Just as real, perhaps, as a glimpse of heaven to the old and pious. But she was too young. No harps or angels or Nirvana for her. Life—that was the heaven which Dina saw unfolding. Yet she crunched and she swallowed, and her heart raced so that she thought its last fluttering was on her. But still the heavy boots marched on each side of her, and she with them.
All men are much the same. My duty was to see that she died before she could talk. Theirs was to exterminate the saboteur. Yet they were quite content to question her decently for a day, and then put her in Ravensbruck Camp as a highly suspicious character against whom nothing definite could be proved. Even in Ravensbruck the commandant made a sort of pet of her. When for a few seconds you have longed to live with a passion that most of us never know in our whole existence, your joy thereafter is bound to make its mark on those around you.
And so on to this day. What we see in her is a woman whose every cell is still rejoicing because it is alive. There’s little room for hurt after a rebirth like that, and none at all for guilt. And love of husband and children is an unexpected Gift of God that goes far beyond the hackneyed phrase, even beyond her dreams of them while crunching cyanide. That is the explanation of Dina.
A miracle? No, I gave her real Aspirin, of course. There are times when the preservation of an individual is more important than any good reason of state. Isn’t that what we were fighting about?
8
The Case of Valentin Lecormier
M. LE CONSUL:
I ask you to excuse the paper upon which this is written. Where I am, the necessities of civilisation do not exist. Even the poor devils of police who patrol the frontier do not normally carry paper. In order to write to you I had to capture an assistant-inspector of customs, and relieve him of his spare account-books.
This is not a begging letter. You cannot help me. Whether I live or die depends entirely on myself, and I do not know which I deserve. In any case one rarely receives what one merits. No, M. le Consul, I write to you only to establish the nationality of my wife and children.
We were married by the priest of Ferjeyn on April 15th, 1944. The marriage is recorded in the church register; and also the births of my three sons. They are French and, though so young, they know it. In twelve years they will be ready and willing for their military service. I shall be grateful to you if you will enter their names upon the register of French citizens. As for my wife, she is a simple Christian Arab. Syria is her country, and without me she would be lost in France.
M. le Consul, my name is Valentin Lecormier, formerly sergeant-major of cavalry. I am a deserter. It is very rare for a warrant officer of the regular army to desert, but I will explain it as best I can. There may be some record of me in your office files, but it is probably considered that I am dead.
I joined the Army in 1932. For me it was a profession as congenial as any other, and, to tell you the truth, what most attracted me was the pleasant life of our little garrison towns. I was not such a fool, of course, as to suppose that I should spend all my years of service under the trees of the main square; but we export our civilisation with our soldiers, and I knew that I should seldom be far from a shaded pavement upon which to spend my hours of leisure.
When that damned Hitler unleashed his war, I had already passed four years in Beirut as a corporal-instructor training Arab levies. I assure you I had no ambition. I merely applied for every post which suited my taste for small towns, and pretended to have the requisite qualifications. I persuaded my superiors that I spoke Arabic. And if you are young and make a show of accomplishment which you wish you had, it will not be long before in fact you have it. That’s life.
After the fall of France, when our army and government in Syria declared for Vichy, I rode over into Palestine with my troop to join the Fighting French. It was not a question of choice. I have never made a choice for myself more than any other man. Choice? There is no such thing. One follows events, and gets out of the mess as best one can. That is, I believe, what they now call existentialism. A long word for the practical philosophy of every soldier.
No, I did not trouble my head with de Gaulle or Pétain, or faith in France or the lack of it. I considered only my affection for Colonel Collet. A mountebank. One admitted it. Still, a soldier must feel love like the rest of us, and he cannot be held responsible for where he places it.
After that there was no time for decisions. The campaign against our own countrymen in Syria. A harsh interval while we exchanged our horses for armoured cars. The Western Desert. Bir Hachim. And believe me, M. le Consul, the world was wrong to make such a fuss of that battle. I was there, and I tell you we could not run away because the Boches were all round us. And then it was hardly decent to surrender when there had been so much surrendering in France.
And so, better men being dead, I was hoisted up to squadron sergeant-major, and on we went to Tripoli (where one saw a town and a square and a civilised café again) and into Italy and back to Syria for rest and reorganisation.
In that narrow strip of Syria between Turkey and Iraq, which is called the Duck’s Bill from its shape, there was some fear of a rising of Moslem fanatics. So they sent me out in charge of a detachment. A captain was in command, of course, but an old soldier was needed to see that he came to no harm. Since I now spoke fluent Arabic, it was an excuse to present myself with a deal of liberty. I used to pass my days at Ferjeyn, which, being an island of Christians set upon a mountain in the middle of two hundred thousand Moslems, was the right post for a man of tact.
At Ferjeyn, M. le Consul, I fell in love. She was the daughter of the headman, John Douaihy. What else could you expect, given eight years of foreign service and no hope of France? Our regiment had not been picked for the invasion—for there were not enough of us left to be any use to a higher formation—and so we comforted ourselves with the thought that it could not possibly succeed. I repeat, we had no hope of France.
I should not like you to think that my love for Helena Douaihy was that of a soldier who marries, in a moment of supreme boredom with interminable male society, the first decent girl he had seduced. No, as a responsible warrant officer, I used to warn my lads against such unsuitable attachments.
I did not seduce her. I have nothing of which to accuse myself but the strange and bitter chivalry of the French. Since it has persisted in our nation through five centuries of common sense, it is not surprising that in a poor devil like myself it should outlive those many years when my only choice was between celibacy and army prostitutes.
It was her rags, I believe, that aroused in me an overwhelming desire to cherish her. Her father was by no means badly off. But you know the Arab. He does not waste money on daughters, unless they must be curry-combed and clipped for church or a party. Yes, it was her rags. When Helena was working in the fields or drawing water, she seemed to me like a fifteen-year-old princess of the romances, dressed in the clouts of the kitchenmaid. She had worn her one frock so long that the stuff had become threadbare over her breasts, worn away by the continual sharp pressure from within. Well, that is not a phenomenon which repeats itself in later years; but her face has kept its delicacy. I assure you that one would turn round and stare after her even in the streets of Paris. And she has been a wife without reproach. That is what I wish to impress on you. In her way she is a true bourgeoise, and she has helped me to bring up our sons so that France can be proud of them.
It was not then—on detachment in the Duck’s Bill—that fate made of me a deserter. In the spring of 1944 we were ordered, for God knows what reason, to Cyprus, where we found ourselves among a lot of damned Englishmen and Greeks. Of the two I preferred the Greeks. They have inherited the culture of the Roman Empire, whereas the English have no idea of what a town should be.
There we were. More training. For ever training. It seemed to us that we were destined to nothing but camps, year after year of camps, till we were old and grey.
It happened, M. le Consul, that the major wished to buy some
wine for the officers’ mess, and I for the sergeants. The wines of Cyprus are fairly drinkable, but merchants are inclined to sell any filth in their cellars to soldiers, since the English, whose palates are rotted by beer and whisky, do not know good from bad. So we decided to go out in civilian clothes. The major pretended to be a French diplomat on leave, who had rented a villa in the hills, and I—I dressed myself as any poor and decent Syrian who might be his cook or butler.
We settled down in a cellar by the quay to taste what was offered. The wines were good and, to tell the truth, we forgot all differences of rank. The patron did not bother us. He slept behind his counter, and only woke up when we called for another bottle. The major was not a bad little chap, but of the right wing of the de Gaullists. He was a royalist and thought of nothing but some damned Henry V who was to come to the throne of France. As for me, I am a republican. True, the Third Republic made me vomit. But being what we are it is the best we could do.
Well, at three in the morning we began an argument. It was foolish. A sergeant-major should not talk politics, and least of all with an officer. But he was as bored as I. We were two Frenchmen, isolated among Englishmen and Greeks, with no hope of home. I cannot remember at this distance what was said. No doubt there were faults on both sides. Our nerves were exasperated. And so I found that I had hit my commanding officer over the head with a bottle.
I examined him. I had enough experience of wounds. I said to myself that he would not die, but that he would need a comfortable week in hospital. The patron had not woken up. In his trade, if one is to get any sleep at all, one must not pay attention to a little noise. I bandaged my major and wrapped him in blankets, and walked out on to the quay.
M. le Consul, I had made no plan whatever. Choice, as at every turning in a man’s life, was forced on me. It was that hour, with dark turning to grey, when no one takes a decision, least of all a soldier. He stands to, and obeys. As for the general who issued the orders the night before, he is fast asleep.
I walked on the deserted quay, regretting that I should never see my Helena again, for she would have married some village notable long before I came out of gaol. True, they might treat me more leniently. We old soldiers of the Fighting French were charitable to one another. But the best I could hope for was the mental hospital. And indeed I had well deserved that I, a sergeant-major, should spend five years sewing rabbits upon babies’ nappies under the eye of the occupational therapist.
The black mass of Lebanon showed up against the red of dawn. It was not a cloud. It stood upon eighty miles of steel sea and striped haze, and so solid it was that I prostrated myself like a Moslem praying upon the quay, and bowed my farewell to Helena and to Ferjeyn and to Asia. I must admit that I was very drunk.
Then a voice hailed me from the dock:
‘Brother, that is not the direction of Mecca!’
I looked up. A caique was drifting out on the dawn wind, her captain at the great tiller. Her sail was half hoisted, and she was painted blue and yellow. I asked the captain where he was bound.
‘To Beirut,’ he said, ‘if it pleases God. Come with me, brother, and learn the difference between east and south!’
He took me for a fellow Moslem, you see. And they do not care about passports and police controls, those chaps in the caiques.
All the same, he intended a mere sailor’s jest, I suppose, rather than a serious invitation. But I did not wait for him to change his mind. I would have obeyed any sensible suggestion from any quarter. I dived in, and he luffed and picked me up. I told him with much detail that I was a Turk who had escaped from an English prison. That amused him so richly that he did not ask too many questions.
And there I was condemned by a single impulsive act to the life of a deserter, and presented at the same time—for luck cuts both ways—with a chance of permanent freedom, since it would be assumed for at least a week that I was still in Cyprus.
The west wind was fresh and steady, and by sunset we were close under the land. Part of our cargo, like that of any caique in wartime, was contraband. In the night the captain rowed his crates ashore on the beach of Batroun. Half an hour later he had resumed his voyage to Beirut, and I was walking to the coast road through a darkness that smelt of the spring rains.
By bus and lorry—and detours on foot around the control posts of military police—I reached Damascus, where I had banked for years the economics of my military pay. It was a little account which I had kept quiet. Not that it was dishonest. Far from it. Custom demanded that when an Arab trooper was posted to the squadron of his choice or recommended for promotion he should give a little present. That was something which everyone knew, but of which no one spoke. So it was only decent that I should not flaunt my bank account before the eyes of the military authorities.
I was sure that there would be no enquiry for me yet in Syria. After all it was only forty-eight hours since I had deserted. So I presented myself at the bank without fear. There was a clerk on duty who knew me, and it was not the first time he had seen me in civilian clothes.
The sum was small. It would not have bought a decent tobacco stall in France; but it was enough for a house and farm at Ferjeyn, and something over. Provided I presented myself as a prosperous man, well-dressed and careless, I had no doubt that John Douaihy would give me his daughter. They are easily impressed, the Syrians. So long as nothing is stinted at the marriage, they do not much care what happens to a daughter after.
The journey along the edge of the desert to Hassetche was arduous. I had no papers—beyond a good French military map—and so it was essential to avoid all roads and public transport. Stained with dust and salt water as I was, I resembled the poorest of Arabs. I bought a camel and pretended to be taking it to market—always at the next town along my route. I have had charge of many animals in my time, but I tell you a camel is the only one it is impossible to love. One receives a more civilised response from an intelligent jeep. Sometimes I rode my camel and sometimes I led her. She was only a stage property and of little use to me. Perhaps she knew it.
At Hassetche I sold my camel and bought a fine pony and dressed myself decently. Then I rode to Ferjeyn and was received by John Douaihy with that superb hospitality which the Christian Arab reserves for the elder European brother—provided, of course, that he behaves like a brother. John knew what I wanted from him, though we did not yet mention it. There was a difficulty to be disposed of first. He expected me to tell him that I had enough of the war.
I should explain to you that our commune, isolated for centuries among hostile Mohammedans, saw nothing at all disgraceful in being a deserter. No fighting had ever counted for them but the long bickering between Christian and Moslem, which in their soil was native as the mulberry. War between Christian nations was to them as irresponsible as the jealousy between the House of France and the House of Anjou must have seemed to a sensible Crusader. A free fighting man who withdrew himself from participation in any such lunacy was not to be blamed.
But why tell them at all, you will ask. Because I had to prevent them from chattering far and wide that there was a real Frenchman in Ferjeyn. If they understood that I had deserted and was wanted by the police, they would be as untruthful about my past as if I had been one of themselves. And it was not difficult for them to accept me. They think in terms of religion, not, as we do, in terms of nationality. I was Christian. I spoke Arabic. Therefore, if I wished to be, I was one of the commune. It is true that they were Maronites and I (according to that enthusiastic socialist, my father) was an atheist. But Ferjeyn and Helena were well worth a mass.
M. le Consul, I married Helena and I bought my few hectares of good land. My father-in-law—for, being headman, he had the right—gave me the identity card of a man of Ferjeyn who had gone to Morocco twenty years before and never returned. I am no longer Valentin Lecormier. I am Nadim Nassar. I permit myself to bore you with these details, since I hope that you will wish to check the truth of my story. My sons, though they bear the
name of Nassar, are in fact three little Lecormiers, and, I repeat, they look to France and to you to claim them in due season.
You have no interest in a renegade? M. le Consul, I plead my long service, such as it was, and I would beg you to understand that there is not all the difference you would think between Ferjeyn and a mountain village of France. I was happier there than I have ever been. True, I was ravished by my little Helena, but ravishment is not necessarily content. I will try to tell you how I could be content, and still remain a Frenchman.
Where there is stone for wall and paving, one is not wholly a barbarian. My house was well above the commune, and three hundred metres below the top of the mountain. In a hard winter the lowest tongues of snow felt for the limit of my land and melted into the stone channels that irrigated my terraces. When the sluices were open, the water ran on an even slope, quite silent and without foam; but the rush was so fast and smooth that a leaf falling into the channel vanished to eternity as swiftly as a human life.
When you looked up from the plain of Duck’s Bill towards Ferjeyn, you saw nothing but stone, and strips of green. Terrace rose over terrace, and above each was the bare rock from which the earth had been stripped, and packed into the narrow fields that girdled the mountain. But when you looked down from my house over the grey walls and flat roofs of Ferjeyn, there were only green tops, falling in steps, of orchard and vineyard and olive and wheat. I find that civilised, M. le Consul.
The life—well, it was a little primitive but not unfamiliar. We had our group of village notables, and the café where we gathered at the end of the day’s work. True, when I first knew it, our café was nothing but a hole in a ruin furnished with bench and counter. So I set into the pavement three tables which I had made with my own hands, and planted a vine to give shade. There we played our games and drank our wine and araq—as good fathers of families, of course—and watched the life of the commune on the flag-stones of the little square. There were John Douaihy and his brother Boulos, and the priest, the saddler, the grocer and myself.
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