On Leave
Page 16
“Don’t scream,” he said. “And take this…”
He had a clutch of assorted banknotes in his hand.
“Take these,” he said. “To bet on the horses.”
“No.”
He raised his eyes to the heavens.
“I’m telling you to bet on the horses for me. And not on any old nag. This is all I’ve got.”
“Ach! Robert, just like that…” she said with a faint smile. “What will I do with the winnings?”
“Bet again.”
“Sure, sure,” she said gravely (she believed in such things). “How many times over?”
“As far as it goes,” he said. “Until there’s none left.” He gave her a peck on the neck.
“All aboard! All aboard!” the conductors shouted.
Valette kissed his father and moved away, then turned back and took him in his arms, gripping his sleeve with his hand.
“What’s the matter, lad? What’s up?”
“You shouldn’t have come,” he said, with tears welling into his eyes.
“All aboard! All aboard!” the conductor yelled, getting closer.
“Lena, Lena,” Lachaume said. “In a way you are all the family I’ve got…”
“Ach! Laachaume, my brother…” she repeated, with shining eyes.
“What about me?” Lasteyrie said. “Am I not a brother, too?”
“No,” she replied. “Not a brother. Anyway,” she added with a giggle, “what would you do with a sister?”
“I would defend her honor!” he retorted, puffing out his chest with bravado. “Cross my heart! I would defend my sister’s honor, if I had one. But I don’t!”
“All aboard,” the conductor said one last time, waiting for them to get in before slamming the carriage doors.
The train was about to leave.
At every window there were soldiers leaning out and banging the sides of the carriage with the flats of their hands, shouting: “Send us home! Send us home! Send us home!”
Then: “Down with the war! Down with the war! Down with the war!”
Lachaume and Valette could be seen at one window, banging the outside panels along with the rest. A detachment of military police with fixed bayonets was rushing toward them down the corridor of the next carriage. Lasteyrie appeared last, at the window beside theirs, holding up two fingers in a mocking half-salute.
And they, for their part, watched the dark and empty platforms roll back, glistening with rain beyond the end of the glazed vault of the station, and they went on chanting:
“Send us home! Send us home! Send us home!”
Paris, February–March 1957
APPENDIX: DANIEL ANSELME INTERVIEWED BY MAURICE PONS
Like the owl of Minerva that takes its flight, as Hegel tells us, only when the shades of night are gathering, Daniel Anselme, a fat and tousle-haired night owl himself, can only be found when the cafés of Saint-Germain-des-Prés are clearing away their last tables. That is where this unmistakable figure has been ensconced for many years. It’s quite surprising, given the hurried generation to which he belongs and given that he’s been surrounded by precocious young writers, that he’s waited until the age of thirty to bring out his first book, La Permission, which has just burst on the literary world like a bombshell.
DA: To begin with, I was in a hurry to live, and I began living very young. I volunteered for the Resistance when I was sixteen and then went into the army. Because of the war my life began in a way quite similar to that of young men at the start of the nineteenth century.
Maurice Pons: Like Stendhal, you mean?
DA: Let’s stop joking. My reasons are more serious. Seghers published my first poems in 1944, then G.L.M. brought them out again in 1948, as A l’heure dite (“At the appointed hour”).
MP: Why didn’t you write anything for so long after that?
DA: Why? Because I had written a long poem, “L’Adieu au poème” (“Farewell to the poem”). I can still remember passages.
Daniel Anselme closes his eyes, runs his fingers through his hair to the back of his head, stirs, and so to speak shakes himself into action, while words resurface from the depths of the poem.
DA:
Qu’importe Daniel que tu parles
Qu’importe la musique lointaine
Si tes amis sont couchés par balles
Sur la page de ton prochain poème
(Who cares about your words, Daniel
Who cares about the distant tune
If your friends are put down by bullets
On the page of your forthcoming poem)
Yes, under the Occupation, in 1944, poetry was peculiarly important. I gave it up because I was troubled by its ineffectiveness in the world of today.
MP: You could express yourself more effectively as a journalist?
DA: I wrote journalism of the most polemical kind until I could no longer find an organ that matched my convictions. I’ve not known where to carry on the fight for two years now. I found a refuge only in some Italian and Polish papers.
MP: Is that why you suddenly decided to publish your book?
DA: Yes, a book is the only place you can express opinions freely in France. As in the nineteenth century, I’ve come to literature as a mode of action. I’m not out to make a literary career.
MP: But to make an impact on public opinion?
DA: More than that. I want to act. To be a man of action with a pen in my hand, because at the moment that is the weapon that I have.
MP: What kind of action are you calling for now, through your book?
DA: Last January I went to Gare de Lyon with a friend at the end of his leave from Algeria, and I witnessed the scene that constitutes the last chapter of my book: the troop train slowly moving away, with soldiers leaning out the windows over an empty platform. It struck me that this generation had nobody to speak for it. It’s an aspect of the Algerian issue that nobody sees as urgent: the drama of a generation that is losing the best years of its life, as one of my characters says.
MP: But you’re not going to tell me that you turned yourself into a novelist overnight! It seems to me that you’ve been writing in secret for many years in preparation for this moment, like learning to swim in case you get shipwrecked.
DA: Literary modes of action do indeed constitute an emergency exit, a rescue vehicle, for what Roger Vailland calls a “man of quality.” To be a “man of quality” in that sense means to act at all times by the most appropriate means in support of a few broad ideas to which you are attached.
MP: What are the broad ideas to which you are attached?
DA: First, that half the planet’s population goes hungry.
MP: The same idea tortured Romain Rolland.
DA: Yes. There’s a problem, first of all, in the distribution of wealth, and especially with the maintenance of production. Even though the problem of hunger is not so acute in some countries, the system by which goods are allocated falsifies human relationships.
MP: Is that what you think important to change? Will your next books be focused on that topic?
DA: Obviously, to my mind, since these problems are constant preoccupations, they cannot but be present in everything I write. At the moment I’m finishing a long novel, Le Retour d’Arcole (“Return from Arcole”); it’s the story of a group of decommissioned Resistance fighters looking back on a revolutionary adventure that never happened. But beyond their individual stories the constant theme of the book could be summed up by the lament that any one of the characters, whatever his position, could utter: Our lives are not what they should be!
Published in Arts, May 1957
THE WORKS OF DANIEL ANSELME
A l’heure dite. Paris, G.L.M., 1948 (46 pp.)
Contribution to Hommage des poètes francais à Attila Jozsef. Paris, Seghers, 1955
La Permission. Paris, Julliard, 1957
Les Relations. Paris, Laffont, 1964 (339 pp.)
Une Passion dans le désert. Catalogue of an exhi
bition at the Galerie Saint-Germain, 1965
“Pennaroya,” in Quatre Grèves significatives. Paris, Epi, 1972
Le Compagnon secret. Paris, Laffont, 1984. Reprinted 1997 (259 pp.)
James Jones, Le Pistolet (The Pistol). Translated from the English by Daniel Anselme. Paris, Presses de la Cité, 1960
WITH JEAN LAUNAY
Vilain contre ministère public. Script of a television serial. Paris, Laffont, 1969
Faber and Faber, Inc.
An affiliate of Farrar, Straus and Giroux
18 West 18th Street, New York 10011
Copyright © 1957 by René Julliard
Translation and introduction copyright © 2014 by David Bellos
All rights reserved
Originally published in 1957 by Éditions Julliard, France, as La Permission
Published in the United States by Faber and Faber, Inc.
First American edition, 2014
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Anselme, Daniel.
[Permission. English]
On leave: a novel / Daniel Anseleme; translated from the French by David Bellos. — First American edition.
pages cm
Includes an interview by Maurice Pons with the author (1957).
ISBN 978-0-86547-895-4 (hardback) —
ISBN 978-0-86547-896-1 (ebook)
1. Algeria—History—Revolution, 1954–1962—Fiction. 2. Soldiers—France—Fiction. 3. Psychic trauma—Fiction. I. Bellos, David, translator. II. Title.
PQ2601.N69 P413 2014
843'.914—dc23
2013034994
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eISBN 9780865478961
*Sidi Bel Abbès, a small town south of Oran, was the home base of the French Foreign Legion from its inception in 1843 until 1962.