by Romain Gary
She slept, that night. And the next day I saw a great deal of lightness and gaiety in her face. She had taken a turn for the better, I thought, and I was soon proven right.
Every morning, Lila took her bicycle to run errands in Cléry. Every morning, I would walk her to the door and watch her go: nothing made me smile more than that skirt, those knees, that flying hair. One day she came home and put her bike away; I was in front of the house.
“Huh,” she said.
“What is it?”
“I was coming back from the grocer’s with my basket, and this lady was standing there waiting for me. I said hello to her, I didn’t remember her name — I know so many people around here. So I set my basket on my bike and I was getting ready to go when she came up right beside me and called me a Bochesse.”
I examined her carefully. She was truly smiling. It wasn’t one of those smiles you wear in defiance, or put on so you don’t cry. She wrinkled her nose, and ran her hand through her hair.
“Huh,” she repeated. “Huh. Bochesse. And there you have it.”
“Everyone can feel victory coming, Lila — so everybody’s getting ready for it in their own way. Don’t give it another thought.”
“Oh no, I have to think about it.”
“Why on earth is that?”
“Because feeling like the victim of an injustice is so much better than feeling guilty.”
46
It was June 2. Four days later, we were flat on our stomachs one mile to the east of La Motte as the bombs fell around us. Even today, I remain convinced that the first successful hit made by the thousands of Allied boats and airplanes engaged in Operation Overlord was my bicycle: I found it in twisted ruins in front of the house. “They’re coming,” “They’re on the way,” “They’re here,” were the only sentences I believe I heard all day. As we ran past the Cailleux farm, old Gaston Cailleux was outside, and, having informed us that “they’re coming,” he added a sentence he couldn’t have heard on Radio London, as de Gaulle only uttered it a few hours after that: “My little Ludo, this is the battle of France, and it’s France’s battle!”
But I guess historic statements are like everything else in life: once in a while, the impossible draws a winning hand.
We left him there, with his crutch, jumping for joy on his one and only leg.
There wasn’t a German soldier in sight. All around us the fields and woods were being barraged with fire, most likely to prevent enemy reinforcements from reaching the beaches.
I hadn’t yet learned to distinguish between the whistle of a bomb falling from an airplane and the whistle of shellfire, so it took a while for me to figure out; just as you might expect, hell comes from the sky. There were more than ten thousand sorties made that day by the Allied air force over Normandy.
We had only covered a few hundred yards when I saw a body lying across the path, unmoving, arms spread-eagled. It was a body I was used to seeing; I recognized it from far off: Johnny Cailleux. Eyes closed, head bloodied; he was dead. I was certain of it. I loved him too much for anything else to be possible.
I turned to Lila. “Come on, what are you waiting for? Examine him, for God’s sake!”
She looked surprised, but crouched down beside Johnny and pressed her ear against his chest. I actually think I laughed. In all those years of her absence, I’d spent so much time imagining her caring for the wounded in the Polish Resistance that I expected her to perform her duties as a nurse. And that’s exactly how she looked just then, bent over the body of my comrade, searching for a sign of life. She turned to me. “I think …”
Right at that moment Johnny moved. He sat up on his rear end, snorted, shook his head three or four times, his eyes still a little hazy, and shouted, “They’re coming!”
“Goddamn son of a bitch!” I yelled out in relief.
“They’re here! They’re coming!”
I grabbed Lila by the hand and we started to run.
I wanted to find shelter for Lila and then join my comrades. The “Green Plan” had long ago given us our mission: we were to attack convoys and sabotage rail lines and high-tension lines. We were to meet in the Orne — but nothing went off as planned. When, the next day, I finally managed to locate Souba, I found our dear commander in a blind rage. Dressed in a magnificent uniform — he’d promoted himself to colonel — he stood there shaking his fist at the sky, in which Allied planes were circling.
“Those bastards screwed it all up,” he shouted. “They screwed up all our communications. All our guys are wandering the countryside! If that isn’t a horrible goddamn waste I don’t know what is!”
He wasn’t far off cursing the Allied landing. Even many years later he would still grumble whenever it was mentioned in his presence. I think he would have liked to resist for another twenty years.
Each time a bomb showered us with earth, Lila would stroke my face: “Are you afraid of dying, Ludo?”
“I’m not afraid, but I’m in no hurry for it, either.”
We left La Motte at six in the morning, and by six that evening we were still only two miles past the milepost at Clos. It was there, lying flat on our stomachs behind an embankment, sniffing the air to try and guess where the next wave of the assault would be coming from, that we were treated to a spectacle. To this day, I don’t know whether it was pathetic, heroic, or both at the same time. Four Percheron horses filed past us, the first one harnessed to a wagon and the others to carts, all plodding along with an indifference to the world around them that they must have caught from their owners. The Magnard family was moving house. There they were, piled together in the wagon, the two daughters seated on crates of provisions, the father and son standing at the front. The carts behind them were piled with the furniture, beds, chairs, mattresses, chests, wardrobes, bundles of linens, and barrels. Three cows followed up from behind. They jostled along the road, their expressions just as closed as ever, without so much as a glance toward the sky or the earth. I will never know whether the Magnards were bovine or superhuman. Who knows, maybe it was just their own brand of kite.
This procession of invulnerable humans left me embarrassed and a little ashamed, since I was sweating bullets, but Lila laughed.
“You’re all the same, you Polish folk,” I grumbled. “The worse things get the better you are.”
“Give me a cigarette.”
“I’m all out.”
The incident that occurred just then returned all hope to me. A few isolated shots rang out from behind us, followed by machine gun fire. Quickly, I spun around. An American soldier backed slowly out of the woods, his machine gun in hand. He waited a moment; then, looking reassured, he touched his side and examined his hand. He appeared to have just been slightly wounded. It didn’t seem to concern him; he sat down on the ground beneath a bush, took a packet of cigarettes from his pocket — and then exploded.
He literally exploded, all at once, for no apparent reason, disappearing in a rain of earth that fell to the ground as quickly as it had flown upward — but without him. I think that same bullet that had caused his minor wounds must have touched the pin of one of the grenades hanging from his belt. When he sat down, it must have dislodged the pin the rest of the way. He had disappeared.
“Too bad,” Lila said. “They must be all gone.”
“All what?”
“He had a whole pack in his hand. I haven’t smoked an American cigarette in years.”
At first I was horribly upset. I was on the verge of saying, “Darling, that’s not keeping your cool, that’s downright cold,” when suddenly, happiness washed through me. It was the Lila of our childhood, the Lila of wild strawberries and little provocations: she had returned.
We lay flat there, behind the embankment, for nearly an hour. There was no trace of the Germans anywhere, and I couldn’t understand why the bombs and shells would be coming down so hard in the w
oods and fields.
“You’d think it was us they were after!”
Calmly, she pulled clumps of dirt out of her hair. “You know Ludo, I’ve already been killed several times in my life.”
A few days later, Souba explained the reasons for this nearly continuous bombardment of a dozen square miles of the Norman countryside, so far from the landing beaches. An American airborne division had been dropped and scattered too far inland by mistake, and so a German unit had been pulled from the coastal regions to fight off what they thought was a premeditated maneuver. We had been caught in its fire, as well as that of the English regiment guarding the two bridges over the Orne River as the Allied air force bombed all of the region’s roads and railways.
We took advantage of a moment of calm to advance a little in the direction of the Orne, when about a hundred yards ahead of us, we saw a line of German tanks appear. It was the armored division that had, at four o’clock that afternoon, received orders from Hitler to cut back the Allied bridgehead.
My only thought was, “They’ll shoot at anything that moves,” which cropped up from an account of some massacre or another. I took Lila’s hand. We froze in the middle of the field. Not one of my fallen comrades had been lucky enough to have his hand held in this way. In a manner of speaking, this was my last thought. And the brightness, the burst of sunlight among heavy, gray clouds, that little scrap of blue sky that always knows to shine the very best of itself at just the right moment. And Lila’s profile, her blonde hair falling over her neck and shoulders — her face, in which fear had chosen a smile.
There was a German officer standing in the gun turret of the tank at the head of the formation. As they drove by, he raised his hand in a minute gesture of friendship. I will never know who he was or why he saved our lives. I don’t know whether it was out of scorn, or humanity, or if it was merely a matter of style. Perhaps the sight of a couple of lovebirds holding hands had caused him, too, for just a moment, to yield to higher faith. And then again, maybe he just had a sense of humor — I don’t know. Once he had passed us, he turned, laughing, and gave us another little wave.
“Phew,” said Lila.
We were exhausted and starving; more than that, in the chaos, there was no particular reason to pick one place over another. We weren’t far from the Clos Joli, which was about two miles to the south, but the bombing seemed most intense in that area, most likely because of the Orcq Bridge and the highway; nevertheless, if anything remained of the restaurant, we were sure to find something to eat, even among the ruins. Emerging onto the Ligny Road, we stopped up short: there before us was an armored car, upended and burnt, still smoking. Two German soldiers lay dead beside the vehicle; a third one was sitting with his back against a tree, holding his belly, his eyes rolled back, emitting the groaning hiss of an empty hose. His faced seemed familiar to me and at first I thought I knew him, and then right away I understood that what was familiar to me was the expression of suffering. I had already seen it on our comrade Duverrier’s face after he escaped from the Cléry Gestapo and dragged himself to the Buis’ farm to die there. German or French, in those moments, it’s actually interchangeable. I thought of that later on, every time I heard the term “blood bank.” He had a beseeching look. I tried to hate him, so I wouldn’t have to finish him off. It was no good. You have to have it in you. I had no talent for it. I took his Mauser, cocked it in front of him, and waited, to be absolutely sure. Something approaching a smile appeared on his face. “Ja, gut …”
I lodged two bullets in his heart, one for him, and one for everything else.
It was my first gesture of Franco-German brotherhood.
Lila had blocked her ears, closed her eyes, and turned her head, in a movement that was feminine, or childlike, or both.
I felt, rather stupidly, that I had made friends with this dead German.
Six American planes flew over us and dropped their bombs in the place where the armored division must have been. Lila watched them. “I hope they didn’t kill him,” she said.
I think she meant the tank commander who had spared us. My nerves were so frayed that I was overcome by my weakness for mental math, which emerged as a defense mechanism for my sanity when it felt threatened. I told Lila that we had covered about twelve miles, when we’d actually only advanced about three or four, and I estimated our chances of survival at around one in ten. I placed the number of shells and bombs we had dodged at a thousand, and the number of planes we’d seen overhead at thirty thousand. I’m not sure if I was trying to prove my godlike equanimity to Lila or if I was actually beginning to lose my head. We were sitting by the side of the road, exhausted, drenched in sweat, bleeding here and there where we’d been grazed, reduced to the merely physical presence of our bodies. We were pulled out of our torpor by a bombing so violent that the entire forest two hundred yards ahead of us was pulverized before our eyes in the space of a few seconds. We took off running through the fields toward Ligny and ended up in front of the Clos Joli a half hour later. I was struck by the immutability of the place. It had not been marred in any way. The chimney smoked quietly. The flowers in the garden, the orchard, the old chestnut trees — they had a serenity which to me bore witness to some sort of deep certainty. I was hardly in a meditative mood in that moment, but for the first time since the day had begun, I remember feeling the both bizarre and soothing impression that everything was saved.
The intact, red-curtained rotunda was completely empty. The tables were set, ready for service to begin. The crystal sang with each explosion. The portrait of Brillat-Savarin was in its place — a little off kilter, it’s true.
We found Marcellin Duprat at work in the kitchen. He was very pale and his hands were trembling. He was just pulling a panade aux trois viandes — which requires several hours of cooking — from the oven. He must have started at the beginning of the shake-up. I don’t know whether it was an attempt to soothe fear with familiar gestures, or a loud report for duty. His eyes shone from his haggard, worn-looking face with a gleam I recognized as the madness so dear to me. I thought of my uncle Ambrose. I went over to Duprat, and, with tears in my eyes, embraced him. He appeared unsurprised, perhaps even unconscious of my gesture.
“They all left me in the lurch,” he croaked, his voice hoarse. “I’m all alone. No one to run the front of the house. I’ll be in fine fettle if the Americans show up now.”
“I don’t think the Americans will be here for a few more days,” I told him.
“They should have let me know.”
“About the landing, Monsieur Duprat?” I stuttered.
He thought about it. “Do you not find it interesting that they chose Normandy?”
I looked at him in astonishment. But no, he wasn’t pulling my leg. He was crazy, splendidly crazy.
“They must have studied the Michelin Guide and picked the best spot,” Lila observed
I glanced at her furiously. I almost thought I heard Tad’s sarcastic voice. It seemed to me that sacred flame of such grandeur deserved a bit more respect, if not downright piety.
Duprat gestured to the big back room. “Sit down.”
He served his panade to us himself.
“Taste it, taste it. I had to make it from leftovers. How is it? Not too bad, given the circumstances. There were no deliveries today. Well, what can you do?” He went to get the tart from the oven. As he was returning, I heard a whistle I had learned to recognize. I just barely had the time to grab Lila, push her to the ground, and lie down on top of her. The explosions continued for several minutes, but they were happening somewhere near the Orcq, and just one window was broken.
We got back up. Duprat had remained standing, holding the tart in its dish. “It’s safe here,” he stated in a voice I didn’t recognize as his. It was muted, mechanical: it came from the very depths of his refusal, and he underlined it with his fixed glare. “They wouldn’t dare,” he added.
I helped Lila to her feet and we returned to our seats at the table. Never, I imagine, has Duprat’s Norman tart been less appreciated. The Clos Joli trembled from top to bottom. The glassware sang. After a day of hesitating, Hitler had, at that late hour, given the order to launch two strategic reserve divisions to support his Eighth Army.
Duprat hadn’t budged. He was smiling — and with what scorn, with what superiority!
“See,” he observed. “It missed us. And it will always miss us.”
I attempted to explain to him that I was planning to reach Neuvet before nightfall and then continue along the Orne River to join my combat unit.
“Mademoiselle Bronicka can stay here,” he told me. “She’ll be safe.”
“Come on, Monsieur Duprat, haven’t you thought about it? You’re going to take a hit at some point.”
“Oh, please. You think the Americans are going to destroy the Clos Joli? They can’t afford to. The Germans didn’t touch it.”
I was speechless. Such crazy confidence in his three stars inspired an almost religious respect in me. Clearly, in his mind, the Allied troops had received orders, possibly from General Eisenhower himself, to ensure that this hallowed place in France remain intact.
I tried to convince him: the Clos Joli was going to be caught up in deadly crossfire. He should leave the place. All I got out of him was, “No way. You’ve hassled me for long enough with your Maquis and your Resistance. Now it’s my turn to show you who is, and always has been, the true leader of the French Resistance!”
I couldn’t resign myself to leaving him like that, in cloud-cuckoo land; I was sure he had lost his mind and was going to die among the ruins of the Clos Joli. In my head was a map of the area’s roads, bridges, and railways, and I knew that if the Allies weren’t pushed back to the sea, then the most intense fighting would have to take place right where we were. But Lila had reached her limit; a glance at her face affirmed that she was in no state to follow me. I knew that if there really was a God, as they say, then she had as much chance of getting out alive here as anywhere else: it was one of those moments where you think of God, who’s a past master at the art of biding His time. It also occurred to me that it wasn’t the level of risk that was making me unsure about leaving Lila with Duprat — it was because I didn’t want to leave her. And yet I was desperate to join my comrades. How could I hesitate? We had waited for this moment with too much hope and for too long. It was Duprat who decided it for me. He appeared to emerge from his daze, put his arm around my shoulders, and said, “My good Ludo, you can rest assured, Mademoiselle Bronicka will be safe and sound here. I have the best cellars in France. I’ll put her in the safest spot, right with the best wines, where nothing can happen to her. I don’t know who said, ‘happy as God in France,’ but I’m sure that God will know to watch over what’s His.”