‘There’s still my bedroom, come in quickly now and make yourself at home.’
It was no good protesting that she could walk: as she got down from the lorry, a soldier took her in his arms and carried her up to the house.
She sat down in a wicker armchair near the stove, her baby asleep in her arms, a brown and white cat rubbing up against her legs. The kitchen was full of soldiers. When she came in they’d been eating their meat and beans but now they were more interested in the woman and child, staring at them, forks in the air. One of them said, pointing to the baby: ‘Well, there’s someone who’s not worried.’
They went back to their food and from time to time they looked at her again, smiling gently at her, perhaps because she seemed so tired, to cheer her up. The farmer’s wife came back and said:
‘The room is ready. But there’s no electricity, so you’d better change the baby down here.’
‘Yes,’ she said, ‘And it’s time to feed her, she’s beginning to fret.’
She told the farmer’s wife how the baby cried after a feed, and that she still seemed to be hungry.
‘It’s because you don’t have enough milk,’ the woman replied. ‘It’s a real problem. I’ve had eight children, and I went through it with the last two: I had to give them three bottles a day.’
‘That’s all we need!’ she said, in a flat voice.
‘Let’s have a look.’
The woman went up to her and pressed her breast: she managed to produce a few drops of milk. The men stopped eating again: they were quite still, waiting to see what would happen. Silence weighed on the room. Finally the woman said:
‘It’s not marvellous… not to mention the fact that your milk probably isn’t very nourishing. They’re fatal, those long journeys by road, they make you so tired.’
‘I’ve a bottle of condensed milk with me, I’ll give her some after I’ve fed her.’
One of the soldiers opened the tin with his knife. Some milk spilled over his fingers so he licked them.
‘Look at Armand, he’s guzzling the mother’s milk,’ somebody said, and everyone burst out laughing. She asked the soldiers how long they were going to stay in the village.
‘We’ve been here several days already. Tomorrow at dawn we’re going to Dunkirk, and there we await our orders.’
‘Dunkirk?’ she said. ‘We’ve just come from there…’
‘And we’re just about to go there…’
Another said: ‘And while we’re waiting, we’re all here together…’
The soldiers, the young woman and the farmer’s wife all looked at each other and smiled.
Washed and changed, the baby slept contentedly in her mother’s arms. She was sitting in the wicker armchair again, resting her head on the back of it. She was waiting, because the woman was making coffee for the soldiers and had told her that she ought to have some too, because it would do her good. The lamp was very dim and shed a great golden halo on the table, over the hunks of half-eaten bread and the quarter-full bottles of wine; the rest of the room was bathed in a half-light, the soldiers settled where they could. One had taken off his jacket, rolled it into a cushion and stretched out on a bench near the wall, his shirt half-open; the brown and white cat curled up in a ball on top of him, its paw on his smooth young chest. No one spoke. All you could hear was the noise of the coffee-grinder as the woman slowly turned the handle, and the baby sucking her lips in her sleep.
When the woman had finished grinding the coffee the smell filled the entire room, and the atmosphere became even more intimate. The soldier lying on the bench, stifling in sweetness, let out a deep sigh, and said in a child’s voice:
‘How good this place makes you feel.’
The farmer’s wife said, ‘I wish you could stay on here.’
Silence took over again until a distant voice emerged, as if from the shadows:
‘I heard someone say just now that they’ve occupied Brussels.’
‘I was there yesterday morning,’ she said.
3
She hoisted herself up on to the enormous bed. She’d installed the child next to her on two chairs pushed together, and she let her hand hang over the side of the bed so as to be able to touch her – she seemed so far away down there. Exhausted, she went to sleep straight away.
At dawn she was woken by the footsteps of the soldiers leaving. She could hear them shouting at each other:
‘Come on Robert, we’re waiting for you! Why are you taking so long?’
‘I can’t find my notebook!’
‘What notebook?’
‘A little address book with a red cover. Maybe it’s in the barn, I’ll go and look.’
After a few minutes someone shouted out:
‘Well, have you found it?’
‘Hell, no…’
‘We’ll come and help you.’
Footsteps on the paving-stones in the courtyard faded in the direction of the barn. Then they came back and passed beneath her window again. The sound of their footsteps altered as they reached the road, and soon she could no longer hear them.
She didn’t get back to sleep. As daylight began to filter into the room she could make out several rosaries with large, carved beads hanging on the wall, and a highly polished mahogany bed, with starched sheets and pillow-cases, initialled in red cross-stitch. Suddenly a ray of sunlight lit up the room, so she could see clearly the face of the little girl sleeping down there on her two chairs. She was getting more and more beautiful.
*
The vehicles set off again. But she looked out of the window and saw, just for a moment, the open door of the big kitchen and the cat warming itself in the sun.
The sun was really strong, the countryside beautiful. Sometimes they had to stop so that she could heat up a little mineral water on an alcohol stove by the side of the road to add to the condensed milk, for she had less and less of her own milk.
How sombre, how sad, Boulogne – encircled by huge balloons, captive, heavy in the sky. Soldiers everywhere – in the streets, in the houses. In Boulogne you had to go into banks and bureaux de change to have the money in your possession inscribed on your identity card, and while these formalities were underway, she waited for hours with her baby in a small café. The room was full of English soldiers, and she watched them closely: their uniforms were finer than those of the French soldiers and it seemed as if they were less embarrassed by them, that they suffered less from the heat despite the heavy material, the kitbags, the guns. They seemed, too, to have managed to forget their names.
She walked up and down the room, trying to send the baby to sleep. At the window, she pressed her face up against the glass. The streets were full of people who were strangely silent, and the big balloons looked fixed in the sky; she felt heaviness and oppression in the air. Turning away she went on walking up and down. The soldiers weren’t talking, they were lined up on the café benches as if they were storing sleep, gathering their strength. She felt very alone, caught up in the great apparatus of war. She tried to find a single face on which to rest her gaze. The baby raised one arm and uttered a little cry; she quietened her by leaning against her face. They stayed like this, their faces buried in each other’s.
Under her large dressing-gown, she could feel a trickle of blood running down her leg. She hadn’t had a chance to attend to herself for several hours now. She could see a door marked ‘lavatory’ on the far side of the room but to get to it she’d have to disturb this great pack of silent soldiers. So instead she sat down at a table and slowly rubbed one leg against the other to wipe away the trace of maternal blood.
In the evening, the beach at Crotoy was golden yellow, purple in places. In the morning it was a brilliant white, already too hot, and everyone wanted to bathe, to stretch out on the burning sand, to find instant solace from the anguish and uncertainty around them; they wanted to stay here, to wait, and to revive.
She heard a commotion on the road. With a noise that was a cross between clank
ing and spluttering, a strange car came into view, its windows broken, its bodywork smashed, its wings ripped off. It slowed and stalled, with an odd sound. A man emerged and said:
‘I’ve been shot at. My car turned over three times, over and over. The engine’s still going, and so am I…’ He laughed, thinking himself touched by the grace of God.
They drove along beautiful roads lined with trees, roads that hadn’t been surfaced nor always well repaired: roads of earth and stone, roads that you wanted to walk on, that made you want to sing.
The road was white-hot, with banks covered in willowherb and grey signs that came and went: Abbeville 10, Abbeville 15, Abbeville 20. The four vehicles met up with the main road via a smaller one, seven kilometres south of Abbeville, and they all travelled at high speed, the noises of the engines intermingling. Suddenly a man ran out into the road. Wearing a blue peasant’s smock and a straw hat, he was gesticulating at them with his stick.
‘You want to take cover,’ he said. ‘They’ve sounded the alarm in the village, there’s going to be action right above us.’
The vehicles stopped and everyone got out.
‘Come this way, to the crossroad, under the trees.’
She leaned against a tree trunk and bent over her baby: the peasant stood leaning against another tree opposite her, his hand on his stick.
The time had come, and in the sky above them the planes moved away, came together, swooped down on each other, while gunfire crackled from right to left, above and below the road. Then there was an explosion, a loud bang, and the man said, in his country accent:
‘The bloody idiots, they’re dropping them anyway, their filthy bombs…’
He counted them, banging his stick on the road as he did so.
‘There they go again, bloody idiots, they’re unloading near our village, in the heart of our fields…’
Suddenly he was off, making his way towards the village where the bombs were falling. He strode away, his stick raised, brandishing his fists, powerful in his rage.
Silence returned, and so did the beautiful hot road, all earth and stones. Abbeville 25, Abbeville 30. Abbeville was further and further away, and as soon as the dull murmur from the town hit the road, it seemed to fade into nothing. Was it time to feed the child? A few minutes to go yet… She was piecing together the scraps of a sentence in her mind: Abbeville… Abbeville, in the Somme… what was it? All of a sudden the sentence came back to her, in its rectangle of words, the sentence that she’d read a hundred times over:
‘Published on the… by F. Paillart, at Abbeville (Somme).’
At Gravigny, where they had to stop for the night, all her travelling companions found rooms. In a kind of kitchen-dining-room, a local schoolteacher served mutton chops to her and to his daughters, Jeanne and Valentine. They were sixteen and eighteen; they had sad eyes and moved softly. He went out and came back with some bottles which he placed on the table. He said:
‘You can drink this without worrying: it’s only homemade wine. I made it myself, with apples and rhubarb.’
He raised the blind a fraction and looked outside:
‘They’re still arriving… There won’t be room for them all tonight, where are they all going to sleep?’
He sighed and poured out more rhubarb wine. On the armchairs and floor were coloured silk cushions embroidered by Jeanne and Valentine.
Gravigny was a small seaside town, pinkish grey, with turreted houses and white railings; there were many hotels and garages. In the evening the roads were dark yet they thronged with people, bumping into each other, interrupting and questioning each other, still hoping to find somewhere to spend the night. It was full of people and quite dark, until the great green and red arc lights shone out over rooftops, walls and faces.
She stayed still for a moment, the child in her arms, overawed. Above her was the beauty of the guns. A second of immobility was enough to embrace, and reject, the beauty of the guns, denuded, useless, miraculous, valuable only in their own right. But what if this beauty was meant to become embedded in the secret of all things, to flourish in the greens and reds of nature and the rhythms of the earth? Or perhaps to be exploited, warped, faded, false as the beauty of the helmeted warrior and his steel blade, false as the beauty of the dead hero – kissed, corrupted, rejected? Above her was the beauty of the guns.
People took refuge in shelters, standing close to each other, elbows touching, shoulder to shoulder. For how many hours did she hold her child above people’s heads so as to save her from being smothered? It seemed like an omen.
Evreux 5… Evreux 10… Evreux 15…
4
The cathedral of Chartres stood intact, miraculous, majestic, blending with the sky.
A little further down the lorry stopped near a bend, and everyone got out to have a drink. But instead of going into the café with the others she lagged behind, leaning against the wall near the windows. She felt that if she took another step she would lose all her blood. Looking through the window into the café she saw a room, blue with smoke and full of soldiers. Outside, the street climbed up to the square and opened out to show the cathedral bathed in sun. The houses were quiet and peaceful, still preoccupied with the business of everyday life. She could hear young, passionate voices rising and mounting to a crescendo: the soldiers were singing. Blood still trickled from her body, staining her legs, sometimes flowing for minutes on end. The sun warmed her hands, burned her forehead and her face, and the child was rather heavy in her arms.
Her body was suffused with warmth and tenderness, as from a slow, sweet exhaustion. She thought of the man she loved, of the way his fair hair fell over his eyes. One of the soldiers sang a line from an old song and, because they all knew it and liked the irony of it, the others joined in: ‘That’s a lot better than catching “scarlet fever”.’ Their voices were strong and happy, but the moment the joke began to pall, they became slow and monotonous, as if they were only singing to stave off boredom.
A train heading for Paris started up and whistled at the nearby station. Two soldiers passed and she heard one say, ‘How the time drags…’ Then two others: ‘I’m famished.’ ‘Here, have a piece of chocolate…’
She looked round at the quiet, simple houses, at the sun, at the searing beauty of the cathedral, at the tiny baby in her arms, and she felt love in her heart – for the singing soldiers, for the blood flowing down her legs, for the soldier munching chocolate, for the sweet brown earth of the Beauce. Her throat swelled, and joy and happiness rose up in her: her memories were intact, they were present and all around her, and her heart, alive and warm, was in harmony with them. All around she perceived the world’s splendour, its pain and its joy: in the sweetness of the air, in the sound of the men’s voices, in the colour of the earth, in the halo created by the stones, in the simplicity of a movement, in everyday remarks, in the tenderness of a look, in colours, sounds, the light of the sun.
She raised her eyes and looked again: ‘Oh God, protect your church, let every one of its stones be saved, and let none of these singing soldiers die.’
The Sologne was a lush, green place; its villages had sonorous names, like Fort Saint-Aubin, and the sky above the woods and the marshes was peaceful. When a villager offered her a room, she spent a whole day resting, letting the vehicles and lorries go by. In the evening her hostess watched over the baby while she went out. She walked along with tiny little steps. There were no lights but the sky was clear; the roads were deserted and cars were parked along the pavements. She passed two soldiers sitting outside a shop-window, and one of them said:
‘Where are you off to, all alone?’
‘Well, I’m looking for a…’
‘Why don’t you look for it later – come and sit here with us.’
Hearing youth and boredom in their voices, she went and sat between them; they all linked arms, and one of them leaned towards her, resting his head gently on her shoulder as if in a kind of trance. They were silent for a few moments unt
il one of them said:
‘What was it you said you were looking for?’
‘I was looking for a café. I was hoping there might be something left to eat.’
‘You’re not from the village either, then?’
‘No, I’m not.’
‘Come on, let’s go and look for somewhere together.’
They took her along with them but she couldn’t keep up with their pace.
‘What’s wrong, do your feet ache?’
‘No, it’s not that…’
She went on, speaking very quietly:
‘I’ve just had a baby, she was born on the 9th of May.’
They said, ‘Oh…’ In the darkness she couldn’t see their faces very clearly, but she could sense that they were confused, a bit thrown by what she had said. They took her by the arm again, walking at her speed now.
When they found the café it was packed, with villagers as well as people passing through, all gathered round a wireless set. The same speech was being broadcast for the third time, with that sentence about a miracle. They sat down at a table but the owner told them there was nothing left to eat.
‘Nothing at all, not even bread and sausage?’
‘Nothing. We haven’t even eaten ourselves, I was serving non-stop till nine o’clock. There’ll be more again in the morning.’
‘OK, shall we have a drink?’
One of the soldiers nudged the other and said, ‘Look, André, see that bottle of decent brandy, that’ll warm us up.’
‘You’re not cold are you, in this weather?’
‘Not really… that’s to say, I am and I’m not.’
‘Patron, three brandies, if you please!’
André got up and went over to the wall. ‘Look, a map of France… It’s one of those that show where all the different cheeses come from – funny.’
A Nail, a Rose Page 13