by Michel D
‘As soon as I can.’
‘You mustn’t give it up, you have a talent. How many press-ups are you on now?’
‘A hundred. Mireille wore me out in the last few days at Roquebrune.’
‘You didn’t pick it up again on the way back?’
‘I’d like to have seen Palfy’s expression, watching me do press-ups every morning.’
‘I didn’t like the man. I expect you noticed. His money doesn’t impress me. He’d do better to spend some time improving his mind. Oh well, you can’t always choose your travelling companions. Drop in at the bookshop during the week, I’ll think about your problem, but these days life is hard, the crisis is hitting everybody.’
That evening, at the rectory, Jean opened his notebook and wrote:
e) It is wise not to mix one’s friends. I should never have put Ernst and Salah or Palfy and Joseph in each other’s presence. Ernst despised Salah a priori because he’s black and Salah despised Ernst’s racism. Even though when you think about it it’s hard to understand why: both are such generous and disinterested natures, they’re made to get on with each other. The same difficulty when Joseph involuntarily made me think how dishonest Palfy is, dishonest in a way that I’d found entertaining up till then. Yes, I was a bit uncomfortable with it for a while, and felt guilty at benefiting from his swindles. So my moral sense was suddenly alerted because of Joseph. On the other hand, Palfy helped me, almost without a word, without comment, to see that despite his posturing Joseph is never going to rise very high. He’s jinxed. Everything he touches turns to dust: today his bookshop, tomorrow his film club, even the Dieppe Rowing Club, where he’s the most energetic and least talented member. Whereas everything works for Palfy: he steals cars without a second thought, finds a cheque book when he needs one. Everything amuses him because everything succeeds, and because success is his only criterion he believes himself justified in acting the way he does. The whole situation is a bit of a catastrophe: my friends don’t get on, and their mutual discord shows both of them in an unpleasant light. It would have been the same if I’d switched them, Ernst face to face with Joseph, Palfy face to face with Salah. It’s a good lesson to remember. Don’t mix your friends. Put each of them in a drawer, and don’t open one drawer without being certain that the others are tightly shut.
At six in the morning the abbé woke Jean.
‘I have no one to serve mass. Will you come, as you used to when you were a pious little boy?’
‘Yes, Monsieur l’abbé.’
In a church numb with cold, lit by two mean yellow bulbs and a few candles, a moving, simple mass took place that was attended by three old women and a young man on his knees at a prie-dieu, his face hidden in his hands. After the ‘Ite, missa est’ the three women stayed behind, telling their rosary, and the young man crept towards the door as though he wanted to hide, but Jean was certain that the devout early-riser deep in prayer had been Michel du Courseau. Jean did not take communion, and when he was in the sacristy afterwards, helping the priest to take off his chasuble and alb, Monsieur Le Couec said to him sadly, ‘That mass was intended for you, my dear Jean. You must have had your reasons for not taking communion, which I respect and shall not enquire further about. Let’s go and have a bowl of coffee.’
The penury of the rectory was such that the abbé heated up his coffee over a spirit lamp, and for breakfast buttered two thick slices of a brown loaf he was given by one of the farmers every week.
‘And now what will you do, my boy? We hoped you would go on with your studies. It’s possible, there are scholarships—’
‘I want to earn a living straight away. But what can I do here?’
‘That is a very good question. Antoine du Courseau has gone, but we could speak to Madame du Courseau.’
‘She doesn’t like me.’
‘You’re wrong. Obviously there was that regrettable story—’
‘I didn’t do it.’
‘Time has passed. She’s a charitable woman.’
‘When she’s sure everyone around her will get to hear about it.’
The priest smiled and nodded his head.
‘At your age it’s a little sad to possess so few illusions. You’re undoubtedly right. So let us make her think that everyone in Grangeville who matters will hear about her tireless generosity towards her gardener’s son.’
They began to list a number of others who might be willing to help Jean.
‘The Malemorts?’ the abbé wondered. ‘Hmm … alas, I fear that their own situation is not very splendid. The marquis has dismissed two farm workers, and I’m not sure I can see you working on a farm. There’s the Longuets …’
Jean snorted, and the abbé reddened. He still had a soft spot for Madame Longuet and felt sincerely sorry for her having a crook for a husband and a future thug for a son. He felt that she was a victim. She had, apparently, pleaded the Arnauds’ cause in vain to her intractable husband.
In the end it was Joseph Outen who found a job for Jean, at La Vigie. The newspaper also printed announcements, handbills, menus and cards. A dozen women made up the orders, and Jean stored them and delivered them in a van. It did not demand great genius, just physical strength and a character sufficiently cheerful to be able to withstand the crudity of the supervisor, a man named Grosjean who had fulfilled Jean’s own role for nearly twenty years and whose promotion at his career’s end, elevating him to the rank of supervisor, had dangerously intoxicated him. Jean left Grangeville on foot at six in the morning, started work at eight, and finished at six. In his lunch break he had a sandwich and went to Dieppe Rowing Club, where he rowed and trained with weights for an hour before going to see his mother in hospital.
Jeanne was not on the road to recovery. In truth she had quickly become used to the relative comfort of the ward on which she lived alongside several women older than she. Driven out of the place she had long considered her home, she found a ready-made community there, and unexpected company. Her neighbours’ chatter delighted her and she realised that until that point in her life she had only ever talked to her family circle. The women’s gossip, their fears and dreams, their nasty comments, opened up an unknown world to her. And for the first time in her life there were people serving her and she enjoyed it. The sound of the trolley that brought her meals – the only interludes of those long days that began with the taking of her temperature and ended with her nightly infusion – filled her with pleasure. It made her quite forget the visitors sitting at her bedside, who suddenly discovered that their charitable gesture no longer interested the patient, who was overcome with joy instead at a very average hospital lunch. She rambled incoherently, especially with Jean and Albert, managed to mix up Madame du Courseau, Antoinette and the marquise de Malemort, and then the abbé Le Couec and Monsieur Cliquet, all of whom left each time with the impression that the doctors were keeping Jeanne captive, and that her stay in bed was making her weaker and weaker. Jean contemplated her with a sinking heart, remembering how often this half-disoriented woman, too unsteady on her feet to walk without help, had been good to him, how she had opened her heart to a baby abandoned in a Moses basket on her doorstep. He would have liked to question her – perhaps she knew the truth – but was afraid to upset her any more than she already seemed to be. Each time he saw her she asked him to tell her again the story of his papal blessing in Rome, and each time he patiently started again and watched her face take on a look of delight and serenity, her hands clasped together on the coarse brown bedspread.
Jean worked hard to erase his memories of recent weeks and was relieved to find that Mireille was easily forgotten, although her image nagged at him on certain nights so violently that it produced a real, physical pain. He did his utmost, walking, rowing and lifting weights, discovering that his youth required an almost demented expenditure of physical energy to resist the temptations of memory and imagination. He still had not seen Chantal de Malemort, and in a way he dreaded their eventual inevitable meeting, as if she would instantly b
e able to see on his face that he was no longer the same, that some inner torment had devoured him and left him changed, even after it subsided. Antoinette on the other hand used every ruse she knew to meet him, and he could not avoid her. On the pretext of visiting the house her mother was building at Grangeville, she walked over from Malemort every afternoon and waited for Jean at the top of the hill. He would see her at the last bend and slow his pace. As night fell they walked on side by side, Antoinette talking volubly, Jean saying little, answering with a yes or no. He could not understand why she now came looking for him after having behaved so casually towards him before, but Antoinette, who was more perceptive, had guessed without him saying so that something had happened, something that had spoilt the memory of her joyous reward for his bac. Now she wished she could forget him, for the bitterness of other flings whose short-lived pleasure had never come near the state of sweet tenderness she had felt with him had torn away the veil: it was Jean and no one else that she loved, fled from, and tempted back, and the certainty of being able to lure him back every time had concealed the one fact that makes love insistent and nearly unbearable: its fragility. Jean’s absence, which was now no longer a physical absence but the absence of a response, profoundly distressed Antoinette without her being able to name the feeling that drove her to look for him every time she could slip away without attracting her mother’s attention.
One evening she succeeded in persuading him to come with her to visit the new house. It smelled of fresh plaster, varnish and paint. The electricity had not yet been connected, so she lit a candle which they took with them as they pushed open squeaking doors and wandered through deserted rooms. The new floor creaked sharply under their feet. Antoinette led Jean by the hand through the labyrinth of bedrooms and bathrooms to a room that faced north for Michel to paint in and set up his printing press. Jean said nothing, and his silence put Antoinette into a state of panic. She could not understand, she did not understand anything any more, and looked desperately for the slightest sign that might bring back the closeness they had had before. Why didn’t he speak, why didn’t he hold her hand more tightly? In one of the rooms a bed had been set up for a cabinetmaker from Caen who had worked there for several days. Antoinette pulled Jean down onto the bare mattress. Despite the discomfort and the chill of the unheated house, she felt a pleasure so intense that afterwards she burst into tears. The candle’s harsh glow lit her wet face with grimacing shadows and Jean was touched to see her suddenly ugly, stripped of her attractiveness.
‘Why are you crying?’
‘I can’t tell you.’
He sat up, irritated. The guilt that had once weighed on him in his games with Antoinette had disappeared, and he felt only repulsion and sadness and even a sort of resentment towards her.
‘Well, don’t cry in front of me then. Let’s get out of here. I hate this house.’
‘Why?’
‘It reminds me that my parents don’t even have a roof over their head for their last years on this earth.’
‘It’s not my fault.’
‘No, it’s nobody’s fault. Nothing is anyone’s fault. I’m beginning to believe the whole world is under the spell of some sort of total irresponsibility. It’s really comfortable, and I wonder why there are still a few idiots who worry about other people. Let’s get out of here, I said, I hate this place.’
In a childish gesture, she dried her eyes with her cuff. She couldn’t understand Jean’s bitterness. What was he talking about? About a roof over someone’s head, about ageing parents without a penny to their name, while inside her was a sorrow she didn’t dare utter, and her distress felt to her like the greatest and the only distress in the world. Outside the rectory, Jean said goodnight to her. She picked up her bicycle, pedalled a few metres, turned round and came back.
‘Don’t you know what’s happened to me?’
‘No.’
‘I’m pregnant.’
He did not move and watched her pedal away down the road, lit by the flickering yellow glow of her light. No. No, Jean repeated to himself. No. I’m not getting caught like that. He would not fall into her trap, and if she ever had the nerve to repeat those words to him he would just say, ‘By whom? Anyone I know?’
Albert was waiting for him, chatting with the abbé, the bottle of calvados between them. He no longer foresaw any kind of future. His world was dying; he could not see what would follow this chaos. Jeanne’s condition did not preoccupy him greatly. He had got used to it and refused to sink into a sentimentality that, as he claimed, was the undoing of men as well as governments. It was the spoilt peace, once more in jeopardy, that obsessed him. He could no longer bear Monsieur Cliquet’s prognostications about the state of the railways or Captain Duclou’s optimism about the navy. The abbé was the only man who understood him, and these two men who, ever since their return from the front, had not ceased to hurl brickbats at one another and cross verbal swords at every opportunity, had, in the current disastrous situation, rediscovered a comradeship that had something of the trenches about it. Albert had also watched with relief as his son got a job. He was now a worker, as he, Albert, had been, not a student, with all the distance that that would have created between them. Jean would forge his future on his own, if he had one, so long as they did not sacrifice him blindly to the Moloch of war.
‘Well, my boy? You’re late,’ he said, seeing Jean come in.
‘I met Antoinette, and she took me to see Madame du Courseau’s house.’
‘Was that her leaving on her bicycle?’ the abbé asked.
‘Yes.’
‘Why doesn’t she come to see me any more lately?’
‘I don’t know,’ Jean said evasively.
Unless there was an explanation, and she really was pregnant. The abbé saw the shadow pass over Jean’s features. It saddened him. The boy knew and would not say anything. All these children he had baptised, whose confessions he had heard, to whom he had given communion and nurtured in the principles of a solid religion, free from the sort of fine distinctions that risked misleading them, all of them were slipping away from him one by one. The only one who remained attached to him, Michel du Courseau, was also the only one he didn’t truly care for. Which left Jean, but Jean dissembled.
‘How’s your work?’ Albert said.
‘You call it work, Papa? I don’t. I carry parcels all over the place, and there’s always a donkey braying at my heels, that Grosjean …’
‘What a blockhead! Fifteen years a lance-corporal. A record. To get him to leave the army they had to promise to promote him to corporal.’
‘One day I’m going to punch him in the face.’
‘Stay calm, Jean!’ the abbé said.
‘If he goes on behaving like a swine, I will, I promise.’
Albert filled his pipe to avoid replying. For some time he had been asking himself whether his son wasn’t right. Why had he himself not rebelled earlier? His life would have been different if he had.
‘You protest too much,’ the abbé said, to change the subject. ‘And you don’t eat enough. How goes the rowing?’
‘At lunchtime I’m all in. Knocked out … At this rate I’ll be good for nothing by next spring.’
‘A society that has nothing but unskilled manual work to offer a boy like you is indefensible,’ Albert concluded. ‘Sweeping—’
With an expansive hand gesture he made as if to sweep around him, knocking the calvados bottle over, which the abbé, whose reflexes were always prompt, caught just in time.
‘If they force another war on us,’ Albert added in a loud voice, ‘I hope we lose it.’
‘You may not say such things!’ the priest thundered, banging his fist on the table.
‘I say them!’ Albert declared placidly.
‘Well, say them then … You don’t believe a word of them.’
‘I believe every word.’
The abbé raised his arms to heaven, opened his mouth to utter some imprecation that stayed in his
throat and, suddenly calm, said, ‘Mother Boudra brought me a dish of salt pork this afternoon. Jean, why don’t you warm it up for us?’
Jean lifted the cast-iron pot onto the spirit stove. The aroma of the salt pork filled the room and the abbé fetched two bottles of the new season’s sparkling cider from the cellar. They ate in silence, conscious that the slightest political allusion was likely to spoil the taste of the shoulder of pork and the lentils that went with it. In truth, sparkling cider was not the perfect complement to salt pork. They would all have preferred a solid red wine, and for an instant the abbé regretted being so poor, living from gifts and invitations. It was, none-the-less, a pleasant moment that justified the silent reflections of each of them on life and what was worth living for in this very lowly world.
After dinner Jean accompanied his father back to Monsieur Cliquet’s. Albert had been walking with difficulty for some time. His orthopaedic leg hurt his groin, and to save money he refused to see a doctor, having decided that since he was no longer useful to anyone, he was not worth anyone’s consideration.
‘You’re a good boy, and determined,’ he said after a silence, as they were about to part at the gate of the cottage.
‘I don’t know if I can stand it much longer.’
‘I wouldn’t hold it against you. But what next?’
‘Yes … exactly, what next.’
‘I was careless, I didn’t think I needed to make provision for a twist of fate like this, and now the Assistance Publique are paying your mother’s hospital bills. We’ve become beggars.’
‘It’s not your fault, Papa.’
‘Your mother and I’ll come through it; I don’t want you to worry about us. You keep pushing ahead. Make a life for yourself. Don’t respect your elders too much, apart from our dear abbé. I was wrong to talk like that in front of him; I hurt him.’
‘Not badly. He knows what you’re like.’