A Nail, a Rose

by Madeleine Bourdouxhe

  ‘Hilarious.’

  Back at the table, they clinked glasses and downed their brandy in a single gulp.

  Outside there were the deserted streets, the stationary vehicles, and the sky: fine, clear and starry, making her feel a little sad. The soldiers linked arms with her and pressed their bodies lightly against hers. With tiny tiny steps they took her back to her lodgings.

  In the Indre there’s a beautiful village with a large central square and a smart hotel used by travellers en route for their holidays: it’s called the Hôtel de la Promenade. When they arrived there were so many people on the terrace and so many in the village square that you’d have thought there was going to be a fête. To these people, an open lorry was like a cage of wild animals from a travelling circus, and inside the cage were lunatics, cared for on their journey by each village that they passed through. Today, their nurses were taking refreshment at the Hôtel de la Promenade.

  She put her baby in a wicker basket that she’d bought on the journey: the baby seemed happier in it. With this cradle tucked under her arm, she knocked at the door of the solicitor’s house, where she was to spend the night. There she was shown to a magnificent bedroom, with Empire bed, Empire wardrobe, Empire chairs, Empire cradle. Worn out, she sank down, dimly aware of an intoxicating smell that came from the ground floor: of meat cooked in wine, and a fruity sugary scent that made her think of the solicitor’s wife standing in front of a vast red copper basin, making – what sort of jam? Too early, surely, it’s only May… Calmness filled the whole house, and warm air drifted in through the open window. She saw red and blue lupins in bloom against the wall of the house, and heard birds singing in the trees. Then a voice broke the silence:

  ‘Babinette, will you fetch me a bit of parsley from the garden? Quickly, darling…’

  She heard a child’s footsteps.

  That night there was a lot of noise in the village. Just before dawn a company of soldiers had turned up, setting up camp in a lane opposite the central square. Were they or were they not going to cook up some food? Of course they were. Let’s throw papers and wood into the roaring flames, let’s make a good blaze that will throw up flames high, high into the sky…

  Then a plane spotted the fire and peppered the whole area with incendiary bombs. A soldier said, ‘That’s not fair play, just as we were going to eat.’

  Nothing fell on the solicitor’s house.

  By morning the square was peaceful again, for most of the vehicles had already taken off and the soldiers and their lorries had left the village.

  The lorry she was in pulled out on to the main road from a side street and she could hear the whirring noise of a hundred or so bicycles making for the South: kids of fifteen to eighteen on their way to Toulouse. The lorry came to a halt, blocked by this great movement of young hearts, this surge of pure spirits, this vast wave of idealism. Ambivalent and irresolute, their faces were pale and dusty, streaked with sweat, which made them look older than they were, and their eyes were heavy with the need for sleep. They looked what they were: tired children who had just travelled hundreds of kilometres.

  The lorry left the road again for a cross-country route that would be quicker than the overcrowded highway. The baby sometimes opened her eyes wide now, for several minutes on end. Her face was beginning to take shape, to live.

  *

  A warm, light breeze did not disturb the chestnut trees of the Corrèze but a tall poplar, an uneasy exile, stirred with a sound like distant water. The mornings were dazzling. By the afternoon the sun had risen above the bare-topped hills encircling the horizon, and the air was full of the scent of dry grass and heather. Evenings were still, and nights full, light and starry, the sky at peace: in this area, nights had become human again.

  Dressed in a checked cotton overall she had bought at the village shop, she would walk round the grey and white houses, sometimes going down as far as the pool to watch the children fishing or chasing the eels that slithered among the reeds. She’d go back when the sun began to set but would linger in the chestnut wood, sitting on the grass and the dead leaves, held back by the sweetness of the air. She dreamed of a house somewhere on the road, with its own little cottage garden: in the evening, the man she loved would come home, take her in his arms and hold her close. Nights would be quite silent, like last night and the night before that, and they would be followed by days that held no fear. Fine, warm nights, nights to make love in… Tears came to her eyes. The baby stirred in her arms, and she breathed in her faint breath and her milky smell, bending over her, finding a little comfort in her small daughter’s warmth. Would they ever come back, those carefree days and nights?

  Every evening at the inn the men gathered round the wireless set, drinking gentian-bitter, Pastis or sweet beer, and chatting about what they’d just heard; then, one by one, they’d go home. The days slipped by, sunny and peaceful, and every day the men would gather round the wireless set. The village began to lose its tranquillity as men and women from the road turned up and stayed on, while Belgian soldiers passed through in lorries, straggling soldiers on their way to somewhere or other.

  There was fighting at Dunkirk.

  A wind began to get up in the village, which made it difficult for the baby to breathe. Sheltering in the church porch she shifted the shawl on the tiny head. They could hear children’s voices breaking into song after the catechism: ‘Sacred heart of Jesus…’ The voices rose, sharp, high-pitched, slightly off-key: ‘Save, save France…’ The words were preposterous, ridiculous, unbearable.

  In Gardonne they found themselves in a garden that reminded her of Italy. They had thought they were following the route but the road ended in this little garden full of palm trees and flowering laurels, wild and mysterious, with no owner in sight. Eventually an old woman with a Dordogne accent appeared on a path and directed them to the nearest inn. As the vehicle reversed, everything began to sparkle the way it does in Italy. Was it something to do with the place itself, she wondered, or was it the hour – that moment when the sun disappears in a mass of dying red rays? Or was it to do with the unusual brightness of a particular day?

  The inn had a large, ancient kitchen where everyone ate, and inter-connecting bedrooms on the first floor. Hers was the room at the end. In a vast wooden bed the baby looked lost, like a little elf in a fairy-tale. A fierce summer storm wracked the night sky and when she got up to close the window she thought she could hear other noises between the thunder-claps: bombs falling or bursts of shellfire. Maybe they were blowing up munitions at the Bergerac explosives factory, or maybe some bombers had lost their way in the storm. She thought she could hear engines, muffled by the sound of the torrential rain, approaching, receding, returning; then a series of short, sharp explosions, distinct from the fuller, louder, echoing background of the thunderclaps. She lingered at the window before closing it. Bright flashes of lightning lit up the roofs and the garden, and night briefly recalled day as objects took on their usual colour and shape. Freshness and the sweet smell of ozone filled the air. Suddenly she thought: ‘If my baby and I have to die in this war, please let it be from the sky’s natural thunder.’

  5

  Lying beneath pine-trees on the edge of a wood in the Landes, in an old-fashioned pram belonging to a woman from the village, the little girl smiled for the very first time. The sun, peeping through a tear in the pram’s hood, shone a star on to her cheek. It was that time of day when heat is beginning to ease, and smells drift up from the over-heated earth. On the other side of the road a thin dark-skinned boy, moving jerkily with a can on his back, was treating some vines with sulphate.

  She heard the sound of a horn, distant at first, then getting closer; through the pine-trees at the bottom of the wood she could see the Beautiran-Cabanac train. It was time to go back. There were only eight or nine houses in the hamlet, and the men and women who lived there had come out to discuss the news that they had just heard on their wireless sets. The Germans had entered Paris. A woman s
tanding in an open doorway was the only villager who seemed unmoved by the news. As if replying to a question, she said: ‘What’s the point of crying today rather than yesterday, or any other of the days we’ve lived through? Not that we had reason to cry on any of those days either…’

  Her eyes shone bright, her face a picture of serenity. She made no effort to explain what she meant but said, looking at the little girl fidgeting about in her pram: ‘You mustn’t waste time: this child must eat every day that God sends.’

  Every day, at the end of the afternoon, the mother took her baby for a walk. She’d follow the road up the hill past some vineyards and stop at the entrance to the woods. Or she might go down to the village, where there was the church, town hall, baker’s, and a café. This took longer because the road was stony, and one of the wheels of the pram had lost its rubber tyre: it sounded like a cart. Military trucks were parked under the plane-trees in front of the town hall, and there were usually soldiers about, sitting on the running boards or on the steps of the church porch. They’d wander in and out of the café and play with a young blackbird that they’d tamed and adopted. When they got bored with doing nothing they’d play a peaceful game of cards, and the blackbird would jump from one shoulder to another. They didn’t make jokes, and there was nothing cheeky about them: they had serious faces and a thoughtful expression in their eyes. Sometimes you would see the faint glimmer of some secret wish deep in their hearts, something you had to sense without mentioning it or drawing attention to it. Were they perhaps guided by a higher force, something inexpressible that had been instilled into them, something that emanated from every living creature?

  ‘Are you here for long?’ she asked them.

  ‘We’re awaiting orders…’

  She’d heard that phrase from so many of them now. She could remember them all: the men she’d met before they got to the border, who’d carried their names all over their faces; the men who’d carried her on a stretcher; the men at the farm, whom she’d heard leaving at dawn; the men she’d heard singing in Chartres. All these men had been awaiting orders. But there was one order which they already had, which no one had given them, but which was more compelling than those which might or might not yet come. It came from the very depths of time or perhaps from the edges of the future.

  She went up to the soldiers, spoke to them again. Smiling, they showed her the blackbird and told her what it liked to eat. All the way back to the hamlet she thought about them and their buried secret.

  *

  The news came faster and faster, got worse and worse. People talked of the Loire as a rampart of steel – but water is only water, and Frenchmen are only men. The days got hotter and hotter, the grapes in the vineyards began to take shape. The villagers left their radios on all day and the news was interrupted by strange messages: one, two, three, four, five, six, and so on up to fifty or fifty-three. ‘Twenty-five armoured cars approaching, abandon route 60, take route 80…’ On the road to the left of the hamlet, scent from the bullet-scarred pine-trees permeated the still air as the thin dark-skinned boy treated the vines with his jerky movements. The train from Beautiran went past: it was time to feed the child. ‘Sixty-five armoured cars approaching on route 93…’ One, two, three, four, five, six, and on up to fifty-eight.

  Now the wireless sets stayed on both day and night. The summer was relentless and the fields, which had turned gold, were all that shimmered in the faint breeze of the evening.

  Today the fighting was over. How hot it was. Through the wide open window, the overwhelming scent of the pine-trees drifted in on the night air.

  She went down to the village. The military trucks had gone and the square near the town-hall was empty. But other trucks had arrived in their place – huge, powerful, black – white deaths’ heads painted on black bodywork. These soldiers were tall and strong, all young, mostly fair, with fine, well-cut uniforms. They didn’t say much; calm and correct, they possessed the equanimity of a conquering army.

  On her way back to the hamlet she stopped at the house of the inscrutable woman. They looked each other in the eye without saying a word. Because the pram had stopped moving, the baby had woken up. Then the woman said, ‘You’d better keep on the move. And you ought to sing her a song, too.’

  The woman went back into her house, put her coffee-pot to heat on the embers of the open fire, while the mother went on her way, pushing her baby’s pram. Still, there was one memory in her heart that would never fade – of soldiers with serious faces playing a game of cards while a blackbird hopped from one shoulder to another.

  All the past had to be lived again.

  Life resumes its slow, difficult course: an odd, half-awake kind of life. The little girl learns to walk and talk. One day mother and child are standing close to each other, looking out of the window. The little girl sees a dog going past, and waves to a small boy; the mother is thinking of a huge band of earth stretching from the Meuse to Marseille. She hears people saying, ‘France has been beaten by her army.’ Smiling at her child, she points out a horse and cart in the street. The child is much too small to understand what her mother wants to say and besides, how can she possibly get it across? The thing is as ineffable, as nebulous, as the little girl herself; her senses and ideas have yet to develop properly. As the years pass she will become a woman, and have clear ideas about life.

  ‘Listen, here’s a nice song: Silly snail, lend me your feelers…’

  But still the voices droned on:

  ‘What’s the point of scuttling the fleet, unless it’s yet another sacrifice in the spirit of our defeat?’

  As for now, only a silence, and no danger of blasphemous thoughts.

  Bibliographical Note

  With the exception of the novella Sous le pont Mirabeau, which appears here for the first time since its original publication in French, the stories in A Nail, A Rose were published by Editions Tierce, Paris, in 1985, as Sept Nouvelles, in the Littérales collection edited by Françoise Collin. This was the first publication of ‘Clara’ and ‘Champs de Lavande’ (‘René’), both written between 1980 and 1985. Publication details of the remaining stories are given chronologically, with the translated title, if different, in brackets.

  Sous le pont Mirabeau (with illustrations by Mig Quinet): Editions Lumière, Brussels, 1944

  ‘Les Jours de la femme Louise’ (‘Louise’): Les Temps Modernes, Paris, 1947

  ‘Un clou, une rose’ (‘A Nail, A Rose’): La NEF, Paris, 1949

  ‘Anna’: La NEF, Paris, 1949

  ‘L’Aube est déjà grise’ (‘Leah’): Empédocle, Paris, 1950

  ‘Blanche’: Voyelles, 1981

  Madeleine Bourdouxhe’s other published work includes:

  La Femme de Gilles (novel): Gallimard, Paris, 1937, reissued Editions Libris, Brussels, 1985

  A la recherche de Marie (novel): Editions Libris, Brussels, 1943

  ‘Les Temps Passés’ (extract from unpublished novel): Le Monde Nouveau, Paris, 1956

  Acknowledgements

  Madeleine Bourdouxhe’s work has barely been documented and much of the information offered in this volume is the result of new research in London, Brussels and Paris. I am especially grateful to Françoise Collin, Marcelle Marini and Françoise Pasquier for the help they gave me and to the Musée et Archive de la Littérature for providing a photograph of the author. Daphne Tagg in London and Doreen Vincent in Dieppe provided invaluable editing and linguistic advice. I should also like to thank Susan Bassnett, Scarlett Beaurain, Judith Chernaik, Ros de Lanerolle, Suzanne Perkins and Lynne Stevenson. And Dr John Stokes.

  FAITH EVANS

  February 1989

  PUSHKIN PRESS

  Pushkin Press was founded in 1997, and publishes novels, essays, memoirs, children’s books—everything from timeless classics to the urgent and contemporary.

  This book is part of the Pushkin Collection of paperbacks, designed to be as satisfying as possible to hold and to enjoy. It is typeset in Monotype Basker
ville, based on the transitional English serif typeface designed in the mid-eighteenth century by John Baskerville. It was litho-printed on Munken Premium White Paper and notch-bound by the independently owned printer TJ International in Padstow, Cornwall. The cover, with French flaps, was printed on Rives Linear Bright White paper. The paper and cover board are both acid-free and Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) certified.

  Pushkin Press publishes the best writing from around the world—great stories, beautifully produced, to be read and read again.

  COPYRIGHT

  Pushkin Press

  71–75 Shelton Street

  London WC2H 9JQ

  This edition published by Pushkin Press in 2019

  First published in Great Britain by The Women’s Press Limited 1989

  Sept Nouvelles first published by Editions Tierce, Paris 1985

  Sous le pont Mirabeau first published by Editions Libris, Brussels 1944

  Translation and Introduction copyright © Faith Evans 1989

  Sept Nouvelles copyright © Editions Tierce 1985

  Sous le pont Mirabeau copyright © Madeleine Bourdouxhe 1944

  1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2

  ISBN 13: 978–1–78227–514–5

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior permission in writing from Pushkin Press