by Alan Furst
Bibi broke away in order to laugh. “Oh you are terrible, Jean-Claude.”
“What were we, twelve?”
“Yes.”
Tenderly, he pressed his lips against hers, dry and soft. “God, how I came.”
“You rubbed it.”
“You helped.”
“Mmm. Tell me, are you still a voyeur?”
“Oh yes. Did you mind?”
“Me? Jean-Claude, I strutted and danced and did the fucking cancan, how can you ask that?”
“I don’t know. I worried later.”
“That I’d tell?”
“Tell the details, yes.”
“I never told. I lay in the dark in the room with my sister and listened to her breathe. And when she was asleep, I put my hand down there and relived every moment of it.”
The cab turned the corner into the rue Chardin, the driver said “Monsieur?”
“On the right. The fourth house, just after the tree.”
Casson paid, the cab disappeared into the darkness. Casson and Bibi kissed once more, then, wound around each other like vines, they climbed the stairs together.
Suddenly, he was awake.
“Oh God, Bibi, forgive me. That damn Bruno and his damn Pomerol—”
“It was only a minute,” she said. “One snore.”
She lay on her side at the other end of the bed, her head propped on her hand, her feet by his ear—her toenails were painted red. Once in the apartment, they’d kissed and undressed, kissed and undressed, until they found themselves naked on the bed. Then she’d gone to use the bathroom and that was the last he remembered.
“What are you doing down there?”
She shrugged. Ran a lazy finger up and down his shinbone. “I don’t know. I got up this morning, alone in my big bed, and I thought . . .” Casually, she swung a knee across him, then sat up, straddling his chest, her bottom shining white in the dark bedroom, the rest of her perfectly tanned. She looked over her shoulder at him and bobbed up and down. “Don’t mind a fat girl sitting on you?”
“You’re not.” He stroked her skin. “Where did you find the sun?”
“Havana.” She clasped her hands behind her head and arched her back. “I always have my bathing suit on, no matter where I go.”
He raised his head, kissed her bottom; one side, the other side, the middle.
“You are a bad boy, Jean-Claude. It’s what everyone says.” She wriggled backward until she got comfortable, then bent over him, her head moving slowly up and down. He sighed. She touched him, her hands delicate and warm. At this rate, he thought, nothing’s going to last very long.
Worse yet, their childhood afternoons came tumbling back through his memory; skinny little dirty-minded Bibi, been at the picture books her parents hid on the top shelf. What an idiot he’d been, to believe the boys in the street: girls don’t like it but if you touch them in a certain place they go crazy—but it’s hard to find so probably you have to tie them up.
But then, what an earthquake in his tiny brain. She wants you to feel like this, she likes it when your thing sticks up in the air and quivers. Well. Life could never be the same after that. “Thursday we all go to the Lachettes,” his mother would say in Deauville. His father would groan, the Lachettes bored him. It was a big house, on the outskirts of the seaside town, away from the noisy crowds. A Norman house with a view of the sea from an attic window. With a laundry room that reeked of boiled linen. With a wine cellar ruled by a big spider. With a music room where a huge couch stood a foot from the wall and one could play behind it. “Pom, pom, pom, I have shot Geronimeau.”
“Ah, Monsieur le Colonel, I am dying. Tell my people—Jean-Claude!”
From the front hall: “Play nicely, les enfants. We are all going to the café for an hour.”
“Au revoir, Maman.”
“Au revoir, Madame Lachette.”
There were maids in the house, the floors creaked as they went about. Otherwise, a summer afternoon, cicadas whirred in the garden, the distant sea heard only if you held your breath.
“You mustn’t put your finger there.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t think you’re supposed to.”
“Oh.”
A maid approached, the Indian scout put his ear to the waxed parquet. “Pom, pom!”
“I die. Aarrghh.”
Aarrghh.
Bibi’s head moving up and down, a slow rhythm in the darkness. She was coaxing him—knew he was resisting, was about to prove that she could not be resisted. Only attack, he realized, could save him now. He circled her waist with his arms, worked himself a little further beneath her, put his mouth between her thighs. Women have taught me kindness, and this. She made a sound, he could feel it and hear it at once, like the motor in a cat. Now we’ll see, he thought, triumphant. Now we’ll just see who does what to who. Her hips began to move, rising, a moment’s pause, then down, and harder every time. At the other end of the bed, concentration wavered—he could feel it—then began to wane.
But she was proud, a fighter. Yes, he’d set her in motion, riding up and down on the swell of the wave, but he would not escape, no matter what happened to her. It was happening; she too remembered the afternoons at the house in Deauville, remembered the things that happened, remembered some things that could have happened but didn’t. She tensed, twisted, almost broke free, then shuddered, and shuddered again. Now, the conqueror thought, let’s roll you over, with your red toenails and your white ass and—
No. That wouldn’t happen.
The world floated away. She crawled back to meet him by the pillows, they kissed a few times as they fell asleep, warm on a spring night, a little drunk still, intending to do it again, this time in an even better way, then darkness.
A loud knock on the door, the voice of the concierge: “Monsieur Casson, s’il vous plaît.”
Half asleep, he pulled on his pants and an undershirt. It was just barely dawn, the first gray light touching the curtain. He unbolted the door and opened it. “Yes?”
Poor Madame Fitou, who worshiped propriety in every corner of the world. Clutching a robe at her throat, hair in a net, her old face baggy and creased with sleep. The man by her side wore a postal uniform. “A telegram, monsieur,” she said.
The man handed it over.
Who was it for? The address made no sense. CASSON, Corporal Jean C. 3rd Regiment, 45th Division, XI Corps. Ordered to report to his unit at the regimental armory, Chateau de Vincennes, by 0600 hours, 11 May, 1940.
“You must sign, monsieur,” said the man from the post office.
A COUNTRY AT WAR
The column came into the village of St.-Remy, where the D 34 wandered through plowed fields of black earth that ran to the horizon, to the fierce blue sky. The mayor waited in front of the boulangerie, his sash of office worn from waist to shoulder over an ancient suit. A serious man with a comic face—walrus mustache, pouchy eyes—he waved a little tricolor flag at the column as it passed. It took two hours, but the mayor never stopped. All along the village street, from the Norman church to the Mairie with geraniums in planter boxes, the people stood and cheered—“Vive la France!” The war veterans and the old ladies in black and the kids in shorts and the sweet girls.
A unit of the Section Cinématographique, attached to the Forty-fifth Division headquarters company, headed north in the column of tanks, gasoline trucks, and staff cars. The unit, assigned to take war footage for newsreels, included the producer Jean Casson—now Corporal Casson, in a khaki uniform—a camera operator named Meneval, like Casson recalled to service, and a commander, a career officer called Captain Degrave. They were supposed to have a director, Pierre Pinot, but he had reported to the divisional office at Vincennes, then disappeared; averse to war, the Wehrmacht, or the producer—Casson suspected it was the latter. The unit had a boxy Peugeot 401 painted army green, and an open truck, loaded with 55-gallon drums of gasoline, 35-millimeter film stock in cans, and two Contin-Souza cameras
, protected from the weather by a canvas top stretched over the truck’s wooden framework.
The village of St.-Remy disappeared around a bend, the road ran for a time by the river Ourcq. It was a slow, gentle river, the water held the reflections of clouds and the willows and poplars that lined the banks. To make way for the column a car had been driven off the road and parked under the trees. It was a large, black touring car, polished to a perfect luster. A chauffeur stood by the open door and watched the tanks rumbling past. Casson could just make out a face in the window by the backseat; pink, with white hair, perhaps rather on in years. The column was long, and probably the touring car had been there for some time, its silver grille pointed south, away from the war.
Casson had hoped, in the taxi on the way to the fortress at Vincennes, that it was all a magnificent farce—the work of the French bureaucracy at the height of its powers. But it wasn’t that way at all and in his heart he knew it. At the divisional headquarters, a long line of forty-year-old men. The major in charge had been stern, but not unkind. He’d produced Casson’s army dossier, tied in khaki ribbon, his name lettered in capitals across the cover. “You will leave for the front in the morning, Corporal,” he’d said, “but you may contact whoever you like and let them know that you’ve been returned to active duty.”
From a pay phone on the wall of the barracks he’d called Gabriella and told her what had happened. She asked what she could do. Call Marie-Claire, he said, keep the office open as long as possible, explain to the bank. Yes, she said, she understood. There was nothing but composure in her voice, yet Casson somehow knew there were tears on her face. He wondered, for a moment, if she were in love with him. Well, he hoped not. There was nothing to be done about it in any event, the life he’d made was gone. Too bad, but that was the way of the world. Over, and done. Part of him thought well, good.
“Perhaps,” she’d said, “there are certain telephone numbers you should have, monsieur. Or I could call, on your behalf.”
Gabriella, he thought. I never appreciated you until it was too late. “No,” he said. “Thank you for thinking of it, but no.”
She wished him luck, voice only just under control, soft at the edges. All during the conversation Meneval, the cameraman, was talking to his wife on the next phone. Trying to calm her, saying that a cat who’d run away would surely return. But, Casson thought, it wasn’t really about the cat.
Gabriella had approached the subject of phone calls with some delicacy, but she knew exactly what she was talking about. She knew he belonged to a certain level of society, and what that meant. That X would call Y, that Y would have a word with Z—that Casson would suddenly find himself with an office and a secretary and a job with an important title—honor preserved, and no need to die in the mud.
The column left Vincennes at dawn on the twelfth of May, a Sunday. Captain Degrave and Meneval in the Peugeot, Casson assigned to drive the truck—once again, somebody had disappeared.
At first he had all he could handle. The truck was heavy, with five forward gears, the clutch stiff, the gearshift cranky and difficult. You didn’t, he learned quickly, shift and go around a corner at once. You shifted—ka, blam—then slowly forced the truck around the corner. It was hard work, but once he caught on to that, to approach it as labor, he started to do it reasonably well.
Strange to see Paris through the window of a truck. Gray, empty streets. Sprinkle of rain. Salute from a cop, shaken fist from a street cleaner—give the bastards one for me. A toothless old lady, staggering up the embankment after a night’s sleep under a bridge, blew him a kiss. I was pretty, once upon a time, and I fucked soldier boys just like you. Up ahead, the commander of a tank—its name, Loulou, stenciled on the turret—waved a gloved hand from the open hatch.
They moved north, no more than twenty miles an hour because of the tanks, through the eastern districts of Paris. Nobody Casson knew came here—indeed there were people who claimed they lived an entire life and never left the 16th Arrondissement, except to go to the country in August. Here it was poor and shabby, not like Montparnasse; it had no communists or whores or artists, just working people who never got much money for their work. But the real Parisians, like Casson, made the whole city their home. The column crossed the rue Lagny, at boulevard d’Avout. Rue Lagny? My God, he thought, the Veau d’Or! Poor and shabby, yes, but there was always a way to spend a few hundred francs if you knew your way around. The vin de carafe was Brouilly, old Brouilly, from some lost barrel, almost black. And the Bresse chicken was hand-fed on the owner’s mistress’s mother’s farm.
Strange how life turns, Casson thought. He suddenly felt the ecstasy of the unbound heart. Going to Belgium, to the war. Well then, he’d go. He’d never used the word patriot, but he loved this whore of a France, its narrow lanes, dark and twisted, where you smelled the bread and smelled the piss and bored women leaned on the windowsills— want a ride? The engine of the truck whined, Casson tried a lower gear. But now it grumbled, skipped a heartbeat or two, so he shifted back to the whine.
Rheims.
Again the crowds, and everywhere the tricolor. The women hung garlands on the tanks’ cannon and handed the crews armloads of flowers, cigarettes, candy. Casson had a long pull from a bottle of champagne handed through the window and a wet kiss from a girl who jumped on his running board. A priest stood on the steps of Rheims cathedral and held up a crucifix, blessing the tanks as they rumbled past.
A few blocks ahead, the Peugeot was pulled over and Degrave waved at him to stop. “We’ll want this,” he said. Casson and Meneval loaded one of the cameras, set it up on a tripod on the back of the truck. Degrave took over the driving, Casson worked as the director. They circled around through the backstreets, rejoined the column, filmed the women kissing the tank crews and waving the tricolor. Of the priest, a close-up. Casson banged on the roof of the cab and Degrave stopped. A very French priest—rosy skin, fine hair, a certain refinement in the set of the lips. He held the crucifix with passion. They’d shut up in the boulevard movie theatres when they saw this, Casson thought. It was all well and good to screw the boss and hustle the girls, but they’d all made first communion, and they would all send for the priest when the time came. Cut to the faces of the tank commanders as their machines clanked past. Serious, courageous, going to war. Then a fourteen-year-old girl, tears in her eyes as she ran alongside a tank and handed up a branch of white lilac.
The column left the city on the RN 51. By the side of the road, the stone markers said SEDAN–86. Eighty-six kilometers, Casson thought. From here, you could drive to the border in an hour.
The crowd beside the road through Rethel was nothing like the one in Rheims. This crowd was watchful, and silent, and there were no garlands for the tank guns. After that, the villages were empty. There was no mayor, nobody waving, nobody. They had locked their houses and gone away. When Casson turned off the engine, he could hear the distant rumble of artillery.
On the Route Nationale there were refugees who had come south from Belgium. It looked the same, Casson thought, as the newsreels he’d seen of Poland in September of 1939. Exactly the same. To the question what should be taken? every family had its own answer—the bed, the painting, the clock. But then, days later, it didn’t matter. Exhaustion came, the treasures were too heavy, and into the fields they went.
Rough faces. Flemish, reddened, coarse to French eyes—the thick-handed cousins from the north, pikemen of a hundred armies in wars that lasted a century. The column slowed, then stopped. A nun came to Casson’s truck and asked for water. He gave her what he had, she took it away, shared it out among the refugees sitting by the roadside, then brought back the empty bottle. “God bless you, monsieur,” she said to him.
“Where are you from, sister?”
“The village of Egheze.” Then she leaned closer and whispered, “They burned the abbey to the ground,” her voice shaking with anger while she held his arm in a steel grip. Then she said, “Thank you for your kindness,”
and walked away, back to the people by the side of the road.
The column stopped at dusk. From the Ardennes forest, up on the Belgian border, the guns thundered and echoed. The tank crews sat on a stone wall, smoked cigarettes, and drank wine from a brown bottle. There was a reservist with them, a man with a double chin and a hopeful smile. For a long time nobody spoke, they just listened to the artillery. “Well,” the man said, “it seems the Boche have come a long way south.” The tank crewmen grinned and exchanged glances. “He’s worried we won’t win,” one of them said. They all laughed at that. “Well,” said another, “one never knows.” That was even funnier.
After a moment the first one said, “Ah, my little patapouf .” Fatty, he’d called him, but gently, with the tenderness that very hard people sometimes show very soft people. “You have a day or two left to live,” he said. “You better take a little more of this.” He handed over the bottle. The man drank, then wiped his lips with the back of his hand and made an appreciative face to show how good the wine was.
A dispatch rider on a motorcycle picked up the day’s film. Then Casson followed the Peugeot on a steep, narrow road that wound down to the banks of a river. A series of tight curves—it took Casson four moves to maneuver the truck through the final hairpin.
He turned off the ignition, then sat still for a long time. A tiny village, completely deserted, the people fled or sent away. A silent, cobbled street; on one side the river, on the other a few old buildings, crumbling, leaning together, ivy and wild geranium growing up the stone corners and over the tops of the doorways. In the silver moonlight the water and the stone were the same color. A low hill rose above the tile roofs to a wall masked by shrubbery, then Lombardy poplars rustled in the breeze. Then the stars.
Captain Degrave walked over from the Peugeot and appeared at the window of the truck. “There’s a hotel up the street,” he said. “The Hotel Panorama. We were supposed to billet there, but the colonial troops have it.”