Intoxicated by the smell and the colors of my life, I walked on through the stink of corpses and shit that we gave off, all of us, uniformly gray, from our heads to our feet, skin pasty beneath the grime, a battered troop shuffling through the endless abattoir that was this path in a world so gray even the snow couldn’t whiten it, on the lookout for the distant black lines of fires like so many landmarks stretched horizontal by the wind. Surprised and terrified when one of us collapsed puking blood, because of the sudden flash of color and because that scarlet was death carried within them like a monster and delivered in a final rattle.
And one day, I died too.
I fell on the hard, dirty snow, packed solid by thousands of feet. I was on all fours and trying to breathe, to pump in air as if I might have been able to reinflate myself and get back on my feet, but each time I had the impression I was emptying myself even more. I was on all fours and I felt my arms trembling, incapable of holding up my body, and the cold was burning my hands and knees. I had seen so many do the same and whom we’d tried to carry a few meters further, hoping that they would start walking again but whom we’d let go in the end because we didn’t have the strength to help them anymore. We had to leave them behind because there was always a guard or an SS officer who would come up to us screaming, pushing men out of the way with the point of his bayonet or whirling his stick, and who would start kicking the man lying flat on his belly or beating him with a club. Sometimes he would kill them on the spot or he would have them carried to the roadside and leave them there, maybe already dead.
Someone grabbed me under the arms and lifted me up, whispering that we were going to get in more trouble, and I was surprised to hear them speaking French; I don’t know why, there were other French men in the camp, and in our line, of course, but since we’d been walking we’d said so little that whenever we talked to someone we used, I think, a sort of pidgin made up of a few dozen words borrowed from German and French or Italian, or Polish. Survival words, essential words, without sentences or grammar. Something like the sounds that animals make to each other.
I heard the guard yelling and straight away we were pushed in the ditch before I even got to see the face of the man who’d been helping me and I fell flat on my belly, the other man on top of me, on a soft layer of snow piled up there, almost comfortable, and I thought how lucky I was to be able to die without any further suffering. Two gunshots exploded overhead, and in the moment when I felt a bullet in my shoulder, the man who had lifted me up suddenly became heavier and I was pushed down into the snow and I turned my head a little so I could take a few more breaths, then I had the impression of being pushed further down and all I felt then was the cold, nothing else, not even pain. The cold, and nothing more.
I was suffocating. I lifted my head and I spat out water and bits of ice and I cried out in order to breathe. The man’s corpse was crushing me and I couldn’t move at all now, couldn’t feel any part of my body, as if I were nothing more than a severed head. I was lying in the melted snow and I thought I was going to die of cold under this corpse that was pressing me down into the ground so I would stay with him in death. I concentrated on my hands. One was trapped beneath me but the other one was above my head and I was able to wriggle my fingers. They came back to life and then I could move my arm. It was at this moment that I heard the man moaning and it didn’t even surprise me. As the living were already dead, the dead could easily be resurrected from one hell to another. I asked him to get up because I was dying underneath him but he continued to groan, his head between my shoulder blades. I tried to push down on my free arm but I had no strength and sometimes I couldn’t even get enough breath in my lungs and I was suffocating so I started wriggling as much as I could, twisting myself under that dying body and I insulted him, you fucking piece of meat, go and die somewhere else, I spat insults at the man who had helped me, supported me, carried me, who had taken the two bullets that should have killed me.
I don’t know how long I spent twisting like a worm in that frozen mud. The man’s body suddenly tipped over and I found enough strength to crawl away from him, as if he might jump back on top of me. I sat up, leaning against the embankment, and looked at him. He had lifted himself up in a strange way, his back arched against the edge of the ditch, eyes wide open, mouth gaping and full of bloody spit. I went over to him and felt for the artery in his throat so I could take his pulse, but all I felt beneath my fingers was a tangle of knotted strings around the bones protruding under his skin. I closed his eyes, my teeth chattering. I was now nothing more than shivers and the cold took hold of me and I felt it spreading through my stomach and paralysing me inch by inch. As the man’s jacket was dry, because it had been lying on me, I took it off him and put it on, but his trousers were covered with shit and mud so I had to get up to try and find another pair.
Trembling, I took a few steps, my heart in a panic and my chest filled with pain. I rubbed my sides but that was worse: I no longer knew where it hurt and I felt that crazy pounding under my fingertips, making my skeleton vibrate with those heavy beats that would surely smash it to pieces. The injury to my shoulder was nothing in this cage of pain. Just a hole that had gone through me above my collarbone. I began walking again and found a bit of breath and only then did I lift my eyes from the paved road and look around me.
The light was unbearable. Everything was white, all the way to the horizon, dusted with fresh snow and encrusted with ice. The sun fell from above, hitting this whiteness and making it sparkle, blinding. The sky was a pure blue so deep and clear that I expected to see a few stars in the middle of the day.
The road was empty. Rows of footprints covered by snow trailed off westward, millions of hollows turning blue in the harsh sunlight. The traces of ghosts. In the still air, the silence was absolute. I could feel my heartbeat thudding against my skull, but that could only be a distant echo of life, because I was dead. I knew it in that instant. I would never return from this frozen earth, I would never leave this corpse-lined path. I would never rediscover life. I was walking down this road, on this cold, powdery ground, among the dead men abandoned by the roadside, with nothing to hold onto, with no physical substance. I was now the only one who could see me, who could experience the material reality of my spectre. For everyone else, I was disappearing into the transparency of the air. Their gazes would pass through me without ever guessing at my existence.
Sometimes the night would open around me and then only those wandering souls I passed randomly would recognize me, their eyes dead with horror like mine, their mouths wide open in their final breath like me as I suffocated, surrounded by the living. But I would glide on forever, unperceived, amid calm executioners and traitors turning their backs on the past, and they would never know who killed them nor from what hell came stealing this shadow who stared and smiled at them.
I could barely walk and I was making myself promises that were impossible to keep but it was the only thing I was capable of believing in, so I clung to that as to a shaky handrail on a collapsed staircase.
4
When the light comes on again, while the murmur of conversation rises around him, Daniel remains seated for a few seconds longer, watching the silent white screen. He blinks as if he were in the dust and blinding sunlight of Tombstone, and he clicks his tongue like Doc Holliday when he’s thirsty and he sees the street flooded with light bordered by wooden sidewalks where figures on rocking chairs sit motionless in the shadows. Inside his head, men are still running, leaping, falling during the gunfight, shots are still echoing, the cocking levers of Winchester rifles still snapping into place. The seats bang softly into seatbacks as people stand up and he feels these muffled thuds in his back, savouring this solitude in which he lets the film percolate through him, burning itself into his memory. His friends often ask him how he manages to remember so many details about the films he sees, the names of actors and directors, things they pay no attention to. He replies simply
that he likes all that stuff and that, if he could, he’d go to the cinema every day and write books about it, write reviews in newspapers. The others think this is too much: write a book? Oh yeah, and what else? Him, the mechanic from rue Furtado, the kid who grew up here in Bacalan, this workers’ suburb on the edge of the city and the marshes?
He doesn’t dare tell them how he used a folding ruler to make a little rectangular frame that he keeps in a pocket and that he often looks between those right angles at people and things and that nothing then exists except what he sees there, a sharper, deeper image, something stronger and more singular. He doesn’t dare tell them—because they’d think he was crazy—that he frames women walking down the street and they are more beautiful that way, that the city itself, enclosed in this geometry, becomes a place of intrigue where anything might happen, mysteries appearing suddenly from the corner of that street, the middle of that square, behind that window, in that car driving past too fast . . .
He hears the lid of a lighter snap open somewhere above him, and immediately afterwards a cloud of smoke with the smell of Virginia tobacco pours down on him. Alain hands him a pack of Camels.
“So are you staying to bury the dead or are you coming with us?”
“Where are the others?”
“Outside, where do you think? It’s stuffy as hell in here.”
Daniel takes a cigarette from the pack and Alain lights it for him with his Zippo.
“Let me see,” says Daniel. “Where’d you get that?”
He weighs the lighter up in his hand, opening the lid with a flick of his thumb, turning the wheel. Smell of oil, good strong flame.
“From a sailor, on the docks. I worked there five days last week and got chatting with a wop. He told me he had loads of ’em. He’s from Naples, and down there they buy and sell anything American, he said. Apparently the Yank soldiers have these in their kitbags.
“You couldn’t get another one, could you?”
Alain shakes his head. Then throws Daniel the pack of Camels.
“Here. You can keep these. He gave me two cartons. His boat left yesterday and he won’t be back till February—they’re going to Senegal and then Tunisia. Next time he comes he might be selling bags of couscous or wooden statues.”
They leave the cinema laughing, arm in arm, and bump into an old granny who yells at them, waving the handle of her umbrella.
“Oh, don’t bother saying sorry! That’s young people for you these days! Just a bunch of hoodlums! I’d send the whole lot of ’em to Algeria . . .”
“My son is there at the moment,” says a woman behind her. “That’s young people for you these days, as you say. The things we do to them. Sending them off to war, as if the last one wasn’t bad enough. So let them have a bit of fun, and shut your face!”
The granny turns around but says nothing, dumbstruck, mouth gaping idiotically. She holds her handbag and her brolly tight to her side.
“I’m going there in February, if that makes you feel any better,” Daniel tells her. “I’m just waiting for my marching orders. So stick it up your ass.”
The woman goes purple-faced. A man appears from behind her and grabs the younger man by the arm.
“What did you say to my wife? Say it again.”
“Oh, that’s your wife, is it? Well, tell her from me that she can stick it up her ass, if she didn’t hear me the first time. And so can you, dickhead. How’s that for you?”
The people around them have stopped and are watching in silence. A dark little crowd, faces pale under the lobby’s bright lights. Who knows what they’re thinking. Maybe they’re expecting a scrap. Another duel, minus the sunlight, on this winter night whose cold air they can feel blowing through the open doors. The man grabs Daniel’s collar and shoves him, yelling “What? What?”, eyes bulging from their sockets, spit drooling from his lips. He’s shortish but well-built, fists as big as his thick-skulled head, and Daniel retreats, not knowing how he’s going to get rid of this moron because right now, pushed backwards, off-balance, he can’t even give him a good kick in the balls. Alain gets in between them. He grabs the man by his collar and blocks the way so he has to stand on tiptoes to face him down, like a cock on its spurs.
“So you’re too bloody scared to take me on your own, eh, you queer?”
Alain lets go of his collar, pushing him back slightly. The people around them are leaving now, perhaps disappointed by the punchup. The man gives up but remains standing in front of the two youngsters, his face white with rage, forehead shining with sweat.
“Fuck off then, you little fags! You won’t have to worry about the Algerians cutting your balls off!”
Daniel takes another step forward, but Alain drags him towards the exit. “Come on,” he says. “Just ignore those assholes.”
Their friends are waiting for them on the sidewalk, under the awning, although even here the cold drizzle reaches them, blown there by the wind. Irène and Sara, whispering to each other a little further off, and big Gilbert, who comes towards them.
“So? What’re you up to?”
His black moustache smiles, his eyes growing round under his mass of hair. Too tall and wide for his tight raincoat, his long legs poking out from his ill-fitting trousers. A thick blue scarf wrapped around his ears. He always says he doesn’t give a toss if he’s badly dressed when girls politely mention it to him. You could make an effort, they tell him. You’re a handsome bloke. Look at you. Like a bloody scarecrow. And he smiles, red-faced, clowning around because he’s the center of attention, all these girls crowding around him, pulling at the sleeves of his jacket or his turtleneck sweater. They all know he’s tight up though, with his half-mad mother and his three sisters to feed, even working overtime every day as a docker, and they know that his clothes are hand-me-downs from an uncle who’s not rich either but is a lot shorter and punier than Gilbert. It’s actually because of this unshakable poverty that he’s been spared Algeria. Family to support. He has broad shoulders and strong arms, but sometimes his burden gets too heavy and they can tell it’s hard for him.
Alain tells the story. Sara wants to go and explain things to the old lady, and she looks through the crowd to try and find her. She shakes her head and mutters to herself. Daniel shrugs.
“Shall we go?”
They start to walk, pressed close together, their shoulders bumping occasionally. Sara insinuates herself between Gilbert and Alain and hangs on to their arms, her legs suspended above the ground, betting them they can’t carry her all the way home like that, while Daniel and Irène walk just behind them, not saying a word.
“Can you believe it? Having a go at Daniel about that! If there’s anyone who actually wants to go to Algeria, it’s him! We should have beaten the shit out of that dick!”
Daniel walks over and stands in front of him.
“What did you say?”
“Nothing,” says Irène, taking his arm. “He didn’t say anything. And you—why don’t you give it a rest, eh? You really think this is the time?”
“I didn’t say I wanted to go, I just said I was going. That it doesn’t really bother me. At least I’ll get to see what it is.”
“We already know that,” says Sara. “It’s an imperialist war. You think they’re going to let Algeria go, after what happened in Indochina?”
“Your father was in a war, wasn’t he? You talk about it all the time!”
“Careful what you say about my father, Daniel. Yes, he went to war to fight the fascists. Yes, he died and I’m proud of that even if I’m sad that I never got to know him, that I don’t even remember his face. And Maurice and Roselyne fought the war too, in their own way, I have no problem with that. But Algeria . . . who are you fighting against?”
They have stopped in the middle of the street, gathered in a circle, and their breath and the words that they speak look like smoke in the cold air as if
they were pouring in a blaze from their mouths. The street has gradually emptied. People pass them by, grumbling because they’re in the way.
“Yourself, that’s who you’ll be fighting against,” says Irène in an undertone, as if talking to herself.
Daniel seeks out her eyes in the shadows of her face.
“Why do you say that?”
“You know.”
“Stop trying to sound clever, with all your philosophy. Just cos you passed your exams.”
“She’s right,” Sara says. “Men often go to war to find themselves, to discover their limits. You see that in plenty of films—you should know, you love them so much. But this war you want to see is a real one. Errol Flynn won’t be there, just a bunch of morons and shit. What did they see in Palestro1, huh? Are any of them still around to tell people about their adventures?”
“So? What do you think I should do then, you and your big mouth? You think I should desert? Or jump on a boat like Alain wants to do? Anyway, it’s my life: I’ll do what I want with it.”
“Works for me,” says Alain. “We’ll enroll as novices on a passenger-cargo ship going to French West Africa and we’ll get to see theworld! And at least we won’t have our balls cut off by bicots.”2
“What? Shit, you can’t say stuff like that,” says Irène. “It’s a disgusting way to talk.”
After the War Page 4
