Jourdain sighed. “Science is wonderful!” he remarked apropos of nothing in particular. They watched the motley throng form up behind the wains as if for a harvest or a funeral or a fairing. “This is the way revolutions start, by accident,” he went on, for he could hear that somewhere in the crowd someone had given tongue with the Marseillaise, and as the distance lengthened they heard the marvellous verses begin to take shape. “If anything can make one march on an empty stomach, that song can,” said Smirgel, shaking his head. But now they noticed that the bombing seemed to have stopped. The doctor held out his hand as if to feel whether it was raining or not. Indeed a light shower had started. But the silence which flowed in was absolute, and one could hear the rain purring like a cat. Smirgel asked if he might have another drink. “Well, the Swiss Army has closed the border. The Allies are moving up on us from Nice. I have enough petrol in my little car to take us somewhere where we might find some scraps to eat, north or east, I leave it to you.”
“Did you notice how once they united in a purpose music was necessary to mark time, to mark step?” In fact two of the “dangerous ones” had found tambourines and a trumpet, relics of some village band, and beat out an admirable rhythm with them, while the trumpet choked and squeaked. The doctor sighed again as he heard the diminishing chant and thought of Cock Lorel’s Boate and the Bateau Ivre. “Have you ever heard of The Ship of Fools?” he asked his companion but Smirgel shook his head. It would take too long to explain the medieval notion of treatment for lunatics, specially to a German, so the doctor dropped the subject. “There is one person I didn’t see,” he said, “and that was our great stationmaster Imhof, by the way he is English. I wonder where he has got to.” But Imhof had slept through it all, comforted by the model train which he kept under his pillow; he hardly stirred when his pulse was taken.
The two men made their way down to the old cowshed where the German’s car lay hidden; they were still undecided about which direction to take. Only one thing seemed certain: there would be no point in following the procession of lunatics towards the town. That way lay trouble – or that is what they surmised. They would sneak across country to the Fontaine de Vaucluse and then turn north. Who knows?
Now that the bombers had gone away the little procession was filled with renewed confidence, and made good time on the road to Avignon, the tambourines keeping them in a good humour when they were exhausted with singing the anthem. Quatrefages was transfigured, like an actor now, turned into a medieval knight bearing high his standard. From time to time he thought of the great wall in the hotel with “his” Templars and their dates recorded on it – the solemn procession of forgotten knights. No, not forgotten, so long as one person could remember them! History was like that – a negative of which one was the print, the positive. He thought: “People are not separate individuals as they think, they are variations on themes outside themselves. Think: Galen’s daughter progressed could be Sylvie who was only imagined, who could be Sabine child of Banquo. The lost remain the lost, the found the found. Oranges and Lemons!”
The trumpet blared.
On they went boldly, extravagant in their fine optimism, the mad leading the blind, the blind leading the sane. “Variations on themes,” he repeated aloud, “Just as a diamond is a variation on carbon, or a caterpillar on a butterfly.”
They approached the mother city with confident tread, sure of their welcome, sure of food and drink. For its own part Avignon had begun to stir from its forced sleep. The silence and the emptiness had at last evoked some response; a few faint news bulletins had managed to penetrate the overwhelming sense of desolation and hopelessness in which they had existed for so long, tortured both by the enemy and by their own fascist kind, the Milice. As soon as the mayor of the town found the incredible thought of an empty city begin to dawn in his mind, he opened his front door cautiously and surveyed the deserted streets with suspicion mingled with mounting elation. No noise but the rain, the soft thistle-sifting rain of the Vaucluse. “Ils sont partis,” someone said above his head, someone behind a shuttered window. It was as if they were trying out the phrase, so long rehearsed in the mind: though as yet it had no real substance and they did not dare to fling back the shutters. The mayor gave a small sob and groped for his old bicycle. Very slowly and circumspectly he set out on a tour of the walls, bastion by bastion, feeling the rain on his neck like a benediction. Yes, they had gone; once more they were master of their fate as he was master of his town. He returned to the Mairie and unlocked the doors, throwing them wide. Now people were emerging from holes and corners, from cellars and stables and garrets, saluting each other in hushed voices and gazing about them. The mayor, filled with a sudden vertiginous ecstasy, raced up the stairs to his office and went out on to the balcony. He was going to do something he had not done for years, namely call his friend Hippolyte, the pompier de service, who lived opposite the Mairie on the square. Cupping his mouth he roared, “Hippolyte-e-e-e-e!” After the third bellow he saw his friend trotting towards him across the square waving his arms. “Ils sont partis, partis, partis, partis!” the words were taken up and repeated, rattled like peas on a drum. The first act was to announce the fact to the town in time-honoured fashion through the town-crier, and Hippolyte, already in uniform, had already started to assume his official responsibilities. He had belted on the sour kettle-drum and fixed the rubber hooter to his bicycle handle. At the four quarters of the town he would now announce after a preliminary klaxoning, followed by a long ripple on the kettledrum, “Oyez! Oyez! Oyez! Official announcement by the Mairie. The Germans have gone. The curfew is lifted until further notice.” At each repetition he was mobbed. More and more people came forth from the ruins, many in tears, some with great difficulty because of age or wounds or for other reasons. Hippolyte was kissed and embraced almost senseless. And slowly the crowd began to wend its away towards the cathedral and the main square over the river. To celebrate, to give thanks, to express their overwhelming relief – that was the first instinctive reaction to the news. Perhaps M. le Maire would speak? But when they got to the square they found him at the head of a dense crowd ready to lead them to the cathedral for a service of thanksgiving.
Within the echoing precincts (there was only candlelight, the electricity had cut out) the atmosphere echoed with an extraordinary fervour, with tears and groans, with sobs and cries – for everybody had something or someone to mourn and few had recovered enough to manage to rejoice with any wholeheartedness. And so many were hungry!
The service was long and though improvised upon the occasion elaborate and memorable. Who would wish to relive those years again? Down in the town, however, new crowds had begun to form of a dissimilar caste and colour. They were composed of a heterogeneous collection of men and women of the lower layers of society, workmen, sempstresses, night watchmen, farm-hands, mechanics and railway-workers – a laic image in sharp contrast to the bourgeois image produced in the cathedral. A dozen such groups milled about with conflicting or parallel intentions centred vaguely about a civic celebration. Their activity was only co-ordinated by mood, for they had not decided whether to give the proceedings a political colour (there were many Communists, as usual well organised) or simply a national and patriotic flavour. Gypsies had come forward now, crawling like snakes out of nowhere, also Arabs in their indolent and lustreless fashion, waiting to start picking pockets; then an amorphous band of “slaves” composed of Czechs, Russians and heaven alone knows what other breeds swept down south by the tides of war. Worst of all, though perhaps most suitable to the scene, was the appearance of some great casks of red wine which were at once made available in the square by the Monument des Morts with its frieze of debased lions and flying heroines, vaguely evoking both Marianne and Mistral’s dearer Mireille. All the cafés now opened and did what they could to promote festivities. Some had bricked up their cellars at the beginning of the war and now were content to release stocks of drink which had ripened in the darkness for those who dran
k harder stuff – marc, calva, fine.…
The procession from Montfavet finally joined forces with the forming surging crowd at the Magnagnon Gate where they were wildly applauded as being – so people vaguely imagined – a body of country people who had done something gallant to resist the Germans, perhaps even killed a few, to judge by the histrionic attitudes of Quatrefages. He was on the one hand acting out his role, shouting the word “Citizens!” over and over again as if he were about to make a speech; and at the same time inside himself he was quite serious and was talking to himself in his mother’s voice, encouraging himself, soothing himself. He had bad stage fright. Moreover he feared that someone, perhaps a member of the Milice, might take a pot at him from a balcony. But they advanced with a will, driving their carts into the centre of the melêe and letting the crowd surge approvingly round them. By now, to compensate for the lack of light, fires had been lit everywhere, as if it were the Eve of St. John; at almost every street corner there was a blaze throwing sparks up into the drizzle which was soon to part dramatically upon a gaunt moon. With the leaping light and the capering shadows, the cries and the crack of wood, the whole scene resembled some wild kermesse taking place in the appropriate decor of the medieval walls of the second Rome.
But if Quatrefages was shouting the word “Citizens”, his echo, the mad preacher from Anduze, Raynier de Larchant, was producing a headier slogan, which had the power to ignite souls. With his shock of white hair and his deep-set eyes he was an impressive figure – a generation of Protestant worshippers had been swayed by his delivery. He threw back his head and roared like a lion the words “Vengeance!” and “Justice!” This roar punctuated their progress like a ripple of kettle-drum music. Though mad, he knew how to carry the crowd, for everyone has something to expatiate and everyone seeks retribution. In this wild, colourful way they advanced towards the central square of the town. Some bread had appeared from somewhere, but there was precious little food, so that the floods of coarse wine and spirits kindled and warmed the hearts of the demonstrators with speed. Here and there people reeled. Incidents exploded on the screen of light – a man fell into a fire and was rescued by children. There were no police to interfere with the folly of so many fires. They were all hiding in civilian clothes from the vengeance of the Milice. Their central propaganda office with its pictures of Pétain had been stormed and set on fire.
Here and there in a completely arbitrary and unorganised fashion dancers had appeared: each music had its little circle, like eddies in the vast crowd. In one corner the celebrated wooden-legged Jaco set up shop with his wheezy accordion. Where had he been? everyone asked. All through the occupation there had not been a sign of him, and suddenly here he was again, quaffing the pinard and playing Sous les toits de Paris and Madelon as if the whole world had become a guingette and all the people revellers. In another corner fragments of the town band tried hard to assemble a farandole, for this type of folklore seemed appropriate to a nationalist and patriotic celebration. A tribune had been erected, at one end and suitably covered by flags and decorative emblems. One vaguely thought that here the mayor, backed by the town band, would make an excessively long peroration and end by burning the Nazi flag before the approving eyes of the people.
It did indeed start like this, in a confused sort of way. The band was reduced to three instruments, it was true, and lacked drive, for the soloist played a violin. But they played the national anthem creditably as an introduction and then the mayor in his sash started to orate, though he could hardly make himself heard above the buzz and roar of the crowd. Moreover the crowd was restive, they were after other game; vaguely they would have liked to execute some Nazi criminals on the spot to express their feelings of frustration and pain – for of course many had lost friends and relatives in the carnage of the years of war. The long tally of savageries, deportations, tortures and murders still lingered in the consciousness, their memory hung like a miasma over the music and the dancing, the relief and the joy.
The mad preacher’s roars, calling for justice and retribution, could not have come at a more apposite moment, for just as they burst into the square with the firelight dappling their cows and horses, there emerged from the old quarter of the Balances another procession, of women this time, marching in a bedraggled column with lowered heads, and guided by a guard of youths and prostitutes and old women, some with lighted torches. At first one thought them penitents, perhaps come to offer thanks or some signal sacrifice to the forces of liberation. But no, they were those who had collaborated in whatever degree with the occupying forces. Some had been the concubines of soldiers, some had fraternised, unaware that they were being noted down by that group of festering moralists who plague the decency of every town by their puritanical fervours. Many had done nothing at all, they had simply been pretty enough to earn the jealousy of old maids who had “reported” them to the Vichy police, or sent in their names anonymously as “fraternisers”. They must pay for it now. A roar went up from the crowd – they were not after all going to be deprived of a summary vengeance on someone or something. “The scissors!” they cried. “Where are the scissors?”
A corridor of fires the whole length of the square was cleared and organised by the crowd, while the victims were mobilised at one end in a group, looking pathetically like a group of schoolgirls about to participate in a race. They were in fact about to be forced to run the gauntlet, launched by a committee of old hags who brandished several large pairs of scissors such as dressmakers use to cut up lengths of cloth for their creations. Each was first shorn of her hair, had her face smacked soundly and her dress torn or pulled down over her shoulder; then with a sound push she was launched upon her course down the gauntlet where the public waited to take a smack at her with a belt or a switch. Conspicuous were the old women who in this way compensated for loveless lives, calamitous disappointments, or simple childlessness. They whipped away as if they were invoking fertility on the young bodies of virgins – they say that in Roman Italy statues were whipped to provoke fertility. The victims, for their part, though they cried tears of shame and indignation at the cries of “Prostitute!” were glad enough to escape with their lives, for the mood was ugly and the crowd under the influence of the drink had become temperamental and capricious. Already a fight or two had broken out among the spectators, and there were several disputes among armed onlookers somewhat the worse for red wine. But the best was yet to come.
It was rather like a Roman triumph, in which the best and most lucrative hostages, or those whose rank carried prestige beyond the common crew, were displayed at the end of the procession. So it now proved, for with a crackle of drum beats a smaller group emerged from the shadows guarding a single prisoner, pièce de résistance, it would seem of the evening’s pieties. She, for it was a woman, walked with a deathly pale composure inside a square of guards who looked vaguely like beadles, though they carried the short trident of the Camargue cowboys as part of their fancy dress. They guarded her preciously though she did not seem to need guarding. She walked quietly with apparent composure and lowered head but her pallor betrayed her mortal fear – her skin glowed almost nacrous in the warm rose of the flambeaux. Her hands were tied behind her back. “There! There!” cried the crones as the little group advanced. “There she is at last!” It was clear that they spoke of the Evil One herself. The woman as she advanced overheard the tumult and slowly raised her head. Her wonderful head of blonde hair rippled upon her shoulders, her blue eyes were wide and cold. Her nervousness gave her the air of almost smiling. It was as if she had stage fright, she hung back in the wings, so to speak, for she had never acted this part before. “Up! Up! Up with you!” cried the crowd, indicating the rostrum upon which at last they mounted her, attaching her wrists to a column of wood. A pandemonium of rage broke out. The women with the scissors scuttled up on to the dais and waving to the crowd histrionically made as if to chop off her tresses, pulling them to full length so that they gleamed like the fruit of the
silkworm’s agony. “Justice!” shouted the madman down below and the crowd echoed him. “Vengeance! Justice! Prostitute! Traitor!” The scissors began their work and the blonde tresses were shorn and thrown into the crowd as one throws meat to a pack of dogs. They were torn to bits. Meanwhile the phalanx of kettle-drums – for new musical reinforcements had arrived – kept up a heart-shaking tattoo, such as might accompany the last and most dangerous act of a trapezist. They tore down her dress until she stood there clad only in her shift; the more they tried to debase her the greater her beauty was. Her little ears were pointed, like those of a tiny deer. And now they poured water on her head and shaved her with a cut-throat razor until she was as bald as an egg. “Shame on you!” they cried hoarsely, for she did not seem to be repentant at all, she did not weep. The truth was that she was too afraid. Everything had become a blur. She felt her wrists tugging at the post. They held her upright, for she felt on the point of fainting.
Then came something which, though quite unpremeditated, might easily have been expected, given the context of such an evening. She was pelted with refuse from the dustbins. God knows, there were enough of these. A pile of refuse built up around her feet. Eggs were not plentiful. Then a young man, extremely drunk, mounted the stage and rather unsteadily produced a heavy revolver. The crowd roared. He took up several menacing postures as he flourished the weapon and pointed it at her, so as to show the crowd what her deserts should really have been had they not been true patriots and civilised people. That is, at any rate, what the majority of the crowd thought.
As for the young man, so far-gone in wine, he was bursting with civic pride and a deep-seated sense of misgivings about his own inconspicuous role in the war and the Resistance. He longed to affirm by some dramatic act that he was an adult and a warrior of principle. Lurching about on the rostrum in front of the victim he took the roars of the crowd for approval. At first he had had in mind to fire a few shots as an alarm, or a feu de joie or … to tell the truth the devil only knew what. But this was the hated concubine of the Gestapo chief, after all. The cries which exhorted justice and vengeance had gradually worked on his fuddled adolescence until, almost without thinking, he placed the cold barrel of the pistol against the brows of the tethered woman, right between the eyes, and pulled the trigger.
The Avignon Quintet Page 94
