He picks up the pistol and gets to his feet. Catches his breath. Mazeau is breathing peacefully, as though asleep. André dresses in haste, keeping his eyes on the motionless policeman, keeping the gun to hand on a nearby shelf, just in case, but the cop remains still. André knows he’s not dead, probably not even unconscious, maybe faking it to lower his vigilance. Viewed this way, lying on the floor, arms stretched out wide, he looks like someone who’s collapsed with exhaustion and is now recovering. Or thinking.
Because André now leaps to the conclusion that should have come to him earlier, as soon as the cop first appeared in his flat: out in the street there are two cars full of cops waiting for a sign, or for a certain period of time to elapse, before they intervene. Almost certainly they have blocked both ends of the street. They will hurtle up the stairs, guns at the ready, and smash down the door and pin him to the floor and drag him outside like the body of a felled stag or boar, and throw their trophy in the back of a car. He runs over to the window, but of course he cannot see anything; obviously they are not going to be waiting outside the door, waving to him.
He grabs a suitcase and tosses a few old clothes inside it, along with his notebooks and pens. He goes into the kitchen to pick up his wallet, checks that he has everything he needs, not forgetting his chequebook. When he returns to the living room, he sees the cop moving slightly and doesn’t know what to do because in a minute he might get up and yell at him or attack him. Gripped by uncertainty, he aims the pistol at the cop’s head, but his hand trembles and the trigger seems to resist the pressure of his finger. He thinks he ought to tie him up and gag him—that’s what they do in films—but maybe the policeman is just waiting for him to try that in order to go for his throat.
He gives Mazeau a quick kick in the face, prompting a muffled groan, then he kicks him again and again, screaming with rage, kicking with both feet at this body that no longer moves at all. After that he remains immobile for a few seconds in the middle of the room, letting his eyes wander from the unmade bed to the table where he writes down his memories every evening, from the window where the dawn light is coming in to the cracked ceiling still dark with the remnants of night.
He decides to leave his den and run down the stairs, the pistol held out in front of him, and he knows that, this time, he won’t have to press very hard on the trigger to shoot down the first cop that bars his way. He goes flying out the door, breath held, as if by not breathing he might escape the attentions of the men lying in ambush. But he runs twenty or thirty steps, and reaches the corner of the cours de l’Yser, where he closes his eyes against the sun on the horizon. People walk past without seeing him, and the city opens up with a roar and he is swallowed by its huge, swarming mouth.
And then he is walking down streets he barely recognizes, suitcase in hand, wandering lost, drifting towards the river by following the slope, the path of least resistance, bowed down by the noise, shaken by the din of traffic on the docks. Beyond the warehouses, the high tide lifts up the boats like dazzling white cathedrals in the bright sunlight, with slow-moving cranes bent solicitously over them. He walks, avoiding the eyes that he thinks are staring at him—the fugitive, the stowaway, the hunted ghost—and he constantly dreads the touch of a hand on his shoulder, the thought of an arm surging from the crowds massed around the bus shelters and knocking him to the ground, slamming his face into the tarmac, don’t move, you piece of shit, we’ve got you now and we’re not letting you go this time.
Outside the offices of the Transat ship company, he looks at color photographs of big passenger-cargo ships going to Africa and he thinks that he could soon be arriving in a heat-battered port, roaming through the chaos of its commotion, lost, again, in a country that would not be the end of the world but a dead end where his poverty would pale into insignificance beside the others’. He imagines putting his suitcase down by a filthy counter where whites macerating in a bitter sauce of sweat and alcohol would let their hatred and their filth stew under the lazy blades of a gigantic fan. He sees himself in the dusty, shadeless streets riddled with exhausted figures, broken by their work, faces black and shining, poor devils, whining children, women bowed by their burdens; he sees himself in that world like a nail hammered into an eye.
He would like to dream up images of a river with luxuriant banks, the water rippling as canoes glide through it, listening to calls echoing in the air and distant voices answering them, but he cannot: the pictures shrivel up as soon as he thinks of them.
People say leaving is a kind of dying, without knowing anything about it. He knows it’s true. But now that he has come back, he may as well die here, and for good this time. The destination is less uncertain.
He picks up his suitcase again, finding it surprisingly light, and retraces his footsteps. He walks quickly, as he likes to do, matching his breaths to his stride. He no longer hears the city, and sees only vague shadows that he passes in a continual hum.
Another hotel. Cours Pasteur. Standing behind its counter, the receptionist looks like Juliette Gréco. He fills out the register, pays for two nights in advance. The woman gives him his key, staring at him in surprise or with suspicion, and he meets her gaze: hazel irises and lids heavy with eyeshadow. She tells him there are towels in the wardrobe. As he walks away, he hears her hoarse voice again:
“It gets a bit noisy, around midnight, for an hour or so. Then it calms down again.”
He turns and shrugs.
“I’m just telling you cos some of our customers complain.”
He tries to smile.
“I never complain.”
She nods, then picks up a magazine which she opens with a brusque gesture. And, as he moves off towards the staircase, she speaks again:
“The cops hardly ever come here.”
“Why are you telling me that?”
“No reason. Just so you’ll know.”
“If they don’t come here, that’s because everything’s fine, right? That’s reassuring . . .”
His hovel of a room is painted pale blue and overlooks a narrow street where young people’s voices echo, shouting and laughing. André drinks long mouthfuls of water from the tap. When he sits on the bed, he’s surprised by the silence and the firmness of the mattress. Then he lies down and lets his fatigue settle over him.
Just as he is starting to nod off, he suddenly jumps to his feet and goes to the sink to splash water on his face. Then he slides his suitcase under the bed and takes the pistol from his pocket, wondering where to stash it. He opens the wardrobe, looks on top of it, then under it, for a place where he can put the gun, but nowhere looks safe so he gives it some more thought, passing the weapon from one hand to the other. Then he aims at his reflection in the dirty mirror over the sink and catches sight of his stiff, sinister figure in the darkness of this seedy room and sighs, finally slipping the pistol into an inside pocket of his coat.
When he goes past the reception desk, the woman does not look up from her magazine, but he knows she is watching him from under her dark brown fringe. He strides quickly, decisively down the street and pushes open the door of the bank with an energy that surprises Philippe, the cashier, who recognizes him and smiles.
“Monsieur Vaillant, how are you? It’s not payday, is it?”
Behind him, the secretary hammers away at her typewriter, copying columns of figures onto a stack of carbon papers. As usual, she does not greet him, remaining concentrated on her work.
“Monsieur Bessière sent me because he needs cash to pay a supplier who’s been making his life a misery.”
“Cash?”
The cashier adjusts his glasses as he looks at André.
“It happens, as you know, from time to time. It’s the Duchêne company in Bègles. He wants to settle all his accounts with them because they’re late with deliveries, they wrangle over offcuts and they don’t supply the sizes we need. It’s never-ending with them. S
o, earlier today, on the phone, Bessière got annoyed and decided he didn’t want to deal with people like that anymore.”
“Yes, I see, but—”
“If it’s a problem, I can go back to the shop and tell him, and he can come himself. He’s not going to like it though—you know what he’s like . . .”
“No, no, it’s just that . . . How much do you need, I mean how much does he need?”
“Five hundred thousand.”
The cashier nods without answering, then purses his lips.
“It’s just that . . . I’m not sure I have that amount here.”
He walks to the back of the room and opens a large accounts book, his finger running down various columns of figures.
“Oh, we do. You’re in luck. We had a deposit yesterday, and I can see that it’s still here. Good, good . . .”
He has André fill out a form. Signature, stamp. Then he goes behind the cash register and opens a metal drawer with a little key that he wears around his neck. He puts the notes—denominations of five and ten thousand—on the countertop, snapping them between his fingers as he counts them.
André takes the money, carefully wrapped in a thick paper envelope. He says see you on payday and waves as he opens the door. Out on the sidewalk, he glances quickly around and, not seeing any cops on stakeout, starts walking towards the hotel, because now his only desire is to sleep, to abandon himself for a few hours somewhere the police won’t know where to find him, giving Mazeau time to decide whether he should talk, whether he should admit that he played solo and lost.
15The central police station in Bordeaux was located on this street until recently.
16Former medieval fortress, very close to Bordeaux’s city hall, used as a prison from the middle of the nineteenth century until 1967. All that remains of it today are two towers within the walls of the National School for the Judiciary. During the Occupation, Jews arrested during round-ups were held there while awaiting deportation, as were many Resistance fighters.
13
Algeria appeared to them first as a discontinuous line of flickering glimmers at the level of the waterline in the already fading night. Hearing the shouts of those who saw it first, standing at the ship’s bow, the others rushed over to see it too, shoving each other and standing on tiptoes, leaning on others’ shoulders or jumping in the air in an attempt to glimpse the land that had been promised to them, even though they had never wanted or asked for anything. They were silent after that, blinking from the sea air that blew in their faces or because they were tired after hours of rough weather that had liquefied their legs and turned their stomachs and a night spent almost without sleep on this old tub, being thumped by waves, the air stinking of blocked bogs, piled up on top of each other on deckchairs or camp beds, dazed by seasickness, and sometimes spattered with vomit because a few people were unable to resist this sneaky, punchy eastern swell. So, pitching or rolling, guts or bowels, they didn’t know the difference and often remained bent over the barrier trying to puke, a glaze of sweat covering their faces that were the same olive-green as their uniforms, sticking their fingers down their throats to puke, hitting themselves in the bellies to puke, puke, puke, and dying for an end to this shaking of their entire beings, from their brains to their bollocks, turned to jelly, endlessly stirred like a mass of treacle that they wanted to eject by any means necessary, like that half-wit, made crazy by nausea, who’d tried to open up his stomach with a knife to get rid of the guts he couldn’t manage to vomit up. It had taken three of them to stop him disembowelling himself, and a caporal had knocked him out with a punch to the back of the neck to calm him down and then declared that he’d get a week in jail, the prick, for disobedience and attempted self-mutilation.
Daniel had managed to find a spot on the upper bridge, below the gangway, and, with Giovanni—a man from Lorraine he’d met at the training camp in Mulhouse—rolled up in their blankets, using their kit as a pillow, they had managed to grab three or four hours’ sleep amid the deafening roar of machines and the worrying vibrations that shook the ship’s frame every so often. When they heard the others shouting, they sat up and contemplated the string of lights stretched out before them, the two of them open-mouthed, their blankets sliding off their shoulders, as if they had witnessed a miracle.
“This is where the Athenians landed,” says Giovanni. “What a shit heap . . .”
Daniel does not reply. He watches the sea as it emerges from blackness, transforming by turns into steel and bronze, and the sky as it pales then blazes amid a flock of purple clouds massed in the distance that he imagines are guarding the Strait of Gibraltar. The Pillars of Hercules, as they say in those sword-and-sandals films. He takes the frame from his chest pocket, unfolds it and captures this dawn in a long panoramic that he cuts as soon as the ship’s bow slices through the surface of the water and points towards the coast, a line that grows thicker with every passing moment.
“Is it better, if you look at it like that?” Giovanni asks.
“I dunno. It’s the same thing, but different. I don’t know how to explain it.”
“Yeah, it’s the same shit, but without the stink . . .”
“I think it’s a better way of seeing things. You isolate what you want to see from the rest and that makes you see it better.”
Giovanni reaches out for the steel rectangle.
“Show me.”
He makes a darkroom with his two hands and puts his eye to it, grimacing as he blinks. He walks around with the frame, smiles, then stops.
“That’s funny . . . you’re right. I love the flicks, but I’d never thought of making my own wherever I am.”
He gives the frame back to Daniel, who folds it and slips it in his pocket.
“Why didn’t you ask for a deferment, since you’re a student? All this shit would’ve been over by the time you were done.”
Giovanni is still staring at the horizon, where Algeria moves closer. He nods and smiles sadly.
“I’ll tell you one day. Not today. Sois sage, ô ma Douleur, et tienstoi plus tranquille . . .”17
“Who’s that?”
“Baudelaire. I’ll lend it to you.”
They fall silent. Four other men have joined them and are yelling, leaning against the handrail and going into raptures about what they can see. They wonder aloud if there’ll be dark-skinned whores to fuck, and one of them mimes jerking off, crotch thrust forward, in the direction of the coast.
“Just wait till you see my big gun in action. I brought plenty of fucking ammo too!”
They laugh and slap their thighs.
“And even if you miss the target, it doesn’t matter!”
“It’s war, innit? We’re not going to be scared of a little trou de balle .”18
They fall about laughing, collapsing into each other’s arms. Pass around a flask of hooch, looking about to make sure there are no officers who might see them. They cough and choke, gasping that fuck it’s strong but really good.
“Want some, pal? My dad makes it, from plums.”
A small, dark-haired boy is waving the flask under Giovanni’s nose. He grabs it and turns to Daniel.
“What shall we drink to?”
“Who cares? Drink to whatever you want.”
“To the French army, then, and its glorious soldiers!”
He downs a mouthful and passes the flask to Daniel.
“To our dead, in the past and the future.”
The other lads stare at him in the silence that has suddenly fallen. The small, dark-haired boy gets his flask back, puts the cork in it and drops it in a pocket of his khaki trousers.
“Why’d you say that?”
“It’s war, isn’t it? You said it yourself. People always die in wars.”
“Shut your mouth,” says one of the others, with a ginger crew cut. “It’ll all be over in six m
onths, and we’ll go home. The colonel in our training camp said that, and he knows what he’s on about. He was in Indo and he couldn’t wait to get here to give these ratons what they deserve. What the fuck did he say that for, about the dead?”
He is furious. He waves his cap at Daniel.
“You dipshit! You’ll be dead before me!”
Daniel stares him down. What can he say to that? And what if it’s true? Exasperated, the boy gives him the finger and turns around, pushing his friends out of the way so he can lean on the handrail. Daniel picks up his bag and hoists it onto his back. For a few seconds, gasping and unsteady, he wonders if he’ll be able to walk a single step with this weight crushing his shoulders, riveting him to the metal gangway. He hears the boy whispering insults and curses that are suddenly lost in the flurry of an unknown language. Giovanni comes level with him and leads him away by the arm. The lads make jokes about them. Queers. Why don’t you go somewhere quiet so you can have each other? Fucking ass bandits.
They join the crowd of grunts on the bridge. The smell of tobacco, sweat, dirty feet. Even the sea wind cannot dissipate this festering reek. They’ll be there in an hour. The N.C.O.s bellow. A platoon stands near the railings, about fifty men in combat gear, wearing helmets, rifles on shoulders, bags at their feet. Daniel watches, surprised. A caporal explains that it’s for the news. First they film the men who look most like soldiers, to show people we’re not here to mess around. Afterwards, they show the dickheads who smile at the camera, happy to be there, who’ve come full of enthusiasm to crush the rebellion and protect the population. Always the same routine. Daniel glances at the stripes on the man’s chest, suspicious of this over-chatty officer, wondering if he’s trying to spot the troublemakers, the rebels, the reds.
After the War Page 19
