When Jean came back from those visits to Weissberg, he blossomed. The old man had made him see and love so many things that were new to him.
One evening at the beginning of April Jean had gone off toward the Avenue de Clichy for his regular visit. But the concierge stopped him as he was passing and told him that the old gentleman who lived on the fifth floor was no longer there. Two days before, at five o’clock in the morning, the German police had come for him. “Three of them were looking for him,” said the concierge, “all of them very polite, especially the tallest one, who spoke French.” But as they were taking the poor man away, the tall one, obviously an officer, had turned around and said to her: “Don’t be upset. It is only a Jew.”
Some days after this, Radio Paris, which was German, announced that French terrorists had cut the telephone lines used by the German army near the coast of Brittany. As a result ten French hostages had just been shot.
Then one day, as I was coming out of the lycée at noon, a young man I didn’t know took hold of my arm as I was going by. He drew me into the corner of the entrance hall and said to me in an anxious voice, “The Gestapo arrested Gérard this morning. I think he is at the Santé.” The Santé! It was the first time the name of that Paris prison had sounded so close and so personal in my ears. The young man went on: “I am Gérard’s oldest brother. I am in danger myself. Our father joined the Free French Forces in London last June, as you know. They must be holding Gérard as a hostage. I thought I should tell you, since you were his best friend.”
Three days later, I fell ill. I am not sure whether it was because of Weissberg, Gérard and the hostages. The illness itself was common enough. A bad case of measles declared itself in a few hours and broke out in a rash after four or five days. When it left me, it set a torrent of energy free. I hesitate to say so, but that is really what I think. There is no doubt that I believed it at the time. In the first hours of fever it became obvious that my system was purging itself of a poison and spewing out foreign bodies. But the poison was moral as much as it was physical, of that I am sure.
When the fever was at its height I had the shivers. But, strange as it may seem, my head was still clear and I watched the battle going on. Emotions were driving my body and my mind every which way. I threw myself forward with fury, as though I were driving off the enemy. Soon the notion that I was sick no longer mattered to me. This was no microbe or virus making its way in. It was resolve.
It took me over from head to foot like a conquered land. I could not resist it, for it had taken the wheel. It was driving me to definite destinations which I had not thought about before it came.
This resolve gave me orders, telling me first of all that I must say nothing to my family, at least not right away. I must have a meeting with two of my comrades, with François and Georges by themselves. Even Jean would not be there. Later I should have to get in touch with about ten more. The list was already made up.
My new resolution didn’t tell me what to say to them. And that didn’t matter, for when the time came, I should know well enough. My only haste was to get my body well again, to risk it in the great adventure.
What a fortunate case of measles that was! In me it had catalyzed a pack of fears and desires, intentions and irritations which had held me closed in a tight fist for weeks, and which I should never have been able to break open myself. On the first day of convalescence I said to myself aloud in my room: “The Occupation is my sickness.”
That was in April in our first Nazi spring. Youth, the Occupation, convalescence whirled around in my blood. My temples throbbed when I saw everyone saying nothing and doing nothing while my country lay motionless. Recently a new name had been going the rounds, a name which described all such people: les attentistes, the waiting ones.
What were they waiting for? For the terror to clamp down? For it to consume our joy of living, working on us like an enormous microbe? — this would soon be accomplished, for not much of the joy was left. Waiting for all the Weissbergs to be arrested or missing? For France to be made up of only two kinds of men, the hostages and those on whose behalf they kill the hostages? That I did not want.
Of course, once again “want” was an empty word. Nothing could convince me that all the people who were waiting were doing it because they liked it. They were doing it in spite of themselves. And besides, were they all really waiting? How could you tell? In those days there was no communication.
In conversation, when words like Nazis, Gestapo, torture or shooting came up, then all of a sudden something was turned off in the person you were talking to. I had grown so sensitive to this phenomenon that I thought I could almost hear a characteristic sound. In such cases one never knew whether people were closing their eyes, their fists or their mouths. All that was left of them was a bundle of rejection. This was especially true of the adults, but recently the sickness had spread even to my contemporaries.
There it was, I had grasped it, the subject I must discuss with François and Georges. I would talk to them about the reasons why everyone was holding his tongue. I could prove to them that all the reasons were poor. I would make them speak, or I would speak in their place.
I had words in my head and words in my throat. But nothing was to be gained by making them into a novel or into verse. This was not a time for speeches. I had words enough to fill my arms and hands.
If I didn’t know yet precisely what the Occupation was, that was because it was too important and, after all, almost invisible. The Nazis had perfected a new way of inserting themselves into the body of Europe. They held themselves in rigid order, at attention quite correctly, at least in France. They stole from us, looted us, taking home 85 percent of the agricultural and industrial production of our country. But they didn’t talk about it, or hardly ever. They never made threats. They were satisfied with signing requisitions.
Behind the army — everyone knew it, and those who were not sure were afraid of it, which had an even greater effect — behind the army there was something hidden. This was not a war like other wars. It was not violence which lay behind this war but something worse, an obsession: make Europe Nazi, kill everything un-German, or grind it under the German heel.
And this obsession was not just mad. No one saw the foaming at the mouth. There was a directing body, and that was the secret. All the plans had been set down in advance. They were under cover, in desk drawers in offices from Narvik to St-Jean-de-Luz, and lately as far off as the island of Crete. In Paris the drawers were in the Rue des Saussaies, the Rue Lauriston, and in all the apartment houses the Gestapo had occupied.
By now I felt I understood the Germans. There would be no massacres, for one could count on the Nazis to be more adroit. Or, if there were any, they would happen one at a time, man by man and disappearance by disappearance. One day, perhaps after several years had gone by, it would become clear that not a single Gérard was left in our France, not one free man, not one Weissberg.
Once the measles were cured, my determination to speak out became a second malady. This one too gave me the shivers and pricked my tongue. The pain I felt was certainly real.
Then I said to Jean: “Why don’t we learn to dance?” I suspect the relation between the rhumba, the fox-trot and my new fever for liberty will probably escape even the attentive reader. Nevertheless there was a very simple bond between them. I was not yet ready, not entirely. The seething of my mind, transmitted to my body, gave me a strength which I would be at a loss to call by name. Cosmic might be the word for it. There was in me such a train of forces preparing themselves for deeds that all roads had to be cleared at once to allow them to pass.
I learned all the basic dance steps in two weeks, as fast as parched people quench their thirst in midsummer. I covered the whole range from waltz to swing and became a real fan of swing, not for aesthetic reasons as you may guess, but because swing was really a dance to drive out demons. When you had whirled a pack of girls at arm’s length for five or six hours, with all
their perfume coming back to you by the handful, you were dead beat. But still you had driven off the devils. And they are made to be shaken, these devils, whether they are political or individual.
Besides, the distinction people made between the problems which concerned them personally and those that concerned them only generally, as they put it, seemed to François, to Georges, to Jean and to me absolutely repulsive. The life of the country was our own affair, there was no question whatever about that! It was a fact, and one which burst forth in the first talks I had with each of them at the end of April.
AT THE BEGINNING OF MAY I had adopted the ascetic way of life which befits a soldier of the ideal. Every day, including Sunday, I got up at half-past four before it was light. The first thing I did was to kneel down and pray: “My God, give me the strength to keep my promises. Since I made them in a good cause, they are yours to keep as well as mine. Now that twenty young men — tomorrow there may be a hundred — are waiting for my orders, tell me what orders to give them. By myself I know how to do almost nothing, but if you will it I am capable of almost everything. Most of all give me prudence. Your enthusiasm I no longer need, for I am filled with it.”
Then I washed quickly in cold water, and looked out of the window of my room to listen to Paris. I was taking Paris more seriously than I ever had before, yet without getting my blood up, without feeling myself accountable for the whole city. But three days before, in this city lying half stupefied and frozen by the curfew every night from midnight to five o’clock, I had become one of the responsible ones. There was nothing anyone could do about that, not even I myself.
It was the others, my comrades, who wanted it so. And only the week before, when I had my first confidential talk with François and two hours later with Georges, I was still wondering whether the storm of sentences pouring from my lips would mean anything to them. François had nearly cried for joy at the first words. He had embraced me, a thing we never did among ourselves, and stammered: “We all expected this from you.” I had to bite my tongue to keep from saying, “From me? But why from me?”
The rest of the hour had to be spent throwing water on the fire. I had barely said to François that we no longer had the right to stand the Occupation when he burst out with a whole column of plans. Not crazy ones; on the contrary, they were drawn up like reports on tactical maneuvers. Clearly he had been thinking of nothing else since the summer before. But these plans were so rash they would have put all our lives in jeopardy in an hour.
I was forced to admit it, I had thought of everything but the danger. And here was François throwing danger straight at me, like a clenched fist full in the face: my danger and his and at the same time the danger of all those to whom I was about to speak. I needed time to accustom myself to the harsh fact that from now on I should not be speaking a word which was not also an act. I was in urgent need of God, and I promised myself to pray every day.
Georges’s reaction turned out to be quite different from François’s. Georges was a little man, full of boldness but also reserved. Besides, his lack of intellectual gifts had held him back in his studies. By now he was twenty, and by contrast with François he understood only practical things. He had been badgering me to give him my plans in detail. But what I had was only a purpose, and that was not the same thing as having plans.
I recognized in these circumstances that I must improvise an organization on the spot. Already Georges was asking, “What kind of people do you want to get in touch with? How many? When will you need money and how much? Where are you going to put the headquarters of your movement? What sort of discipline are you thinking of using to keep the activities of the members under control? When are you going to tell London about your existence?”
Your existence! Your movement! They were all moving faster than I was. But if I was surprised to see the pace they were setting, I was even more surprised to see my own. By a feat of acrobatics which I didn’t believe I was capable of, and which I had certainly never learned anywhere, I was not only following François and Georges but going ahead of them. By very little, but very definitely: by a sentence, by a head.
For instance, I heard myself saying to Georges that we would not know how extensive the movement was until after a two months’ trial period; that until this period was over, we must not treat the comrades we had been in touch with as full-grown men but as Boy Scouts. It seemed inevitable that among the first twenty some ten would drop out, and that this kind of dropout could only be permitted in the earliest stages before the organization was really established. After that there would be martial law because we would be in the underground.
Georges had certainly heard what he wanted to hear because at the end he had said, “I swear to you…” Then he hesitated before taking the plunge: “I swear to you by the head of my mother that I am with you.”
The next day I called on three other schoolmates to come to my room. I had met two more going back and forth to the lycée. Now I was feeling uneasiness verging on doubt as I realized that I was not saying the same thing to all of them. Some I was encouraging. Others I was calming down. Without figuring it out exactly, but for reasons which seemed compelling, it was only to Georges and François that I told the whole story. To Jean I told only half of it.
At the end of four or five days, about ten boys were gathered around and pressing me to act. To me this meant embarrassment very like panic, making me feel a painful stiffening of the muscles in the back of my neck. What action was I capable of, blind as I was? Yet it was for me all of them were waiting.
I sought no one’s advice and did not have time for it. I had already sent out invitations for a preliminary meeting in the apartment of Jean’s family on the following Tuesday. The ten comrades we were in contact with would be there at five o’clock on the dot.
And they were there, not ten of them but fifty-two. When I heard the wave of voices climbing the narrow stairs of the apartment house, I had the foolish idea that someone had denounced us.
But ten minutes later, when the fifty-two boys were sitting on their heels in the middle of the big room with the stained-glass windows, with all eyes turned in my direction, when suddenly they fell silent as I had never heard men fall silent, and when one of them, I think it was Georges, said to me, “The chips are down. It’s up to you to speak,” then an unaccustomed radiance filled my head, and my heart stopped beating out of rhythm. All at once I began to understand everything I had been seeking and not finding for the past weeks.
The consciences of my companions seemed to lie wide open before me, and all I needed was to read them. As to my own conscience, it no longer troubled me. I had dedicated it to a cause which must have the power of truth since it was teaching me to speak all those words I had never uttered before.
To the fifty-two I said that there was no turning back from their commitment. They would not be able to close the door they had opened that night. What we were making, they and I together, was called a Resistance Movement. The fact that the oldest of us was not yet twenty-one, and that I was not quite seventeen, though it did not make all our operations simple, made some of them possible. So long as people thought of us as kids, they would not suspect us, at least not right away. In the six months ahead, we must make the most of this prejudice and this piece of luck.
For the first six months, for a year if need be, our resistance would be passive while we were preparing the way. First we would proceed to set up the cells of the Movement, one at a time. There would be no appeal from this rule. The meeting of the fifty-two had been madness, not deliberate of course, and perhaps necessary, but it would be the last. From now on the members of the Movement must never meet more than three at a time, except in serious emergencies.
In the preparatory stages, all childish dreams must be thrown away without pity, all those dreams of cloak-and-dagger, those dreams of conspiracy and guerrilla war. Until new orders were issued, there would be no arms in the Movement, not even a single hunter’s gun. And the
re would be no talk of arms.
Besides, in ordinary conversation, nothing that meant anything must be discussed. Starting that very evening we must lead a life divided right down the middle, on one side the life of innocent young people, open with their families, their teachers, the classmates they didn’t know well and with their girls; on the other side the other life. Those who had time for affairs could still have them, but they would talk to their girls about love and bedroom slippers and nothing more. Families were the most dangerous; since by definition they meant well, they might get in our way or gossip.
IT WAS LESS THAN A WEEK since I had said all these things. Already the wheels were turning, and I was at the head of a Resistance Movement. In the courtyard in front of me, when the early sun cast its first musical rays, the delectable aroma of salt and sugar mixed together came up from the bakery next door. It smelled as sweet as it always had, before the days of the Resistance. It made you want pleasure, not serious deeds. Among all the dangers that beset me, there would always be that one to reckon with, the one that comes from the enjoyment of everyday things.
I had stripped myself of the right to dream. At any rate, now my dreams could take only one path, and I should never know what lay at the end of the road until it was upon me.
Under pressure from Georges and François, and then from two others, Raymond and Claude, we had already had to form a Central Committee for the Movement. Central Committee! It sounded like a farce, almost as if we had been playing at tin soldiers. All the same that wasn’t true. The need was real and we were working at it.
What I could not devise was devised by the other four. You see there could be no question of getting expert advice, not from politicians, officers, newspapermen, or even from our parents. And when fifty boys have to be persuaded to do something, or worse, be prevented from doing it, tactics are a must.
And There Was Light Page 14