Blood Dark

by Louis Guilloux

  “Do you believe in mankind?”

  Cripure’s phrase. Lucien thought he could hear him. Without trying to, Faurel had mimicked the old master’s tone of voice, as it amused him to do when he’d been Cripure’s student. How many times had Cripure spoken in class of that idiotic belief in a so-called man, capable of so-called conquests . . .

  “You can put it that way if you want to,” Lucien replied.

  “Why did you agree to be his second?” Faurel asked.

  “Out of friendship.”

  “But you just said . . .”

  “That he deserved all our pity. I should have added: all our friendship too. I made my choice, but that doesn’t mean I abandoned my friendships. Cripure stands for the inverse of what I want. Is that a reason not to help him in extremis? We’re not executioners.”

  “We?”

  “Well . . . I’m going too far.” He wasn’t going to set about explaining these kinds of things to this staff officer? He’d chattered on too much. He got up. “Perhaps we should involve ourselves a little in this document?”

  “One moment,” said Faurel, obliging him to sit back down. “You use words that frighten me—Cripure will disappear, help him in extremis. What are you really thinking? You’re speaking in the abstract, aren’t you, when you say disappear? You’re taking Cripure as a symbol?”

  “I’m thinking also of the individual that he is.”

  “Oh! You mean to say that he’ll take . . .”

  “What else could he do, otherwise?” Lucien replied briskly. He added, “It’s why I ask myself if we’re doing the right thing, if, not good sense but goodness wouldn’t have been to let him have his duel.”

  The others, in their corner, did battle with the pen and their voices around the table.

  “Then, and you can think what you like about this, I realized that after all, Nabucet is less certain than the other solution.”

  “Out of goodness, that too?”

  “I told you you could think what you like.”

  His coldness seemed more put on than involuntary to Faurel, and he didn’t reply.

  “Listen,” Faurel went on, putting his hand on Lucien’s shoulder, “between you and me, we have in common this man we both love—”

  Lucien cut him off. “It’s not about knowing if one should live or die, love or hate. It’s about knowing: in the name of what?”

  And their conversation ended there.

  •

  The others, once they’d got something in motion, started to be shocked at the absence of Faurel and Lucien. Moka, putting down his pen, stuck his long, bird-like neck out towards them. “Let’s have a reading! A reading! Tell us what you think!”

  He’d become jovial again. This time, his luck had come through. The document had been written in such a way that it didn’t seem possible to him that Cripure would refuse to sign. They’d completed the overwhelming tour de force of passing off the “universal slap,” which had escaped Cripure against his will and which was certainly given without the intention of offending Nabucet. But Nabucet too, had to make a sort of apology. That was Captain Plaire’s undertaking. “You get yours to sign, and I’ll take care of my side,” he’d said to Moka. And Babinot had fallen in line.

  Moka, standing, gave a solemn reading of the text. When he had finished, he placed the document on the table. “What say you, dear sirs?”

  “Nabucet will never sign that,” said Faurel.

  “Oh,” replied the captain, “I’ll take care of it. If it’s only a signature you need, you can count on me!”

  “So be it, gentlemen,” said Faurel, “you’ve done a great piece of work. Your mission for tonight is accomplished. It’s time for some refreshments, don’t you think? It seems our little reunion has gone rather late, and I thought it would be good to have a little cold supper prepared. Let us move into the dining room. My car will take you home.”

  CLAIRE fought to at least spare herself the folly of placing too much hope in a man she didn’t even know, who would perhaps listen with only one ear, bored, or even hostile, since really he was a staff officer and complicit. But perhaps not. Everything she’d heard rumored about him, all she’d been able to guess from the rare times she’d seen him in public, like a few hours ago at that ridiculous party where they’d decorated his wife, came back to her memory; her courage returned, and she thought that her excursion would be undoubtedly well received, that in any case Faurel couldn’t be a bad man.

  At the edge of town, practically almost in the countryside, the avenue that lead to the Faurels’ forked off a roundabout, and the deputy’s chateau rose behind it, defended by bars, as if there were crocodiles ready to bite. Of course, it wasn’t a chateau except in name, since there was nothing in the way of architecture. It was a bourgeois house, larger and more pretentious than the others, surrounded by far-stretching lawns and gardens, a façade in pure 1900s style, as serene as its era. At the sight of that façade, one could guess that the man who built it had been a bigwig. The chateau was in fact the work of Madame Faurel’s father, the Count of Trinquaille, a great hunter, huge eater, big smoker, big drinker, owner of tons of property, and huge dandy, prodigious fucker of women, fat and crass in everything, loving the fatness and the crassness. This fat descendant of a large, crass family had taken a liking to this little town, and for a widow here, and since, strangely, he didn’t own anything in town, he’d built (with money stolen from his farmers) this chateau, which seemed to have been built for a Monsieur Prudhomme. And yet, the chateau took on a feudal aspect at night, as if the count had influenced his architects without knowing it. But perhaps it was also that Monsieur Prudhomme, feudal himself, liked feudal castles, as he liked to walk on the skins of lions other people had killed. And still the straight eaves flanked the building with its pointed roofs, high in the air, spiked with arrows on weather vanes and lightning rods straight as pikes, like the lances and standards of fantastical knights who jousted on the roofs, perhaps against the town or against the clouds. The weather vanes creaked like the clanking of armor. One of them stood out in black against a shred of pink sky and seemed to lead the cortege.

  •

  Claire rang the bell, realizing sharply that this moment would engrave itself forever in her memory, that she’d always remember, until the end of her life, the tinkling of the bell in the night. Dogs barked in response to her ring, and someone came, a man in clogs who held a lantern and a guard dog on a leash.

  Above the grate, a lamp shone, lighting the deserted drive, and the avenue leading to the chateau looked entirely pink and white under the ashy foliage of lindens. She had to negotiate with the concierge through the grate, to say that it was about something urgent.

  But the concierge wanted to discuss it. A rather late visit by a woman . . . hmm. And his boss wasn’t expecting anyone. Was it perhaps an old mistress, with a revolver up her sleeve? That wasn’t unheard of.

  “Monsieur Deputy is very occupied at the moment,” he said.

  He didn’t think those gentlemen had finished their discussion yet, and he wasn’t totally sure the deputy would be in shape to receive anyone. But in the end, he went to ask. He tied up his dog, opened the grate, and Claire finally entered the park. He left her there.

  The wooden clogs slipped on the too-fine sand of the drive, and the man, still holding his lantern, walked slowly towards the chateau where she could make out the lighted rectangle of a window. The night smelled of earth and wet wood. The dogs weren’t barking anymore, but in the back of their kennels, they growled softly without stopping, making a savage accompaniment to the light sound of a breeze in the branches, brought to the town on the faraway rising tide.

  •

  After a cruel wait, at last the man in clogs returned. She heard his monotonous and indifferent steps at the end of the drive; she saw his lantern, which he still held out at the end of his arm. She could go in! The deputy would see her that very moment.

  She followed him.

  The
man took off his clogs, and they went into the immense vestibule. He opened a door, showed her into an elegant little parlor, and she’d barely sat down when Faurel appeared.

  She trembled and stood up, seized with panic, her sight clouding with the blood that rushed to her head. She wasn’t going to be able to say a word . . . How could she speak of Pierre to this elegant man, so visibly different from his surroundings?

  •

  Yet she spoke, and as she spoke, in a calm voice, raising her eyes to Faurel from time to time to ensure that he was understanding, the deputy became somber. He changed his seat to be nearer to her, as if to hear her better, but really it was so that he could better hide his eyes. He’d understood. It was too late. And time enough for a hundred interventions wouldn’t have helped at all. She didn’t know them!

  He asked, “When did you receive the letter?”

  “This evening. The five o’clock post.”

  “Do you have it on you?”

  She took the letter out of her bag and handed it to him.

  “Dated the day before yesterday,” he said, handing it back to her. And he was quiet. Claire put the letter back in her bag.

  “Yes, the day before yesterday.”

  And announcing the execution for tomorrow morning, he thought.

  “My husband wanted to leave for Paris, but . . .”

  “I know. There was a riot at the station this evening. There were no more trains for civilians.”

  “Only you can tell me you tell me if there’s still something to be done.”

  Claire’s voice was almost natural, like her gestures. Nothing betrayed her distress. There was an almost perfect symmetry in her, a coherence of herself with her sorrow. Faurel felt it and he was afraid. He was less fearful of saying what had to be said than he was of the connection created between himself and this woman—a connection absolutely without lies. He couldn’t fool her, even if he wanted to. By everything she was in that moment, she forced him to resemble her, so that she drew him, in spite of himself, into a country of cruel truth, absolute, where he wasn’t sure that he would escape suffocation.

  She was waiting for his response. He couldn’t find the words, at once racked and complicit before this woman who was also a judge. He wished she hadn’t come. That cowardly desire—he justified it with his own sorrow. Wasn’t it some sort of injustice that she’d chosen him to bear this burden? He felt a moment of hate towards her, as if she were no longer a wife and a mother full of grief but a pain in him, like a wound in his flesh he should have had the right to resist. The moment passed. He discovered something else, a strange necessity of the circumstances, by virtue of which her presence here was legitimate, maybe even necessary. Two human beings, couldn’t they find each other this way and see into the depths of each other through their connection to the most extreme sadness?

  He finally dared to raise his head. She hadn’t moved, hands crossed over her bag.

  “If I were a doctor, and if you’d called me to the bedside of a sick person, would you ask me to tell you the truth?”

  She said yes, with her lips and her nod.

  “Yes?”

  “Yes.”

  He didn’t say anything else. She’d understood. Her eyes closed. She turned pale all at once, that supernatural pallor of women after giving birth. He saw before his eyes that transformation of her face, turning toward an absolutely pure beauty that was almost transparent—the face she must have in the moment of love, and surely the one she would have in death. As for his own face, he felt it hardening, tightening at the top of his cheeks, grimacing. Claire closed her hands over her bag once again and her fingers linked. He bent towards her, ready to catch the fainting body in his arms. But she fought with all her might, as if swimming from the depths of the water to the light of day, not for love of the light, but because, above sorrow, there was still something to reach. This horror must be overcome—the horrible revelation that not only can children die, but they can be delivered to the executioners.

  She wanted to get up, and didn’t succeed right away. She felt a weight of lead all over her body, a heavy disturbance, and when she finally stood, it seemed that everything was in chaos around her. Out of instinct, she reached for something to lean on, found the back of the chair, put her hand on it. Faurel had also stood up, feeling the same grimace on his face. She heard him offer a bit of port and she refused, stammered.

  “Thank you.”

  “How can I assist you?”

  She refused again.

  “Thank you. You have been . . .”

  The word wouldn’t come. He bowed his head. And Claire took a step towards the door.

  “It would be very easy to have you driven home.”

  “I think not,” she said.

  “My car is at the ready, in fact, we just . . .”

  “No. I prefer to walk home.”

  “Are you able?”

  “Yes.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes, thank you. Completely sure.”

  They went out, walked through the garden without saying a word. She walked next to him with a firm step. His was less so. He opened the gate and backed away, searching for a gesture, a word. Which one?

  AFTER Madame Marchandeau left, Faurel didn’t return to his guests right away. As much to collect himself as to escape questions he was neither willing nor able to answer. He went back to the little parlor, sat in his armchair, tossed away the cigarette he’d taken from his case without lighting it, and put his head in his hands.

  It was too much horror, too much blood, too much grief. For what reason? Once again he was confused, lost himself in his thoughts and pushed them away.

  Poor woman! And it’s only just begun!

  Soon, when her son was officially reported “missing,”[18] the torment would take a different form. She and her husband would have to pretend to share with their friends the hope that their son could return one day—not all the “missing” were dead. They had to keep on hoping for as long as they had no proof of death—it wasn’t possible to avoid. One of the wounded, the Germans had picked him up, they were taking care of him in Germany, but he was forbidden to write. People would cite a thousand cases like that, instructing them to have patience. Hadn’t they seen soldiers rattled, losing their memory in the middle of a battle? Sure, there were papers, the identification tags, but, so the good Samaritans would say, didn’t they know that for certain missions, the soldiers weren’t allowed to wear anything that would reveal their identity? Once again they had to keep on hoping.

  To all that, they would have to respond without betraying themselves. Would it be possible? It would show so little on their faces, but in the back of their eyes, would there be a dead son, executed? Would the others be wracked with that rotten compassion for long? Wasn’t it a thousand times better to tell the truth at once than to let them all guess? At least silence would make a shield around them and they could suffer in peace. They wouldn’t need to alienate anyone, people would flee of their own accord. Enough! The deputy sighed once more, rubbing his hands over his face.

  In any case, that’s what people would end up doing. Here, their easy compassion would be denied that element which elsewhere made it so correct. They only had to look! That grief, they’d suspect it wasn’t real when enough time passed so that it wasn’t possible—they’d say, reasonable!—to wonder if her son was still alive, they’d see that Madame Marchandeau didn’t dress in black, that not only did she refuse to wear mourning clothes, but that she also kept away deliberately—they were sure—from remembrance societies and commemorative ceremonies, solemn masses for the rest of dead soldiers’ souls. At least, he thought getting up, they weren’t for their torment!

  •

  He decided to go back to his guests, and composing his face with a smile, he pushed open the door.

  Babinot, his hands crossed over his belly, nodded his head, vanquished by the emotions of the day. The discussion of the duel, the little meal which F
aurel had served, had finished off his energy. But all the same he still chattered, in a voice that, admittedly, was mushier and more nasal than ever, and he often interrupted himself to yawn.

  Moka had stopped listening to Babinot a long time ago. He was burning with impatience to go tell Cripure about the happy outcome of the negotiations, and found that they’d been keeping him here for a long while. As for Lucien, he was calmly smoking. His mission here was done. He’d given Cripure the last bit of help he could give him, and he was happy to think it had been a service of friendship.

  “I must say,” said Babinot, turning toward the captain, “he was one of those fat boys with chubby pink cheeks, you know, that dame Germania is so good at producing. My son went to study for a year in Dusseldorf; the following year, it was the son of Herr Professor Schröder who came to stay with us. A real prewar Boche, you understand!” and he winked his one eye with a disdainful air.

  “Isn’t it time we should . . .” Moka tried to say.

  What mortal purgatory must his good master be in! Why didn’t Faurel give the sign to go? He’d just sat down and seemed to be thinking of something else entirely.

  Babinot started in again, “and besides, heavy and clumsy . . .yes, yes, my dear Captain. And the proof was that little Angèle that my son’s going to marry, well then . . .”

  “He wanted to steal her from him?” asked the captain.

  Really? They were going to talk about women?

  “Nah, nah, not at all.”

  “Ah?”

  “Nah, my dear captain. Not for anything! But that’s not what the story is about. He found himself, my . . . Boche, having to accompany this little Angèle into town one day. She’s wily, that one! Eh, do you know what he offered her?”

  “I can’t imagine . . .”

  “To carry her purse! Her evening bag! Ah, ah, ah!” cried Babinot, giving himself a big slap on the knee, “that’s a good one, don’t you think? That fits the bill? Her little purse!” wheezed Babinot.