by Michel Déon
His mouth painfully dry from the dust, his stomach empty, his head burning, and still with the taste of his exhausting nausea on his tongue, Jean’s mind began to wander. The war was ending just when it could have become amusing and comfortable, riding in this tracked contraption after having marched themselves to a standstill ever since the Ardennes, chasing the ghosts of promised trucks that would miraculously allow the regiment to rest and re-form. But the trucks had archives of documents to save, tons and tons of archives that headquarters were relying on to exact their revenge one day.
The first evening they broke open the door of an abandoned farm. A slab of butter still sat on the pantry shelf. Picallon, brought up in the country, milked the cows and brought a jug of cream to the table. They found ham and saucisson in the cellar, and some bottles of light red wine and apples. Unmade beds told of a hasty flight. Palfy went looking for bedsheets and found piles of them in a cupboard; picking up a sheet, he rubbed the linen between his thumb and index finger.
‘Obviously it’s not satin, and there’s no trace of a monogram. But the mistress of the house washes her own linen and hangs it to dry in the meadow. Even in London you won’t find whiteness like this any more. We must make do. In any case we have no right to ask for too much, my friends. I must remind you that there’s a war on, in case you’ve forgotten, for youth is terribly forgetful.’
‘You’re amazing,’ Picallon said. ‘You’ve seen everything, you know everything. Without you we’d either be dead or have been taken prisoner.’
‘Perhaps I’m actually God!’ Palfy suggested, modestly.
‘No, definitely not, I know you’re not Him. I may be naive, but I’m not that naive.’
Night was falling. They lit candles and stuck them in glasses on the big table in the main room.
‘Look at us, back in the good old days at Eaton Square all over again,’ Jean said. ‘All that’s missing is Price and his white gloves.’
Picallon was astonished that his friends had seen so much of the world. He was particularly dazzled by Palfy, who was way beyond the experience of a country boy from the Jura. He watched in amazement as Palfy laid spoons to eat the melons that he had cut in half and scooped out.
‘My dear Picallon,’ Palfy said, his voice tinged with regret, ‘I know that at your seminary no one would ever have dared to serve melon without port. Unfortunately I’ve run out. My butler drank it one evening when his boyfriend cheated on him. I sacked him of course, but the damage is done and there’s not even a drop of white wine left to help you save this melon. Just this red which, incidentally, as you’ll note at once, has the same lightness as your Jura wines. I hope you won’t be cross with me for inviting you and offering you such simple fare …’
Picallon was not cross with him at all. He found the entire dinner marvellous, down to the candles that cast the room’s soot-blackened chimney, post office calendar and portrait photo of a lance-corporal in the engineer corps into gloomy oblivion. The war had been banished and no longer filled their thoughts. Around midnight they stumbled on a bottle of what they thought might be plum brandy.
‘When you’re a bishop—’ Palfy said.
‘Me a bishop! Not ruddy likely. I don’t like tricky situations. As you’re my witness, I shall be a priest and stay a priest …’
‘You lack ambition.’
‘Ambition is a sin.’
‘Picallon, you’re an imbecile.’
‘Yes, maybe I am, but you’re too clever, you know too many things. Doesn’t he, Jean?’
‘No. Palfy doesn’t know anything. He guesses it all. And because he doesn’t know anything, he dreams up fabulous schemes that make him a multimillionaire one day and a conman the next.’
‘Conman is harsh,’ Palfy said without irritation.
Picallon, his mind opened to life’s great adventures by the plum brandy, wondered whether the things he had been taught at the seminary still meant something. The invader was trampling France – the Church’s elder daughter – underfoot, and of his only two friends one was disenchanted and the other a conman. His mind a little fogged by alcohol, he tried to work out whether it was all a very good joke, or a dream inspired by the Great Tempter.
‘You’re mocking me, both of you,’ he said. ‘You’re incapable of being serious …’
And he went to bed, in a bedroom that smelt of wax and straw dust, which was a reassuring atmosphere for a country lad from the Jura.
We shall not elaborate now (or later for that matter) on the conversation that took place between Jean and Palfy after Picallon had gone to bed. More serious than usual, it went on until around two in the morning, after a last glass of plum brandy. The bottle was empty. To find another they would have had to break down the cellar door and they were neither vandals nor looters, just soldiers abandoned by a republic in flight. A minimum of careful thought was vital. Where had the French army gone? Even in the absence of official news, it was plain to see it had evaporated. The worst part was that there did not seem to be a German army either.
Standing on the doorstep, admiring the warm starry night that enveloped the farm and the countryside, Palfy sighed.
‘If we were genuine optimists,’ he said, ‘we’d be imagining that both armies have put the wind up each other. The Germans have turned round and nipped back across their beloved Rhine to stroke their Gretchens with their blond plaits, and the French have laid down their rifles and put in for their paid holidays, a month’s leave on the Côte d’Azur …’
‘I wouldn’t mind going down to Saint-Tropez myself …’
He thought of Toinette and the sweet letter she had written him when he enlisted. But dreaming was forbidden! Palfy reminded him of it every time he weakened, and did not fail to do so this time as well.
‘My dear boy, one doesn’t sleep with one’s aunt. It’s no more unhealthy than sleeping with anyone else, but it may bring misfortune on your head. Now is the time to be superstitious again, believe me. I would not have messed up my last two projects in London and Cannes so stupidly if I’d paid attention to certain signs …’
‘You’ll never fail to make me laugh,’ Jean said. ‘Let’s go to bed. Tomorrow—’
‘Mañana será otro día.’
‘Don’t get clever with me. I know those are the only four words of Spanish you know.’
‘Mm, they’re all I need. In them lie all the hopes of the world.’
*
Tomorrow was indeed another day. The tankettes had to turn out onto a short stretch of departmental road that might be used by the Germans. As soon as they were under way they glimpsed a motorcyclist in the distance, bent over his handlebars and riding flat out in their direction, like a fat cockchafer. The insect swelled disproportionately and they made out a green jacket, black boots, a sort of large, gleaming kettle crowned with insignia and, beneath it, a face grey with dust. The rider did not slow down, acknowledging them with a friendly wave as he flashed past and immediately disappeared behind a hill. Palfy, driving in front, stuck out his right arm, indicating that they should turn onto a dirt track between two large fields. The track led to a barn and a ruined farm. Picallon jumped down, opened the gate, and the two tankettes concealed themselves behind the barn’s stack of hay.
‘That was a German!’ Picallon yelled, as soon as the two engines cut out.
‘Thanks for telling me!’ Palfy sighed. ‘I came to the same conclusion. I must say, strong emotions make me hungry and thirsty.’
They found some shade and sat down to some saucisson and the two bottles of light red wine they had liberated unrepentantly from the farm that morning.
‘It should be drunk cooler than this!’ Picallon observed, the taste of the light wine reminding him of haymaking time on his father’s farm.
‘I say, young priest, you do know how to live!’
‘Don’t make fun of me, Palfy. I went straight from my farm to the seminary and from the seminary to the army. You’ve seen the world; I haven’t. So perhaps you
know why that German didn’t stop and didn’t shoot at us.’
‘It’s probably perfectly simple: a humble soldier on the winning side finds it impossible to imagine that behind his army’s lines are three chaps in French uniforms out sightseeing on a couple of tankettes.’
‘Are you saying he took us for Germans?’
‘Precisely, my dear young priest. In which case, it also occurred to me that a semblance of thought might run through his fat head and perhaps cause him to turn round and come back. Which is why we are sitting eating saucisson in the hay in the shelter of a barn while there’s a war on somewhere.’
‘All right,’ Picallon said, ‘I get it. We’re in the hands of divine Providence again …’
Providence was no slouch. From the haystack they watched the road for more than an hour. It remained empty. They set off again in the summer heat. Their tracks chewed the soft tarmac. Picallon sat cooking on Jean’s bonnet while the tankette advanced at a stately pace and Jean alternately dozed and watched anxiously as the fuel gauge neared zero. They had been on the move for two hours when they glimpsed a village whose church pointed a tentative spire into a sky empty of aircraft. Palfy held up his arm and they halted outside the mairie. The tricolour hung despondently from its pole. There was not a soul on the street, not even a stray dog. A grocer’s had been looted and the Café des Amis had barricaded itself behind wooden shutters. It was an ordinary French village, pleasant, neither ugly nor handsome, lacking all arrogance as it lacked all pretension. Windows closed, it slumbered quietly in the warm afternoon. On nameplates they read: Jean Lafleur, solicitor; Pierre Robinson, doctor: surgery hours from 2 p.m. to 4 p.m. and by appointment; Auguste Larivière, contractor … Where had they all gone, these peace-loving citizens, exiled one morning in panic from their village, from their memories, their family portraits, the little gardens you could picture behind their houses, tidy and neat, with an apple tree, a few rose bushes and some geraniums? Crammed into wheezing cars, they had fled the war without thinking that the war would travel faster than they could on the congested roads. The single petrol pump was, predictably, padlocked, and hung with an unequivocal sign: ‘No more petrol, so don’t ask.’ The situation seemed perfectly simple: they would have to continue on foot.
Palfy said bad-temperedly, ‘God, what fools you French are!’
Picallon’s hackles rose. ‘You’re French as well.’
‘I do apologise, young priest, I haven’t regaled you with my life story yet. My mother was English, my father Serb. I’m wearing the same uniform as you are merely because I happened to be born at Nice while my father was trying out an infallible system at the Casino on the Jetée-Promenade.’
‘An infallible system?’
Palfy raised his arms heavenwards and called Jean as his witness.
‘Must I explain everything? Listen to me, Picallon: my heart belongs to France. I could have steered clear of this war, but it amused me and came at the right moment, when I had one or two problems as well—’
Jean interrupted him, pointing his finger at a window on the first floor of a grey house with a shale frontage.
‘I saw the curtain twitch and a hand, just a hand …’
A cat sauntered calmly across the square, walked up the stairs to the mairie, and sat down to watch them.
‘The curtain twitched again!’ Picallon said.
Someone was watching them from a window. The village was not entirely dead. A hand and a cat still lived here, and things began to look more lively as a breeze rustled the leaves of the ash trees shading the avenue with its inevitable war memorial, which for once was reasonably discreet, an obelisk decorated with bronze laurels beneath which was inscribed the fateful date ‘1914–1918’, followed by a list of names. At a second gust of wind a door creaked, and the three startled men whipped round: one of the doors of the church had swung open onto a dark space streaked through with reddish flashes of sunlight from the stained-glass windows.
‘Blimey!’ Picallon said, crossing himself.
The seminarian went in, crossing himself again after dipping his fingers in the font. Jean did the same, and both felt the incense-scented coolness of the holy place buffet their hot, dry faces. Picallon knelt to pray while Jean, moved by the silence and innocent simplicity of the church, which reminded him of the abbé Le Couec’s at Grangeville, stayed standing in the nave. A splintering sound distracted him. Palfy was trying to force the poor box underneath the Sulpician statue of St Anthony. Their gazes met. Palfy shrugged and went out.
‘Why do you keep doing that?’ Jean asked, following him outside to the porch. ‘It’s like an illness with you. I thought you’d got over it.’
‘I’m not harming anyone. I believe I explained it to you years ago, when we first met. What’s in the poor box is for the poor. And we’re poor: twenty-five centimes a day is nowhere near enough to live on. Particularly as our government no longer knows where we are.’
‘You’re forgetting the postal orders Madeleine sends you. And that I always share the ones Antoinette sends me.’
‘Money from women doesn’t count. It’s dishonourable. Can only be spent on things you shouldn’t spend it on. The only money I respect is the money I earn.’
‘By stealing?’
‘There are risks.’
‘Not in churches.’
‘Jean, you’re being tiresome.’
Picallon was still praying. They walked back to the square. Again the curtain fell back. Someone was spying on them. Approaching the front door, they read the enamelled nameplate ‘Jacques Graindorge, surveyor’. Palfy rang the bell. They heard chimes: three notes repeated three times. The house remained silent.
‘Perhaps it was the wind twitching the curtain,’ Palfy said. ‘Or just a mirage. I don’t know how many days it’s been since we saw a civilian, apart from that handicapped chap in his wheelchair, whom the pigs must have eaten by now.’
‘I saw a hand the first time.’
The cat, licking its paw on the top step of the mairie, stretched, arched its back, and padded towards them. An ordinary cat, black spotted with white or white spotted with black, in no hurry, pausing to bat playfully at a piece of paper before proceeding with remarkable casualness across the deserted square. Jean watched it closely: it was clearly well fed, so there was no question of it making do with rummaging in dustbins or hunting mice. No, this was definitely a proper, bourgeois moggy, returning from a short stroll after its lunch. Nothing surprised it, not even the two men in khaki shirtsleeves who had arrived from another planet in their big noisy toys that were resting further down the avenue. It walked between Jean and Palfy, lifted a paw to push a flap that swung back in the bottom of the door, and hopped through it. The flap closed automatically.
‘There’s someone inside,’ Jean said.
Palfy rang the bell repeatedly. The only reply was the sound of meowing. The cat did not like the noise of the chimes.
‘I know what to do,’ Palfy said, walking back to the tankette and pulling out a machine pistol. Of course, the classic tactic: a quick burst to shoot the lock and you push the door open.
But there was no need: above them the window opened and an anguished voice called out, ‘Kamerad! Kamerad! Don’t shoot! Me friend Germans. You speak French?’
‘Like your mother and father,’ Palfy said calmly. ‘My friend too. Open this door or I’ll shoot it open.’
‘I’m coming! I’m coming! Don’t shoot!’
The house suddenly came to life. A door slammed, hurried steps made their way downstairs. A chain was slipped and a key turned in a lock. In the doorway stood a man in his forties, his red hair tousled, his lips pale and quivering in an almost purple face.
‘Gentlemen, forgive me, I thought you were French soldiers. I swear’ – he put out his right arm – ‘I swear I’m a friend of the Germans, a friend of Grossdeutschland and its leader, the Führer Adolf Hitler.’
Palfy put on an interested expression.
‘So yo
u’re definitely not hiding any Frenchmen?’
‘I’m the only Frenchman in the village.’
‘You don’t listen to the lies on the English wireless?’
‘Never. Anyway I don’t understand a word of English.’
Palfy turned to Jean and said to him in English as guttural as he could make it, as though it was spoken with a German accent, ‘This bugger deserves to be taught a lesson. Go and get Picallon, and tell him not to utter a word of French.’
In French he said to the surveyor, ‘That’s all very well, but we’re an advance force. The regiment is following behind and we’re here to start the requisitioning. What do you have for lunch?’
Monsieur Graindorge raised his arms heavenwards.
‘Requisitioning! What an awful word, Messieurs. You won’t be requisitioning anything here. You are my guests. My maid – a very stupid woman – has gone off pushing a pram filled with everything she holds most dear. But I can do without her. Give me an hour and I’ll have the pleasure of offering your German palates – a little basic, I’m sure you won’t mind me saying – a lunch worthy of French discernment and quality. I trust you accept?’
‘Of course, Monsieur Graindeblé,’ Palfy answered with blithe artlessness.
‘Graindorge!’ the surveyor corrected him. ‘Strangers do sometimes muddle up my name.’