by Alex Capus
‘What was the matter with my right eye?’
‘It was rather bloodshot. Maybe a midge had flown into it. Or a fly.’
The girl laughed. ‘It was a May-bug the size of a hen’s egg. You remembered that?’
‘And your bicycle squeaked.’
‘It still does,’ she said, lighting a cigarette. She held it between her thumb and forefinger like a street urchin. ‘What about you? Do you prop up the bar here every night?’
Oh, thought Léon. So she knows I come here every night. Oh-oh... That probably means she’s already noticed my existence. More than once, too. Oh-oh-oh... And now she comes in and acts as if she doesn’t recognize me. Oh-oh-oh-oh...
‘Yes, mademoiselle. You’ll find me here any night of the week.’
‘Why?’
‘Because I don’t know where else to go.’
‘A big boy like you? Strange,’ she said. She put the packets of cigarettes in her pocket and turned to go. ‘I always thought railwaymen were active types – itchy-footed, even. I must be wrong.’
‘I was just going,’ he said. ‘May I walk with you for a bit?’
‘Where to?’
‘Wherever you like.’
‘Better not. My way home takes me down a dark side street. You’d probably claim we’re soulmates or something. Either that, or try to read my future from my palm.’
And she was gone.
4
An unaccustomed silence had descended on the Café du Commerce while the girl and Léon were talking together. The landlord had assiduously dried the same wine glass, the regulars had blown smoke rings at the ceiling and used the glowing ends of their cigarettes to bulldoze the ash in the ashtrays into little mounds. Now that the girl had disappeared beyond the glass door they came to life and started talking – at first only haltingly and hesitantly, but in joyful anticipation of the moment when Léon would also disappear and enable them to discuss every facet of the little scene they’d just witnessed. Sure enough, before long Léon buttoned his uniform tunic and waved goodbye to the landlord. Unable to restrain his urge to communicate any longer, however, the latter caught hold of Léon’s sleeve, insisted that he have a glass of Bordeaux for the road, and told him all he knew about the girl in the red and white polka-dot blouse.
Little Louise – she wasn’t conspicuously short, but people called her that to distinguish her from fat Louise, the sexton’s wife – had been taken in by the inhabitants of Saint-Luc like a stray cat two years earlier. Many people claimed she was an orphan who hailed from one of those villages on the Somme of which not one brick had been left on another after the Germans’ spring offensive in 1915. Nobody knew anything for sure; when anyone asked Louise about her origins in the early weeks, she silenced them with such feline ferocity that they never dared raise the subject again. She spoke French with a clarity and lack of accent that defied geographical attribution but made it seem likely that she came of good family and had gone to good schools.
Like Léon, Louise had come to the town under the auspices of the direction of labour programme. She worked as an office girl at the town hall, where she ran errands, made coffee and watered the pot plants. She had learned on her own initiative to use the typewriter that had hitherto languished untouched in the mayor’s outer office. Little Louise was a bright, lively girl who proved adroit at all she did. The pot plants flourished as never before, the coffee tasted excellent, and she was soon typing immaculate letters.
The mayor, who was very satisfied with her, was surprised to notice after a few weeks that he was, despite himself, becoming extremely susceptible to her unaffected, tomboyish charms. Being conscious of the thirty-year age difference between them, however, he imposed the utmost restraint on himself in his dealings with his office girl and treated her with feigned detachment or aloof courtesy. He did, however, yield to the temptation to make her a present of his old bicycle, which had been standing unused in his barn for years. This Louise used for her official errands, which she carried out in a prompt and reliable manner.
Early in the mornings she rode it to the post office and emptied the mailbox; at half-past nine she fetched the croissants, and just before midday, if unexpected business awaited him in the office, she summoned the mayor from the Café des Artistes, where he habitually partook of his apéritif. In the afternoons she was out on her bike again. She delivered judicial demands for payment, official instructions and smallish sums of money, together with mayoral orders to the beadle, the road-mender and the chimneysweep. But the hardest thing was the invitations she had to convey, on the mayor’s behalf, to the families of soldiers killed in action. Thoroughly noncommittal, these invitations simply contained a request to their unwitting recipients to present themselves at the town hall at a certain hour on such and such a day. In the early months of the war the persons concerned read them with a shrug and obediently set off for the mayor’s office, where they stood in front of his desk, unsuspectingly kneading their caps, and enquired what could be important enough to summon them away from their work. Reading aloud from a sheet of paper, the mayor thereupon informed them in resonant tones that their son, husband, father, grandson or nephew had died a hero’s death at such and such a place on the field of honour in the service of the Fatherland, a sacrifice for which the Minister of War in person and he himself, the mayor, expressed their profound condolences and the gratitude of the entire nation.
The mayor sought to mitigate the ensuing scenes of despair, to which he was defencelessly exposed, by consoling the inconsolable with allusions to heroism, patriotism and rewards in the world to come. These they couldn’t help construing as a slur on their grief because, if they couldn’t have their nearest and dearest back, they wanted at least to mourn his passing.
It could even happen that the mayor had to endure three such scenes in his office in a single day. He started to anaesthetize himself with copious quantities of pastis and couldn’t sleep at night despite this, his digestion went haywire and his head became heavy, and grief and nameless dread made itself at home in his office, which had hitherto been a place of dignified self-satisfaction. So great was his distress that he more than once came close to walking into the church and entreating the priest for pastoral assistance, even though the cleric had been his arch-enemy ever since the urinal affair.
Such was the situation in the spring of 1915, when little Louise arrived in Saint-Luc and started running errands. She soon grasped the connection between the mayor’s invitations and the rustically maladroit scenes in his office. On perhaps twenty or thirty occasions she saw the city father sweating and shaking behind his desk, struggling for words and composure but never managing to shake off his woodenly official manner; and when she knew for certain that nothing would ever change, no matter how long the war lasted, she decided to act. ‘Please excuse me, monsieur le maire,’ she said the next time she had an invitation to deliver.
‘What is it?’ asked the mayor, smoothing his eyebrows with his thumb and forefinger and treating himself to a glance at the delectably swanlike curve of her neck.
‘Is this another of these invitations?’
‘What else, ma petite Louise, what else?’
‘Who it is this time?’
‘It’s Lucien, only son of the widow Junod,’ said the mayor. ‘Nineteen years old, the girls called him Lulu. Killed on February 7th at Ville-sur-Cousances. Did you know him?’
‘No.’
‘He was home on leave only this Christmas, I saw him at midnight Mass. He had a nice voice.’
Louise took the envelope and went outside. Mounting her bicycle, she rode at full speed across the Place de la République and headed straight for the widow Junod’s house on the western outskirts of town. She rang the bell and handed over the envelope. When the widow had torn it open with her forefinger and was staring at it helplessly, Louise said:
‘You don’t have to go there.’
Then she took her by the elbow and led her into the house, sat down beside
her on the sofa, and told her that her Lulu wouldn’t be coming back because he’d been killed in action.
Louise sat silently on the sofa while the woman threw herself on the floor, screaming, and tore out whole tufts of her hair. Having later submitted to being pummelled by the widow’s fists and clasped around the neck by her, she let her cry her eyes out with an abandon she might have been too inhibited to display in the presence of a friend or relation. Louise passed her two handkerchiefs in succession and, when she had calmed down a little, lit one of her sugar-dusted cigarettes, pillowed the widow Junod’s head on a cushion, and went into the kitchen to make her some tea. When she returned with a steaming cup, she said:
‘Well, I’ll be off now. Don’t worry about the invitation, Madame Junod. I’ll tell the mayor you won’t be coming.’
A few minutes later, when she informed the mayor of how she’d handled the matter, he looked stern and said something about taking liberties and breaches of official secrecy, but he was of course extremely relieved and profoundly grateful to have been spared the inevitable scene for once. And when two more invitations cropped up the following day, he didn’t send Louise off with an admonition of any kind; on the contrary, he gave her the unsolicited information she needed in order to fulfil her new mission.
‘This one’s name was Sebastien,’ he said, gazing up at the ceiling so as not to have to look down her cleavage. ‘He was the youngest son of Farmer Petitpierre. A decent lad. He had a hare lip and was good with horses.’
‘And the other?’
‘Delacroix, the notary. Fifty years old and childless, both parents dead. There’s only his wife. Now go, ma petite Louise. Well, off you go.’
From then on the bereaved no longer had to present themselves at the town hall. Louise simply delivered the invitations to their homes; then they knew what was what and could fully surrender to the first great onset of grief while she sat on the sofa like a mute but sympathetic angel of death. The next day or the day after that, they were usually calm enough to send for Louise because they wanted to know details. Louise would then pay them a second visit and tell them everything that had been officially ascertained: exactly when and where and in what circumstances David or Cedric or Philippe had lost his life, whether he had suffered or died a merciful death, and finally, the most urgent question of all: whether his body had found eternal rest beneath the sod or lay strewn across the mud somewhere, blown to pieces, decaying, and lying around for the ravens to devour.
Although Louise seldom had anything consoling to report, she refrained from false embellishment and always told the truth as far as she knew it, realizing that truth alone can stand the test of time. She took her task very seriously, and the inhabitants of Saint-Luc repaid her with warm affection. Becoming accustomed to the ominous squeak of her gentleman’s bicycle, they all listened for it and were glad when it grew fainter instead of ceasing abruptly outside their homes.
Many people revered Louise like a saint, but she didn’t like this. In order to destroy the halo they tried to impose on her, she smoked her sugared cigarettes, bathed half-naked in the Channel on Sundays, and acquired an arsenal of coarse expletives that contrasted strangely with her slender figure, girlish voice and educated French.
The worst thing was, news of a soldier’s death often got to Saint-Luc long before the ministerial notification – for instance when a comrade home on leave reported at the kitchen table that Jacquet, the schoolmaster, was lying at the bottom of a muddy shell-hole with his skull shattered, whereupon the news spread like wildfire from house to house until it reached every kitchen table in the town save the one to which Jacquet, the schoolmaster, would never return; for the spreading of rumours was a punishable offence and notification of a death had to be conveyed to the bereaved through official channels alone, to preclude any distressing errors and mix-ups. This was how it came about that Jacquet’s widow, who still had no idea she was one, bought a big joint of beef at the market in joyful expectation of her husband’s home leave. Meanwhile, the other women timidly and sympathetically watched her out of the corner of their eye, and then, so as not to arouse suspicion, greeted her as casually as they could manage.
Once Louise had taken over the job, however, this problem too was solved. ‘Go and tell little Louise right away,’ any soldier coming home with bad news would be told from now on. When Louise’s squeaking bicycle pulled up outside her front door, a previously unsuspecting widow knew at once that it would be a long time before she bought a joint of beef big enough for two.
Léon Le Gall walked home in a very pensive mood the night the landlord told him all this. It was not only the first warm night of the year but one of those nights on which you could see the sheet lightning generated by the front line beyond Saint-Quentin; and occasionally, when the wind was blowing from the north-west, you could also hear distant peals of thunder. Léon unbuttoned his jacket and took off his cap. He watched the vagaries of his own shadow, which lay at his feet, short and crisply defined, whenever he walked under a lamp-post, then gradually lengthened and was bleached by the intensifying glow of the next lamp-post until it lay at his feet and grew brighter and paler once more. He removed his jacket and slung it over his shoulder. It was far too warm for the time of year, and he now wondered why it had never occurred to him in the last five weeks and three days, when going for his evening stroll, to take off his official garb with its ludicrous sergeant’s stripes.
The station building at the far end of the avenue of plane trees was in darkness. No light was on upstairs either. Léon pictured old Barthélemy, blissfully snuggled up against the comforting warmth of his Josianne, slumbering his way towards another working day beneath a thick duvet. He walked across the station yard to the goods shed, then climbed the creaking stairs. His silent room hummed with the echoes of his memories of the day just past.
He reflected that, next morning and on all the mornings that followed, he would be greeting incoming trains with his little red flag. He thought of his jiggery-pokery with the Morse transmitter, of his fear of the creaking beams, and of his taciturn evenings at the bar of the Café du Commerce, and he came to the conclusion that what he had hitherto done in life could not be called good. It wasn’t bad either, because he hadn’t so far done any damage worth mentioning and had never harmed anyone or done much that he would have been ashamed to admit to his parents; but it was also true that none of his daily doings was truly important, fine or good, and he certainly had no reason to be proud of anything.
Léon didn’t know how long he’d been asleep when the sound of voices woke him. It was coming from outside the window, which he’d left open because the night was so warm, and it was accompanied by a peculiar stench – a mixture of disgusting smells whose source he couldn’t identify. He got out of bed and looked down at the platform. There in the dim light of the gas lamps stood a long train made up of goods wagons and cattle wagons, and old Barthélemy and Madame Josianne were bustling along the platform from one to the next. Léon descended the stairs in his bare feet, stripped to the waist.
The train was so long, it seemed to have no beginning or end. Many of the wagons were closed and many open, but issuing from them all was that frightful stench of putrefaction and excrement, together with the voices of men groaning and screaming and begging for water.
‘What are you doing here, boy?’ said Madame Josianne, who was doling out water to the soldiers in a big pitcher. They were sitting or lying on bare wooden planks strewn with straw, their faces glistening with sweat in the light of the gas lamps. Their uniforms were filthy, their bandages soaked in blood.
‘Madame Josianne...’
‘Go back to bed, my pet, this is nothing for you.’
‘But what’s going on here?’
‘Just a hospital train, my angel, just a hospital train. It’s taking the poor fellows south to hospitals in Dax, Bordeaux, Lourdes and Pau, so they soon get better.’
‘Can I help?’
‘That’s kind
of you, my treasure, but now go. Go on!’
‘I could fetch some water.’
‘No need. We’re used to it, your chief and I. You young people shouldn’t see such sights.’
‘But Madame Josianne...’
‘Go to your room at once, my pet. At once! And shut the window, you hear?’
Léon tried to protest and looked round for Barthélemy in search of support, but as soon as the stationmaster heard his Josianne raise her voice he came hurrying up. He eyed Léon sternly and pursed his lips so that the bristles of his moustache stood out horizontal, then pointed to the goods shed and hissed:
‘Do as madame says! Dismissed!’
So Léon gave up and went back to his room, but he left the window open in defiance of Josianne’s instructions. Stationing himself in the shadows behind the curtain, he watched what was happening on the platform. When the train pulled out he flopped down on his bed and, because the whole incident had tired him out, fell asleep even before the nocturnal breeze had carried the last remnants of the stench away.
It so happened that just before work began the next morning, as Léon was on his way from the goods shed to the station building, little Louise came riding along the avenue with her bike squeaking urgently. Reaching the station, she applied the back-pedal brake so hard that gravel crunched beneath her wheels and a cloud of dust went drifting across the forecourt. She left her bicycle in the bike shelter and ran up the three steps to the booking hall. Léon would have liked to follow her, but it was his unpostponable duty to get his red flag from the office and be standing on the platform by the time the 8.07 a.m. passenger train arrived.
When the train pulled in, Louise was the only passenger to emerge from the booking hall. Léon was relieved to note that she was holding a ticket in her hand but carrying no luggage, so she couldn’t be going away for long. All that annoyed him was that she waved to him just as he, for his part, had to wave his red flag at the incoming locomotive.