28 MARCH, 1957: SECOND DAY
Matthew xxv, 41–43
Every morning the shame of being oneself must be discovered anew. But, before this, the grace of a secret respite is granted. The night’s dream disintegrates, leaving nothing more in Capitaine André Degorce’s heart than a vague premonition of grief to come. He has no past, no family, no name. He simply lies there on his bed, his eyes open upon the light of a dawn he does not recognize. As yet nothing exists in this world apart from the incredibly calming image of Tahar, seated on his straw mattress, his feet and hands shackled, smiling at something invisible. Capitaine Degorce would like to go on enjoying this sweet obliviousness, but he cannot stop himself wondering who this man is and then he remembers brutally. The recollection is pitiless.
(I am a jailer, his jailer.)
Seated on the edge of his bed, he surveys his bare legs with disgust, goose pimples everywhere, the hairs standing up on the livid skin of his thighs. He dresses with the feeling of hiding a loathsome secret from view and gulps down a large cup of tepid coffee which makes him feel nauseous. He smokes several cigarettes at the open window, sucking in the damp, cold air. A yellow glow lights up the horizon and the call to dawn prayers arises from the Casbah. When the muezzin has fallen silent the sun appears above the city’s apartment buildings. Capitaine Degorce paces along empty corridors. He hears murmuring and moans from behind the doors of the cells. Two harkis are energetically cleaning the floor in one of the interrogation rooms. Adjudant-chef Moreau sits on the corner of a table, and seems absorbed in the glum contemplation of the ceramic friezes at the corner of the ceiling – sinuous stylized flower patterns, yellow, green and blue, which look strangely dull under the harsh brilliance of the electric light bulb. One of the harkis lets his mop fall in order to stand to attention, the other steadies it to his side, doing what he can to adopt a more or less regulation position. Degorce signals to them to carry on and goes to shake the hand of Moreau who has stood up to salute him.
“How’s things, mon capitaine? Would you like some coffee? We have some freshly made.”
The capitaine consents as he watches the foaming of the grey water across the tiles.
“Thank you, Moreau. What I’ve just been drinking was really vile.”
He follows the adjudant-chef into a little room arranged as a makeshift kitchen. They drink their coffee in silence. Capitaine Degorce pulls a face as he sets his cup down.
“This is vile, too. But, at least it’s hot.”
Moreau smiles faintly.
“May I have your permission to speak about something, mon capitaine?”
“That’s the stupidest question I’ve ever heard, Moreau,” Capitaine Degorce remarks good-humouredly. “How do you expect me to tell if I can give you permission if I don’t know what it’s about? Speak anyway. I’ll soon tell you if you’d have done better to keep your mouth shut.”
Moreau extracts a crumpled packet of Gitanes from his pocket. He takes out two cigarettes and smoothes them for a long time before offering one to the capitaine. He explores his pockets again in search of a box of matches.
“Spit it out, man!” says the capitaine impatiently, offering his lighter.
Moreau still takes the time to inhale deeply.
“It’s about Febvay.”
“Febvay?”
“Sergent Febvay, mon capitaine.”
“Well? Do you mean you still haven’t banished him to Tamanrasset for me?” Capitaine Degorce asks, hating the falsely assumed casual tone he can hear in his own voice.
Moreau pointedly refrains from smiling and stares attentively at him, drawing on his cigarette.
(I’m no longer good for anything. Nothing at all.)
“The thing is, mon capitaine, I’d like you to reconsider your decision. I don’t think it’s fair. Febvay is a good fellow.”
“A good fellow,” Capitaine Degorce repeats. “A good fellow.”
He forces himself to recall the revolver thrust into the girl’s vagina, the sergent’s laughing face and repeats again, almost in a murmur: “A good fellow …” hoping that anger would come to his aid and let him get carried away, but nothing happens. He does not even manage to feel concerned.
(I simply ought to be somewhere else, somewhere else.)
He closes his eyes for a moment and the words come.
“I don’t propose to discuss your quite fascinating conception of what constitutes a good fellow, Moreau, because it doesn’t interest me and because it’s beside the point, do you see, it’s totally beside the point. Let me brief you on what’s at stake here and when you’ve understood this clearly yourself perhaps you’ll be able to back me up effectively by making sure the men never forget it, instead of trying my patience with reports on your early morning cogitations. What’s at stake, Moreau, is the sense of our mission. What’s at stake is what justifies it and it’s very simple, really very simple. What we do here only makes sense because it’s effective. It’s only acceptable from a moral point of view because it’s effective. It enables us to save lives … innocent lives. Effectiveness is our only goal and that’s what sets our … limits. If we lose sight of effectiveness …”
“But, mon capitaine, we don’t …”
“Be quiet when I’m speaking, adjudant-chef, be quiet!” says Capitaine Degorce crisply, fully aware that he has found his authority again. “Confine yourself to paying attention and keeping quiet until I tell you to speak. So, if we lose sight of effectiveness, if we allow people like Febvay to run amok and take perverse pleasure, lubricious pleasure, in the … in the operations of … the process, we are no longer soldiers fulfilling their mission, we’re … I don’t know what we are. I don’t even want to think about it. Do you understand?”
“Yes, mon capitaine. I understand. What Febvay did was out of order. Totally out of order. And I was totally out of order in letting him do it.”
“I’m not obliging you to say this, Moreau. And don’t make too much of that aspect of the problem.”
Capitaine Degorce pours himself another cup of coffee without taking his eyes off Moreau. He has just found honourable and rational motivation for behaviour which, the previous day, at the moment when he totally lost control of himself, was motivated by nothing more than frayed nerves caught on the raw.
But the most troubling thing is that the line of argument that absolved and justified him, was not even something he had to fashion for himself, it was already there, immediately to hand, he has heard it a hundred times in the mouths of his superiors and all he had to do was to take it up for his own use with equal fluency and conviction, reproducing it even down to the calculated hesitations, circumlocutions and euphemisms, and for these, since he did not invent them, all he had to do was to let the powerful tide flow through him, like foul water along a sewer, a tide of words whose impeccably logical sequence required neither his input nor his assent. Yet every time he has himself heard this line of reasoning being advanced, notably in the robust version of it favoured by the colonel, he has experienced an extraordinary revulsion, shuddering with disgust at every word uttered, not so much because there was a brazen lie within it, but because at the very heart of this brazen lie, expression was being given to the purest, the most undeniable truth, a truth over which he had no control and which held them all, Moreau, Febvay, the colonel and himself in its icy grip.
“It was out of order, I know, mon capitaine,” Moreau repeats. “But we all screw up at times. We’re all human.”
Capitaine Degorce makes no reply.
(We’re all human. But that’s the fault, not the excuse. The fault.)
“It’s not easy here,” pleads Moreau again. “It’s the arsehole of the world here.”
“To the best of my knowledge,” says Capitaine Degorce, “and to take up your elegant metaphor, the world has a number of arseholes.”
Moreau smiles weakly.
“So what about it, mon capitaine?” he asks. “He’s already felt the weight of your fist in
his face. Couldn’t that be enough? Please.”
Capitaine Degorce knows he risks nothing now by appearing magnanimous. He couldn’t give a damn about Febvay. If he gets rid of him they’ll give him another Febvay. Men have lost all that used to make them unique, for good or ill. They are all alike.
“Very well, Moreau. Tell Febvay the incident is closed. And tell him to keep out of my way in the corridor over the next few days. To give me time to calm down completely.”
Adjudant-chef Moreau lays a grateful hand on his arm.
“Thank you, mon capitaine, thank you.”
For a moment Capitaine Degorce wonders why Moreau is so keen to keep Febvay at his side, for the sake of what shared past, what blind affection, what fatherly protective impulse. He could try to find out, he could have a heart to heart talk with Moreau, break out of the glutinous straitjacket that restricts him, speak words that are really his own, but once again he feels overcome by a longing to be somewhere else, somewhere, he now realizes, where he should have been since he woke up.
“Let’s just say that I’m doing this for you, Moreau.”
“Thank you, mon capitaine.”
Capitaine Degorce leaves the room, saying, “I’m going to look in on Hadj Nacer.” He takes a few steps, and turns back towards the adjudant-chef.
“Do you need me this morning?”
“I’ve got some leads to follow up, mon capitaine. An individual to bring in. But I can look after all that on my own.”
*
He squats unmoving on his mattress, as in Degorce’s dream, but he is so tranquil one could believe him to be seated in the cool shade of a palm grove at Timimoun or Taghit, watching the undulation of the dunes caressed by a warm wind, beyond the filthy wall, absorbed in the contemplation of sweet and mysterious things that belong to him alone.
“Good morning,” says Capitaine Degorce, stopping himself at the last minute from saying, “Did you sleep well?”
Tahar greets him with a tilt of his head.
“I have no news concerning you. I shall certainly have some during the course of the morning.”
“It’s not important,” Tahar says.
The capitaine remains standing for a moment before sitting down facing his prisoner. He feels obliged to explain his presence, he searches for some kind of pretext, but can find nothing to say apart from the truth and the simplicity of this truth gives him an immense feeling of well being.
“If you are willing to do so … I wanted to have a conversation with you. If you are willing. I don’t want to intrude on you.”
“We can talk, capitaine,” says Tahar. “We can talk.”
Capitaine Degorce relaxes and leans back against the damp wall, with half-closed eyes. “I’m not at peace with myself,” he says softly and adds in even quieter tones, as if to himself, “Not at peace at all …” A painful emotion weighs upon his chest. He could have said these words to Jeanne-Marie, instead of persisting in writing to her in the same set phrases, the only ones his mind is apparently capable of producing now and at the cost of such a painful effort whenever he tries to address his wife and children, and of course Jeanne-Marie would not have judged him, on the contrary, she would have preferred a thousand times to be sharing his torments and doubts, instead of wearing out the patience of her love against the ramparts he has erected around his heart, day after day, a heart filled with silence, or he could have sought an interview with the colonel and spoken these same words to him, without beating about the bush, as befits a free man on whom his actions confer the inalienable right to express himself as he likes, and what would it matter to him if that idiot did not understand him or bawled him out or threatened to place him under arrest? He had no need of the colonel’s respect, but above all, he should first have spoken those words to himself, confronted them on his own, and gauged the fearful weight of them, he should have taken thought before incurring the guilt of such a terrible transgression by uttering them here, face to face with a man in chains whom he has spent weeks hunting down and who remains his enemy, a man who has ordered the deaths of innocent civilians, and armed those who killed them, on a number of occasions, who has sown death and terror and who seems as serene and easy as if all this spilled blood were no more important than a rainstorm blown away by the wind. And it is for this reason, Degorce knows it well, that these words can only be spoken to him.
“I understand,” murmurs Tahar.
The softness of his voice suddenly makes Capitaine Degorce horribly ill at ease.
“No,” he says in firm tones. “I’m not at peace. And so, you see, when I told you yesterday that it’s all finished, I was not seeking to impress you or anything, I was not being triumphalist, not at all. I said it because it’s true, it’s finished. It’s only a matter of time. If you come into my office you’ll see it for yourself at once. You’ll see the organization chart, your organization has been almost entirely dismantled, its total dismantling is inevitable, truly, and so, it’s finished. But this victory, this victory …” The capitaine shrugs. “… I suppose there must be some less painful victories, victories one can be proud of. Well, let’s say this is not one of them and I should personally have preferred to have had no part in it.”
He lights two cigarettes and offers one to Tahar.
“Why?” Tahar asks with genuine interest. “I don’t believe in your victory at all. But if you are sure of it, why?”
“You know why,” says Capitaine Degorce.
“No, I don’t know,” insists Tahar. “Tell me.”
Capitaine Degorce waves the smoke away with an open hand and takes refuge in silence for a moment.
“You know,” he finally says, “I was in the Resistance –” and holds back from adding, stupidly, “As well.” “And I was arrested. In 1944. Arrested and interrogated.”
He has confessed this dozens of times, in confident tones, to Algerian prisoners, as he did only the previous day to Abdelkrim, seeking out weak spots, each time seizing the right moment to establish an apparent human contact with the man being spoken to, either so as to lead him to think that what he has just suffered was commonplace and trivial, or on the other hand to let him glimpse a feigned weakness which might encourage fresh trust, without his realizing that such trust would be his undoing. Capitaine Degorce has learned to modulate his declaration, adopting the tone most appropriate to his chosen goal, donning a mask now of compassion, now of spinelessness, now of arrogant disdain, and on each occasion he has concentrated on this goal to the extent of forgetting that he was talking about events that had actually taken place. But today there is not this goal and for the first time the words send him back to the Gestapo command post in Besançon, where two men, whose faces he has forgotten, but not the smell of their tobacco and eau de cologne, stroll slowly round him, rolling up their sleeves with fastidious care in the June heat. He understands the intent of their theatrical display and tries to breathe steadily without following them with his eyes, but he cannot control the thumping of his heart. A few weeks before, when Charles Lézieux, his mathematics teacher in the senior preparatory class, agreed to entrust him with his first mission of clandestine billposting, a pathetic mission, he said to him: “If you have the misfortune to be caught, André, don’t seek to play the hero. Try to say nothing for twenty-four hours. Twenty-four hours. That will be enough.” Tied to a chair, as the two men prowl round him with the calm assurance of predators, André Degorce only asks himself one thing: will he be able to hold out for twenty-four hours? This question totally absorbs him, prevents him thinking about his parents’ loving care, his dreams of winning a place at the Ecole Normale Supérieure, his long walks after school on spring evenings beside the river Doubs in the company of Lézieux, the laughing eyes of an unknown schoolgirl whom he will never meet again, the gentle warmth of the midnight Masses of his childhood, all the things whose memory is waiting to slip into his soul and move him and bend it until it breaks under the weight of sadness and when one of the men finally strikes
him with his hand and the signet ring he wears bursts open his lip, he is almost relieved because he knows the answer will come soon. Yes, it is a real relief, he remembers it clearly, because hope and fear have been brutally driven out by the supreme intervention of physical pain which also dislocates memory, thought and time, but the answer will not come, it has never come, each moment has been curiously nullified or extended, one second following another second, they are absorbed into nothingness, where they congeal to form eternity and twenty-four hours is now utterly meaningless. Capitaine André Degorce again sees him-self naked, lying on the ground, his knees pressed back into his chest, no longer knowing what part of his body to protect, there is an uncanny slowness about the way the two men lean over him, he can smell them, feel the heat of their breath, there is an electric light bulb, a bare wire, the grey china of a bath, a sky overhead of soapy water that tastes of blood and suddenly he is alone, breathing greedily, a hand is pulling at his hair, he has emptied his bowels beneath him, he hears an unhappy voice saying disapprovingly, you’re really a swine, young man, a filthy swine, where were you brought up? His broken ribs are making him wail like a newborn baby, but he can no longer feel any pain, pain has become the intimate stuff of his being and he is delaying the confessional moment from second to second, the delicious moment when he will be able to say the name of his mathematics teacher, the only name he knows, he delays it until, without his having said anything, they lock him up in a cell, from which he only emerged to be sent to Buchenwald. At the transit camp, he finally learned that ten days had elapsed since his arrest, but he has never known how much time the interrogation lasted. On the station platform the scents of summer and the vastness of the sky make him giddy and when the van doors close on him all the memories of his youth, which the dominance of the pain had so far kept at arm’s length, come flooding in all together, they melt into one another and become concentrated into a single feeling, one of absolute simplicity, the poignant feeling of life’s sweetness, he is nineteen, sobs choke in his throat and if at that moment someone had promised him he could return home and see his mother again, he would have told them all they wanted to know. His Gestapo torturers ought to have known that, they should have granted him the respite that would have opened his soul to them, but they could not care less about what he did or did not confess, they only wanted to test and punish him. They had no need of intelligence because Charles Lézieux had been arrested an hour before him, just as he was getting ready to meet André, and there had never been any secret to protect.
Where I Left My Soul Page 5