by Alexis Jenni
The leather strap was shiny, oiled by decades of sweat. He clearly had not changed that either; it was probably leather from a water buffalo that had grazed in Indochine in the depths of the last century. Perhaps that had imparted a smell, but I did not get close enough to know. He let it drop against his chest and rebuttoned his shirt.
‘He probably serves as my heart, this fat little man with his eyes closed. I’ve never dared be without it, never set it down for too long. I was afraid something would stop and it would all be over. There is just enough metal in it to cast a bullet, a silver bullet like the ones they use on werewolves, vampires, the evil creatures that cannot be killed by ordinary means. So I picked it up, the bullet that did not kill me, the bullet that had my name on it, and as long as I keep it hidden, as long as I keep it close, it cannot hurt me. No one has seen that Buddha except Eurydice, who’s seen me naked, and some of my paratrooper buddies who saw me in my boxers or in the shower, but they’re all dead now, and now there’s you. In this whole story, the only thing I’ve kept is this death that was not mine.’
‘You didn’t bring anything back, didn’t keep anything? No exotic curios to remind you?’
‘Nothing. Apart from a talisman and a few wounds. Nothing remains of those twenty years of my life, apart from my pictures. I painted so many, so now I’m trying to sell them off. The heat over there cured me of exoticism. That said, Indochine was a weird bazaar, you could buy anything there: American rifles, Japanese military swords, Viet Minh sandals made with Michelin tyres, antique Chinese objects, broken French furniture, everything bought there became exotic. But I never hung on to anything. I gradually lost everything. I left it behind. Some things were stolen or destroyed or confiscated, and what was left, the things you’d expect to find in an old soldier’s attic, like a beret or a badge, a medal, maybe a gun, I threw away. I have no souvenirs. Nothing here relates to that part of my life.’
Surrounded as we were by all the pointless objects that decorated the room, which spoke of nothing but their own pointlessness, and visibly confirmed that they were related to nothing other than themselves, I had no trouble believing him.
‘All I have is the silver Buddha I’ve just shown you; and the ink brush I use, which I bought in Hanoi on the advice of the man who was my teacher. And a photograph. Just one.’
‘Why that particular one?’
‘I don’t know. The little Buddha is something I never took off. It hasn’t been out of my sight in fifty years. The ink brush is something I still use. But I don’t know why I still have the photograph. Perhaps it has only survived by accident, because something always survives. Of the thousands of things I’ve handled in those twenty years, there are those that disappear, and you find them again one day, and you wonder why.
‘I should have torn it up, thrown it away, but I never had the heart. I kept the photo. It has overcome every threat of extinction and it’s still here, like one of those insignificant relics that unaccountably survives for hundreds of years when everything else has disappeared, a mark in the sand, a battered sandal, a child’s terracotta toy. There is a form of archaeological chance which dictates that, for no particular reason, certain things remain.’
He showed me a small black-and-white photograph, half the size of a postcard, with a white deckle border, the way they were printed back then. In that cramped space a number of people stood grouped around a large vehicle with caterpillar tracks, staring at the camera. It was difficult to see much, because of the size of the figures and the poor contrast. The laboratory assistants would have scrimped on paper and chemicals and those in backwater towns in Indochine were slapdash and churned out pictures too quickly.
‘The fact that you can’t see much is one of the reasons I kept it. I’ve always told myself I would work out who was in the picture and find out how many were still alive. I’ve waited so long that number must be close to zero. I think I’m the only one left. And maybe that machine, a hulking wreck rusting in the jungle. Have you spotted me?’
It was difficult to make out the faces. They were simply a grey blur in which a dark hollow indicated the eyes and a white smudge the smile. I found it hard to recognize the vehicle; the turret was unlike the ones you see on tanks, and the gun barrel looked like a short pipe. In the background there was a mass of hazy foliage.
‘The forest of Tonkin. We used to call it the jungle, but people don’t say that any more. Have you found me?’
I finally identified him by his height, his leanness and the proud tilt of his head, by the fact that he looked like an ensign planted in the ground.
‘Here?’
‘Yes. The only picture of me in twenty years and I’m barely recognizable.’
‘Where were you?’
‘When it was taken? Everywhere. We were the reserve force. We went wherever things were going badly. I was stationed with them after my convalescence. We needed able-bodied men, lucky men, immortals. We never marched, we ran everywhere. We hurled ourselves at the enemy. If someone called, we came.
‘I learned to jump out of a plane. We didn’t often jump. We went most places on foot, but jumping is an intense experience. We were deathly pale, silent, lined up in the fuselage of a Dakota that was shuddering so hard we couldn’t hear anything above the roar of the engine. We would wait next to a door open on to nothing; there was a vicious draught, the whine of the propellers, a flash of different shades of green below. And, one by one, when the signal was given, we jumped on to the enemy below; we jumped on his back, lips curled, teeth bared, claws unsheathed, eyes glowing. We threw ourselves into the terrible fray; we charged the enemy after a brief flight and a fall in which we were little more than naked bodies in the void, our cheeks juddering, our bellies knotted with fear and the urge to kill.
‘It was really something, being a paratrooper. We were warriors, hoplites, berserkers. We were expected never to sleep, to jump by night, to march for days on end, to run without ever slackening, to fight, to carry extremely heavy weapons and keep them clean, and always to have a hand steady enough to plunge a knife into someone or to carry a wounded man.
‘We would pile into huge, decrepit planes with a pack of folded silk strapped to our backs. We made the flight in silence and when we came to the jungle, the swamp, the vast plains of elephant grass that from above are simply different shades of green, but which are also different worlds, with distinct challenges, particular dangers, different ways of dying, we would jump. We jumped on the enemy hiding in the grass, under the trees, in the mud; we jumped on the enemy’s backs to save a friend who was trapped and about to die, in a post under siege, in a column under attack, who had called on us for help. This was all that mattered to us: saving. Get in quick, fight hard, get out alive if we could. We kept ourselves clean, we had a clear conscience. If this seemed like a dirty war, that was just the mud: we were fighting in a humid country. The risks we took cleansed everything. We saved lives, in our way. That was all we did. Save lives; save ourselves and in the meantime, run. We were magnificent machines, catlike, stealthy, we were the light airborne infantry, slim and athletic. We died easily. That way, we remained clean, the beautiful machines of the French army, the most beautiful warriors who ever lived.’
He fell silent.
‘You see,’ he went on, ‘the thing that fascists have, above and beyond that simple thuggishness anyone might have, is the notion of “romantic death” that has them bid goodbye to life while in their prime, a funereal joy that leads them to feel contempt for life, their own and other people’s. There is a melancholic will-to-machine aspect to fascists evident in their every gesture, their every word; you can see it in their eyes – they have a metallic glint. That’s why we were fascists. Or at least we pretended to be. That’s why we learned to jump: to weed out people, to identify the fittest among us, to cull those who would turn tail when things got tough, to keep only those capable of laughing in the face of their own death. Keep only those who could stare it down and keep marching.
‘All we did was fight. We were lost soldiers, and losing ourselves was our way of protecting ourselves from evil. Me, I probably saw a little more of what was going on, because of the ink. The ink cloaked me somewhat. It gave me a sense of detachment. Working with ink meant sitting down, saying nothing, observing in silence. The narrowness of our world view gave us incredible solidarity, and it later left us orphans. We were living a boy’s adventure story, shoulder to shoulder; in the thick of the fight, as in a phalanx, all we had was our neighbour’s shoulder. We would have liked to live that way for ever, for everyone to live that way. In our eyes, bloody comradeship seemed to resolve everything.’
He paused again.
‘That machine with the caterpillar treads,’ I said. ‘Was that parachuted in with you?’
‘Sometimes. We parachuted in with heavy weaponry we assembled on the ground to build fortified positions in the jungle to lure the Viet Minh, who would end up impaled on our spikes. We were the bait. The Viets wanted nothing more than to destroy paratrooper bases; we wanted nothing more than to destroy their regular divisions, the only units that were about the same strength. At five to one in their favour, we considered it an equal fight. We played hide-and-seek. Sometimes we had huge, hulking machines like this dropping from the sky. We would dig them out of the mud, assemble them, and they would break down. In that godforsaken country we were the only things that worked: a naked man with a weapon in his hand.’
‘The turret is a strange shape.’
‘It’s a flame-throwing tank. An American tank left over from the war in the Pacific. It was used in the beach landings. They used it to burn the bunkers made of coconut trunks that the Japanese had constructed all over the islands. They were easy to build – fibrous trunks, sand, solid blocks of coral – they withstood bullets and bombs. To destroy them, you had to blast liquid flame through the loopholes and burn everything inside. Then you could advance.’
‘Did you do that too?’
‘The Viet Minh didn’t have bunkers. Or if they did, they were so well hidden we never found them; either that, or they were in places the tanks didn’t go.’
‘So what did you use the tank for? You’re all posing with it as if it was your favourite elephant.’
‘We did ride on its back, and we used it to burn villages, that’s all.’
Now it was my turn to fall silent.
A bizarre army had been launched on Indochine, whose only mission was to sort things out for themselves. An ill-assorted army, commanded by aristocrats from days of yore and stray Resistance fighters; an army built from the wreckage of various European countries, comprising a handful of young men who were well-educated romantics, a mob of losers, morons and bastards, and many normal guys who found themselves in a situation so abnormal that they became what otherwise they would never have become. And here they were, all posing for the photographer, grouped around this machine, smiling at the camera. They were the ill-assorted army of Darius, the imperial army. They were capable of thousands of things. But the machine had a single purpose: to burn. And here there was nothing to burn except villages and their huts of wood and straw, and everything within them. This weapon ensured that things could not have turned out differently.
The house burned and everything within it. Since it was made of straw, it burned easily. The thatch of dried palm leaves blazed, flames licking at the wall of woven wood and then at the timber joists and the floor in a thunderous roar that put an end to all cries. These people cried out in their language made up of cries that seemed to mimic the calls of the forest. They shrieked and the roar of the blaze drowned out their cries, and when the fire dwindled and nothing remained but the blackened pillars and the floor, there was nothing but an immense silence, some crackling, a few embers and the sickening stench of burnt fat, charred meat, that hovered over the clearing for days.
‘You did that?’
‘Yes. We saw so many dead, piles and piles of tangled corpses. We buried them with bulldozers when the business was over – the taking of the village or a skirmish with a Viet Minh regiment. We no longer saw them. We were bothered by the smell of them, so we tried to protect ourselves by burying everything. The dead were simply a part of the problem, killing was simply a process. We had the power and by using it we caused damage. We were trying to survive in a country that was collapsing: we relied for support only on each other. The vegetation was itchy, the ground shifting, the people elusive. They were nothing like us. We knew nothing. In order to survive we devised a jungle code: staying together, being careful where we stepped, clearing the path with machetes, never sleeping, running as soon as we heard a wild animal. That was the price of getting out of the jungle. But what we should have done was never go in.’
‘All that blood,’ I murmured.
‘Yes. That was the problem, the blood. I’ve had under my nails for days in the jungle blood that was not my own. When I could finally take a shower, the water turned brown, then red. Filthy, bloody water would flow from me. Then the water would run clear. I would be clean.’
‘A shower, that’s all?’
‘A shower was the least of it if you were to go on living. I survived everything and that was not easy. Have you ever noticed that it is the survivors who describe wars? Listening to them, you think you can get out alive, that providence protects you, that you can watch death from the outside, swooping down on others. You end up believing that death is a rare accident. In the places I went it was easy to die. The Indochine I lived in was a museum of ways of dying: you could die from a bullet to the head; a machine-gun burst riddling your body; a leg blown off by a landmine; a gash from a piece of shrapnel that left you to bleed out; a direct hit that reduced you to a bloody pulp; you could be crushed by the wreckage of an overturned vehicle; burned inside the cabin by an armour-piercing shell; spiked by a poisoned trap; or you could die simply – mysteriously – of exhaustion and heat. I survived everything, but it was not easy. In fact, it had little to do with me. I simply avoided everything. I am here. I think that the ink helped me. It hid me.
‘But this is the end. Even if I don’t really believe it, I will die soon. All these things I’m telling you, I’ve never told anyone. With those who lived it, there was no need, and those who didn’t live it refuse to hear. Eurydice, I told through gestures. I painted for her. I showed her how beautiful it was, nothing more, and I spread a cloak of black ink around her, so she would not suspect.’
‘So why me?’
‘Because this is the end. And because you, you see through the ink.’
I was not sure I understood what he was saying. I did not dare ask him. He was standing, looking out, his back turned towards me. Through the window he would have seen only the houses of Voracieux-les-Bredins framed by towers, in the grey light of an interminable winter.
‘Death,’ he said.
And he said it with that French intonation, that timbre of church and palace, the tone I imagine Bishop Bossuet used, a low throb like a bassoon reed inside his nose, which, when as he orates creates a muted yet fearsome note; the note that declares a state of affairs about which nothing can be done, and yet must be proclaimed. Because life must go on.
‘Death! It’s finally coming! I’m tired of this immortality. I’m beginning to find the solitude weighs heavily. But don’t say that to Eurydice. She relies on me.’
I headed back to Lyon on foot, a journey that was never conceived for pedestrians. I kept my fists balled in my coat, wrapped myself around my clenched teeth, and strode on.
Voracieux-les-Bredins had not been planned with walking in mind. No one walks here. The building projects are bordered by a grey area on which you stumble. Beyond that there is no thought. I walked fretfully. It was like a rhythm, the snare drum of my heart, the bass drums of my footsteps, the tom-toms of the vast buildings lining my route. I crossed zones and thoroughfares intended for heavy traffic. I had to step over low walls, walk through patches of waste ground where shoes sink and trousers a
re dampened by tall, fronded weeds. I had to follow narrow, rubble-strewn paths between badly connected spaces. On a map you can make the journey by car, it is simple, but on a human scale the spaces are cemented by the sweat of footsteps. People pass all the same. They stream along paths not set out on the map. No one ever considered that a person might walk from one place to the other. In Voracieux-les-Bredins nothing is consistent; it was planned that way.
As I followed the dirt tracks through the city, I saw dozens of GAFFES posters plastered over every inch of wall. Rash urban planning throws up countless windowless walls, vast grey canvases blatantly begging to be scrawled on. They are festooned with spray-can paintings and posters that peel off in the rain. The GAFFES posters were blue and had the face of De Gaulle – recognizable by his nose, his kepi, the little moustache he grew during his years in London, the haughty stiffness of the neck. A long quote in dazzling white demanded to be read.
It is very good that there are yellow French, black French, brown French. They show that France is open to all races and has a universal vocation. But only on condition that they remain a small minority. Otherwise, France would no longer be France. We are still primarily a European people of the white race, Greek and Latin culture, and the Christian religion.
This was all, and it was signed with the GAFFES logo. They stick up posters with these slogans, allowing people to believe that ‘The Novelist’ himself wrote them. Nothing else is added. The posters are plastered over every wall in Voracieux-les-Bredins. That seems to be enough; they know what they mean. Voracieux is a place where our darkest thoughts ferment. You take a piece of text, superimpose it on a photograph of de Gaulle from his heroic period and that is enough. No reference is given. I know this speech: The Novelist did not write it. He simply said the words. They were published in newspaper accounts. It begins: ‘Fine words are not enough.’ But they are enough, and he knows that. You can imagine him talking to a reporter who is taking notes, things become heated, he lets rip: ‘Let’s not kid ourselves! Have you gone to see the Muslims? Have you seen them in their turbans and their djellabas? It’s perfectly obvious that they are not French. Anyone who supports integration has the brain of a hummingbird, however educated he might be. Try mixing oil and vinegar. Shake the bottle. After a while they separate again. The Arabs are Arabs, the French are French. Do you really believe the French body politic can absorb ten million Muslims, who will number twenty million by tomorrow and forty by the day after? If we accept integration, if all the Arabs and the Berbers in Algeria were considered French, how could you stop them moving to metropolitan France, where the standard of living is much higher? My village would no longer be called Colombey-les-DeuxÉglises, it would be Colombey-les-Deux-Mosquées.’