Suite Française

by Irene Nemirovsky

  8

  The Michauds got up at five o’clock in the morning to have enough time to clean their apartment thoroughly before leaving. It was of course strange to take so much care over things with so little value and destined, in all probability, to be destroyed when the first bombs fell on Paris. All the same, thought Madame Michaud, you dress and adorn the dead who are destined to rot in the earth. It’s a final homage, a supreme proof of love to those we hold dear. And this little apartment was very dear to them. They’d lived here for sixteen years. No matter how hard they tried, they could never take all their memories with them: the best memories would remain here, between these thin walls. They put their books away at the bottom of a cupboard along with the sentimental family photographs, the kind you always promise to put into albums but which are left in a mess, faded, caught in the groove of a drawer. The picture of Jean-Marie as a child had already been slipped deep inside the suitcase, in the folds of a spare dress. The bank had firmly instructed they take only what was strictly necessary: a bit of clothing and some toiletries. Everything was finally ready. They’d eaten. Madame Michaud covered the bed with a big sheet to protect its slightly faded pink silk upholstery from the dust.

  “It’s time to go,” her husband said.

  “Go ahead, I’ll catch up with you,” she said, her voice faltering.

  He went out, leaving her alone. She went into Jean-Marie’s room. Everything was silent, dark, funereal behind the closed shutters. She knelt for a moment beside his bed, said out loud “Dear God, protect him,” then closed the door and went down.

  Her husband was waiting for her on the stairs. He drew her close, and then, without saying a word, hugged her so tightly that she let out a little cry of pain: “Maurice, you’re hurting me!”

  “Sorry,” he murmured, his voice husky.

  At the bank, the employees assembled in the large entrance hall, each one with a little bag on his knees, whispering the latest news to one another. Corbin wasn’t there. The manager was giving out numbers: they had to get into the car assigned to them when their number was called. Until noon, departures were carried out in an orderly fashion and in almost total silence. Then Corbin came in, impatient and sullen. He went down to the basement, into the room where the safes were kept, and came back up with a package which he held half hidden beneath his coat.

  “That’s Arlette’s jewellery,” Madame Michaud whispered to her husband. “He took out his wife’s two days ago.”

  “As long as he doesn’t forget us.” Maurice gave a sigh that was both ironic and anxious.

  Madame Michaud deliberately stood in Corbin’s way. “You’re still planning to take us with you, aren’t you, Monsieur?”

  He nodded yes and asked them to follow him. Monsieur Michaud grabbed their suitcase and the three of them went outside. Monsieur Corbin’s car was waiting, but as they got closer, Michaud narrowed his short-sighted eyes. “I see our seats have been taken,” he said quietly.

  Arlette Corail, her dog and her luggage were piled up in the back of the car. Furiously, she opened the door and shouted, “Are you going to throw me out on to the street, then?”

  The couple started bickering. The Michauds moved back a few steps, but could still hear every word.

  “But we’re supposed to meet my wife in Tours,” Corbin finally shouted, kicking the dog.

  It gave a little yelp and hid under Arlette’s legs.

  “You brute!”

  “Oh, do shut up, will you! If you hadn’t been gadding about the day before yesterday with those English pilots . . . two more I’d like to see at the bottom of the ocean . . .”

  “You brute! Brute!” she repeated over and over again, her voice growing shriller and shriller. Then suddenly, with the utmost calm, she said, “I have a friend in Tours. I won’t need you once we get there.”

  Corbin gave her a savage look but seemed to have made up his mind. He turned towards the Michauds. “I’m sorry, there isn’t enough room for you, as you can see. Madame Corail’s car was in an accident and she has asked me to take her with me to Tours. I cannot refuse. There’s a train in an hour. It will probably be a bit of a crush but it’s a very short journey . . . Whatever happens, make sure you manage to join us as soon as possible. I am counting on you, Madame Michaud. You are more energetic than your husband and, speaking of which, Michaud, you must really try to be more dynamic”—he stressed the syllables “dy-nam-ic”—“than recently. I will no longer tolerate your attitude. If you want to keep your job, take this as a warning. Both of you must be in Tours the day after tomorrow at the latest. I must have all my staff.”

  He waved them away, got into the car next to the dancer and drove off. The Michauds were left standing on the pavement, looking at each other.

  “Well, that’s the way to do it,” Michaud said, lightly shrugging his shoulders, his voice nonchalant. “Give the people you should be apologising to a good telling off, that’s it!”

  In spite of themselves, they started to laugh.

  “What are we going to do now?”

  “We’re going to go home and have lunch,” his wife said, furious.

  It was cool back in their apartment, the kitchen without many provisions, the furniture covered up. Everything seemed secretive, friendly and sweet, as if a voice had whispered from the shadows, “We were expecting you. Everything is as it should be.”

  “Let’s stay in Paris,” Maurice suggested.

  They were side by side on the sitting-room sofa and, with a familiar gesture, she stroked his forehead with her thin, delicate fingers. “My poor darling, that’s not possible. We have to live and we haven’t any savings left since my operation, as you know only too well. I only have one hundred seventy-five francs in my account. Don’t you think Corbin would jump at the chance to get rid of us? After a blow like this, all the branches are going to reduce their staff. We must get to Tours at all costs!”

  “I think that will be impossible.”

  “We have to,” she repeated.

  She was already standing up, putting her hat back on, picking up the suitcase again. They left and headed for the train station.

  They would never manage to get inside the large departure area; it was closed, locked, blocked off by soldiers and by the jostling crowd crushed against the barriers. They stayed until evening, struggling in vain. All around them people were saying, “Too bad. We’ll have to walk.”

  Everyone spoke with a kind of devastated astonishment. They clearly didn’t believe what they were saying. They looked around and expected some miracle: a car, a truck, anything that would take them. But nothing came. So they headed out of Paris on foot, past the city gates, dragging their bags behind them in the dust, then on into the suburbs, into the countryside, all the while thinking, “This can’t be happening! I must be dreaming!”

  Like all the others, the Michauds started walking. It was a warm June evening. In front of them a woman in mourning, wearing a black crêpe hat askew over her white hair, stumbled on the stones in the road and, gesturing like a madwoman, muttered, “Pray and give thanks that we’re not fleeing in winter . . . Pray . . . Just pray!”

  9

  Gabriel Corte and Florence spent the night of 11 June in their car. They had arrived in the town at about six o’clock in the evening and the only accommodation left was two hot little rooms right under the roof of the hotel. Gabriel strode angrily through the rooms, pushed open the windows, leaned out for a moment over the bright safety rail, then pulled his head back in, saying in a curt voice, “I am not staying here.”

  “We have nothing else, Monsieur, I’m very sorry,” said the manager, his face pale and exhausted. “Just think, with all these crowds of refugees, people are even sleeping on the billiard table. I was trying to do you a favour!”

  “I am not staying here,” Gabriel repeated, stressing each word as he did at the end of discussions with editors when he shouted at them from the doorstep: “Under these circumstances, it will be impossible for
us to reach an agreement, Monsieur!” The editor would then weaken and increase his offer from 80,000 to 100,000 francs.

  But the manager just shook his head sadly. “There’s nothing else, nothing at all.”

  “Do you know who I am?” Gabriel asked, dangerously calm all of a sudden. “I am Gabriel Corte and I’m telling you that I would rather sleep in my car than in this rat hole.”

  “When you leave, Monsieur Corte,” replied the offended manager, “you’ll find ten families on the landing, begging on their knees for me to rent them these rooms.”

  Corte let out a loud laugh, overdramatic, icy and scornful. “I certainly won’t be fighting for them. Adieu, Monsieur.”

  To no one, not even to Florence who was waiting downstairs in the lobby, would he ever admit the real reason he had turned down the rooms. In the fading light of the June evening, he had seen a petrol depot from the window; it was close to the hotel and, a little further away, what looked like tanks and armoured cars were parked in the town square.

  “We’ll be bombed!” he thought, and he started trembling all over, so suddenly, so profoundly that he felt ill. Was it fear? Gabriel Corte? No, he couldn’t be afraid! Don’t be ridiculous! He smiled with pity and scorn, as if replying to some invisible person. Of course he wasn’t afraid, but as he leaned out of the window once more, he looked up at the dark sky: at any moment it could rain fire and death upon him, and that horrible feeling shot through him again, first the trembling right down to his bones, then the kind of weakness, nausea and tensing in the stomach you feel before you faint. He didn’t care whether he was afraid or not! He rushed outside, Florence and the maid following behind.

  “We’ll sleep in the car,” he said, “it’s just one night.”

  Later on, it occurred to him that he could have tried another hotel, but by the time he’d made up his mind, it was too late. An endless, slow-moving river flowed from Paris: cars, trucks, carts, bicycles, along with the horse-drawn traps of farmers who had abandoned their land to flee south, their children and cattle trailing behind. By midnight there wasn’t a single free room in all of Orléans, not a single bed. People were sleeping on the floor in cafés, in the streets, in the railway stations, their heads resting on suitcases. There was so much traffic that it was impossible to get out of the city. People were saying that a roadblock had been set up to keep the road free for the troops.

  Silently, with no lights on, cars kept coming, one after the other, full to bursting with baggage and furniture, prams and birdcages, packing cases and baskets of clothes, each with a mattress tied firmly to the roof. They looked like mountains of fragile scaffolding and they seemed to move without the aid of a motor, propelled by their own weight down the sloping streets to the town square. Cars filled all the roads into the square. People were jammed together like fish caught in a net, and one good tug on that net would have picked them all up and thrown them down on to some terrifying river bank. There was no crying or shouting; even the children were quiet. Everything seemed calm. From time to time a face would appear over a lowered window and stare up at the sky for a while, wondering. A low, muffled murmur rose up from the crowd, the sound of painful breathing, sighs and conversations held in hushed voices, as if people were afraid of being overheard by an enemy lying in wait. Some tried to sleep, heads leaning on the corner of a suitcase, legs aching on a narrow bench or a warm cheek pressed against a window. Young men and women called to one another from the cars and sometimes laughed. Then a dark shape would glide across the star-covered sky, everyone would look up and the laughter would stop. It wasn’t exactly what you’d call fear, rather a strange sadness—a sadness that had nothing human about it any more, for it lacked both courage and hope. This was how animals waited to die. It was the way fish caught in a net watch the shadow of the fisherman moving back and forth above them.

  The plane above their heads had appeared suddenly; they could hear its thin, piercing sound fading away, disappearing, then surging up again to drown out the thousand sounds of the city. Everyone held their breath. The river, the metal bridge, the railway tracks, the train station, the factory’s chimneys all glimmered; they were nothing more than “strategic positions,” targets for the enemy to hit. Everything seemed dangerous to this silent crowd. “I think it’s a French plane!” said the optimists. French or enemy, no one really knew. But it was disappearing now. Sometimes they could hear a distant explosion. “It didn’t hit us,” they would think, sighing with happiness. “It didn’t hit us, it’s aimed at someone else. We’re so lucky!”

  “What a night! What a terrible night!” Florence groaned.

  In a barely audible voice, which slipped through his clenched lips with a kind of whistle, Gabriel hissed at her as you would to a dog, “I’m not asleep, am I? Do what I’m doing.”

  “For heaven’s sake, we could have had a room! We had the unbelievable luck to find a room!”

  “You call that unbelievable luck? That disgusting attic, which reeked of lice and bad drains. Didn’t you notice it was right above the kitchen? Me, stay there? Can you picture me in there?”

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake, Gabriel, don’t be so proud.”

  “Leave me alone, won’t you! I have always felt it, there are nuances, there is a . . .” he was looking for the right word “. . . a sense of decency which you simply cannot feel.”

  “What I can feel is my painful arse,” shouted Florence, suddenly forgetting the past five years of her life and slapping her ring-covered hand vigorously against her thigh in the most crass way. “Oh, for goodness sake, I’ve had enough!”

  Gabriel turned towards her, his face white with fury, nostrils flaring. “Get the hell out! Go on, get the hell out! I’m throwing you out!”

  At that very moment a bright light lit up the town square. It was a missile shot from a plane. The words froze on Gabriel’s lips. The missile disappeared but the sky was filled with planes. They flew back and forth above the town square in a manner that seemed almost lazy.

  “What about our planes, where are ours?” people groaned.

  To Corte’s left was a miserable little car carrying a mattress on its roof, along with a heavy round gueridon table with vulgar bronze mounts. A man in a peaked cap and two women were sitting inside; one woman had a child on her lap and the other a birdcage. It looked as if they had been in an accident on the way. The car’s bodywork was scratched, the bumper hanging off and the fat woman holding the birdcage against her chest had bandages wrapped round her head.

  On his right was a truck full of the kind of crates villagers use to transport poultry on Fair days but which now were full of bundles of old clothes. Through the car window right next to his, Gabriel could see the face of an old prostitute with painted eyes, messy orange hair, a low angular forehead. She stared at him long and hard while chewing on a bit of bread. He shuddered. “Such ugliness,” he murmured, “such hideous faces!” Overcome, he turned round to face inside the car and closed his eyes.

  “I’m hungry,” Florence said. “Are you?”

  He gestured no.

  She opened the overnight case and took out some sandwiches. “You didn’t have dinner. Come on. Be sensible.”

  “I cannot eat,” he said. “I don’t think I could swallow a single mouthful now. Did you see that horrible old woman beside us with her birdcage and bloodstained bandages?”

  Florence took a sandwich and shared the others with the maid and driver. Gabriel covered his ears with his long hands so he couldn’t hear the crunching noises the servants made as they bit into the bread.

  10

  The Péricands had been travelling for nearly a week and had been dogged by misfortune. They’d had to stay in Gien for two days when the car broke down. Further along, amid the confusion and unimaginable crush, the car had hit the truck carrying the servants and luggage. That was near Nevers. Fortunately for the Péricands, there was no part of the provinces where they couldn’t find some friend or relative with a large house, beautiful
gardens and a well-stocked larder. A cousin from the Maltête-Lyonnais side of the family put them up for two days. But panic was intensifying, spreading like wildfire from one city to another. They had the car repaired as best they could and set out once more, but by noon on Saturday it was clear the car could go no further without a thorough overhaul. The Péricands stopped in a small town just off the main highway where they hoped to find a room. But all sorts of vehicles were already blocking the streets. The sound of creaking brakes filled the air and the ground next to the river looked like a gypsy camp. Exhausted men were sleeping on the grass, others were getting dressed. A young woman had hung a mirror on a tree trunk and was putting on make-up and combing her hair. Someone else was washing nappies in the fountain.

  The townspeople had come out on to their doorsteps and surveyed the scene with utter amazement. “Those poor people! But honestly, they look so awful!” they said, with pity and a secret feeling of satisfaction: these refugees came from Paris, the north, the east, areas doomed to invasion and war. But they were all right, time would pass, soldiers would fight while the ironmonger on the main street and Mlle Dubois, the hatmaker, would continue to sell saucepans and ribbons; they would eat hot soup in their kitchens and every evening close the little wooden gates that separated their gardens from the rest of the world.

  The cars were waiting for morning to fill up with petrol. It was already becoming scarce. The townspeople asked the refugees for news. No one knew anything. “They’re waiting for the Germans in the Morvan Mountains,” someone said. Such an idea was greeted with scepticism.

  “Come on, they didn’t get that far in ’14,” said the fat chemist, shaking his head, and everyone agreed, as if the blood spilled in ’14 had formed some mystical barrier to keep the enemy out for ever.