by Marcel Ayme
“You’re screwed. There’s the Americans on their way. You’d be better heading back home right now.”
The other man patently did not understand a word of this and smiled amicably. As I was now coming level with him, the old man called me as witness to this blockheadedness.
“They don’t know owt about owt,” he said. “Their gibberish aside, they’ve not more conversation than do my clogs. You can’t call them civilised people.”
I stared at him, stunned into silence. Finally, I asked:
“Look, I’m not mistaken am I? They really are German soldiers?”
“Looks a good deal like ’em,” said the old man, not without a dash of irony.
“But how can this be? What are they doing here?”
He eyed me warily and seemed about to leave my question unanswered. Then he changed his mind and in his turn asked me:
“Perhaps you’ve come over from the free zone?”
I stammered a few words that trailed into silence, which he interpreted as an affirmative reply, for he undertook to instruct me on living conditions in the ‘occupied zone’. My mind was in retreat; I was unable to follow the sequence of his remarks, throughout which these impossible terms kept recurring: free zone, occupied zone, German authorities, requisitions, prisoners, and others no less alarming. The two Germans had strolled off and were making their way towards the village, with the regular, heavy gait of soldiers weary of aimless wandering. I interrupted the old man with irritable abruptness.
“But come on!” I exclaimed. “What are you going on about? None of this makes any sense! The war’s been over for years!”
“Would be hard for it to be years,” he observed, calmly. “It only began two years ago.”
At the village, in a shop where a German NCO was choosing postcards, I bought that day’s newspaper. I dropped a coin on the counter and gathered up the change automatically, without a glance. The newspaper was dated the 3rd of July 1942. The headlines—The War in Russia; The War in Africa—described events which I had lived through once already and whose course I knew as well as their final outcomes. Forgetting where I was, I stayed there by the counter, absorbed in my reading. A lady come to buy a few items talked about her son who was a prisoner and the parcel she was preparing for him. That very morning she had received a letter from East Prussia where he was working on a farm. What I was hearing was no less significant than the date on my newspaper, and yet I still refused to believe my eyes and ears.
A man of fiftyish came into the shop, wearing breeches and leggings, his hair slick, complexion fresh, in the manner of a country gentleman. From the words he exchanged with the shopkeeper, I gathered that he was the local mayor. I engaged him in conversation and we left the shop together. Prudently, feeling instinctively that I ought not to betray the irregularity of my situation, I broached the topic of summer time, and then of the decree. He replied with a broad grin:
“Ah yes! The time decree. On my last visit to Dole, two months ago, the sub-prefect mentioned it. I think I remember that the newspapers also gave it a few lines. A good joke to keep our spirits up. Putting us all ahead by years, can you imagine!”
On asking him a few more specific questions, I thought, to my great relief, that I knew what had happened to the village. Due to an administrative or communicational error, the decree to advance time had not been transmitted to this tiny community, and, lost deep in the woods, it had kept to the old regime. My mouth opened to tell the mayor of the specific anachronism in his village’s situation, but at the last moment I felt it wiser to hold back. He would not have believed me and I risked being thought mad. Our conversation continued amicably and as we began to speak of the war, I was curious enough to hazard a few predictions, all of which left my interlocutor perfectly incredulous, the future, it is true, having scarcely conformed to logical probability. Before we parted, he indicated the path to the village of La Vieille-Loie, my intended destination. I had gone quite far off-track, for I still had thirteen kilometres to go.
“It won’t take you more than three quarters of an hour on your bicycle. You might still get there before nightfall,” he told me.
As I was still hesitating over starting out that evening, he reasoned that a young man like myself should hardly be daunted by a thirteen-kilometre ride, at which I pointed out that at fifty-six and counting, one is no longer a young man. He was quite astonished and assured me that I did not look my age in the least. I spent the night in the only inn in the village. Before falling asleep, I considered my adventure. Having got over my initial shock, I wasn’t at all vexed. Had my journey allowed for more spare time, I should have liked to spend a few days in this time regained and, among these poor people held back in the first half of the century, reverently to relive my country’s misfortunes. I then set to examining a few of the enigmas thrown up by this exile in time, to which I had paid little attention at first. For example, it was strange that the village was still able to receive newspapers from Paris and letters from soldiers held captive in East Prussia. Between this village in 1942 and the rest of the universe older than it by seventeen years therefore existed some means of communication, or the appearance of communication. Having left Paris seventeen years earlier, in what storeroom, in what cupboard of time could these newspapers have been stored before arriving at their destination? And the prisoners who had not come home and must no longer be in East Prussia, where were they? I fell asleep puzzling over these mysterious splices between two eras.
The following day, I woke very early and made several singular discoveries. In my very sparsely furnished room there was no mirror and in order to shave I had to use the one from my travelling case. On seeing myself in the mirror, I realised that I was no longer fifty-six years old but thirty-nine. Besides I sensed a great ease and energy in my movements. The surprise was not unpleasant, but it troubled me. A few minutes later, I made some more discoveries. My clothes had also grown younger. The grey suit I had been wearing the day before had become quite another suit, of a slightly outdated style, one that I vaguely recalled wearing some years ago. In my wallet, the banknotes were no longer those current in 1959. They had been issued in 1941 or earlier. This adventure was drawing me further in. Instead of travelling through an earlier time as a disinterested spectator, I was participating. Nothing gave me reason to believe that I should ever escape its grip. I reassured myself with rather fragile reasoning. “To be from an era, I thought, is to behold the world and oneself in a certain way that belongs to that era.” I wanted to believe that simply by crossing beyond the confines of the village I would return to my vision and understanding of the day before, and that, without being required to change, the world would present itself from a different side.
I reached La Vieille-Loie at seven in the morning. I was keen to see my friend Bornier, to discuss my tribulations with him and, first of all, to reassure him, for he must have waited up for me. Along the way, I saw two German motorcyclists in steel helmets and I wondered, with renewed anxiety, whether I might not soon rejoin the year 1959. I crossed half the village without seeing any more Germans and then recognised the house where I had visited my friend Bornier two years earlier. The shutters were closed, the garden door locked. I knew that he was a late riser and hesitated to wake him, but I needed to see him and hear him speak. I called out his name several times. The house remained silent. Three young people who were passing, pitchforks on their shoulders, heard me calling and stopped by the side of the road. They informed me that my friend was imprisoned in Silesia and that they had last had news of him via his wife who was still in Paris.
“He’s working on a farm,” said one.
It was hardly the profession for him. There was a silence. We were thinking of the composer’s thin and delicate form, bent over a pickaxe.
“My poor Bornier,” I sighed. “He has already had one very hard winter, but when I think of the pulmonary congestion he’ll come down with in six months. How wretched!”
The t
hree young people looked at each other in astonishment and went away in silence. I was remembering my last visit to Bornier. I saw him again, sitting at his piano, playing the piece Forest of Fear to me, which he had just composed. My daughter had played it often since then and I could recall a few passages. I would have liked to hum a little of it, in homage to my friend who was toiling on German land and who would later return, ailing, to compose the works that perhaps he had not yet conceived. But I couldn’t find my voice. Seized by a sudden, panicked desire to escape from this return to the past, I jumped on my bicycle and pedalled back towards Dole. On the way, I saw several further manifestations of the foreign occupation. I was cycling at top speed, in a hurry to leave this forest, whose borders I felt marked the beginning of the time regained, as if the shadow of the woodland had led to the insidious awakening of bygone years.
When I reached the edge of the Chaux forest I felt immensely relieved, convinced that at last I had escaped the enchanted circle. So it was a cruel disappointment when, on coming into the town by the Doubs bridge, I overtook a platoon of German infantry singing as they returned from a drill. That the villages in the forest had been held back in time was reason for surprise, but these soldiers, in my view, showed that an entire district had eluded the decree’s authority. Logic had fairly met its match. At once the problem outgrew not only its allotted dimensions, but its whole appearance. All the facts were turned upside down. Yesterday, the 3rd of July 1959, I had left the town of Dole and I was returning to it on the following day, the 4th of July 1942. I was tempted to think that, in defiance of the dogma of time’s irreversibility, a new decree had cancelled out the first. In that case, the town’s inhabitants would, like me, have retained memories from their future lives, but I was certain that they did not. I was coming to the baroque conclusion that there were now in simultaneous existence two towns known as Dole, one living in 1942, the other in 1959. And doubtless so it went on for the rest of the world. I hardly dared to hope that Paris, the Paris to which my train would soon return me, might belong to another era.
At a loss, on reaching the town I got off my bike and sat down on the little bridge over the Tanneurs canal. I lacked the courage once more to live through a life I had already lived. The relative youth I had just regained held no attractions.
“An illusion,” I decided. “Youth that has nothing to discover is not youth. With this stretch of seventeen years that lies before me—but seventeen years already explored, already familiar—I have more experience than all the old crocks of France and Navarre together. I am a sad old man. Not for me tomorrows and dicing with luck. My heart won’t beat faster in expectation of the days to come. I am an old man. Here I am reduced to the sad condition of a god. For seventeen years, all I shall have are certainties. I must say goodbye to hope.”
Before catching the train, I tried to return my bicycle, but the bicycle shop it came from did not yet exist. An umbrella shop occupied the site. Its keeper, a young man of between twenty-five and thirty, was lounging in the doorway. Just to be sure, I asked him if he knew a bicycle salesman in the town by the name of Jean Druet.
“There’s no such thing here,” he said. “I would know. But it’s funny; my name is also Jean Druet.”
“Indeed, coincidence is a curious thing. And you haven’t the idea or the wish to sell bicycles one day?”
He laughed heartily. Plainly the idea that he might one day be selling bikes struck him as quite ludicrous.
“No, thank you, it’s not a line of work that would tempt me. Though I should add, there’s nothing wrong with them, but bicycles, well they aren’t much like umbrellas.”
While he was saying this, I was comparing his young face, fresh and smiling, with another, seventeen years older, of which one whole side was disfigured by lupus.
When the train pulled out I was still nursing some hope of finding Paris in the same period as I had left it.
My adventure had been so strange that I felt somewhat justified in counting on the absurd, but the train was advancing within a world that was rigorous and faithful to its own laws. In the countryside and in all the stations we stopped at, I could see German troops, who did not appear to be wavering between two periods of time. From the conversation of my fellow travellers, some of whom had left Paris less than a week earlier, it was clear that the capital was still in 1942. I tried to resign myself, miserably. In this railway carriage, I was truly reliving the oppressive atmosphere of those years of war and occupation. Neither at Dole, where I had only made the briefest of stops, nor in the villages of the Chaux had the situation felt so oppressively present. Now, conversation was all about the current concerns or came back round to them after a detour. People spoke of the progress of the war, of prisoners, of the difficulties of daily life, of the black market, of the free zone, of Vichy, of desperation. With a heavy heart, I heard travellers discussing the development of world events and adjusting their own fates according to probabilities they believed to be certainties. I who knew, I would have liked to disillusion them, but the too-fantastical truth had not the support of those rigorous, impeccable arguments on which my neighbours’ convictions depended. An elderly lady sitting next to me confided that she was coming to Paris to pick up her grandson, a child of nine living in Auteuil, who had become pre-consumptive due to the privations of living in the city. His parents were entrusting him to her for the holidays but insisted that he return in October, because of his schoolwork. She was still hoping to plead the needs of his sickly lungs.
At the Gare de Lyon, even before the train stopped, the silhouette of a German guard pacing along the platform caught my eye. Paris was occupied. To tell the truth, I had no need of this visual evidence to be certain.
I had left my carriage and was making for the exit when I realised that I had forgotten my hat. Retracing my steps, I found it in the abandoned compartment and, at the same time, saw that the elderly lady, my neighbour on that side, had left behind a rather substantial parcel. I took it with me in the hope of catching up with its owner, but she was not at the exit, nor could I see her in the metro, where I thought she must have got ahead of me, since, like me, she was heading for Auteuil. I allowed two trains to go by to give her time to catch up with me, then, getting into the third, I sat down, opposite a German officer.
Burdened with the old lady’s parcel, I reach Auteuil at eight in the evening. It is still day, but I look in vain for my house. In place of the brand new building in which I had taken up residence in 1950, there is nothing but an outer wall through which trees can be seen. Then I remember that my apartment is still on Rue Lamarck in Montmartre, that I still have eight years to spend there. I go back into the metro.
At Rue Lamarck, a maid, whose name suddenly comes back to me, opens the door. She asks if I’ve had a good journey. I reply with compassionate warmth, recalling that next year a Negro from Place Pigalle will pluck her away out of her kitchen and then leave her in the gutter. It is nine in the evening. Not expecting me, my wife has just finished dining. She has recognised my voice; she rushes into the hall. I am moved to see her suddenly so young, hardly twenty-eight years old, and, hugging her close, tears come to my eyes.
But for her, not remembering that she saw me the day before yesterday, only seventeen years older, I haven’t changed and I can see that my emotion surprises her a little. In the bathroom where I freshen up, she asks me about my trip to the Gironde and, the moment that I reply, memories return of this journey that I made on the same date. I report the little incidents that happened on the way, even, it seems to me, using the same terms that I had used last time. What is more, I have the feeling that I am not entirely in control of my words, but instead am fulfilling requirements, falling in with them somewhat, as if acting a part. My wife talks about Clovis, who is sleeping in the next room, and of the difficulty of finding baby cereals for him.
He is healthy, but for an infant of fourteen months he is not quite at the correct weight. Two days before, when I left Paris, C
lovis had been in the middle of the written exams for his baccalaureate. I don’t ask after Louis or Juliette, the two youngest. I know they don’t exist. I shall have to wait nine years for Louis to be born and eleven for Juliette. In the train I have thought a lot about this absence, I have tried to prepare myself, but now I am finding it hard to accept. I end up enquiring with cautious neutrality: “And the other children?” My wife raises her eyebrows pointedly and I hasten to add: “Yes, Lucien’s children.” But I have put my foot in it for my brother Lucien will only marry in two years and hasn’t any children yet. I correct myself straight away, insisting that it was a slip of the tongue and I had meant to say Victor, not Lucien. This slip worries me a little. I am afraid that I might find myself confusing the two periods in more important matters.