by Leon Werth
She’s as childish as a fifty-year-old girl, and if she tries to be imposing, she has the gravitas of a teacher’s aide on holiday.
She’s a little bohemian but not ugly, though she has thick arms and legs. She speaks French without an accent but is said to have been born in central Europe and to have relatives in Vienna. But I don’t see that, at any rate, as an excuse. As a foreigner married to a Frenchman, she might speak discreetly out of normal decency, if not prudence.
Her linguistic mistakes aren’t those of a foreigner, though. She gives words ambiguous meanings, like people who will never speak a language fluently, even their own. Wanting to show admiration for a politician to whom she attributes a great knowledge of foreign customs, she says, “He is very international.” But she has what language teachers call a vocabulary. She aspires to conversation and speaks to me with disdain about people who aren’t cultivated. Perhaps the only time in two weeks that I wanted to laugh was when I heard that word from her mouth.
“A German colonel,” she tells us with a hint of pride, “asked me for a private conversation … He told me France had been overfond of ease but that she would pick herself up again. He told me that by his own hand he had killed twelve Senegalese prisoners, who for him are less than dogs …”
She pauses for a while, then continues in a quasi-confidential tone.
“What he wanted was information about Frenchmen’s state of mind …”
You see this scene in novels or onstage at the theater: the Frenchwoman, with all her finesse, disarming and disconcerting the barbarian. But Soutreux has no background in theater.
We often wondered whether Lerouchon and Soutreux were part of the fifth column. It always seemed unlikely to me. It’s inconceivable that a traitor would not feign perfect loyalty while in the country he’s betraying. The shamelessness, the insolence of Lerouchon and Soutreux stunned me. They were inexplicable to me then. Moreover, it doesn’t seem to me that propaganda for the enemy that was so overt and so crude would be effective. Today I believe the crazed lip service for order, even Hitler’s order, that came over part of conquered France had infected these dull souls.
When the Germans had left Les Douciers and their nearest billet was three kilometers away in the village of Dampierre, one of their trucks turned off the road and came into the courtyard. Soutreux rushed over to the cab, occupied by the driver and a noncommissioned officer. A conversation began that I didn’t understand. It was evident that the noncommissioned officer did not come under orders but for a visit. He had enormous, very white teeth. Soutreux was beaming, smiling, happy, though nothing led me to believe her happiness was anything more than speaking in German about Germany with a German.
But the following is more suspect. Two horse carts had stopped in front of the house: some peasants who had fled on the announcement of the German advance and been unable to cross the Loire at Gien had turned around and were coming back home.
“I told you not to leave,” Soutreux shouted at them, “that the Germans would do you no harm … but that those who did not return quickly would not be allowed to move back in …”
The armistice had not been signed. We had no news except what circulated by word of mouth and was born out of thin air by spontaneous generation. That the Soutreux woman might claim several days before the Germans’ arrival that they would do no harm is explainable: to the extent that someone can love a group, a people, she loved them; for her their arrival was a blessing. Her certainty of a German victory, of their advance to the Loire, is explainable as well: she considered them invincible. But how could she have foreseen that the Germans would distinguish between abandoned farms and those that peasants had temporarily evacuated? She was wrong only on a detail. The Germans indeed ransacked only abandoned houses in this region, but they were not opposed to the return of peasants who had fled. But that’s thinking like a prosecutor.
In Dampierre, Soutreux met with a woman I know nothing about except that local people whisper that she is a “fifth columnist.” She speaks German volubly, giddily, ostentatiously. What to conclude? Except that during the last war I knew how to laugh at spies’ disguises. I truly believe Soutreux loved Germany with an exhibitionist passion.
Some attribute to young women a sentimental pity for soldiers. I think Lerouchon might have welcomed French soldiers as willingly as she did German soldiers. It wasn’t the same with Soutreux. This proves it.
On the path in front of the house is an example of those one-of-a-kind, homemade carts that before the exodus would have been ashamed to be on the highway. Next to it three young men are resting, wiping their brows. They are three French soldiers from the Forty-Sixth or Forty-Seventh Division. Taken prisoner by the Germans, they escaped. Two of them had been captured twice and twice had escaped. They have formed a band; they have linked their fates. One of them is from the Nièvre, the other two from the Jura. They were given civilian clothes, and they got rid of all their identity papers. They’re navigating by the sun and a map, avoiding the highways, taking small roads. They’d fought at the Somme. Their morale had been good. They might have held on had they seen French aircraft and been given ammunition. “Then,” they said, “we understood … The order was, every man for himself …”
They left like the rest, southward. They met a motorcyclist who told them, “Don’t worry … they’re twenty-five kilometers behind you …” The motorcyclist, who spoke perfect French, dashed off ahead of them. Half an hour later they found German soldiers barring their route.
One of them is a railway worker, the other a farmer, the third a cheese maker in Lons-le-Saulnier. They were undaunted by fatigue, they had already gone about a hundred kilometers. Another hundred kilometers for the railwayman to be home. The two others must walk another three hundred kilometers.
It must be said, Soutreux brought the three French soldiers a bottle of wine. But I don’t count the generosity of this gift for much, because I remember the champagne she offered the Germans. Not that I prefer sparkling wines, not at all! But I know the hierarchy of wines, to the extent Soutreux can provide them.
Experienced walkers, the three soldiers mixed their wine with plenty of water from the fountain. They were about to set off again, pushing their cart, which contained some food and three travel bags. They were about to set off and we were thinking of the fifty bicycles that Soutreux had stored in her hayloft. We were thinking of them, but she wasn’t. I still reproach myself to this day for not having been imperious and rude. I was a coward. It was my wife who made a discreet allusion to the stock of bicycles, which Soutreux chose not to understand. That was too much. We signaled to the three soldiers and went to fetch three bicycles. They fastened the straps of their bags to their shoulders, straddled the bicycles and disappeared.
I don’t know what became of the soldiers, but Soutreux never forgave us.
I bathe in the Loire, a miserable bath. It’s more a soap and rinse. I’m returning to Les Douciers by way of the fields. I hear a call. I see a Senegalese infantryman appear on the riverbank, like a god emerging from the water.
He had been hiding in the woods, or rather in the thicket. What help can I give him? Soutreux would not take him in. And though I don’t have the right to accuse her of being connected to the Germans other than by friendship, I suspect she’s capable of inflating her importance and showing them her consideration by handing over this Negro. I can’t even think of getting him into some civilian clothes: he’s black.
His stature, his gait have an elegance that whites rarely have, the elegance of deer and gazelles. It’s a bit silly and straight out of Larousse, but I think of how the goddess is revealed by her gait. What naive charm in that innocent smile! He smiles while talking to me, he’s smiling under the threat of capture or death, as if his eyes were playing with the landscape, playing with me, as if despite the war there was a magic in the world that made him smile. I remember the Senegalese whom Lucie Cousturier introduced me to in Fréjus and a certain Amadou Lo, who wrote L
ucie a letter that ended: “I say hello to everything in the house and in the garden.” I’m also thinking about the German colonel who Soutreux claimed killed them by the dozen.
What can I do for him? I advise him not to go back up to Les Douciers; I tell him the Germans are in Dampierre and suggest he keep hidden in the underbrush. There’s some on an islet in the middle of the Loire that can be reached by a ford. I believe if he can hold out for three or four days, chances are he will not be shot. Indeed, in the area they talk of little else besides the armistice and the imminent peace. What’s more, the two terms are often confused, sometimes I learn that the armistice had been signed at four in the morning, sometimes I hear it will be tomorrow. But my Senegalese will need something to eat. He pulls four cans of monkey meat from his haversack to show me.
I ask him how he eluded the Germans. The story he tells me is so astonishing and so full of hope that I had him repeat it so I could check it with questions and cross-references (one Jesus Christ is enough …).
He was wandering in the woods. He saw a German leaning against a tree. The German signaled him to approach. “Me thought he was goin’ to kill me …” The German gave him four cans of monkey and said, “Beat it; you’re on your own …”
He rummages through his haversack again and offers me a pack of cigarettes. It wasn’t to curry favor. I had shaken his hand and we were about to separate. It was a magnificent gift, like in legendary times.
The armistice, the peace … “You have to count on about a week, perhaps two, between the armistice and the peace. The roads are open … but only in the direction of Paris … The Germans want everyone to return to Paris.” Bells are rung in Dampierre, it’s the armistice; other bells, it’s the peace. “The occupation cannot last a long time … But they will demand an enormous sum …”
I know that the road is open as far as Gien; I know nothing more. I wander idly around Soutreux’s yard. We are looking for another house, a room, a barn. But the farmhouses are quite far from one another and, mysteriously, more concealed in this flat countryside than anywhere else. In the meantime, the Soutreux woman invites us to stay a few more days. She offers us a mattress, a beautiful mattress, she tells us. She invites us to her table. I’m very happy to sit at a table. It’s a highly civilized luxury that I’ve lost the habit of. But mealtimes are trying nonetheless. We and the Aufresnes maintain a prudent silence that makes for a heavy atmosphere.
The vieux monsieur went back to Paris with his son. But before leaving he told us that Soutreux had confided to him that the Aufresnes were being very tactless by settling in with her. This is a delicate way of making us feel that we ourselves … He did not seem at all pleased by our presence. Doubtless he was afraid we were competitors in salvaging. He repeated insistently, while Soutreux insinuated discreetly, that the difficulties of driving on the roads were much exaggerated. To hear them, it was like driving on a racetrack. There were greased roadways where French municipalities and the German Kommandantursc were fighting over who could distribute the most bread and gasoline.
The worst is that Soutreux is not at all being cruel about this. She’s poorly suppressing very natural feelings that a more polished soul might reject or transform. I feel strongly that if I had to lodge strangers in my home, where I seek solitude, where I want only proven friends, I would hardly feel an irresistible joy. I would not give in to the ancient laws of hospitality or Franciscan tradition with instant enthusiasm. But the slightest human spark on the part of the unknown guests would make me forget that my sanctum was being violated. And we’re not living in ordinary times. History is being mass-produced for us. Soutreux couldn’t sense that any more than Lerouchon. History passes over them as over beasts. We are shipwrecked. Soutreux sees us only as importunate.
If Soutreux’s house were one of those old homes where the objects and furniture have the aura of relics, it would be understandable that she suffered by bringing in strangers. But she’s putting us in empty rooms where the bare plaster is still fresh. The most surprising is that in sheltering the Aufresnes and us she seems to be resigning herself to some noble sacrifice, but when lodging a detachment of Germans, who turned her house into a barracks, she welcomed them the way Biblical patriarchs welcomed guests. Even the empty food cans they scattered in her garden did not put this meticulous housekeeper in a bad mood.
All this led us to some ignoble thoughts that I must recall here. The circumstances are such that even begging would seem barely less humiliating to us. But the Aufresnes, like us, don’t want to be indebted to Soutreux for anything but the space in her courtyard and her empty rooms. We don’t want her bread. We fetch bread in Dampierre. Two or three kilometers from Les Douciers some isolated farmhouses are newly reoccupied by their owners, who were unable to cross the Loire. There we buy some chickens and some eggs, which feed us and Soutreux.
That’s how we explore the countryside. We pass a shack in whose doorway stands an old woman leaning on a stick; she remains still except for her head, which is trembling. We weren’t able to tell whether the house was hers or not. She says nothing to us but, “I’s walked … I’s walked.”
At the first farm we reach, the people have just returned. They have come back with a very agitated strapping young man about whom I could gather only two things: that he is Parisian and that his forearms are covered with tattoos. I don’t recall whether he was one of their relatives or an unknown refugee. I won’t repeat all his remarks, which express the total resignation that follows panic among some Frenchmen because they have discovered its brutal oscillations between fear and the illusion of security. These people were afraid that the Germans casually kill everyone. They survived. They were relieved and didn’t even know whether they were hopeless or happy. The young man does not recount his flight, his personal adventure, easily. There’s surprise and anger in his words. “In Ouzouer, there were Germans … They gave us a room.” (He doesn’t add that the village was nearly empty then and the Germans few in number.) “They gave us a room and something to eat midday and evening … The French didn’t do as much.”
We go as far as another farm. The farmers had left and then returned before the departure of the Germans, who had looted savagely. But the wife had been able to save her horse, which the Germans wanted to take.
“They took my husband’s shirts from us,” she says, “our clothing … When we came back, I killed a duck and cooked it. When it was cooked, a German seized it and ate it by himself, in front of me … It was an officer who slept in my room. Look what they did … they tore spikes out of the stable and nailed them here (she shows me the bedroom wall) … to hang the officer’s uniform.”
In another corner of the room, the flowered wallpaper had been torn. It’s a little thing, but there’s an ownership that’s solely from the heart. This peasant woman was as distressed and hurt by this torn wallpaper as by the hole in the roof of her stable from a mortar.
We find Soutreux contemplating her butane stove melancholically. “I would have enough for myself alone,” she says. “But my supply isn’t inexhaustible … To use the gas for so many people, soon I won’t have any more … What will I do then?…”
She’s not speaking to us; she’s not speaking to the Aufresnes. She seems to be unaware of our presence. She’s appealing to the stove, apparently.
We deliberate with the Aufresnes. Lerouchon has agreed to let me have a few liters of gasoline. I have enough to go about fifty kilometers. Aufresne, as I’ve already said, is immobilized by a leaky piston rod. He would like me to tow him. I hope he knows I would have done it willingly if my clutch had allowed.
Where to find refuge? Which roads are open and in what direction? We have friends in the Yonne, but hadn’t they fled? We decide to go to Chapelon: We’ll ask Abel Delaveau for shelter. Even if Soutreux hadn’t by unsubtle hints made us feel the weight of her limited hospitality, we could not have stayed: We were infuriated by the revolting atmosphere at Les Douciers, by the human stink one breathes there, w
e could no longer stand Soutreux’s pinched hysteria or Lerouchon’s low-class hysteria. In our shipwreck, Abel Delaveau’s farm seems a happy island to us. But has Abel Delaveau returned home? Is he stuck, with his horse carts, short of Gien or beyond Gien? Who can know? But we’re no longer hesitating. We’re playing our luck. It’s too late to leave this evening. We’ll leave tomorrow morning.
I informed Soutreux of my decision. Her expression was sour and sniveling at the same time. I’m well aware of her grievances. She can’t forgive us the three bicycles that she didn’t dare refuse but which are now missing from her stockpile. I’m not accusing her of being selfish; I believe her inspiration is the commercial valuation of objects and that she’s in the grip of an unselfish obsession with collecting, with accumulating. She can’t forgive us our polite sarcasms either. She doesn’t have as thick a skin as Lerouchon. Accustomed to ruling over her maid and a crowd no doubt dazzled by her 4,000-franc windowpanes, she sensed our resistance, our distaste. She could not analyze her unease. Like the insane, whose delirium is only a rational justification of their anguish, she looked for its causes. She found absurd, childish ones, but nothing she considered beneath her.
“Monsieur,” she says, “I really do not know if I can invite you to my table anymore. Yesterday your wife gravely insulted me … She was the one to carve the chicken … And to whom did she first pass the platter? Whom did she serve first?… Me?… No, monsieur … Am I not the mistress of the house?… Isn’t the plate offered first to the person of honor?…”
I would like the reader to excuse me for recounting this harangue. But I’m not writing a novel and I can’t choose my characters. Besides, the stupidity of even this woman, in contrast, at a time like this, had a kind of pathos. And this woman, whose presence in normal times we might have ignored to begin with, we had been her guests, and in our distress we had come to her carried away with premature gratitude.