After the War

by Hervé Le Corre

  He gets his breath back, has a brief coughing fit.

  “That’s not what I’m talking about. It makes no difference who finds who—it’ll end the same way. He’s not up to it. Anyway, if he really wanted to kill me, he’d have done it already, don’t you think? I would never waste time like that: as soon as I get him in my sights, he’s a dead man. But anyway . . . what I meant is that I got here just in time to see you still alive. That’s my fault. I should have thought of it earlier. But for me, you were the last person Delbos could have gone to, given . . . After everything you told me the last time I saw you . . . All your big words . . . It’s true Jean wasn’t too happy about you flirting with Olga. Beautiful girl, wasn’t she? Do you remember, or has your memory gone down the shitter with the rest of you? He used to tell me about it sometimes, the way you’d come on to her. You were a good-looking guy back then, and a charmer too. You could sell water to a drowning man, remember?”

  Abel lifts his arm then lets it fall again.

  “Go away. Leave me in peace.”

  Violette bends over him because suddenly he is not moving at all anymore. She puts her hand on his chest and nods.

  “Nothing in the cellar either, boss,” says Lefranc.

  The commissaire turns around with a look of contempt and signals him to button it.

  “I have to call the doctor,” says Violette. “He needs to come.”

  Darlac shakes his head.

  “We can do better than that. He can go to the doctor. Lefranc! Call an ambulance.”

  Violette plants herself in front of him, her face at the level of his burly chest.

  “But I’ve been looking after him for months. He wants to die here, not in hospital!”

  “He’s already unconscious. And once he’s dead, why would he care where he is? You don’t seem to understand: you were sheltering a criminal, you and Abel. Obstructing an investigation. Aiding and abetting. I kind of doubt whether Abel will be able to tell me much, but you . . . You’re going to come with us and you’re going to tell us everything. After that, the judge will decide. So what do you want to do? Let him die here or take him to hospital?”

  Violette stares at him, mouth half-open. She looks stunned, uncomprehending. Abel’s hand is still in hers. Then she makes a movement to which Darlac pays little attention and suddenly he sees her holding something in her fist and throwing herself at him. When he realizes that she is trying to stab him with a syringe, a hot flush rises through him and he recoils, almost stumbling, then falls into a chair that slides backwards under him. He is poised to defend himself—legs bent, feet forward—but Lefranc smashes the butt of his pistol over the woman’s head and she staggers sideways. A second blow on the temple knocks her out. Darlac kicks the syringe away as if it was a grenade or a venomous snake, then he calls out to the two guards:

  “Take her to the station. I’ll deal with her later.”

  The two cops lift the semi-conscious woman, her earlobe pouring with blood, and support her down the hallway, her bare feet dragging on the floor.

  “What about him?” Lefranc asks.

  “Wait for the ambulance and then go back to the station and get started with the paperwork. I’ll get there as soon as I can.”

  Outside, he finds it easier to breathe. Relieved to get out of that house of death, with its smell of disinfectant and chamber pots. He gets in his car and calls his colleagues to find out what’s happening. Nothing. Delbos has vanished. Four cars patrolling the area, and not a trace of Delbos. Shit. He tells them to forget it, then he has an idea. After this, he doesn’t give a toss anymore. He can have Delbos when he wants him. All he has to do is arrest the son, who’s deserted and must be hiding somewhere in Bordeaux, and he will have the father. Poor bastard is bound to be overcome by sentiment after all these years. He’ll just have to use the press.

  Soon he’s out in the sticks. He hates all these fields, these trees and these hedges, these farmhouses covered with wisteria, these carts still pulled by horses. These dogs that attack the wheels of cars, these chickens that peck the grass by the side of the road. He can’t stand this rustic straitjacket that stops the city expanding, although he knows that in twenty years it will all be gone. Drainage ditches everywhere, marshy expanses flooded throughout the winter and infested with mosquitoes during the summer, market gardens and watercress beds. He almost misses the little road to the left, braking and turning the steering wheel at the last moment, making the back tires screech as they send up clouds of dust.

  The house is more or less as he remembers it: long and low, white, at the edge of a wood planted with hundred-year-old oaks. He has never been inside. He knew that madame would come here. That Kraut she used to fuck during the war. Who gave her a child named Elise. Recognized at birth by Inspecteur Darlac, who was madly in love with that tall blonde who looked like she’d walked straight out of a Hollywood film. He thinks about that again, heating his anger to boiling point. He remembers all the lies she told him. Her insistence on passing her driving licence, on having her own car. For two years, he’d been completely taken in. And then, one day, a colleague named Gauthier in the secret service had taken him aside in a deserted office, looking embarrassed, and had spoken to him in a whisper as night fell outside and neither of them thought to turn on a lamp, or dared to do so. Of course, his colleague had told him all that as a friend. To warn him, to put him on his guard. He would keep the secret, naturally. He didn’t know anything about the kid, but he knew the background of Hauptmann Wilhelm Müller: Bordeaux, then the Eastern Front, Stalingrad, where he lost half his face and a few other important parts of his body.

  Albert Darlac walks along a high laurel hedge and puts his hand on the bolt of a black-painted iron gate. He walks up a driveway lined with blooming rose bushes that loom towards him with their large flowers and their thorny stems. He doesn’t knock, because the door is not locked. He takes the handkerchief-wrapped pistol in his hand, sliding his index finger over the trigger and holding the gun against his thigh, arm dangling at his side.

  He stops in the entrance hall that opens directly onto a living room still filled with bluish darkness due to the tall trees outside. He can hear classical music playing somewhere in the house. He doesn’t recognize it. Violins, a symphony or a concerto . . . he knows nothing about all that stuff, couldn’t care less. He can smell baking. To his right is a kitchen, with a cake on the table, in its tin. Still warm. He examines the room: clean, tidy, perfectly ordinary. The smell of bleach. He jumps, sensing a presence behind him. A small, ageless woman holding a cloth in her hand asks him what he’s doing there. Accent so thick you could cut it with a knife. She stands in the doorway, two meters away from him. She repeats her question in a louder, high-pitched voice, her eyes wrinkling and twisting with fear.

  He shoots her in the face and she is thrown backwards, collapsing onto a coffee table between two chairs. He watches as she struggles, her arms twitching two or three times, then a long shudder runs up to her shoulders and she stops moving. There’s a lot of blood pouring from the back of her head. Her eyes are wide open, in an expression of amazement.

  He follows the sound of music, enters a corridor. The door is already open onto it, throwing a rectangle of light on the floor. The music stops and the silence halts Darlac as if he’d walked into a glass wall. He moves forward again, one step at a time, holding his gun out ahead of him, and in the doorway he spins to face a figure in a wheelchair, lit from behind, his back to Darlac, staring out of the window.

  “I hope it wasn’t too difficult.”

  The voice is composed, kindly. The accent, very light, gives a sweet harmony to his words. With a squeak of wheels, the man turns around.

  “Most of all, I hope she didn’t suffer. She’s already suffered enough in her lifetime. In a certain way, you have brought to an end an ordeal that has gone on too long.”

  Darlac suddenly feels his hea
rt stir. He is no longer sure that it’s beating.

  In front of him, barely three meters away, sits half a man, speaking like an actor in a sentimental film. In front of him is this wax statue that has melted down one side: only frozen drips remain, hastily pressed down over gaping wounds. In front of him is a body that looks like it might have been run over by a train, carved up by a band saw, cauterised in red-hot fires and sewn back together with coarse string.

  And it speaks. There is something human on the other side, a surviving Siamese twin still stuck to the corpse of its brother. Hauptmann Wilhelm Müller. Willy, to his friends.

  Albert Darlac saw some smashed-up faces in ’22, at a war memorial service. His twelve-year-old eyes had been riveted to those devastated mugs, despite his mother pinching his arm to make him stop staring. Back at the house, he had burst into sobs. Disfigured ghosts had haunted him for nights on end, robbing him of sleep. But here, now, at forty-eight years old, he is not sure he can understand what he’s seeing. He cannot get his head around this reality. All he feels is a sad, sickened stupefaction. He can think of nothing to say. He wants to toss his pistol to the floor and leave this place. Oh well. He wouldn’t be able to blame this one on Delbos anyway. Besides, that imbecile already has enough crimes to his name that he will go to the guillotine whatever.

  “What do you intend to do?” Müller asks. “Someone already came, a few weeks ago, and pointed the same kind of gun at me. He didn’t kill my mother though. He just spoke to me about you and Annette. And Elise of course. Then he left, as he had come, on a motorcycle. Do you know him?”

  In Darlac’s malfunctioning mind, the questions pile up like disused wagons on a railway siding. He tries to find words, air. He notices that he’s trembling. Finally, he manages to speak:

  “How did you recognize me?”

  The lid of the man’s single eye bats its long black lashes.

  “You disappoint me. You. A gifted detective. Annette showed me photographs of you. I thought you were good-looking to start with. You were in love. You had a nice smile, holding the baby in your arms. I knew that Elise would be happy, that you would bring her up with good values.”

  He pauses to take a cigarette and a lighter from behind the gramophone.

  “Do you smoke?”

  Darlac shakes his head. He is no longer trembling. On the handkerchief, around the butt of the gun, he can feel the dampness of his sweat. He watches Müller take two drags with visible pleasure. Little by little, he recovers his spirits.

  “For a long time, I trusted your nice-looking face and what Annette told me. It was difficult for me to check for myself, as you can see . . . And then, last year, she told me how much you torment her all the time because you are mad with jealousy over a ghost . . . Look at me. Look at what I’ve become. Look at the reason why you put her through such hell. Every day, every night. This constant slavery . . . Ever since I returned, more or less . . . For six years she kept silent about it, endured it without a word, without ever complaining. For the good of Elise. For my daughter. That is why I must not hate you or feel this desire to spit in your face. For her. So that something may be saved from this disaster. She is the only reason I have stayed alive. I should even thank you, but that is not why you are here, and I am not sure that good manners are appropriate between us.”

  The man speaks as if he’s telling someone else’s story. In an equable tone, with elegant restraint, with no hint of even the slightest emotion.

  Darlac does not understand. He hears no anger, perceives no sadness, no distress in the words and attitude of this man. He does not feel he is in a position to understand, as if suddenly the man was speaking to him from a long way away, in a foreign language. He feels a vague unease, standing in front of this maimed flesh, of course. But above all, he cannot conceive how the man’s mind has managed to barricade itself inside that destroyed fortress, nor in what state he has been able to survive, still capable of loving a slut and her bastard, and listening to that music without falling asleep, washed by his old mother. All of this is beyond Commissaire Darlac’s comprehension. The man strikes him as the typical Francophile German officer, korrekt, cultivated. He used to see them smiling under their visors, standing straight in their boots, glasses in hand, surrounded by collaborators and gorgeous whores, in the drawing rooms of the prefecture or the mayor’s office. He remembers that it didn’t bother him much, at the time. He thought they had the style and elegance of victors, and that made it less bitter to accept the little arrangements and important services which he had resolved to render them. He had even shaken a few hands, like a well-raised child, bowing, straight-backed, to an affably smiling S.S. lieutenant as he stumbled through a few words in his tentative French, or to a Wehrmacht officer with graying temples. They had won the war against a nation of half-assed yellow-bellied losers softened by too many paid holidays. That was simply the way it went.

  Except that those bastards ended up losing. Destroyed. In shame and dishonor, with all the stuff about the camps. Woe to them! Darlac sometimes likes to package his morals in simple catchphrases. No need to think too much.

  He extends his arm and fires two bullets in the Kraut’s chest. He didn’t dare demolish what was left of his face. Müller is jolted backwards by each impact, sending his wheelchair rolling into the wall behind him. In the seconds that pass as his arteries swell and his lungs fill with blood, he continues to stare unblinkingly at the cop, as if he is thinking of something to say, then he shakes his head and blinks, perhaps with contempt, and slumps over onto the maimed side of his body, with blood running from his mouth.

  Darlac folds the handkerchief around the gun and exits the room, slightly dazed, as if he’s just been through twelve rounds. He shivers as he sees the old woman’s corpse, between the two chairs, then walks more quickly and leaves the house without another backward glance.

  Outside, the sun beats down oppressively, almost knocking him to the ground. On the sidewalk he hesitates, working out where he is, then runs towards his car. The oven-like heat inside the vehicle forces him to breathe through his mouth as he winds down the windows, then he drives away, trying to get rid of the solid air that burns his face like hot wax.

  34

  Bad dreams pursue him to the point of total exhaustion. He falls asleep at eleven at night, but there are always the dead to wake him. The fell cut in half, the woman with the destroyed face, Giovanni twisting in pain around the bullets lodged in his guts. After that, sometimes until dawn, he tosses and turns in the warm sheets and once again he is trekking through the suffocating dust, under the vertical sunlight; he is with the others, and he can hear the slow footsteps of the column of men as they climb a path up the hillside.

  Then a machine-gunner opens fire and they throw themselves to the ground and then he sees the face of the gunner in the crosshairs of his scope, frowning, cheek almost touching the handle of his machine gun, face trembling in rhythm with the bursts of fire. Daniel squeezes the trigger but nothing happens or he sees the bullet leave, in slow motion, with a curving trajectory that never reaches its target. And while this is happening, he can hear men being hit all around him, their screams, their moans, their children’s voices returned at the backs of their throats. Blood gushing between their hands.

  In odd moments, shame grips him like a fever and he starts sweating as he thinks of the others who are still there, in that shit heap, the fear in their guts making them savage and stupid. He should feel happy to be away from all that, back with his loved ones, in his city. He should love the moments when Irène holds him tight to her and he feels her body through the light fabric of her summer dress. But he is only relieved, as if he had escaped the wreckage of a plane crash while others were still trapped inside it.

  Most of all he is frightened by that other he left behind in Algeria, that twin brother, the double who emerged from him and who loved the war, who experienced every instant of those eig
ht months as an adventure capable of imbuing life with meaning, who succumbed to the power conferred upon him by his weaponry, who surrendered to the dizzying spiral of violence and hatred, who tasted horror the way we might be pleasantly surprised by the sweetness of a cheese after first smelling its foul odor. On those paths, in the back of a half-track, staring into the scope of a rifle, he abandoned a soldier who looks so much like him that he struggles to tell the difference between them. Like a twin looking in the mirror every day and suddenly, one morning, no longer knowing if what he sees is his brother or his own reflection.

  And he searches for the terrified child on a rooftop waiting for Mummy and Daddy to come and fetch him. And he can no longer tell if he really lived through that experience that has been told to him so many times that it has become like a tale of giants or dragons, something that seems harder to believe in with each passing year. And he misses that other little brother, perhaps stolen away by a dragon, perhaps dead.

  He does not tell them any of this. He pretends to slip back into the calm flow of everyday life, in this peaceful summertime. From time to time, Maurice tries to get him to talk, making allusions, mentioning what he went through in ’39-’40, hoping that Daniel will respond with confidences of his own, but nothing comes, apart from a few anecdotes, tales of drunkenness, Sergeant Castel with his soul still partly in Indochina, the wait for the post to arrive and be distributed, and then the city with its separate quarters, Europeans on one side, Arabs on the other, two worlds, two countries existing side by side. “Or one on top of the other,” Irène suggests. Yes, that’s it. One on top of the other, with a sandwich filling of meat and blood.

  Of course, Roselyne and Maurice tell Daniel about the cop’s visit, the return of his father to Bordeaux, the murders of which he’s accused. Daniel listens to the fear in their voices, and the sadness too. Irène had written to him about it, but here, now, he has the impression of an old machine that everyone had thought irreparably broken, suddenly jerking back to life and threatening to crush in its gears anyone who gets too close to it.