On Leave

by Daniel Anselme

  He threw away the stone, as he was unsteady with fatigue and had pins and needles all up his legs. Five or six o’clock was striking somewhere behind Parc Montsouris when, on the other side of the street, Françoise got out of a taxi. She was on her own and seemed weary. Lachaume looked at her as from a great distance, from the opposite bank of some unknown river, so wide that he could not shout across it; he watched her disappear, walking unsteadily on her high heels, and then he hailed the taxi she’d just vacated, which had turned around in the street, and told the driver to take him to a hotel in the Latin Quarter.

  CHAPTER THREE

  The night spent waiting for Françoise put Lachaume out of sync with normal time. He would go to bed at first light and wake when night had already fallen. His small hotel room in Rue Saint-Jacques was well suited to such a routine, as it gave onto a narrow inner courtyard that was permanently dark. But even after spending seventy-two hours in the place, Lachaume hadn’t had occasion to notice this. It wasn’t even clear that the room was equipped with electric lights, since its tenant hadn’t bothered to try the switch that there must have been somewhere on a wall.

  When he came back in, Lachaume would undress in the dark and slip into a bed that hadn’t been made for three days. He would lie dreaming and chain-smoking cigarettes that he took from the carton of Gauloises that lay within easy reach on the floor, then sleep would come the way it does, in mid-cigarette, and Lachaume would barely manage to stub it out on the floor before dropping off. It was the same when he woke. He would lie in bed smoking in the half-light with his eyes open, until hunger forced him to get up.

  He would pass the murky cubbyhole that served as hotel reception and ask, in a casual tone that split his own ears, if there was any mail for him. The manageress would waddle out of the adjacent kitchen, where there was always something on the stove, to tell him, unsurprisingly, there was none at all. Lachaume’s persistence seemed to irritate her. He’d sent the hotel’s address to Françoise. Every day, he asked whether he’d received a letter.

  “Absolutely nothing!” The face of the manageress was pale and puffy with anger as she spoke to this unlikely customer who didn’t flatter or grumble like the others. It was easy to see that she hated and despised Lachaume for presenting her with such a puzzle.

  “Okay, okay,” he would say as he turned around in the narrow passageway where there was always a smell of something cooking—he knew the smell but could not put his finger on what it was.

  The absurdity of the struggle had a bitter taste that held him back in the hotel. “Otherwise you’d leave for somewhere else,” he sometimes told himself. “Françoise won’t write, you chump … Why should she?”

  He fed himself on the standard fare of the all-night cafeterias in Boulevard Saint-Michel, under the alien light of pink-and-green neon tubes, and then killed time in the local bars, with his pipe stuck between his teeth, and when someone approached him, he would respond with a loud “What?” as if he was slightly deaf and about to burst out in anger at anything said to him. The two servers at the snack bar in Rue Cujas, where he used to eat his second meal around 3 a.m. before ending his night, called him Sourdingue, summing up in a single word of slang their view of him as a nutcase as well as hearing-impaired.

  But there was Lena, and she stood by him. “Leave my brother alone,” she would shout as she quivered with laughter that obliged her to hang on to the ledge of the bar with both hands. “Ach, Laachaume, my brother,” she would repeat in her German accent, laughing as if there was nothing more comical on earth than her imaginary relationship to him.

  She was older than he was by five or six years, which counted double, but she was still able to turn the heads of men who were sensitive to the kind of strong features that she had, to her ash-blond hair and eyes, whose grayish blue hue seemed to have been diluted by a whole childhood of tears, as well as to the desperate energy of those young German women who had pounced on pleasure with wolfish appetites after the end of the war.

  She lived in a hotel nearby, went shopping every afternoon, held firmly to a whole array of superstitions, and drank pastis like a legionnaire, round the clock.

  They had met the first night at the snack bar in Rue Cujas and ever since then would meet there by unspoken agreement around 3 a.m. every day. It was she who had broken the ice: after laughing off his “ehs?” and “whats?” she’d leaned on his shoulder and shouted something in German into his ear which he didn’t understand. She’d been sitting opposite him at his table, nodding her head with her chin in her hands, as if to say: What a fine mess we’re in together! But she had drunk a lot that night, more than usual, and as she thumped the table with her fist, she tried with all her might to make Lachaume a German.

  She’d appealed to the two waiters as witnesses, calling them by their first names. “Doesn’t the gentleman look like a Kraut?” Then she turned to Lachaume indignantly. “With your sick-cow look, anyone can tell you’re a Westphalian from a hundred yards…”

  “Why Westphalian?” Lachaume asked her the following night.

  “I don’t know,” she answered with a smile. “Maybe because I’m from Westphalia myself and I knew boys back there who were like you … No, I really don’t know why.”

  And that is how Lachaume became her brother.

  She would say, “Let’s have a drink,” and didn’t mean it just for herself; she would run her fingers through his hair and gently stroke the back of his neck, and it wasn’t really to lead him on. In any case, when he walked her back to the front door of her hotel, a few yards from the snack bar, she was ready to fall asleep.

  Her fevered mouth stank of alcohol and aniseed, but the back of her neck had a delicate perfume which prompted Lachaume to put his arms around her all of a sudden, and they hugged as they stood there for a long while, rocking each other against an imaginary strong wind.

  “Ach, Laachaume, my brother…” she would say again, smothering a last burst of laughter on his shoulder.

  He would then have a milky coffee in the café opposite the Luxembourg Gardens which opened earlier than any of the others. The manager, who wore a waistcoat and sported a well-washed and well-rested face and still-wet hair plastered over his skull, gaily spread butter on baguettes sliced lengthwise for equally well-washed and well-rested customers, and as he went back toward his hotel, Lachaume encountered other washed and rested faces topped with plastered hair that shone in the light of the streetlamps that had not yet been put out, and this odd little world briskly moving forward sometimes emitted jolly whistles that struck Lachaume’s ear like the language of some alien planet, as if Martians had landed on Earth in the course of the night.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  On the fourth day, as he stepped out of his hotel, Lachaume came face to face with his friend Paul Thévenin, a young cardiologist at the start of a brilliant career.

  “Well, there you are at long last!” Thévenin exclaimed. “You haven’t called, not a sign…” He kept on patting him on the back with his long arm. “Françoise gave me your address, and as I happened to be in the area, I was about to leave a note for you myself…” His tone of voice gave Lachaume to understand that he was being asked to be impressed by the amount of time that had already been sacrificed on his account. To embarrass him further, Thévenin, with a mock-solemn gesture, presented him with a prescription form, where he read:

  Lit. chum Lach.

  Wht abt yr frnds? Don’t you bothr any mr?

  Let’s hve dnr togthr—Sun OK?

  Call me Sat 5pm

  Y know my num

  At the foot a large arrow pointed back to the letterhead:

  Dr. Paul Thévenin

  Former Registrar in the Paris Hospital Service

  55 Rue des Belles-Feuilles XVIth arrondissement

  Tel. POIncaré 37–85

  By Appointment Only

  “Okay, all right for Sunday,” Lachaume said, absentmindedly handing back the prescription. Thévenin glanced at it with a satis
fied smile, screwed it up into a ball, and threw it in the gutter, as if he was sorry.

  “What are you doing in the next hour? I have a call to make in Rue des Saint-Pères, then I’m free until a quarter to nine. Come along. We’ll have a meal afterward.”

  He slapped Lachaume on the back to move him toward the car, a low-slung black coupe, which he slipped into nimbly.

  “What make is it?” Lachaume asked out of politeness.

  “It’s a Jowett,” the young medic explained. “But if our Minister of Health has his way, I’ll soon be back on Shanks’s pony…”

  The Jowett darted through the traffic with sharp bursts of acceleration that made its engine roar. Lachaume noticed that the speedometer showed rpm, like on airplanes.

  “I didn’t know you had a taste for racing cars,” Lachaume observed.

  “A bachelor’s whim,” Thévenin said, as he always did when people asked the same question. “But you’re more or less a bachelor again, aren’t you? If I understood Françoise correctly…”

  “Oh. So she told you…”

  “Of course she did, you chump.” He parked the car and switched it off.

  “I know all about it…” He gave Lachaume another pat on the back, as if it would make him feel more at ease. “Back in ten mins.”

  But I don’t know anything about it, Lachaume thought. The prospect of a talk with a Thévenin who “knew all about it” made him want to run away. The slightest engagement with his old life made everything more complicated.

  Thévenin and Lachaume had been friends since their childhood in Arras, and the two families were connected. Mme Thévenin and Mme Lachaume, both widows, lived in Arras and kept up with each other. To stay out of trouble on that front, Lachaume needed Thévenin to be discreet. He was thinking about the situation with weariness, not to say revulsion, in his heart, when the young medic dropped his bag in the back seat and jumped into the driver’s seat.

  The Jowett thundered off.

  “That was an odd case,” he explained. “The man’s wife has convinced him he has a heart condition, so he’s stuffing himself with camphor against my advice, and he’ll end up killing himself. The funny thing is, I’ve now found he has a lesion that wasn’t there six months ago.”

  “If his wife is a pretty woman, that would be par for the course,” Lachaume commented in a gloomy voice.

  “Bloody hell, Georges, you haven’t changed an iota!” Thévenin exclaimed.

  They’d reached a restaurant. The rustic decor made it clear that this was a smart place to go.

  “Come on, let’s go inside,” Thévenin said after a sideways glance at his friend’s imitation-tweed jacket a size too big for him. “Come on!” he repeated with another pat on Lachaume’s back.

  “Am I adequately dressed?” Lachaume asked in an ironical tone that Thévenin didn’t pick up.

  “Between you and me, light tartan is out of fashion,” Thévenin conceded. “But you’re not required to know that, seeing as you’re in the army…”

  “Unfortunately, people can’t see that I’m in the army; maybe you could go in first to warn them…”

  “Don’t be stupid! I’ve only got forty minutes to have a bite,” Thévenin protested. “Let me go in first…”

  He deposited his black cape with the cloakroom lady, revealing his smart gray check suit nicely complemented by a slim, bright-red mohair necktie. Lachaume and his loose-fitting jacket followed him to a small table at the back of the room, underneath a Lurçat tapestry of fish swimming among what looked like trees.

  Diners were whispering or chewing sullenly at the other tables under the muted light coming from overhead fixtures made of brass, but the room was pervaded by a strange, sharp, and briny smell that nobody else seemed to have noticed, since the doors and windows were all shut tight.

  The waitress greeted Thévenin with a “Good evening, Doctor,” in a discreet tone that was nonetheless loud enough to be heard, since the tables were set very close to each other.

  “Will it be the usual, Seafood Medley with Market Greens?” she asked.

  “Yes, fine. In winter, it’s a good substitute for cod-liver oil!” He cast his eyes around the room to see if he’d raised a smile.

  “As our good friend the deputy prefect likes to say,” he went on, but now quite loud enough to be heard, “this is a posh place for plain people.”

  “What’s he up to?” Lachaume asked. (The deputy prefect was a childhood friend.)

  “He’s deputizing on all four cylinders!” Thévenin boomed, in top form. “Hey! Look at that brunette,” he said in a whisper, “the one sitting by the fireplace. That’s L.B., the journalist on L’Express…” And he tapped the side of his nose in a way that suggested he had designs on the girl. “This place is a hotbed of supporters of Mendès-France. Mendès even comes here himself from time to time.”

  “Do you know the Prime Minister?” Lachaume asked, with a spark of excitement. “Have you argued with him?”

  “Yes, a bit. I’m on the Radical Party’s local committee for the second sector,” the young doctor added, raising his eyes to the ceiling. “What a chore that is!”

  The Seafood Medley arrived, and Lachaume finally grasped where the sour smell in the room came from. What he now had beneath his nose was a large wooden platter bearing twenty small pots, each containing a different variety of salted, marinated, or pickled fish, labeled as if they were on display in the Trocadéro aquarium. The Market Greens, on the other hand, consisted of a plate of raw vegetables served unpeeled, so as to give them an authentic touch.

  “Have you ever seen anything … But have you ever seen…” He shook his head in disbelief as he held out a peapod, as if there were nothing more comical and heartrending on earth than a pod of fresh peas. “Have you ever seen anything…”

  “That’s Paris for you.” Thévenin smiled. “Is there any other place on earth where you would willingly pay a hundred and fifty francs for that thing?”

  “That’s not enough,” Lachaume said. “Nothing is ever expensive enough.”

  Thévenin looked at his friend in that calm and attentive way that was now taken for a professional look but which he had always had with Lachaume. He took his four years’ seniority very seriously.

  “So, tell me about it,” he ordered through a mouthful of Dutch herring.

  “About what?” Lachaume grunted, in panic at the idea of talking about the war in Algeria within earshot of these almost silent diners who all hoped that their neighbors’ conversations would be more interesting than their own. No, he had nothing to say to them, to people like them, for whom he had no sympathy and no spite, either. At the next table a pretty and exquisitely well-made-up woman leaned her head smilingly to one side as she crunched a raw leek. Each bite made her long Venetian earrings tinkle, creating the illusion that she was quivering from head to toe from some hidden pleasure. To speak of Algeria to such a beauty would be so completely absurd that the idea made Lachaume smile in spite of himself. In bed, after sex—well, perhaps, he thought, feeling dissatisfied with himself straightaway for coming up with something so banal, especially as he was no more inclined to bed the woman than he was to tell her about the clans of the Nemencha. But Thévenin would not let up.

  “So tell me all about it. You’re leaving Françoise?”

  How stupid of me! Lachaume thought. That’s what’s important, when you see the situation from Paris … And indeed, the beauty with the Venetian earrings was now paying him that discreet attention that men who have just returned to the market deserve.

  “Yes, I think so,” he said after a long pause.

  “But do you have someone else?” his friend asked in a whisper.

  It felt as if ten pairs of ears were on alert for the answer he would give.

  “Yes,” he said, to keep things simple.

  “May I know who?”

  “No.”

  “But I’m not asking for a name!” Thévenin protested, putting his hand on Lachaume’s
sleeve. “I’m only asking, what kind of woman…”

  “She’s German.”

  “Ah! Of course!” the medic exclaimed, leaning back in his chair. “You met her last year in Koblenz, you sly fellow, you…”

  “Yes, that’s right,” Lachaume said.

  “Ah, I see,” Thévenin said. Such huge satisfaction spread across his face as to embarrass Lachaume.

  Why am I lying and hiding things? he wondered. Why is my mouth going dry? Why do I turn my eyes away from my oldest friend? What can it be…?

  “How long have you still got?” Thévenin asked. “Six months?”

  “Why six months?”

  “But it is six months! I read a piece in Le Monde, and it reminded me of you…”

  Thévenin was priceless! He had memorized all the dates and numbers from the last Ministry of Defense circular! Juggling the unit serials like a recruiting sergeant, and therefore knowing that cohort 55–1 would have to serve twenty-seven months, he announced to Sergeant Lachaume that he would get his demob on next September 1, say September 15 for safety, the ideal date for a quick trip to Saint-Trop’ to dip his feet in the Med, because the summer crowds would have left by then. “I’ll take you down,” he promised, “as long as Mr. Heart Attack gives me time off.”

  For the first time Lachaume did not cower under the flood of facts and figures.

  “Why are you smiling?” Thévenin asked, with a look of mild anxiety.

  “No reason,” Lachaume said. “Because it’s nice to see you … You’re an odd bird, really.”

  The medic frowned and glanced down at his red mohair tie, as if that was what was making his friend smile. He wasn’t sure how to talk to him anymore. All the clichés about war turning young men into old went through his mind, and a momentary panic struck him at the thought that such banalities might be exemplified by a living person—by a friend, to boot. That was hard to take. He looked at his watch.

  “Twenty-five to. I have to run in ten minutes.”

  “Another patient?” Lachaume asked.

  “No, the union. We’re holding a war council…” He realized straightaway that he should not have used that word. “But it’s true,” he went on. “I have to be there, I have to report back…” And because Lachaume started to take an interest, Thévenin launched into a detailed explanation of the Gazier Plan, named after the minister of the day, who wanted to subject doctors’ fees to an official scale of charges. “It’ll have a negative effect on quality,” Thévenin opined. “To make up the difference, doctors will just take on more calls. And anyway, why should health be nationalized when steel and finance haven’t yet been touched?” He was using his friend to rehearse what he was going to say to his colleagues a few minutes later. Rather than listening, Lachaume watched him talk, as if he were at an army film show with an almost inaudible sound track. The restaurant’s muted background music increased his impression of being at the cinema.