The door was eventually opened to me, with a reek of pickled cabbage, by a dumpy middle-aged women who had recently been crying. I began to wish I had not come, but it was too late to withdraw. The flat was tiny, and Gombach’s irascible voice, half-strangulated as if with pain in his throat, could already be heard asking the meaning of this disturbance:
‘Another of those people you encourage, Cecilie?’
‘Not this time, Serge.’ Cecilie was horribly meek as well as red-faced and damp. ‘He says he’s one of your pupils.’ With timid incredulity.
The following ten minutes passed for me in a haze of embarrassment. Cecilie did not know what to do with me; such a visit was clearly unprecedented. The sitting room was cold, she said nervously, and she seemed appalled at the thought of introducing me into the bedroom where her husband lay. I babbled that I did not want to disturb him – had just happened to be passing – that what I had wanted to ask the professor would keep for another day … But since both of them were evidently under the impression that I could not possibly be intruding in this way unless it were on a matter of some urgency, they conferred in anxious halftones in the bedroom, while I loitered in the tiny hallway in the smell of old cabbage pretending not to listen. Presently I heard Gombach shout in a whisper:
‘Well in that case bring him in here, you fool. Oh bring him in and stop dithering.’ And Cecilie, gulping, ushered me into a room where Gombach, looking older and smaller than he did in his office, lay in a bed with yellowed sheets, the shutters drawn, in an atmosphere redolent of slop-pails, seldom-washed clothes, ice bags, rectal thermometers and other unmentionable intimacies of French illness. I hastened to apologize, once again.
So unnerved was I by this time, and so weak was Gombach’s voice, that I had more or less achieved the note I had come for and was preparing to take my leave, when it dawned on me that he, this sick, bad-tempered domestic tyrant, was actually quite pleased at my visit.
‘Sit down,’ he said, gesturing at a spindly chair not meant for anyone of my build. ‘Since you’re here, you can take some notes for me for various people. That will at least save the postage. And you can tell me some more about your project at the Bibliothéque de l’Hôtel de Ville. I suppose you do realize that’s a major archive for material on the Resistance? Though a lot of it’s uncatalogued, so far.’
‘Yes, Professor. That’s why I wanted to use it. You see –’ Once embarked, I was off. He lay and listened without any great enthusiasm but without his usual air of sarcastic mockery – that automatic questioning, like a neurotic tic, which had earned him his sorry reputation for brilliance. Eventually, when I ran out of steam, he said:
‘You ought to meet my old friend Jacques Mongeux. He can tell you more than I can about how the Resistance actually worked – I mean, the welding together of the elements, the committed Party members with the others … He was one of the few organizers who was there right at the beginning and was still there at the end.’
‘A survivor, then?’ I said, no doubt attempting something of Gombach’s own habitual sharpness. But on this occasion he looked perversely disapproving, as if almost hurt by the implication of the word I had used.
‘Jacques – Jacquou – was a hero of the Resistance,’ he said heavily. ‘A great man, and a modest one. You should go and talk to him. No, he’s not in Paris, not Jacquou. He’s a man of central France. We met here at the École Normale, but then he returned to teach history in his own part of the country. A beautiful part, all hills and streams … You should get out of Paris for a few days, anyway, you’re free enough: I only wish I could. Stinking, crumbling, rotten place – a whole city, and most of it fit for nothing but to be pulled down. There are rats in this building, would you believe? Rats. In the middle of the twentieth century. Faugh! Have you seen pictures of the new architecture that’s going up in places that were devastated in the war, like Cologne and Budapest? I tell you, sometimes I think the Nazis didn’t do us any favour after all in refraining from burning Paris –’ As if this attempt at his usual manner had been too much for him in his present state, he embarked on an unrestrained fit of coughing. He looked so ill that I was afraid some seizure was about to follow. Cecilie obviously thought the same, for she came from her kitchen to hover in the doorway, but he waved her away furiously, flapping a dirty handkerchief at her as if she were an undesirable bird.
‘Give me that pad of paper again,’ he gasped at last. ‘I’ll write some messages for you to leave in pigeon holes in the Sorbonne. And I’ll write Jacques Mongeux’s address down for you too. Meanwhile take that magazine – yes, take it away with you, someone passed it onto me (I can’t afford to buy such things) and I’ve finished with it. There’s a piece in it about the Swiss architect, Le Corbusier. Now there’s one man with vision for you. Ah, if only this disgusting, obsolete Second Empire Paris could be replaced by his glass towers …’
Oddly, though Serge Gombach remained my supervisor for most of my time in Paris, this is the clearest memory I have of him. Later, no doubt, although I saw him regularly, I needed him less, had met more people both in and out of the university and had constructed my own existence. And when my thesis was finally taking shape as a great stack of cross-referenced papers, he fell ill again, more seriously this time, and it was a younger and less formidable colleague of his who shepherded me perfunctorily through the concluding stages. I left the Sorbonne without seeing Gombach again, and the next I heard of him he had retired prematurely, suffering with emphysema. The thought of him and his wife, confined together by his illness, with him ranting alternately about Socialist glass towers and the countryside he had known in the Resistance, gave me an unexpected pang.
They must both have been dead for decades now … Well of course they must be. Dead, and rotting away separately in one of those great, sad cemeteries on the outskirts of Paris, all rusting iron and dirty wax flowers. Come to that, almost all the people I knew when I was young are gone, including my parents. That is the common lot, the natural consequence of middle age. But one never quite gets used to it. You are young, or at any rate fairly young, for such a significant part of your life, that you never get entirely used to not being young any more. Or to the fact that the world and its inhabitants that you have lost will not, like the seasons and fruits, return.
Jacques Mongeux lived in the Creuse, a part of central France which takes its name from a substantial river. This rises among the limestone plateaux of the Massif Central, winds through sheep and cow pastures and then through deepening gorges, past ruined medieval strongholds, through a hydroelectric dam and a reservoir, past a dilapidated iron works or two and under bridges with Roman names. It joins forces with the Gartempe, and then the Vienne, and finally, among the flat lands and wide wheatfields and vineyards, it decants itself into the great, indifferent, sandy Loire on her way to the Atlantic Ocean.
Jacquou’s home was one of the old mills along the river’s middle reaches, where the flow of the water, channelled, is strong enough to turn the paddles of a wheel even in a dry summer, but where the gorges, with their rocky cliffs, lie some miles downstream.
‘Creuse’ means ‘hollow’, but with a more intense resonance than the English word. In the Department of the Creuse you are hidden away in a fold of land in the green heart of France.
I have come to Jacquou’s mill so often over the years, both accompanied and alone, at every season and at almost every time of the day or night, that all my arrivals are in a way one arrival. I have come when the ditches are spotted with pale cowslips and the first wild cherry and hawthorn are whitening the black twigs of the wooded slope above, or when the river meadow is strident with buttercups and with the first lush grass of summer. I have come when the hedgerows are shaggy and dusty and the reduced water in the millpond is brown as beer, and I have come when the whitening on the branches is morning hoar-frost. There, near the unseen mountains, the heavy evening dew crystallizes on a cold night, decorating with its carapace every twig and leaf, every s
pider’s web, every piece of the intricate millwheel’s disused structure.
(Even the hardy late flowers, the chrysanthemums and marigolds, become limned with frost, as they were when I last saw them, and then, as the autumn sun climbs in the sky, this icing melts away, sometimes leaving the blossoms untouched. But the last time, the very last, that I was there, I did not have a chance to note which flowers were still living.)
So, my memory of the first time, the very first, that I came to Jacquou’s mill is overlaid by so many others that I can no longer be sure how it was. But I know I came on foot down the long, winding road from the village, as I had no car in those days; and my feeling is that, as I descended the road, catching intermittent glimpses of the river’s curve, poplars and mill, the pinkish light of evening was fading, with a sliver of moon rising. I think that, by the time I had got down to the level of the river – it is always further than it looks from the hill above – and the water in the millstream was a continuous sound, the unreal light was going fast. It was as if the pinkish colour had been generated by the stone and was now seeping out of it minute by minute; the mill-house and its outbuildings at the end of the rough track were becoming one dark mass, the oak tree leaves overhead a black lace. A late bird was calling as if it were lost, and there were also disconcerting sounds from somewhere near at hand as if giants were trampling and breathing in the long grass: I was unused then to cows or to the country at all. With my knapsack on my back, and the mixture, usual to me then, of uncertainty and brash confidence, I strode down the track and then blundered around looking for the way into the house’s central yard.
I got in, and was confronted by the high bulk of the mill and a low penthouse to one side with three doors. The shutters must have been drawn across the windows at that hour, leaving only chinks of yellow light. I fancy I could hear a radio playing softly, but, though I tried saying ‘Hallo!’ loudly several times, no one came. I chose a door at random and knocked, but still nothing happened.
I tried again, but although I thought I heard someone moving behind the door they did not open it. After a long moment, I put my hand to the door-latch. It gave way unexpectedly, and I almost fell down one step into a warm farmyard darkness and practically onto the horns of a small white goat. We staggered back from one another, both affronted, and were nervously appraising one another when a door further along opened and my host appeared.
‘Good evening, good evening! You must be Monsieur Ferrier – I see you have already met Monsieur Seguin’s goat. Come out, and let us shut the door quickly or she will be off to her assignation with the wolf on the mountain. But I forget, you are English – perhaps you don’t know the story?’
It was so typical of Jacquou kindly to ignore my unguest-like behaviour, but to set to work to instruct me at once in French folklore. I have always hoped, in later life, that I have as little regard for convention as he had. That, at any rate, is how people seem to think of me: no doubt I have worked to produce that impression. But I cannot help also noticing that I, too, tend to want to tell people about things. Jacquou himself used to say that teaching is in the blood, that if you are born that way it is best just to capitalize on it.
He took me into his lighted kitchen. A stocky man about the age of my own father – the age, I calculate with the customary twinge of disbelief, that I am now. A little shorter than myself: a good size for a Frenchman. Thick grey hair; a crumpled face with a protruding lower lip. His voice and manner were those of an educated man, his tattered clothes suggested a peasant farmer, which is a rarer combination in France than in England. I came to learn later that his tastes in literature, music and sport too were eclectic, in a slightly eccentric, un-French way. He spoke a fair English, when he cared to, and honoured the memory of several of the Englishmen he had met during his wartime activities. But I believe that that first evening he and his surroundings all struck me as deeply, exotically foreign, far stranger than anything I had so far encountered in Paris. I also had the dreamlike, exhilarated sensation, born partly of tiredness and a day of travel and expectation, that I myself was somehow transformed by being in this place with this person.
The kitchen seemed very high, crowded, old with the patina of other lives. Obsolete-looking farm implements and nets of root vegetables hung on hooks from a ceiling still blackened by smoke from long-extinct lamps. The slate slabs underfoot were as large and uneven as those in the courtyard, but the place was made comfortable, in a makeshift way, with rag rugs and battered cane chairs. There was a large, blanket-covered bed in the shadows cast by the impromptu-looking dangling light bulbs, and stacks of books on shelves made of bricks and planks. More books and piles of papers covered the slab of wormy oak that was a table, except for one corner on which Jacquou had evidently been eating his supper: broken bread, pâté still in its tin, a wine-bottle and a purplish stained glass. A wood-burning stove wittered quietly to itself in the cavern of an open fireplace, the radio talked softly. Some intensity in the great room, in spite of its superficial disorder, suggested the hideout and clandestine power-centre that, ten years ago, I understood it to have been. But it also seemed like a place that had been lived in for generations without ever being completely cleared or renovated. Old earthenware bowls lay on a high shelf, worn lace-covered cushions were squashed back into chairs. There was a fearsome rat-trap standing rusty in one corner, and a shotgun on hooks above the door, but there were other objects that seemed to be there for decoration: a wooden angel with a broken wing perched high on the chimney shelf, a carved bird, whole and perfect, small dented clay figures such as children make. There were also pieces of furniture – chests, a child’s chair – painted with birds, flowers and miniature country scenes, distinctive and elegiac.
‘It’s a very nice place,’ I said at last.
‘Wants a bit doing to it, like all old houses.’ He divested me of my pack, poured me a glass of wine, and continued: ‘Apart from the electricity, and that tap over there that draws off the well, nothing much has been done to the whole place since my grandfather’s day. He was the last working miller here, before the steam-mills came in the big towns. And my parents didn’t live here, except for holidays.’
‘But you live here all the time?’
‘I do now. I used to be at Poitiers and just come here for the summer, but after the war I decided to retire from the university and spend my last working years back in a local school. Part-time. That suits me, these days.’
‘Professor Gombach said you had an important Chair at Poitiers?’
‘Yes, but you can have enough of being important. After a certain time you should go back to where you began – like the retiring Abbé becoming the monastery doorkeeper. Gombach: yes of course, he sent you here. How is he, poor old Serge?’
As I have expressed his words, they sound patronizing, but in fact I believe that what Jacquou said was mon pauvre vieux Serge, with a rueful tenderness as if he and Gombach had indeed been close at one time. I attempted, hesitating for words that would not sound either trite or impertinent, to indicate how I had found Professor Gombach on our last meeting. Jacquou listened, nodding his head slowly, and finally said:
‘We were together for a time in the war. He came to me because we had been friends years before as students. He was with my group for some time, till he was picked up in a random check and deported. They didn’t realize he was a maquisard, of course, or they would simply …’ He drew his hand across his throat. ‘Poor Serge, the time he spent in Germany did his health no good … Does it surprise you to hear he could be quite brave? And dependable. He was here with me and several others in this house when we were running the network from here for a while in ’43.’ He paused, then said: ‘I can see him now, over there by the window, very slowly peeling potatoes. He was the most incompetent cook ever, but determined to do his share … Excuse me, but what did Serge tell me your name was? Your first name, I mean?’
‘Tom.’ Still unused to the French reticence with first names, I e
xpected him to call me that anyway.
‘Yes, I thought that was it. As it happens, Tom was my own maquisard name, my pseudonym in the network, I mean.’ His eyes, rather odd, light-grey eyes with ringed irises rested on me momentarily as if he attached some kind of significance to the coincidence. ‘And I think, from your surname, you must be of Huguenot stock? So am I. We are Protestants in my family, originally from further south.’
Another happy coincidence, I thought. Or perhaps more than that? The out-groups – Protestants, unbelievers, Jews, all the significant minorities of anti-clerical France – naturally tended to figure more prominently in the Resistance than did the mass of regular, Roman Catholic Frenchmen. Yet when Serge Gombach had told me Jacques Mongeux had been a Resistance leader, my first reaction had been one of scepticism. In that extended period known in France as l’aprés-guerre, a time of delayed shock and slow reappraisal, the lives of individuals were dominated by the enormous fact of the Occupation and how they themselves had experienced it. By the early 1950s, the number of people claiming to have been ‘in’ the Resistance passed all probability and circumstantial evidence; even I, a relatively innocent Englishman, was learning enough to be cynical about such claims. But the detail Gombach had since told me had convinced me that Jacques was a genuine example. I was eager to ask him more about his involvement right away: after all I was in his house for that purpose. But, having just touched on the subject, he moved the conversation firmly back to Gombach, telling me what a tough time he had had as a boy and how ambitious and hard-working he had always been.
‘I don’t think he’s very happy now,’ I heard myself say. Almost for the first time I was seeing a man much older than myself just as an equal individual, and envisaging the boy he had once been.
‘No? People aren’t always when they get what they think they want. Like Monsieur Seguin’s goat.’
Give Them All My Love Page 4