by Adam Thorpe
‘You’re the Nazi, mate! I captured this off an SS platoon that I wiped out single-handed. I’m a Resistance hero, OK?’
‘Why do you keep missing, then?’
‘My rear sight assembly’s completely fucked and the recoil booster’s got dented by a mortar so I’m firing blind, OK?’
He fired again and I crouched down with my back to the bed, realising my Luger pistol had run out of ammo. I unclipped the box magazine and double-checked. Yeah, all eight rounds gone. I wiped my stubbled, greasy face and blinked away the mingled sweat and blood trickling into my eyes. Before me was a great plain of waving grass in somewhere like Russia or Poland. The sun beat down. I was on my own. My whole platoon had been wiped out. We had all been at school together. All my mates had been killed and now I was on my own, crouched in my torn combat tunic and ripped trousers behind the wreckage of an armoured car. It was good, feeling evil: I always preferred being the German. I liked losing, battling on against all the odds and then being killed.
‘You’re behind hay-bales, mate!’ he shouted. ‘These bullets rip through ’em like they’re butter!’
‘It’s camouflage. There’s an armoured car behind, a wrecked one!’
‘Not enough to stop ’em at this range.’
‘I’m at least fifty metres,’ I yelled.
‘You’re at twenty-five, I can see the holes I’m making in the metal. This can go up to two hundred metres.’
‘Crap.’
‘It fucking can, mate. And it’s still really effective at thirty so say your prayers.’
‘Schweinhund!’
‘Go for cover, there’s a huge tree over there.’
‘No chance.’
‘It’s your only hope, the bales are burning.’
He fired another round.
‘There’s no other cover, you French bastard,’ I shouted, with a German accent. ‘It’s just grass here, OK? There’s no tree! I’m staying put. Yahwohl! Achtung! ’
He started whistling the Marseillaise, softly. I clenched my teeth, feeling the badness rippling through my body into my staring, desperate eyes.
‘Verdammt!’ I shouted. ‘Heil Hitler!’
The machine gun chattered and stammered, the bullets ricocheting off the twisted metal. Then there was silence. I mustn’t let him know I hadn’t got any ammo left. The only sound was a fly buzzing over the grass. I’d had nothing to eat for days, and only a little stream-water left in my bottle. Fortunately, I had a grenade. I tore off the safety cap with my teeth, swivelled round in a crouch and hurled it at the bunk through the stammer of the MG42.
‘Yah yah yah!’ I screamed. ‘French Schweinhund!’
The grenade exploded just after it bounced. Christophe mimed the explosion. I felt the bullets tearing into my chest, leaping back with the force of them, my arms outspread, rolling in the little space between the armoured car and the wardrobe. Christophe was groaning, his hand crookedly hanging over the edge, dying a slow, heroic death. He enjoyed dying as much as I did. The bunk creaked as he twitched.
That is why I liked Christophe: other boys would not have been blown up, would have ignored the grenade and carried on in their own world.
So we both died in the grass, twenty-five yards apart in the middle of the huge grassy plain somewhere in Russia or Poland, my body twisted in its filthy, lead-riddled tunic. I lay there in the silence, trying to imagine not imagining or thinking. Then I felt paper skittering over my face.
‘Nazi bastard! Still alive, huh?’
‘No, I’m dead. Honest, I’m completely dead,’ I said, grabbing the comic he’d thrown at me – a frayed Fripounet et Marisette – and nearly hurling it back as he shielded his face. But I didn’t want a comic fight: comics were too precious to be torn and broken like that.
I got back on the bed and kneeled on it with my chin in my hands, beginning to read the Fripounet et Marisette. It was especially for country children, with photographs of the readers under trees or on farms or in front of a village sign they’d decorated with flowers. Otherwise, it was like any other comic. Although we’d go to the countryside for a week in August, and I had once been to a Catholic summer camp (which I’d hated, as it kept raining into my tent), I couldn’t imagine actually living in the countryside. There was a strip about the history of truffles, and one about a Resistance member called René Bailly hiding on a farm. I couldn’t get the smell of my mother’s nightdress out of my head.
Christophe was looking bored again, long legs swinging, his hands under his thighs.
‘Let’s go into Paris,’ he said.
‘What do you mean?’
‘Just us two. My parents said I’m old enough now.’
‘OK. Just for the day?’
Christophe nodded.
‘The Pigalle,’ he smirked.
‘I wouldn’t be allowed to.’
‘I was only joking. We can go to the parks and shops and stuff. I’ve never been up the Tour Eiffel. We can go to a film.’
‘When?’
He shrugged.
‘Soon, maybe.’
‘I’ll show you where I went with my sister. There’s a Wimpy on the Boul’Mich. She always took me there.’
‘Chic,’ he said. ‘My dad said to me your sister had the kid, it wasn’t your mother.’
I stared at him for a moment. His legs swung to and fro. He had a smirk of embarrassment on his face.
‘What?’
‘Yeah. It wasn’t your mother’s. It was your sister had it. I dunno.’
I snorted and shook my head and circled my finger around my temple to show the extent of his mental derangement. My throat was drying right out so that I could hardly swallow.
‘I told him he’d got it wrong,’ Christophe said.
‘Very wrong.’
‘“The whole of Bagneux can’t be wrong,” he says to me.’
Christophe imitated his father’s high, jokey voice very well.
‘I’ve saved up quite a bit,’ he added. ‘We can go to Wimpy’s and watch two films.’
There was a shout up the stairs, just then – just as I was about to say, ‘It’s a stupid lie.’ It was after five and time to give a hand.
Christophe swore, jumped down and sped out of the room without saying anything more. I heard him having a pee in the toilet at the end of the corridor – it was a porcelain hole, like the ones in cafés, with newspaper to wipe yourself with. I would try to avoid using it when I came round. He pulled the chain and a pipe next to my ear gurgled, then whined.
He thumped down the stairs and I heard a door crash shut.
It was weird, being alone in his room, in the silence of it, trying to work out why I was trembling – left out in the cold while the whole of Bagneux was inside.
‘Piss-head liars,’ I murmured to myself.
I hated being thirteen, I thought. I hated stupid liars like Christophe’s father.
I tried to read but I couldn’t stand being on my own, now. I made my way down to the shop, two steps at a time. I could hear Mamie sort of squeaking to herself in the kitchen. The door connecting the house with the shop was locked, so I had to go outside.
Christophe’s father was finishing a joke when I entered.
‘So I said, I said I’d be the first and the last in line, in that case!’ he bellowed.
Everyone laughed, saying he was ‘too much’: there were about five women in there and a little old man with a beret, but it seemed like the whole of Bagneux. I greeted them shyly as they turned to see who it was had made the door ring.
‘Ah, the other escaped convict,’ he exclaimed, his huge hands running a side of ham under the slicer. I could easily see them sweeping an axe against a massive tree in Silesia. ‘Monsieur Papillon’s side-kick.’
As usual, the blood smell mixed up with dried sausage and sawdust hit me in the face as much as the sweet stink of incense in church would. I slipped through the customers and entered the chilly back room with its huge refrigerators and ancient chopping block and white tiles.
Its whiteness always reminded me of hospitals, except that hospitals were hotter and sadder and immediately made you feel ill. Christophe was helping his mother carry in carcasses. There were enormous long pigs with ears like kepis; halves of cows where you could see the ribs; a whole sheep without its head and with its hoofs tied together as if it was praying.
‘Ah,’ said Christophe’s mother, ‘another big strapping lad.’
I helped as best I could, feeling the cold meat of animals under my hands. I didn’t really think of them as animals, though; they were more like objects. Their souls had vanished (if they’d ever had any souls) and their bodies were just waiting to be sliced up. It was always like winter in the back room, with Christophe’s father bellowing next door in his high voice, chopping and hashing and slicing, telling jokes and more stupid stories.
‘Three saucissons, Madame Lallié? Three little jésus?’ I heard him yell, over customers laughing. ‘Three of them? Not one, not two, but three? Don’t worry, I won’t tell anybody else that you want three saucissons, Madame Lallié! Not a word to anyone, eh? Mouth shut, you see that? We don’t want the whole of Bagneux knowing, do we, Madame Lallié? About your three saucissons? Your three little jésus? Do we now, eh, Madame Lallié?’
13
The next day my mother and I went to second Mass at eight o’clock. Her favourite priest had told off the ten o’clock congregation recently for never doing just that. It was strange, not having the service sung and sitting with different people, who all seemed to be pale and serious under black scarves and hats and said the prayers loudly. The silence before the service, though, didn’t seem as silent as at ten or eleven o’clock; I always liked coming in out of the outside world into that silence, everyone just sitting there meditating, but the outside world at eight o’clock was even quieter than inside: even the bells seemed quieter.
The whole service was in Latin. This was because the old priest, Père Romains, took the service. It felt holier, not really understanding everything. My mother always complained about the abolishing of Latin, but I knew she preferred services in French. Père Romains kept his back to us the whole time, facing the altar – which also felt holier. Although the church was almost as full as it was at ten or eleven o’clock, I still reckoned I’d earned quite a few extra points from God. I wondered if going every Sunday to the eight o’clock Mass might get me to Heaven on its own. Everyone spoke Latin in Heaven, of course.
I prayed extra hard for Carole and Nicolas.
While the echoey sermon was droning on, I stared at the gold Christ hanging on the Cross high up at the back. This one always looked bad-tempered under His brown beard, not in agony at all. The church was colder than usual – the big old stove in the middle hadn’t had time to warm the air up – and looking at Christ’s bare chest and legs made me feel even colder. That, and the stupid lie about Nicolas, kept making me want to shiver. The pew creaked when I did so and my mother hissed at me to stop fidgeting.
In semaphore, I thought, Christ’s position of the arms means a letter. He’s signalling to us. He’s almost in the nude.
I looked around at all the faces looking up at the pulpit, and wondered how many of them knew about the stupid lie.
On my way out, I made sure I popped some centimes into the box that said, in faded white paint, Pour les mes du Purgatoire. Purgatory was better than Hell, though more boring; I used to think the centimes dropped through some special tube in the box all the way down to where the bored souls scrabbled for them in the cold fog. Now I didn’t know how it worked. Perhaps the priests prayed for the souls in Purgatory only when the coins got up to a certain sum. The box sounded empty.
The town centre was coming to life by now. When we’d arrived it was weird: only the bells showed any sign of activity, apart from a few people walking like us to church. Now it was more normal. We bought some warm croissants and walked home through very quiet streets, with just a few old ladies sitting by their doors on rickety chairs.
‘Well,’ my mother said, ‘I do feel better for that.’
My uncle had to go out after lunch; there was someone he had to ‘chat up’ about a deal. He would often do this on Sundays, although my mother felt it was not quite right. The two of us went to visit Carole, my mother driving on her own.
I kept my ears open in the home. The trouble with the stupid lie was that it had become a sort of object or pretend person, as real in my head as the truth. With Carole next to me, this nasty real thing sort of froze, in suspended animation. I wanted to know if the wicked things Carole had been saying were anything to do with the lie. She might, I thought, let something out.
It was a very bright afternoon and we walked around the grounds, scrunching the gravel on the twisting little paths. Carole walked over-carefully, as if she was avoiding treading on insects, but otherwise she seemed normal. As usual, she and my mother were talking about things like seams on clothes and the nice shrubbery. It was quite cold, and the sun lit our breath. There were white patches of frost on the grass.
We came to a little lawn with a broken statue of a half-nude woman in the middle and a big blue type of pine-tree that my mother said was a Cedar of Lebanon. Someone had written Infinité in black felt pen across the woman’s bare tummy.
My mother tutted.
‘Aren’t people disrespectful?’
‘She’s going to have a baby,’ said Carole. ‘That’s why.’
‘Oh, I see,’ said my mother, nodding as if it was true. Then Carole smiled.
‘She’s dead, but she’s happy. She’s going to be a little mother.’
‘I see, dear.’
There were a lot of crocuses under the bare trees. I found the crocuses very special, for some reason. My mother had changed the subject, going on about borrowing for the washing machine and Oncle Alain changing to the Crédit Lyonnais. As they walked off, chatting, my mother waving her gloved hands around, I stopped by a small patch of the crocuses. Flowers had never interested me much, except when I had been allowed to grow some forget-me-nots as part of the tiny rockery in front of the house – I was eight or nine. Now I found myself staring at the crocuses. They were very special in some way. They were purple and had little veins.
A phrase came into my head from the catechism class, something about the mitigation of pain. Everyone here was a cripple. The crocuses made me feel as if I was floating. There was no difference between the crocuses and me. We were both eternal because the moment was spreading out either side and would never stop. No, we weren’t really the same, but very close – more like a best friend. I felt happy, very happy, happier than I had ever felt in my life before. The sun’s rays slanted very brightly across the grass and got caught up in all the spiders’ webs there and I could smell the frost and grass at the same time. I stared at the crocuses and let myself soak up this moment until it evaporated, my mother and Carole already vanished like ghosts into the shrubbery.
‘I wish we had a proper garden,’ I said, on the way back.
‘I wish we had a normal family life, dear,’ said my mother.
She was still driving slowly and jerkily, blinking anxiously through the curved windscreen.
‘It’s quite normal,’ I said.
‘What’s normal, dear?’
‘I don’t know. You said you wanted it normal.’
‘Did I?’
‘You just said it.’
‘At least Carole is on the mend,’ she sighed. ‘But it does rake me up, seeing her.’
‘Why do you always talk to her about boring things, Maman?’
She frowned, still concentrating on her driving.
‘You may find them boring, dear. Carole doesn’t.’
‘Is it part of her treatment?’
‘She was always very outspoken,’ she said.
I stared out through my side window. I wanted to ask her about the lie, but didn’t dare. The jerking car was making me feel sick. We went through a red light and a man crossing the road shook his head sadly at
us, as if we were already beyond redemption.
I stood, later that week, in my parents’ bedroom. My mother was below, dropped off on the sofa in front of the television. My uncle was seeing the insurance people somewhere in Paris.
On his bedside table there was a thick book called La Montée du Nazisme. Another book looking exactly the same, with a big red swastika on it, lay on the floor. It was called La Chute du Nazisme. He had sent off for the books three years ago, cutting out a panel in the back of the special Paris-Match on Churchill. The one on the bedside table had a gold Toledo sword tucked in about a quarter of the way through. This bookmark was a birthday present from me. It had cost five new francs.
I was playing the detective. Inspecteur Leclerc, or someone. Definitely not the Thomson twins. Investigating.
I began to talk to myself, imagining the speech-bubbles rising from my head and my faithful dog replying in thought-clouds, like Milou or Idéfix. Detectives had to search for clues in drawers, but there was a lot of danger in it – the sitting-room, with my mother dropped off on the sofa in her green slacks in front of the television, was just below. The backs of my legs were pressing against the huge double-bed. On the glass surface of my uncle’s bedside table were lots of items of evidence, which I noted down: nail-scissors, tweezers, clippers, a comb with his black hairs in it, his Remington electric razor with its knob set to 6 (only the closest shave for the clients, he told me once), a green bottle of Brut after-shave, the small musical clock that woke him up with Clair de Lune, a Kronenbourg ashtray, and a small portrait photo of my mother on their wedding day.
In the drawer I itemised, in my own notepad: a broken silver medallion, a spare watch, a gold-plated cigarette lighter, a thin gold pen given to him by someone important, a Thomson key-ring, his pipe and a pouch of Clan tobacco, a broken cassette of Juliette Greco songs, business cards with the old phone number on, a roll of Kodachrome film, a creased black-and-white snapshot of a class of lycée pupils from a long time ago, a spray to stop his shoes smelling.
I looked for my uncle in the rows of lycée faces. There was someone at the back, face slightly blurred, who could have been him. Their short hair was funny, oily-looking and with ripples in it. Some of them were serious, some of them almost laughing. One face had been crossed out with a pen so you couldn’t see it: he’d obviously died.