That was when I realised that Sophie had not posted it.
If Maman had known about me, about the baby, she wouldn’t have left. I am sure of that. She would have waited for me. I wasn’t sleepy, I needed some air. I needed to walk. My body was aching. I felt worn-out. Drained. But my mind was seething. War, this was war, the real thing. I tried not to listen to the howling of the cats and dogs roaming everywhere in the village. People had abandoned them during their flight. And there were cows mooing in pain; no one had milked them for days. Like me. My breasts hurt. Milk was oozing onto my shirt. I collapsed outside the gate to L’Escalier. I had made my way there, without thinking. I wept and wept. I called out to Maman.
For weeks we waited for her to return. I prayed with all my strength that she was all right. That she had found shelter somewhere. Every day there were people returning to the village. But there was never anyone who had seen her.
After some time had gone by we did the same thing a lot of people had done: we put a notice in the newspaper. It was the only thing left to do. But we didn’t really know what to write. We knew nothing. We didn’t know where she had gone. Or when. Or how she was dressed. I tried to work that out. Maman didn’t have very many dresses; I could have figured out which one was missing. But when I stood before her wobbly wardrobe, I realised I no longer knew the clothes she had. For months I hadn’t paid the slightest attention to the woman I now claimed to love with all my soul. You could not blame life for taking something from you when you hardly even noticed it anymore.
If we wanted to have a chance of finding her, though, we had to put something in our notice. So we put her name. Her age. Her white hair. That much we were sure about. The beauty mark she had in the hollow at the back of her neck, right at the roots of her hair. And even her broken tooth, the right-hand canine. Maybe her Bible. We couldn’t be sure about that, either. She might have left with it then lost it along the way. And above all—above all—we would refund any telegram expenses so that we could be sure that money would not prevent any news of her from reaching us. Then we waited. Until that Friday, the thirtieth of November 1940.
I will always remember the date, Louis, it was not long after your return. I was also worried about you. You cannot imagine how happy I was. For the first time in all those long months, I said to myself, ‘It’s going to be all right. It’s going to be all right. Louis is home. Now everything will be all right. Maman will come home, too.’ And then we got the telegram. The only news of her that we did not want to get.
regret to inform stop eugénie gallois dead stop bombing stop personal belongings to follow by post stop
The doubt. Unbearable. A few more days. And then the package. Her Bible. Her wedding ring. A little bit of money. And the thimble I had given her and which she always had with her. The certainty of it. Maman was dead.
We had never had much to say to each other, my father and I, and from that day on, it was finished for good. I handed him Maman’s ring. He threw it back in my face.
‘It’s a living woman I married, not a dead one.’
That was the end of my family life. Never again would there be the three of us, never again could we be just the two of us, either. Strangers meeting over a meal, that was all we were. And even eating didn’t release any meaning, as we faced off pitifully across the table.
My father had taken in a stray dog, and he’d talk to it, short commands like sit, lie down, give me your paw, good dog . . . Those were the only words that came out of his mouth. I was there, but it was as if he had erased me from his life. He seemed to have got used to it. I hadn’t. He held me responsible for Maman’s death and I couldn’t say anything. In a way he was right. I had the impression that nothing I did could ever be as good as the way she had done it. Her memory was everywhere. I couldn’t stay there. With my father looking at me but not seeing me, my remorse was slowly killing me. And I had to live, for Louise’s sake. That is why I went away again. Forgive me, Louis, forgive me for leaving the village without saying goodbye. But if I had come to see you, I would have told you everything. And I didn’t want to get you mixed up in it. I had only one thought in my mind: to get my child back.
I don’t know how I managed to read to the end of that letter.
I finished it—drained, stunned, as I repeated the same gesture again and again, of running my finger over the hollow in the nape of my neck, at the roots of my hair.
Over my beauty mark.
Annie had left me outside the entrance to the municipal baths, but not before she had told me several times that she would be right back. I waited for her in the café opposite, still shocked by what she had just told me.
I wondered what she had done to Sophie to ‘make her pay’ for not sending the letter; there was so much hatred in her eyes when she said it. What I imagined was nowhere near the truth, and I will be sorry all my life for having been the cause of it.
A quarter of an hour after she had left me Annie tapped on the windowpane by the table where I was sitting. She was smiling; she had put on a bit of lipstick. She was beautiful, even more beautiful than she had been in the village. Her husband was a lucky man. It was strange for me to see her resorting to artifice; she really was a woman now. But I too had become a man, and to see the proof that one is growing older is always a bit sad, even when one is young, and even when one is a man.
She motioned for me to join her. She smelled good. She had heard about a restaurant where you could still find decent things to eat, and she was about to continue her story when I interrupted her. I had to confess to her now; afterwards it would be too late.
‘I sent you that telegram. Your mother died before my eyes.’
Annie put down her fork, speechless.
At least I could try to restore some truth to this story riddled with lies. I could not tell her about the letter she had sent to her mother, but I had to tell her everything about the telegram.
When everyone was beginning to flee, my mother insisted I leave the village. She could not bear to think I might end up in the hands of the Germans, the way they had in 1914. If my father had not been at the front, he would have told me to leave too, of that she was sure. She would stay behind in the village with my sisters, that was her duty. She closed the haberdashery in order to teach the village children—one fine morning Mademoiselle E. had simply failed to turn up. She had vanished into thin air like so many others.
My mother kept telling me that for me it was different: I wasn’t running away, like all those cowards; I was leaving in order to defend us if things got worse, and it was my duty to obey the orders of the authorities. ‘All boys over sixteen must avoid capture by the enemy.’
I was to set off with four friends who had also decided to leave. We didn’t really know where to go, we wanted at least to get to the other side of the Seine, to get away from the Germans; we still thought the army would stop them before then.
I had promised Annie’s mother that I would call past to say goodbye. She was sitting on the same stool in the hallway as on the afternoon when she had told me she didn’t know how to read. She was wearing her coat, and between her feet she had a small suitcase. She was waiting for me. If I still didn’t know where to go; she did. To Collioure, to join Annie. Did I want to come with her? She was leaving, no matter what. There was no point trying to make her change her mind, the most recent bombing attacks had convinced her. She would not stay another minute to wait for the Boches’ flame-throwers to come and singe her bottom, particularly as now my mother had closed the haberdashery, and her ‘intelligent eyes’ were leaving her as well. That’s what she called me, her ‘intelligent eyes’. Should we say goodbye there and then, or did I want to go with her to look for Annie?
I couldn’t abandon her, she wouldn’t be able to cope on her own, nor could I impose her on my friends, so I didn’t join them. We could always go a little bit of the way together, as
far as the station.
People were shouting, fighting, trampling on each other, because it was those who managed to get on the train who’d be able to flee; the Germans might show up at any minute. They were bombing the rail convoys relentlessly. I decided to take the main road; a moving crowd seemed less dangerous than a stampeding crowd.
We found ourselves among a group of good village souls. They had piled everything higgledy-piggledy onto their carts: supplies, furniture, canary cages, rabbit hutches, two old women and a child. They kindly cleared a spot for Annie’s mother so she could sit down. We inched our way along, followed by a few tireless goats. Everyone was afraid.
On the third day, we went through a little abandoned village. Outside the pharmacy a man in rags was meticulously arranging medicine bottles according to colour, and every time he saw someone, he said, ‘Just a little shot, Monsieur Thingmajig, just a little shot.’ And on the square were a man and a woman, also in rags, and espadrilles, and they answered ‘Napoleon’ and ‘Joan of Arc’ when we asked them their names.
They were lunatics who had escaped from a hospice because the nurses had abandoned them as they fled. Suddenly this particular Joan of Arc started screaming, hiding her head with her hands.
‘Aeroplanes! Aeroplanes!’
Black dots were in fact emerging from the clouds. A squadron of several dozen Stukas with their wings in a W formation and their sirens sounding were headed in our direction. Everyone panicked.
‘Bloody hell, you’re the ones they’re aiming for, take off that uniform, quick!’
One of the men was screaming at a group of fleeing soldiers who had joined us.
‘You fucking bastard soldiers! Why don’t you stick together and fight each other instead of hanging around with civilians and land us with all these fucking Stukas.’
They would have come to blows for sure if those ‘fucking Stukas’ had not come straight at us. I shouted at Annie’s mother to get down off the cart. I tried to make my way over to her. She was walking as fast as she could but she couldn’t run. I heard the whistling of machine-gun fire. I could see the ground exploding all around us. The bombing was terrifying. When it was calm again at last, and once they’d recovered their wits, everyone immediately looked for their loved ones. I was so relieved, her mother was in the ditch a few metres from me, safe and sound, reciting her act of contrition. Everywhere else there was nothing but screaming. Napoleon and Joan of Arc were writhing on the ground in fear, like lunatics indeed. And in the middle of all the shouts were even more terrible cries, a little girl with her mother lying in a pool of blood at her feet, dead. Behind me there was a strange noise, like tiny bursts of machine-gun fire. I turned around: it was a swarm of bees, circling madly, relentlessly, around their hive which had been crushed in the attack. It was a terrifying vision, a scene from the Apocalypse.
Then suddenly I heard new cries, more animated, more intense. Out of nowhere—no doubt he’d escaped from his paddock thanks to the bombs—a horse had just broken through the hedge between us, and it was as if he had gone mad. People were running in every direction to get away from him. When I looked around again for Annie’s mother, she was no longer next to me. She was comforting the little girl whose mother was lying at her feet. The horse was headed straight for them. It all happened so fast, there was nothing I could do. Nor did she have time to react. When she saw the horse it was too late. She lay over the little girl to protect her with her body, and the horse’s hoof struck her right in the back of the skull. She died instantly.
‘I hoped I would never see you again, I felt so guilty. But when I went back to N., you were there, back from your “trip” with Madame M. I didn’t recognise you anymore, you looked so tired, so sad. I read your notice in La Gazette every day, and finally I replied. With that telegram. Because I was too much of a coward to tell you to your face. Because I didn’t want to become the person who told you that your mother had died: I know that once someone tells you such a terrible piece of news you can never see them as anyone but a bearer of bad news. I did not manage to protect her. Please forgive me.’
‘It wasn’t your fault.’
Annie was in shock, but she seemed to be thinking about something.
‘What day did you say you left?’
‘The twenty-third of May.’
‘That’s what I thought. If Sophie had posted my letter the morning after the birth, like she had promised me she would, my mother would have got it and she would never have left, she would have waited for me. You see, it’s not really your fault.’
How much guiltier could Annie make me feel?
I suddenly felt the waiter tapping me on the shoulder.
‘I’m sorry, but I have to ask you youngsters to leave now, we’re closing up.’
It was already a quarter to midnight, the time had flown by. We were the last customers, the chairs were already on top of the tables. As the door to the restaurant was closing behind us, the loudspeakers on the police cars blared their message into the street.
‘Attention, attention, any individuals found in the street after midnight will be taken to the police station and held there until five o’clock in the morning.’
Whether we went to my place or Annie’s, it would still take us longer than fifteen minutes, and she preferred to come to my place. Of course! Her husband must be at home. And what if she didn’t love him anymore? The thought suddenly crossed my mind.
We ran as far as the métro; I have such a vibrant memory of that mad dash. We ran, looked at each other, ran, looked at each other. And once we were in the métro, out of breath, red in the face, we were overcome by an irrepressible and inappropriate fit of laughter, one of those childhood fits from when we were still ‘those inseparable kids’, as my father used to call us . . . like those lovebirds you must always buy in pairs, otherwise they will die.
When we got out of the métro it was after midnight. And we had at least five hundred metres left to get to my place. We mustn’t be caught. The wooden soles of Annie’s shoes made such a racket that it felt as if, with each step she took, every German guard in Paris must be about to descend upon us. I told her to climb onto my back. She didn’t want to, no doubt out of a sense of female vanity. I insisted.
‘Do you know what happened the other night near the Luxembourg Gardens? At twenty minutes past nine?’
‘No.’
‘A Jew killed a German soldier, ripped his guts out and ate his heart.’
Annie was giving me an odd look. ‘What are you talking about?’
‘You know perfectly well that Germans don’t have hearts, that Jews don’t eat pork, and that at twenty minutes past nine everyone is listening to the British radio. Feel my soles.’
I was used to dealing with the curfew: my soles were made of felt. I walked right down the middle of the street to avoid the soldiers patrolling the pavement on either side; I had already fooled them any number of times. If I happened upon a group of guards I would stop and wait for them to move on; we simply had to do the same thing now. In the dark they could not see a thing. Annie climbed on my back; I could tell she was proud of me.
I tried not to panic. Evidently, whoever was writing these letters wanted to make me believe that he was talking about me. But who could want to do this to me?
Other than the men in my life, no one knew about my beauty mark: I have long hair and never tie it back. As for author-lovers, I’ve always tried to avoid them, I have to live with writers all day long, so to have one in my bed, no thanks! Nicolas said that no beauty mark had ever been more deserving of its name, and he was very fond of it. He would have done better to be fond of me.
Our dinner was an utter fiasco. Apparently that word often applies to sexual relations. But this wasn’t far off, same difference. I should just call the baby ‘fiasco’ in honour of its father.
Nicolas was mutter
ing between clenched teeth. He accused me of trying to have a baby behind his back. He should have expected as much: at my age, that’s all women think about, their biological clock.
I got up and said that Cinderella had to get home, that she wouldn’t lose her shoe, and that he could just go fuck himself. Just like he had fucked me in order to make this baby.
What with Nicolas and all these letters I hadn’t eaten much for several days. But I had to get something down my throat for the baby’s sake. Now I was even beginning to sound like those letters.
I found two slices of ham in the fridge—that was something. Maman always said you could tell when people were depressed because they ate straight out of the fridge, so I went and sat back down at my desk, but not on the side where I work, the other side, closer to the kitchen, not so much to try and get comfortable but simply to stay off my feet, and above all keep my nose out of the fridge.
And that is when it came to me. Which just goes to show that it is always a good thing in life to change your point of view; I mean your perspective, not your opinion.
From that point of view a squadron of Stukas was in plain sight, their wings shaped like Ws.
While I was reading I had automatically scribbled the letter W on the back of the envelope, but from where I was sitting those Stukas were not very frightening anymore, they were no more than an army of the letter M staring at me, inoffensively.
Madame M.
I turned the envelope upside down.
M W M W.
And what if this were a hidden initial?
What if Madame M., that monster the guy was describing to me week after week, was actually Madame W.?
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