mould. The illustrated cover showed a sort of musketeer, with a feather in his hat, sword-fighting with two men. Le Capitan. Michel Zévaco. He sat down and opened the grimoire.

  The next day, he ran behind the son of the Hunchback in the moats of Caylus Castle. He would have killed Peyrolles with his bare hands. The rough, porous paper smelt of the old days. Daniel lost himself in the alleys, evaded the traps set by the hateful conspirators. Galloped. Crossed swords with ten ferocious but stupid assassins, his back to the wall.

  The days passed slowly. He shuddered every time the gates banged in the street or someone knocked at the door downstairs. The widow would stop what she was doing then, listen closely, and shake her head. “It’s nothing,” she would say.

  Daniel wondered how she could be sure. “I have an ear for disasters. When my husband died, I heard him fall, even though I was out in the courtyard hanging up laundry. I knew straight away. I still hear him, every day. There are times when I think it would be better to be deaf.” So he put his trust in those ears capable of hearing misfortune knocking at the door, or doom walking down the street.