by Julien Gracq
TOWARD the winter’s end, Grange’s leave came up. Paris, in its brief wet dawn, seemed gray and dirty, unwelcoming. At the hotel he had directed his driver to, the blue-daubed lamps cast a lonely and clinical light across the bed, making the feel of things uncertain. Warmth could be recovered only where bodies were pressed against each other, in the luminous caves of bars and theaters; it was as if the zone of life had gradually, imperceptibly, gone to earth, as in the ice age. Grange ran across a few vague friends here and there, accidental encounters in cafés, but his heart wasn’t in it, nor the city’s either: Paris was nothing but a great railroad station, a slamming of doors between trains, where all night long the smoky signal lamps winked between the coal-colored rows of houses. At the first signs of spring, no matter how chilly, people were sitting on the café terraces; hands folded in their laps, they watched the city with that idle yet anxious glance one gives one’s own house on moving day. Now that the lights were dimmed throughout the city, Paris had lost its bloom, and Grange felt he was touching the hard core: this knot of roads which had been here forever and which shrank, now, between the armies and the country villas, to a city of the Late Empire—its blood thinned to supernumeraries, official stand-ins, and hearing in its own empty streets the murmur of the ambiguous storm that drifted over the frontiers.
Grange was bored: he took another train, this time for the country. The Vienne was swollen by the sudden thaw; a sour spittle flooded the low fields that were already turning green; through the Chinon valley the pale blue of the Touraine was already daubed across every hill; in the naked woods that covered the tufa slopes, flakes and fireworks of yellowish verdure zigzagged across the bare boughs of winter. He left the inn early in the morning, the Vienne visible on his right, between the still leafless poplars, beneath its long scarves of fog. Suddenly turning into the valley the crisp little town out of the book of hours was revealed at the end of its bridge, its blue-tiled roofs mounting out of the morning’s mist more pearly than a school of minnows, and the enormous curtain of the château unfurled above its houses like a royal scroll stretched out at arm’s length. He crossed the bridge with the first peasant carts on their way to market, and early in the morning, sometimes on an empty stomach, drank the light rosé of Vienne in a tiny dim cafe, listening to the iron-sheathed cartwheels and the casks rolling over the round cobbles of its steep, narrow streets.
The town did not oppress him: it seemed detached from time, refreshed by some fabulous primitive imagery. A strange unfamiliar light hesitated a moment on this corner of the fifteenth century. The portcullis of the château of Chinon rose: to the sound of trumpets, a great cortège paraded out of its vaults like some fascinating hand from a tarot pack: “le Prince d’Aquitaine à la tour abolie,” flanked by Bluebeard and the Maid. The world had come apart at some of its principal seams; suddenly his heart leaped up, possibility exploded: the highways, for a moment, lay open to the “great undesirables.”
What also pleased him was the stone of this countryside, a micaceous chalk that was white and porous, sometimes parched and fissured by the sun, sometimes soft and exfoliated, scaling in the clear pools of water that stood in its declivities, mottled with delicate, smoky grays, gritty blotterlike impregnations, its rough seams scarred with the tiny hardened mildewings of Roquefort. The stone was like a pulpy feminine substance, its skin deep and sensitive, downy with all the subtle impressions of the air. Returning from Chinon, he lingered along the paved bank of the Vienne, his spirits high from his heady breakfast of wine and potted pork, discovering the secret manors of the countryside, safe and sound behind their closed gates, their ancient lawns pierced by deflowered hollyhock stalks—houses wedded supremely to their time, placidly yielding to the gentle, mossy light, like a woman in a garden.
Moreover, the country people never mentioned the war, even pretended not to be particularly interested in it. The stifling atmosphere of Paris, its overparticular anxiety, grew airy here, diverted by those inevitable and inevitably ending natural inclemencies of which peasant wisdom had taken the measure. This war with neither soul nor songs, which had never created a popular mentality, which in each man discreetly murmured I and never we, imprisoning only the private universe, disoriented the country infinitely less than the city, for here it did not function contrary to the mind’s habits: the egoistic, short-run calculation, and the resigned, somewhat magical frequentation of a future evasive by nature. There was nothing changed here, one might have said, beyond a curious rarefaction of manpower; instead of the eve of battle, a mortal conflict, one thought of a country which, in view of a long-term reinforcement, had slowly, ponderously, transported and grafted a massive migration of youth to borderlands a little too exposed. “Odd,” Grange thought, “that in this age of lightning wars it should be not an army but a colony that settles on our frontiers. Another year or two and this army will send down roots: it was a sign that already, at Moriarmé and elsewhere, a third of the officers have sent for their wives; I myself . . .”
Sitting at loose ends beside the little wicker table in his bright, sunny room, looking out over the poplars of the Vienne, he fell back into one of his favorite daydreams about the Roof. Nothing in this war was like any of the others; it was a soft degeneration, a dying twilight of peace indefinitely prolonged—so prolonged that one could dream in spite of oneself, after this strange half-season, this plunge into sleepless nights, each new day attaching itself to the old without any break in continuity. Perhaps for many years now the country would transplant, secrete on its frontiers, a population de luxe, a violent, idle military caste depending for its daily bread on the civilians and finally demanding it of them, as the desert nomads levy tribute on the cultivated regions. Frontier prowlers, idlers of the apocalypse, living without material cares on the brink of their sociable abyss, familiars of signs and presages, having no commerce save with a few cloudy and catastrophic grand incertitudes, as in those ancient watchtowers one comes upon at the sea’s edge. And after all, Grange reminded himself, sinking deeper into his dream, that too would be a way of living.
From time to time he wrote Mona short, rather childish letters. Her resemblance to a plant in the sun, her characteristic openness, her way of growing firm and straight within the grain of life, had straightened him out despite himself: in her radiance, he was no more ashamed of his secret withdrawals than a tree in sunlight of its twisted branches. There was only that strange sensation of falling free, that drifting nausea which became his vice, which he never mentioned to her, from which she remained excluded, and which was yet perhaps the essential thing about her. This was what he called, whenever the faint dizziness began again, “going down into the blockhouse.” But when the mere suspicion of the military censors’ opening his letters paralyzed him, he understood how nakedly he lived with her.
The last night of his leave, he had a remarkable erotic dream about her. He was hanging on a gallows or a high branch—in any case, at a great height—the sun was shining, yet this posture, though certainly uncomfortable, did not seem to involve any immediate inconvenience, since he was taking particular pleasure in contemplating the sun-flooded landscape and the globed treetops far below. But the heart of the sensual joy that filled him was much nearer: beneath him—so close that at times his bare feet almost brushed against her blond hair—a thin cord suspended Mona by the neck from his ankles. The wind swung both of them gently through the balmy, pleasant air, and from the rope that was strangling Mona, especially when she was shaken by faint convulsions that raised her shoulders, he received—at his bound ankles and also at his neck where the cord took another turn—so exquisite a communication of her naked living weight searching, stretching, piercing his body, that he experienced a physical pleasure he had never known before, this ending in the final indecency attributed to hanged men.
The whole morning that followed this strange ecstasy of his dream left Grange floating in a kind of consuming heat, exhausted. And yet it was a dream of love, he decided, st
range and poignant, of a really astounding intimacy. The silence and the height, the sea’s murmur, were those of the craggy uplands where the wind begins despoiling the trees, or of high cliffs with a view plunging down into the heart of a city.
When he got off the train at Moriarmé, the Roof no longer seemed the same to him. All along the Meuse, new concrete blocks had been poured: here and there, the naked raw gray of their masonry irritated and obsessed the eye. The little town swarmed with more troops than ever. The Meuse front was becoming populous: wherever billetings had interrupted the Roof’s solitudes, the cavalry now crossed the river and pushed ahead to the line of blockhouses. On the Roof too, the spring had come, noticeably later than in Touraine, but already brilliant. On the road to the blockhouse, the cool air, washed by the west wind, was delicious: Grange walked between two banks of fresh grass already spreading into the stones of the road, sending up little jets of leaves and birds. Yet this was an odd, unwholesome spring: watching it spread over the Roof scarcely dry from the thaw, he felt it was already jostled, abused by a torrid summer full of the crackle of burning forests that raze the shriveled earth to ash. The spring was coming ahead of time, exotic as an Easter out of season beneath this sky that was still cold. Grange looked around him, astonished by the forest’s panic haste; he seemed to have arrived in an unknown town whose balconies bloomed helter-skelter, whose streets since dawn were covered with rugs. It was as if someone were expected.
He found his men glum. The spring was a little too violent. An almost luxurious divisional rifle range had been set up behind the Meuse, with moving targets that rolled along on trucks. Hervouët and Gourcuff practiced there twice a week with the teams of anti-tank crews from the blockhouses. “It’s something to do!” Olivon said, his voice sharp and hard. Grange had scarcely returned when the front was again alerted for several days: the Germans were invading Norway: this time, there was certainly a thaw! The telephone, which had now been connected to the blockhouse, summoned him more frequently to Moriarmé. From early in the afternoon, the precocious heat rose from the sidewalks in waves along the yellow walls; the little town steamed in the rancid hollow of its valley. With its offices humming now, its troubled rumors, Moriarmé became insupportable to Grange; it was a town breeding pestilence; he found a little fresh air only on the climb back up to the Roof, where the shadow of the trees suddenly swallowed the road. When he reached l’Eclaterie, he stepped off the road for a moment and walked to the cliff’s edge. Before continuing, he sat for a moment on the stone bench in the already yellowing light. In the center of the forest’s tremendous funnel, clammy with leaden heat and the glaucous light of an aquarium, he could see the little town squatting at the bottom of its valley, incubating in the heat of its grayish stones, and the Meuse moving gently in the green penumbra, like a carp at the bottom of a fishpond.
“What are we waiting for here?” he wondered, and the familiar taste of tepid, stagnant water filled his mouth again. All at once the world seemed inexpressibly alien, indifferent, separated from him by miles and miles. It was as if everything were dissolving under his eyes, disappearing, cautiously evacuating its still intact appearance down the cloudy, sluggish river, and desperately, endlessly going away—going away.
MAY came, and its first hot days immediately burst upon them in ominous, aborted storms that prowled above the Roof all afternoon, caught in the shaggy treetops. Although Varin telephoned him every other minute (the captain played his post commanders like hooked fish—sometimes he even gave them line), Grange no longer enjoyed staying in the blockhouse; it weighed on his mind, and he felt free only in the open air. Afternoons, he went more frequently to inspect the progress of the work at Les Fraitures, where the barbwire emplacements were almost finished. As soon as he had the clearing of the upland bogs around him, after climbing the hillside that overhung the last pine groves, the air moving now, and full of high clouds, he felt the sudden relief of the sailor coming on deck from the cramped forecastle. The bog was a thin meadow of peat moss and marsh tea, its rising edges ragged beneath the yellow flames of gorse; occasional puddles of cloudy water lay among the bald patches of this lichen-colored area that smelled of rotting straw. At the end of the bog, where the curtain of low trees closed again, some soldiers in shirt sleeves were driving stakes and laboriously unrolling great bales of barbed wire: faint in the distance came the same spiritless commotion of mattocks, spades, and wire-clippers that clicks and clatters in suburban gardens on a summer night until the darkness falls. Mists drifting across the huge, heavy sky created an emptiness, a strange silence around the tiny amateur putterers pegging out their bean trellises in this Sunday wasteland.
For a long time, Grange stood watching their docile farniente in this disproportionate setting against this enormous sky, this endless, oppressive forest horizon, and a vague doubt stirred in the pit of his stomach, an animal suspicion that oppressed him as if some calculation of faces, suddenly conspicuous, had grossly, inexplicably erred as to scale. “They’re beginning the siege of Alésia all over again!” he told himself, puzzled. Then he shrugged his shoulders, but unconsciously thought of Varin, and a disagreeable feeling settled somewhere under his stomach, where forebodings knit: as if he must spread a warning, set off an alarm. At one side of the emplacement, a machine gun was hanging from a stake driven into the middle of the bog—stretched out on the grass, his hands under his head, the gunner was whistling happily, his feet at right angles to each other. “They don’t have any idea,” Grange reflected, glum again and scandalized, and for a moment Varin, the cavalry lieutenant, Norway, the funnels that never came—all coursed together through his mind like the sibilant rout of water flushing down a drain.
One evening, toward the end of the first week in May, when they had finished dinner early, Grange took Hervouët with him to inspect Hill 403, where the engineers had just opened a new cut. The evening was clear, but heavy; there was not a breath of air in the forest. They followed a winding service path bordered with wild strawberry plants, and when they stopped talking they unconsciously strained their ears, surprised by this empty twilight that was open as dead eyes are: it would last until the forest animals awakened. Hervouët scarcely spoke at all: instinctively, through the rank undergrowth, where patches of heavy sunlight fell on grass that was already black, they adopted the long strides and silences of their patrols, when the only noise was the eternal rustle of cold grass against their knees. A curious image occurred to Grange: it seemed as though he were walking in this unfamiliar forest as if through his own life. The world had gone to sleep like another Olivet, exhausted by fear and foreboding, intoxicated with anxiety and weariness, but the day had not disappeared with it: there remained this cold, abundant light which survived all human caring and seemed to glow upon the empty world for itself alone—this abandoned nocturnal eye that opened before its time and somehow seemed to be looking elsewhere. It was still daytime here—a strange daylight limbo laved by fear and desire, a barren brightness that did not warm: the light of a dead moon.
When they drew near the hillock where the cut began, the sky was still quite pale. Along the ruts in the road, filled by the last rainstorm, the slanting light silvered the rails of cloudy water; a smell of sated earth, the coolness of the water-cress pond rose from the banks of new grass. The cuckoo’s solitary call came at intervals from the curtain of trees at the other end of the clearing. High up, against the great clouds that stirred the sky, Hervouët pointed to a buzzard slowly circling, barely moving, borne on the exhalation of the warm forest like a piece of burnt paper above a great fire. This motionless vigil added a drop of venom to the forest’s ponderous silence. Grange saw that Hervouët was sliding his rifle sling off his shoulder.
“No nonsense!” he said, touching Hervouët’s arm: heard anywhere in the forest, a rifle shot brought a mountain of papers down on their heads from Moriarmé.
Hervouët shoved back his rifle with a shrug and carefully spit into the rut. “Gamekeepers!” he sai
d, with a dejected scowl.
“After the war, you can hunt as much as you want. After all, they do leave us pretty much alone here.”
“It’s not that,” Hervouët replied. He seemed hesitant and puzzled, the look of a whipped dog in his eyes. “Just the opposite.”
“You want to get into action?”
“I’m in no hurry, mon lieutenant.” He shrugged again and looked Grange directly in the eyes. “No hurry at all. Only after a while, it’s funny here. . . .” He gestured toward the empty forest and shook his head. “No one’s behind us. . . .”
They quickly crossed the cut. The trees were too young here: virtually none of the rough stakes already cut were the proper size—besides, the work was obviously going forward with extreme nonchalance. Near a pile of skeletal branches, a makeshift hut leaned against a tree. They went inside. Three or four quartered logs served as benches: on one was laid, almost emblematically, a deck of cards and two empty bottles, a still life of a war hibernating now in broad sunlight. Grange put his hands in his pockets and glanced around the hut with one of Varin’s grimaces.