“The other girls get the last metro,” he said. “Parisian chicks watch their pennies! You can’t imagine…”
“In any case, I’m leaving you,” Valette said. “My last train home is at one o’clock from Saint-Lazare.”
“You piss me off!” Lasteyrie suddenly bawled as he let go of their arms. “We’ve been freezing our balls off for an hour! So I’m off. Gimme my case. Cheery-bye!”
“Hang on, hang on,” Lachaume said.
“No more time to lose. Bye!”
He picked up his case, cast a glance around in all directions, then moved off.
“Where are you going?” Lachaume shouted after him.
By way of answer, Lasteyrie just waved his hand without turning around and shrugged his shoulders. Lachaume caught up with him and took his arm.
“Just where are you going?” he repeated suspiciously.
“Let go. No time to lose!”
He’s agitated, and his dark little eyes won’t meet Lachaume’s; he’s struggling to get his arm free of the sergeant’s grip.
“Don’t you ruin my suit!” he says. Then he switches mood entirely and giggles as if he’d just said something funny.
“Come on, let go,” he went on less roughly. “Look, I’m not an intellectual. I want a girl tonight and I don’t care if she’s faking it.”
But Lachaume had no intention of letting him go. “I want a girl, too,” he said. “We’ll get one together…” His suspicions and his crazy hopes all disappeared beneath a lie that Lasteyrie registered with a taunting smile.
“At any rate, I have to get a room,” he said in a mocking tone. “I’m not going to spend all night walking around with my case.”
Lachaume jumped on the excuse.
There they were in a taxi on their way to Lachaume’s hotel. The three of them sat in the back with Lasteyrie in the middle, like a prisoner. They were shivering from the freezing wind that blows along Boulevard de Grenelle from the Seine, making it one of the coldest thoroughfares in Paris.
“What about my train?” Valette said.
“It’ll wait!” Lachaume answered. “Anyway, you’re loaded. You can take a taxi.”
“All that way?” Valette whistled without thinking.
In the dark they could both feel Lasteyrie shrugging his shoulders in between them.
The hotel in Rue Cujas was full. Because of the bank holiday. The black at the reception was very sorry.
They went to Lachaume’s room nonetheless, and the black brought them up hot toddies. Then they overpaid for the rest of the bottle of rum, about three-quarters full. They just couldn’t get warm.
They had another drink, to break the ice that was now forming between them. They had never been so far apart. It was getting unbearable.
Lasteyrie got up and went to the door, carrying his suitcase.
“Where are you going?” Lachaume demanded, standing in his way.
“Let me through,” Lasteyrie answered, with a shrug.
Lachaume stood his ground. Lasteyrie carried on staring straight at him as he wedged his case against his knee and undid the catch.
“For once, Prof, you’re making me laugh!” he sneered. It went like an arrow into Lachaume’s heart.
As he spoke, he jerked the case upward with his two hands and spilled its contents onto the floor. Lasteyrie’s army boots made a dull thump, then came the trousers, the shirt, and the dress cape. It looked like a cardboard cutout of human remains on the carpet.
“There you are,” Lasteyrie said hoarsely. “That’s what was in the case, you twit!” Then he cleared his voice with what was left in the bottle of rum.
Lachaume ordered another bottle on the phone, and the black brought it up straightaway. He looked anxiously at the khaki remains on the floor. They were all sitting around them, Lasteyrie with his back to the only armchair in the room, Lachaume and Valette sitting against the bed, side by side. The bottle did the round slowly, through a haze of cigarette smoke. But it wasn’t the drink that was restoring their friendship. It was the khaki outfit, grotesque and bizarre under the soulless light of a hotel room, that seemed to be bringing reconciliation. They’d rediscovered what they had in common: despair and the absurd. They celebrated it with rum and dropped the ash from their cigarettes onto Lasteyrie’s uniform, which made them laugh with more and more hilarity as the drink took hold.
When Lena came in, pointed in astonishment at the remains on the floor, and, suppressing her laughter, said in her German accent, “Vot is dat? Haf you killed someone?” they collapsed in fits.
They clutched their ribs, wobbled to the side, mimicked her gesture, opened their mouths to try to say something, but just laughed ever louder.
At last Lachaume managed to haul himself upright with the help of the bedpost, and pointing at the kit the way Lena had, he forced out: “That’s our youth on the floor! Best years of our lives!”
Lena opened her eyes wide, ready to join in laughing.
“The best years of our lives just went missing!” Lachaume repeated in a loud and dignified voice. Then Valette pulled him back down to the carpet, and he collapsed in a pile amid guffaws from everyone.
Lena was soon settled on the carpet, too, with her legs crossed, between Lachaume and Lasteyrie, who kept her supplied with cigarettes and rum.
“But who is the other guy?” she asked, pointing. “I see who this one is (she meant Valette, who was in uniform), but the other guy?”
They all laughed at her for keeping on asking, “Who is the other guy?”
“Just a working lad in the garment trade,” Lasteyrie said, drawing closer to her. “Just makes clothes … for ladies!” he added, nibbling her ear.
“And what’s that?” she asked again, pointing at the uniform.
“The best years of our lives!” Lachaume repeated, as if it was obvious. “It’s our best years that have gone AWOL … our youth!”
“So that’s why we shot it,” Valette said, pretending to aim a gun at the khaki. “Bang! Bang! There’s an end to it!”
CHAPTER NINE
There was a knocking at the door. Sharp, quick taps, one after the other. Lachaume half-opened an eye for a split second and smiled. He was in Arras and being woken by his mother. There was more knocking, and in his dream he yawned and stretched, wallowing in the thought of a big bowl of milky coffee awaiting him in the kitchen. After that he would shower and freshen up and cycle to the sports ground just outside town to train with his friends before the first class of the day at his high school. It was spring, the war was over, he wasn’t a boy anymore, the girls were crazy about him, and life was great! There was more knocking. He stretched out his arm, trying to prop himself up on the floor so he could do a side roll out of bed, as he usually did, but as the hotel bed was higher off the ground than at home in Arras, his hand flapped around in the void, and he woke up with a start just as he was about to fall off. The knocking hadn’t stopped.
He stood up, smoothed out the crumpled shirt and trousers he’d slept in as best he could, and grunted that he was coming as he picked his way between the empty bottles and glasses on the floor. Valette, who’d been using the other side of the bed, sat up as well and muttered something or other.
“Georges, darling, are you there?” Lachaume recognized the voice straightaway but couldn’t believe it.
“Yes, I am,” he said after a pause, trying to gain enough time to hide the bottles. He was still combing his hair with his fingers when he opened the door to his mother.
She threw herself into his arms, kissed and patted him, cooing sweetly—until she noticed Valette staring in amazement from under the eiderdown at this tall and well-built lady in a black hat.
“How did you track me down?” Lachaume asked as he rubbed his eyes glumly.
She tapped the end of her nose to signify she had her sources. It must have been a family code, because Lachaume smiled, apparently in spite of himself, because he seemed at the same time to be cross that she was making him
smile.
“Who is this young man?” she said sotto voce, pointing to Valette (who promptly shut his eyes and pretended to be asleep).
Lachaume thought for a moment and then said, “He’s a soldier who missed his train.”
“I came straightaway,” she went on, speaking quietly so as not to wake the sleeping soldier. “Oh, my poor boy, when I heard you were here all alone, that you’d been dropped by that … No need to say any more. Well, when I heard, I got the first train down.”
“But where did you hear it?”
“Now, don’t take it too much to heart,” she continued without pausing for breath, looking at her son with kind, commanding eyes. “That wretched woman’s behavior speaks for itself. Leaving your husband when he’s away in the army is a foul thing to do, and it has to extinguish any feeling you had for her. You’re not still fond of her, are you?”
“Listen, Mom,” Lachaume began in an undertone, after glancing at Valette, who was still pretending to be asleep. “It wasn’t her. It was me. Mother, I don’t know how to explain…”
“Don’t say a word, my boy,” she interrupted, stroking his forehead. “You’re just like your father. When he got hurt he went and hid in a corner and said nothing. You have the same kind of pride.” She took out her handkerchief. “Oh! My darling, I’m not blaming you, not in the slightest … for having kept me in the dark about your leave.”
“Stop crying, Mom,” he whispered. “It wasn’t my fault, it just happened. Next time I’ll come and stay…”
“So when are you going back?” she exclaimed.
“Soon…”
“When?”
He paused.
“In a few days,” he said eventually, and almost inaudibly, so Valette wouldn’t hear him lying to his mother. But good old Valette was still pretending to be asleep, despite the sounds of voices, for which Lachaume was immensely grateful.
“I’m staying at Aunt Évelyne’s, she wouldn’t understand if I didn’t … Why didn’t you stay with her?”
“I really didn’t think of it,” Lachaume answered.
“At least it’s nicer than here,” she went on with a sigh. “Oh, my poor boy, what a state you’re in. You used to be so neat and smart and happy … You used to…” She couldn’t finish her sentence, but wiped her eyes with her handkerchief. Lachaume saw how unsteady her hand had become. It was like an old woman’s hand, and it upset him.
He put his arms around his mother, it was the first time he’d done that of his own accord since he’d been in short trousers, and as he comforted her without embarrassment, he suddenly realized that his adolescence was now truly dead and buried.
“I saw Madame Le Noble, the mother of your school friend who’s now a local official,” she whispered, “and she’s promised me to have a word with people who work for M———. And she will, you’ll see. They’ll give you a job as an interpreter in Germany, working with the Americans. And the Americans will hang on to you, because you’ll get on well with them; with your sports talents, they’ll want to hang on to you…”
Lachaume had borrowed the handkerchief to wipe his own eyes, and he nodded gently in agreement with everything his mother was saying. For eighteen months they’d been talking about Madame Le Noble putting in a word for him, about U.S. authorities blocking his transfer to Algeria, and so on …
“Sure, Mom, sure,” he kept on saying. “It’ll all work out.”
She calmed down gradually. It was half past eleven. She was having lunch at Aunt Évelyne’s, where it was usually served on the dot of noon. Lachaume didn’t want to go. Anyway, he wasn’t ready, and as a proud mother, Madame Lachaume did not want her son to turn up looking scruffy. What with all the gossip the divorce was going to set off, she could do without that. She made him promise to come for dinner at Aunt Évelyne’s that same evening.
“With your head high, young man!” she said affectionately.
But she dithered as she was about to leave. You could guess she’d had an intuition. Lachaume watched her with beating heart. Had she guessed? If she were to ask, he wouldn’t be able to hide the fact that he was leaving that night, at twelve-forty. Should he tell her now, so she could get used to the idea of his going back, or should he spare her until the evening? She had her hand on the doorknob and looked at him in a strange way, unable to make up her mind.
“What’s the matter, Mother?” he asked after a while. His throat was dry.
“You’re going to make fun of me,” she began uncertainly, “but promise me you’ll accept…”
He nodded.
“Promise me you’ll accept, in memory of your poor father and to give your mother great pleasure…”
He nodded again, with a glance at Valette, who was still pretending to be asleep.
“I didn’t dare give it to you when you left for Algeria,” she went on, scrabbling about in her handbag. “I was afraid that woman … that Françoise … would say something unpleasant … But now you’ll not refuse to keep it on you.” And she took from her bag a small white elephant on a neck chain.
“It’s very pretty,” Lachaume mumbled.
“It’s a lucky charm your father gave me the day before we got married,” she said with feeling. “It will protect you … You will wear it, won’t you?… For my sake…”
“Yes, Mom,” he said. “Anyway, I was born under the sign of the elephant…”
“Don’t be silly!” she said, scolding him affectionately. “The elephant isn’t one of the signs of the zodiac. You were born on October 25, my dear, so you’re a scorpion.”
“Six of one…” he said. “I’m fine with being either, elephant or scorpion.”
She beamed with pleasure to see him accept the charm so easily. On the train from Arras she’d worried herself sick about his accepting the gift. And now her darling Georges was quite amenable to it, and was even kissing her to say thank you. Tears of happiness welled up in her eyes.
Once the door had shut, Lachaume went over to the bed. Valette was still feigning sleep.
“Well, there you are,” he said. “That was my mother.”
Since he was supposed to be sleeping, Valette pretended to wake up with a start. He was a kind man.
Lachaume was swinging the white elephant on its chain over his face.
“Take a good look,” he said. “It’s our generation’s emblem.”
“What is it?” Valette asked, as if he didn’t know.
“Come on! Shake a leg!” Lachaume said as he put the charm back in his pocket.
Noticing there was still a drop of rum left in the bottle, he downed it in one gulp.
He washed and shaved, and as Valette tried to spruce up his uniform, Lachaume unpacked his own from his suitcase and put it on, whistling all the while.
“You’re putting it on already?” Valette asked.
“Up to the hilt!” Lachaume exclaimed as he admired himself in the full-length mirror on the wardrobe door. He screwed up his eyes and sneered as if he were his own sergeant-major. No two ways about it, he thought, it is an ugly color. I am making an impartial observation. As for this yellow rope we wear on our shoulders when the Burghers of Calais were granted the right to wear it round their necks, the aiglet of our glorious regiment is merely a depressing reminder of the natural tendency of khaki to mature into a dirty yellow.
He knocked back another drop of rum.
“We must write a petition—since petitions are all the rage nowadays—to demand new uniforms,” he went on. “Anyway, khaki isn’t suited to Africa.”
“Just as well,” Valette said.
“What you just said, Corporal Valette, is utterly stupid,” Lachaume declared as he swung around on his heels to admire the puffed-out back of his tunic. “One day you will see the error of your ways and add your voice to mine to express through the appropriate hierarchical channels our wish to be kitted out with apparel more suited to Africa, and so on and so forth.”
“Stop it, please!” Valette said, raising both
his hands and referring to the unbearably high-flown rhetoric that Lachaume, now overexcited and unstoppably talkative, was teasing him with.
“… I would suggest fern-shaped headgear and zebra-stripe shirts, so that…”
“Stop! Stop!”
“Why should I?” Lachaume retorted with sudden anger. “You mean to say you like this uniform?”
“I don’t give a damn,” Valette said. “Talk about something else.”
“Aha! You don’t give a damn? Is that perhaps because you expect to part with it soon?”
As Valette gestured as if to say that maybe one day they would indeed celebrate their ardently wished-for demob, Lachaume looked him straight in the eye with an odd expression and slowly waved his index finger back and forth to contradict his unspoken assumption.
“No, old fellow,” he said. “You can’t rely on that. You were born a soldier. You will remain a soldier. Like me. Like Lasteyrie. Like everyone our age. We had a few illusions about our station in life, we even chose a career, put time into studying or learning on the job, but our destiny had already been decided. We were deemed fit for service for thirty years of war…”
“You’re off your rocker!”
“No, old chum, what lies in store for men our age is thirty years of war, maybe twenty-five if we’re lucky. Why should it stop? For starters we’re going to reconquer Morocco and Tunisia. Then the front will move into Mauretania, and then it’ll get to Sudan. Then Niger will take up arms, Chad will do the same, then Ubangi-Chari, and then the rest of it … So there we’ll be in the heart of Africa, pacifying virgin forest, with Arabs behind and Zulus ahead. That’s when the French Resident will suddenly notice that the Zulus don’t look like the Zulus he remembers from the comics he’d read as a boy. So they’ll have to be pacified as well … Believe you me, Valette, there is no earthly reason why it should ever stop. If we lose two thousand men a month, then twenty-five years of war will cost barely one-third of the losses we took in four short years from 1914 to 1918. We can afford it! It’s actually the last little luxury France will be able to afford—a twenty-five-year colonial war to take back Africa. That should be just about enough to guarantee the nation’s great power status, and then we’ll be able to rest. Our place in Universal History will be guaranteed. The African Reconquista—it will make tremendous reading. But who is actually going to do the reconquering? We are, pal. All of us … With a spot of luck we’ll step out of the jungle in a quarter of a century somewhere near Zanzibar…”
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