Lieutenant Schreiber's Country

by Andrei Makine

  Time passed, and thanks to the foresight and courage of a few biographers, the idols lost some of their gilding. Idolatrous as we were, we finally opened our eyes; perplexed, we discovered the unimaginative and muddled thinking of their fanciful works and a mixture of humanist pompousness and Nietzschean posturing in their philosophical and moral prose.

  Morality: that’s where we really feel the pinch!

  “I don’t judge them,” Jean-Claude has often told me, “and the fact that they feasted while others were going off like lambs to the slaughter, that’s their business. We have seen this in every war. Yes, the soldiers and the pen-pushers. Except that after the war, those pen-pushers wouldn’t stop giving us lessons in morality. To be free, you should do this! To be an engaged intellectual, do that! Personally, I open my Petit Robert and I read: ‘Engagement: introduction of a unit into battle, fighting confined to a single area and of short duration.’ And the authors of the dictionary could have added that despite this ‘short duration,’ there is more than enough time to get a hole blown through you.”

  He lets out a sad little laugh as he recites this definition, conscious that its truth is nothing in the face of the dogmas decreed by the idols. Varlam Shalamov probably experienced the same feeling: in 1955, nearly blind, his health destroyed, he was leaving the gulag while Sartre, succumbing to the charms of the Soviet regime, was declaring that the freedom of thought in the USSR knew no bounds.

  In 1945, Lieutenant Schreiber does not have enough distance to seize the spirit of the times; that postwar boiling over with guilty consciences, culpabilities disguised as dandies’ grins, political contortions, cowardice, and turnarounds. Still, he understands why the idols were so successful: their writings offer a plenary indulgence to that petite bourgeoisie conscience of which they are the flamboyant representatives. Such absolution works for everyone, except for those who have done nothing wrong. Like Francis Gilot, the eighteen-year-old tank driver killed during the taking of Toulon.

  The French army, actually, is the first victim of the intellectual simony that develops in Saint-Germain-des-Prés while Lieutenant Schreiber’s comrades are crossing the Rhine. When they return, the die is cast. Caught up by daily life, these latecomers have neither the time nor, especially, the media or people skills that would be needed to reestablish the truth. A few years later, the shadow of Indochina and Algeria will lead them toward causes that are even more difficult to defend.

  In the end, there is only one way for a soldier to confront the lies of the idols: to tell the story of his life. By a twist of fate, one of the Parisian fiestas may have unfolded while Lieutenant Schreiber’s tank squadron was heading into battle. Two events, perfectly simultaneous. In a beautiful apartment decorated with flowers, a party is taking place, blending music, songs, wine, feasting, humor, quips, attempts at seduction, kisses, new books passing from hand to hand—yes, this whirlwind of young and replete bodies, smiling faces, gazes veiled with desire, the quivering of all of those Jean-Pauls, Simones, Michels, Alberts, Georges, Marias, Olgas, Pablos, Wandas … and on that same soil, in that same country, at the very same moment, in the middle of a plain that is frozen and shaken by explosions, a young officer standing on his tank calls out to his two wounded comrades. They are crawling, leaving a long trail of blood in the snow. “Leper, Catherineau! Hold on!” He jumps to the ground, runs beneath a whistling of bullets and metal shards, and helps the soldiers hide behind his tank. One of them has lost an arm, the other has had his foot torn off by a shell.

  This simultaneity speaks for itself.

  The appropriateness of silence in the face of the idols’ duplicity became clear to me one day when I asked Jean-Claude why, since he was acquainted directly or indirectly with this whole beautiful intellectual world, he had never tried telling them what he had really experienced, suffered, and realized because of the war. He pursed his lips, preparing a shortened answer, probably to save himself from the confession he was hesitating to make. Then, suddenly, his features froze, and he ended up murmuring:

  “I had among my friends several survivors of Nazi camps. They would never talk about it, and even in the middle of summer they would wear long sleeves so that no one could see the number tattooed on their wrists. Just as it was with the war—but to an even greater degree—what they were put through could not be expressed in our human language. There was also another reason for this muteness, though. They could have said everything, but they didn’t want to talk to people peacefully drinking their glass of wine on the terrasse of a café, eating their rib steak, going to the movies, calling to invite each other to dinner. Or to a fiesta … I realized that silence was their only possession. Everything had been taken from them: their health, their youth, the life of their loved ones, the faith they had in humanity. Everything except that number they were hiding. And their silence.”

  He stopped speaking; then, as always, looking to avoid an overly solemn thought, he added, “So, when talking to Camus, I preferred instead to nicely tell him off so he would stop bothering my wife.”

  On May 15, 1945, on Pont de l’Alma, Lieutenant Schreiber runs into the man who made such a difference in his path as a soldier: Captain de Pazzis, squadron chief in the Fifth African Chasseur Regiment. The man embraces him warmly, expresses his joy at seeing him again (“Damnit, Schreiber, you made it out!”); then, taking a step back, he examines his young comrade’s uniform.

  “Wait, but that cross, where is it?”

  “You mean the Legion of Honor, my captain?”

  He sees Pazzis turn pale with indignation. “No, I won’t stand for this!” the officer exclaims, and without any explanation he leaves and goes straight to the Ministry of War. In November 1944, when he left the squadron, Pazzis gave a very clear order to his successor, Captain de la Lance: “I was stingy when it came to medals. Especially in Schreiber’s case. He’s earned the cross of the Legion of Honor twenty times over. As soon as you have the chance, please rectify this injustice.” A few months later, when two officers reminded Captain de la Lance about this request, his answer fell like a guillotine blade: “I know that Schreiber earned the Cross long ago. But a Jew will never receive the Legion of Honor under my command!”

  A foreigner in this festive Paris, the lieutenant tells himself that it is perhaps his origins that are once more playing against him. He holds onto this explanation because it seems less difficult to bear than the abyss of six years of war that have transformed him into a lost phantom in a world of indifferent people.

  Double-Edged

  He was first bullied because of his origins as a teenager, and this is perhaps why Jean-Claude talks about it in such a detached tone; it’s an old story.

  As a student at the Lycée Janson de Sailly, whenever he was trying to win the companionship of other students, he would hear over and over: “Get lost, dirty Jew! No one invited you.” Audacious, he would retaliate, blows would rain down upon him, and he would return home with his lips bloodied. Was France so fundamentally anti-Semitic? Was poor little Jean-Claude condemned to suffer abuse by such brutes?

  That “poor little” Schreiber will soon be a member of the International League of Fighters for Peace, and will fight against the Croix-de-Feu militants. Among his best friends will be two young aristocrats, Féral and Curial: two barons who, like him, will experience having unsophisticated insults hurled in their direction: “Death to the Jews!”

  In 1940, the young Officer Cadet Schreiber shares his first lunch with the officers in the regiment. One of them, without really lowering his voice, starts yammering about the lack of courage that, according to him, Jews usually demonstrate. Schreiber stands up and asks Lieutenant-Colonel Poupel to give him permission to go “bust in that gentleman’s face.” But the “gentleman” is already out of his seat and moving toward the officer cadet, hand outstretched: “Schreiber, I did it on purpose. I wanted to know if you had it in you. And you do! Don’t be angry with me, and please accept my friendship.” This was Lieutenant Ville
, the one who would write a whole poem in the Journal of Marches talking about the “smiling and fearless kid,” that same Officer Cadet Schreiber, that supposedly fearful Jew whose bravery would astonish even the “old warriors.”

  Much later, in 1942, in the Miranda de Ebro concentration camp, Jean-Claude Schreiber’s origins arouse the suspicions of another officer, Captain Combaud de Roquebrune, as we have already seen. A brief test is imposed: “And Guy, what if I asked your daughter to marry me?” “I would agree to it. But my son would never marry your daughter. Because of the blood …” This was still the era when political correctness did not forbid a person from expressing their prejudices. Which allowed honest and sincere people to dispose of them. The captain also appears interested in attending the operation that will be performed on the prisoner Schreiber by a doctor, also a prisoner, who will be armed with a blade cut from inside a jelly jar. The boils are lanced, with no anesthetic whatsoever, and the patient clenches his teeth, not producing the slightest complaint. After the procedure he asks Combaud de Roquebrune: “Might I ask, my captain, why you have honored this somewhat medieval act of surgery with your presence?” The officer seems embarrassed, puts forth a few fairly improbable excuses, then confesses: “You see, Jean-Claude … I was always told that Jews couldn’t handle pain, and that at the slightest pinprick they squealed like pigs having their throats cut. I see now that this was a ridiculous lie and … I’m asking you to forgive me.”

  During the first postwar days in Paris, Jean-Claude tries to explain away his feeling of isolation with that ancestral distrust that his name and birth—his “different” blood—usually provoke in other people. He remembers situations where an attitude of rejection or scorn made him suffer, conflicts that were often petty and all the more hurtful for it.

  Yet he knows that this is not what makes him such a foreigner in the eyes of Parisians celebrating their victory in this month of May 1945.

  It is his very life that distances him from his compatriots. He is becoming a bothersome witness. For certain people, the return of this soldier awakens a guilty awareness of their well-behaved inaction during the Occupation. As for those even younger than he is, they are irritated to have Lieutenant Schreiber and his combatant’s shadow hanging over their sparkling and untroubled youth. Their eyes reflect the trees in bloom on the boulevards; his, the snowy plains blackened by explosions and tagged with bodies. Their ears are cradled by the lascivious undulations of saxophones. His hearing echoes with the shouts of the wounded, the banging of shots on armored plating. They theorize about existence with pretty phrases while he carries, in his memory and in his bruised body, the density of an existence that refutes, by virtue of its truth, every one of those charming commentaries.

  A Sentinel with No Replacement

  He goes back to Berlin for his new assignment, most of all to reassure himself that the thread of his life as a soldier can be taken up once more. He very quickly realizes that this is only an illusion; the fighter in him is not easily accustomed to the bureaucratic routine of army staff.

  In March 1946, Lieutenant Schreiber returns to Paris. For good. The theater of the postwar is waiting for him. He will have to choose a role, accept the rules of the game, and play a character in this great human production. He will have to conceal from other people what he lived through during the war, avoid bringing up battles, the tanks in flames, and the comrades whose shadows never come back to him except in dreams or rare moments of solitude: Lieutenant-Colonel Poupel, Captain de Pazzis; this rosary of names and faces that emerge from the depths of his sleeplessness—Berton, Gilot, Leper, Catherineau….

  He knows that in order to succeed in his new life, there will be a price to pay: forgetting.

  In truth, this more or less agreed upon erasure will never end. He still tells stories about his years in the war, of course. But the most important things, he is well aware, are never said. So he decides not to bother the people who are listening to him and adopts a light tone, peppering everything with anecdotes and quips. Little by little, his life as a soldier freezes into a series of episodes that are both realistic and entertaining, but—most importantly—are adapted to the “channel switching” spirit of potential listeners. He is no fool: this stylized mode of recalling the past is simply a way of forgetting the real Lieutenant Schreiber. Is it also a way of betraying him? Or perhaps, he sometimes tells himself, it is a way to better protect himself from the fickle curiosity of indifferent people.

  The games of the world drag him along on their merry-go-round. He plays along quite well: he wins, loses, triumphs, falls, and picks himself up again. Journalism, diplomacy, politics, advertising, public relations … the passion in this professional and social jousting seems to erase the memories he has of his youth. In photos he is seen in a tuxedo, a smile straight out of Hollywood, beautiful creatures on his arm. New York, Shanghai, Sydney, Tokyo, London, Dakar, San Francisco, Montreal … the heady urgency of the day-to-day, the rivalry and the balances of power, the ideological clashes; what incredible stimulants! And, too, what excellent drugs for forgetting.

  He boasts about rubbing elbows with the major players in this worldly spectacle: de Gaulle, Pompidou, Giscard, Mitterrand, Chirac…. He talks about it in a book, tracing a very distinct border between the first person on that list and those that followed him. Successes, defeats, revenge, women—lots of women—friends one has to be afraid of, and enemies whose hostility is so consistent that they eventually win his respect.

  He has experienced all of these things; he has even learned that behind this whirlwind of masks, a very large void is always hidden.

  Yes, triumph and disaster, those two impostors….

  And then the century (the millennium!) comes to an end and the old man realizes that his life contains, insofar as a human existence is capable, the essence of the twentieth century. Wars, political paroxysms, intellectual fashions, momentary artistic whims, technical frenzies, and the constant stream of novelties whose sense our spirit no longer has the time to define and whose aftermath it no longer has the time to predict.

  A future that is more and more immediate and invasive begins to cancel out the time when one could still turn toward the past, remember, and speak in silence to those who are no longer here.

  Most of all, he discovers that throughout all of those decades (throughout a life!), a young soldier within him had remained faithful to the memory of his comrades in arms, saving in his memories the name of each one, recalling their courage and their frailties as men, their joys, their injuries, and their deaths.

  Like a sentinel refusing a replacement, Lieutenant Schreiber keeps watch over this past when it no longer interests anyone else.

  He is eighty years old when, in a bookstore, an unusual title catches his eye: Cette France qu’on oublie d’aimer (This France We Forget to Love). He smiles, thinking about the world today in which we swear only by worldwide development, globalization, and other planetary fantasies. A world where humans are very proud to move, bouger, constantly, never noticing that this obsessive change for change’s sake conforms to the great streams of merchandise and capital, the pillaging of one continent for the profit of another, and touristic servitude.

  He begins to turn the pages: a particular idea of France, homeland, de Gaulle. A glance at the name of the author. Ah, you have to really be a foreigner to write this. He sighs: “The word homeland has almost become a bad word these days. How is it that my attachment to this French soil has not prevented me from traveling the world, speaking several languages, all while knowing that my homeland is definitely here, in France, in the small village of Montfrin that I liberated in ’44 with my tank platoon?”

  He goes back to the interrupted chapter and suddenly the lines quiver before his eyes! To the memory of Colonel Desazars de Montgailhard. To the memory of Parachute Captain Combaud de Roquebrune. Both of whom were killed in 1944 for the liberation of France.

  He continues reading with the eyes of the young Lieutenant
Schreiber: “The size of the division is at present reduced to a few men. At eighteen hundred hours, the enemy, wanting to finish it off, launches a massed attack. Using the ammunition of the wounded and dead, the cavaliers of the second division resist. The machine guns fire their last rounds. The enemy is pushed back….”

  From our very first meeting, Jean-Claude’s story would become a profound echo of other French lives about which, at the time, I knew only a few fragments. A sweeping and nuanced voice that, by its power of invocation, gave each character (whether an army chief or an ordinary soldier) a true depth of destiny.

  One day, as we know, Jean-Claude began listing the comrades in his regiment who appeared in an old photo. One silhouette remained unnamed, a tall man with a sad smile. “Wait, his name will come back to me. He’s the guy who was killed at Dunkirk. His name was … ah!”

  The idea for the book came from this brief silence in his memory. That soldier, forgotten in a wartime snapshot, absolutely had to get back his name.

  IV

  The War of Words

  A Character in Search of a Book

  This is a person who was born seven months before the armistice of November 11, 1918. Someone who in 1935, at the age of seventeen, made a solo visit to Hitler’s Germany and then to Stalin’s USSR. Someone who enlisted in the army in 1939, was part of the campaign in France—all the while having a German background—was wounded, and attended the departure of the Massilia because his mother was on board. Someone who, in his parents’ home, encountered Masaryk, Herriot, Laval, and Daladier (who advised him to complete his military service in the armored cavalry). Someone who participated in the Resistance, who was imprisoned in a concentration camp in Spain, and who took part in the landing in Provence in 1944 and the battles in Germany in 1945. Someone who personally knew every president of the Fifth Republic. Someone who had to protect his wife’s moral standing from the Don Juan-esque assaults of a seducer named Albert Camus. Someone who, after ninety years, retains the memory of a young man and the energy of a fighter. Not only that, this someone is also a Servan-Schreiber!