by Marcel Ayme
22nd June
In retaliation to Lucette, Roquenton has bought a batch of black-market tickets worth about ten thousand francs, which he is keeping solely for his own use. His wife has been in oblivion for ten days already. I think he is regretting having been so severe. His solitude seems to weigh cruelly on him. I find him changed, almost unrecognisable.
27th June
The story about May being extended for a few privileged people is widely accepted. Laverdon, a man whose word is generally to be believed, confirmed to me that he had lived thirty-five days in the month of May alone. I am afraid that all this rationing of time may have deranged quite a few minds.
28th June
Roquenton died yesterday morning, apparently of grief. This time it is no relative death, but death full stop. He will be buried tomorrow. On the 1st of July, when she comes back to life, Lucette will find herself a widow.
32nd June
One must admit that time has angles as yet unexplored. What a teaser! Yesterday morning I went into a shop to buy a paper. It was dated 31st June.
“Well I never,” I say, “there are thirty-one days in the month?”
The shopkeeper, whom I have known for years, looks at me uncomprehendingly. I glance over the headlines and read:
“Mr Churchill to visit New York between the 39th and 45th of June”
Out in the street, I catch the end of a conversation between two men:
“I must be in Orléans by the 37th,” says one.
A little further on, I come upon Bonrivage who is walking along with a haggard expression. He explains his stupefaction. I try to comfort him. All you can do is take things as they come. Towards the middle of the afternoon, I made the following observation—those living full-time haven’t the least idea of any anomaly in time’s unfolding. People in my category, who have fraudulently insinuated themselves into this extension of the month of June, are alone in their bewilderment. Maleffroi, with whom I shared my astonishment, understood none of it and thought me cracked. But what does it matter if time is blossoming out? As of yesterday evening, I am madly in love. Indeed I met her at Maleffroi’s. We saw each other and, with that first look, we were in love. Darling Elisa.
34th June
Saw Elisa again yesterday and today. At last I have met the woman of my dreams. We are engaged. She is leaving tomorrow for a three-week journey in the free zone. We have decided to marry upon her return. I am too happy to talk about my happiness, even in this journal.
35th June
Accompanied Elisa to the station. Before stepping into her carriage, she said to me: “I shall do my utmost to be back before the 60th of June.” On reflection, this promise worries me. Since today, of course, I use up my last life ticket. What date will I be living in tomorrow?
1st July
The people to whom I mention the 35th of June don’t understand a word. Not a trace of these last five days in their memories. Luckily, I have found several people who also secretly lived through these days and I was able to speak to them about it. A curious conversation, too. From my point of view, yesterday was the 35th June. For others, yesterday was the 32nd or the 43rd. There was a man in the restaurant who had lived through to the 66th of June, and that’s a fair stash of tickets.
2nd July
Believing Elisa to be away, I saw no reason to go calling on her. Yet a doubt grew in my mind and I called her at home. Elisa claims not to know me, never to have seen me. I do my best to explain, that there is no doubt we have been through some intoxicating days together. Amused but in no way persuaded, she agrees to see me on Thursday. I am mortally afraid.
4th July
The papers are full of the ‘Life Tickets Affair’. The traffic in time cards is set to be the scandal of the year. Due to the monopolisation of life tickets by the rich, our savings on basic commodities have been reduced to almost nothing. What is more, a few special cases have aroused great public anger. There is talk of, among others, the immensely wealthy Monsieur Wadé, who, between the 30th of June and the 1st of July, seems to have lived 1,967 days, that is, a mere five years and four months. Just now met Yves Mironneau, the famous philosopher. He explained to me that each individual lives through thousands of years, but only has brief, intermittent windows of awareness onto this infinitude, the juxtaposition of which windows constitutes our brief existences. He said some even subtler things, but I didn’t understand much more. It is true that my mind was elsewhere. I shall see Elisa tomorrow.
5th July
Saw Elisa. Alas! Everything is lost and I’ve nothing more to hope. What’s more, she does not doubt the sincerity of my account. Perhaps my tale touched her heart, but it did not awaken any feelings of either affection or affinity. I am led to believe that she is fond of Maleffroi. In any event, my eloquence was useless. The flame that sprang up between us, that evening of the 31st of June, was nothing but chance, a momentary disposition. After this, I won’t countenance any more talk about meeting of minds! I am suffering like a soul in hell. I hope I am able to turn my sufferings into a book that will become a bestseller.
6th July
A decree has abolished the time cards. I don’t care.
THE PROBLEM OF SUMMERTIME
AT THE HEIGHT OF THE war, the warring powers’ attention was distracted by the problem of summer time, which it seemed had not been comprehensively examined. Already it was felt that no serious work had been carried out in this field and that, as often happens, human genius had allowed itself to be overruled by habit. On first analysis, what seemed most remarkable was the extraordinary ease with which the time could be moved forward by an hour or two. On reflection, nothing prevented its being moved forward by twelve or twenty-four hours, or indeed by any multiple of twenty-four. Little by little, the realisation spread that time was under man’s control. In every continent and in every country, the heads of state and their ministers began to consult philosophical treatises. In government meetings there was much talk of relative time, physiological time, subjective time and even compressible time. It became obvious that the notion of time, as our ancestors had transmitted it down the millennia, was in fact absurd claptrap. That unrelenting old god Chronos, who, till now, had imposed the rhythm of his scythe, lost a good deal of credence. Not only was he relenting towards mankind, he was obliged to bow to it, to follow rhythms imposed upon him, to move more slowly or take a more dynamic pace, to say nothing of those vertiginous speeds that would have his poor old beard streaming out behind him. The old, stately pace was over. In truth, Chronos was only fit for a mantelpiece ornament. Men were the masters of time and were going to distribute it with much more imagination than the deposed god had applied in his excessively placid career. At first it appears that the governments did not make best use of their new conquest. The secret trials they held came up with nothing very useful (see the Map of Time). In the meantime, their peoples were getting bored. Civilians of all nations were growing gloomy and ill-tempered. Chewing on their black bread or drinking ersatz coffees with saccharine, they dreamt of banquets and tobacco. The war was long. They didn’t know when it would end. But would it one day end? All sides believed they would triumph, but feared that it might take a while. Their leaders harboured the same fears and were beginning to bite their knuckles. The weight of their responsibilities made them blench. Of course, there was no question of a truce. Honour would not allow it, and there were other considerations too. It was infuriating, though, to know time was under their control and yet not find a way of making it work for them.
In the end, by means of a Vatican intervention, an international agreement was reached that delivered the peoples from the nightmare of the war without in any way affecting the ordinary outcome of the hostilities. It was quite simple. It was decided that, throughout the world, time would be put forward by seventeen years. This figure would encompass the most extreme possibilities for duration of the conflict. Nevertheless, officialdom remained concerned, fearing the advance would be insufficien
t. Thank goodness that when, by virtue of a decree, the world suddenly aged by seventeen years, it turned out that the war was indeed over. It also turned out that another war had not yet begun. It was merely on the cards.
You might imagine that all the peoples gave a great cry of joy and relief. Nothing of the sort. For no one felt as though they had leapt through time. Events that should have occurred during that long period so suddenly conjured away were inscribed in everyone’s memories. Each remembered, or rather thought he remembered, the life he believed he had led during those seventeen years. The trees had grown taller, children had been born, people had died, others had made a fortune or been ruined, the wines had aged, regimes had crumbled, quite as if everybody’s life had taken the usual time to happen. The illusion was perfect.
For my own part, I remember that at the moment the decree took effect I was in Paris, at home, sitting at my table and working on a book of which I had written the first fifty pages. I could hear my wife in the next room talking to my two children, Marie-Thérèse and Clovis, aged five and two. The next moment, I found myself at Le Havre port, on my way back from a three-month trip to Mexico. Though well-preserved, I was beginning to go grey. My book was long since completed and its sequel was no less inspired than the debut, presuming it really was I who had written it. What’s more I had written (it appeared) twelve more books that, I have to admit, had also sunk into oblivion (the public is ungrateful). During my Mexican journey, I had received regular news of my wife and my four children, of which the two youngest, Louis and Juliette, had come into the world since the decree. The memories I retained from that illusory existence were neither less certain nor less dear than those dating back to the earlier period. I had no sense at all of having been cheated of anything and, had I not known of the decree, I should certainly not have had the least notion of our experience. All in all, for mankind everything went on as if we really had lived through those seventeen years, which had, nevertheless, passed by in only a fraction of a second. And perhaps we really had lived them. There was much argument on this point. Philosophers, mathematicians, doctors, theologians, physicists, metaphysicists, theosophers, academics and mechanics all addressed this topic in an outpouring of theses, paratheses, antitheses and syntheses. While on the train that was taking me from Le Havre to Paris, I learnt of three pamphlets that examined the question. The great physicist Philibert Costume, in a summary of his Theory of Outcrops in Time, showed that the seventeen years had indeed been lived. RP Bichon, in his Treatise on Submetrics, showed that they had not been lived. In the end, Monsieur Bonomet, professor of comedy at the Sorbonne, in his Meditation on Laughter and the State, argued that time had not advanced at all and that the famous decree was all a broad farce dreamt up by the governments of the time. For my part, I found this last explanation rather over-egged and in poor taste, even, from the pen of a Sorbonne professor. I am certain that Monsieur Bonomet will never be granted a chair in the Académie and quite right too. As for knowing whether the seventeen years had been lived through or not, I was not in a position to pronounce.
In Paris, I found myself once again in an apartment that I knew, but into which I might have been stepping for the first time. During the infamous seventeen years, it seemed I had moved home, exchanging Montmartre for a place in the suburb of Auteuil. My family was waiting for me at home and I returned to them with joy but not surprise. Real or virtual, the years of our lives encompassed by these parentheses in time were linked to the other years without a single fault in continuity, without even any perceptible joins. Everything fit together seamlessly. The sight of the Paris streets congested with cars could not therefore surprise me. The night-time street-lighting, the taxis, the centrally heated apartment, the unrestricted exchange of merchandise were all once more familiar features. At our effusive reunion, my wife said to me, laughing:
“At last! It’s seventeen years since we last saw each other!”
And gently pushing forward Louis and Juliette, aged respectively eight and six, she added:
“Let me introduce your latest two children, whom you’ve not had the pleasure of knowing.”
My latest two recognised me perfectly, as it happened, and while they were hugging me, I was inclined to feel that Professor Bonomet was on the right track in his assertion that the step ahead in time was no more than a tall story.
At the beginning of the summer, we resolved to go and spend our holiday at the seaside in Brittany. Our trip was fixed for the 15th of July. Before then I was due to make a short visit to Jura, at the invitation of an old composer friend, who had retired to his native village where, for five or six years now, he had been spending his days as a serious invalid.
I remember that on the morning of the 2nd of July, the eve of my departure, having a few errands in the centre of town, I had brought my little six-year-old daughter Juliette along with me. At Place de la Concorde, as we waited on a traffic island for the mass of cars to go by, Juliette pointed up at the mansions of Hôtel Crillon and Hôtel de la Marine. After giving her the explanations she required, it was with some melancholy that I recalled the time of the German occupation and I added, more for myself than for the child:
“You hadn’t even been born then. We were at war. France had been beaten. The Germans were occupying Paris. Their flag hung down over the Ministry at La Marine. German sailors kept watch on the pavement, there, in front of the entrance. And in the square and on the Champs-Elysées, everywhere, there were green uniforms. And those French who were already old thought they would never see them leave.
On the morning of the 3rd of July 1959 I caught a train from the Gare de Lyon and reached Dole towards midday. My host lived eighteen kilometres from the town, in a village in the midst of the forest of Chaux. The bus that regularly linked the two left at half-past twelve but, poorly informed, I missed it by a few minutes. In order not to worry my waiting friend, I rented a bicycle, but the heat was so oppressive that I put off leaving until the afternoon, thus giving myself time for a leisurely lunch. The cooking was good and there was a fine bottle of Arbois. I flattered myself I could cover the whole distance in an hour. A storm was brewing as I set off; the sky was layered with heavy clouds and the suffocating heat was scarcely more bearable than at the start of the afternoon. Moreover, I was handicapped by a sudden headache, which I attributed to my too-copious meal and the excellence of the Arbois wine. Hurried by the threatening storm, I took a short cut through fields and was soon lost in the forest. After further turnings and retracings, just as the storm was breaking I came to a mean little forest path in which carts had dug deep furrows that had grown rock-hard over the summer. I took refuge in the undergrowth, but the rain was falling so heavily that it didn’t take long to penetrate the foliage. Only then did I notice, beside another track, a shelter consisting of a roof of brushwood bundles resting on four wooden posts. Beneath it I found an oak block on which I could sit quite comfortably while I waited for the storm to blow over. The low skies and dense rain hastened nightfall, and the forest canopy deepened the shadows of dusk, which were now and then lit up by great bluish flashes, revealing grand tableaux populated by towering trunks of oak. Between the growls of thunder that went echoing around the forest, I could hear the infinite and at first monotone—although the ear soon learns to distinguish its thousand variations—pattering of rain dripping from leaf to leaf between the boughs. Exhausted, my head heavy, for a second or two I fought it off, but finally fell asleep with my head resting on my knees.
I was woken by a falling sensation that, in my drowsiness, seemed endless, as if I had dropped from the top of a skyscraper. The storm was over and daylight had returned. To tell the truth, it seemed as though the storm had never happened. The ground was dry, parched; nor was a single drop of water to be found shining on the trees, the bushes, nor caught in the blades of wild grasses. Around me, the forest appeared as though after many days’ drought. The sky showing between green fronds was a subtle, light blue, with nothing of the mi
lky tone you see after rainfall. Suddenly I noticed that all around me the forest had changed. It was no longer the mature timber that I had discovered on first entering it, but a wood planted with young trees, only about twenty years old. My brushwood shelter had vanished, as had the great beech against which it had been leaning. Likewise vanished was the log that had been my seat just a moment ago. I was sitting directly on the ground. No more path, either. The only recognisable object was a tall double boundary stone, no doubt marking the limits of some communal division of land. I was almost chagrined at recognising it, for the presence of this landmark did not simplify my quandary. I tried to persuade myself that my first impression of this sylvan landscape had been distorted by the poor light. Besides, I was not unduly worried by this singular transformation. My headache had faded and in every limb, indeed throughout my body, I felt an unfamiliar ease, a new physical lightness. For fun, I imagined that I had lost my way in the enchanted woods of Brocéliande where some sorceress Morgana had bewitched me. Taking my bicycle, I went back to the path that I had left on taking shelter. I was expecting to find it full of puddles and the ruts sticky with mud. I was obliged to note that it was dry and bumpy, without the slightest trace of moisture. “The enchantment continues,” I thought, good-humouredly. After cycling for about a quarter of an hour, I came out into a small valley, an elongated rectangle enclosed by forest. Vividly lit by the setting sun, the roofs and spire of a village rose above the wheat fields and meadows. I left my bumpy track for a narrow, but tarmacked road, and was soon able to read the name of the village on a milestone. It was not the one I was looking for.
Two or three hundred metres from the village, a problem with my front wheel forced me to continue on foot. Along the way, a few paces from a clump of hazels, at the edge of a ditch, I noticed an old peasant deep in contemplation before a field of wheat. Close by, up against the clump of hazels, which had hidden them from my view, I now saw two men, also observing the tall wheat. And these two men were wearing the boots and green uniform of the German army from the time of the occupation. I was not unduly alarmed. My first thought was that these were uniforms left behind by the Germans at the time of their evacuation, that had then been found by the region’s farmers who were now getting more wear out of them. Their current proprietors, two strapping fellows of about forty-five with sun-baked skin, did indeed look like country people. Yet they retained a military air, and their belts, their forage caps, their close-shaved hair, gave pause for thought. The old man seemed to be ignoring them. Tall and lean, he stood there still and very straight, with that air of lofty dignity often seen among old Jura country folk. As I drew near, one of the uniformed men turned to him and, with the air of an expert, said a few words in German praising the fine condition of the wheat. The old man looked round slowly and observed in a calm, unruffled tone: