Léon and Louise

by Alex Capus

  Generally speaking, I’d say we’re in much the same position here as the Germans occupying Paris. From what I hear, they’re also rather sad that the French don’t wholeheartedly welcome them as guests even though they’ve left their tanks outside the city and are behaving quite well in other respects. It’s a curious fact that floggers, when they lay the whip aside for ten minutes, always expect their victims to love them at once.

  One night in the officers’ mess, between the starter and the main course, I expressed the idea that we in Senegal are suffering the same fate as the Germans we fled from; in other words, that we’re the Germans of West Africa, so to speak. That didn’t go down at all well. Since then I’ve learnt that it’s better to keep your thoughts to yourself – or, better still, not to reveal that you think of anything whatever.

  I shouldn’t really be writing to you at all, everything out here still being extremely hush-hush. I suppose I was rather cheeky in my last letter, when I recounted the whole saga of our cargo in the belief that none of it mattered. Since then the commandant has given me several lectures. He impressed on me that it matters a great deal what some humble office girl gives vent to over her milk and biscuits on a quiet night when she’s feeling bored, and that even a little careless talk in times like these can easily put one up in front of a firing squad. Since then I’ve pulled myself together and kept a bridle on my tongue because la patrie is, after all, la patrie. On the other hand, you and I still exist, and I still feel closer to you the further away from you I am.

  I’d dearly like to know why this has never changed over the years. After all, let’s be honest: you aren’t such a uniquely magnificent individual. Anyway, I’m glad of the little pang the thought of you always gives me. For one thing, pain is comforting because only the living can feel it, and, for another, I know for sure you feel it just as I do.

  Not an hour or a day goes by that I don’t want to tell you this or that, and that I don’t wish you were here and could see what I can see, and that I could hear what you had to say about it all. So if I’m writing you another few lines in defiance of regulations, it’s because it may be a long time before such a favourable opportunity recurs: my colleague Monsieur Delaport, who has contracted yellow fever and been issued with a travel permit for Dakar, will take this letter with him and make sure it reaches the Rue des Écoles unopened.

  It’s six months since I wrote to you from Lorient harbour. Time goes fast, especially when lots of things are happening, and even faster when nothing is... Just as I wrote that, a bird that’s driving me mad started up again. ‘Ruuku-dii’, ‘ruuku-dii’, ‘ruuku-dii’, it goes for hours and days and nights on end. Just ‘ruuku-dii’, ‘ruuku-dii’, ‘ruuku-dii’, with a persistence that really ought to exceed its strength, always just ‘ruuku-dii’, ‘ruuku-dii’, ‘ruuku-dii’ until I go to sleep late at night with my nerves shredded and my fingers in my ears. That’s why I can’t be sure whether or not the creature takes an hour’s rest occasionally. Don’t get me wrong, I’m sure it’s a perfectly harmless bird and just as naturally entitled to its niche in Creation as the rest of us. Its cry probably isn’t especially loud or piercing, objectively speaking, but it drives me to such a pitch of fury that I’ve more than once rushed outside with my pistol (yes, I’ve got one here) and would have shot it dead if only I’d been able to spot it in the branches of the acacia where I suspect it roosts.

  The bird has done me no harm. It’s probably vegetarian and goes ‘ruuku-dii’, ‘ruuku-dii’ for laudable reasons. It may be defending its territory, hoping to pass on its genes, or simply having fun. In search of explanations for its incredible stamina, I hit on the possibility that it might be down to the avian respiratory system, which differs in some way from that of us mammals. At college I had to make pretty drawings of it in red and blue crayon, but I can’t recall the details. Air flows through birds’ lungs in one direction only, right? Fine, but how the hell does it find its way out again? Needless to say, there’s no one here with even a smidgen of ornithological knowledge and no Larousse I could consult. Both exist in Dakar, no doubt, but that’s a thousand kilometres west of here and inaccessible without a travel permit, and I’m unlikely to get one of those before the war ends.

  If I were at home in Paris and the bird was perched on my window sill, I’d probably pay it little attention. But here in the sameness of these red, ferruginous hills with their unvarying acacias and baobabs, where I’m irked by the uneventfulness of my hours and days of idleness and the silence of the nights when nothing can be heard but the distant cackle of hyenas, the footfall of shadowy human figures shuffling past nearby, the nightmare whimpers of my companions, and the ‘ruuku-dii’, ‘ruuku-dii’, ‘ruuku-dii’ of this same bird, I sometimes become so bored that I long for some catastrophe – a tornado, an earthquake, a German invasion – to sweep it all away.

  Incidentally, I can’t give you any descriptions of the scenery. There are hills and plains and the river and all manner of flora and fauna here, for sure, and at night the sky is pitch-black and sprinkled with stars. I could no doubt produce some quite edifying thoughts on the subject if I were an English lady passing through in a train. However, circumstances have decreed that I’m not an English lady and not passing through; I’ve got out here and stayed, which is why I relieve myself behind bushes and take my weekly bath in the river, watching out for crocodiles and hippos... What I mean to say is this: When you’re in the middle of a landscape it ceases to be a suitable subject for aesthetic contemplation and becomes a damned serious matter.

  There are moonstruck NCOs here who try to drag me into the bushes. I have to avoid direct sunlight and get into the dry before the next cloudburst. I’m annoyed with my typewriter because the A, V, P and Z have been sticking for some time. I ought to clean my teeth using sterilized water, and it would be to my advantage if I could exchange a friendly greeting with the Malenké king’s wives in the vegetable market, all five of whom are insufferably haughty... In short, if I want to survive here I have to keep my wits about me however bored I am, so I can’t afford to poeticize about trees, mountains and baobabs.

  By contrast, Galiani, our radio operator with nothing to radio, seems to be enjoying himself hugely. He sports an old French pith helmet which he wears cocked at an angle when he goes shooting early in the morning, so it doesn’t hamper his aim. At lunchtime this overgrown Napoleon with the sunny disposition – he’s more likely to die of high blood pressure than cancer of the liver – returns from the bush with an antelope over his shoulder, and in the afternoon he struts around the market and winks at the Fula girls with their long legs and firm little breasts, who smile, blushing faintly, as if they’ve already made his acquaintance elsewhere and at quite other times of the day. In the evenings he sits cross-legged beside the villagers’ fires and converses volubly in a wide variety of native languages, having acquired a smattering of each, and sometimes the darkness swallows him up and he doesn’t reappear until next day or the day after that. I ought to take a leaf out of his book.

  I’m sure you worry about me. You mustn’t, I manage all right. My greatest worry is my digestion. After that come boredom and the fact that I’m the only white woman within a radius of fifteen kilometres. Where the white men in the vicinity are concerned, that earns me a popularity I could happily do without.

  And you? Are you still alive, my little Léon? Are you going hungry while I’m complaining about my stringy chicken? Are your children condemned to shiver while the sweat runs down my forehead and into my eyes? Are you living in daily fear and trembling while I suffer from boredom? Are shots being fired in the streets of Paris and bombs falling from the sky?

  I’d so much like to know all these things, but I know you can’t reply. You needn’t even try to – it’s months since we received any mail and the telephone and telegraph have been out of action for ages. I worry about you terribly – all the more terribly because I have no news of you and there’s nothing I could do for you if you needed my
help.

  We’re separated by 4500 kilometres, an ocean, and the biggest desert in the world, by Nazis and fascists and the Allies and – as if that were not enough – by Marshal Philippe Pétain and General Charles de Gaulle and Francisco Franco and Adolf Hitler. And nearly all of them have it in for us – for me, at least, or so I tell myself.

  ‘Ruuku-dii’, ‘ruuku-dii’, ‘ruuku-dii’, goes the bird while the red hills glow in the setting sun. I never hear any other bird from my room, always just this one going ‘ruuku-dii’, ‘ruuku-dii’, ‘ruuku-dii’, and I wonder whether it really is just one lone individual, or if several members of the same species have joined forces and are taking it in turns to drive me crazy.

  In favour of the first alternative is the fact that ‘ruuku-dii’ always rings out singly, never in a chorus. What argues against it is sheer probability: why should there be only one example of the species for kilometres around? Because it’s the last of a dying breed? Because it has lost its way and really belongs somewhere quite else, Finland or the Balkans, perhaps? Was its courtship display so exuberant that it drove all others of its kind away, male and female alike, and is it now, with a perseverance born of loneliness and despair, trying to call them back? Is the bird perched in the acacia not an exotic creature at all, but a perfectly ordinary wood pigeon that calls ‘ruuku-dii’ instead of ‘groogroo’ only because it was born with a misshapen larynx? Does the pigeon persist so desperately because other pigeons can’t understand its distorted mating call?

  One goes soft in the head out here. We’re cut off from home and from those we love, we get no mail or newspapers, we haven’t been paid for ages and have no idea when or if we’ll ever be relieved. It isn’t the heat or the omnipresent dust during the dry season and the mud during the rest of the year that gets me down, it isn’t the hyenas and snakes or the strangeness of the natives, to whom we’ll never be close however used to them we get because the sjambok keeps us apart and is bound to do so until that inevitable day when the black man sends the white man home; nor is it the sameness of the surrounding plain with its everlasting acacias and baobabs, which extends for hundreds of kilometres and is only rarely enlivened by little hills scarcely worthy of the name. No, what gets me down is the absence of concrete and electric light, of bookshops and bakeries and newspaper sellers, of park benches and rainy Sunday afternoons at the cinema. I miss chocolate éclairs and casual conversations in the office and quick steak-and-chips lunches and good dinners at Chez Graff near the Moulin Rouge. I miss the screech of the trams and the rumble of the Métro, and how much I’d like, on a mild evening in late summer, to go for a long walk in the Tuileries on the arm of my youthful admirer from the Musée de l’Homme, who isn’t so young any more but still, I hope, regards me as a lady.

  Because I miss all these things, I study the phenomena on offer here. For instance, it surprises me anew every day that mashed potato takes far longer to cool down, here in the African heat than in Europe, to a temperature your mouth can stand. On the other hand, you need never hurry over breakfast because your coffee stays hot for hours. I also find it amusing that Africans are almost invisible in the dark, whereas whites like us can be seen from far away in the faintest starlight.

  Then there’s the highly individualistic ana tree (Acacia albida), which sheds its feathery leaves in the middle of the rainy season, when everything around it is green and luxuriant, and stands there with its pale trunk looking dead. During the dry season, by contrast, when everything around it withers and shrivels up, it comes back to life. It blossoms and puts out the lushest of tender green leaves, triumphantly demonstrating to everyone in sight that life goes on even under the most adverse circumstances, after long periods of drought and seemingly endless spells of death and destruction. I hope that isn’t too much for you in the way of metaphor and allegory. It is for me.

  Before I embark on a description of the long, sluggishly flowing Senegal River, or of the gardens that thrive on its banks, in which orchids bloom and birds of paradise breed, passing on the spark of life, I’ll give it a miss and bring this letter to an end. Just one more poetic aperçu for you: When the Africans develop a fever – I’ve been assured of this more than once – they treat it by stuffing a pepper pod up their anus. I kiss you tenderly, my dearest Léon, and firmly believe that we’ll meet again some day.

  Yours, Louise

  PS. On my bosses’ instructions, I had the enclosed photo-booth picture taken a few minutes before our train left the Gare Montparnasse. We each had to take twenty passport photos with us for visas and passport extensions and so on. Please note the strands of white on my left temple – I think they look very stylish. I’d very much like a photo of you. Please send me one addressed to Medina, French West Africa, perhaps it’ll miraculously get here in spite of everything. Oh yes, and – if you can – enclose a few packets of Turmac cigarettes.

  16

  One day in the spring of 1941, Madame Rossetos suddenly reappeared. Léon noticed a preliminary indication of this on coming home from work, when he was still outside on the pavement and spotted it from a long way off: the brass handle on the front door, which had become dull and tarnished in the past year, was as lustrously golden as it had been in peacetime. Not only did the marble floor of the entrance hall sparkle with cleanliness, but hanging once more over the glass door of the concierge’s lodge, which had been a dark, blank rectangle for a year, was a floral curtain with light showing through it, and – unless it was his imagination – Léon could again smell braised onions.

  He paused and listened, then decided to walk on and took a few steps towards the stairs. When his shadow fell on the glass door, however, the clatter of saucepans ceased, to be replaced by the sort of an unnatural silence of which a person is capable only when asleep or dead or listening intently. Léon couldn’t help smiling at the thought that two grown-up people were listening to each other with bated breath, and that one could see the shadow of the other on the pane. To put an end to this ludicrous situation, he went up to the door and knocked. Silence. He knocked again and called Madame Rossetos’ name. When still no sound issued from the interior, he felt sure it really must be her who had slunk back into her lair. What had happened to her in the meantime? How much unhappiness and dismay, how much horror and hardship must she have experienced before she brought herself to humbly return to the Rue des Écoles and throw herself on the mercy of the tenants she had scathingly abandoned barely a year earlier?

  Léon debated whether to bid her welcome through the unopened door. Then, realizing that she would only think he was being sarcastic, he made for the stairs with deliberately heavy tread. He would respect Madame Rossetos’ invisibility for as long as she needed, and on the day she crept out of her lair he would say a casual hello, acting as if nothing had happened and she’d never been away.

  On 8 June 1941, little Philippe was born. When Yvonne’s labour pains began at 3 a.m. Léon summoned a pedicab, accompanied her to the Maternité in the Boulevard du Port-Royal, and took the same taxi home, there to watch over the sleeping children and get them off to school on time. He spent the rest of the night in his armchair beside the living-room window. Having at first tried to read, he turned out the light and divided his time between looking up at the star-spangled sky and down into the deserted street.

  Once he heard a faint whimper from the nursery, probably from little Muriel, who was prone to nightmares since her incarceration in the coal cellar. By the time Léon opened the door she was already snoring her high-pitched, rapid, childish snores. He waited until his eyes had grown used to the darkness, then surveyed his children’s sleeping forms beneath their light summer duvets.

  Eight-year-old Robert and eleven-year-old Yves were lying as far apart as possible in the bed they shared beside the window, arms and legs dangling down on either side. Little Muriel lay sprawled on her back in the middle of her little bed with her limbs flung out in that vulnerable but regal pose characteristic of drunks and infants. Sixteen-ye
ar-old Michel no longer slept in the nursery. On one of the first warm spring days, he had moved into the unoccupied attic room upstairs and underlined his independence by spending some of his pocket money on a second-hand alarm clock at the flea market. The first night her first-born spent on his own had been a wrench for Yvonne, who wept, but Léon welcomed the fact that Michel had bought the clock at the flea market instead of investing in a new one.

  Like Léon himself, the children had developed the habit of bringing home bits of old junk salvaged from rubbish dumps and backyards – rusty horseshoes, jute sacks with exotic inscriptions, and curious pieces of wood or metal that might once have been the components of something. Léon admired these treasures and joined the children in speculating about their original purpose, previous history and former owners. Meanwhile Yvonne, who was less susceptible to the charm of useless objects, stood ready with disinfectant and awaited her opportunity to rid these gems, if they had to remain in the flat at all, of microbes and other sources of infection.

  It pleased Léon that his children were genuine Le Galls. True, they had each been endowed from birth with characteristics unmistakably their own. Robert was fair-haired, Yves auburn, and Muriel on the dark side; the first had inherited his father’s inoffensive stolidity, the second his mother’s acumen and tendency to hysteria, and the third possessed a talent for diplomacy hitherto unknown in the family. But the backs of all their heads were flat, they were amiably rebellious, and even the youngest ones displayed a propensity for cheerful melancholy.

  While surveying his sleeping children, Léon silently recapitulated his highly personal argument in favour of the immortality of the human soul, which he had cobbled together with the aid of basic theoretical physics and probability calculus. The foundation of his theory was the obvious fact that human beings aren’t soulless automata – his children certainly weren’t, he would have staked his life on that – but are quite clearly endowed with a soul from the moment of their birth.