by James Brydon
I hand the article back with a nod.
“Christian will be pleased to receive you,” the woman says. “Please follow me.” She escorts me into a vaulted living room whose only source of light is a fire leaping in the grate. With each gust of wind that swirls down from the chimney, the flames scatter and dance, sending shadows lurching across the walls.
De la Hallière himself is seated in an armchair, allowing the light of the flames to glow on his cheeks and throw his eyes into gloom. His chestnut hair falls smoothly down from a parting in the center of his head and floats gently around his face. His skin is pinched and runs taut over the cheekbones. A thin scar burns sharply above his left eye.
“M. le Garrec, what fortuitous wind blows you in this direction, I wonder.” He doesn’t get up. “One gets so used to being the only war criminal in one’s neck of the woods. How terribly exciting to meet another. Do please take a seat, and I shall ring for Aïcha to bring some refreshments.” His fingers tug idly at a frayed cord beside the fire. The Levantine woman reappears, with that same chiffony film of black clinging to her skin and whispering around the sway of her body as she walks.
“Fetch me a brandy and some cigarettes, and whatever M. le Garrec would like.”
“Just a cigarette. Thank you.”
As Aïcha busies herself at a sideboard, de la Hallière cuts her off. “Wait a moment. Aïcha, come back here. M. le Garrec, would you like her to crawl over there to fetch you your cigarettes? She will, if you would prefer. This will also afford you the opportunity to inspect her hindquarters, which have the voluptuous fullness typical of Maghrebi women.”
Aïcha says nothing, though her eyelids fold and her gaze drops to the floor.
“Would you prefer that?”
“No.”
“In that case, Aïcha, please proceed with your task.” He leans back. “Do you know, M. le Garrec, why she will crawl over to that fine piece of Louis XVI furniture for you, should you so desire? Let me enlighten you: it is a sign of the inherent baseness of the race to which she belongs.”
“Perhaps it’s just the state of powerlessness that you hold her in. A foreigner here with no contacts and nowhere else to go.”
“What an absurd notion! Allow me to explain the matter to you from a pathological perspective. In the Nietzschean sense, I mean.”
Aïcha floats between us and, bending down, cups a lighted match between her hands. As I lean in toward it, the oily perfume of her skin trickles down my throat. Her hair wafts around my face, glowing black. The taste of licorice tingles on my tongue. De la Hallière waves a hand at her and she is dismissed.
“You, le Garrec, with your name suggestive of fine Breton ancestry, would surely not countenance abasing yourself in this manner. Perhaps you attribute this to some personal nobility, or to a cultural penchant for resistance nurtured through years of opposition to the ghastly Jacobin centralism of the Republic. You would be wrong, however. Because a new substance has been discovered—you may have heard of it—DNA. Apparently it contains all of the information about each of us, and what we shall become. When it has been fully researched, I have no doubt that it will revolutionize our understanding of the different races. This tiresome liberal relativism called equality which seems to have grown out of the ashes of Auschwitz will be exposed for the Negro-Jewish propaganda that it in fact is.”
Fumes from the cigarette snake before my eyes. I haven’t smoked since Algeria. For a second, I feel the burning air of Africa once again.
“M. de la Hallière, I didn’t come here to discuss the racial characteristics of your housekeeper. I came to ask you about the murder of Anne-Lise Aurigny.”
“Housekeeper?” He smirks. “My dear fellow, let us not take refuge in euphemisms. We have both seen the horrors and the glories of war close up, you in Algeria and me on the Ostfront. What an extraordinary place—hell is not fire, le Garrec, it is ice, boundless wastes of ice . . .” His eyes glaze for a second, then he shakes his head. “Let us call things by their proper names. Is that not a divine and necessary task? Aïcha is my slave. Come, come.” He waves away whatever objection I am supposed to make. “We can do better than to rehash that dismal little fiction about democracy and social progress that has become so dear to the newspaper-reading, enfranchised masses in recent decades. I know, I know: they work for fewer hours, have disposable income to spend on cultural activities such as books and the cinema, temper their sexual impulses with birth control and thus manage the size of their families. It is all very touching, how the working masses have grown their own little souls. But none of this masks the reality of the DNA. Aïcha is a born slave, and I have provided her with the circumstances in which she may fulfill that vocation. She does my bidding entirely, self-abnegatingly. A society does not have to allow or even avow slavery in order for it to exist. I am quite sure, capitaine, that the dead girl in the back of your jeep learned, perhaps in very great pain, what it feels like to be a slave over those last days of her existence. Perhaps she thought life was different. She had been educated in some Europeanized school. Emancipated from Muslim traditions. Then the war came and she died with the taste of her slavery upon her tongue. That is how it should be.”
He swills some brandy around in his mouth. “Actually, Aïcha has some European blood in her. A Polish grandmother, I believe. Normally I would be suspicious of crossbreeding, but here it has been curiously successful. I would give her 16 out of 20, a rare score indeed.” He smiles weakly. “I met her in Morocco after the war. France wasn’t a safe place for those of us who’d seen something glorious in fascism, so I had to find somewhere else to live. I can’t remember exactly what I promised her if she came back with me. Marriage, perhaps. Jewels. The gilded life of a chatelaine. Sumptuous soirées where she could wear elbow-length gloves and be admired by members of the Légion d’Honneur and the cream of high society.” He glances at the mildewed walls floating in the dimness and chuckles. “Ultimately, she’s just a slave. How else could her story end?”
“Monsieur, I would like to ask you about Anne-Lise. How well did you know her?”
He exhales lazily, allowing plumes of smoke to drift and wreathe in the air around his face.
“I feel that it would be rather indecorous to give away any particulars of my relationship with Anne-Lise. Surely you could not expect a gentleman to be so indiscreet.”
“Then why do you think she was mutilated?”
For the first time, a quiver runs across his face. “Mutilated . . .” He runs the word around in his mouth like a connoisseur. “I’m not sure she was mutilated. Someone cut a piece out of her. But that may have been a gesture of love. We wish to cling to those things that we love. Mutilation sounds so terribly vague and destructive. I’m not sure the killer saw it like that.”
“Were you aware that Lafourgue considered you one of the chief suspects?”
“My dear fellow, whenever a crime is committed in these parts, I am invariably one of the chief suspects. Fascist leanings make one a suspect by default. I do remember that he seated his considerable posterior upon that very chair a few months ago and fired off some rather inconsequential questions at me. I don’t recall how I replied, and I’m not sure that I was aware of being any more a suspect than I normally am whenever someone casts off the chains of convention and takes pleasure in the free expression of criminal impulses.”
“Lafourgue considered you a man of pathologically violent and fundamentally sociopathic tendencies. Did you ever fantasize about hurting Anne-Lise?”
De la Hallière sighs. “Who doesn’t have violent fantasies? Our democratic modernity seems to demand them. How often—when I see some local politician making speeches promising a brighter tomorrow, sick pay for the workingman, improved education for workers’ children—how often does it fill me with a kind of rage? A righteous fury grips me as I watch this lackluster demagogue empowering the basest subspecies that exists among us, out of which no flower of nobility or art could ever bloom. Perhaps you
have felt it too? I long to grab my riding crop and stride over to the fellow! The air seems to scream at me: Thrash him! Thrash this enemy of lineage and of roses! I long to see the horsewhip draw blood from his back! To see him writhing on the ground, howling his impotence and agony like the ape that he is!” He stops dead. “Is that a sociopathic fantasy? If so, then perhaps what Lafourgue says about me is correct. Is that what you were looking for?”
Inside the crumbling château, I have lost all sense of time. There are no windows in the hall and de la Hallière’s voice trickles through the gloom. He enjoys being questioned.
“Do you think Anne-Lise was killed out of love?”
He purses his lips as if searching for a word or the memory of a taste. “Can you imagine what the Ostfront was like? I joined the Wehrmacht and that’s where they sent us. It didn’t take long out there to know it had all gone bad. We went not to fight, but to die for an ideal. The ground was like iron underfoot. The wind was like a perpetual assault. Icy claws ripping at your skin. Eventually it was a total rout. No more matériel. No more orders. I don’t even know how many kilometers we’d retreated but the space just seemed endless. Nobody was under any illusions. The war was being lost here. Fascism died in the wastes of that winter. As it did, some members of the division seemed to have a change of heart. Kein Krieg mehr! They wanted us to leave the Russkies alone. I mean those skinny, starving peasants whose miserable settlements we were passing as we fell back. All that bourgeois democratic Frenchness came flooding back into them.
“One day, we came across a peasant girl lying beside the road. Something had crushed her foot to the point where there was no foot left, just a kind of crimson lump browning and blackening in the freezing air. She didn’t look up as we passed and she didn’t cry for help. She just stared vacantly into the sky. As I got closer to her, I could see that the ice had frozen the pulp of her foot and stuck it to the stony surface of the road. I heard some voices saying that we should try to free her and get her to a settlement nearby. That would have been heroic, I suppose, what with the Russians so close behind us.
“I stared at the girl’s face for a while. Her skin was bone-white. She seemed to look past me. I suppose I could have just let her die.
“I shot her in the eye. Her body was so cold that the blood could hardly squeeze out of the socket. Behind me, I could hear the outrage of bourgeois, democratic voices.
“Now, I suppose that whoever killed Anne-Lise did it for the same reason that I put a bullet into that Russian peasant’s skull. Oh, not to see those looks of sickened horror on the faces of some of my companions. Men who, only recently, had been slaughtering Russians in the service of a regime explicitly geared toward the extermination of a certain portion of the human race. Not that I didn’t savor those reproachful stares from men whose mythical humanity had now come flooding back in defeat.
“No, I shot that girl because it was a crime. We knew it was a crime. The war was over and there was no power to sanction the violence anymore. If it had been an order, it would have been merely pointless. It was a crime, and crime is one of the highest pleasures that can be experienced. We may claim to abhor war, in this sanitized century we inhabit, but the conflicts we have fought have pushed brutality and depravity to hitherto unseen levels. War allows us to taste the pure narcotic of crime.
“Just for a second, as I watched the girl’s body twitching, I felt my own individual desires surging forward, writing themselves onto the world in defiance of the crushing uniformity of a socially useful morality. Life, M. le Garrec, so quickly becomes a net. All we experience is the perpetual nullification of the drives. This is, I suppose, the price we must pay for participation in society. That is: to go to work in bleary-eyed stupor, to read the newspapers and develop personal opinions about current affairs, and, once every few years, to mark our cross on a ballot paper, as if that were a sign or guarantee of equality.
“Now, I have no idea who killed Anne-Lise. All I can say is that it was not me. But whoever did it lived more intensely in those few tormented hours that were Anne-Lise’s last on earth than in the rest of his pallid existence. I am deeply saddened by Anne-Lise’s death. For such a low-born thing, she was surprisingly touched by the spirit of aristocracy. But more than that, I envy her killer the unadulterated exhilaration which exists, and can only exist, when all social convention falls away and we wallow in the crimes that lurk within us all in the form of desire and the eerie whispers of our dreams.”
* * *
By the time I leave the château, darkness has fallen. The forests are just swaying shadows. From the estuary, the murmur of the sea rises into the night.
I left de la Hallière in a frenzied state, his lips flecked with spittle as he denounced the Reds and the Jews who had overrun France since the war’s end. He could have gone on long into the night, barely listening to my questions, delivering his endless tirades into the echoing vaults.
The coast road is deserted. The headlights skim the gorse, picking out the tips of the grass. The sea, invisible as its darkness melts into that of the sky, is just a hiss where it froths at the base of the cliffs.
I try to sift everything I heard today. Something nags at me and makes my gaze twitch uneasily. Something isn’t quite right. I try to recollect the substance of my conversation with de la Hallière. Is there a significant detail lying just behind something he told me?
But it isn’t de la Hallière whose words flutter uneasily in my brain. It is Sarah. Her talk of hatred and malice. Her hands shaking. I think back again queasily to our interview. What did she mean?
I finally track Lafourgue down on the jetty, sharing a bottle of local brandy with some other policemen as they gaze out into the freezing night. He beckons me to sit beside him and nods when I ask him to tell me about what happened to Sarah during the war.
He says that she was in her twenties at the time of the defeat and nothing like her luminous, self-possessed daughter. She left school without her baccalaureate, having dreamed her way through her education, and battled only half-heartedly to get her marks into double figures. She drifted into waitressing at A l’abri des flots, where she would wipe the tables down, shivering in her white blouse in the breaking dawn. She carried cups of thick coffee or shots of spirits to the fishermen in the half-light before they went out to sea.
Lafourgue says that people argued afterward about exactly what happened during the war. Some tried to defend Sarah, and said that when the Germans came in she served them reluctantly, watering down the spirits and making sure that the beers she served were flat. Others said she suddenly came to life. Her cheeks were redder than usual, her eyes brighter, her steps a little quicker, the roll of her hips a little more pronounced. She enjoyed serving the Germans, who called her Fräulein very correctly and, just occasionally, Liebling. They made her feel important. They made the fishermen, who had ignored her for so long, sit outside on the freezing terrace while she busied herself inside, her cheeks pink with anticipation, a couple of buttons of her crisp, white work blouse hanging undone, revealing her tight, white chest heaving beneath.
And Lafourgue? What does he remember?
He shrugs. The Nazis weren’t like the French soldiers, he says. They could make you feel afraid. And what is more hypnotic than fear?
Otto Steiner was just a face in the crowd. A nonentity. A good match for Sarah, Lafourgue says. Only in his midtwenties, he already had a face going pudgy around the jowls. His eyes were brown and wide and trusting. Sarah used to sit cocooned in their kindness. Lafourgue could see fear flickering in them.
“Sarah said he was part Jewish, and that’s why he was allocated to bomb disposal.”
Lafourgue shakes his head. Otto was simply too feeble to serve in the regular army. He had chronic problems with breathlessness and fatigue. Sarah preferred to think of him as a gallant victim of persecution rather than seeing him for what he really was: a runt. And why wouldn’t she? She spent the war years in considerable comfort. While t
he fishermen sat outside at their tables sipping ersatz coffee made from barley, she nestled indoors by the fire, tingling from caffeine and tobacco. She wore stockings and felt the coastal winds rip through her hair as Otto’s car, for which he always had fuel, sped along the corniche past the trudging locals.
The war years were good to her. The malevolent looks she got didn’t make her feel guilty. It was naked jealousy. As the winter of 1940 mellowed into the spring of 1941, Sarah carried her burgeoning stomach with pride. She and Otto christened the baby Anneliese in the church at Sainte-Élisabeth on July 14, 1941.
Lafourgue stares out to the sea. People here know how to wait, he says. They don’t forget.
By the summer of 1944 the last Nazis had pulled out of Brittany. The local committee for épuration had already been set up, headed by a local schoolteacher, Gilles Grégoire, whose clandestine poems had been published by Éditions de Minuit. Later, in 1945, he would resign from his position in disgust after discovering that the graves of five militiamen, tried and shot in the neighboring village of le Guildo, had been dug before the judicial proceedings even began. In 1944 he was still calling for justice and calm in the process of rebuilding the country.
Sarah and Otto kept the curtains in their house drawn and held their hands over Anneliese’s mouth to stop her crying, hoping that their very existence would be forgotten.
It wasn’t. On October 14, 1944, three fishermen who had often sat outside on the terrace of A l’abri des flots watching Sarah bathed in firelight, her laughter visible but inaudible through the thick glass, kicked the door of her house off its hinges and walked inside. The oldest, Marius Martin, was twenty; the youngest, Jean Goff, was just sixteen.
Martin had a boat hook with him, which he used to splinter the wooden doorframe. Then, as he stepped inside, he brought it down on Otto’s head when he stood up to protect Anneliese. Sarah heard wood crunch into his skull before he sank into darkness. Goff grabbed her and forced her onto the ground with her face pressed into the floor. He lay on top of her, pinning her arms to her sides. He could feel her buttocks rubbing furiously against him as she squirmed. It made him laugh. He loosened his grip a little so that she could writhe even more.