“Anything. Mostly novels. He didn’t say what sort of thing he liked but I saw the gaps on the shelves when he left. I’ve always known where my books are. You wouldn’t think so to look at them. They don’t look organized. But I know.”
In this hot weather it was more obvious how thin she was. She wore a clumsily knitted little cardigan over her dress but, what with the heat of the wine, she’d taken it off and Lantier could see her neck with its clearly defined muscles, and the hollows around her collarbones where the straps of her bodice slid over them.
“I had The New Heloise, because it was Rousseau and my father saw him as the great thinker of the Enlightenment. But I knew that Jacques was keeping it such a long time for another reason. He was romantic, without realizing it. And I liked that.”
“Did you not talk to him about politics?”
“Never, at that point. When war was declared we talked about the situation one time. He was incredibly naïve. To be honest, he didn’t know anything. In that way, he was definitely a country boy. He just accepted that one day they’d come and get him to fight, even though he didn’t like it. When he left I tried to talk to him. But I realized it was pointless. I found myself doing things I would never have imagined. I knitted him a scarf. I wanted him to go with something of me. I was really happy when my dog left with him.”
“Is Wilhelm your dog?”
“That wasn’t his name then. He was my great-aunt’s dog, or rather the son of her old Briard bitch. We’d drowned the others but my aunt kept that one for me. I called him Kirou.”
She was laughing now but, mindful of her appearance, she never showed her teeth for long because she had one missing on the side and she knew it didn’t look pretty.
“That dog really liked men. Every time the postman came he followed him, and it was often several days before he came home. When Jacques started coming over Kirou would make a fuss of him.”
“Did you tell him to take the dog to war with him?”
“As if! He went of his own accord. And I was glad of it.”
“Did he send you news?”
“While he was in France I received letters every week. And one day he came back.”
The bottle was empty. Lantier couldn’t make up his mind to buy another. She was breaking up her piece of bread and nibbling on bits of crust.
“It was late December. The weather was very cold. That damp cold we get here. We stayed inside in the warm all day and all night. I burned all the wood I’d put aside for the winter. It didn’t bother me. I wanted him to be comfortable.”
“Had he changed?”
“Completely. He was like a tree with no leaves, all hard and dried out. He’d stopped smiling. And talked a lot.”
“About what?”
“About the fighting, even though he wasn’t at the front at that point. About all the men he’d met in the army. About the unbelievable weapons that had been invented to kill people. He didn’t understand any of it. The war was a mystery to him. He’d never imagined it could exist. He wanted to know. Politics, economics, peoples, nations, he’d started thinking about everything.”
She had picked up her glass and was looking forlornly at the dregs of wine left in it. Lantier ordered another bottle.
“I didn’t want to talk to him about abstract things like that. It might be difficult to understand. But, you see, I was in love and that was all I wanted to think about. I knew he wouldn’t be here long. I wanted to be happy. I wanted to kiss him and touch him and hold him close to me. So I settled for recommending books to him. He started reading political material he hadn’t been interested in till then. And while he read I watched him, I smothered him with kisses, I basked in his warmth.”
“How long did he stay?”
“Two weeks. Obviously I was pregnant. I knew it would happen. I wanted it to. I could almost tell you when our child was conceived. But I didn’t say anything to him.”
The waitress had come back with the new bottle. She filled the glasses with a surly expression and spilled some wine on the tablecloth without apologizing.
“He took three books with him when he left.”
“Proudhon, Marx, and Kropotkin.”
“He told you.”
For the first time since their conversation started she looked intently at Lantier and he felt she was only now acknowledging he was there.
“After that,” he said, “he went to join the Oriental Expeditionary Force.”
She suddenly looked very weary. Her whole face crumpled as if an intense pain had come back to grip her insides.
“That’s what he wrote and told me. I felt helpless. You see, so long as he was in France I felt he was still near. But with the war in Greece it was completely different. I had this feeling he’d never come back. I sent him a letter to tell him I was expecting a child. I felt he had to know before he left. Maybe deep down I was hoping he’d find some way to stay close to me.”
“How did he take the news?”
“He wrote to say it was a good thing, and told me to call the baby Marie if it was a girl and Jules if it was a boy, in case it was born before he came back.”
She gave a nervous laugh. “Like I said, he doesn’t know how to express his feelings.”
Lantier thought he saw a tear glistening in the corner of her eye but she flicked her head to toss her hair back, and everything disappeared.
“So then I realized there was only one hope: for the war to end as soon as possible. I’d distanced myself from my father’s former friends. I didn’t want to hear any more about them. Politics had done us enough harm. But I suddenly changed my mind. The only people fighting against the war—the ones who’d immediately pronounced it a disgrace, who’d dissected what had caused it and wanted to deal with the problem at the very root—were these utopians and socialist agitators, and I’d been wrong to look down on them. I wrote to one of them, a man called Gendrot, who was my godfather. He’d tried to see me after my father died but I’d never answered his letters. Luckily he was still at the same address and my letter reached him.”
Three men had come into the bar, which was cut off from the restaurant by a frosted glass partition that stopped short of the ceiling. They could be heard chatting loudly with the landlord.
“This Gendrot worked closely with Jaurès. After Jaurès’s assassination, Gendrot stayed faithful to his pacifist ideas. He had problems with the army.”
Lantier was glad to see that she no longer seemed to identify him with the army. She was confiding in him and making allowances.
“He carried on running a very active group against the war. They had official activities, with a newspaper that was pretty much censored. But he also took care of supporting pacifist militants, particularly foreigners who needed to hide.”
“Weren’t you afraid you might have trouble yourself by contacting him?”
“What sort of trouble? I’ve always been watched, you know, because of my father. But the police know I don’t do any harm. I didn’t say much in my message, anyway, except that I wanted to see him again because he was still my godfather, after all.”
“Did he reply?”
“He sent someone. A miner from Creusot who traveled sixty miles on foot to come and talk to me. He stayed two days. He saw where I lived and realized how I could help them.”
“Didn’t they want you to move into town?”
“Absolutely not. They needed hideouts deep in the country for boys on the run or who needed to be forgotten.”
“Did you write and tell Morlac this?”
They’d ordered coffee, she’d let two sugar lumps dissolve slowly in hers and was now stirring it.
“Unfortunately not. I didn’t want him to worry. I was doing it for me, you see, so that I felt useful, to contribute, just a bit, to cutting short the war.”
“Had he already left for G
reece?”
“I didn’t know. The mail was getting very irregular. Jacques was trundled from one camp to another, farther and farther south. In the end they took them to Toulon. But the sailing kept being postponed, because of the submarine war.”
She pulled a face. The drunken cries from the bar were growing louder and smothered her words from time to time because she was speaking quietly.
“Anyway, Gendrot didn’t waste any time. He had packets of clandestine tracts delivered to me, and I had to hide them until they were distributed. He sent a couple of Belgians who’d escaped from an internment camp. For those six months there were people in the house practically the whole time.”
“And Morlac still didn’t know?”
She looked down. It was clearly painful for her reliving this time. She was wringing her fingers agitatedly.
“I didn’t tell him anything. Now that I was actually doing something I couldn’t possibly give away any details in my letters. There was military censorship . . . But it’s true, I should have warned him all the same. It would have stopped him finding out for himself.”
“Finding out? How could he possibly know when he was so far away?”
“He came back.”
“You mean he had a second period of leave?”
“In July, shortly before they sailed, he managed to get three days’ leave. He didn’t say where he was going; they’d never have allowed it. He performed miracles, jumping onto freight trains, stealing a horse, walking the last few miles till his shoes fell apart. I only found all that out later . . . ”
She was laughing in admiration, regret, despair.
“He arrived at dawn. He hid behind the little wall around the vegetable plot. Do you know where I mean? He wanted to surprise me.”
She sniffed and straightened in her chair, to gather her composure.
“At the time Gendrot had sent me a laborer from Alsace who was being hunted down for sabotage. He was a great tall gentle boy. He didn’t say much but helped me a lot. With the pregnancy there were some jobs in the garden I couldn’t do. This Albert knew how to work a vegetable patch. I didn’t even have to tell him what needed doing.”
“You only have one room. Where did he sleep?”
She looked up, defiantly.
“With me. We didn’t do anything. I wasn’t far off my time anyway. But, you see, I don’t know if a man can understand this, I needed someone there. I huddled up against him. I was no longer alone. And my child was no longer alone either. It feels strange saying it.”
“And was he happy with that?”
“I think so. He was very gentle. He covered me with kisses. Sometimes I could feel he wanted me, but he never forced me. He told me a bit of tenderness was enough for him. It pained him terribly being away from his family. A family of women, as it happens, his mother and four sisters.”
“Did Morlac find you together?”
“He saw Albert come out of the house, because he always got up before me to go and wash by the well.”
“Did the boy know you had a lover away at war?”
“He guessed, given my condition. But the rule, with comrades, is to say as little as possible about yourself, in case anyone’s interrogated.”
“Did the two of them talk?”
“When Albert spotted a soldier in the vegetable plot he wanted to know what he was doing there. Morlac asked whether I was at home. Albert said I was still asleep.”
She’d wound her table napkin around her fingers and was pulling it tighter and tighter. The blood couldn’t get through. It must have been very painful.
“Albert asked whether there was any message. Jacques stood up to his full height, looked over at the closed door for a moment and said ‘no.’ Then he left.”
“And you didn’t see him?”
“I was very tired that day. The baby kicked a lot. I hadn’t slept well. I got up an hour later. Albert had gone to cut some grass for the rabbits. He told me about Morlac’s visit over lunch. It was too late to catch up with him.”
Lantier looked at her. Despite her thinness, the fact she took so little care of herself and the marks left on her face by her ordeals, there was a spark about her that made her beautiful, like a fire that won’t go out, a light that shines all the brighter for being in total darkness.
“Did you write to him?”
“Of course. But again, because of censorship, I couldn’t explain the situation exactly as it was. And anyway, I wasn’t even sure he was receiving my letters.”
“Didn’t he send you any?”
“Never again.”
“Did you tell him when your son was born?”
“When Jules was born I wrote to him. And a bit later I even managed to have a photo taken in town. I don’t know whether it reached him.”
This time, despite her efforts, she couldn’t hold back her tears. They fell silently and rolled like raindrops over dry wood. She let three or four fall before reacting. She rubbed her napkin over her cheeks, then looked Lantier squarely in the face as she said, “I can assure you, sir, that I’ve never stopped thinking about him. I’ve only ever loved him. I love only him. I dream about him. Sometimes, on winter nights, I’d go out in the cold, without putting any clothes on, without even feeling the frost, and I’d scream his name, as if he might turn up there, among the vegetables, and come back to me. I closed my eyes and I could feel his breath, I could smell him . . . You think I’m crazy.”
Lantier looked down. The screams of a woman in love always left men feeling that, in this domain, they were much the weaker sex.
“Did you not know he was back when he came home after the war?”
“Not until he created this scandal and was arrested.”
The drunks in the other room were tumbling outside. The waitress hovered in the half-open doorway, to see whether she should bring in the check.
“I’m depending on you,” said Valentine, staring the major in the eye pointedly.
CHAPTER IX
Before tackling the final stage of his inquiry, Lantier felt a need to take a long walk through the countryside.
He rose at dawn and set off north, toward the beginnings of the large forest that stretched all the way to Bourges.
The trees were mostly oaks. The first of them had been planted as far back as the reign of Louis XIV. As a walker heads deeper along the forest paths he’ll come across areas where the trees are unexpectedly aligned. Here the random arrangement of trunks briefly gives way to rectilinear pockets that seem to reach all the way to the horizon. This sudden mark of human will amid the chaos of nature is not unlike the birth of an idea in the magma of ill-defined thought. All at once, in both cases, a perspective emerges, a corridor of light that brings order to solid things as it does to ideas, and allows for a more far-reaching view. In both instances, these moments of illumination are short-lived. As soon as the walker sets off again, as soon as the mind starts churning again, the vision vanishes, unless it has been committed to memory or written down.
All the same, walking through a forest like this is a powerful stimulant for thought. Lantier needed it. As well as the investigation keeping him here, he was thinking about the life that lay in store for him, the new phase he would step into when he left military life. He thought about this war that was drawing to an end for a second time, with these last few trials. Cemeteries as rectilinear as those pockets in the trees had been built on the battlefields to shelter the remains of dead soldiers. But those particular seeds would never grow.
He found a pond deep in the forest and walked around it. He came across hunting men patrolling through the woods in preparation for the coming season. They were preceded by their dogs, who came and sniffed at Lantier. It occurred to him that a dog was the only company that didn’t disturb solitude. He thought about Wilhelm and felt that, through his hardships, Morlac had certainly
been lucky to have this animal by his side the whole time. And he resented him for showing so little gratitude.
Next he went down onto a plain sown with barley, and walked along the edge of the fields, which undulated with a swell of blond tufts. He ended up on a dusty track that headed back toward town. He’d barely walked two hundred yards along it before he spotted someone coming toward him on a bicycle. It was Gabarre.
“I was looking for you. They said you were around here.”
The solitude was at an end. The police officer walked up to Lantier, pushing his bicycle. He told him what he had learned.
The fellow was as faithful as Wilhelm, Lantier thought to himself. But even so, going for a walk with a policeman doesn’t have quite the same effect . . .
* * *
Dujeux was cursing the major, who’d asked him to stand guard outside. What sort of idea was that to interrogate the prisoner out of his cell and sit him down in the office! All right, so it was the last day. The man had to sign a written statement and hear the military investigating officer’s decision. But all the same, what an idea . . . He’d walked roughshod over the regulations and if things went awry, Dujeux would be sure to make it clear it was nothing to do with him.
Lantier was sitting behind the desk and the defendant sat facing him in a stick-back chair with one armrest missing.
“I’ve done a lot of thinking, Morlac. Permit me to say that the idea you’ve formed of humanity is somewhat incomplete.”
“What do you mean?”
“This business of fraternizing, the mutiny you were hoping to organize, the end of the war . . . ”
“Yes?”
“That’s what you see as humanity, isn’t it? Fraternity to counter hatred and all that.”
“It is.”
“Well, it falls a bit short, I think. Humanity also means having an ideal and fighting for it. You were in favor of peace because you didn’t believe in this war. You’re against the concept of a nation and against bourgeois governments. Am I right?”
Morlac was slightly wrong-footed because he hadn’t expected the conversation to start like this, and he was on his guard.
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