by Alexis Jenni
And then the sky was ripped open like a sheet of silk, and at the base of the tear a great hammer hit the ground. The ground caved in, stones and splintered wood rained down around them. Then came the screams. Salagnon felt something pierce his thigh and then a warm, liquid sensation. It was torrential, draining: he was bleeding out; the ground was probably steaming. Someone came to help him up. He could see only a whirling that made it impossible to walk. He had to be carried. A sort of damp haze blurred his vision, but that might have been tears. He could hear screams nearby. He tried to say something to whoever was carrying him. He tugged at his collar, pulled him towards him and very slowly whispered in his ear: ‘He’s not doing so good, that guy.’ Then he released his grip and slipped into unconsciousness.
When he came round, Salomon Kaloyannis was next to him. He found himself in a little room with a mirror on the wall and knick-knacks on a shelf. He was lying on a wooden bed, propped up on plush, monogrammed pillows. He could not flex his leg. A tight bandage ran from ankle to groin. Kaloyannis showed him a sharp, twisted sliver of metal about the size of a thumb; the edges were as fine as a shard of glass.
‘Take a look, this is what it was. During explosions you only ever see the light, it’s like a firework; but the aim is to spray things like this, pieces of shrapnel. To shoot razorblades from catapults at people who are stark naked. If you knew the terrible gashes I have to suture. The war has taught me a lot about cutting up men and the techniques for stitching them together again. But you’re awake now and you seem all right, so I’ll leave you alone. Eurydice will come and see you.’
‘Am I in a hospital?’
‘You’re in Mâcon Hospital. We’re all set up now. I found you a private room, because the whole place is crowded. There are guys lying in the hallways, even out in tents in the grounds. I put you in the guard’s room, so I can keep an eye on you. I don’t want them discharging you until I’ve got you cured. I don’t know where the security guard is, so make the most of your little room and get better. I even found you a real sketchpad. Get some rest. It’s very important to me that you pull through.’
He pinched Victorien’s cheek and shook him vigorously. He laid a large, canvas-covered sketchpad on the bed and then left, his stethoscope swaying, his hands in the pockets of his white coat.
The afternoon sun slanted through the wooden blinds, tracing parallel lines on the walls and on the bed. He could hear the constant commotion of the hospital, the trucks, the screams, the jostling in the hallways, the bustle in the courtyard. Eurydice came to change his bandage. She brought a metal tray with crêpe, antiseptic, cotton wool and safety pins – a whole new box of them with English writing. She pinned her hair back tightly and buttoned her blouse all the way to the throat, but it took only a flicker of her lashes, a quiver of her lips, for Victorien to picture her whole, her naked body, her every curve, her tremulous skin. She set down the tray and sat on the bed. She kissed him. He pulled her to him, the injured leg he could not bend made it awkward, but he felt enough strength in his arms and in his tongue to cope. She lay down next to him, her white coat rucking up over her thighs. ‘I want to be reckless,’ she whispered into his ear. Her thigh pressed hard against his injured thigh, their sweat mingled; outside the constant roar grew quieter in the afternoon heat. Victorien’s penis had never been so big. He could no longer feel it, no longer tell where it began and ended, his whole body felt engorged, sensitive; it fit together snugly with the body of Eurydice. When he entered her, she tensed and then sighed; tears trickled; she squeezed her eyes shut, opened them again; she was bleeding. Victorien caressed her from within. They moved in perfect balance, trying not to fall, their eyes never leaving each other. The pleasure that followed was like nothing they had ever known. The exertion, the effort, reopened Victorien’s wound. He was bleeding. Their blood mingled. They lay there for a long time, pressed against each other, watching the parallel lines of light moving slowly over the wall, passing over the mirror, which shimmered but reflected nothing.
‘I’ll change your dressing. That’s why I’m here.’
She made the new bandage a little less tight; she also cleaned his thighs. She kissed him on the lips and left. He could feel the wound in his thigh throb, but it had healed over. He exuded a musky odour that was not entirely his own, or one that he had never given off before. He opened immaculate white pages of the handsome sketchpad Salomon had given him. He made light, supple strokes. He tried to convey in ink the softness of the sheets, their infinitely sinuous folds, their smell, the parallel bands of light reflected in the mirror on the wall, the pervasive heat, the clamour and the sun outside, the clamour outside that is life itself, the sun that is its source, and himself in this dappled room, central and secret, the beating heart of a great joyous organism.
He recovered, but his progress was less swift than that of the war. The Zouaves continued on their northward march, leaving a trail of wounded in their wake. When Salagnon could finally manage to get up, he joined a different regiment and, with a new rank, they continued on their way to Germany.
* * *
The summer of 1944 was sunny and warm; people did not stay cooped up: everyone was out in the fresh air. Men strolled around in oversized shorts fastened at the waist with a leather belt, shirts open to the navel. There was much yelling and shouting. They joined the thronging crowds, they marched, they cheered, they followed the victory parade as it moved through the streets at a leisurely pace. Army trucks moved at walking pace as the crowds parted; in the back of the trucks sat soldiers, affecting a stiff military bearing. They were wearing clean uniforms, American helmets; they forced themselves to keep their eyes front, to grip their rifles manfully, but each sported a quivering smile that threatened to split his face. Painted cars followed behind filled with young boys in scout uniforms waving flags and ill-assorted weapons. Officers in jeeps shook the hands of hundreds who reached out to touch them; they opened the path for tanks recently baptized with French names daubed in white paint. Next came the vanquished: soldiers with hands raised high, stripped of their helmets, their belts; they were careful not to make any sudden movements, not to make eye contact with anyone. Lastly came a few women, hemmed in by the crowds closing up behind to follow the procession; the women were all alike, their bowed faces streaked with tears, their features so expressionless as to be unrecognizable. They brought up the rear of the parade, and behind them the jubilant groups lined up along the pavement poured into the street to join the procession; everyone marched; everyone thronged; the crowd marched between two watching crowds; the crowd was triumphant, revelling in its victory, a rapturous crowd jeering these women who walked on in silence. With the defeated soldiers, they alone were silent, but they were jostled, they were mocked. The armed men surrounding them brandished their rifles light-heartedly and did not intervene. An armband served as their uniform, they wore their berets at a rakish angle and their shirts undone; an officer wearing a kepi led them to a spot where they paused for a moment to expiate their shame. Then the crowd moved off again on a different footing, louder, stricter, sturdier. The carnivalesque crowd drank deeply of the summer air of 1944; everyone breathing the open air of the streets where everything takes place. France would never again be a German whore, a dancer in lurid lingerie teetering on a table, stripping her clothes off, drunk on champagne; France was manly and muscular now; France had been reborn.
Throughout the afternoon, in the empty streets far from the victory parade, in houses whose doors stood open, in empty rooms – everyone was outside, net curtains fluttered from the windows, warm breezes gusted from room to room – isolated gunshots rang out with no echo; scores being settled, funds transferred, captures and transport; unobtrusive men slipped down side streets carrying suitcases to be stashed somewhere safe.
It was a glorious French celebration. When making a casserole in a stockpot, there comes a moment when the soul of a dish is born; simmered over a high heat, the flavours mingle, the flesh falls away f
rom the bone; it is this that produces the characteristic aroma. The summer of 1944 provided the heat that warmed the national melting pot, the moment that produced the distinctive flavour that the dish would have after long hours of simmering. Needless to say, peacetime was quick to re-establish its filters, and in the days that followed these strainers were patiently shaken and the little people slipped through the sieve and found themselves, as they had been before, inferior to the others. People were sifted according to their size. But something had happened, something that left a tang of solidarity. France needs its regular popular uprisings, its celebrations: everyone outside! and we all rush out and this creates a sense of togetherness that lasts a long time. Otherwise the streets are deserted, people do not mix; we often wonder who our neighbours are.
In Lyon the leaves of the chestnut trees were beginning to shrivel; the shop was where it had always been, of course, and still standing. A large French flag fluttered over the doorway. Three strips of cloth had been stitched together, but the colours were wrong – all except the white, which came from a bedsheet – the blue was too pale, the red too mottled, the fabric used to make it was too worn, too washed-out, but in the sunlight, when the dazzling sun of the summer of 1944 shone through it, the colours blazed with just the right intensity.
His father seemed happy to see him. He let him give his mother a long, silent hug, then he hugged him. He led him away and opened a dusty bottle of wine.
‘I kept this for when you came home. Burgundy – that’s where you were stationed, isn’t it?’
‘I disobeyed you.’
‘You chose the right path all by yourself. That’s why I didn’t say anything; and now everything is clear. Look,’ he said gesturing to the flag, the badly chosen blue was visible through the doorway.
‘Were you on that path?’
‘Paths fork, they don’t always lead where you expect… but now our paths have met up again. Look.’
He opened a drawer, delved under a pile of paperwork and took out a gun belt with a revolver and an F.F.I. armband.
‘You weren’t afraid?’
‘Of who? The Germans?’
‘No… of the other resistants… because of what you used to do…’
‘Oh, that… I’ve got all the secret documents I needed to prove that I was only providing supplies to the right people. Going back far enough, so that no one could doubt that I was on the right side.’
‘And did you?’
‘I’ve got the proof right here.’
‘And how did you get it, this proof?’
‘You’re not the only one who knows how to forge documents. In fact, it’s a commonplace skill.’
He gave his son a wink. The same one, which had the same effect.
‘What about the guy at the préfecture?’
‘Oh… someone informed on him and he was thrown into jail. Like a lot of people who had dealings with the Germans.’
He took the revolver from the battered leather holster and examined it quietly.
‘It came in handy, you now.’
Victorien looked at his father, incredulous.
‘You don’t believe me?’
‘I do. I’m sure it was useful. But I don’t know in what way.’
‘A revolver in the right hands is much more useful than all your military fireworks. Have you got any plans?’
Victorien got to his feet and walked out, without turning back. As he left, he got tangled in the flag flapping over the door. He tugged, the crude stitches gave way and suddenly it was a three-tongued flag, a tongue for each colour, waving him off.
Victorien spent the summer in the uniform of Free France. People hugged him, shook his hand, bought him drinks, offered intimacies which he sometimes refused and sometimes accepted. He was enrolled in an officers’ training corps and graduated as a lieutenant in the new French army.
In the autumn he was in Alsace. In a forest of fir trees he guarded a fort made of logs, filled in with earth. The fir trees grew straight despite the steep slope, the base of their trunks twisting forcefully. Darkness drew in at about four o’clock and daylight never truly returned. It was increasingly cold. The Germans were no longer on the run; they were dug in on the other side of the knoll, on the far slope. They sent out patrols, wearing cloaks that blended with the undergrowth, accompanied by dogs trained to be silent and to point with their muzzles when they caught a scent. They threw grenades, blew up blockhouses, captured young French soldiers who had enlisted only weeks earlier; boys who, after so many years, no longer remembered what it was to sleep without gripping a loaded rifle.
When it rained the water coursed in torrents beneath the carpet of pine needles; the floors of the blockhouses became quagmires; the mud reinforcing the logs began to dissolve. The fervour of the young French soldiers faltered faced with Germans who, though not much older, were hardened by five years of survival. Massive assaults were ordered by officers, who competed with each other, who had much to prove or much they wished to forget. They launched raids of light troops on Germans hiding in foxholes, but they were repelled. Many died in the cold, sprawled in the mud, and still the Germans did not retreat. Ranking officers took charge. They needed to be patient, methodical, disciplined. They eked out their ammunition as best they could; the men became calmer, more cautious. The war was no longer fun for anyone.
The Zouave regiments returned to Africa. Victorien forged on into the heart of Germany, a lieutenant in command of a group of young men who sheltered in abandoned farmhouses, waging bitter, brief battles against the remnants of the Wehrmacht, who no longer knew which way to turn. They captured all those prepared to surrender and liberated prisoners whose emaciation and exhaustion frightened them. But their protruding bones were less terrifying than their glassy stares; like glass, the gaze of the prisoners had only two states: vacant and clear or shattered.
The spring of 1945 arrived like a sigh of relief. Salagnon was amid the ruins of Germany, gun in hand, commanding a group of muscular young men who no longer hesitated to act. Everything he said was immediately followed by actions. People fled before them, they surrendered, spoke to them fearfully, mumbling in broken French. Then the war ended and he had to return to France.
For a few months he stayed in the army, then he was returned to civilian life. ‘Returned’ is the word people use, but for those who have never led a civilian life, the return came to seem like being naked, left by the roadside, sent back to what was called home, a place that, to them, did not exist. What could he do? What could he possibly do in civilian life?
He enrolled in the university, attended classes, tried to broaden his mind. Young people sitting in a lecture theatre, heads bowed, transcribing the words read to them by an old man. The place was freezing; the voice of the old man trailed off in a shrill falsetto; he stopped in order to cough; one day he dropped his notes, which scattered over the floor; in the long minutes while he gathered them, put them back in order, muttering to himself, the students sat, pens poised, waiting for him to continue. Victorien bought the books he was supposed to read; he read only the Iliad, but that several times. He would read lying on his bed, wearing linen trousers, shirtless and barefoot in hot weather or wrapped in a coat and huddled under a blanket as winter drew in. Again and again he read the description of the terrible fray in which bronze cleaves limbs, cuts throats, pierces skulls, plunges through the eyes to emerge at the neck, dragging warriors into the shadows of death. Open-mouthed, trembling, he read of the fury of Achilles as he avenges the death of Patroclus. Breaking every rule, he cuts the throats of Trojan prisoners, defiles their corpses and spurns the gods without every ceasing to be a hero. He acts ignobly towards men, towards the gods, towards the laws of the universe, yet he remains a hero. Throughout the Iliad, throughout this book which people have been reading since the Bronze Age, he learned that the hero does not have to be good. Achilles radiates vitality; he bestows death as a tree bestows fruit; in feats, in bravery, in prowess he excels: he is not
good; he dies, but he does not have to be good. What did he do afterwards? Nothing. What could anyone have done afterwards? He closed the book. He did not go back to the university. He looked for work. He found a job, several jobs. He left them all; they bored him. In October that year he turned twenty. He collected all the money that he could and left for Algiers.
It rained all through the crossing; grimy clouds scudded over the dark waters; a relentless wind made being on deck painful. The choppy autumn waves slapped the sides of the ship with a harsh crack, sending muffled vibrations shuddering throughout the structure of the ship and into the very bones of passengers who could not sleep, like kicks to a man lying on the ground. When she is not smiling brilliantly, when she is not laughing with that throaty laugh of hers, the Mediterranean is vicious and spiteful.
In the morning they hove in sight of a grey stretch of coast where nothing was visible. Algiers is very different from what people say, he thought, leaning on the ship’s rail. He could just make out the outline of a drab city clinging to a slope, a little town on an unprepossessing hill bereft of trees, which would be bare earth in warm weather and, just now, mud. Salagnon landed in Algiers in October and the ship from Marseilles had to pass through curtains of rain to reach it.
Fortunately, the rain stopped as the ship pulled into the quay. The sky yawned wide as he stepped on to the gangway, and as he started up the steps leading from the docks – in Algiers the port is set low – it became blue again. The white, colonnaded façades quickly dried; a bustling crowd spilled out on to the streets; children wheeled around him, making offers he did not listen to. An elderly Arab in a threadbare, possibly official, cap offered to carry his bag. He politely refused, gripping the handle of his suitcase tighter, and asked for directions. The man muttered something that was clearly unfriendly and vaguely pointed towards an area of the city.