On Leave

by Daniel Anselme

  “I owe you a thousand francs in any case. I lost at cards the other night,” she said, taking a thousand-franc note from her purse.

  “Not at all!” Lachaume protested. “I lost. I owe you.”

  “No! No! You were as drunk as a fish,” Lena said. “That’s why you won.”

  “Not at all. I remember losing very well,” Lachaume riposted, taking a thousand-franc note from his pocket.

  “I’ll settle up between you, all right!” Lasteyrie said. He grabbed the two notes. “We’ll drink them both.”

  “Give that back!” Lachaume yelled.

  The burst of anger made his hands shake. Lasteyrie was leaning on the counter in a mocking pose, staring cheekily at Lachaume.

  “Another round of the same,” he said to the waiter in a slow drawl. He held up a thousand-franc note with two fingers.

  “Give that back!” Lachaume shouted. “I cannot bear having things torn out of my hands.”

  “He can’t bear it!” Lasteyrie said. “He’s so sensitive!”

  Two drunks at the other end of the counter smirked at them; Lachaume shot daggers at them with his eyes.

  “Ha ha! The sergeant’s getting robbed,” one of them said, clapping his hands.

  “What’s the matter with you two?” Valette asked glumly. He was blinking, as if the light hurt his eyes. “What’s up? What’s got into you?”

  “What you are doing is disgusting,” Lachaume said to Lasteyrie in a quieter tone. He meant to refer to the grinning drunks, who seemed to be in cahoots with Lasteyrie.

  “Disgusting!” he repeated, with disproportionate feeling. He went to sit with Lena by the window.

  There were four students standing in the street just outside, constantly fiddling with the position of their hats and making sure their swords were set at the correct angle, swaying on their feet in a manner that was casual and military at the same time. Lachaume could see the face of only one of them, a baby-faced adolescent. Another was taller and stouter, wearing a square-cut black mustache that added to his years. A fifth student from Polytechnique came up to them. The one with the mustache, whose pudgy face and double chin beamed with good cheer, was the first to stretch out his long and easy arm to shake the newcomer’s hand, and it was easy to see that he would do it in exactly the same way in twenty years’ time, when he’d be Minister of Construction.

  “I’m sure I lost,” Lachaume said. “I can see the game in my mind…”

  “Well then, you’re seeing double!” She laughed. “You were as pissed as a newt.”

  Taxis and chauffeur-driven cars were pulling up in droves outside the theater. Men in formal attire and women in ball gowns, wearing fur stoles, got out, alongside more students from Polytechnique with hats under their arms and swords at their sides.

  “I’m telling you, I lost!” Lachaume said again.

  Lasteyrie came up with a glass in his hand.

  “You should have something to drink,” he said, “because it’s on your tab, anyway.”

  Lachaume knocked it back in one gulp.

  “You are disgusting!” he said.

  A student with some urgent business went up to a policeman, who saluted him, paid respectful attention to what he had to say, and then accompanied him promptly as he held on to his hat with one hand and his sword with the other.

  “Well, I know I lost,” Lachaume said, with a shake of his head.

  “You’re as pissed as a newt.”

  Four more serious-looking students piled out of a small taxi and stopped in front of their mustachioed colleague and his friends, but as they got no response, they went on their way submissively. The space vacated by their taxi was immediately taken by a black limousine. The chauffeur hurried out with cap in hand to open the rear door. From it emerged in slow motion a tall brunette in an emerald-green ball gown and a suave and tall student from Polytechnique. Behind their backs, the chauffeur gave a wink to a plain-clothes policeman, in mockery of his own simulated servility.

  “Come on, have another,” Lasteyrie said.

  The tall student and the girl sauntered past the one with the mustache, who was waiting to be acknowledged, but he wasn’t sure whether they would shake hands with him. All he got as they went by was the merest wave of a hand.

  Lachaume went to the counter to fetch his glass, which had been topped up meanwhile, and when he got back to his window seat, he could see the tall student standing still on one side while the girl in emerald green put the wing collar on his black tunic on its hook.

  His sallow skin, bony nose, black almond-slit eyes, and large cheekbones made his face vaguely Napoleonic—disenchanted and skeptical in addition. Like a Bonaparte whose life had started on Saint Helena.

  “What are you looking at?” Valette asked as he came toward the window.

  “At France!” Lachaume said, raising his elbow so sharply that the rum splashed onto his hand.

  A bell rang inside the theater for the start of the show, and the pavement cleared.

  “Forward march,” Lasteyrie said.

  They dawdled their way to Porte Saint-Denis along Boulevard Bonne-Nouvelle, and then Lachaume, as was his habit, stopped dead in his tracks and shook his head indignantly and waved his arms about as if he was about to make an important announcement.

  “Have you seen this?” he finally uttered. “Have you ever seen anything like it? Ludovico Magno…”

  What had made him furious was the arch of the Porte Saint-Denis with its bas-reliefs and its legend in Latin.

  “Forward march!” Lasteyrie repeated.

  “What about that thing?” Lachaume argued, meaning the ceremonial arch. “Are we going to leave it standing?”

  Lasteyrie took him by the arm and tried to drag him away.

  “Go away and leave me alone,” he shouted, jerking his arm free. “I’ll do it all by myself!”

  He stepped into the roadway and wove through the cars toward the arch of the Porte Saint-Denis. Lasteyrie, Valette, and Lena shouted at him from the pavement. At last he turned around, standing in between two lanes of fast-moving cars, and made a sweeping, cynical gesture that told them to leave him alone. Then, holding his head up and his neck straight, he strode to the other side and onto the traffic island, where he could be seen leaning his head on the blackened stonework of the arch as if he was trying to head-butt it to the ground.

  “Go get him back,” Lasteyrie said to Lena.

  When she got there, he was in the same position, with his forehead on the stonework, keeping himself upright by holding on to the hoof of one of the horses on the bas-relief.

  “Ach! Laachaume, my brother,” she said with a little laugh, “you’ll have me crying as well…”

  “Leave me alone,” he said, without budging. “I don’t need anybody else, you’ll see.”

  She stroked his neck as if by accident, then slid her hand between the stone and Lachaume’s face to wipe away his tears, with tenderness that was neither simulated nor unintentional.

  Then Lasteyrie took them on down Boulevard de Sébastopol toward the Seine.

  It’s a straight, ill-lit thoroughfare over a mile long. So they took almost an hour to get from the Tour Jean-Sans-Peur to the Tour Saint-Jacques, the two monuments at either end of the boulevard.

  Lena moaned: “What about your mother, Laachaume? Aren’t you going to give her a hug?”

  She was hanging on his arm with her cheek on his biceps.

  “Laachaume, Laachaume! They’ve put out your plate, they’re waiting for you, the goose has been served … Ach! Laachaume, everything on the family table has gone cold…”

  “Shut up,” he kept saying.

  She took up the same fight with Valette.

  “What about your folks? Don’t they want you to kiss them goodbye? To say ‘good night’ and give them a hug? Haven’t they made your favorite dish? Aren’t they wanting you to come home?”

  “Then they shouldn’t have let me go,” Valette said, with a shake of his head.

/>   Lena abruptly decided to go no farther and flopped down onto a bench.

  “Mein Gott! It’s always the same,” she said, putting her head between her hands. “The other guys drank like fish as well. The other guys bad-mouthed their mothers as well. Why? Why?”

  Lasteyrie came to fetch her.

  “Come on, gorgeous,” he said, and took her hand.

  “What about the photos?” she said. “I won’t have any souvenirs. There won’t be anything. Nobody will have anything.”

  “She’s right,” Lachaume said. “We can’t leave just like that. That would be too easy. On the whistle, train … go! With us inside…”

  He squinted at the city.

  “What are we going to do? Three guys with a bit of spunk can do a lot of damage to a town…”

  “Yeah, we could break some windows,” Lasteyrie said. “And then pay for the broken glass.”

  “Just let them try to charge us!” Valette said. He’d been lolling around a little way off. “I ain’t paying for nothing, not anymore. Never again!”

  “What are we going to do?” Lachaume kept saying, clenching his fists. “Lasteyrie, you’re the Parisian, so you should know. What do you think your bloody town looks like?”

  In a bar that had just closed a waiter stood behind his counter making little piles of the small change he got in tips.

  Assuming the troopers wanted a drink, he shooed them away.

  “What are we going to do?” Lachaume said again. “You’re the one from Paris. Tell us where to hit it. Where it would hurt the most.”

  “Don’t waste your energy,” Lasteyrie said. “Paris is armor-plated.”

  “There are three of us,” Lachaume said. “I’m telling you, we can smash something.”

  “If every man jack who didn’t like the idea of going off to war had managed to take something down, there wouldn’t be a stone left standing in the whole city,” Lasteyrie said.

  “If they had the heart to join forces,” Valette said, “then something could be done. They took down the Bastille once upon a time.”

  “Well, we did demolish the fairground at Luna Park,” Lasteyrie said.

  They reached the banks of the Seine. Their hair and faces were wet with drizzle. At the Pont d’Arcole there was a set of steep steps leading down to the lapping water that glinted in a small arc from the light of a streetlamp.

  “Let’s go down there,” Lachaume said, and he started on the stairs, wobbling badly. “Lena…”

  “No,” she said. “Come back up. It’s raining.”

  He sat down on a step and put his head in his hands.

  “So what are we going to do?” he mumbled.

  The town hall clock struck half-past-eleven.

  “Are we really going to go just like that? Just like that?”

  “And the photos?” Lena said. “No souvenirs. Nothing.”

  Their eyes turned to Lasteyrie, who was cuddling the parapet affectionately, with his cheek lying on top of it.

  “Forward march,” he said in a drawl.

  He slowly pulled himself upright, stroking the stonework tenderly, and led them along Quai des Célestins toward the railroad station, where the train was due to leave in three-quarters of an hour.

  He hesitated at the Pont de Sully, looked toward the Ile Saint-Louis, and then made them all cross the river. The tip of the island is a public garden that is closed at night. He stopped at the low railing, then wiped his rain-soaked face on his sleeve.

  “Let’s give them a surprise,” he said slowly. He nodded toward the quais on the two sides of the river, shimmering in lights and overrun by cars.

  “Like your Duchess Thingummy,” he said, with his hand on Lachaume’s shoulder, lowering his head as if he was trying to stifle a giggle. “Just like your duchess!”

  Then he clambered over the railing, despite Lena’s objections. In the middle of the garden there was a peculiar monument.

  What looked like two naked savages sitting on a defeated animal watched over each side of an empty plinth. A naked child stood behind each of the savages.

  Using the children’s heads as a handhold, Lasteyrie climbed onto the lap of one of the savages, then onto his shoulders. He grasped the bronze laurel wreath at the bottom of the plinth, then climbed onto the head of one of the children, and from there he put his foot on the bronze wreath, and gripping the ledge with his hands, he hauled himself to the top of the plinth. The Germans must have removed the statue that used to be there to melt it down during the last war. That was presumably why it was empty.

  He stood on the plinth with his legs apart, took his comb case out of his pocket, then his comb out of its case, and carefully did his hair in the light of a streetlamp, with the rain for hair cream.

  “Come up,” he said eventually. “We’ll raise our own statue.”

  Valette, already perched on the shoulders of a savage, pulled himself up to the plinth and sat on the edge with his legs hanging over the side. He put his head in his hands. You couldn’t tell whether he was laughing or crying. Nor could he.

  Lachaume had got his shoe stuck in the gaping maw of one of the animals, but Lena, who’d stayed on the right side of the railings because she was afraid of the police, refused to come and help him out.

  “Get down,” she pleaded. “You shouldn’t damage statues.”

  “That’s true,” Lasteyrie said. “We shouldn’t damage our very own comrades and friends … Next time we’ll get ourselves transferred to the Louvre.”

  “Or over there,” Valette said, pointing to the dark outline of a large building on the Left Bank, in the Jardin des Plantes. “Being a stuffed animal in the Natural History Museum would be a cinch.”

  Lachaume had finally got his foot out of the animal’s mouth and was now taking a breather on the shoulders of one of the natives.

  “Who is this naked gentleman?” he asked.

  “A pacified Zulu,” Valette said.

  Lachaume was pulled up onto the plinth.

  “You,” Lasteyrie said, “you’re standing with your hand over your eyes, like you were scanning the horizon…”

  Lachaume didn’t move.

  “Like this,” Lasteyrie said, shading his eyes with his hand.

  “What am I scanning?” Lachaume asked eventually, but angrily.

  “You’re on the lookout for something,” Lasteyrie said. “It’s better than doing nothing, it passes the time … And you, old pal,” he said to Valette, “you’re on your knees, hands crossed on your chest, like you’ve been injured. That’s the least that can happen to a guy with his heart in his hand…”

  Lachaume looked toward the lights of Paris twinkling through the bare branches of the acacia trees and put his hand to his brow; Valette knelt in front of him with hands crossed over his heart, as if he was about to declare his love in a comic opera, and Lasteyrie laughed.

  “As for meself…” He cleared his throat. “As for me … if you permit, I shall lay myself down at your feet…”

  “At our feet?” Valette queried.

  “Yes, old mate, like I was dead.”

  So he lay down full length in front of his comrades. The rain got heavier and made their faces wet.

  “They’ll go berserk when they see our monument,” he said.

  “Get down,” Lena begged from the other side of the railing. “Get off there!”

  “Never!” Lasteyrie said. “We’re here forever … Lena, take a picture of us!”

  “Ach! Robert, that’s impossible…”

  “Lena, I said take a picture!”

  Suddenly yielding to weariness and indifference, as if she had always been obliged to put up with despair and the absurd, Lena silently took her camera out of its case, removed the lens cover, pulled back the viewfinder, and pointed it at the monument. She could see a black rectangle; with a bit of goodwill, you could make out a vague smudge in the middle.

  “That must be it,” she muttered, and clicked the button.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN<
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  Army trains leave late at night, after the last civilian service. Paris keeps them hidden.

  Gare de Lyon was bustling with clean-shaven soldiers looking either too pale or too ruddy, talking to each other without eye contact, cracking jokes without smiling, and watched over by military policemen patrolling with fixed bayonets. There was hardly a civilian to be seen. Fathers, mothers, sisters, wives, and girlfriends hadn’t come to see off their sons, brothers, husbands, and boyfriends. Because it was late, because the last metro had gone, because they had to get up for work in the morning. And then those involved just hated waving handkerchiefs. If the trains had to go, then at least they could be spared the sight of resignation. There’s not enough difference between a handkerchief waving and the stationmaster’s flag …

  The first person Valette saw as he went into the station hall was his father, despite his standing at the side, with the khaki kit bags over his shoulder. Valette, in a sodden cape and with a rain-soaked face, went up to him timidly.

  “Dad! You shouldn’t have come,” he said sullenly. “Look, nobody comes. You’re the only one…”

  He took his kit bags and put his arm around his father. Then Lachaume came up and shook the old man’s hand. Then Valette introduced Lasteyrie and Lena to M. Valette, who looked them up and down with his fuzzy eyes. There was a long pause, though there were only five or six minutes left.

  “Dad, about this evening…” Jean Valette finally muttered. “About this evening…” His voice was breaking.

  Lachaume, Lasteyrie, and Lena had moved away. M. Valette said nothing and nodded his head, his impenetrable gaze masked by thick spectacles. The only expression on his face was the redness of his cheekbones. At any rate, that’s all that the others could see. But Jean Valette was upset.

  Whistles were blowing, men were shouting.

  They went onto the platform. The military policemen with their bayonets at the ready got on board. Officers hurried up and down the platform alongside the train with railway inspectors.

  “Listen, lad,” M. Valette said in a muffled voice. “We’ll get something going, just you wait…”

  Lasteyrie had taken Lena off to the side.