by Alexis Jenni
‘Come back to what? From the moment I stopped being a child, I’ve been fighting wars. Even as a child I played at war. Then I did my military service and that led straight into the war. I’ve spent my whole adult life at war, although I never planned it that way. I’ve always lived out of a box. I never imagined things any different, and it suits me. I can hold my whole life in two hands. I can lug it around without getting tired. How else would I live? Go to work every day? I don’t have the patience. Build myself a house? It would be too big for me. I wouldn’t be able to pick it up and move it. All you can carry when you move is a box. And sooner or later we all end up in a box. So why make a detour? I carry my home with me and I travel the world. I do what I’ve always done.’
In the tiny room where he spent his furloughs, there was hardly space for a single bed and the chair on which he set his folded uniform. Victorien gingerly moved the uniform, careful not to crease it, so he could sit stiffly on the edge of the seat, not leaning back. Lying on the bed, the uncle talked to him, staring at the ceiling, his feet bare, his ankles crossed, his hands clasped behind his head.
‘What book would you take with you to a desert island?’ he asked.
‘I’ve never thought about it.’
‘It’s a stupid question. No one goes to a desert island, and people who find themselves on one wind up there without prior notice: they don’t have time to choose. It’s a stupid question, because nothing is at stake. But I’ve played the desert island game. Because my trunk is my island. I’ve asked myself what book I’d take with me in my trunk. The colonial troops get letters, and they’ve got time to read them while they travel on ships and spend long nights lying awake in countries where it’s too hot to sleep. Me, I carry the Odyssey, which recounts the long-drawn-out wanderings of a man who is trying to go home, but cannot find the way. And while he wanders all over the world, searching, his country is given over to sordid ambition, to greed, to pillage. When he finally arrives home, he sorts everything out through the strategies of war. He clears, he cleans house, he restores order.
‘It’s a book I read piecemeal, in places that Homer never knew existed. In Alsace, buried in the snow, by the glow of a cigarette lighter so as not to fall asleep, because if I’d fallen asleep in that cold I would be dead; at night in Africa, in a straw hut, this time I was trying to get to sleep, but it’s so hot you’d take off your skin if you could; I read it in steerage on a cargo ship, leaning against my trunk, so I could think of something other than throwing up; in a bunk built of palm trunks that shudders every time a mortar explodes, and each time a little dirt drifts down on to the pages, and the lamp hanging from the ceiling starts to swing, making the text difficult to read. The effort I have to make to follow the sentences makes me feel better; it focuses my attention and I forget to be afraid of dying. The Greeks knew this book off by heart, apparently, learning it was their education; they could recite a few lines or a whole book any time and anywhere. So I’m learning it, too. I aim to learn the whole thing and that will be the extent of my education.’
In the tiny little room where there was scarcely any room, the very trunk they talked about sat between the end of the bed and the chair, such that Salagnon could not stretch his legs. The more they talked, the more the green metal trunk gained in significance. ‘Open it.’ It was half-empty. A carefully folded piece of red cloth hid the contents. ‘Lift it up.’ Beneath it was the book about Odysseus, a large paperback volume that was beginning to shed its pages. It rested on another piece of cloth, which served as a cushion. ‘I protect it as best I can. I don’t know if I’d find another copy in Upper Tonkin.’ Under the book there was nothing but a few items of clothing, a pistol in a leather holster and a washbag. ‘Unfold them, the two pieces of cloth.’ Salagnon unfolded two flags of medium size, both of them predominantly red. The first was emblazoned with a swastika inside a white circle, now fading to blue; the second a single, gold, five-pointed star.
‘I picked up the Nazi flag in Germany at the end of the war. It was flying from the aerial of an officer’s car. He kept it flying to the end at the head of the armoured column we captured. He made no attempt to shield himself; he drove at the head of the convoy in an open-topped Kübelwagen, followed at a distance by a line of tanks. They carried on until their tanks were empty, then there would be no more petrol and their war was over. His peaked cap singled him out and he was wearing a jacket that, though patched and worn, was clean and immaculately pressed. He had polished his Iron Cross and was wearing it around his neck. He was the first to die, with his arrogance intact. We wiped out the tanks one by one. The last tank surrendered, only the last one. There was no one left to see, so they could afford to. My comrades wanted to burn the flag flying from the officer’s car. But I kept it.’
‘What about the other flag, the one with the star? I’ve never seen one like it.’
‘It’s from Indochine. The Viet Minh designed a flag for themselves, communist red with yellow symbols. I got this one when we retook Hanoi. They were expecting us; they had fortified their defences, dug trenches across the streets, foxholes in the lawns; they’d cut down trees to create barricades. They had stitched flags to let the world know who they were; some were made from cotton, others from expensive silk requisitioned from shops. They had something to prove, and, having been driven back by the Japanese, we had something to prove, too. Both sides were proud of their flags. It was all very heroic, and then they fled. This particular flag was one a young lad had used to taunt us. I prised it from his dead fingers in the street amid the rubble. I don’t think I shot him, but in street battles you can never know for sure. I took it to protect my book. Now it is safe.
‘Both of these guys terrified me. The arrogant Nazi officer and the fanatical young Tonkinese lad. Both were alive when I first saw them, then they were dead. I stole both flags and folded them to wrap up Odysseus. These men terrified me, because they chose to brandish a red flag rather than hide themselves and save their skin. They were little more than flagpoles, and they died. That is the horror of systems, of fascism and communism: man disappears. They talk on and on about mankind, but they don’t give a shit about man. They worship dead men. And there I am, fighting wars because I never had the time to learn anything else. I try to place myself in the service of a cause that does not seem too immoral: to be a man, for my own sake. The life I lead is a way of being a man, of remaining a man. With the things you see over there, it’s a full-time objective; it is something that can take a lifetime, take every ounce of strength; you can never be sure that you’ll succeed.’
‘What is it like, over there?’
‘Indochine? It’s like the planet Mars. Or Neptune. I don’t know. It’s a world that is nothing like this one: imagine a country where there is no dry land. The muddy sludge of the delta is the most disgusting substance I know. That’s where they grow their rice, and it grows terrifyingly fast. It’s hardly surprising they bake this mud to make bricks: it takes a sort of exorcism, a trial by fire, for the soil to hold together. It takes extraordinary rituals, a thousand degrees in a kiln, to overcome the despair you feel when faced with land that’s constantly slipping out of sight and out of reach, earth that sinks under your feet and slips through your fingers. It is impossible to grasp that mud; it bogs you down, it is thick and sticky and it stinks.
‘The mud in the rice fields sticks to your legs, sucks at your feet, gets daubed over your hands, your arms; you find it smeared over your forehead as though you had fallen; as you tramp through it, the mud slithers over you. And all around, insects drone, some chirrup, they all sting. The sun beats down. You try not to look at it, but it reflects in every puddle, throwing off dazzling sparks that follow your gaze, blinding you, even when you lower your eyes. And everything stinks. Sweat streams from under your arms, down your legs, into your eyes, but you have to keep marching. It is vital that we not lose a single piece of the heavy kit weighing on our shoulders, the rifles that must be kept clean in order to work
. We have to march without slipping, without stumbling; the mud comes up to our knees. Aside from being inherently toxic, the mud has been booby-trapped by the people we are hunting. At times it explodes. At times it gives way: you fall twenty centimetres and find your feet impaled on bamboo spikes. Sometimes there’s a crack of gunshot from behind a bush on the outskirts of a village or from behind a ditch and a man goes down. You rush towards the place from which the shot was fired, scrabbling through the thick sludge, making little headway, and by the time you get there, there is nothing, not a trace. We stand like fools around the wounded man, beneath a sky that is too vast for us. Now we have to carry him. He seemed to fall suddenly, for no reason, and the dry crack we heard before he fell must have been the snap of the thread keeping him upright. In the delta we move like puppets, silhouetted against the sky, our every movement seems clumsy and awkward and predictable. Our limbs are wooden; the heat, the sweat, the crushing tiredness leave us senseless and slow-witted. The peasants watch us pass without troubling to interrupt their work. They crouch on raised banks on which they build their villages, doing God knows what, or they stoop into the mud, which they cultivate with simple tools. They scarcely move. They do not speak, do not run away; they simply watch as we pass; and then they bend again and carry on with their humble work, as though their task is for all time and we are nothing, as though they are here for all eternity and we, despite our slowness, are merely passing through.
‘The children are more active; they follow us, running along the dykes letting out shrill cries, their voices much more high-pitched than children here at home. But even the children come to a standstill. They often lie on the back of their black buffalo as it plods along, grazing, drinking from streams, not even realizing it is carrying a sleeping child.
‘We know they are all informers for the Viet Minh. They tell them where we are heading, what equipment we have, how many there are of us. Some of them are fighters themselves: the Viet Minh militia’s uniform is not different to the black pyjamas worn by the locals. They roll up their rifle and a few bullets in a piece of tarpaulin and bury it in the paddy fields. They know where it is, we would never find it; and when we have left, they dig it out again. Others, especially the children, remotely set off booby traps, using a length of wire to trigger grenades tethered to a stake planted in the mud, hidden in a tuft of grass or in a bush. As we pass, they tug the wire and it explodes. So we’ve learned to keep the kids away, to fire so that they don’t come near us. We’ve learned to be particularly suspicious of the ones who look like they are sleeping on the backs of black buffalos. That piece of string they’re holding that dangles in the mud might be the reins or it might be a trigger. We shoot wide to scare them off and sometimes we slaughter the buffalo with a machine gun. Whenever there’s a gunshot, we round up everyone, all those working in the paddy fields, we smell their fingers, bare their shoulders, and we deal harshly with anyone who smells of gunpowder or sports the tell-tale bruise made by a rifle’s recoil. When we approach a village, we machine-gun the scrubland all around before we advance. When there is nothing left moving, we go in. The people have fled. They are afraid of us. And besides, the Viet Minh tell them to leave.
‘The villages are like islands. Islands beached on low embankments, towns ringed by curtains of trees; from outside you can see nothing. In the villages there is solid ground, you do not sink into it. Standing in front of the huts, we are almost on dry land. Sometimes we see people and they tell us nothing. This almost always sparks us to fury. Not their silence, but the fact of being on dry ground. Of finally seeing something. Of being able to grasp a handful of earth without it trickling away. As though in villages we are free to act, and that action is a reaction to being mired, bogged down, helpless. As soon as we have the ability to act, we act harshly. We have destroyed whole villages. We have the power: in fact, it is the hallmark of our power.
‘Luckily we have machines. Field radios that connect us to each other; aeroplanes that drone above out heads; they are vulnerable, solitary planes, but from up there they can see much better than we who are stuck on the ground; amphibious tanks that move through water, through mud, as easily as they do on the road, in which we are sometimes transported, packed like sardines behind the white-hot armour plating. We are saved by machines. Without them, we would be swallowed by this mud and devoured by the tendril roots of rice.
‘Indochine is the planet Mars or Neptune, a place like nowhere we have ever seen, a place were it is easy to die. But sometimes it offers a sizzling spectacle. Sometimes we step on to dry land and we do not strafe anything. In the middle of the village is a pagoda, the only permanent structure. Pagodas are often used as bunkers in our battles against the Viet Minh; by us or by them. But sometimes we step quietly into the almost cool shade and, there, once our eyes have adjusted, we see only deep red, dark wood, gold leaf and dozens of tiny flames. A gilded Buddha gleams in the shadows, the flickering glow of the candles flows over him like clear water, making his skin luminous and trembling. Eyes closed, he raises one hand and that simple gesture is astonishingly calming. We breathe. Crouching monks are swathed in huge orange robes. They whisper, bang gongs, burn incense. We feel like shaving our heads, wrapping ourselves in bedsheets and staying here. When we go back into the sunlight, when we sink back into the muddy delta, at that first step, we almost feel like crying.
‘The people over there never speak to us. They are shorter than us; they tend to crouch and their stiff politeness makes it impossible to look them in the face. So our eyes never meet theirs. When they do speak, it’s in a shrill, piercing language we don’t understand. I feel like I’m meeting Martians; and fighting men I can’t tell apart from the rest. But sometimes they talk to us: village peasants, townspeople who went to school just like we did, or soldiers fighting alongside us. When they speak to us in French it makes up for the things we endure, the things we commit to every day; with a few words we come to believe we have forgotten the horrors, that they will not return. We gaze at their women, who are as beautiful as silken veils, as palm fronds, as gossamer things that flutter in the breeze. We dream of the possibility of living here. Some do. They settle in the mountains where the air is cooler, where the war is less invasive, where, in the morning light, those mountains float on a sea of iridescent mist. We can dream of eternity.
‘In Indochine we live with the most abject horrors and the most spectacular beauty; the biting cold of the high peaks and the torrid heat 2,000 metres below; we endure the terrible dry heat of the limestone karsts and the overwhelming humidity of the delta marshlands; we suffer constant fear of attack by day and night, and experience a blissful serenity when faced with wonders we did not know existed on Earth; we are constantly veering between terror and exaltation. To be subjected to such conflicting forces is a brutal ordeal and I fear we will split the way timber does when forced to endure such pressures. I don’t know what state we will be in afterwards, those of us who don’t die, I mean, because men die quickly.’
He was staring at the ceiling, hands folded behind his head.
‘It’s crazy how quickly a man can die over there,’ he murmured. ‘Guys arrive, they come in by the boatload from France. I hardly have time to get to know them; they all die and I’m left behind. It’s crazy how many men die; they slaughter us like tuna.’
‘What about them?’
‘Who, the Viet Minh? They’re Martians. We slaughter them, too, but how they die we never know. Always hidden, always elsewhere, never there. And even if we did see them, we wouldn’t recognize them. They all look the same, they dress the same; we don’t know what we’re killing. But when we’re ambushed, when they’re hiding in elephant grass, in the trees, they kill us methodically; they spear us like fish. I’ve never seen so much blood. It’s plastered over the leaves, the rocks, the lush ravines, the black mud runs crimson.
‘It reminds me of a passage from the Odyssey. This is the passage that made me think of fish.
There I sack
ed the city, killed the men…
Then I urged them to cut and run, set sail,
but would they listen? Not those mutinous fools…
And all the while the Cicones sought out other Cicones, called for help from their neighbours living inland: a larger force, and stronger soldiers too, skilled hands at fighting men from chariots, skilled, when a crisis broke, to fight on foot. Out of the morning mist they came against us – packed as the leaves and spears that flower forth in spring – and Zeus presented us with disaster, me and my comrades doomed to suffer blow on mortal blow…
Long as morning rose and the blessed day grew stronger we stood and fought them off, massed as they were, but then, when the sun wheeled past the hour for unyoking oxen, the Cicones broke our lines and beat us down at last. Out of each ship, six men-at-arms were killed; the rest of us rowed away from certain doom.
From there we sailed on, glad to escape our death, yet sick at heart for the dear companions we had lost. But I would not let our rolling ships set sail until the crews had raised the triple cry, saluting each poor comrade cut down by the fierce Cicones on that plain…
‘Shit! That’s not the right passage. I could have sworn there was something about spearing fish. Pass me the book.’
He sat up on the bed, grabbed the battered book from Victorien who was holding it gingerly in case pages should fall out and feverishly thumbed through it, taking little care.
‘I could have sworn… Ah! Here it is! The Laestrygonians. I got the Laestrygonians confused with the Cicones. Listen: The nightfall and the sunrise march so close together…
But the king let loose a howling through the town that brought tremendous Laestrygonians swarming up from every side – hundreds, not like men, like Giants. Down from the cliffs they flung great rocks a man could hardly hoist and a ghastly shattering din rose up from all the ships – men in their death-cries, hulls smashed to splinters. They speared the crews like fish and whisked them home to make their grisly meal.