Sara has walked ahead a few steps and now turns around.
“So we’ve got one who wants to go but doesn’t really know why and another who’s refusing to go but sounds like a stupid grunt. I’m sick of talking with you lot.”
“Alright, calm down,” says Alain. “I shouldn’t have said that. But everyone talks like that, so . . . You know me though! You know I’m not a racist!”
“What about you, Gilbert? Don’t you have an opinion?”
Irène has turned towards the beanpole, who shrugs.
“Me? Well, I’m just going to stay here, safe and sound, while the others go and get shot at, so . . . But I think our friends are both pretty brave, each in his own way. I don’t know . . .”
They are silent for a few seconds. The rain starts falling more heavily.
“Well, I’ve got some new Yank records,” says Alain. “We could listen to them while we have a beer. What do you think?”
Smiles all round. They rub their hands, pull their collars up and set off the other way, towards Alain’s house. But Daniel does not move. He is watching them walk away when Irène turns around.
“Aren’t you coming?”
“Nah. I’ve had enough of this crap. I’m going home to crash out.”
The others call out to him. Come on, Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, how can you say no to that?
He says goodnight and turns around, ignoring their protestations. He hears them behind him, worrying about him. What’s up with him? Irène says something in reply then their voices vanish in the distance and the wind. Once he is around the street corner, all is silent again, except for the low insistent hiss of the rain in the gutters. He walks quickly, almost running, and the night protects him, deeper and darker here on this street bordered by rumbling factories that glimmer and smoke. He turns onto rue de New York, his fingers already clasping the set of keys in his pocket. Breathlessly he climbs the three steps, trembles as he searches for the lock and almost dives into the hallway, banging the door shut behind him. He stays like that in the blackness, leaning against the wall, the cold raindrops trickling down his neck, over his face.
He starts thinking about them. It comes over him sometimes. Especially his mother. She is merely a silhouette, a shadow, the timbre of a voice. A woman singing. What about him? He would come along sometimes, smiling, happy. He sniffed all the time. He can no longer remember his face. All that remains to him now is that photograph in which he can barely recognize the couple who stand hand in hand on the cours de l’Intendance in August 1936, the date marked in purple ink on the back. Here in this darkness he summons their faces, but his cinema does not respond and the screen remains dark, flickering only with a few stray images from the film. The Earp brothers and Doc Holliday walking down the street and the dust kicked up by their boots. The tormented look on Kirk Douglas’ face. Guns swaying against their thighs. They are walking towards him and maybe they are going to appear at the end of the hallway, the door swinging behind them for a long time, letting in waves of sweltering Arizona sunlight. Daniel is almost panting with the effort of trying to remember his parents’ faces and he can feel himself falling slowly to the bottom of a well, from where daylight, seen through the opening, will soon be no more than a quivering star. And he knows that the two of them, leaning on the rim, are staring down at him.
The kitchen door opens and Roselyne pokes out her head, wide-eyed. The pale light gives her a tired look, a grey face.
“Ah, I thought I heard the door. What are you doing in the dark?”
“Nothing. Just thinking.”
“Irène isn’t with you?”
“No, they went to drink coffee and listen to records at Alain’s place.”
She nods, smiling vaguely. She pulls the woollen shawl more tightly around her neck, then takes a handkerchief from the pocket of her dressing gown and rubs his hair with it.
“Look at you. You’re all wet. Was the film good?”
“Yeah, it was good. A Western.”
“Ugh, I hate those!”
He holds her shoulders and kisses her on the forehead. “I know . . . What about you? Why are you still up?”
“Couldn’t sleep, so I made myself a herbal tea. Maurice fell asleep on his book and started snoring. Do you want anything?”
Daniel does not reply. He holds his hands over the stove. Drops of water fall from his hair and crackle on the burning steel. He becomes more peaceful as the well disappears from his mind and he finds the open air again.
“I’m going to heat up some coffee.”
He pours a few drops into the saucepan then takes a cup and some sugar from the sideboard while it warms up. When he sits down, Roselyne stares at him.
“What were you thinking about, all alone in the dark?”
He stirs the sugar into his coffee, fully absorbed by what he’s doing so he doesn’t have to look at her. The clink of the spoon against the cup. Occasional murmurs of wind in the chimney.
“You don’t want to tell me?”
“What am I supposed to say? It’s always the same thing. When it comes over me, there’s nothing else I can think about.”
She tries to take his hand, sliding hers onto the oilcloth, but he gently shrinks away.
“Have you talked to your sister about it?”
He shakes his head.
Silence falls between them. They sip their too-hot drinks. Roselyne watches Daniel, a mocking smile in her eyes. He does not look at anything. Maybe the sideboard, standing in front of him, and the frosted glass doors, their panes decorated with floral swirls. He feels either sad or bitter, he’s not sure which.
“Anyway, she’s not really my sister.”
“She’s just like your sister. We raised you together. She was only two when you arrived.”
Roselyne suddenly stops talking, and a smile spreads across her face.
“That is one of my happiest memories, you know: seeing the two of you there with me. Your parents had been arrested but, back then, we didn’t know where they were being taken, although there were rumors, of course. Germany, Poland . . . People talked about prison camps, but everyone thought they were like the P.O.W. camps where soldiers were kept. But anyway, we had to face up to the truth. It was hard; we forgot what normal life was like. Irène called you Dada straight away, remember? That went on for years. She used to follow you around all the time to start with; she didn’t understand why you couldn’t go out like her. Once, I remember, we were in the butcher’s—this was in January ’44—and she started yapping away about Dada. That butcher was a nasty piece of work: he used to sell meat on the black market to the Krauts. I didn’t know how to stop her talking. She was going on about how she talked with Dada all the time, how she played cards and Ludo with him because he got bored in his room that he could never leave, how he spent too long in the toilets . . . just a whole load of stuff, and I could imagine her spilling the beans completely at any moment and I had no idea how to stop her. And that bastard started questioning her, casually, you know, like ‘And what’s he like, this Dada? Is he nice? Why doesn’t he go out? Is he ill? What sort of stories does he tell? What’s his real name?’ He knew there must be something fishy going on and he wanted to figure out what it was, like a dog sniffing around a bush. She was only three or four at the time, and you remember what a chatterbox she was—she used to drive us all crazy! And then suddenly she stopped talking and she looked at that bastard and giggled and she said: ‘He’s silly, that man, he’s getting it all mixed up. A teddy bear can’t go out in the street or he’ll get wet, and he can’t tell stories, I just said that so he would sleep in my bed. Dada is for Danilou. That’s what they call him in the forest.’ You should have seen the guy’s face, and him holding a packet of meat in the air. All the people in the queue were laughing at this little girl and the way she talked, addressing everyone in the shop, her eyes wide as saucers.
As a recompense, he gave us an extra fifty grams of beef trimmings. When we got out of the shop she held my hand and said, ‘Did you see how I got out of that? It was good, wasn’t it? He wanted me to tell him about Daniel, did you see?’ She’d understood completely. War makes children grow up faster but it doesn’t necessarily make them more intelligent; otherwise human beings would all be geniuses. But that kid: she knew exactly how much danger you were in, she knew that there were bastards all over the place with big open smiles like gas chambers. She never asked many questions about the Germans, or what was happening in the news, but she listened to everything, and observed, she watched us talking with Maurice at the dinner table with that serious look on her face and sometimes I’d catch her looking at me with those huge eyes as if she wanted to swallow me whole. I was so afraid for those eyes and I wondered what world they would see later. Anyway . . . She started hopping about on the sidewalk again and I was worried like always that she’d trip over a cobblestone, but I felt happier then than I’d felt in a long time.”
“I used to listen to you too. I stayed in my little room but I heard everything. And I used to listen out for any noises on the stairs. I thought they’d come back and we’d all go home and life would go on like before. Or I’d look through the window. I used to stand on a chair and pull back the curtain to see as far as I could. And sometimes my heart would leap because I thought I’d seen Mom crossing the street. I wonder if Irène understood the situation better than I did. She knew they weren’t coming back, that it was all over. That was why she used to hug me sometimes without saying anything and I’d let her even though it annoyed me.”
Daniel lights a cigarette and gets up to fetch a clean ashtray from the sink.
“Camels, huh? Let me have one.”
“Do you smoke? Alain got them from a guy on the docks.”
She lights her cigarette and closes her eyes as she takes a drag.
“It’s going to make my head spin, but it’s really nice!”
They smoke in silence, smiling occasionally, each in their own thoughts. Daniel feels good here, with this woman who raised him and who has blown away the dark night that was closing around him like a toxic cloud. This is his home, these people his family. With eighteen-year-old Irène and her green eyes that sometimes don’t dare meet his, that turn away and hide themselves the way a woman might cover up a suddenly bared shoulder.
“I miss them too, you know, even after all this time. Your mother was like a sister to me. See, we can’t get away from the subject of brothers and sisters, can we? Anyway, I sometimes imagine that she’s going to come home too, that she’s standing outside the door at that very moment, so I wait a few minutes to see what happens. It’s a strange sensation: it seems so definite, I’m sure that she’s going to walk in. There’s a knock at the door and I open it and there she is, smiling at me but looking so terribly tired after all they put her through, after all she must have seen . . . So we fall into each other’s arms and we start crying and laughing at the same time and then we talk for hours . . . How many times have I stopped what I was doing in the hope that my daydream was about to come true!”
“What about my father?”
“We’ve already talked about this . . . When he was there, with the two of you, he was an extraordinary man. Always so cheerful, and gentle. He’d come back with presents, toys, sometimes money. And Olga, your mother, would welcome him back the way people greet a cat who’s spent three days outside in the rain and who’s been fighting with other toms. She would dote on him and he’d promise that he wasn’t going to do it again, that he was going to stay with you at home, that all his stupid behaviour was a thing of the past. For a long time she believed what he told her. I think she wanted to believe him. She must have liked the lies somehow. Maybe she loved men who were like tomcats, I don’t know . . . She suspected there were other women, of course, beautiful women, unclean women . . . Maurice and me, we knew what was going on, but we never dared talk to her about it. But we should have, me especially . . . Then again, would it really have changed anything? Anyway, one day, in place Pey-Berland, she saw him in the arms of another girl, saw him kiss her and laugh with her. I remember the day she came here in tears, with you in your pushchair, just a baby.”
Roselyne suddenly stops talking and looks up at Daniel, as if surprised to see him there, across the table, as if just emerging from a daydream.
“Why am I telling you all this? You know it already.”
Daniel had let his cigarette burn down to his fingers while he was listening, and the burn of it on his skin wakes him from the trance in which he was floating. He stubs out the butt in the ashtray and the smoke drifts away like the transparent images that came to his mind before, leaving only the smell of tobacco, already overpowering. He seeks out the woman’s hand and she moves it towards his and they touch their fingertips together without looking at each other, without speaking.
“It helps me,” he says quietly. “Like this, they still exist a little bit.”
Roselyne smiles sadly at him.
“We should go to bed, don’t you think?” she asks.
They overcome their tiredness at the same time, pushing themselves up from the table. Roselyne goes into the hallway before Daniel, then turns around and strokes his cheek.
“Sleep well.”
“Goodnight.”
He hears the door creak softly behind him and Maurice’s muffled snoring. Then he switches off the light before entering his room. The window looks out over the little garden where a faint light, falling from the low sky and worn away by the wind, attaches itself to the pane along with the rain. He takes off his damp jacket and his shoes and lies on the bed in his clothes. His mind is a confused place, full of strange entanglements. Brambles, ivy, suffocating flowers. He stares up at the invisible ceiling and that is, perhaps, how he falls asleep, listening to the distant sound of a badly closed shutter rattling somewhere in the winter night.
1The Palestro gorge: located 50 miles south-east of Algiers; this is where a French army patrol was caught in an ambush by the resistance fighters of the Algerian A.L.N. (National Liberation Army) on May 18, 1956. Twenty-one soldiers died in the attack, and their bodies were found horribly mutilated. The attack caused outrage in France, and the Palestro Ambush, although far from the only such attack, became the symbol of this war’s cruelty, and crucially gave credence to the image of the insurgents in French public opinion as “barbarians” fighting against the “pacifying” efforts of the French Army (c.f. L’Embuscade de Palestro by Raphaelle Branche, Armand Colin, 2010).
2Racist slang term for North Africans.
5
The young girl nods at the surly-faced woman who watches over the pupils as they exit the school, dressed in navy-blue skirts and white socks, all wrapped up in dark coats. She moves away from the stern-looking herd that is slowly dispersing along the high walls, behind which ring chapel bells, then almost immediately crosses the boulevard to the bus shelter. The large satchel she wears over her shoulder bangs against her hip as she walks, forcing her to twist her body and limp slightly. She drops it on the ground as soon as she arrives beneath the sign and pulls her fawn leather gloves more tightly over her fingertips. She stares out through the noisy crowds of cars and trucks, then glances at the time on the little gold watch that she wears on her wrist.
The man is about two meters away, casually watching her. His eyes shine darkly as they linger on the young blonde girl’s delicate face and green eyes, then turn away as soon as she looks up at the traffic, the houses, the leaden sky, with a calm, virtuous expression. He too, from time to time, scans the horizon to check whether the bus is arriving, then turns his gaze back to her. He keeps his hands in the pockets of his long and rather worn charcoal-grey coat, his collar turned up, and stamps his feet to keep away the cold and hunches his shoulders as he blows into the scarf he wears wrapped around the lower ha
lf of his face.
When the bus arrives, the young girl gets on first and he lets the other two people waiting in line go before him too, a birdlike woman carrying a shopping basket and a bearded old man in a sailor’s cap. On the bus, he leans against a steel pole, one hand hanging on to a leather strap, and watches the girl out of the corner of his eye as she sits next to a sleeping man. Two weeks ago she gave him the slip by getting off three stops early and he had to run until he was out of breath to glimpse her entering a house on rue Georges-Mandel. She was meeting a boy called Philippe who studies law in place Pey-Berland. It had taken him two telephone calls to ascertain that. He doesn’t know if the information will prove useful, but its possession makes him feel stronger, more secure.
Today, she gets off as expected by the local sports ground and crosses the boulevard towards rue d’Ornano. He follows her on the opposite sidewalk. She never turns around, walking quickly, one hand gripping tightly to the strap of her bulky schoolbag. She turns into rue de Madrid, so he quickly crosses the road but lets her get further ahead as he knows where she’s going. As soon as she’s disappeared around the corner of the street, he breaks into a run and sees her rummaging in her bag outside her front door. He walks up to her and she turns to face him, holding up a steel key, then emits a feeble scream when he grabs her throat with one hand and squeezes her larynx between his fingers just enough to make her choke and her face turn purple. He is still holding her when she slips down onto the doorstep, arms flapping, eyes bulging, mouth full of slobber and a tearful groan. He bangs her head against the door and tears her satchel off her and opens it and throws it into the middle of the road, where textbooks and exercise books go flying, pages whipped by the wind.
Behind him a window is flung open and a woman starts screaming, “Help! Stop him!” but he doesn’t run away. He leans over the suffocating girl, keeping hold of her throat, and grabs her by the coat collar.
After the War Page 5
