Lieutenant Schreiber's Country

by Andrei Makine

  In my view, Jean-Claude’s memoirs could under no circumstances be published there. Stylistic incompatibility, in a manner of speaking. I also preferred to think in coldly strategic terms (was I not, temporarily, his literary agent?): Pygmalion was a small publishing house with little means and limited media firepower; its team would have had to demonstrate a rather unbusinesslike self-sacrifice, of an almost kamikaze nature, if Jean-Claude’s project were to see the light of day. Especially considering that even the powerful and prosperous publishing houses had rejected it outright.

  I had arranged the meeting just in case. Charles Dupêchez listened to my plea with polite attention, but with no signal that could have betrayed any interest. He promised to telephone me the next day.

  The shortness of the delay clearly indicated to me that this was going to be a refusal; the editor simply wanted to ease the abruptness of his decision with those twenty-four hours of waiting in accordance with convention.

  He called me in the morning to tell me what I had already heard so many times: the defection of readers caught up in entertainment, the fading away of real literature, the unbridled obsession with what is current that devalues the past and its witnesses. Also, alas, Pygmalion’s size prevented him from taking too many risks. He repeated the arguments of his counterparts, though, it’s true, in a more polite tone.

  I was about to thank him and hang up when, without pausing for a transition, still in that even voice which I would identify as one of the key aspects of British composure, he informed me that he was absolutely willing to publish Lieutenant Schreiber’s memories.

  My confusion was such that I began involuntarily reminding him of the pitfalls he was exposing himself to: an author of that age has little chance of being able to produce a series of twenty volumes, the war is not a subject that interests female readers, and what’s more, he would have to find a talented journalist who could give energy and vigor to those memoirs….

  Charles Dupêchez finally emitted a small, short laugh, assuring me that he was aware of all of these difficulties. “If Mr. Servan-Schreiber is ready to sign, I will prepare his contract this afternoon.”

  He went to meet Jean-Claude a few days later. My task completed, I did not attend this interview.

  “I have a few things in common with this man,” my friend announced to me when we met again. “I studied political economy for three years at Oxford, Exeter College, and throughout my life I have often worked with British people. But the most marvelous thing is that Charles’s father fought in France during the war, in ’44, as an English soldier. I might have run into him!”

  “So you’re not too dissatisfied with your future editor, Jean-Claude?”

  “No, not at all! Charles is a true gentleman. Do you know what that means?”

  “Of course. A man who is distinguished, courteous, sincere….”

  “Certainly, except that’s not all it takes.”

  “Oh really? Is there another definition?”

  “Yes. A gentleman: while speaking with him, you feel like a gentleman.”

  Waiting for D-Day

  The person who replaced me as Jean-Claude’s confidante fulfilled his task with the utmost professionalism. For long hours, he listened to the old man, recording his story, discussing the composition of future chapters with him, and undertaking the necessary corrections. It was patient, painstaking, and prodigiously difficult work, for inside a short book they had to scroll through a whole century that had grafted one soldier’s destiny onto the greater outline of history. This was an effort made even more commendable because the name of this writer was not going to appear in the published book. Far from playing a “ghost” writer, the man had made himself a phantom listener whose mere presence could enliven the tale, keeping it from echoing into the void.

  The editor rarely intervened, paying most of his attention to deadlines, manufacturing details, and organizing the launch.

  After six months of work, the manuscript was ready. I read it with emotion: how would this voice I had listened to so often be transferred into a written form? And had the writing itself, having banished the rough edges of conversation, produced a text that was too smoothed out and sanitized?

  I knew that either way I would be a bad reader, too interested in finding what these pages could not show: Jean-Claude’s smile, his gestures, the distant moments gazing at the photos he would show me, the turning of the seasons behind the windows in his apartment.

  Naturally, I stumbled upon sentences that should have probably been cut out. That quick burst of wit with which Malraux (perhaps as a victim of a hallucinogenic plant plucked from inside a Khmer temple) introduced Jean-Claude’s mother, Suzanne Crémieux, as a nymphomaniac whose sensuality had toppled every politician in the Third Republic. I would also have removed the sequence dedicated to the legendary Jean-Jacques, Jean-Claude’s enemy cousin, a dashing former presidential candidate who, in the manuscript, had received too many arrows shot in his direction. It would have been simpler to say “Rest in peace.” There was also at times a little bit of detachment lacking in the pages that talked about the Servan-Schreiber dynasty. But in a way, I told myself, this smoldering of passions perhaps prevented the clan’s legend from becoming frozen in the hagiographic chill of a modern myth.

  The rest—what was essential—was transcribed just as Jean-Claude usually told it: a human reed struggling in the gusting wind of wars. The Battle of France, fighting as a member of the Resistance, the prisons in Franco’s Spain, landing in Provence, Liberation … the storyteller’s style had been respected, as had the outline of great events in which, as if on top of snow or sand, Lieutenant Schreiber’s stubborn path could be recognized.

  “I’m thinking about publishing this book in the beginning of May. Around that time, we might have a chance as far as the media goes. Between May 8 and June 18, a book talking about the last war and that references de Gaulle shouldn’t go unnoticed.” Charles Dupêchez summarized this plan of action in a tone that betrayed a cheerful regret: we would have to make do with days of remembrance, the French people’s commemorative fad.

  The eve of our battle was beginning. Everything would be decided, therefore, between the day of the victory over the Nazis and the muffled echo of de Gaulle’s decree.

  This is How Books Live

  At the beginning of May 2010, a small book entitled Tête haute: Souvenirs made its discreet appearance in bookstores amid the bestsellers, books by celebrities, summer novels, soccer player biographies, literary prize banners, stories about politicians, white, black, red, beige, and yellow collections, and covers with slices of color like those on traffic lights.

  The author had just celebrated his ninety-second birthday.

  On the cover of the book, we see the photo of the young Lieutenant Schreiber at the turret of his tank, looking out over a stretch of snow-covered plain. Alsace, 1944. Whenever I entered bookstores, I didn’t notice anything except that cover. Or, more often, its absence.

  How could people help a published author with a small print run from a modest publishing house? The press service had conscientiously sent copies to at least a hundred journalists, contacted the editorial boards, and called them back again. Friends mobilized, talking about it to those around them and sending text messages (“JC’s book is out!”). For my part, I referenced those war memories at each of my (rare) media appearances. Before publication, I even arranged to have lunch with the person in charge of the culture pages at a weekly magazine; the man promised me he would read Jean-Claude (I would have never undertaken a thousandth of such a process to discuss my own writings). Charles Dupêchez did his best, telephoning right and left (in the nonpolitical sense), but he didn’t have a network of people who owed him a favor or a band of trusted accomplices, things that are useful and even indispensable in the grand editorial fun fair. The inconvenience of being a gentleman.

  After something happens, we always tell ourselves that the result was predictable and that we had been disc
erning enough to see it coming. I hadn’t seen anything at all, and was convinced that when the book appeared, the articles would rain down, the interviewers would brandish their microphones, and the makeup artists on television sets would pick up their brushes and pat the forehead of that imposing old man who was ready to tell the audience about his astounding passage through the century.

  No, I could not imagine—not in May nor even in June of 2010—that this soldier’s memoirs would collide with such total indifference.

  “Collide” is not the right word, for it implies a shock, a rejection, a tension. A reaction, in other words. Lieutenant Schreiber’s words did not provoke anything of the sort. They were drowned in a viscous magma that suffocated every sound and neutralized any debate, not forbidding the expression of ideas, but rendering them inaudible. An intellectual space that was perfectly soundproof. One could shout, take exception, proclaim its truth, but no echo would come to reflect back these appeals. A censor that did not say its name and that nevertheless acted more effectively than every authoritarian “no.”

  I began resorting to this kind of analysis after June 18, the cutoff date that Charles Dupêchez had told us was the symbolic end of a period during which the book could, logically, arouse media curiosity. Yes, the general’s voice on the BBC in 1940, and this book, the voice of an old soldier who, as a young tank driver in ’44, met the leader of Free France and had several chances to speak with the great man after the war.

  But nothing happened on June 18, 2010.

  That’s not true; many things happened, as a matter of fact. Everyone was talking about the recession and the horrible traders who, carrying on their dirty obsessions, had claimed millions of euros in bonuses for themselves. Next to them, a politician accused of embezzling one hundred and fifty thousand euros to finance a political party seemed like a pickpocket. And all of them, the traders and the politicians, became small potatoes in the face of a billionaire (the richest person in France) who had offered precisely one billion euros to a photographer friend. People were also talking quite a bit about the lawsuit filed against the former president of the Republic. And the filming of a movie starring the wife of the current president. People snickered as they recounted the anecdote—true or false—according to which Woody Allen had been forced to shoot one scene, in which that tremendous actress was portraying a woman coming out of a bakery, a baguette under her arm, thirty-six times. But most of all, soccer, soccer! Matches, goals, scores, transfers of human merchandise, to the tune of millions of euros, from one club to another. Current events.

  No, nothing else for June 18, 2010. Nothing about Lieutenant Schreiber.

  Final Rounds

  We met again with Jean-Claude a few days after that date. On the table in his living room, I noticed several typed and handwritten sheets.

  “I’m trying to put my affairs in order a bit,” he explained to me, a little hesitantly.

  He was dressed as if he were getting ready to go out: a navy blue blazer, gray pants, a tie, well-polished shoes.

  Suddenly, I realized that ever since the book had come out, he had taken particular care with his appearance. “He must be expecting them to come to him!” I said to myself, with a brief clenching of pain. But of course, during those six weeks between May 8 and June 18, he had hoped for visits, interviews, meetings, and questions about what that short string of days in the spring of 1940 had held for him and for his comrades. Those six weeks reminded him of the dates registered in the Journal of Marches: battles in Flanders, in the pocket of Dunkirk, in Normandy, in Deux-Sèvres, the death of comrades, the tank on fire whose “crew could not be pulled out.”

  Yes, every morning he had been preparing to tell about the life and death of the men thanks to whom his homeland had survived: Lieutenant-Colonel Poupel, Captain de Segonzac, Lieutenant Ville, Sub-lieutenant Guillien, Officer Cadet Aussel. In the leaflet of the Journal, their names were inscribed this way, according to their ranking, squadron by squadron. And in pencil, Lieutenant Schreiber had added, here and there, two symbols: a “p” for “taken prisoner” and a cross for the dead.

  He certainly did not want to look like a rambling little old man hunched in his armchair in front of any potential journalists. He brushed his silvered hair, dressing himself as if for an official ceremony, and stood up straight, wanting to be worthy of the memory of his comrades from the regiment.

  That night, a few days after June 18, he was wearing his “media combat outfit” and seemed to be mobilized to confront a salvo of questions. His state of mind was already different, though, emancipated from the tension he had imposed on himself for weeks. He began showing me pages from his archives, letters from friends, the one from clergyman André Carette, the regiment’s chaplain, with whom he had remained very close. And also a copy of the letter he had sent de Gaulle on December 12, 1965, that began with these sentences: “Do I have a chance of being heard by you, even though I am neither a man of letters, nor a savant, nor a great manufacturer, nor a top civil servant? I am just a humble soldier in your combat forces, and as a result I am someone who has lost infinitely more than he has gained on the individual level. I am only desperately in love with my France, with our France.”

  Behind this writing—whose momentary blunders are easily noticeable to stylists and purists—is expressed the single prayer that Lieutenant Schreiber had always addressed to his compatriots: despite my origins, I am one of you, I love this country, I spilled my blood so that it might live, I would like to still be useful to it, give me the chance to be heard! He was saying it in January 1941, trying to remain in the army despite the status given to Jews. He repeated it in the sixties, writing to de Gaulle.

  And he was saying it once again now, in the present, a few days after June 18, 2010.

  The general had received him on several occasions, the last time on July 5, 1968. A long conversation, an inspiring exchange, even a clash of opinions (they spoke about the “mess” in May, strikes, disloyal politicians, relations with Israel); it was a frank and friendly discussion, the happy “chance to be heard,” and at the end, a judgment on which our current ruler would do well to reflect: “During each of those interviews, I always felt transformed by his presence and his affectionate way of letting me speak. I experienced a feeling of being stronger and freer. That is probably a characteristic of truly great men. Not only do they not make you feel that they are superior, but they allow you to believe that you are their equal!”

  That evening, as often happened during our meetings, Jean-Claude’s story would change trajectories, going back toward the war years, to that day in November 1944 when, in the village of Cercy-la-Tour, in the middle of the Nivernais, he had marched his tank platoon in front of General de Gaulle before being introduced to him.

  Listening to him, I noticed a new chord resonating in his voice, one that was a little bitter, less tinged with irony than usual. His hands were mechanically touching and moving around the letters scattered on the table. This movement and his slightly halting voice seemed to be trying to conquer the indifference of those who had so pitifully ignored his book. The archives he was showing me represented, in fact, even if he was not entirely aware of it, the final proof of what he had lived, the modest exhibits of a destiny, the last possibility of attracting other people’s attention, of obtaining the chance to be heard.

  The chance to bring Lieutenant Schreiber back to life.

  A Meteorite

  The awareness of a failure comes late to every author, in the same way as a military defeat: certain units continue the battle, kernels of resistance are still warding off the thrust of the enemy, and a few scattered soldiers even have the illusion that they are moving forward … but the defeat is already there and the writer, since we’re speaking about him, finally notices it; the calls from the press attaché have stopped, his book has disappeared from the display stands, and he feels somewhat laughable for still having the desire to defend his ideas.

  The situation was familiar t
o me, so I tried to defuse it as much as I could for Jean-Claude. In the weeks that followed June 18—as our waiting was becoming more and more pointless—I often talked to him about the caprices of literary recognition. Like an emergency survival ration, every writer holds onto these kinds of anecdotes because they help him tolerate the incomprehension, the defamations, the failure. Yes, Proust was refused by Gallimard and published at his own expense. And before him there had been Nietzsche and his forty self-published copies of Zarathustra. Schopenhauer, overwhelmed by his rejected manuscripts. Chekhov and his Mouette (Seagull), which, in the beginning, never “took off” from the stage because of skeptical audiences. Gide’s famous calculation: in twenty-five years, his Nourritures terrestres (Fruits of the Earth) achieved a print run of six hundred copies; in other words, twenty-five new readers per year! Verlaine did better: one of his poetry collections sold eight copies.

  These testaments to the blindness of one’s contemporaries did indeed make the old man smile. After all, hadn’t Flaubert, Turgenev, and a few others created a “circle of the booed” which only allowed writers reviled by public opinion to become members? Each candidate had to provide formal proof of having been “booed” by a critic.

  Jean-Claude was not fooled by these literary parallels, for his book, while not booed, had elicited a reaction that was much more difficult to parry: indifference.

  He never showed himself to be a poor loser, placed no blame, and even expressed his remorse: “I made Charles Dupêchez spend a lot of money! I feel terrible.” I reassured him; since he had never touched any advance, he was not really an author who would destroy the publishing house. And besides, just wait, maybe in July or August the book will have a rebound!

  A delayed spike in interest was wishful thinking, we knew: as if those vacationers liquefied by heat were supposed to read Lieutenant Schreiber’s memories. The publishers had already prepared for them the usual summer grazing material made from fat books whose pages would be covered with sunscreen fingerprints.