by Alex Capus
‘Say what you like, but one needs a good light to do good work by. Just because you’ve got used to your old thing, that doesn’t mean it gives a good light. Mind if we disconnect it and plug this one in instead?’
‘If you insist.’
‘This is a Siemens, the Mercedes of desk lamps, so to speak – no comparison with that old thing of yours. If you’d just sign for it as a matter of routine. Administrative routine is important, is it not?’
‘Yes, monsieur. What about the coffee?’
‘What about it?’
‘Don’t you need a receipt for that too?’
‘Now you’re poking fun at me, Le Gall. That’s unjust. I’m not a pettifogging pedant, so don’t get me wrong. Personally, I need no receipts for anything at all. My own view is that life demands an unsolicited receipt from us all, sooner or later. But the bureaucrats can’t wait for our demise, they need receipts before that. And to be fair, administrative routine is never an end in itself; ultimately, it exists for our own benefit. Isn’t that so?’
‘Of course.’
‘So administrative errors can have grave consequences, I always say. But here I am, standing here chatting when you’ve a great deal of work to do. Au revoir, Le Gall. See you this evening.’
‘Au revoir, monsieur.’
Knochen hurried out into the passage, coat tails fluttering, and pulled the door to behind him. A moment later he opened it again.
‘I almost forgot. At lunchtime you must look in at the kindergarten in Rue Lejeune – the headmistress called. It’s about your little daughter – the four-year-old, what was her name again? Marianne?’
‘Muriel.’
‘Apparently, little Muriel threw a cobblestone at a third-floor lavatory window and smashed it.’
‘Muriel did?’
Knochen made another of his dismissive gestures. ‘It’s all nonsense, of course. I mean, how could a girl of four throw a cobblestone at a third-floor window? A mix-up, no doubt – just a typical administrative error. Still, perhaps you’d better look in there at lunchtime. I was told that the little girl has been locked up in the coal cellar – in durance vile, so to speak – and she’s crying her eyes out.’
Léon pushed his chair back with a jerk and made to get up, but Knochen gripped him by the shoulder and forced him down again.
‘No rush, Monsieur Le Gall, no fuss. The best thing we can do is let matters take their course in the routine way, don’t you agree? One’s work takes priority over one’s private life. Put in another two hours’ conscientious copying, then it’ll be lunchtime and you can go to the Rue Lejeune. The headmistress is a hidebound martinet, I’m told. If she won’t let your little daughter out of the coal cellar, tell her Hauptsturmführer Knochen sends his regards, that should help. Au revoir, monsieur, and happy copying. Have a nice day.’
15
Then came the winter of 1940–41, and Paris turned cold. In summer the switch to German time had granted the city’s inhabitants long, light evenings on which the sun didn’t set until after ten o’clock and residual streaks of daylight still glimmered on the horizon at midnight. They paid for this now because the working day began in the middle of the night. Léon rose when it was pitch-dark and shaved by dim electric light. At breakfast he could see his reflection in the black window pane, and on his way to work the stars twinkled in the sky as if it were already dusk, not early in the morning.
That winter, where his work at the Quai des Orfèvres was concerned, Léon realized that right had become wrong and wrong was now the law; the scum had risen to the surface and the laws were made by rogues. In the passages at headquarters, policemen exchanged whispered reports of the latest doings of the most notorious hoodlums in Paris – ‘Pierrot la Valise’, ‘François le Mauvais’ or ‘Feu-Feu le Riton’ – who had exchanged their ten-, fifteen- or twenty-year prison terms for freedom, cars and petrol, not to mention firearms and German police permits. Things had yet to reach the stage where they turned up at the Quai des Orfèvres in broad daylight and arrested the policemen who had arrested them, but everyone knew that day would soon come.
Although it was to Léon’s advantage that he did his work anonymously and out of contact with the outside world, he could literally smell danger whenever he passed the various departments on the stairs every morning, and he realized that any colleague, secretary or gendarme could be in cahoots with the villains and murderers. He could see no way out of this situation, so he took refuge in his laboratory, performed his duties, and carefully avoided all non-essential contacts.
As early as November, a big depression flooded the city with cold air from Siberia. Petrol and diesel became so scarce, the streets were dominated by bicycles, pedicab rickshaws and horse-drawn vehicles. If an occasional car did drive past, you could be sure that the person behind the wheel was a German or a collaborator. Most noticeable of all was the silence in the streets and the cold, unspeaking silence of those who trod the pavements. The old street noises were no more. Now, all that could be heard was the crunch of hurried footsteps on hard-frozen snow, an occasional cough, a perfunctory greeting, or the listless cries of a newspaper seller who had long abandoned hope of selling his German-dictated papers.
Silent queues stood outside shops and policemen on street corners behaved as if they weren’t there. In cafés, people crowded into the warmth of the coffee machines, silently staring at the bottles of colourful liqueurs, most of which were dummies, the faded Martini calendars and the statutory notices proscribing public drunkenness. Many of them had red noses and cheeks flushed with fever, most wore hats, scarves and gloves, and all were clearly refugees from homes in which it was little warmer than outside in the street.
The Le Galls went to bed in long stockings, gloves and woollen sweaters. In the mornings they scraped their frozen breath off the window panes. When Léon came home with a bundle of firewood bought on the black market, as he sometimes did, they spent the evening seated around the open fire in the living room. Lulled by the unaccustomed warmth they would fall asleep, one after the other, on the sofa, in the armchair, or on the Persian rug. Long after midnight, when the fire had gone out and the cold had crept back into the flat through cracks and crannies, Léon and Yvonne would carry the younger children to bed one by one.
It was on one of those nights that they begot Philippe, their little afterthought, who in his turn, almost exactly twenty years later, in September 1960, would meet a young girl from Switzerland who was passing through on her way to Oxford University but prolonged her stay. One mild autumn night she accompanied Philippe back to his attic room in the Rue des Écoles, with the result that nine months later she gave birth to a little boy who was baptized in my own name at the church of Saint-Nicolas du Chardonnet.
They all remained healthy, however, nor did they have to go hungry. Because Léon and Yvonne retained vivid memories of the First World War, they had, from the day war broke out onwards, amassed as much as they could in the way of emergency supplies of food. Prices had risen only moderately by the autumn of 1940, so they filled their cupboards with sacks of rice, flour and oats. They also, behind an inconspicuous curtain in the light shaft over the lavatory, where no looter would have suspected the presence of food, stashed scores of tins of beans, peas, condensed milk and apple purée.
Even eggs, butter, meat and sausage appeared on the table regularly once Michel, their eldest son, began visiting Rouen on the first weekend of every month to see Aunt Sophie, who maintained a cordial relationship with various Normandy dairy farmers. The sixteen-year-old youth much enjoyed setting off for the Gare Saint-Lazare on Saturday morning with his pockets full of money and boarding the Rouen train with all the aplomb of a seasoned traveller. Somewhat less enjoyable was his return journey on Sunday with a bulging suitcase. Forever on the qui vive for gendarmes and German soldiers, he had to lug this three long kilometres from the station to the Rue des Écoles.
The winter of 1940 was hardest of all for Yvonne. Ever since the schoo
l authorities had thought it necessary to confine little Muriel in the coal cellar and turn her into a persistent bedwetter, Yvonne’s keen intelligence had been devoted day and night to keeping her family fit and intact. The entries in her dream diary ceased, and gone were the days of pink sunglasses, filmy summer dresses and light-hearted singing. From now on her thoughts revolved around nothing save how to keep her husband and children safe until the war’s end, to feed and warm and shield them from sorrow and affliction.
She pursued her aim with the guile of a secret agent, the courage of a goddess of war and the ruthlessness of a Panzer grenadier. In the mornings she accompanied her children to school one by one – even big Michel, who vainly jibbed at being escorted by his mother – and in the afternoons she collected them all again. Before she let Léon leave the building in the morning she went to the living-room window and peered in both directions, on the lookout for potential dangers; and when he was a few minutes late back from work she went to meet him and reproached him bitterly. If one of her children developed a cough she procured honey, lime-blossom tea and Sirolin cough syrup with the aid of lies, counterfeit money, and her décolletage. When the water in the kitchen froze, she felled a small acacia outside the Romanian Orthodox church, in broad daylight and under the eyes of several curious onlookers, then hauled the whole tree home and chopped it up into firewood in the inner courtyard.
The day after she heard strange noises on the stairs one night, she bought a black market Mauser 7.65 automatic plus ammunition and informed her disapproving husband that, if anyone set foot in their flat without her consent, she would shoot him without warning. When Léon pointed out that a pistol hanging on the wall in the first act of a play had to be fired in the second act, she shrugged and retorted that real life and the Russian theatre followed different rules. And when he asked why she had opted for a German pistol, she explained that if the German authorities found a German bullet in a German corpse, they would very probably go looking for a German perpetrator.
Whether these hard times welded Yvonne and Léon even closer together because they had to supply renewed proof of their mutual loyalty and dependability every day, or whether they forfeited their last hope of romantic love because they had quite pragmatically to function as comrades-in-arms – in other words, whether they grew closer under these circumstances – is hard to tell, but it’s conceivable that they never asked themselves that question. What mattered was not the label on their partnership, but sheer daily survival. All metaphysics apart, time had simply created certain facts that weighed more heavily than any words.
It was, for instance, a fact that they were both over forty and had, with a fair degree of probability, passed the midpoint of their lives. It was also an arithmetical fact that they had spent half their lives together and would soon have spent more nights sleeping together in the same marriage bed than alone. It was furthermore foreseeable that their children would grow up in a surprisingly short time and go out into the world as living proof that Léon and Yvonne had been passable parents. Before long their remaining days on earth would speed by ever faster, and the sum of their shared memories would soon be so great that it offered greater comfort than any prospect of a life without each other, whatever form that might take.
Of course, something or other might one day cause Yvonne to run out on Léon or him on her. But it wouldn’t be a new beginning or a new life, just a continuation of their previous lives under new circumstances. There was no such a thing as a second life; you only had the one. Although this seemed shattering at first sight, closer inspection revealed it to be comforting in the extreme, for it meant that their lives to date, far from being unimportant, were the essential prerequisite of all that was to come.
Léon was the man in Yvonne’s life and she was the woman in his. She had no further grounds for jealousy. Nothing would change this even if they did lose one another in consequence of some disaster or senile folly. There simply wasn’t enough time left for them to spend as many nights sharing another marriage bed with someone else as they had already spent together.
For Léon, who had long grown used to having two wives, one at his side and one in his head, nothing much changed, but Yvonne’s soul found peace at last. For her too, the question of whether or not they were destined for one another had now been settled, and it no longer mattered whether they were really passionately or only half-heartedly in love, or whether they only pretended or wrongly believed that they loved one another. All that mattered was the actual status quo. It was as simple as that.
Without putting her feelings into high-flown words, Yvonne had to admit that she was still attracted – perhaps even more so than before – by Léon’s stolid masculinity. She liked to hear his light-footed tread when he came up the stairs and his firm footsteps when he crossed the landing, and she liked the unaffected good nature in his voice and the strong but never acrid body odour given off by his overcoat when he hung it on the hook at the end of a day’s work.
She liked it that the children, although they were really too old for it, still climbed on his lap and sat quietly there, and she liked the fact that he didn’t cross his hands on his stomach as men of a certain age tend to do, and that he didn’t yet groan when getting to his feet and still showed no signs of becoming a know-it-all who delivered long-winded lectures.
She liked it that malice and cruelty were foreign to his nature, and she still liked it when he wrapped his long arms around her in his sleep. And even if it happened that he sometimes embraced another woman in his dreams, the weight of the facts was on her side. In truth and actuality, she was the woman in his arms, no one else.
Medina
on the banks of
the Senegal River
24 December 1940
My dearest Léon,
Are you still alive? I am. I’ve just thrown the remains of a preternaturally tough chicken over the terrace wall and into the Senegal River. Now dwarf crocodiles are tussling for them while hippos look on with bored expressions and open their jaws for those funny little birds with sharp beaks to pick strands of chewed-up waterlily from between their teeth.
Soon the sun will set and the muezzin will utter his call to evening prayer. Then comes mosquito hour. I spend it in our fortress in the officers’ mess smoking room, which has thick stone walls and thick mosquito netting over the windows. The mess is the only still semi-habitable building in this dilapidated old colonial town. All the other European buildings are ruins in which young trees are growing and the Africans erect their huts. My companions in the smoking room include the fortress commander, his two sergeants, and my two colleagues from the Banque de France. Another member of the party is Giuliano Galiani, the expectorating radio operator from the ‘Victor Schoelcher’. You remember, he was assigned to us as a liaison officer (although there’s nothing and nobody here to liaise with).
Until dinner we sit in cane chairs and smoke. Meanwhile, outside in the other ranks’ quarters up against the fortress wall, the ninety Senegalese riflemen who guard our precious cargo (of which I’m not allowed to speak) sing melancholy songs of love, death and homesickness. When the bell sounds for dinner we repair to the dining room, where a loudly shrieking fan with rust-eroded blades rotates above the table. One day in the not too far distant future it’s bound to fall from the ceiling and neatly behead us all within the same hundredth of a second.
Until that happens we sit there submissively and sweat, curse the heat, and vie with each other in fantasizing about wagonloads of chilled beer and champagne. When nothing else occurs to us, one of the men will present an account of his day’s doings, its inevitable theme being the Africans’ chronic unreliability and aversion to work.
Our overseers do, in fact, have great difficulty in keeping their native labourers hard at it. As soon as the sjambok is out of sight, any African promptly retires to the shade of the nearest baobab tree. I can sympathize with this, personally, because the work they have to do for us – breaking stones, car
rying water, felling trees – is really no fun in a temperature of fifty degrees. This climate is enough to make the likes of us collapse under our own body weight.
It’s also true that the Malinké, Wolof and Toucouleurs have never been keen competitors for the privilege of working for us, nor, to the best of my knowledge did they invite us here in the first place, bid us welcome, or beg us to stay once we were here. Even so, it surprises us every day that our overseers have to extort the requisite hospitality again and again with the aid of the sjambok.
The everlasting floggings and beatings, the screams and the blood and humiliation are a trial to everyone here – mainly to the victims, of course, but also to the floggers themselves, with whom I sit in the smoking room night after night. For the first few weeks I often wondered how these whip-wielders could bring themselves to have so little compassion and be so brutal and lacking in humanity. Since then I’ve realized that, if no one restrains them, floggers succumb to a sort of mania that impels them to go on flogging more and more brutally because only constantly repeated violence confirms their superiority over their victims and provides a justification for the obvious injustice of brutality.
But there’s something else involved. Because I’m with my whip-wielding colleagues every hour of the day, I’ve got to know them pretty well. I hear them cry out at night when they’re tossing and turning in their own sweat, racked by nightmares. I hear them whimper and cry out for their mothers, I hear them bellow commands and throw grenades, and I hear them running along the trenches of the Chemin des Dames to which they’ve returned night after night for the past quarter of a century, fleeing from German bayonets and poison gas and searching for their lost humanity.
It’s particularly sad that the floggers were not on their own at the Chemin des Dames; many of their black victims were there too, side by side with their present tormentors. Even sadder is the prospect that the victims will one day rise and reach for the sjambok in their turn, and that, if no one intervenes, the flogging will be perpetuated from generation to generation.