“I . . .” he starts to say.
Then he goes. He runs behind the boatswain, arms tensed by the unbearable weight of all his belongings. The sailor stops and waits for him. Then Alain drops his bags and runs to Sara and takes her in his arms and lifts up her slight body and they kiss full on the mouth as they’ve never dared to before.
“I’ll write to you,” he says. “One day, we’ll be together for good.”
They gently push each other away and stare deeply into each other’s eyes for—what?—three seconds. Then it’s over. Alain joins Oskar, who takes one of the bags and throws it over his back as if it weighed no more than a pillow.
They listen to their footsteps on the gangway, they see their friend’s hand slide up the railing, but he doesn’t lean over, not even once, and Daniel knows that he doesn’t want to show his face twisted with sorrow, wet with tears.
“Shall we go?”
Sara has turned around, already near the warehouse. She waits impatiently, hands in pockets, tapping her foot. Irène joins her first and the two of them start walking, quickly and lightly, arm in arm. Daniel and Gilbert quicken their pace and go through the half-open gate just after the girls. They don’t speak. They let the girls share their secrets while the four of them walk northward along the narrow street, past the fences that surround the port.
A little further on, just as a breeze hits them cold in the face, Irène and Sara burst out laughing then turn towards them:
“Don’t you know?” Sara says. “I’m going to get married!”
All four of them laugh. They joke around, push each other, indifferent to the cold wind and the tough times. Then they fall silent and walk back towards their homes, north toward their neighborhood, which is like a suburb, almost like an island in fact, surrounded by the river, the wet docks, the marshes, connected to the rest of the city by three swing bridges when there are no boats trapped between the locks trying to manoeuvre their way into dry dock. Few cars pass, and behind the fences are the train carriages, the trucks and the warehouses and the thousands of logs from Africa, all covered by the night like a tarpaulin. Nothing moves. A few suspended street lamps illuminate nothing but themselves. Their bulbs shine so weakly that the light never reaches the ground, remaining enclosed in a feeble halo. Here and there, in the forecastle of a cargo ship, a lit-up porthole pierces a patch of brilliance in the night.
Daniel tries to imagine Alain alone in his cabin, perhaps testing his mattress or putting a bag on the floor, and he feels a pang in his heart that makes him grimace in the darkness. He doesn’t know what a true friend is. He doesn’t know the difference between an ami and a copain. He should talk to Irène about this: she knows so much about words and their nuances. Friend, brother . . . Sister . . . Who is what? He watches Irène’s chestnut hair bubbling over her scarf; it looks almost blonde in the darkness and he feels like holding her by the neck and pressing her close to him and . . . Once again, he is seized by this desire that often comes to him when she moves close to him with those intimate, tender gestures, those bursts of sisterliness that she has sometimes, that childish teasing that he has always known in her, or at least since her parents welcomed him to their home and adopted him and then loved him like their own son and this girl looked at him for the first time with those wide laughing eyes, pulling softly on his ear.
She is his sister, obviously. And yet, not at all. Above all, she is the person he feels closest to in the whole world. Who senses every shiver within him. The one he let enter his secret by opening, for hours at a time, the gates to his sufferings and nightmares, and whispering it all into her ear. The whispers sometimes choked with sobs. That is how she knows about the shining eyes of the sparrows hopping on the rooftop in the cold, the tiny birds watching that little giant pressed against the chimney. That is why she has almost the same memories as him. She went up with him to the roof, when he told her about the day of the round-up, so much so that sometimes he surprises himself by remembering that she was next to him as he leaned against the chimney, under the grey and icy sky, surrounded by ruffled birds, waiting for someone to come and get him.
Irène.
He watches her walking and he loves the way she moves and this thought disturbs him, dizzying him like a child on a merry-go-round seeing the faces rush past without being able to make any of them out.
Especially when, just after the swing bridge, the girls start singing “Milord” at the tops of their voices and dancing badly and laughing and inviting them, Gilbert and him, a pair of clodhoppers who follow without saying a word, to dance with them.
They fall silent again as they get closer to home, passing the walls of the factories, listening in spite of themselves to the deafening roar of the steelworks, groaning like a man-eating monster.
When Irène and Daniel find themselves alone, they hold hands for a moment, as they have often done, since childhood.
“Does she really want to marry Alain, Sara?”
Irène giggles.
“She’s mad. But I’ve been telling her that, about Alain, for a long time. The way he looks at her and all that.”
“Oh, really? I didn’t notice anything. And he never mentioned it.”
She pinches his arm.
“You never notice anything like that. You probably wouldn’t even notice if a girl snuck into your bed! That’s because you don’t look. Anyway, guys don’t talk about love, everyone knows that. All they can do is go on about their performance and laugh like idiots.”
Daniel can think of nothing to say in reply to this. He registers the words, tries to understand them, files them away in his pocket wrapped in a handkerchief.
Lying in bed, he tries to fall asleep, hoping to dream of ships and vast horizons and swarming ports, all ablaze with sunlight. He forces his imagination, summoning memories from films, but the images constantly vanish or freeze and turn dark. He falls asleep, his heart in chaos, his mind heavy with confusion and fear.
In the middle of the night he wakes up touching his leg, which has just been torn off by an exploding grenade. He lies there panting, covered in sweat, still blinded by the sunlight that flooded his nightmare, one hand touching his knee, and he has the feeling that he never falls asleep again, until his alarm goes off and he opens his eyes, dazed with exhaustion and sadness.
10“As I was going down impassive rivers / I no longer felt myself guided by haulers . . . ’—from “The Drunken Boat”, translated by Wallace Fowlie.
11“And at times I have seen what man thought he saw!”—Ibid.
10
He wakes with a start because he felt something move near him or heard a groaning sound breathe into his ear and he lies immobile in the blackness, muscles stiff, heart racing, and he stares into this impenetrable darkness and notices that he is still alive, because he’s in pain. He is on his back, the blankets pulled up to his chin by his two fists, afraid that they will fall off him or be torn away by someone. There is always a long terrified moment before he remembers where he is: a bedroom heated by the gas stove that he can hear now, humming in the background. A new bed with clean sheets, where he is alone. Around him, the city still sleeps. The city where he was born, grew up, lived, loved. The city that holds all his memories of before. Scraps of torn newspaper blown by the wind. The ruins of a party swept away by a tornado. Paper chains ripped to shreds, Chinese lanterns extinguished. And in the middle of all this chaos he wanders, sometimes thinking he can hear wafts of music, an accordion waltz, a confusion of happy voices.
The rhythmic jingling of the alarm clock. The distant rumble of a truck, on the cours de l’Yser. The muted trickling of gutters. As he does every morning, he finds these blind man’s landmarks and, as every morning, he will later have the feeling that he is opening his eyes for the first time in a long time. He dares reach out next to him with his hand and finds only fresh sheets, so he rolls onto his side then stret
ches out on his belly and sighs with relief.
Sleep takes him again, scattered with visions. Dreamed recollections. The nightmare ofmemory. He moves inside these moments from the past, sometimes moaning and weeping.
Each morning, his unexpected dawn is ripped by the ringing of his alarm, at the other end of the room. He waits for it to stop before rising effortlessly.
He washes himself at the sink in a corner of the kitchen, inhaling the mixed scents of coffee and soap. He rubs his skin until it’s red. He holds the flannel underwater then wrings it out then rubs again to rinse himself off then dries himself with a towel. He cannot see his whole body in the little mirror hung in front of him but he knows his body bears no traces except for the scar below his collarbone and that hole in his shoulder blade. No pain. His body is tall and lean and hard. Muscles, tendons, bones. His body is still young, at nearly fifty. He knows it, he feels it. He won’t get old until that has been accomplished. He will keep this strength and vitality intact the way you keep a weapon in secret, oiling it regularly, checking its mechanism. And exercising with it too.
His face is all marks, traces, scars. Paths dug in the too-soft ground, trenches never filled after a lost war. An ancient, ageless cartography. Cuneiform writing that you think you can understand without knowing how to read it.
Coffee, barely sweetened. Buttered bread that he dips in his drink and chews, sometimes closing his eyes. He lets the burning liquid pour down the back of his throat, feels its heat spreading through his insides.
Each morning at this wooden table, its uneven legs wedged with cardboard, sitting on his creaking chair, he delights in this moment, both hands cradling the bowl and those little gulps that bring tears to his eyes. And, almost splitting in two, he sees the man he has become savoring what others rush through, what he himself, for a long time, took for granted, until one day he had to lift up the body of a comrade who had died in the night to pick up the scrap of bread he’d fallen asleep on.
Each morning in his mouth the taste and the scent of a silent reconquering.
In the hallway, already filled with the smells of bleach and soap—Madame Mendez must have put her washtubs on the fire—he hears the sound of her radio, the indistinct chatter of a presenter then music and, fading into the distance behind him, the voice of Edith Piaf. The street is narrow, dirty, sticky with damp. The stinging odor of burned charcoal. He steps over the gutter where whitish, lukewarm water runs, steaming slightly in the cold air. Once he’s on the main road, he quickens his pace, matching his footsteps to his calm breathing. He moves through the crowds at the Marché des Capucins, slaloming between the trolleys loaded with crates and boxes and the vans parked willy-nilly on the square and customers carrying large baskets or dawdling in front of stalls. The smells of meat, vegetables, fish, diesel. The shrill cries of the barrow boys and fishmongers, echoing in the covered market, the laughter of butchers coming out of a bar, aprons stained with blood and forearms bare, accompany him like so many auditory landmarks on this itinerary that he has been following for several months now. Next he walks down narrow streets below dark façades, then he enters the roar of cours Victor-Hugo, jammed with traffic, stinking of diesel oil, shouldering his way through the mass of pedestrians, all rushing like him, sometimes muttering a vain excuse.
He enters rue Bouquière, the sidewalks already clogged with parked vans being unloaded by lads in grey shirts. Bundles of clothes, lengths of cotton, wool, terylene, in solid colors or prints or tartans or polka dots or floral patterns: for soft furnishings, dressmaking. Wholesale and retail-wholesale. A shop every ten meters, each with its own specialities, its own customers.
The one where he works is a long corridor, three meters wide, the ceiling four meters high, the walls covered with shelves full of rolls of cloth, offcuts, clothes in packets of twenty: trousers, suits, jackets, waistcoats, shirts, and overalls. Look all you want, but you won’t find any bright colors. Everything here is grey, charcoal, brown, navy blue. Beige at a push, but it stands out a mile. Pinstripes are as whimsical as it gets. Houndstooth is an extravagance.
The boss, Monsieur Bessière, is standing behind a counter, examining a tweed offcut. He barely even glances up as he greets him with a sigh.
“Hello, André. No lack of work today. And plenty of headaches as usual.”
He says more or less the same thing every day. Drowning in work. Looking exhausted as soon as he starts the day, tired-eyed and pasty-faced beneath his greying brush cut, his forehead glistening in the dreary neon light. With his impeccable white coat, he looks like a doctor or pharmacist on the verge of a nervous breakdown, no longer able to bear informing people that there is nothing more he can do for them and that they must prepare to die with a great deal of suffering. Next, in the same cavernous voice, he complains that business is bad, that people don’t dress properly anymore. That is how he justifies the pathetic wages he pays. If he could afford to pay more, he would do so with all his heart, that goes without saying. But the competition is pitiless. The major stores. Look at America. The peril is at our gates, and soon it will swoop down on small businesses and tear them to pieces. He mopes around behind his cash register, a pencil tucked behind his ear. Some days you’d think he was about to slide the key under the door and go downstairs to hang himself in the cellar.
It’s a shame. He should remind him about his house in Caudéran more often, with its big garden, and the three or four apartments in town that he owns, even if he does have occasional difficulties with tenants. That would do him the power of good, poor Monsieur Bessière.
“Hello, André. Your work is ready for you. Thank you for being early.”
He says that sometimes. When he’s in a good mood.
André. The man always feels a twinge when he hears people call him that. The spare name came to him spontaneously last year in Paris when the man who was forging his papers asked him for it, just after he’d taken his picture. Family name, first name. The forger had a stock of blank identity cards, picked up during the Liberation from the prefecture offices, taking advantage of the chaotic battles being fought on the streets and the desperate demand for certificates of resistance from coppers. He was a former Resistance fighter. Georges. He knew him only by his first name. Georges told him all this under the red lamp of his little darkroom while he soaked the photographic paper in the developing tank. His voice went hoarse as he described the vileness of French cops. After rounding up the Jews and hunting down the Resistance fighters on behalf of Marshal Pétain and the Gestapo, they suddenly felt all republican and hurried through the corridors of the prefecture building in shirtsleeves, a red, white, and blue armband around a bicep, to offer their services to the very people they’d spent the last four years hunting and fighting. It was like a huge herd of calves stampeding in all directions, terrified by the arrival of cowboys and desperate to save their asses from being branded with hot iron. The most they ever did against the Germans was to fire their .30 pistols through the windows, without even aiming, as the tanks sped past on the other side of the Seine. “One month earlier, those bastards would only have set foot inside the building on rue Lauriston to smash our heads with truncheons. But . . . what can you do? History is stronger than men, so they say. And we wanted to believe it, back then.”
André Vaillant. He liked the sound of that straight away. He tried to forget his real name, the label attached to his previous life, which every day he tried to tear off: Jean Delbos. And so André Vaillant, born 18 March 1911 in Courbevoie, came into existence. Afterwards, he and Georges went to grab something to eat and drink at a greasy spoon on rue de Charonne, and the forger told him about the fighting around Madrid, the fall of Barcelona, the desperate flight of his brigade, his comrades in tears. The death of a dream. It was war, down there in Spain. Heavy artillery, planes, tanks. He saw it all. Hideous death. Friends blown to pieces. Defeat, foreshadowed by terrible massacres. But he doesn’t remember being afraid
. Rather, a desire to get stuck in, to go and hunt down fascists everywhere he could find them, to flush them out of hiding and confront them head on, to fight the last battle at every moment.
Then came the clandestine struggle. The secret meetings. The preparation of ambushes. The stakeouts. The enemy everywhere. On a street corner, behind a window, in a dark corridor, crouched behind double doors. You search for him and he finds you. After that, blackness. Falling.
And so came terror, though you would never admit it to your friends. Terror that pins you in the middle of the street unable to take a single step or prevents you sleeping for a whole week, woken by a door banging shut in the street. Terror that tears to shreds your paper sleep, with nightmares where you hear them climbing the stairs and smashing down the door, where you see yourself tied to a chair being beaten and tortured, not knowing if you’ll be lucky enough to die before you give them the three names you know because you can’t take it anymore, because no-one can withstand those weapons, those refinements of brutality, the pleasure they take in it and pursue unwaveringly, perhaps hoping that you won’t talk so it lasts longer and they can get their kicks . . . That, that was the true terror, the terror that reigned during the years of the Resistance.
André listened to him talking quietly, his voice husky with emotion, controlling the urges of his hands, which wanted to move around, perhaps to make sure they didn’t say more than he wanted to, to make sure they didn’t betray him. Like an armless Italian. His shoulders twitched but his fists remained balled to prevent the hands flying around. He had known a Jew in Turin who talked like that, with his shoulders, arms severed by exhaustion.
He liked Georges, this Resistance fighter still tormented by fear, who talked and talked in order to keep it quiet.
Yes, he said, that terror at the idea of falling into their hands because he knew what would happen if he did, that vertigo he felt before he entered a building or crossed the street for a meeting, the silence that always settled within you in that instant, so heavy and massive that it seemed to spread all around and to point you out in the eyes of everyone as the person responsible for that sudden deafness of the air, he had felt that so many times and still dreamed of it now. “Some nights I wake up on the Gestapo’s chair, even though I never sat on it. I’m there in the place of friends whom we never saw again afterwards or whose screams were described to us or the state they were in when they were sent back to their cell, shit, sometimes I’m there and I’m scared that I’ll talk, can you believe it? And I wake up and I don’t know who I am anymore and sometimes I bawl my eyes out like a little kid! It was my one obsessive fear, of course, but nearly fifteen years have passed since then and it still haunts me! How is that possible?”
After the War Page 12
