Suddenly she moved even closer to me, held me more tightly. “So?” she said. “How is it?”
I didn’t understand. I thought she was talking about the fact of us dancing together, as this was the first time we’d done so in the months we’d known each other. “It’s good,” I said. “I’d been wanting to for a while.”
The music stopped and people clapped and shouted. Around us, people changed, swapping partners. “No,” she said in an irritated voice. “I mean you, now. How are you?”
The orchestra started up again and we remained immobile, face to face, looking at each other and hardly even breathing, mouths open, despite our breathlessness and the weight that was crushing our chests. “I don’t know. I kind of feel like I’m floating. I just let it take me. Enjoy it. And sometimes it’s like I’m watching myself do it, from afar.”
She nodded, looking thoughtful, her eyes darker and deeper than ever, staring into mine.
“What about you?”
She thought for a few seconds then said: “Me? I dance.” And she led me once again out onto the dance floor and I followed her twirls with my feet of lead, legs stiff, head hanging heavy.
I saw her maybe another dozen times and we never spoke again, not face to face like that. Jacques was no longer around. He’d gone back to his hometown, summoned by the Party to stand in the elections. So Hélène danced with other men, never more than a dance, and she chatted and she laughed, and Suzanne and her friends put the world to rights, convinced that Stalin would not leave the French working classes alone against strike-breakers, that Maurice, as they called him, would guide the people of France towards a better tomorrow. I thought they were right. I remembered the soldiers of the Red Army who found us, the ten of us, hidden out in the ruins of a farm, reduced to chewing the frozen meat of a dead cow. I remember their appalled looks when they saw our moving corpses, in spite of all they must already have seen, and their kindness and all the little things they did to make sure we’d be less cold, less hungry, that we wouldn’t die. So it seemed to me that those people really could save the world, even if I didn’t know from what, because I couldn’t see what might happen to us now.
I reckon Hélène thought the same way as me: she didn’t speak much, mostly content to share in the general outrage or to nod agreement with that smile which would, in itself, have been capable of changing people’s lives had it been plastered to the walls or projected on a cinema screen. Sometimes I met her dark gaze that cloaked a suffering I immediately sensed was just like mine. Several times I tried, as we were leaving, somewhat dazed by the noise, head heavy from too many cigarettes and too much booze, to walk next to her and talk to her but I never managed to say anything and the last time I saw her she took my arm and said: “Life is good, don’t you think? The weather’s good, and spring is in the air!”
“That doesn’t alter the fact that we . . .” I began to reply, but she put a hand to my lips: “We’re alive, aren’t we? Plenty of others are dead. We have to deal with that. As best we can. Anyway, no-one’s listening.” Then she moved away from me, lifting her hand above her head and giving me a little wave of goodbye.
That is the memory of her that I keep. The warmth of her skin on my lips. And then that hand waving above her hair, like a wing. And her fathomless gaze and her smile that I try to summon in the evenings when I feel the abyss sucking me down. Because I tell myself that if she was capable of smiling like that, of producing so much light and warmth and spreading it all around her, then I should have the strength to remain, to carry that flame, to stay on my feet and keep moving forward a while longer.
One Friday evening, Suzanne was waiting for me outside my building, something she never did. As soon as I reached her, she collapsed in tears into my arms. The day before, about six in the evening, Hélène had thrown herself under a metro train in the gare de l’Est.
We went to a café, holding each other up because we might easily have fallen, exhausted, there on the sidewalk. People moved out of our way, as they would have done for a drunken couple. We ordered a cognac and the alcohol brought more tears to our eyes and Suzanne told me what she’d heard from someone who’d been at the same camp as Hélène: how she’d been forced to carry her mother’s dead body, among others, to the crematorium. The sort of madness into which she’d sunk, refusing to eat the little they gave her, explaining that, like this, her mother would have more, and the way she started dancing, unsteadily, whenever a kapo entered the block or approached the work commando. Other than that, she remained lucid, continued to help the weakest in spite of her own exhaustion, and would tirelessly discuss the end of the war, analyze the courage of the Soviet people in Stalingrad, dream of what she would do when she returned to France. Apparently she already had it then, that smile which could resuscitate those who were close to death.
“Me? I dance.”
Afterwards we stayed there, not saying anything, sitting across from each other and watching the people and the cars passing on the boulevard amid the murmur of conversations and the clinking of glasses.
The day of her funeral—this was June—the burning sun scorched our eyes and the heavy air left the red flags hanging like damp dish cloths from their poles. I remember the silence. The crunch of gravel under our soles. A woman spoke. Her voice was powerful and calm. I don’t recall what she said. She talked about Hélène, of course, about her courage and her devotion, probably. All those banal and true things that get said when people like her die. Listening to her, I imagined Hélène on the platform, among the crowd, watching out for the train under which she would throw herself. But I couldn’t imagine her face. What her face was like at that moment. When the woman stopped talking, someone started humming the “Chant des Partisans” and then all of us—a hundred or a hundred and fifty of us, standing in that humid heat, dazzled by the pitiless light—we all hummed it while the coffin was lowered into the ditch.
At that moment, I regretted not having taken her by the waist and held her against me to kiss her. I found it unbearable that I would never again see her shake her hair or feel her drape the black veil of her gaze upon us . . . upon me. I realized then that we must love the living because the dead don’t care and will leave you for the rest of your days with your remorse and your grief. Olga, Hélène. I had let them leave without doing anything, incapable of understanding, of living.
We saw each other a few more times, Suzanne and I. But there was someone in the room with us, watching. Or pacing the floor, from the door to the window. When I mentioned this to Suzanne, she stared around her, panic-stricken, in the silence of that winter afternoon where the only sound was the whispering of the rain. So we didn’t dare anymore. Or didn’t want to, I don’t know which. We shared exactly the same sensation of that presence with us, between us. We felt the same terrified sadness. One night, when I was alone, I saw Hélène, forehead pressed to the window, holding the curtain back with one hand. I sat up in bed, hopeful that she would turn around and give me one of those smiles that would dispel the darkness, but her image was absorbed by the lights in the street.
She came almost every night for a month. I did start talking to her but she never replied, just turned her sad face towards me. I asked her if she could dance, if she could still do that where she was now, but she remained immobile, her hand always holding back the curtain. Then I didn’t see her anymore. I woke up at night, about two in the morning, and I scanned the shadows in search of her. I think I even wanted to make out, in the bluish gleam from the window, her long silhouette and the disorder of her curly hair around her face, but it was over: the curtain remained motionless and heavy, only a few vague traces of light from the street penetrating the room. It seemed to me that she was there though, around me. I thought I could see the shadow of her eyes in the darkness. I was waiting for her ghost and I was angry with myself for this superstitious hope. Then she left me. My solitude deepened, bit by bit. Some days I managed not to
think about her. My nights tormented me, full of shadows and cries and bodies that I felt on top of me, everywhere, all around, trembling with fever and fear.
I bumped into Suzanne at a protest march the following year. She was pretty and fresh-looking, on the arm of a tall, shy man. We embraced like old friends, happy to see each other, and we told each other what we were up to. She was going to get married. She would invite me, but she didn’t have my address. Then a movement of the crowd around us swept her to the other side of the boulevard. I saw her looking for me. I took advantage of this moment to go home, my throat lined with sand, my heart so swollen that I could hardly breathe.
9
They are on the docks, by the prow of the ship, the Katrina, a Norwegian passenger-cargo ship that will load up in a few hours, and above them rises the ship’s bow in a perfect curve like a saber. They can’t see the river. It is only a black expanse flickering with the occasional hazy gleam, a will-o’-the-wisp perhaps. They can smell its odor of mud and diesel, hear its sound like a mouth sucking at the concrete bank. All five of them stand at the foot of a crane, in precisely the location planned for the meeting, and stamp their feet in the cold. Irène has tied her scarf around her head, and her coat collar is turned up, the lower part of her face gagged with red wool. Sara is wearing a black beret pulled down to her eyebrows, and she’s buried inside a reefer jacket that’s too big for her because it belonged to her father, a gigantic anarchist who died in Lerida in August ’38 during the retreat on the Ebro.
Alain and Daniel look the same from a distance: cap and sheepskin coat. The only difference is the large bag and the suitcase at Alain’s feet. Gilbert is sitting on a crate, feet resting on a knot of ropes, and he smokes as he looks out over the dark water.
They have been here for ten minutes. The man had told them eleven sharp, but they’re here and he is not. Nor is the boatswain, who’s supposed to be in charge of boarding.
They hear men shout then laugh. One of them begins to sing, but his voice breaks up in a fit of coughing. Somewhere an engine starts up, purrs, stops.
Daniel listens to these erratic noises and tries to put images to this soundtrack, but all he can see is their group, the five of them, silent and alone and frozen stiff, and he frames a series of dimly lit close-ups on their darkened faces. He looks for Alain’s eyes but sees only a sparkless hollow, extinguished by his own night. He goes up to him and offers him a cigarette.
The flame of the American lighter. Illuminating only the shadow of eyelashes. Alain nods his thanks.
“You O.K.?” Daniel asks.
“I’d better be.”
Forced smile. My brother, thinks Daniel, giving him a little punch on the arm.
“Everything will be alright. We’ll get through this.”
The girls come up to them. The pack of cigarettes is passed from hand to hand. Their faces light up in the glow of the embers, eyes shine but say nothing.
“There’s someone coming,” says Gilbert.
He gets to his feet and joins them and they all watch the figure walking towards them. It’s him. Jacky. Long coat, trilby hat. Tall and broad, with a supple, silent gait.
“Sorry I’m late,” he says, greeting them.
He shakes the boys’ hands, keeping Alain’s in his. “So? You changed your mind?”
“No. I’m not backing out. I’ve not spent all that money for nothing.”
“The money’s nothing. I’ll pay you back right now if you want.”
“Keep it. I know what I’m doing. This war . . . I’m not going. I’ve talked about it so many times with Daniel. And anyway I want to leave this place. I can’t stand it anymore, I . . .”
He stops talking and breathes in, as if he had been suffocating.
“I want to see what it’s like, in other places. But not in Algeria.”
Irène walks up to him. She holds his collar and plants a kiss on his forehead.
“Comme je descendais les fleuves impassibles / Je ne me sentis plus guidé par les haleurs . . .”10
He looks at her, surprised.
“It’s poetry: Le Bateau ivre by Rimbaud. Et j’ai vu quelquefois ce que l’homme a cru voir!”11
“Why drunken?”
“You’ll find that out for yourself pretty soon!” Jacky says.
He laughs and pats his shoulder. Irène starts to mutter something then changes her mind.
“Maybe by becoming a sailor, you’ll put poetry in your life,” Sara says. “You’ll see sunrises that we’ve never seen.”
He shrugs.
“I couldn’t care less about poetry. I just want to get out of here. The war’s just an excuse for finally doing it.”
They hear footsteps echoing on the gangway, further off. Jacky squints into the darkness to get a better view of the figure now walking on the dock.
“That’s Oskar, the boatswain.”
A sturdy man walks towards them, hands in his trouser pockets. He’s wearing a woollen hat on the top of his head and a pea jacket of no discernible color. Maybe grey. He says hello to no-one in particular, his voice muffled. Round, smooth face. Clear, almost transparent eyes. Jacky starts talking to him in English, supported by a full range of hand movements and nods. The other man seems to understand him. He stares at Alain the whole time, looking preoccupied because Jacky is jabbering at him.
“O.K.,” he says after a while.
Then he smiles at Alain and places a thick, short-fingered hand on his shoulder.
Alain seems to become a little boy again. He looks at the boatswain with fear and respect, eyes shining. His friends are crowded around him, trying to read his face, which is held apart from the night by those incredibly clear eyes.
“Me speak a little French,” he says. “Few words. But the cook he is French too so you can ask him. Good guy, you’ll see. You’ll help him, at the beginning. Serve the passengers in cabins, and other things. O.K.?”
“Oui,” Alain says, but the word gets stuck in his throat and he has to cough to force it out. “Oui,” he repeats. “C’est d’accord.” And then in English: “Alright.”
The boatswain laughs.
“Oh, you speak English! No problem, then!”
Above them, on board the ship, men are talking loudly while a muffled, metallic, grating movement echoes on the bridge.
“In one hour we leave,” says Oskar. “High tide. Twenty passengers for Tangiers, and afterwards Dakar. Hot down there! Not like here or like my country, Norway! I have to show you to the captain.”
Jacky waves goodbye to the company, gives Oskar a friendly dig in the ribs and walks silently away.
Alain looks at the other four with a sorrowful smile.
“Alright, well, this time . . .”
He takes Irène in his arms and they kiss cheeks noisily while trying to smile.
“I’ll think about your drunken boat,” he tells her. “But, I swear, I won’t drink too much! I’ll be a good boy! I mean, I’m already a deserter, so . . .”
“No, it’s called a conscientious objector. And I don’t really know what being good means these days.”
Sara goes next, hiding her face in the young man’s chest.
“We said we weren’t going to cry,” he reminds her.
She looks up at him, eyes shining, and shakes her head.
“I’m fine. Anyway, it’s not like they were going to shoot you! You’ll be back in five weeks, and you can pay us a little visit before you go off on your travels again! But I’ll miss you, all the same.”
She turns around quickly and stands next to Irène and the two of them remain with their backs to the boys, whispering to each other.
Daniel and Gilbert give him a bear hug and clap him on the back, then finally kiss cheeks noisily, to show that they’re men, that their kisses are not the sly, quiet type that signify tenderness or love.
“It is a bit like a cousin going away,” Gilbert explains.
“Or a brother,” says Daniel.
Alain grabs the collar of his sheepskin coat and pulls him close. He talks into his ear. Their eyes shine with the same dark gleam.
“Be careful, O.K.? Don’t be a hero. Get yourself a cushy job. Let those other jerk-offs march into battle if they want to, but you need to come back in one piece. Understood?”
“Yeah, I know. Jesus, give me a break! You sound like Maurice. You’re going to see the world and I’m going to see the war. I’ve already told you why I want to see it. But I’m no hero. That stuff’s just for the movies. I have no desire to snuff it over there. And this way, we’ll have plenty to talk about. I want us to be able to tell each other what we’ve been up to the next time we’re together. So don’t worry. I’ll be back. Just like you. O.K.?”
Alain nods. He smiles sadly.
“Just be careful. You’re not only going to see the war, you’re going to be smack in the middle of it.”
“You need to go,” Oskar says. “It’s time now.”
He walks away, past the side of the ship, head down, without turning around. Alain tears himself away. Takes a step back, holding his bags, and looks at the four of them.
After the War Page 11
