No Man's Land

by Pete Ayrton

  Julia interrupted him with a glance. ‘The man from the town hall is already on the fields,’ she said.

  ‘Who did he want?’ the father asked, scarcely opening his lips.

  ‘Not us,’ Julia said. ‘He was opposite the door and when he saw me come out, he signalled to me to say no.’

  ‘So who did he want?’

  ‘It’s Arthur, Arthur Buissonnades.’

  ‘Arthur!’ the father exclaimed. ‘That tall fellow? Felicity’s husband? The one who was so good at plucking grapes? The one who helped us the year of the storm? Is that the fellow?’

  ‘That’s the one,’ Julia said. ‘Felicity’s alone with the child.’

  ‘Give me my stick,’ the old man said. ‘I’m going there. A woman can’t stay alone on a beautiful day like this with all that on her mind. What wretched times we live in!’ He took his stick, went out and banged the door. Madeleine pressed her face to the window and watched her father. He hurried as fast as he could along the Buissonnades’ road.

  ‘Too many have died,’ Julia said. ‘Too many. It doesn’t seem possible. Arthur! You remember, Madeleine?’

  Madeleine’s tears streaked down the window.

  ‘And we’re all involved, you know,’ Julia said. ‘Madeleine, that’s something we don’t think about often enough.’ She went back to the cattle-shed.

  The window felt cold against Madeleine’s forehead. The glass was misty with her tears. She could no longer see the green corn, the almond blossoms and the swallows. Arthur! He was never that close to us, but that doesn’t make it any easier to bear. A handsome man he was and so well built! And how he could laugh! The whole world was heavy with mist. If she opened the window everything would be clear again. She’d feel the fresh wind. She’d see tulips and watch the almond blossoms falling. God pardons us for not always thinking about death.

  JEAN GIONO

  NEWS FROM JOSEPH

  from To the Slaughterhouse

  translated by Norman Glass

  WHERE COULD SHE HIDE, where could she hide? Wherever she ran, things rose up against her. Her feet no longer recognized the threshing-floor, or the courtyard, or the path that led to the fountain, nor that fragment of meadow, nothing. Everything capsized around her. She stumbled against the stones and her skirt got tangled in her legs. Where could she hide herself?

  She couldn’t bear to see old Jerome as he looked at his hand; nor the sight of his earthy face furrowed by old age and ancient sorrows, his old man’s mossy, earthy face all wet with big white tears; those trembling lips, that fallen chin which he couldn’t lift to close his jaws, and the saliva and tears, and the moaning of a man at the end of his days. If that was all! But no. Through his tears he stared at his big right hand. It was deformed.

  No. She had buried her head in her apron and wept with him, but suddenly she could stand it no more. Go away? No. Hide herself, get into some little corner like an animal, writhe on the ground, roll up into a hole in the earth and stay there. Stay there, huddled up, with her flesh, her tears, her sorrow.

  Julia pushed open the stable door. The old horse turned its head and looked at the woman. It wasn’t feeding time.

  ‘Move over,’ Julia said.

  She slid against the horse, went to the back of the stable and lay down in the straw under the trough, in the warmth, reassured by the horse’s shadow, comforted by its smell and heat. The horse jangled its chain and gently tapped its hoof in the straw. So, just like that, they’d cut off Joseph’s arm! His right one. It’s done. There’s nothing more to do, that’s how it is. She’d got the news in a letter. The arm! The hand and all. They cut off his arm! Is it possible? How did they do it? Why did they do it? He must have suffered! Oh, Joseph, my poor love! And now there’s nothing more on your right side? No more arm? That explained the long silence. That was why they hadn’t heard from him for over three weeks. It was as though he’d been rubbed out with an eraser. No more Joseph! Lost in the wind. And that was when they’d cut off his arm. Where? At the elbow? Is there a stump or has it all been levelled off? Oh, my poor love!

  ‘Oh, Bijou,’ Julia called to the horse. The old horse lowered its head towards her and sniffed her, spraying its heavy breath over her through the two jets of its nostrils. ‘You, you’re happy!’

  The horse’s large, kind eyes were green and red. It had spent all its life looking down at the earth and up at the trees. Its eyes were brimming with sweet and ancient things.

  She had been happy too. There was the dance-hall down in the village, which they used to decorate every Sunday with box-tree and oak branches. And Jerome came down from the hills with his accordion on a shoulder-strap, and young Mercier came down also with his brightly polished cornet. From one o’clock onwards the benches used to be packed with girls. But Julia went to stand behind the houses, at the edge of the apple trees from where you could see the road. She watched Madeleine arriving in her blue dress, her face red from the bright sun, but there was always a lovely blue air about her from the reflection in her eyes. ‘He’s coming,’ Julia used to say. ‘He’s put on that handsome hat.’ Then she ran across the orchard towards the hall. She just had time to sit down with the others, on the edge of the bench near the door, when he appeared, Joseph, standing in the doorway, almost filling it with his broad shoulders, and his big black hat tilted to the left of his head. The horse rubbed its forehead against Julia’s shoulders.

  ‘Oh, Bijou, yes, my beauty!’

  She had loved Joseph at once with the whole of herself, without holding anything back. She was smitten by him, by the way he swung his shoulders when he walked, by his solidity, the health glowing in his reddish-brown eyes. Jerome played the accordion, young Mercier said: ‘One, two,’ then put his cornet to his mouth. And Joseph took her in his big arms.

  ‘Oh, my love, my poor love!’

  His arm! They’ve cut off that arm. The one he put around me. Warm and firm around me when we waltzed! That was the hand that he touched me with the first time, there, on the cheeks, on the eyes, on the mouth. We were in the hay-shed at seven o’clock. We looked up through the sky-light at the night, violet like a plum. The smell of crushed hay when we sat down!

  And all that happiness made me giddy as we nestled together and we were drunk with joy that ran through our bodies to our finger-tips. That was the hand he touched me with the first time. On my cheek. He touched the round of my cheek. Then my mouth and eyes. That was the hand he knew me with afterwards…

  ‘Oh, Joseph, oh, my poor love!’

  And now there’s only half of you left. You won’t be touching me any longer with that hand, will you? It was a clever hand, darting around like a little animal, hot and hard, and no stranger to any part of me. Never again, will you? Why? Tell me. I haven’t had that hand for very long. So, you’ll have to learn to touch me with the other hand, won’t you?

  She was sitting in the straw. The old horse lowered its head again, stuck out its tongue and tried to lick Julia’s cheek, but the bridle was too short.

  ‘Julia!’ a man’s voice called. It was Jerome.

  ‘Yes,’ Julia said. She came out from under the trough.

  ‘I was looking for you. I was afraid. I saw you running away so wildly. Be reasonable, try to…’

  They stood and faced each other in silence. Tears streamed down their faces.

  ‘Oh,’ Jerome cried out, lifting up his arms, ‘the right hand has gone from the plough. Oh, my son!’

  JEAN GIONO

  JOSEPH’S LEFT HAND

  from To the Slaughterhouse

  translated by Norman Glass

  THERE WERE THREE PRECISE LITTLE BLOWS on the door below, then the noise of somebody moving back into the straw of the threshing-floor to look up at the window. Julia listened, holding her breath. Joseph was asleep, lying beside her. He had arrived in the five o’clock mail-coach. He was nailed to her by the hook of his thin thigh. Julia gently took hold of that thigh at the top, by the thick part, unhooked it, and slipped out of b
ed. She stood up. Joseph remained deep in sleep.

  Julia opened the door. As recently as yesterday she used a whole piece of lard on the hinges. She went down the stairs on her heels, because anybody on the look-out would have heard the noise of her toe-nails on the stone.

  There were splinters of broken glass on the kitchen floor. Joseph had thrown a bottle at Madeleine’s head. Fortunately the little one had ducked. She had run towards the door, at which he had grabbed the jug in his hand, as though about to throw that at her too. There’s some strength in his left hand.

  There was another small knock on the door. Julia touched the frame of the doorway with the palms of her hands. She touched the lock, but not the key; instead she went higher and only opened the peep-hole. Outside the night was clear. The man was there with his face stuck against the small window.

  ‘Julia!’With his low voice, he breathed into the room the tart sweat of August.

  ‘Yes,’ Julia said softly.

  ‘It’s three days now. Come!’

  ‘No, I’ve got my man.’

  ‘What man?’

  ‘My own.’

  The big face no more than skin and bone, with a head like a beast’s, eyes like stars, and the large ravenous mouth wounded by more than hunger.

  ‘Do you want some bread?’

  ‘You!’

  ‘Tobacco?’

  ‘You, Julia, come on, I need you, I’m alone, alone! Only once. Just once more. Come, Julia!’

  There was silence for a moment. The man’s big body trembled against the wood of the door.

  ‘No,’ Julia said, ‘it’s no.’

  The man breathed heavily into Julia’s face. His breath smelled of raw grass and tobacco.

  ‘I’ll give you some bread, if you want, and some cartridges.’

  ‘I don’t give a fuck for your bread.’

  An owl hooted.

  ‘And I don’t give a fuck for you.’

  He spat into the peep-hole. Julia closed the little shutter and put up the bar. The man leaned with all his weight against the door. She listened to the cracking of his bones and his heavy, weary breathing, like an animal’s. He went away. Julia wiped her forehead with the back of her hand. The man’s spittle was running down to her lips.

  Joseph was asleep. He didn’t wake up, he didn’t turn round. The hook of his thigh was still there, in the air, waiting for the woman’s flesh. Julia climbed gently into the bed. She checked to see if Joseph was well covered, over there, on the right side which he couldn’t look after alone any longer. She stretched out under the hook of thigh. She drew her night shirt up like a cushion under her chin. She took Joseph’s left hand and spread out his fingers. She put one of her breasts in the full of that left hand and, softly, she stayed there, under that hand, breathing and living.

  Jean Giono was born in 1895 in Manosque in the South of France, where he died in 1970. He fought in the war and the horrors he experienced on the front turned him into a lifelong pacifist. In the 1930s, he produced his great pacifist works, including To the Slaughterhouse (Le Grand Troupeau), written in 1931, Refus d’obéissance (1937) and Lettre aux paysans sur la pauvreté et la paix (1938). With like-minded pacifists, Giono met in the village of Contadour in Haute-Provence from 1935 to 1939; their writings were published yearly as the ‘Cahiers de Contadour’. The French title of To the Slaughterhouse, Le Grand Troupeau, refers to both men and animals. The novel starts the day after a group of soldiers leave for the front, with a great herd of sheep passing through the village where there is no one to look after them. Giono powerfully conveys how the balance of the rural community is disrupted by the removal of the men – the crops are not cared for and the women pine for their lost companions and lovers. Giono lived all his life in the Haute-Provence: The Man who Planted Trees (1953) brought him fame and is an ecological classic. Giono’s insistence on the need for an equilibrium between mankind, animals and nature is readily understood by today’s readers.

  LOUIS-FERDINAND CÉLINE

  IN TEN THOUSAND YEARS, THIS WAR WILL BE UTTERLY FORGOTTEN

  from Journey to the End of the Night

  translated by Ralph Manheim

  THERE WAS QUITE A COMMOTION. Some people said: ‘That young fellow’s an anarchist, they’ll shoot him, the sooner the better… Can’t let the grass grow under our feet with a war on!…’ But there were others, more patient, who thought I was just syphilitic and sincerely insane, they consequently wanted me to be locked up until the war was over or at least for several months, because they, who claimed to be sane and in their right minds, wanted to take care of me while they carried on the war all by themselves. Which proves that if you want people to think you’re normal there’s nothing like having a lot of nerve. If you’ve got plenty of nerve, you’re all set, because then you’re entitled to do practically anything at all, you’ve got the majority on your side, and it’s the majority who decide what’s crazy and what isn’t.

  Even so my diagnosis was very doubtful. So the authorities decided to put me under observation for a while. My little friend Lola had permission to visit me now and then, and so did my mother. That was all.

  We, the befogged wounded, were lodged in a secondary school at Issy-les-Moulineaux, especially rigged to take in soldiers like me, whose patriotism was either impaired or dangerously sick, and get us by cajolery or force to confess. The treatment wasn’t really bad, but we felt we were being watched every minute of the day by the staff of silent male nurses endowed with enormous ears.

  After a varying period of observation, we’d be quietly sent away and assigned to an insane asylum, the front or, not infrequently, the firing squad.

  Among the comrades assembled in that suspect institution, I always wondered while listening to them talking in whispers in the mess hall, which ones might be on the point of becoming ghosts.

  In her little cottage near the gate dwelt the concierge, who sold us barley sugar and oranges as well as the wherewithal for sewing on buttons. She also sold us pleasure. For non-coms the price of pleasure was ten francs. Everybody could have it. But watch your step, because men tend to get too confiding on such occasions. An expansive moment could cost you dearly. Whatever was confided to her she repeated in detail to the Chief Medical Officer, and it went into your court-martial record. It seemed reliably established that she’d had a corporal of Spahis, a youngster still in his teens, shot for his confidences, as well as a reservist in the corps of engineers, who had swallowed nails to put his stomach out of commission, and a hysteric, who had described his method of staging a paralytic seizure at the front… One evening, to sound me out, she offered me the identification papers of a father of six, who was dead, so she told me, saying they might help me to a rear-echelon assignment. In short, she was a snake. In bed, though, she was superb, we came back again and again, and the pleasure she purveyed was real. She may have been a slut, but at least she was a real one. To give royal pleasure they’ve got to be. In the kitchens of love, after all, vice is like the pepper in a good sauce; it brings out the flavour, it’s indispensable.

  The school buildings opened out on a big terrace, golden in summer, surrounded by trees, with a magnificent panoramic view of Paris. It was there that our visitors waited for us on Thursdays, including Lola, as regular as clockwork, bringing cakes, advice and cigarettes.

  We saw our doctors every morning. They questioned us amiably enough, but we never knew exactly what they were thinking. Under their affable smiles as they walked among us, they carried our death sentences.

  The mealy-mouthed atmosphere reduced some of the patients under observation, more emotional than the rest, to such a state of exasperation that at night, instead of sleeping, they paced the ward from end to end, loudly protesting against their own anguish, convulsed between hope and despair, as on a dangerous mountain spur. For days and days they suffered, and then suddenly one night they’d go to pieces, run to the Chief Medical Officer, and confess everything. They’d never be seen again. I wasn’t ea
sy in my mind myself. But when you’re weak, the best way to fortify yourself is to strip the people you fear of the last bit of prestige you’re still inclined to give them. Learn to consider them as they are, worse than they are in fact and from every point of view. That will release you, set you free, protect you more than you can possibly imagine. It will give you another self. There will be two of you.

  That will strip their words and deeds of the obscene mystical fascination that weakens you and makes you waste your time. From then on you’ll find their act no more amusing, no more relevant to your inner progress than that of the lowliest pig.

  Beside me, in the next bed, there was a corporal, a volunteer like me. Up until August he had been a teacher at a secondary school in Touraine, teaching history and geography, so he told me. After a few months on the front lines this teacher had turned out to be a champion thief. Nothing could stop him from stealing canned goods from the regimental supply train, the quartermaster trucks, the company stores and anywhere else he could find them.

  So he’d landed there with the rest of us, while presumably awaiting court martial. But since his family persisted in trying to prove that he had been stupefied and demoralized by shell shock, the prosecution deferred his trial from month to month. He didn’t talk to me very much. He spent hours combing his beard, but when he spoke to me it was almost always about the same thing, about the method he had discovered for not getting his wife with any more children. Was he really insane? At a time when the world is upside down and it’s thought insane to ask why you’re being murdered, it obviously requires no great effort to pass for a lunatic. Of course your act has got to be convincing, but when it comes to keeping out of the big slaughterhouse some people’s imaginations become magnificently fertile.

  Everything that’s important goes on in the darkness, no doubt about it. We never know anyone’s real inside story.