The Great Swindle

by Pierre Lemaitre

  Unquestionably his greatest inspiration, what one might call his “efflorescent” period, began when he learned to masturbate, at which point his work teemed with imagination and inventiveness. His paintings now presented all of the staff—including the servants, something that offended the dignity of the teachers at the school—in epic panoramas where the sheer number of characters made possible the most remarkable sexual configurations. Everyone laughed, although confronted with this erotic imaginative world, they could not help but reconsider their own lives, and the smartest saw in it a troubling predilection for—how to put it?—questionable relations.

  Édouard was forever drawing. People said he was wicked because he liked to shock—and he invariably succeeded—but the sodomy of Sainte-Clotilde by the bishop of Reims deeply upset the school authorities. And his parents. Outraged them. His father, as always, offered to pay whatever was necessary to avoid a scandal. Nothing would persuade the school to acquiesce. On the subject of sodomy, they remained obdurate. The whole world was against Édouard. Excepting a few friends, particularly those who found his drawings titillating, and his sister, Madeleine. She found the whole thing hilarious—not the bishop of Reims shafting Sainte Clotilde, that was ancient history, but imagining the expression on the face of Father Hubert, the principal . . . She had attended the girls’ school at Sainte-Clotilde, she knew exactly what it was like. Madeleine would laugh at Édouard’s nerve, his insolent remarks. She loved to tousle his hair—though only when he let her, because, though several years her junior, he was so tall . . . He would bend down and she would bury her fingers in his thick curls, and tickle him so hard that he would eventually beg for mercy. It would not have done for their father to catch them doing this.

  To get back to Édouard. As far as his education was concerned, everything turned out for the best because his parents were very wealthy, but it was not an easy road. Even before the war, M. Péricourt had been earning pots of money, he was one of those men who flourish in a crisis, as though such things are intended for them. No one ever spoke of Maman’s fortune, there was no need; one might as well ask how long has the sea been salty. But since Maman died of heart trouble at a young age, Papa was left solely in charge. Since his time was wholly taken up by his business interests, he delegated the education of his children to institutions, teachers, and private tutors. To servants. Édouard, everyone agreed, had been gifted with an uncommon intelligence, an extraordinary natural talent for drawing—even his teachers at the Beaux-Arts were astonished—and the luck of the devil. What more could he have hoped for? This, perhaps, was why he had always been so provocative. Knowing one had nothing to lose, that everything can be worked out, leads to a lack of inhibitions. You can say what you like, however you like. The fact is that M. Péricourt rescued his son from every situation, but he did so for selfish reasons, because he refused to allow his name to be tarnished. And this was no easy matter since Édouard was deeply rebellious; he relished causing a scandal. Édouard took advantage of his father’s lack of interest in his future to enroll at the École des Beaux-Arts. A loving and protective sister, a powerful reactionary father who habitually rejected him, an undeniable talent, Édouard had just about everything he might need to succeed. Of course, we know that things are not going to be quite so straightforward, but as the war is coming to an end, this is how it seems. Apart from his leg. Which is horribly mutilated.

  Of such things, of course, as he checks and changes Édouard’s linen, Albert knows nothing. The only thing he knows for certain is that, whatever it might have been, Édouard Péricourt’s trajectory changed radically on November 2, 1918.

  And that his shattered leg will soon be the least of his worries.

  Albert spent all his waking hours by his friend’s bedside, working as a voluntary assistant for the nurses. The nurses took charge of all care intended to limit the risk of infection, his feeding (he was fed through a tube with a concoction of milk whisked with eggs or gravy); Albert did everything else. When he was not wiping Édouard’s forehead with a damp cloth, or helping him to drink with the precision of a jeweler, he would change the draw sheets. At such times he would have to hold his nose, turn, and look away, reminding himself that his friend’s future probably depended on such disgusting duties.

  His attention was wholly occupied by these two tasks: trying vainly to find a way to breathe without moving his ribs, and keeping his comrade company while they waited for the ambulance.

  Over and over, he saw Édouard Péricourt half-sprawled on top of him when he returned from the dead. But what haunted him was the image of that bastard Pradelle. He spent countless hours imagining what he would do when next he ran into the lieutenant. He could still see Pradelle on the battlefield, charging toward him, could feel the almost physical way the shell crater had sucked him in. But it was still difficult for him to think for long periods of time, as though his brain had not yet managed to return to its normal speed.

  But shortly after he returned to the land of the living, a phrase occurred to him: someone had tried to kill him.

  It sounded bizarre, but not unreasonable; after all a great war was merely attempted murder on a continental scale. The difference in his case was that he had been personally targeted. Sometimes when he looked at Édouard Péricourt, Albert found himself reliving the moment when the air grew thin, and he seethed with rage. Two days later, he, too, was ready to commit murder. After four years fighting a war, it was high time.

  When he was alone, he thought about Cécile. She had grown more distant, and he missed her terribly. The force of events had thrust Albert into a different life, but since no life was possible unless Cécile was part of it, he clung to his memories, gazed at her photograph, enumerated her countless flawless features, eyebrows, nose, lips all the way down to her chin, how was it possible that something as perfect as Cécile’s mouth could exist? It was being taken from him. One day, someone would come and take it. Or she would leave. Would realize that Albert was not worth much, whereas she, her shoulders, just her shoulders . . . It killed him to think about it; he spent inconsolable hours. All this for that, he thought. Then he would take out a sheet of paper and try to write her a letter. Should he tell her everything, she who wanted to hear nothing more about the war, who wanted it to be over and done with?

  When he was not thinking about what he should write to Cécile, or to his mother (first Cécile, then his mother if he had the time), when he was not working as a volunteer nurse, Albert brooded.

  He often thought, for example, about the horse’s head he had discovered buried beside him. Curiously, as time passed, it no longer seemed so monstrous. Even the stench of the putrid air that had belched from its mouth no longer seemed foul and fetid. While the image of Pradelle standing on the lip of the shell crater still had the exactness of a photograph, the image of the horse’s head, which he would have liked to remember, gradually melted, the details blurred. Despite his efforts, the picture faded, and Albert felt a sense of loss he found obscurely worrying. The war was drawing to a close. This was not the time for reckonings, but the terrible moment when one must survey the extent of the damage. Like those men who had spent four years crouched under a hail of bullets and would, literally, never stand tall again but would go through life with their shoulders bowed by an invisible weight, Albert was convinced that one thing at least he would never recover: serenity. For several months, since he was first wounded at the Somme, since the interminable nights spent working as a stretcher bearer, scuttling around, terrified of being hit by a stray bullet, looking for wounded men on the battlefield, and even more since he had returned from among the dead, he knew that he would forever be inhabited by an indefinable, pulsing, almost palpable fear. This had been made worse by the devastating effects of having been buried alive. Some part of him was still buried in the earth, his body had emerged, but some captive, terrified part of his brain had remained trapped below. The experience was seared into his flesh, his actions, his eyes. Panicked a
t the thought of leaving the room, he was alert to the faintest footstep, put his head around a door before fully pushing it open, hugged the walls as he walked, often imagining a presence shadowing him, studied the features of those he talked to and was careful always to be close to an exit just in case. Whatever the circumstances, his eyes were perpetually shifting this way and that. When sitting by Édouard’s bed, he sometimes felt the need to get up and look out of the window because he found the room oppressive. He was permanently on the alert; anything and everything made him suspicious. Serenity, he knew, was gone forever. He had to learn to live with this animal fear, just as a man who inadvertently discovers he feels jealous realizes he must reconcile himself to this new disease. This saddened him.

  The morphine did its work. Though the doses would be regularly reduced, for the moment Édouard was allowed one ampoule every five to six hours. He was no longer writhing in pain; his room no longer echoed with monotonous whimpers punctuated by blood-curdling howls. When not dozing, he seemed to float, but he had to remain strapped to the bed in case he tried to scratch his open wounds.

  Albert and Édouard had never been friends; they had seen each other, run into each other, said hello, smiled perhaps, but nothing more. Édouard Péricourt, a comrade like so many others, close yet terrifyingly anonymous. Now, to Albert, he is a puzzle, an enigma.

  The day after their arrival at the field hospital, he noticed that Édouard’s belongings had been put at the bottom of a wardrobe whose doors creaked and swung open at the slightest breeze. Anyone could come in and steal them. Albert decided to put them somewhere safe. Picking up the burlap sack that contained Édouard’s personal effects, Albert realized that the reason he had not done so before was because he would not have been able to resist the temptation to rummage. He had not done so out of respect for Édouard; that was one reason. But there was a second reason. It reminded him of his mother. Mme Maillard was the kind of mother who rummaged. Albert had spent his childhood coming up with ingenious ruses to hide his—obviously trifling—secrets, which Mme Maillard would eventually discover and wave under his nose, while unleashing a torrent of criticism. Whether it was a photograph of a cyclist clipped from L’Illustration, three lines of a poem copied from an anthology, or four marbles and a taw won from Soubise during playtime, Mme Maillard considered every secret a betrayal. On days when she was particularly inspired, she might brandish a postcard of the “Tree of the Rocks in Tonkin” given to Albert by a neighbor and launch into an impassioned diatribe that ranged from the ingratitude of children in general to the particular selfishness of her own child and her fervent desire to join her dead husband as soon as possible so that she might finally get some peace; you can guess the rest.

  These painful reminders faded when, having opened Édouard’s knapsack, Albert almost immediately came on a battered hardcover notebook closed with an elastic band that contained nothing but sketches in blue pencil. Albert sat there cross-legged on the floor facing the creaking wardrobe, hypnotized by these drawings, some clearly hastily sketched, others carefully reworked with dark shadows of crosshatching as dense as torrential rain. All of the pictures—a hundred or so—had been sketched here at the front, in the trenches. They depicted everyday scenes: soldiers writing letters, lighting pipes, laughing at a joke, preparing for an assault, eating, drinking, things like that. From a single stroke one could make out the weary profile of a young soldier, three lines and the whole face emerged, the sunken eyes, the haggard features—it was gut wrenching. From almost nothing, a line that seemed effortless, casual, Édouard captured everything, the fear and the pity, the monotony, the despair, the exhaustion; the sketchbook was like a manifesto of fate.

  Leafing through it, Albert felt sick at heart. Because in these pages there were no pictures of the dead. Nor the wounded. There was not a single corpse. Only the living. And that made it more terrible, because every drawing seemed to scream the same message: these men will die.

  He packed away Édouard’s belongings, overcome with dismay.

  5

  On the subject of morphine the young doctor was resolute: things could not carry on like this, people become dependent on such drugs, which can lead to terrible problems, you have to understand we simply cannot carry on, we have to stop. From the day after the operation, he began to reduce the dosage.

  As he resurfaced and gradually became more conscious, Édouard found himself in terrible pain, and Albert began to worry about the transfer to Paris, of which there was still no sign.

  When questioned, the young doctor threw up his hands helplessly; his voice dropped to a whisper.

  “Thirty-six hours he’s been here . . . I don’t understand, he should have been transferred already. Obviously, the ambulances are overstretched. But it’s really not good for him to be here . . .”

  Worry was etched into his face. From that moment, a panicked Albert focused himself on a single goal: having his comrade transferred as soon as possible.

  He did everything in his power. He set about questioning the nurses, who, though the hospital was quieter now, still scuttled around the corridors like mice in an attic. This tactic was useless: this was a military hospital, which meant it was almost impossible to find out anything, including the names of those who were in charge.

  Every hour, he would come back to Édouard’s bedside and sit with him until he fell asleep. The rest of the time he spent lurking around the offices and the corridors that led to the main buildings. He even went to the general headquarters.

  Coming back from one such mission, he ran into two soldiers cooling their heels in the corridor. From their immaculate uniforms, their freshly shaved faces, and the halo of confidence that surrounded them, it was clear they were from HQ. The first handed him a sealed envelope while the second, perhaps to give himself an air of authority, laid a hand on his pistol. Such anxious reflexes, Albert thought, were not entirely unfounded.

  “We did go in,” the first soldier said almost apologetically, jerking his thumb toward the door. “But we decided it was better to wait out here. The stench . . .”

  Albert went into the room, dropping the letter he had been opening, and rushed to Édouard’s bed. For the first time since being admitted, the young man’s eyes were open. He had been propped up on pillows—by a passing nurse, probably. His hands, still strapped to the bed, were covered by the sheet. He nodded his head slowly, uttering guttural sounds that trailed off into gurgles. Put this way, it does not sound like much of an improvement, but until now Albert has only seen his comrade’s body racked by spasms and terrible howls or lifeless almost to the point of coma. What he now saw was infinitely better.

  It was difficult to know what mysterious current had passed between the two men in the days while Albert sat dozing in a chair, but as soon as Albert laid his hand on the bed, Édouard jerked frantically at his restraints and managed to grab him by the wrist and hold on like a drowning man. What precisely this gesture meant, no one is in any position to say. In it were condensed all the fears and all the hopes, all the pleas and all the questions of a twenty-three-year-old man who is wounded, unsure of the seriousness of his condition, and suffering so greatly he cannot locate the source of his pain.

  “Finally decided to wake up, then, friend,” Albert said, attempting to put the greatest possible enthusiasm into his words.

  A voice from behind made him start.

  “We have to head back . . .”

  Albert turned.

  The soldier held out the letter he had picked up off the floor.

  He spent almost four hours sitting on a chair waiting. Time enough to go through all the possible reasons why a humble solider like himself might be summoned to the office of Général Morieux. Aside from being decorated for acts of bravery regarding Édouard’s condition, it is anyone’s guess.

  The result of these hours of cogitation melted away in an instant when, at the far end of the hallway, he saw the tall, thin figure of Lieutenant Pradelle appear. The office
r stared him in the eye and swaggered toward him. Albert felt the lump in his throat drop into his belly and was overcome by an urge to retch he barely managed to suppress. Except for the speed, this was the same swagger that had pushed him into the shell crater. The lieutenant tore his eyes away when he drew alongside Albert, pivoted on his heels, knocked on the général’s door, and disappeared inside.

  It would have taken Albert some time to digest this information, but time he did not have. The door reopened, he heard his name barked, and, faltering, he stepped into the holy of holies, which smelled of brandy and cigars; perhaps they were celebrating the coming victory early.

  Général Morieux seems terribly old and looks like all those old men who have sent generations of their sons and grandsons to their death. Combine the portraits of Joffre and Pétain with those of Nivelle, Gallieni, and Ludendorff3 and you have Général Morieux: walrus whiskers, rheumy eyes sunken in his ruddy face, deep wrinkles, and an innate sense of his own importance.

  Albert stands, frozen. Impossible to say whether the général is alert or half-asleep. There is an air of Kutuzov4 about him. Sitting behind his desk, he is poring over his papers. Standing facing Albert, with his back to the général, Lieutenant Pradelle does not move a muscle as he glares at him, looking him up and down. Feet apart, hands behind his back as though on inspection, he is rocking gently on his heels. Albert gets the message and stands to attention. He holds himself stiffly, arching his back until it aches. The silence is heavy. Finally the walrus lifts his head. Albert feels obliged to throw his shoulders back even further. If he carries on, he’ll end up bent double like a circus acrobat. Under normal circumstances, the général should put him at ease from this uncomfortable position, but no, he stares at Albert, clears his throat, glances down at a document.