Jean-Claude pretended to believe in a hypothetical resurgence, most of all so as not to contradict my encouragements. He sometimes even exchanged roles with me: “Oh, you know, the book is out there, that’s what’s most important. If in ten years someone wants to study that period in history, they will always be able to find two or three interesting things in the story I’m telling.”
From then on, each time I went to his home, his apartment seemed to have been emptied of a presence. Nothing had moved, though: the furniture was the same, there was still the large amphora on its pedestal, and the German daggers, those war trophies, were still attached to the walls. There were the photos in which, as though I were among close friends, I recognized every gaze, every gesture, and the light of their distant days. And that snapshot where the man whose name Jean-Claude could not manage to remember is standing in a group of soldiers. On a small side table near the window, a sliver of the porcelain figurine, that decapitated little nativity figure.
One evening Jean-Claude stood up, went over, and squeezed the mutilated relic stained with dirt. Then he examined it, as if the fragment’s presence seemed out of the ordinary to him, too. I held my breath, afraid to ask a question that would disturb the shadow of the past I could see in his eyes.
“It was back in Germany, in the Black Forest. Our offensive was preparing itself and Captain de la Lance had given me the honor of commanding the head of the platoon. I was going to attack in the tank that would open the march! I was crazy with joy … and then, paf, a radio call comes in: I’ve been summoned by Colonel de Beaufort. I try to explain that we’re fifteen minutes away from attacking but … an order is an order. So I leave, and Lieutenant Mauclerc was to command the head tank in my place.”
He told the story I already knew, but this time he was holding the broken figurine in his hand. As if, with this touching, he had wanted to attest to the truth of what he was saying.
The sliver of porcelain resembled a speck of cosmic dust that, minute but undeniable, demonstrated the existence of a galaxy that no one wanted to believe was real.
V
His Own Sky
Under a Sign
Colonel de Beaufort had summoned him for nothing! Or almost nothing. Miffed, Lieutenant Schreiber goes back to his tank; the whole squadron has already left. Over the radio, he is ordered to remain at the edge of the forest to warn of a German counterattack. He decides to do a reconnaissance over the terrain separating him from the enemy. He crawls, scanning the surroundings with binoculars. Suddenly, from the turret of his tank, one of his men flags him over to tell him this: Lieutenant Mauclerc (the man who took command at the front of the group) has just been killed!
“This was such a blow to me that I instinctively thrust my fingers into the earth; I was still lying stretched out among the trees. I squeezed the earth where I could have been buried—in place of Mauclerc. Regaining my senses, I saw this figurine in my hand: a small porcelain virgin without a head. A sign. There were no houses in the surrounding area. I would later learn that Mauclerc had been decapitated by a shell.”
He speaks about this with a confounding simplicity, which makes a person want to tell him not to concentrate too much on games of chance, those fateful coincidences of heads or tails, those “signs of destiny.” We’re in the country of sixty million Cartesians, Jean-Claude!
It is with the same level of candor that he has always told the story of his discovery of God. On the afternoon of June 17, 1940, the young soldier leaves the hospital at the Chateau du Hâ fort in Bordeaux, dragging his wounded leg. Fleeing the heat, he pushes open the door to the cathedral, which is completely deserted. No burst of spirituality, just the desire to stop banging against the cobblestones with his crutch and to wait in the cool for his train that leaves late that evening. He sits down, exhausted, worn out by the pain, and feels drowsiness begin to weigh on his eyelids. The shadow of the nave, the luminous openings of the stained-glass windows, the Christ above the altar; all of these things are mixed together in a single sway of fatigue. It is then that a voice, very distinct, reaches him: “What are you waiting for to join us?” The soldier opens his eyes, meeting the Savior’s gaze. He will ask to be baptized in the church in Ribérac in Dordogne and will preserve for his entire life a faith that is insatiable and fierce.
He says it and writes about it this way. Illumination. Revelation. The road to Damascus walked, in Bordeaux, on his lame leg.
It’s hard to avoid a sigh of compassion: “Sweet Jesus! Doesn’t Lieutenant Schreiber know about the corrosive acid his words are falling into? The prevailing mentality is one in which intelligence must be cynical and derision replaces all forms of judgment. A story like this could only elicit a viperine jeer: a guillotined virgin, a Christ who starts talking, you’ve got to be joking!”
To avoid the vipers, does this tone that borders on naiveté need to be adjusted? Should Jean-Claude be persuaded to add a few sentences about the ambiguous familiarity that unites every soldier with death? Death is everywhere, in the mad variety of mutilated, disemboweled, and burned bodies. And yet, mysteriously, death has not yet touched his body, this young body that breathes, sniffs the scent of the earth on the outskirts of the Black Forest, and comes to believe that death does not see him, or else she has decided to spare him. Or perhaps, by an inconceivable harmony of words, movements, thoughts, and wishes (or prayers?), a secret understanding has linked him to death; from now on, she will pass just next to him, making him understand that she has seen him, but she will leave him intact, killing in his place a certain Lieutenant Mauclerc. And so that he can be sure of the reality of this choice, she will put into his hand a small, decapitated relic. The old man could tell any number of stories about how war makes even the most convinced rationalists begin to watch for signs and collect talismans.
He could also describe the infinite confusion of the young Officer Cadet Schreiber who, limping on his crutch, is crossing Bordeaux one day in June 1940. He does not know that the war is lost and that the armistice will be signed in a few days. He is still hoping to take up arms again and return to his regiment. At twenty-two, he carries within him a past that a person rarely possesses in peaceful times: the keen understanding of courage and fear, the ordinariness of killing, the extreme ease with which men slide toward an animality that is multiplied tenfold by the power of machines. Most of all, he knows the insidious nearness of death: the tank burning in the place where his own had passed a few seconds before, a volley of shots that whips over the turret he has just dived into. A coincidence? Fate? Or a supernatural force that is watching over him?
Our reason mocks this uncomplicated mysticism, doesn’t it? To become less taunting, all we would have to do is find ourselves, just once, beneath the pretty little trajectories of tracer bullets, the ones that draw out their path in the darkness as they approach your body. Anyone who has experienced this knows that at that point, a person would accept even the most irrational protection.
I have often spoken with Jean-Claude about those moments in war when our arrogant reasoning suddenly becomes humble and seeks support in ideas that at first sight appear quite far-fetched. Signs of destiny, omens … before we call this young soldier superstitious, we must be able to explain to him what place reason has in the monstrous clashes of populations, the extermination of millions of humans, the planetary meat mincer of lives that he was swept up in at such a young age.
It is this soldier, rattled in every cell in his being, who pushed open the door to the Bordeaux cathedral.
The old man would prefer not to add these kinds of extra comments to his story. He wants to tell the facts as he experienced them, to recall his emotions without their retinue of wise ruminations. But more importantly, as he has gotten older, he has become more and more aware of a supreme truth, one far broader than his memories as a young soldier and far simpler than the doctrines the fiesta philosophers were constructing.
For him, this truth had the force of a new birth, a new path he c
ould step onto, distancing himself from the farce playing out all around him with its bloodshed, its rapacity, its comedy of vanities, its exaltation of reason, of history.
“War is one hell of a summary of the world,” he told me one day. “Death, survival instincts, hatred, love, flesh, the spirit; the soldier has the chance to probe the depths of all of these things and in a very short time. And if he is not stupid, he learns fundamental things! He acquires an unequaled knowledge of his mortal body, of its laughable limits, and also knowledge of his role in the great comedy of society; in war, we see the very same human theater, but the pistols are not made of plastic. Yes, the same merry-go-round is turning. What is most important comes afterward, when the soldier discovers that it is possible to go further than the whirlwind of those bodies filled with the desire to live and the fear of dying. Yes, when he understands that there is a way off of the merry-go-round.”
A way off of the merry-go-round…. The memory of these words returned to me in those sad days of post-June 18, 2010, when our hopes were dying out one after the other.
Charles Dupêchez, with the help of his assistant and friend, Sylvie Goguel, fought until the end: “I called one of our authors, he promised me he’d talk to someone at Libération.” Nothing. “Wait! There might be a little piece in Paris-Match next week.” Nothing at all! The summer holidays were approaching, everyone was getting ready to leave, and a soccer championship was occupying the screens, the radio waves, and people’s minds.
Jean-Claude did not show any bitterness. These disappointments with the media must have seemed of little importance to him next to the death of Lieutenant Mauclerc. No, the merry-go-round of small Parisian games did not interest him. He only regretted that he hadn’t been able to make the names of his comrades heard, for before they died, some of them, like him, had caught a glimpse of the way.
It was while thinking about these men that he once confided to me, in a voice that was very detached from the daily sounds around him: “If I lived to be this old, maybe it’s so that I would have the time to tell their stories.”
The Words for Another Life
And then comes that August evening, an indecisive storm that ends up pouring out a fine rain tinted by the sunset. I arrive a little early, and having come up too quickly I see the old man straining to lift himself out of his armchair.
Three months have passed since the book’s release. The bookstores are going to return the unsold volumes to the publisher, who in turn will send those “stocks” to the paper masher. When the new titles appear in the fall, the book will no longer exist.
I prepared myself to tell him, organizing a whole arsenal of stylistic devices. I must play on several registers, starting with the one we use most often: “Listen, Jean-Claude, we have lost a battle, but we have not lost the war!” Then I’ll also talk about “long sellers,” books with an unexpected longevity that rival the success of bestsellers inflated by fashion and publicity. But most importantly, Charles Dupêchez promised me that Jean-Claude would never receive that atrocious letter sent to writers to inform them that, in view of a “reduction in stocks,” their book is going to be sent to the paper masher.
Yes, we must spare this young ninety-two-year-old author.
As I enter his home, I notice right away that he is no longer wearing his “combat outfit”; no blazer, and no tie, either. The evening is very hot, this is true. Nor are there any more archive pages on the table in the living room. At first, there aren’t even any words. The storm that can’t decide whether or not to dissolve over the city furiously shakes the branches in front of the open windows and fills the room with a rustling of leaves, preventing either of us from speaking without raising our voices.
Dressed in a short-sleeved shirt and summer pants, the old man is allowing a fragility to show. At his age, it recalls the leanness of adolescents. The bony relief of his shoulders, the skinny molding of his elbows and wrists … growing old, beneath life’s polar latitudes, is as rapid as childlike growth. And yet, since I have known him—more than four years—I have never detected any sign of a slump, an alteration of features, a warping of his gaze. This is the first time that, suppressing an influx of pain, I say to myself, “Now he’s really gotten old!” This verdict is absurd, considering it’s being applied to a person making a start on his tenth decade, but at the same time it is accurate: a sudden change, impossible to deny, marks the contours of his face, his silhouette, his gestures, and the expression in his eyes.
A voice in me repeats, “Age, yes, age,” but the certainty that I would like to silence at all costs is undeniable: in telling his story these past few years, in remembering himself in his book, he has lived in the midst of an atemporal past, in rhythm with the young lives that it resuscitated in him. In the body of Lieutenant Schreiber. That August evening, the years that had been kept at bay had broken through the dam. Time had reclaimed its due with the violence of a tidal wave. The young soldier had been frozen on a book cover destined to be reduced to paper dust. The old man had put away his clothing for grander days, put away his letters and the photos of his comrades, and without protesting, had opened his life to the years that had arrived late.
The storm skirts around Paris, ending with a calm rain that fell from an almost cloudless sky. From the courtyard rises the smell of dampened earth, the breath the plants can take again after the furnace of the day. Jean-Claude stands up to draw aside a curtain and his gaze lingers on that photo: a small grayish snapshot in which a young woman is adjusting her curls, snatched by a gust of wind.
He starts telling me the story I know: early in the morning on November 11, 1942, he fled his parents’ home in the company of his friend Sabine. A long walk close to German tanks, the arrival in Tarascon, the missed train to Marseille, and the happy decision to take refuge in a hotel where their pursuers would never come looking for them.
I never interrupt when his tale takes another tour through events he has already related to me. With each repetition, a new detail emerges, a forgotten person passes through the field of vision, the composition changes. The density of our memories relies predominantly on the number of these double exposures.
This time, it is not a question of details: the scene is relived in an entirely different way. In fact, it is also told in a very different tone. The speed of the plot (flight, anxiety, refuge) cedes its place to slow-paced words interrupted by long pauses, allowing this murmured narration to include the sunset that is bathing the rain behind the windows with color and that other rain, just as light and sun-colored, that shone in the small opening between the shutters of their hotel room during that strange morning of November 11, 1942. On that day there had been, of course, the deadly tension of the game they were playing, and the novelty of those embraces just steps away from the streets where their pursuers were circling in their cars, pleasure sharpened by danger, the somewhat crazy joy of having dared to take the gamble and having perhaps gotten away with it.
Today, these emotions hardly emerge in Jean-Claude’s story. Instead, what seems more intense is the astonishment that had struck the young man back then and is now finding its way, amplified, to the old storyteller seventy years later. It is a difficult sensation to express: those two lovers whose happiness hung on a single careless word from the hotelier, those two particles thrown into the monstrous avalanche of history, those two young desperados who were able to free themselves from it, thanks to their love. The young woman falls asleep and her friend stays awake, more and more aware that what he had mistaken for a brief reprieve is revealing itself to be a new life, unsuspected, the essence of what he has to live. He tries to understand it, but his thoughts are only of that autumn sun, that light with which the yellowed leaves of the plane trees illuminate the room; the warm wind that passes and makes the shutters move; the presence, so touching in its abandon, of this young woman; and minutes that had never before known such transparency, this slowness given rhythm by the brightness and shadow of the parading foliage that m
orning.
The old man is sure to have spent time inside this other life, and the words simply have not yet been found to say it. There was also the night in a city liberated at the cost of bloody fighting, that Baden-Baden unrecognizable in its warrior décor. And that woman who welcomed him in, whose tenderness interrupted his soldier nightmares. She spoke the language of the enemy and yet … in actual fact, it was not just a night of love. It was … how to explain it?
Yes, an exhilarating freedom, the feeling of no longer playing. Exactly like after his return to Paris in May 1945. A festive city, effervescent, crowds excited by the end of the dangers. And his own solitude, the almost physical impossibility of approaching other people, of speaking to them, of telling them what he had just been through … and those few days spent with the woman he didn’t have to explain anything to because she had been through the same war. Thanks to this uselessness of words, they had very briefly lived like foreigners, emancipated from the world’s playacting, discovering a life off of the merry-go-round.
The daylight has died out; only the tops of the trees in the courtyard keep a bit of the paleness of the setting sun. Jean-Claude stands up and turns on a lamp.
“Actually, what I’ve told you, those weren’t really love stories.”
An irritation resonates in his voice: he most certainly does not want to give the impression that he is drawing up a list of his conquests! No, the moments he has just mentioned have nothing to do with a seducer’s prize list. Those loves were of an entirely other nature: they did not drag the lovers into the thickness of the bonds of desire and possession. Quite the contrary; they were freeing.
Lieutenant Schreiber's Country Page 9