Maud courageously refused the second round of brandy, but the others had to comply. Marc and Alex had apparently acquired remarkable resistance to the brew during their previous stay. Above all, they were able to swallow the slices of greasy lard that were offered at the same time. Lionel and Vauthier were sickened by the rancid cold meat, and drank their brandy on an empty stomach. Lionel was looking more and more gloomy. He kept glancing over at Maud and Alex, with a sullen expression on his face. What she had suspected the night before without really believing it was confirmed that morning: he had been mortified by the fact that she went to sleep in Alex’s tent. She never dreamed he might be jealous. But she had to accept the fact: he had been deeply hurt.
As for Vauthier, he seemed to be shrinking under the effect of the alcohol. Drunkenness compressed his violence like a gas under pressure. You could sense he was about to explode. The bad energy he had stockpiled was in danger of creating a terrible blast.
When at last they left their hosts behind, each of them was lost in thought, and for several of them those thoughts, visibly, were dark. Everyone sensed that something serious was about to happen but no one knew what form the crisis would take.
3
The track the officer had advised them to take was an old, badly paved, narrow road. It wound its way up the mountain to a pass, which they couldn’t see yet. The wheels spun in the hairpin turns because of the mud that had accumulated in the ruts and hadn’t dried. The lead truck was struggling. The engine stalled frequently and took a long time to get going again.
The mood in the cab was one of brooding tension. Lionel was still in a foul mood. Vauthier was finding it harder than ever to contain his anger. Marc pretended to ignore the malaise; he was full of energy. He even tried humming, but Lionel shut him up, grumbling that he had a headache.
The spark came, as always, from a few innocuous words. After struggling to get around a steep bend, Marc commented that the engine was overheating, and that he hoped the repaired radiator hose would hold up. Vauthier sprang forward from his bunk.
“If we’d stayed on the proper road, we’d be on the flat and there would have been garages.”
Before setting off they had discussed the officer’s advice, and Marc had recommended following it. Basically it was his fault now, in a way, if they were on this bad road, which must only be used for farm vehicles and military convoys. But he wasn’t about to react to Vauthier’s comment; he merely smiled, glancing briefly in the rearview mirror.
“You think it’s funny, huh?” said Vauthier.
When he got no answer, he got even more riled up and went on complaining. Nothing was spared: neither the choice of the road nor the gunfire the previous night nor the explosives in the boxes.
“I should have gotten the hell out of here, that’s what I should have done.”
“Nothing’s stopping you.”
Marc said it with a smile, his fingers on the radio dial, which he kept turning to no avail, trying to find some music.
Vauthier immediately raised his voice.
“Maybe it’s you and your buddy who should be thrown out. With a kick in the ass, while we’re at it.”
“Be my guest. Why don’t you?”
Lionel was holding his head, saying, “Shut the fuck up!”
Vauthier turned to him, trying to draw him into the argument.
“Don’t you think so, Lionel? You’re the boss, after all, aren’t you? You’re not gonna let this dumbass decide for you.”
“You know what the dumbass has to say?” interrupted Marc.
“You should never let soldiers on convoys like this,” insisted Vauthier, shaking his head. “They’re swine.”
“We used to be soldiers, and we don’t hide the fact. So why don’t you tell them you’re a cop?”
“Who’s a cop?”
“You are, old man. You think we haven’t figured that out?”
The mechanic registered what he had said then let out a stream of insults. At first, Marc smiled. Then suddenly he lost his cool. Was there one word in particular that set him off? It was on hearing “son of a bitch” that he reacted. Maybe he was just worn out after a sleepless night, made restless by the šljivovica-induced nightmares? Regardless, at one point he let go of the wheel and grabbed Vauthier by the collar. The truck swerved to a stop across the road and the truck behind had to slam on the brakes not to run into them. Maud, who was driving, saw the door open and Marc jumped out, dragging Vauthier behind him. The two men fell to the ground, in the mud. Blows were raining down on Vauthier. Initially stunned, he recovered his wits and fought back, stronger than anyone suspected. He also knew how to fight hand-to-hand and dealt Marc several blows to the face that made his lips and temple bleed.
Lionel immediately jumped out and rushed over to them. He tried to grab Marc around the waist to pull them apart. Vauthier seized the opportunity to step back and punch Marc in the stomach. Alex, who had climbed out in turn, grabbed Lionel by the arm.
“Don’t get involved. Let him go!”
Lionel turned back to Alex, his face twisted with anger. Maud realized the fight was now in danger of spreading to those two. She began by separating them, then she turned to the men who were still on the ground and screamed at them to stop. Marc had the advantage again, and after one final punch to his opponent’s jaw he stood up and stepped back.
Vauthier was a mess. One eye was closed and swollen, and he was holding his right arm and wincing. The blue marks on his neck showed that Marc had nearly strangled him. He got to his knees, as dazed as an ox whacked with a cleaver. His clothes were covered in mud. Maud wondered if he wasn’t about to collapse. But he struggled to his feet, one leg after the other, looking around him in a stupor. His gaze came to a halt on Marc, who had taken out a jug of water and was washing his face.
“You,” he said, pointing at him, “I’ll kill you.”
As always, or almost always, whenever they stopped somewhere, there were kids watching from a distance. They had come at a run when the fight began. Who knew whether they wouldn’t run for help? Alex was convinced the paramilitaries used them as lookouts.
After the fight, he was the least troubled of them all. He insisted they get the convoy back on the road as quickly as possible. If a patrol came by now and stopped to inspect them, they’d look pretty suspicious. The first truck was still sideways across the road, the doors open. Various items had fallen to the ground when Marc pulled Vauthier from the cab. Lionel was hunting in the mud for his tobacco pouch, which had rolled into the soaking grass by the embankment. The belligerents were standing on either side of the truck, leaning on the slatted sides. Their clothes were streaming with mud, and while Marc had managed to clean his face somewhat, Vauthier still wore a mask of black earth and dried blood.
Maud was upset. She never thought they would go that far. There was one thing about men she didn’t understand—or rather, she understood it, but could not accept it: this complete absence of civilization, this innate acceptance of violence. Coming to a territory that was at war she had expected to be confronted with it. But she never expected it to come from the very people who were supposed to incarnate peace and humanity. It was like seeing policemen robbing the very citizens who had come to them for help—just as shocking.
Lionel had found his tobacco. He was inhaling deeply on a hastily rolled cigarette which was splattered with dirt.
Apart from Alex, who was trying to tidy up the battlefield, no one had any energy and they all seemed resigned to inertia. Eventually they got their wits about them when the distant rumbling of an engine reached them on a cold gust of air. It came from higher up, and sounded like a motorcycle. They hurried in disarray toward the cabs. But just as they were climbing on board, the same thought occurred to them: there was no way they could leave Marc and Vauthier in the confined space of a shared cab.
Lionel had to think on
his feet. There were only bad solutions. In the end he shouted to Alex to join them in the front truck, and he barked at Marc to go back to Maud’s truck.
For once the engines, which had had time to cool down somewhat, started up on the first try. They got in line and by the time the motorcyclist appeared, the convoy looked normal again.
A very young man was riding the motorbike. He wasn’t in uniform. Slung across his back on a leather strap was a machine gun. Behind him a large woman all in black was sitting sidesaddle, holding herself in a very dignified position, with a wicker basket on her lap. They went past the convoy without slowing down or responding to the drivers’ greetings.
When they reached the pass, the road left the forest behind at last and grew wider. The panorama appeared: below them was a wide valley scattered with dark forests, with metal pylons here and there. The fact that there were quite a few of these pylons suggested there must be a town nearby. And indeed, at the far end of the valley, almost on the horizon, they could see rows of gray apartment buildings.
As the officer had said, there was no checkpoint on the pass. However, on either side of the road they could see clear signs of former trenches and the vestiges of combat. It was a sinister place, with charred trees and wrecks piled in ditches. It was impossible to tell when the fighting had occurred. It would not have surprised them to see corpses on the ground. But it could also have been a long time ago. And there was no one around, nothing anywhere nearby, except the inevitable crows.
It was lunchtime, but given what had just happened, nobody felt like stopping and besides, they weren’t hungry. The trucks began their descent.
In the lead cab, Alex was at the wheel and Lionel was sleeping, dozy from the alcohol at breakfast. Vauthier, behind them, was chewing over his hatred. Alex could hear him rubbing his arm from time to time, stifling a moan.
“Nothing broken, I hope?”
“Mind your own business.”
Alex sensed that Vauthier still made no distinction between Marc and him. The conversation would go no further. He concentrated on the road. A rusty road sign riddled with bullet holes read, “Sarajevo 120 km.” Ten years earlier, when the city had hosted the Olympic Games, you could come here from the capital for the day to take a walk and have a family picnic.
The sky was heavy with dark, ominous clouds. The weather changed quickly on these late autumn days. The cold had already taken hold in the mountains and the wind, which had veered to the north, was biting. It was dark in the forest. Alex wondered why this atmosphere seemed to him to be war’s natural setting. He had often pondered the subject at school, daydreaming during history lessons. Whenever the date of a battle was in the spring or the summer, he pictured it as a pleasant outing in the country, something cheery and not at all serious. He couldn’t believe there could be death among the flowers or on tender green fields. When he was a soldier he always felt safe when the fine weather arrived. Only when one of his comrades was hit by a bullet in the middle of June, and he saw him lying beneath a copse of white hawthorns, did he realize how ridiculous his assumption had been.
“Have you been with Maud for long?”
Lionel had emerged from his stupor and was looking at Alex with bloodshot eyes.
“Nice nap?”
“I think I asked you a question?”
“I didn’t understand what you meant.”
“Of course! You didn’t understand . . . ”
In the descent, the road was particularly rutted and Alex had to swing the steering wheel abruptly not to be dragged into the ditch.
“No, I didn’t understand. Please explain.”
Lionel turned abruptly to face him.
“I asked you when you started sleeping with Maud. That’s clear, isn’t it?”
“I’m sleeping with Maud? But I’m not sleeping with Maud. Except tonight, and it seems to me you gave me your consent.”
“You don’t have to lie. I don’t give a damn what the two of you are getting up to.”
Alex glanced over at him. Against a background of stupor, Lionel’s expression was filled with pain. Alex felt like taking his companion by the shoulders and giving him a friendly shake. But given the feeling in the team, he ruled out any display of familiarity.
“Let me tell you something and I hope you will get a better idea of what’s going on: I am going to see the woman I love in Kakanj.”
“And does Maud know?”
“You want to know exactly what I told her?”
Alex told the whole story, leaving nothing out. Lionel listened and didn’t say a word. Alex saw him relax, as surely as if he had smoked another joint. He probably wanted to hide his feelings, and maybe he even thought he’d manage to. But Alex could read him like a book.
“Can I ask you a question now?”
“Go ahead.”
“If you want to know how things stand between Maud and me, it must mean that you—”
“Mind your own business,” said Lionel.
He bristled. But his bad mood was as transparent as his cheerfulness. And this time, Alex almost felt sorry for him. He let a little time go by, then continued the conversation on a less sensitive topic.
“You know what it reminds me of, our trucks and our adventures as the days go by?”
“No.”
“A comic book. But I can’t tell which one. I’ve read so many.”
“Oh, you like comics?”
“That’s all I ever read. What about you?”
“Which ones are your favorites?”
“I like them all! But especially Corto Maltese, Largo Winch, all the adventure stuff.”
They talked for a good half-hour about their favorite heroes. Alex had won Lionel’s trust. The descent was nearly over, and as they went around some of the bends they could make out the first buildings of the town. But Lionel had settled in for a long conversation, comfortably wedged in the corner between the seat and the door.
Lionel was in a joking mood, and when both of them laughed, Alex thought he could hear a vexed sigh coming from Vauthier’s bunk. He pictured him shrugging his shoulders, thinking how stupid they were.
“You know, when they gave me the chance to become a peacekeeper, I thought I’d be having a heap of adventures, like Michel Vaillant. Have you read those ones, the Michel Vaillant series?”
“Of course! Every one!”
“What about you? Did you go into aid work for the adventure?”
“I might have,” said Lionel, shaking his head, “because I read a lot of stuff about the French doctors, and it was fascinating. But that’s not the way it happened, because of my parents.”
“What do they do for a living?”
“They’re in sales. My father was manager at a little Félix Potin supermarket in Écully, and my mother worked with him. Since they didn’t have much time to take care of me, they put me in boarding school in Vénissieux. I hated it, and I started smoking a lot, just to cope. Not the best thing there is for passing exams. I could see disaster looming, so I thought I’d become a truck driver. That’s why I got my license. But my father didn’t want to know. For him it had to be an office job, some serious thing. He made me take a course so that I could work at a bank.”
“And did you?”
“I had no choice.”
“To be honest, Lionel, I can’t see you as a bank teller.”
“But I stuck it out for two years. Little suit, white shirt, and tie. By the time I came home in the evening I was exhausted. I rented a studio in Villeurbanne.”
“So why didn’t you go on with it?”
“My boss caught me smoking at the office.”
“Smoking? You mean—”
“Yeah, exactly. Not that it exactly freaked him out. He would go right ahead and do the same thing on the weekend. But at the bank it was strictly forbidden. And mainly, h
e was fed up with my mistakes, with my showing up late, all of that. So this was the pretext to give me the shove.”
In the distance they could see a major checkpoint looming. Alex slowed down to let the second truck catch up.
“During my month’s notice,” concluded Lionel, “I saw an ad in the paper. An NGO was looking for administrators. It was at the beginning of the war here. They were hiring left, right, and center. So here I am. Well, that’s all very well. Now we’re going to say hello to our Serbian friends . . . ”
In the cab of the second truck, Maud and Marc were back on the road, after the fight, jaws clenched.
Maud was driving, concentrating on the road. She found it hard to control the steering because of the ruts and the mud. But it was the sort of difficulty she was determined to deal with by herself, and for nothing on earth would she have asked for help. It was better this way, anyway. The difficult driving distracted her: Marc’s massive presence next to her made her ill at ease. It was the first time she had been this close to him. Up to now, unconsciously, she had always kept herself at a distance, as if he were somehow dangerous. And yet she wasn’t afraid of him, and since their visit with the Croats her opinion of him had even begun to change. The sight of him rolling around in the mud, giving and receiving blows in that bestial way, had not made him more terrifying. On the contrary. Maud saw the fight again in flashes: there was something revolting about it, as she had felt initially, but with hindsight she was surprised to discover a beauty in the memory that had not been apparent to her at the time. It was like some savage ballet, a brutal, burning pavane, an archaic vision that stemmed from the origins of humankind, its essence. She came to the conclusion that she despised all the unnatural, supposedly civilized forms of male violence; yet in its most primitive expression there was something natural, as in this hand-to-hand combat in the mire; there was even, in a way she could not understand, something desirable.
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