“How could I have guessed the truth? You kept everything from me: even your real name! Concealed everything down to the smallest detail!”
“But he must have spoken to you about me, I’m certain he did!” she exclaimed.
Her lover’s eyes gazed at her as though he’d never seen her before. A stupefied murmur dropped from his lips: “Which eyes did he use to look at you? He must have described you a dozen times to me and I never had the slightest suspicion.”
Overwhelmed, Jean thought about the monstrous mistake his friend had made, who still hadn’t understood the fact that a woman could wear a hundred faces, and that all of them could be real, simply because they weren’t conjured by that woman herself, but rather by the man who cherished her.
Taking advantage of his silence, she threw herself at him, wrapping her bare arms around him. “Kiss me, Jean,” she pleaded.
Every single one of Jean’s nerves rebelled. Denise had assumed that after the initial shock had worn away, he would take her back and things would carry on as usual. He harshly rejected her embrace and, employing a stern tone, he said: “Tell me, don’t you know how much he loves you?”
Humiliation cast a shadow over her features, but she wanted his present refusal to have a flattering reason behind it. “Are you jealous?” she asked.
An insulting smile contorted Jean’s face.
It was clear that Denise didn’t want to grasp what a terrible disgrace this was, how it was on a par with suddenly revealing an act of incest, that Jean’s feelings of pity and respect for Maury, along with their comradely fellowship, had been permanently corrupted and tarnished! And she’d dared to choose the very instant he’d learned the truth to try to tempt his body, whose stirring shape, which emerged from the half-open fabric, he’d turned away from with a strange sort of hatred.
Jean felt as though Maury’s pitiful ghost was present in the room, observing their conversation, and every fibre of Jean’s being trembled with furious indignation: his youthful sense of pride which still hadn’t been corrupted by compromises, his instinct for camaraderie, which had been fuelled by life in the squadron, and the pride which he felt at being in the confidences of a man whose spiritual refinement was superior to his own, as well as his fiery nature, which refused to reach an accommodation with fate.
“Of course I’m jealous,” he shouted. “But I would gladly take that a hundred, a thousand times over, you hear me! How am I supposed to go back there now?”
“Ah, so he’s the one you’re thinking about! I don’t mean anything to you any more! So, you mean to tell me you didn’t know I had a husband?”
Jean, in all sincerity, replied: “I didn’t think he would be at the front.”
“Why?”
“Because of his age.”
“Why would you assume that?”
He was at a loss for a comeback. Triumphant, she continued: “So, having made an assumption which you didn’t bother to verify, and which wouldn’t have furthermore excused anything you’ve done, you’ve now completely absolved yourself, and you’re going to blame me because fate put you in Claude’s path?”
A sudden rush of anger made her neglect to pursue her advantage. “Why did he join the air force?” she shouted.
“Shut up!” Jean exclaimed. “It was to please you!”
“What an inspired choice!”
Jean couldn’t understand that only a wild, boundless kind of love, which he was the recipient of, could possibly explain why Denise would rebel against a decision that would take him far away from her. Instead, he perceived it as cruelty, and it exasperated him.
“I really don’t know who you are any more,” he coolly told her.
“Of course, because you thought I was like you and that I was just playing at love, simply because I laughed to make you laugh, because I didn’t want anything to darken your mood.”
“Don’t you get it? Your husband loves me like a brother!”
“You wouldn’t think about that if you really loved me,” she said in a hushed whisper as she collapsed onto the settee, exhausted.
Her anger had vanished. Tears brimmed in her eyes. Herbillon had never seen her cry before. He felt suddenly helpless, empty. Hadn’t he been pointlessly brutal? What was she guilty of? He didn’t know anything any more, save that his neck hurt and that he couldn’t let that woman keep crying.
He planted a sweet kiss on her hair, then sat down beside her, helpless. They lingered there in silence for a long time. Denise awkwardly adjusted the bathrobe she was wearing, which had slipped slightly loose, revealing her neck. That shy, modest gesture, which was so alien to the mistress Jean had come to know, filled him with pity: for her, for Claude, and for himself.
Perceiving a poignant sorrow in his eyes, she said the following with an astonished pensiveness: “Do you really love him so much?”
He painfully hung his head, realizing she’d also submitted to Claude’s invisible presence.
What could he possibly say to that? Of course, the feelings he had for Maury now bore no resemblance to the proud feeling of friendship he’d nursed for him before crossing that sitting room’s threshold. It was now polluted by an aversion that had bent it out of shape, making it look grotesque. It was all so burdensome and intolerable that he stood up. Denise didn’t try to hold him back.
“Are you leaving, Jean?” she asked him. And, after a long pause, she added: “Forever?”
He directed his lifeless eyes at her and replied: “I don’t know.”
He found himself back out in the street. The passers-by had translucent faces, and the cars wheeled along noiselessly. He couldn’t hear anything except for the buzzing in his ears. He randomly walked into the thick throng of shadows to which he now also belonged.
However, a vague recollection made him quicken his pace. He had to dine early; he had to meet someone later that evening. But who? A powerful thought crossed his mind: Denise was waiting for him.
At that exact moment, all the street’s noises, having been muted by some inexplicable spell, came pouring into his head. At the same time, all the men and women he crossed paths with on the streets had also reacquired their texture, while their skin once again bore the colour of live flesh. Being back among the living gave him such relief that the idea of seeing his mistress again soon actually seemed quite agreeable to him. He still imagined her as he’d seen her the previous day, when he’d been pleased by her carefree, graceful movements, and saw her smile, stretching out in ardent languor, admiring the blitheness of her grey eyes.
Jean’s image of Denise suddenly seemed incredibly ancient, and the memory of the sitting room he’d just left rushed back. Instead of the face that it should have evoked, an anxious troubled face took its place, and the latter only bore a formal relationship to the former. He wanted to annihilate this new face. All to no avail, of course. The new vision supplanted the older one, and superimposed itself on it not like a mask, but like a living thing, albeit at first immobile. He realized he would never again find that face, which he had so long thought of as indelible and wholly his. Jean mused over how it had taken just a single morning to destroy a face even though it hadn’t actually changed in the slightest.
On seeing him look so haggard and defeated, Jean’s parents assumed that his sadness was caused by the thought of his imminent departure. In order to banish it, his parents feigned a cheerfulness which didn’t actually brighten their eyes, while Jean, for his part, employed the same stratagem.
Nevertheless, the thought of how empty that afternoon ahead of him would be simply terrified him. He felt it would be impossible to sit down with a book. The enthralling hour when he could head to the bars was still some time away. His eyes met his younger brother’s, which followed all his gestures with undying admiration.
“What are you doing after lunch, Georges?”
“I’m going to school, you know that!” he replied.
“No, you’ll stay right here with me. We haven’t had the chance to t
alk yet and I’m leaving tomorrow.”
Jean knew his unexpected request couldn’t be refused so long as he made it, and in order to replace that presence which had filled his days until that point, he needed the tenderness of a child who was entirely devoted to him, since it was almost as though Georges were in love with him.
Despite his father’s protests, he took Georges to a café, ordered him liqueurs and treated him like a peer. He spoke to him of Thélis as though the captain were a legend, knowing that the boy would understand him better than anyone else. He asked Georges about his teachers and schoolmates. Hearing about his younger brother’s life made him feel like himself again to the extent that he didn’t need to fake his interest and the brothers laughed at the same jokes and were incensed by the same outrages.
By the time he took Georges back home, Jean’s suffering had decreased. That childish exchange had lightened the heavy burden of his human pain.
Jean managed not to think about Denise a single time throughout the entire evening. He dined with old classmates of his from Fontainebleau who were also in town on leave. Coming from their camouflaged artillery batteries and their dugouts, they’d listened with admiration to Jean’s stories about his life of freedom in the squadron, which was filled with comforts and risks. The thousands of creature comforts that Jean had looked on as insignificant over there, now acquired a great deal of importance when compared to the life led by his old classmates, and made him seem quite privileged. However, the daily, lethal risks he exposed himself to, which were the price he paid for those comforts, filled with him a secret disdain for those earthbound boys, or those “bookkeepers of bullets” as he called them in his head, the kind of soldiers whom pilots haughtily called crawlers.
Despite the police curfew, the dinner only drew to a close at six, with everyone drunk, as was to be expected.
However, the first image that flashed across Jean’s still smoky mind was that of Denise. The argument which he’d successfully banished the previous day now came flooding back into his mind. He’d come to a decision as to how he would behave towards both Denise and Claude. He had plenty of time to decide what he would do with Claude, but, as for Denise, he felt forced to act without further delay.
They hadn’t fully explained themselves to one another. Their last conversation had been marked by incoherent words and instinctive reactions. Could he truly break off a relationship while he was still under the effects of its poisonous charms? Why should he refuse to see her again and not tenderly confess his love, however impossible that love really was?
Yet, in a sudden about-face, the reasons that had seemed irrefutable just a moment earlier, now seemed powerless and, predicting Denise’s responses, he felt completely disarmed, before he’d even begun. He could now consider this new situation from his mistress’s perspective, rather than in terms of his relationship with Maury.
Truth be told, nothing had changed from Denise’s point of view. What had been a heartbreaking revelation for Jean had been the mainstay of her life for the past several months. What could she have possibly done about the fact that her husband and her lover had been assigned to the same squadron, about the fact that they were now bound by a deep affection, about the fact that life in the squadron had soldered their nerves into a single body? Should she have pushed Jean away? How could she have shared the horror of a situation which she had accepted from the very start, and which Jean had remorselessly taken advantage of, even though he didn’t even realize who the real victim was? Seeing as how he hadn’t tried to understand her life, seeing as how he’d limited himself to taking pleasure in her body and her laughter, how could he then claim the right to insult her feelings, which he now realized were so alive and full of pain?
Despite realizing all this, Jean still couldn’t go along with it. He knew this inner sense of conviction would prove stronger than all his other arguments. Consequently, due to his inability to prevail over his mistress, he resolved to leave without seeing Denise, regardless of the suffering it would cause him. He would only have to amuse himself for a few more hours before life in the squadron completely absorbed him once again.
He spent the last day in his family’s company, steeped in the languid sadness that follows in the wake of all renunciations. Yet while they spoke softly amidst the falling shadows, the spectre of death glided towards Herbillon. Some of his comrades’ phrases resounded in his memory: “One squadron can always be replaced by another.” “The more you fly, the unluckier you get.”
Over the course of just a few weeks—and during a lull in the fighting to boot—he had witnessed the deaths of Berthier, Deschamps and Gival. Nothing justified his faith in his body’s invulnerability. A single burst from one of those artillery shells that peppered his aerial path was enough to make him shut his eyes in fear. His fate hinged on the skill of a German fighter pilot, or the trajectory of a bullet—which usually hit its target merely by happen-chance—or on an engine’s badly timed tantrum.
How fragile his life really was—and how shallow the anguish which had gripped him over the past couple of days! How brittle his chances—and Maury’s—were when it came to escaping all the pitfalls that lurked in the skies. Furthermore, wouldn’t their simultaneous demise soon resolve the entire matter anyway?
At which point, Jean’s breast swelled with a desire as deeply rooted as his will to live. Since all the above-mentioned was true, and that nothing truly mattered when death was constantly snapping at his heels, didn’t he have a right to have everything he wanted? Why should he refuse the ultimate gift that destiny had offered him?
Night fell, sparking the fire of desire. Denise was luring him towards that house whose existence he’d been completely oblivious to until the previous day. Jean made his way over there, haunted only by the fear that he wouldn’t find her there.
When she noticed his feverish eyes and his trembling lips, she threw herself at him, more passionate and beautiful than ever before.
CHAPTER II
THE TRAIN WAS conveying Herbillon to the front once again. Yet his thoughts lay with the first train he’d travelled on three months earlier, a time he now looked on both tenderly and condescendingly, as one behaves towards a sibling who’s both a lot younger and infinitely less worldly.
This time, Jean’s impatience to reach the front didn’t seize his throat with an intoxicating anxiety. The questions which had seemed so essential prior to his first departure no longer mattered. Now he knew that one couldn’t impress anyone at the squadron by dint of one’s courage, because, brave or not, everyone genuinely set themselves to the same dangerous tasks. Now he knew that the art of looking was more highly prized than recklessness, that the whimsical path of a stray bullet could lead one to victory just as much as a martyr’s death, and that luck ultimately determined one’s achievements in life. This luck, which he could only observe like a passive bystander, also inspired a fear which he was no longer ashamed of, now that he knew he could pull himself together while seated in his cockpit, able to muster all his sangfroid and determination he would need to succeed.
He allowed himself to bounce about on his seat without any melancholy. If his experiences thus far had stripped him of his heroic illusions, it had replaced them with a practicality that provided him with some comfort. Once he arrived at the station in Jonchery, he waited for the car emblazoned with the White Rabbit, the squadron’s mascot. Back in his familiar room where, thanks to his efforts, the walls no longer looked so sullen, Mathieu the orderly had lit the gas stove and unleashed its crackling song. On waking the next morning, Jean would meet up with his comrades once again. Thélis’s laughter would animate the mess hall; Marbot’s delighted face would be astonished by all the money Jean had spent during his leave; while Captain Reuillard, with his grey moustache, would make some obscene comment or other.
Jean had returned to the fold of his large, welcoming family, the wholesome, coarse clan of men whose existences were governed by basic laws that didn’t burden t
hem with unnecessary worries.
As he’d drawn towards the end of his journey, the images of Paris, which he’d lived so vividly until only a few hours earlier, began to fade until they completely vanished.
It had taken him a day to adapt back to life as a civilian, but the front had reabsorbed him before he’d even returned to it.
The following day, while the first few moments that followed sleep still kept the officer cadet glued to the web of his dreams, Maury cautiously entered his room. Herbillon shut his eyes in a subconsciously defensive manner, but he still observed Claude through his half-shut lids.
Claude had stopped on the threshold. His pensive head, which poked out of the dressing gown that concealed his body’s defects, was ennobled by the morning’s light. He gazed at Herbillon for a long time. His face, which was unaware it was being observed, was marked by a friendship that was so deep and generous that the officer cadet found the sight of it unbearable. His regrets, which had faded away when he’d shared his last embrace with his mistress, now re-emerged, sharper than ever. Jean wanted to shout: “You can’t look at me like that any more!”
But Maury shyly shut the door.
As soon as he did so, Jean reopened his lucid eyes to reality. He couldn’t even claim ignorance as an excuse any more, because before leaving Paris he’d committed the ultimate act of betrayal. The sophistry he’d used to distract himself crumbled away in that cold room, which was as austere as a monk’s cell. Everything was clear-cut here, just like life in the squadron, and this forced him to judge things with unsparing clarity. The situation which had seemed so complex in Paris now seemed so straightforward.
The young man firmly resolved to beg the captain to bring his partnership with Maury to an end and, if necessary, to come clean with Claude about everything. It was the only way he could behave with dignity, and there was a chance Claude might even forgive him.
He self-righteously pictured that scene, where both parties spoke honestly and candidly, while respecting each others’ dignity, and Jean thought that it would play out in a manner that would be in keeping with the life he’d just resumed. Unable to consider how that scene might also play out in a childish, cruel and even pathetic way, he rose out of bed feeling relieved and overjoyed to see his comrades again.
The Crew Page 8