He has an inkling that he will not know how to say it. How could he express that distant feeling of being reborn into a different life? Of no longer belonging to a world where, beneath the windows of the hotel where the lovers are hiding, gloomy individuals in leather coats are walking by? A world that at night makes the tank tracks squeal in front of the house where an unknown young woman whispers tender words to a soldier struggling in the depths of a nightmare. A world that swirls around those forgetful Parisian crowds who are happy to find lightness again, the merry-go-round of life, and who don’t even notice the couple (a young officer and a nurse) who silently fade away in the midst of a city in celebration.
I sense in him the fear of appearing sentimental, of rewriting his war as if it were the chronicle of a dashing hussar who, after each battle, rushes into a new bed of love. His features harden, and in the twilight he seems to see the shadow of days that he alone is still able to examine.
“It was in Alsace. We had spent three days unable to leave our tanks. We’d been living inside this hovel of steel, suffocating on the exhaust of the shells we were firing; the Germans were attacking relentlessly. We no longer felt hungry, we had very little water left, we were only sleeping in snatches, and also … you already know this: war is not very romantic. We had to relieve ourselves in shell cartridges and empty them through a slit. The movies never mention those kinds of details. At the end of the third day, we started losing our minds. There were five of us crammed into this armored tomb that bullets were ricocheting off of all the time. We focused on each other with our burning, wild eyes; we were aware that each minute could turn our bodies into a pulp of flesh and blood; yes, a single shell would have been enough. Usually, one doesn’t have time to see death coming. And there, we had seventy-two hours to think about it. Well, I was in no mood for mulling things over, I felt everything all at once, like a prisoner sentenced to death: these five bodies, five souls with their unique destinies, their memories, their hopes for love, their dreams of the future; in a few seconds all of that would be clumped together in a pile of meat from which would emerge arms, bones, torn-off faces, burst eyes, shouts, groans, the hissing of blood on burning metal. And in this pile, there would be this me, with my skin, my breath, my thoughts, the reflection in me of the people I loved, the worn sheet of the last letter I’d received from them … all of this, in that organic heap. The idea was so horrible that I acted out of instinct. I pushed open the turret, pulled myself out of the tank, jumped into the snow, and started pacing beneath the sights of German barrels.
“Each mouthful of the air’s coolness made me so intoxicated that I had the sensation I was biting into it. My body was living like never before, or rather it was rediscovering what life could be if men had dared to exist differently. Yes, if they had dared to be reborn into that new life, to free themselves from the insanity that shut them inside the steel coffins of their tanks. On this snow-covered field, somewhere in Alsace … I felt almost divinely powerful and, at the same time, very weak, because I knew I was incapable of telling other people what I had just understood. The most incredible thing was that during the twenty or so minutes of my ‘stroll,’ not one shot was fired. It was as if I had truly found myself in a fundamentally different dimension.”
He is quiet for a moment, then murmurs with a smile, “But to tell people about it, I would have to write another book, wouldn’t I?”
I know that on that evening he expressed the essence of this new existence, the possibility of which he had hinted at several times already. A confinement within a situation, a trap of history, or in a role, and suddenly, this liberation, the serene certainty of being somewhere else.
It is this revelation that he had so wanted to share with those who, like him, had remained imprisoned in the bowels of the tank. And throughout his entire life, this thought had possessed him. To the point where, in it, he had come to see the very definition of the human condition: a long series of confinements; a slew of penitentiaries interrupted by the hope of pushing away a sheet of steel, of jumping to the ground, breathing that snowy chill and finding the sight of the barrels pointed against one another ridiculous.
VI
Beyond Words
In the Name of a Soldier
I will spend the following month in Russia and will not see Jean-Claude until the end of October. The geographic separation gives the illusion of a long gap; the time we spent looking for a publisher and waiting for the book’s release was in another era—a far distant past. Especially since in this part of central Siberia, on the banks of the Taimura, the snow arrived the last week in September. In the morning, the fishing nets hanging over the fence of the house where I am staying are covered in a lace made of frost. Piotr, an old friend of mine who invites me to stay with him in this almost deserted village, works in Moscow and runs around Europe and America, but as soon as the moment presents itself he comes back here, to the house where he was born and that he wants to save from ruin. The only street in the area features many izbas—log huts—with sunken roofs and empty windows.
Just like his return to this house, Piotr’s story often goes back toward a subject that has pursued him since his youth and that he talks about, unaware of the repetition, with what must be the same experience of turmoil, the same pain, every time. Every night, concerned that he will bring it up and suffer as a result, I try to reroute the conversation, pushing him to tell me about his latest travels or reminding him of when we were young, our military service in Afghanistan. He gives in, responding through a haze of visions that cloud his gaze, and then, inevitably, he begins talking about his father.
I know by heart the story of the man who died when Piotr was eleven. An artilleryman during the Second World War, the young soldier had found himself all alone with his cannon one day, facing the German tanks. The other gunners had just been killed. There were a few interminable seconds during which the idea of his finished life—an imminent death beneath the tracks of a tank, his body being crushed between the steel and the dirt, this physical contact with the void—became a part of him, a gash that would never heal over in his memory.
Piotr sighs. “He told me about that episode more than once, but I was ten years old, I wanted to be running through the taiga forest, not staying at the house and listening to the old people.”
A short while afterward, his father died. The boy, without realizing it, had retained not so much the story itself (the shots of a nearby battery would save the young artilleryman) but the impression of a very great fragility in his father, who in the end he had known so little and had tried so little to get to know. With age, this vague culpability would only worsen, and now, fifty years later, Piotr probably tells himself that the twenty-year-old soldier (his father) could today be his son.
He must also think that by letting his father speak, by listening to him, he could have, by way of his childish questions, his curiosity, or his naive astonishment, erased from his father’s wounded memory the deadly emptiness he felt in front of those tank cannons.
“I believe my father understood a very simple truth that most people avoid thinking about,” Piotr tells me. “Whatever story we tell, religion or not, belief or not, we are always alone before death. And essentially, he lived his whole life like that—alone! No, he loved my mother, me, and my sister, to be sure. But that other solitude, the one he experienced during the war, he never got over it.”
I don’t interrupt him, telling myself that this sense of solitude, like an inheritance of culpability, had been passed down from the father whose confidences he had neglected. And now he will continually—and, as he grows older, more and more painfully—relive this scene: his father’s wavering silhouette, that terribly young man lost amid explosions, overturned earth, and dead bodies ripped to shreds by the caterpillar tracks. Alone.
I begin to talk to him about Lieutenant Schreiber as a response to his own story. A young French tank operator at the other end of Europe, the same frozen plains in that winter
of 1944–1945, the same vision—monotone and atypical every time—of torn bodies, the same banging of shell bursts on steel, the same awareness of the extreme speed with which his breath (“my breath,” the soldier thinks) could be mixed with the snow, catch, and give out.
Minute by minute, Piotr seems to be emerging out of the past that has been keeping him prisoner and starts asking me questions, asking me to specify certain dates, names, and places.
I end up taking him through Lieutenant Schreiber’s entire book! I don’t even notice, at first, that in the evening Piotr no longer starts in again with his chronicle of the young artilleryman, his father, alone in the face of death.
From now on, he knows that his father was not alone, and that another life, so different from his own and yet so close, was keeping the young Russian soldier company in the inferno of battle. And that perhaps, by an unimaginable chain of coincidences, his father’s life had been saved thanks to the courage of a young French lieutenant, thanks to that “smiling and fearless kid” who was fighting in Alsace, in Germany, and attracting his share of Panzers, too. The very same tank, a heavy German Tiger, that could have, had it found itself on the Eastern Front, wiped out with one shell or a round of machine gun fire the silhouette of a young artilleryman astray among the dead.
Piotr’s voice changes, free of the tension that always gave him away as soon as he talked about himself, about his parents. His gaze loses that saddened background he usually tried to conceal by exaggerating his cheerfulness and carefree mood.
He seems soothed to me, like a man who, after a very long wandering, has finally returned to his home.
The day of my departure, I am awakened by the sound of hammering. The sun has not yet come up and it is the frost’s whiteness that is filling the izba with brightness, an already wintry light. I think that Piotr is perhaps in the process of repairing his old boat, or perhaps strengthening the fence. I get dressed, go out onto the small wooden front steps, and I see him. One nail squeezed tightly between his lips, he sticks another in as he attaches a small board to the corner of his house. I take a few steps and make out the characters lined up next to each other on it from one end to the other. The inscription, in blue felt pen, marks the freshly planed wood: Rue du Lieutenant Schreiber (Lieutenant Schreiber Street).
During the six-hour return flight from Siberia to Moscow, I have the time to recall a good number of the cities, towns, and villages that Jean-Claude liberated aboard his tank between Provence and Alsace. I know that not one street, not one town square in any of those amnesiac localities, bears the soldier’s name.
A Burned Tree
On the day of our reunion in Paris, at the end of October, it is almost hot. A wind out of the south, bursting with sun, is painting a summer tableau in motion: a crowd of people in short sleeves, full terraces, the liveliness of a Saturday (or is it already vacation time again?).
Jean-Claude has just called me on my cell phone to say that he will be a little late. I sit down in a café near his place. I never expected it to be like this: to me his building seems to be inside a vision I have strangely outrun, as though it had been pushed back toward the most ancient years of my life. And that’s what it is, another era, the one of the publication of his book, of our waiting.
I don’t notice his arrival right away. Because of the roadwork that is underway, the taxi drops him off nearly fifty yards away from the entrance to his building. When I see him he has already paid the driver and is entering into the back and forth of people walking past.
It is his black suit that makes him immediately visible; he is probably coming back from a ceremony, most likely a funeral. I remember what he said to me one day: “At my age, the letters one receives are most often death announcements. In fact, I sometimes feel like I am moving through a forest of dead trees.”
In the midst of a crowd of people resembling Southerners, his silhouette looks more like a tree burned in a fire.
I let ten minutes pass before going to join him. Enough time to discern within myself the echo of his words, their slowness, their power.
As I come in, I spot him in the small hallway that extends along the living room in his apartment and whose walls are punctuated here and there with photos. At that very moment he happens to be hanging one up, but the ring on the back of the frame refuses to pass onto the hook. In fact, I arrive precisely when this gesture is becoming exasperating; come on now, aim for that damned hook with this minuscule lasso of a loop!
He turns around, greets me with a somewhat embarrassed smile, and without making another attempt he puts the photo back on the table in the living room. With a quick glance I recognize the snapshot in its old wooden frame. A German city, military vehicles in the background, that young woman in uniform. She’s the one Lieutenant Schreiber met again in May of ’45, in a festive Paris where everything seemed so strange to him.
Jean-Claude lets out a small sigh. “Ah, this hook, worse than a cup and ball game!” But this regret, I know, has an entirely other meaning.
He offers me a glass, sits down, pours himself a golden drop of whiskey, and stays a moment without moving, his gaze drawn toward the rippling of the branches behind the windows. The tiny opening of the balcony door lets in the sound of a television set; the hubbub of a stadium before the match, the excited voice of a commentator who says he is sure that “tonight, millions of French people are going to quiver.”
The old man stands up, shuts the door, and emits a small laugh with a contraction of sadness: “Those poor people, that’s all they have to make them quiver! How could a people become dulled to this extent?”
He sits down again, seeming a little grumpy, but, already mocking himself for having such an attitude, he says, “Forgive me, I’m playing the old grouch. It’s just that there are moments when these silly things hurt more than usual.”
His eyes half closed, he returns little by little to the detachment that had earlier made him so different from the suntanned crowd: a man with white hair, a black suit; a burned tree.
His voice becomes more subdued. “What struck me earlier, at the cemetery, was how easily a life fades away. A slab of stone, a name, and for a curious passerby it’s just a tomb like all the others. Actually, the fading starts well before that. An old woman is walking down the street; people are passing, overtaking her, annoyed at having to walk around this shadow who is moving too slowly. And no one thinks to wonder what her life had been like, her youth. Apart from a few people close to her, no one knows that during the war, as a nurse, she had saved hundreds of wounded men, from Toulon to Strasbourg.”
In his way of speaking, there is the tension of the man whose voice would try to cover the rumbling of a strong wind or stand against the hostility of a multitude. In spite of the closed windows, the rumbling of the television hisses, a background noise blending the screeching of fans and the hysterical squealing of the commentator, the shout of the crowd that is “quivering.”
“And besides, how could I tell people about the life we had? You remember how I talked about General Picard in my book? A week ago I reread those pages … I had the urge to tear them out!”
May, 1940. On the orders of Lieutenant-Colonel Poupel, Officer Cadet Schreiber must find the division HQ, which relocates from one town to another as it follows the chaotic movements at the front. Finally, at nightfall, he succeeds in locating the HQ that is set up in a grocery store. He introduces himself to the general and passes on the message he had been given: the loss of thirty tanks in battle. The man’s response gives him doubts about the reality of what is happening. “What the hell do I care?!” The general is in a flagrant state of intoxication; his kepi is sliding over one ear and his eyes are barely able to make out the young officer cadet standing in front of him.
“At twenty-two years old, the scene felt like I’d been hit on the back of the head with a sledgehammer. That night, something inside of me fell apart. And it was in losing the things I was certain of that I realized how much I had believ
ed in military honor, in the values of heroism and abnegation. As a matter of fact, those were the ideas my father had always held to. In my book, I talked about General Picard like a colorful and pathetic drunk. And yet … I should have explained that we had been betrayed. The battle plan that the general had prepared was well thought out, I know this now. Except there was no longer any overall commander. And Picard saw that for the privates, his offensive was turning into a firing line where our tanks were burning by the dozen. He gave the order not to move to stop the carnage and … he lost it. Yes, I should have written that. But I thought it would have been too long, too hard to understand for one of today’s readers. So I gave the anecdote: a drunken general. Not a bad way to amuse the peanut gallery, eh?”
He bends over the low table and grabs his book, which is lost among the newspapers, and turns it over to look at the back cover.
“And here, you see, they wrote: the anti-Semitism of the French army. That’s not one hundred percent untrue. I ran into a few officers who detested Jews. But there was also Poupel, the commander of our Fourth Cuir. Taken prisoner by the Germans, he managed to get a letter passed out in which he requested a medal for me, talking about my achievements in battle. Can you imagine doing that for a Jew from the shacks of a Nazi camp?”
He almost shouts it. Then, lowering his voice: “Of course, I could have told the journalists about that, if….”
His sentence remains unfinished. The old man guesses that his tone might be interpreted as a sign of resentment or a plea in disguise, and therefore completely futile.
A wrinkle of severity hardens his lips, his gaze sharpens; the people who shamefully ignored his book would have been stared down this way. He adds something in a neutral voice, one no longer intended for all of those indifferent people.
Lieutenant Schreiber's Country Page 10