Between Anschluss and the Capitulation of Munich I made so much progress that I could read Heine’s Book of Songs, Schiller’s William Tell and the autobiography of Goethe. Each one of these books baffled me. I could see no connection between them, their harmonious and humane language, their thoughts so exalted one could not always follow them to the end, and the armored divisions, the SA and SS, those assemblies of hate in the Sportspalast in Berlin, on the fairgrounds in Nuremberg; Jews insulted and arrested — they said even tortured — all these people fleeing from Germany, because a free man could no longer live there. War and death.
War! There really were men who loved it. Already I knew that for sure. As for death, there were men who were killing for pleasure. So history was all true, all the slaveries, all the punishments, all the battles, all the massacres. And it was about to start all over again in our time. It was only a matter of weeks or months. In the summer of 1938, if there were still politicians in Europe who doubted it, they should have consulted the thirteen-year-old schoolboy, for there was no hesitation left in him.
Every night on the radio I hung on the statements by Daladier, Chamberlain and Ribbentrop. In September in the weeks before Munich, there was not an interview or a speech that I missed. If I happened on the BBC, my ignorance of English caused me real regret. I waited patiently for two hours until the BBC gave out the same news in French or in German.
I was not afraid, not yet. Of that at least I am sure. I passed through a series of interesting states of mind: curiosity about trouble, need to understand, fascination with mystery, the poetry of the future and the unexpected — the unexpected most of all.
Because of my father we had German friends. Having made several trips to Germany in his profession as an engineer, my father had established connections. But, above all, devoting his leisure time to philosophical and spiritual studies, he had made real friendships in Germany with some remarkable men: one a professor of mathematics, another a former minister in Bavaria. And now these peaceable men, who seemed to me to resemble Heine, Goethe, and Beethoven, were in flight. I learned they were all threatened with imprisonment, perhaps with death.
At the beginning of August 1938, my father made plans which threw me into the midst of adventure. He took me with him to spend three days in Stuttgart. On the slopes of the Uhlandshöhe, above the city, we visited the director of a German school who was a friend of my father’s. I was struck by the man’s calm, his moderation and his sadness. He told us that all Germans who wanted peace, or preferred it to war, were already suffering or preparing for suffering ahead. He spoke little and in a low voice. Still, he made it clear that everything we could imagine was less horrible than the reality. For it was not only Germany, but France, England, the whole world, which was on the point of bursting into flame. For his part, he would have to leave his country before the end of the year. He knew it but could not decide to act on it.
When we got back to Paris, naturally I played the prophet to my companions. Almost without exception they failed to understand. In their families they heard nothing out of the ordinary. There had always been incidents, and always would be. Three years before there had been colonial war in Ethiopia and threats of blockade from the Western powers, but nothing came of it. At this very moment there was civil war in Spain. It had all been in the newspapers.
But one of the rules of bourgeois comfort — comfort in the family — was that newspapers were read but not believed. The press lied, now more, now less, but continually. It was best to think about it as little as possible. From my point of view, this refusal to face reality was the stupidest thing I had met in my thirteen years. For my companions and their parents, I was ashamed. If I had only known how, I would have made them understand.
Most grown-ups seemed to be either imbeciles or cowards. They never stopped telling us children that we must prepare for life, in other words for the kind of life they were leading, because it was the only good and right one, of that they were certain. No, thank you. To live in the fumes of poison gas on the roads in Abyssinia, at Guernica, on the Ebro front, in Vienna, at Nuremberg, in Munich, the Sudetenland and then Prague. What a prospect!
I was no longer a child. My body told me so. But all the things I had held dear when I was small I loved still. What attracted me and terrified me on the German radio was the fact that it was in the process of destroying my childhood.
Outer darkness. Here it was. A place worse than any melodrama, where men must shout at the top of their voices to be heard, where they talk honor when they want to dishonor, and fatherland when they want to pillage.
In such a school I should have learned to hate the Boches. But no more, thanks be to God. My family dissuaded me. Books and symphonies told me it must not be so. I went on calling them Germans, and with respect.
Some of my companions declared themselves patriots. Not I. I had no desire to be like them, for they were all braggarts, and not one made the slightest effort to understand what was going on. Besides, inside their anti-German families, it was amazing how indulgent they were toward Hitler and his crimes.
Without admitting it to myself, I had already imagined the Nazis everywhere. From now on the world was like a giant kettle heated by rancor and violence. I was still dreaming at the end of 1938, but for the first time the dream did not come of itself. You had to watch over it, to keep the gate of the Kingdom open behind you. The great unity had been cut in two, with love on one side and hate on the other; fear one way and joy another.
There was no doubt everything was going to be hard, a little harder from day to day. But after all, even if life was not good, it still looked as though it was going to be exciting.
THE YOUNG GIRL JEAN MET ON SUNDAY for the second time was called Françoise. Why should he have concealed her name after their first meeting?
The girl was of no consequence to me since I had never met her. Besides, I should probably never see her. She was the daughter of some rather distant friends of Jean’s family. Still, everything had been going at cross purposes for me since she came into the picture.
Jean had a strange way of talking about her. He said she had the eyes of an angel, hazel brown. He said again and again that she had a slim waist and shoes you couldn’t take your eyes off. He kept coming back to her figure, her shoes, the fabric of her dress, and to a mole he said was just at the hairline on the back of her neck. When he mentioned these things he spoke in a whisper which got on my nerves. I wanted to tell him he was ridiculous, but I didn’t dare for fear of interrupting him so he would not give me any more details. I wondered whether Françoise would interest me. Was that possible? I was not as happy as I had been. No doubt about it, I had worries.
That Monday morning, the day after his second meeting with the girl, because he could no longer contain himself, Jean had told me her name was Françoise. On his way to my house, he had run into her by chance on the platform of the bus. It was so crowded he had had to stand pressed up against her for five minutes. She was smaller than he, and to answer him, to look at him, she had to lift her eyes. So he had a good look at her eyes, and at once they became the center of his world.
I listened to Jean and was miserable, truly miserable. There was a lump in my throat, and Jean did not seem to be aware of it. He talked on all by himself. In a way that was lucky for, if he had asked me a question, I couldn’t have opened my mouth. But why? There was nothing novel about a girl named Françoise with hazel eyes.
My anguish lasted for days, growing bigger and more and more formless. By this time Françoise had nothing to do with it. She might as well have been called Monique or Jeanne, or have blond instead of dark hair like Jean’s Françoise. I should have suffered just the same.
The only thing to do was to tell Jean about it without waiting any longer. I would find no other doctor, for Jean still loved me and would do something to help. Only this time, instead of declaring myself frankly as usual, I saw myself making endless preparations. I was calculating the attack. I w
as afraid of myself.
Frankly, I was frightened, and that was my trouble. As soon as the idea occurred to me, I launched into confession boldly. I took Jean for a three-hour walk near the Porte d’Italie, because I knew that this neighborhood would be deserted until the factories let out.
First I begged his pardon for all the wrong I had not yet done him (but which, in all probability, I was already doing). I made it clear to him that Françoise was only a pretext. Because of her I had remembered that I was blind. Or rather I had realized for the first time that this was so. I would never be able to see the girls’ hair, their eyes or their figures. As for their dresses and their shoes, I knew very well they were important but what could I do about it? It frightened me to know that I should always be kept away from these marvels. And girls as a rule were so intent on your looking at them that perhaps for them I might never exist.
While I was talking, I had already begun to say to myself that I was wrong, that there were girls of a different kind. But Jean was terribly embarrassed when I had finished speaking. I had never seen him in such a state. He couldn’t express himself, and was fiddling with my shoulder as though he wished he could make his hand talk in his place.
The incident had no sequence. In the first place Jean did not see Françoise again, or hardly ever. In the second place he treated me with a kindness which broke my heart more than once. No doubt about it, the danger must be real if pity was the treatment I deserved.
Without realizing it, I had just faced one of the toughest obstacles a blind person ever has to meet, and from here on I had to go from one fall to another for two years, until I regained my common sense.
I used to stand at the window in my room listening to the noises in the court below. I touched, I heard, but I no longer perceived as I had. A veil had come down. I was blind.
Then I closed the window and shut myself up. I told myself stories of boundaries that could never be crossed. I ridiculed my childhood dreams. My heart was full and my hands were empty, without arms in a world where everything is made to be seen, where there is no place to go unless one goes there by oneself. I felt myself reduced to doing the thing in which I excelled, but which interested me least: shining in studies. My throat tightened with envy when they told me about the boys who were going out on their bicycles with girls. I would stay at home. That was inevitable.
Fortunately jealousy and foolishness never took hold of more than half of me, even during those two years. And even then it was the smaller half. Above all, there was Jean, who with every argument, with overwhelming patience, tried to prove that he had no special advantages: “If you only knew how few things we really see! Girls do not let us see anything.”
Then too, there was the voice speaking inside me. Whenever I had the strength not to silence it, I heard it clearly, calling me a fool. The voice said I had fallen into a trap, had forgotten the true world: the world within, which is the source of all the others. I must remember that this world, instead of disappearing, would grow with the years, but only on one condition: that I believe in it unshakably.
The voice added that what you have seen one day as a child you will never stop seeing. According to the voice, great things lay ahead of me. The easy girls, the ones who think of nothing but themselves, would drop me. But there would be others, the ones who were genuine. And they would be more worth having. They would expect me not to doubt them. They would not want me to give up what I loved, for they would love it too. Above all, they would forbid me to compare my position with that of the average man. This much I understood, that to make comparisons is to suffer, and without reason since, in any case, no two things are ever comparable.
All the same, I listened to the good voices in vain. I would have given so much to recapture the peace that was mine when I was twelve. Since I had been fifteen the universe had taken on a kind of dense coarseness. People worked, talked on the radio or made love to girls, as if each one of them were all alone in the world.
No way now to share, except possibly with Jean. But even with him would it last forever? The question tortured him as it did me, to the point where we made solemn vows to reassure each other in the summer of 1939. Each of us swore to tell the other the whole truth, every time, whatever it might be, and swore that no girl would ever come between us.
The pledge was no sooner made than we found out to our amazement that we had never yet told each other the whole truth. There were countless secret places in our consciences where we had never looked. We were so badly made, so timid, so selfish, fickle, jealous, prudish and forgetful. We had to admit we were not deep. To put it simply each of us had a double or triple base, a mechanism to deceive himself and deceive other people.
Still, we had taken the pledge, and we were going to keep watch loyally. No more mysteries or prudishness between us. We would spare each other nothing. We would go the limit with words, and if words hurt, then we would console each other.
Life being what it was, with all those ministers and fathers of families preparing to make war, with all those girls who laughed for no good reason, and kept giving looks you could never understand, surely it would take two of us to man the attack.
[ 8 ]
MY COUNTRY, MY WAR
THE BUS DRIVER, after stopping in front of me to make sure, said with the kind banter that is typical of the south: “So, young fellow! You can’t see. Well, for the first time you’re in luck. It could last a hundred years this war, without your being in it.”
Then he turned around briskly, sat down behind the wheel, and drumming with his fingers on the dashboard, began to sing a military tune. But why should the man say I was happy not to go to war?
That was at Tournon on the Rhône on September 2, 1939, a few hours after the orders for general mobilization had been posted on every wall in France. For a few days Jean and I had been staying with my godmother in the little town where the streets smelled of peaches and onions. The World War had started the night before.
All the men were going away to war, the bus driver as well. He was twenty-five years old, and had a wife and a small daughter. He told us the whole story of his life. This was the last trip he was making in his bus. Next day he would be a soldier. From time to time he grumbled or sighed, but mostly he did not seem sad. He was waiting for the customers who would be taking the bus to Lamastre. But today — he said so in a loud voice — there were no customers, and that made him laugh. “No one will come,” he said, and then repeated himself as if to get the full flavor of his conclusion.
Five o’clock struck. As it turned out, Jean and I were the only travelers. Then our driver started up, singing. He burned up a strip of the big highway along the Rhône at sixty miles an hour; then, hardly slowing down, took the first curves along the mountain road. He turned left, he turned right, and kept blowing his horn like a madman. Had he been drinking to get up his courage? Not even that. He was as fresh as paint. Only he was going off to war and was already dreaming about it.
Ever since the night before, when the radio announced that Nazi tanks had gone deep into Poland, people were not the same any more. I could see it clearly.
Some of the women wept, some of them held back their tears. On the square in front of the town hall the old men were reminiscing about 1914 to 1918. It was not exactly heartening. Obviously, Frenchmen had no idea in the world why they should have to fight now. The Danzig Corridor, the treaties with Poland meant nothing to them.
By the time our driver had climbed down from his seat, Jean and I were as stirred up as he was. And who knows, perhaps for the same reasons. Besides, everyone was excited.
Was it with pain or pleasure? It would have been hard to tell. But everywhere there was a sense of adventure. People were not taking the bus. They were not going to bed at the usual hour. The express trains blew their whistles twice and stopped at the small stations. The radio played military music till the middle of the night. People no longer wrote each other letters. They telegraphed instead. There were r
umors that Göring’s planes had already bombed Paris; others said it was London. Everyone was arguing and trying to find out whether there would be poison gas, germ shells, or trenches as in the last war. But one thing no one talked about was victory. This time no one was on his way to Berlin.
The reality of war made its way into my consciousness drop by drop, like the effects of hard liquor. Once the first intoxication was absorbed, a single question grew till it blotted out all the others: “Is the war our business?”
We had not yet come to a decision, either Jean or I. But that was not because we didn’t know the answer. On the contrary, it was because we knew it too well, and it seemed to us unreasonable, frankly childish. Since we were still only fifteen, we were still protected, and the rest was only smoke.
Still, the smoke kept getting thicker and thicker, from one day to the next. It gathered in front of us, in the path of our future, like a cloud. None of the shapes in the cloud stood out clearly, but in the end, we could read the signs: “It will be your war, for both of you.” And even if we were shocked into discomfort, or worried till it hurt, there was no way out of it.
Jean finally told me that in his case, leaving all fantasy aside, the premonition was not necessarily silly. The war might last two years, and if it did he would enlist. Why not? Or four, like the last war, when even the youngest classes were mobilized. But in my case it was ridiculous. There could be no foreboding. I was completely out of it.
Wise reasoning, but it solved nothing for either Jean or me. I saw that at once with a joy I cannot describe. He didn’t believe what he was saying. He had the same visions of the future as I. Foolish or not, they were as insistent as prophecy. They drew us on by their weight. As far as we were concerned they were more like an appeal than a threat, a kind of dizziness, a magnetic force. In the end I said to Jean, “I am going to make war. I don’t know how, but I shall make it.”
And There Was Light Page 10