On Leave

by Daniel Anselme

  “Ten to: I have to dash.”

  Thévenin’s lips had stopped moving.

  Well, that’s over, Lachaume thought as he waited on the pavement outside while Thévenin retrieved his loden from the cloakroom. “Goodbye, Dr. Thévenin!” he muttered to himself in English.

  “Can I drop you off anywhere?”

  “No thanks,” Lachaume said, with a shake of his head. “Off you go, old man.”

  They submitted themselves to a few ridiculous pats on the back and shook hands clumsily. Lachaume couldn’t wait for him to be gone. What’s the point? he thought. Goodbye, dear sir! The Jowett thundered away, but screeched to a halt after twenty yards. Thévenin stuck his head out the driver’s window.

  “Eh?… What?…” Lachaume grunted, frowning as if he hadn’t heard the call, and went up to the car unwillingly.

  “Hey, listen…” Thévenin said, gripping Lachaume’s arm. “Where will you be around midnight? There was no way of having a proper talk in that hostelry … See you at midnight, okay?”

  “What?… What?…” Lachaume mumbled with a scowl. “Midnight?… If you like!…”

  He was now in a state of permanent fury. The herring he’d had for dinner had given him an unquenchable thirst. He went into bars with his pipe clenched between his teeth and downed pints and chasers in any old order, angry with all he saw and heard simply because he could see it and hear it, angry from head to toe, but letting none of it escape in a glance or a gesture, with his tongue clamped beneath the stem of his pipe. He drank until midnight, pulling crumpled banknotes out of his pocket and putting them down on the bar stiffly, with rigid fingers, betraying in his eyes not a glimmer of the black fury that the banknotes provoked in him. His pockets were stuffed full of them, and even through the sweat-drenched fabric of his trousers they stuck to his skin like pieces of filth.

  The smooth white face that he saw when he entered the bar they’d picked to meet in at midnight alarmed Thévenin. “He must be drunk,” he told himself by way of reassurance. “As pickled as a newt in a jar…” He forced himself to see only Lachaume’s inebriation; he undid his shirt collar and ordered a double filtered coffee. Lachaume submitted with eyes in which Thévenin chose to see only an alcoholic glaze.

  Then he spoke to him the way you talk to a drunk, that is to say, if you are tolerant, the way you talk to a dog that’s lost its keeper.

  “Goddam!” Lachaume suddenly burst out in antiquated English. “If I hear you aright, my liege, just as you would speak pidgin to the natives, to the trooper you chin-wag in trooperese! Do me the honor of constructing a few coherent sentences, and then … gimme a drink!” And he slammed his fist on the table.

  Thévenin laughed nervously.

  “What news from the Mehdi-Kal Brigade?” Lachaume resumed in a funereal voice. “Will Abdel Gazier be punished for his Krim?”

  “Well, if the government isn’t booted out in the next month…” the doctor began, not having grasped his friend’s desperate wordplay.

  “Boot out the government? How impolite is that? Has France lost its manners?”

  Lachaume went on for a while, cracking gloomy jokes like a Shakespearean gravedigger; his face bore that white, blank look that wasn’t pallor but the color of anger condensing like steam on an icy windowpane. Then he stopped speaking, just like that, and the strange look in his face slowly faded. He’s going to drop off, Thévenin thought, still clinging to his diagnosis of drunkenness.

  He comforted him by telling trivial anecdotes, and surprised himself to discover he was indeed in possession of a heart, smiling benevolently at this lanky lad whom he loved, so he told himself, like a younger brother. “Poor old Georges! If he’d done his service before studying for his teaching qualification, he wouldn’t have got tangled up in this ghastly business.” But the idea that a misfortune of that kind could affect himself in the slightest particular didn’t even cross Thévenin’s mind. The Algerian War was reserved for the under-thirty-twos, just as silicosis was for miners. Thévenin was in no danger in either respect.

  Lachaume had been trying to say something for a while. He raised his hand, he opened his mouth, but then gave up, shaking his head like a foreigner who can’t find the right words. Lachaume realized that Thévenin had diagnosed his problem as drunkenness. He thought that was irritating and pathetic, so he carried on, going over the check pattern on his friend’s jacket sleeve with his fingernail with a trembling hand.

  “Listen,” he said at long last, in a rough voice that wasn’t his usual tone. “Listen … I’m going to ask you one thing … just one!” He paused for the last beat, as if he was tongue-tied from exasperation, then blurted out:

  “When and how is it going to end?”

  He said it once more, louder:

  “When and how?”

  Thévenin didn’t dare meet his eyes. He could almost feel the cold light they cast straight opposite him. As he tried to find an answer that he knew he didn’t have, Lachaume’s two questions went on echoing in his head: “When and how?”

  “And how in heaven’s name should I know?” he answered indignantly. “I’m not in the government.”

  But what did the government know about it, anyway? In a flash he saw the shiny face of the Minister of Health, wiping his chin with a white handkerchief that still had its red laundry ticket on …

  Standing next to his car, he gave Lachaume a last weary pat on the back.

  “See you in six months’ time,” he said.

  “Six months,” Lachaume replied. “Or six years.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  First there’s a song. It spreads around the hall as if the singer were slowly moving among the tables, singing a bit of her song here and there, at so much song per square meter, like a perfume spray. But the comparison with perfume is no good, because this song has the same effect as rough spirits. It shakes you up, from top to bottom.

  Here’s the chorus, sung in a coarse and common voice, with an emphasis on each syllable, angrily:

  Java!

  What’s he doing there

  With his hands in your hair

  That accord … ionist?

  Of course, if instead of hearing it sung you were to see such trivia in print, you would feel let down. But what power it has when it’s sung to the beat of a java! There’s no escaping its grip if you’re hiding some secret bitterness in your heart, if someone has maybe cheated on you, or if something you don’t quite grasp seems to upset the normal order of things.

  So there’s this song spreading through the room, but there’s no performer, contrary to what you might have thought at the start. The song is coming from a jukebox, and in front of the jukebox there’s a young man standing on one leg like a gloomy flamingo, a young man whose face can’t be seen because that part of the room is ill lit. Who cares? His only role is to jingle a small pile of change in his hand which he’ll use at the end of the song to get it to play again.

  Java!

  What’s he doing there

  With his hands in your hair

  That accord … ionist?

  Then there’s the snack bar (half of which is in darkness), the muffled noise of the last conversations, fleeting shouts and laughs, humid heat laden with kitchen smells, glasses tinkling here and there.

  And finally there are insane streaks of pink and green neon running across the ceiling over the bar, matching its contours, like a shadow, so exactly that in the end you can’t tell where the beam is coming from, whether it’s rising or falling, or, by the same token, whether you are standing on your legs or on your head with respect to the rest of the world.

  An electric clock shows that it’s around 3:30 a.m. Every two minutes the long hand jumps forward with a little clack that sounds like a lightbulb bursting. Behind the bar the waiters shift their weight from one sore foot to another. Their faces are worn and their white jackets are rumpled and stained. It must be the end of the week.

  Slumped on the bench seat, Lachaume strokes the back
of Lena’s head as she reads a newspaper with her elbows on the table. There are two large empty glasses in front of her, standing in saucers filled with the black goo of wet cigarette ash.

  He whispers: “Lena! Lena! You’re reading Paris-Turf, you’re drinking your pastis, you’re lighting your Gauloise, and you don’t give a damn whether I’m here or not.”

  And you hear:

  Java!

  What’s he doing there

  With his hands in your hair

  That accord … ionist?

  He leans toward her, slips a hand into her stiff hair with its curls that twist around his fingers, and kisses the back of her neck. She doesn’t react.

  He touches his lips as if he wanted to test the effect of the kiss. He can’t tell if his fingers are cold and his lips hot, or the reverse. Nor can he smack his tongue or click his fingers, and there’s something strange about the floor, because when he stamps his heel it makes no sound.

  “Lena! Lena! Can you hear me?”

  But what can be heard is:

  Java!

  What’s he doing there

  With his hands in your hair

  That accord … ionist?

  The singer moves slowly forward through the ill-lit room. She could be anyone you like, dressed according to your own whim, but she’s dancing the java chaloupée with clenched hands held out in front of her, searching for someone, and everyone around you quakes as if each of them was the person she’s looking for but can’t find because of their borrowed clothes that pinch at the seams and their put-on expressions that stretch the skin over their faces like scars. Everyone sighs with relief, happy to be unrecognizable, but without grasping how much it would hurt to be in that place and behaving that way if in your heart of hearts you still hoped to be sent packing like an urchin with a clap around your ears, and to run back home.

  What nonsense, Lachaume thinks as he sits with his head in his hands. When you’re a kid you start getting excited. You’re knee-high to a grasshopper, but you’re already saying you’ll be this and you’ll do that when you grow up, and your mother approves and your father disapproves … What nonsense! You eat your greens, you grow, you wear long trousers, it’s time to take your school-leaving exam, you saunter around with your ink bottle on a piece of string … Ah! If I could get hold of the swine who gave me that string, I’d give him a piece of my mind!… What nonsense!

  That’s what he’s thinking with his head in his hands, but when he tries to say something and grips Lena’s wrist to force her to listen to him, all that comes out is a scream:

  “They can go hang themselves with their bloody string! They can go…”

  Lena releases herself from his grip, calmly, as if she has always been accustomed to having her wrist crushed for no reason at all, and says: “You’re as pissed as a newt.”

  “Ass-an-oot! Ass-a-noot!” he says angrily, mocking her German accent. “What have you got against newts?”

  “Let’s have a drink,” she says.

  “No thanks. Enough is enough … Why make me drink if I’m drunk ass-a-noot? Why do you talk such rubbish?”

  “All right,” she replies. “You are not drunk.”

  “Yes, I am! I’m totally sozzled. Everyone can see I’m wasted. Except you.”

  “Listen to the music,” she says. “I took a taxi the other day…”

  “I want to dance!” he declares, standing up abruptly and trying to drag her to the floor. “Let’s dance. Just a few steps, to warm up a bit … Come on!”

  “There’s no dancing in this place,” she says.

  “Just let them try to stop me!” he snarls. “Bloody hell! It’s freezing in here…”

  Lena doesn’t pick up on the absurd untruth Lachaume just uttered, as if men had forever lied to her in the same stupid way. She tugs his arm gently to make him sit down again.

  “Listen to me,” she says. “I took a taxi to get to the racecourse at Longchamp, and the driver said, ‘To you camble, matam?’ He was a genuine Russian aristocrat, with a yellow mustache—bright yellow. I said, ‘Yes, Your Excellency.’ So he says, ‘How to you camble, madam?’ So I says…”

  “How about that for a muddle!” Lachaume broke in with a sinister laugh. “You and your accent … mimicking a Russian accent in French! It’s the best philosophy lesson I know. They should make a recording of it to play in schools.”

  “So I says: ‘How about you?’ And he says, ‘I keep it simple, ever so simple. I play my car registration number in order on odd dates and in reverse order on even dates: 423-324–423–324 … It’s the best formula for picking a winner.’”

  The song goes on:

  Java!

  What’s he doing there

  With his hands in your hair

  That accord … ionist?

  He says, “I’ve got a friend who dances the java like a ballroom star. You wouldn’t turn him down if he asked you to dance! He stares at you greedily like he was going to pick a fight at the first opportunity. Mind you, I’ve nothing against him, but I’m wary of guys who look like they’re aiming for the moon. They’ll dump you at the drop of a hat. Don’t you agree, Lena?”

  She says, “Just listen to the guy: ‘I play 423 and lose. Only’—Laaaachaume, I’m talking to you!—‘only I should have played 324 because today is the thirtieth (I was using yesterday’s newspaper), and get this, 324 sure was the right number.’ So I thought, Lena my dear, go back to your mummy, you’re no use, go back and put your little arms round her skirt. So I’m telling you the big story: I am going back to my mother, and I’m going to hug her skirt. After all, she is my mother, and she wanted to have me, to have a girl-child in the house. So okay, let her do that, let her keep me, her girl-child.”

  And he says, “What do you think, Lena, are there any really courageous guys in the world? Men who do what they say…”

  “Aren’t you going to see your mom? Wouldn’t your mom like you to give her a kiss and a cuddle? It’s always the same. Nothing works. You go home, you say, ‘Guten Morgen, liebe Mamma.’ It’s nice, the strudel is in the oven, there’s a lovely smell of nuts, but you’ve already got your eye on the door. Nothing ever works out. Why?”

  “Dunno.”

  “It was the same for the others, for the whole lot of them, with their hangdog looks. But even so, on the last day, at the end of the last day, they still wanted to go home. Go back home, in spite of everything. Cuddle their mom and then have a bite of strudel. Or eat the strudel first and cuddle mommy second, then have some more, but with a cuddle in between. It’s not very draufgängerisch, but you can get through it all the same.”

  And he says, “Have you been with lots of soldiers?”

  “What’s that mean, ‘been with’?” she asks angrily.

  “Just what I said, been friendly with. Shake hands, have a drink, chat. Have you met a lot of soldiers, Lena?”

  “Thousands of them,” she says. “Nothing but.”

  “And what did they do?”

  “Eins! Zwei! Eins! Zwei! That’s what they did!”

  “No.” He shook his head. “No … what did they really do?”

  “What’s that supposed to mean? You’re as pissed as a newt … Go get some sleep. They got sozzled and made a nuisance of themselves with the girls, that’s what they really did.”

  “No, that’s not it,” he said, shaking his head again. “That’s not what I meant at all. Not at all.”

  And the song goes on:

  Java!

  What’s he doing there

  With his hands in your hair

  That accord … ionist?

  “Let’s have another drink.”

  And since he assents with a nod of his head, she orders two Pernods.

  “Ach, Laachaume, my brother,” she says as they clink glasses, “I drink to your health.” She puts her arm around his shoulder and digs her nails into the back of his neck, pulling him toward her, forehead to forehead.

  “Tell me,” he whispers, “what di
d they do when they were at the end of their tethers, right at the end?”

  “Who?”

  “The soldiers,” he says. “The … other soldiers.”

  “Mein Gott!” she exclaims, moving back from Lachaume. “What’s the world coming to if Frenchmen have become as stupid and obstinate as Germans? Sweden is ice-cold, Italy is infantile, Spain … is a wreck. Apparently the only place you can have fun anymore is Japan. Let’s go to Japan, my brother.”

  She gives a little laugh and claps her hands on her thighs.

  “Let’s go and make our fortune in Japan. We could open a French restaurant … Do you know how to cook? Doesn’t matter! I know a boy who hadn’t any talent at all and still made a pile in Japan. He even swam there, if you see what I mean; all the capital he had was the underpants he was wearing. Now he’s rolling in it. His mother lives in Dortmund. You should see her all wrapped up in a kimono! She puts on a posh accent to say, ‘Ja, ja, Wolfgang always was a good swimmer.’ Swimming matters more than a Ph.D., Herr Professor,” Lena added with a laugh. “But do you actually know how to swim?”

  “Yes,” he said ungraciously. “But how did that guy get all the way there?”

  “I don’t really remember … He was in the Foreign Legion in Indonesia, I think, then he jumped off the ship somewhere or other, maybe off Java. Anyway, there were sharks in the water … Anyway, that’s what his mother says, but she’s got a gift for embroidering things.”