On Leave

by Daniel Anselme

  “Oh yes, very!”

  “But what are they up to?… And Luc still isn’t here!”

  “Oh, Luc…” Colette laughed, as though it were quite normal for Luc to be late. “But in my view,” she added with a slightly supercilious air, “the old man and son Jean are taking a liberty.”

  “Ah, here they come,” Madame Valette said, and stood up.

  In the same instant the front door could be heard opening and slamming shut—with a kick, most likely—and Jean Valette appeared with a scowl and a tray of shucked oysters.

  “Damn!” he shouted from the threshold, “there are dozens of you in there and nobody can be bothered to open the door for me!… Hallo, Prof!” he added as he put the tray down. “You been here long?” Without waiting for an answer, he turned to Colette with an accusing glance: Another one of your bright ideas!

  “What’s up?” she asked, quite composed.

  “Those bloody oysters!”

  “And where is your father?” Madame Valette asked in the same calm tone.

  “On his way!”

  Jean Valette was done up in a striped navy blue suit—rather worn and crumpled—and a pink shirt without a tie, but his shoes were small-checked bedroom slippers. What made him unrecognizable above all else was his moody and angry face. He frowned and blinked all the time, as if the light were too much for him. It’s not that Lachaume had never seen Valette in a bad mood or angry. What was surprising was that it seemed to have no discernible cause.

  “You having a good time?” he asked Lachaume.

  Casual language of that kind was equally unexpected. Lachaume glanced at the women to see if they, too, felt startled. All he could see on their faces was hostile resignation and a decision to say nothing for the time being, which only added to his feeling of awkwardness.

  “Where is your father?” Madame Valette asked a second time, still calmly.

  “On his way, like I said!” Valette grunted while lighting a cigarette. “Aren’t we going to eat, then?” His cigarette showed he was only pretending to be eager for lunch.

  “We’ll wait for Luc and Dad,” Colette said as she walked across the room in her shimmering blouse.

  “No! I’m not going to wait for Luc!”

  “You’d do better to pay attention to your friend,” Colette fired back. “He’s been waiting for you for almost an hour.”

  Then she left the room.

  Jean Valette shrugged, and all of a sudden Lachaume saw his good and cheery old face come back, with that special light in his eyes that the women in the family had first made him conscious of.

  “My sister’s a right’un!” Valette said, with that broad smile that seemed to make his ears stick out even farther.

  He sat down next to Lachaume on the convertible sofa, took a Martini from the low table, and then had second thoughts.

  “Let’s wait for Dad. He’s looking forward to meeting you, he’s heard so much about you…”

  Jean Valette stayed cheerful when the three women came back in the dining room, and it seemed to Lachaume that the sun was once again shining its full light on the two brilliantly colored mimosa bouquets standing in their vases on the white tablecloth.

  “Tell me,” Jean Valette asked abruptly, “did you bring those?”

  Lachaume nodded.

  “So I’ve won my bet with Dad! I knew you were the sort to bring flowers.”

  Soon after, M. Valette got back, holding with great care in both hands another tray of shucked oysters. He was tall, thin, and slightly stooped, and wore thick-lensed glasses, which made his drawn face look cold and a little vague. He shook Lachaume’s hand vigorously and stood on one leg in the narrow gap between the sofa and the dining table.

  “They hadn’t opened the oysters,” he said flatly, with a tip of his chin to the ceiling. Then he tried to get more comfortable and leaned on the table, nearly pushing it over. “The folks around here,” he added, “haven’t got the knack, like”—he tried to think where it was that people had the knack—“like in Paris,” he concluded with a quickly suppressed grin. “I bet this is your first time in these parts. Parisians don’t know the outskirts.”

  Jean Valette tugged him on the sleeve and said, “Have you seen the flowers?”

  He glanced at the mimosas and nodded. Jean Valette guffawed, claiming he had “won” something or other. M. Valette took no notice of the noise and made a compliment about the beautiful flowers to no one in particular, maybe to the flowers themselves. But Lachaume realized the game of hide-and-seek he was playing over the “lost wager” and saw through his uncertain look and his flat voice. Something about the man suddenly became dear and precious to him.

  “It wasn’t a put-up job,” he said with a smile. “Valette didn’t tell me he’d made a bet … I’m sorry!” He broke off with a clap of his hands. “I keep on saying Valette instead of Jean.”

  “Doesn’t matter,” M. Valette said. “After all, he is the son and heir … One day, he will be plain Valette, won’t he?” And he grabbed his son by the back of his neck and gave him a good shake, nearly tipping the table over once more.

  “Be careful! Careful!” Mme Valette and her daughters cried out in unison as they came back in bearing dishes and bottles.

  “Should we start?” M. Valette suggested. “It’s nearly one-fifteen.”

  “What about Luc?” Mme Valette said in surprise, with a flash of anger that was quickly suppressed. “It would be nicer to wait for him, wouldn’t it?”

  Her question was addressed less to her husband than to Lachaume, who had no choice but to agree they should wait for Luc.

  He was watching Colette and was amazed to see she didn’t really care. He’d assumed, unconsciously, that Colette and Luc had something going on between them; now that he was aware of it, he felt a pang of jealousy.

  “You see,” M. Valette said in a muffled, almost inaudible tone, “it’s on your account he’s coming. For you, and for Jean.”

  These words went straight to Lachaume’s heart. It was hard to understand, and he didn’t understand it himself, but when he realized that he’d known all along that Luc was coming “on their account,” a strange emotion weighed heavily on him. Jean Valette was standing with his back to the wall and staring at his cigarette with a mysterious smile.

  At that point Luc knocked on the door with three slow, separate knocks. Lachaume was right, it was Luc. Danielle scurried to open the front door. Colette sat up, her face aquiver, and turned her head toward the entrance. At long last Luc appeared.

  “Greetings,” he said slowly, casting his eyes cautiously and patiently all around the room, as if he was making a tally of attendance. “I’m late, alas…”

  It wasn’t a question and it wasn’t an apology.

  He put his bulging briefcase down on a chair (it was one of those fat leather cases called a calabash), rubbed his hands in a low and mechanical gesture, and gave up his faded brown oilskin parka to Colette.

  The first thought that occurred to Lachaume, and he was well aware of its stupidity, was a kind of idiotic relief. Luc wasn’t handsome. He wasn’t a bruiser in the way Lachaume thought proletarians should be, that’s to say, broad-shouldered, like Valette, and as he expected Luc to be. He was a narrow-shouldered weakling of about thirty-five, with his left eyebrow set lower than the right. The slight asymmetry of his lined and drawn face made him look even more worn-out than he was.

  He reached out to Colette as she took his parka away.

  “I was for-get-ting,” he said, syllable by syllable (anyone else would have made it an exclamation), and took a bottle of wine from the pocket of his parka before looking around the whole room again. “Wine, wine from Romania,” he said with a chuckle as he placed the bottle on the dining table, with a gesture intended to be generous, playful, polite, and casual at the same time, but which struck Lachaume as being almost excessive, for it was obvious that Luc was trying hard to overcome his fatigue and to show he was doing it “on account of the two of
them.”

  After that, he shook everyone’s hand in turn, slowly, giving Jean Valette a friendly slap and a conniving nod, and saying his name, Luc Gi-raud, as he looked Lachaume in the eye and held out a broad, warm, and sweaty hand.

  Colette had taken the wine and was reading out loud the lettering on the label: Tragliduru zona Bucuresti …

  “That’s super!” she exclaimed in a manner that seemed to Lachaume excessively lively. “Where did you get it?”

  “A pal of mine who works for the French-Romanian Association gave it to me,” he said slowly. “I thought you would be pleased.” And by “you” he obviously meant the two soldiers. That’s how Colette took it, at least, because Lachaume heard a touch of jealousy in her voice when she said that, for her, the bottle was a reminder of the Festival of Youth. But Lachaume couldn’t work out exactly what the relationship was between Luc Giraud and Colette. She reacted to him emotionally, but without any of the signs of physical intimacy that you notice between lovers. Yet this was something more than a relationship of minds.

  These thoughts occurred to Lachaume in snatches while they all drank their predinner drinks around the low table, by the window. At the same time, he continued to be surprised and, up to a point, fascinated by Luc Giraud.

  What he said was banal (at least, for Lachaume): that the winter, though it had begun mildly, would be harsh; that the Seine was rising. But every word he spoke in his ponderous manner seemed laden with deep meaning, to judge by the reaction it aroused from Colette—as with the bottle of wine, but more mysteriously. At first Lachaume felt, with some irritation, that Colette was just licking the man’s boots; something about her whole way of reacting in her shimmering blouse reminded him of the sweaty obsequiousness of a student gazing at her favorite teacher. But that view wouldn’t hold once Lachaume saw how engaged each was with the other, and when he saw that all his observations of Colette’s behavior with Luc Giraud applied equally to Mme Valette and, to a lesser degree, to the twelve-year-old Danielle, he had to admit that these people were using ordinary words right under his nose to speak a language that came from another world.

  Luc Giraud said it for a second time, pronouncing each word separately:

  “I’m saying the winter will be harsh, and that our brothers will wake on the last day. I’m saying there’s some as what won’t wake up at all. And there’s some as will wake up in the spring when winter’s past. That winter will go by with them having their eyes closed. And I’m saying that’s a bad thing.”

  It was a blend of rural and biblical diction. Lachaume grasped that, for the three women, each word had deep and coded meaning; for them, winter meant something other than cold, mud, and woollies.

  “Let’s drop the subject,” Luc Giraud said with a sigh.

  It was obvious that they were leaving their other world because “the two of them” were in the room. Jean Valette himself didn’t seem to be fully initiated in it. It made Lachaume feel vaguely relieved, as if the fact that there were two of them improved the odds.

  The odds on what, though? He left the issue in suspense. It was quite enough already to confess to himself that he’d come all the way out here with a bouquet to try his luck. Quite enough, not in terms of his self-esteem, but because it meant he risked losing for the last time.

  They took their seats at the dining table as instructed by Mme Valette, who had the sole right to speak during a long silence, like the croupier at some mysterious gambling den. Lachaume was placed between Mme Valette on his left and Jean Valette on the right; sitting opposite were, in order, M. Valette (half-hidden by the mimosa), Luc Giraud, and Colette; Danielle and Granny sat opposite each other at the end of the table nearest the door to the kitchen.

  Nothing was said for a while once they were all seated in their “right” places. Lachaume had another odd feeling. He put his unsteady hands on the table, but slid his thumbs beneath the tablecloth so as to “touch wood.” Luc Giraud was watching him across the table with a faint smile and with his left eye half-closed, as if it were weighed down by his damaged eyebrow.

  “Come on. Tuck in!” Madame Valette said.

  There were oysters, cold cuts, and hard-boiled eggs in mayonnaise. But once again nobody took a helping. An absurd and anxious silence persisted.

  Lachaume eyed an oyster on the dish placed between himself and Colette. If she takes that one, he said to himself, everything will turn out all right. His rational mind rebelled against the powerful dark force that made him stick to his stupid wager.

  His pulse raced as he watched a pallid hand hover over the strangely glinting shellfish. Long supple fingers made as if to touch, then retracted, then stretched out again, then vanished, and returned to almost touch, then tightened, and Lachaume’s eyes slid up the arm to Colette’s shoulder trembling beneath the puckered and knotted silk, and sought in her eyes a gleam of affection that wasn’t to be found.

  The meal began. Oysters were put onto his plate, wine was poured into his glass. Already, faint shadows heralding sunset spread across the sky, which he gazed at every time he looked up.

  “Did you know, sir,” Luc Giraud said, pronouncing each word separately, “did you know that the area we are in presently is called ‘Little U.S.S.R.’?”

  “No, I didn’t,” Lachaume replied.

  “Well, it is!…” Luc Giraud said again. “This neighborhood is called ‘Little U.S.S.R.’”

  “In a manner of speaking,” M. Valette added.

  “What do you mean by that?” Luc Giraud said, interrupting his meal. “What do you mean?”

  “He means it’s not its real name,” Jean Valette said.

  “If that’s what you mean…” Luc Giraud began to say as he turned toward M. Valette, who confirmed his son’s words with a nod of his head. “If that is what you mean,” he resumed, stressing each word, “well, no!… You are wrong.”

  “What do you mean by that?” Colette asked.

  “Wait a minute … You’ll see. What’s the biggest public space in Paris? The place where the heart of Paris beats when the Party summons the masses? Which is it?”

  “The Vél’ d’hiv!” Colette answered.

  “So you see! Your own words!” Luc Giraud raised his forefinger with a smile. “Your very own words. It’s the Vél’ d’hiv. And what is the real name of the place? Is it the Vé-lo-drome d’Hi-ver or the Vél’ d’hiv?

  “That’s what I meant to say,” he resumed in his slow way. “Do you understand, Colette?”

  “Yes,” she answered, with her eyes down.

  “Excuse me!” Lachaume intervened, almost in spite of himself. “Your example doesn’t go very far. Vél’ d’hiv is just an abbreviation.”

  Luc Giraud stared at him with a faint smile, as if to encourage him to speak up. “Can you explain that to me?” he asked slowly. “Can you explain?…” He put his elbow on the table and rested his chin in his hand. His posture obliged Lachaume not only to answer but to say more.

  Did anybody have time for this? You’re just a pernickety intellectual! he told himself angrily. As soon as I open my mouth, I have to give him a lecture. As Luc Giraud went on smiling affably, Lachaume was in a quandary, but having decided it was a device to get him into a proper conversation, he answered briefly:

  “If I understood you right, ‘Little U.S.S.R.’ isn’t a popular abbreviation of, let’s say, the official name of this neighborhood. But even if it were, it would still depend on the meaning you give to the word ‘real.’ For example, most people call the newspaper L’Huma, yet the editors still have L’Humanité printed in full at the top of the front page.”

  “If you will allow me,” Luc Giraud said, almost parodying Lachaume’s manner of expression. “I’m not looking at this from a formal or grammatical point of view but from an objective, concrete position. When I say that the real name of this neighborhood is ‘Little U.S.S.R.,’ what I’m saying is that the ordinary people who live around here have seized on the name and given it a content and a concr
ete, objective value. As for your comparison with L’Huma, it’s false. For a Marxist, anyway. How can you compare things that are so different?”

  He uttered each word separately, and his left eye was half-closed, as if creased up with pleasure. He’d pushed his plate to the middle of the table so he could lean on his elbow and used his hands to shape a globe, which he shook cautiously at each important word.

  “That’s idealism,” he said slowly. “Isn’t all idealist philosophy based on the principle of identity, which consists of comparing incomparable entities? But as Marxists we reject outright such a mistaken principle. In our view nothing is static. Everything changes dialectically. And that,” he said, shaking his globe, “is why nothing can be compared to anything else. Especially in politics. Of course, what I’ve just said could be much better put. I’m saying it in my own words, as a worker. You have to forgive me!” he concluded with obvious irony.

  Lachaume could not have been more surprised, especially as he’d been paying more attention to the sound of the words than to their meaning. He didn’t take the argument seriously, it was just a pretext.

  “A couple more oysters, M. Lachaume?” Mme Valette asked. “And for you?”

  “No, thanks,” Luc Giraud mumbled, with an unthinking tug on the lapel of his blue corduroy jacket. “Not in top form, you know…” He’d suddenly gone pale, and drips of sweat ran down the side of his head. “Have you got something for indigestion?” he asked Colette, who got up straightaway.

  Everyone stopped eating, except Granny, who seemed to be living in another world.

  “It’s nothing, it’ll pass,” Luc Giraud said, with a sad smile. “It comes from stuffing myself…”

  Colette gave him a glass of bicarbonate, which he drank in one gulp, with his eyes closed, then he wiped his brow with a clean handkerchief and lit a cigarette, with an apologetic wave of his hand.

  The meal had come to a halt.

  Granny was given to understand that the interruption didn’t mean she could go on to the next course. The remaining oysters, cold cuts, and hard-boiled eggs stayed on the table, stranded.