Lieutenant Schreiber's Country

by Andrei Makine

  “Don’t worry,” the lieutenant reassures her, “I’ll be very happy to sleep in the dining room.”

  They start to move a mattress that can barely fit through the narrow hallway. Under his breath the lieutenant inquires, “Glauben Sie wirklich, das es sich lohnt?” (Do you really think this is worth the trouble?) And he receives, in response, a wry smile.

  He has not come close to a woman since his escape to Spain.

  That night he wakes with a start, panting. A dream that often comes back to him: a field covered in snow, tall sprays of dirt projected by explosions. He is in the turret of his tank and there—already so close, and so far!—are his two wounded comrades, crawling toward him, marking the snow with a long trail of blood. Another sixty feet and they’ll be safe. Bullets and shrapnel ricochet off the plating, the lieutenant shouts over the din of the battle, “Leper! Catherineau! Hold on!” He gets down, grabs the first one, and clutches the second, who is bruised and covered in blood … and then time jams to a stop, the way it does in nightmares, where one’s movements become stuck in the impossibility of continuing forward, the paralyzing fear at the sight of enemy tanks coming closer, encircling them, preparing to fire …

  He cries out, and his cry wakes him up; he is breathing as if he has just finished an exhausting race through the snow. The darkness, the rapid scanning of a spotlight, the sound of a truck moving farther down the street. A feminine hand places itself on his shoulder. Comforting words in German. “The language of the enemy,” he tells himself, and he thinks once more about the absurdity of these human inventions: allies, enemies, wars, conquests … labels made for killing, hating, dominating, being killed. The woman’s body pulls him away from this world into a time that no longer slides into the airlessness of nightmares, into a moment where he is accepted as he is, and where he is the essence of himself.

  The lieutenant knows that tomorrow, from the moment the day begins, he may no longer exist; the probability is high and the means of destruction are overabundant. A shot from an anti-tank cannon, a shell from a Tiger, a bomb dropped by a plane (the Germans are now equipped with Messerschmitt jets), or a terrible Panzerfaust, the grenade launcher that any teenager in the Hitler Youth could operate. Or even, very simply, a stray bullet. Strangely, he is not gripped by any anxiety at this thought, as if the moment he is living right now already belongs to an existence in which all of those young murderers can no longer reach him. He remembers that he has experienced a similar feeling before. One morning in a hotel near a train station, in the arms of Sabine … just as it is now, his survival then was suspended over a multitude of dangers that followed each of his steps. And yet there is the same serenity, the same confidence, something far beyond the singular pleasure of finding himself with a woman.

  Lieutenant Schreiber’s third campaign ended in the Bavarian Alps at the beginning of May 1945: the last shells were fired on an SS detachment that kept fighting in spite of the imminent surrender. Enemy soldiers were running away, staggering amid the trees, and the lieutenant gives his tanks the order: “Stop! We stop now!” The enemies turn back into men on the run, and the positioning of the tanks—the gray slope of a hill and their warlike anger—becomes an immense fatigue that tumbles down upon the young tank drivers. They leave their armored tanks and deeply breathe the mountain air—so intoxicating after the poisonous exhaust of their cannons—look at the sky, listen to the silence, and no longer have the strength to express their joy.

  A few days later, the lieutenant is informed that the man in charge of the French section of Berlin, General Dubois de Beauchesne, had appointed him as his aide-de-camp. Yes, the same general who, in June 1940, had written on the flyleaf in the Journal of Marches: “With fond memories of my brave little liaison officer …”

  The colonel who gives him the news adds, as if it were nothing, “It’s been more than three months since I received that transfer order. But, knowing you like I do, I was sure that you’d prefer to fight until the victory.” The lieutenant has no choice but to agree: “You’re right, Colonel. Except that, during those three months, I could have gotten killed more than once.”

  While on his way to Paris to finalize the formalities of his new appointment, he will think again about the extreme stupidity of human games: a sheet of paper with his transfer order written on it had been lying in a folder, turning each day into a Russian roulette where the life and death of Lieutenant Schreiber were at stake.

  III

  The Foreigner

  At the Other People’s Party

  He arrives in Paris on the evening of May 8, 1945. The city is light, festive, teeming with people, and most definitely far ahead of the time in which the lieutenant is still living—those winter days in Alsace, in Germany, and those long hours of fighting when his tanks destroyed the frozen earth with their caterpillar tracks.

  Forgotten smells intoxicate him: the various foods people are eating while peacefully sitting on the restaurant terraces, women’s perfumes, the greenery of boulevards, and the florists’ bouquets. Female bodies assault him with their dancing gait and the whiteness of their décolletage, the troubling closeness of this flesh that is no longer hidden beneath the dirty clothes of refugees in the bombed cities, the tatters of survivors coming out of the camps, or the immobility of dead bodies.

  Everything around him is moving too quickly; people catch him in their sights and look away, he intercepts greetings that are not meant for him, responds to smiles by mistake, and hears scraps of chatter in which he thinks he recognizes a comrade’s name, the timbre of a familiar voice. The rapid dispersion of these faces is already reconstructing a new backdrop with other actors, other bodies, other promises.

  He feels like running to catch up with the rhythm of this springtime merry-go-round so he can be accepted into one of the groups of young people, squeeze the waist of the woman brushing past him, talk to her, borrow a little of her happiness, her insouciance, and tell her what he did during those years that separate him from their beautiful Parisian evening. Yes, tell her who he is.

  But wait … who is he to these people whose whirling is making him dizzy?

  He hunches his shoulders to try and pass unnoticed through this colorful mob, adjusts the collar of his peacoat, then sits down, choosing a chair at one end of a terrace, and orders a glass of wine. To his left is the open door of a bar, and inside the entrance are steps leading to the basement. Through the darkness, he makes out the silhouettes of a few entangled couples, the fine curve of a female waist being gently bent by a man’s hand. The trailing sounds of a saxophone flow breathlessly over to the sidewalk. To his right, around a small table cluttered with cups of coffee, three young men and women are noisily arguing, waving their arms, mentioning names he’s never heard of: “Sartre, Camus …” One of the debaters brandishes in her hand, as a symbol of faith, a book that is thorny with page markers. Glancing discreetly in her direction, the lieutenant manages to read the title: L’Invitée (The Invited).

  He smiles, recognizing himself clearly in this description; he feels like a guest who has arrived at a party too late.

  There is a great desire in him to dissolve into this human swarm, to slip into the conversation these young people are having, gesticulating all the while, about … A curious thing! Exist-ential-ism. Never heard that before … what could it be? He could talk to them about his own existence during those six years of war, about tanks on fire, about his involvement with the Resistance, about the weapons he gave to Jean and Simon, both of whom were younger at the time than the people who are now arguing around the table, and also about the concentration camp in Miranda de Ebro, about landing in Provence, about the soldier, Francis Gilot, age eighteen, who died on the outskirts of Toulon for the liberation of France.

  He would have so much to tell! But he imagines that his life would not fit inside the skillfully demarcated boxes of their ideas. “Essence, existence, engagement, liberty …” He listens to these words as if they are in a foreign language. />
  “To live is to get old, nothing more,” a young woman exclaims, quoting the book placed amid the cups. One of the boys pompously retorts, “To live is to bring the absurd to life!”

  The lieutenant understands that these words are simply a game, a new game invented by society for people who judge life while sitting on a café terrace.

  Had he heard the echo of these new theories when he arrived in Paris in May of ’45? Or was it one year later when he returned to Berlin? Or did it happen, perhaps, in the years that followed, when a formidable intellectual spell would deify a few precocious thinkers whose names he had learned on that sweet Parisian evening? The exact chronology of this discovery does not really matter, after all. His memory holds onto what is most important: the war is over, and his reunion with Paris is marked by an intense feeling of loneliness. There is a new generation of youth to which he no longer belongs, a new language he doesn’t know, and another way of understanding life—the “existentialist” view—that has little interest in his own life, his battles, his wounds, or the death, often heroic, of his comrades.

  Today, Jean-Claude expresses this feeling of rupture in terms that all lost soldiers have used, from Remarque to Hemingway: a warrior latecomer who has returned to a time of peace that is populated by indifferent and forgetful individuals.

  “Walking down the streets of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, I wondered if any of the people passing by had really fought against the Nazis. I was sad and overwhelmed.”

  What more is there to say? And how could it be said, after Balzac and his immortal Colonel Chabert, the magnificent revenant from the old guard whose bravery and panache were so ill-suited for the bourgeois world of his treacherous wife? Between the grumbling Chabert, literary hero, and Lieutenant Schreiber, real man, there is only a single step.

  This step, beginning with the return of peace, requires a kind of splitting in two. In order to fit into his new life, the soldier must forget his war, forget the person he was during the war, accept the history that is in the process of being rewritten, and not speak too much about his comrades in arms, because the rancor of the defeat in June 1940 hovers over all of those young lives that were sacrificed. He must become an “other,” renounce himself. Above all, he must accept a revision of what he lived through, reread his past according to the new intellectual fashion, and redesign himself in accordance with what the café philosophers say about engagement, choice, and liberty.

  Balzac would not ask this of Colonel Chabert!

  What strikes him upon his return to the capital is that an entire theory of existence has been hatched during the years when, every day, he ran the risk of no longer existing. A school of thought, born within the narrow perimeter of a Parisian arrondissement, has developed while he was fighting a war, helping the resisters, and crossing through towns in flames. A doctrine has colonized minds, books have been published that kindle shrewd commentaries, and plays have been performed and lauded by the public, all in a perfect disconnect from the life and death of soldiers in the Fifth African Chasseur Regiment of the First Armored Division.

  Lieutenant Schreiber is unable to absorb the idea that he will have to consider this state of affairs to be normal.

  This is how it works: to be admitted into the backdrops of the postwar, he is ordered to act as if everything seems logical and legitimate to him. If he plays the game, then his youth will be returned to him. Once his uniform is stowed away in the coatroom, he will be offered a role, he will be able to enter the scene, and he will even be allowed to join the circle of young polemicists glued to a small café table. He will show himself to be intelligent and modern while he juggles three-cent aphorisms that they will delight in—yes, one of those “to live is to bring the absurd to life.” As he recites them, he will feel the young woman’s thigh push against his own, heavily lined eyes will caress his gaze, and a hand will open its fingers to receive his fingers into their breadth.

  He is twenty-seven years old and has spent six of them at war. Still young, but no longer truly young. And with this bitter thirst for love! No one has explained to him that the world continues its routine after the soldier’s departure. This is the eternal naiveté of fighters: all of them think that in their absence, the country holds its breath, suspends the passing of the days, waiting to see them the way they were when they left for the front, “smiling and fearless children,” twenty-one years old, like the young Officer Cadet Schreiber in the autumn of 1939.

  No, the world has not stopped turning: a new generation has replaced the one that was fighting, and when the survivors come back, inevitably, as in every other country in the world, in every era, they feel unwanted. To leave is to die a little bit, is it not?

  Jean-Claude says this without bitterness: it is a reality, both ordinary and hurtful, that even in his youth he knew how to tame.

  In May 1945, at the beginning of his Parisian stay, he goes through his gear and rereads the small notebooks he used for taking notes between battles, taking advantage of the breaks. And he finds what he was looking for, hiding even from himself the true reason for his search: the address of a friend, Marie-Andrée, a nurse he met in North Africa and who had accompanied his tank squadron during the landing in Provence and the rough climb along the Rhône.

  The young woman is in Paris. They see each other again, relive their shared memories, and enjoy each other. For a few days, these two beings, tested by war, distance themselves from the world in which they feel so foreign. They don’t dare to admit it to one another, but their country is that time of war, those cities with streets streaked with gunfire, those words a person told themselves a minute before death, those faces that smiled and disappeared in the fire. A life that had no need for gaudy aphorisms to be full, intense, and true.

  Impure Luck

  It’s a known fact: the future postwar idols—Sartre, de Beauvoir, Camus, and their companions—are quite busy during the years 1943–45. Plays (Les Mouches, Le Malentendu) are put on with the approval of the German censor. Sartre’s talent as a playwright is commended by the Pariser Zeitung, and de Beauvoir’s novel, L’Invitée, is nominated for the 1943 Goncourt Prize. “All the happiness I thought I had given up was blossoming again; it even seemed that it had never been so abundant.” Mme. de Beauvoir is settled at the Hôtel la Louisiane: “None of my refuges had ever come so close to my dreams.”

  Happiness.

  I can already hear the grumpy remarks of historians who dare to upset this sweet paradise by reminding us that in those same years of “abundant happiness,” the gas chambers were working at full blast and that somewhere on the Russian plains, at the Battle of Kursk, the fate of the war was being decided by the millions of the dead and the “men with broken faces.” How can these bilious historians be quieted? Ah yes, they must be forgetting the heroism of the two illustrious Parisian Resistance members fighting under the pseudonyms of Miro and Castor. Fear not, the identity of these ultra-secret agents (Sartre and Beauvoir) will not be uncovered under torture by the Gestapo, but at the performance of Huis clos (No Exit). In January 1944, one of these courageous resisters leaves to go skiing in Morzine with her young lover, Bost. And in the month of March, she attends the reading of a piece written by Picasso, the title of which dispels any melancholy feelings among those victims of the Occupation: Le Désir attrapé par la queue (Desire Caught by the Tail). We can have a little fun, can’t we?

  Later, this surrealist farce, directed by Camus, will lead to a long night of partying. The “actors,” Sartre, Michel Leiris, de Beauvoir, and Dora Maar, mingle with the members of the audience, among whom one spies Georges Braque, Jacques Lacan, Armand Salacrou, Georges Bataille, Jean-Louis Barrault, and Madeleine Renaud. The evening is such a success that the whole exceptional group decides to organize more “fiestas” and to meet, depending on the night, either where Beauvoir lives, at the Louisiane, or in the shaded setting of the Cour de Rohan, where the Battailles live. On the program: a buffet, wine, music, dancing, sketches, vocal imp
rovisations by Sartre. We are under the Occupation, Monsieur! So we try to find enough living people for each fiesta. The parcels that the aptly named “valisards” import from the countryside do not tolerate the springtime heat very well, provoking a famous scene observed by Simone de Beauvoir and Jacques-Laurent Bost, both distraught: Sartre, as if he were launching a grenade, throws a rabbit, unsuitable for consumption, out the window.

  The terrible constraints of wartime will not, however, stand in the way of the most grandiose fiesta: it takes place on June 5 (yes, the night before June 6, 1944) in the spacious apartment—literary noblesse oblige—where Victor Hugo once stayed with Juliette Drouet. The hosts, Charles Dullin and Simone Jolivet, assisted by Sartre and Beauvoir, have dreamed big: the living room is drowning in flowers, the walls are bedecked with garlands and ribbon, the buffet would make the greatest caterers jealous, and the wine is flowing in waves. There are writers, editors, actors, and that most prominent of couples: Camus and his passion du jour, Maria Casarès, who stars in his Malentendu (Misunderstanding) at the Théâtre des Mathurins.

  That same night, I believe, an American officer will shout to his men, who have landed on the beaches in Normandy and are trying to cling to the cliffs riddled with bullets, “Die as far away as possible, guys!”

  I mention the diversions of these “engaged writers” for the same reason that Jean-Claude speaks to me about them: during his very long life, he had come across certain people who had participated in those unforgettable fiestas, and had even maintained a semblance of a friendship with Albert Camus (several of the writer’s books, affectionately dedicated, are sleeping in the old man’s library). And since we are talking about “stars” who were not yet known by that term, Jean-Claude confides to me with an indulgent smile: “That Camus was a hell of a womanizer. One day, he started flirting so insistently with my wife Jacqueline that I was obliged to set things straight with him.”