After the War

by Hervé Le Corre

  They go back to the city center and Darlac picks up his car and drives home, choking on a rage that won’t let go of him, making his heart race. Often, during the journey, he touches the bulge in his jacket made by the pistol that he wears all the time now, whose weight he likes to feel on his shoulder. And often he has to fight the desire to take it out and point it at the faces of the people around him, those gray imbeciles shoving past each other along the sidewalk, poking each other in the eyes with their umbrellas, waiting impatiently in bus shelters. He wants to wave his gun about and open fire on two or three nobodies, committing an act of power and terror so his enemy—who is, he imagines, following him around like a ghost—will have to come out into the open and face him, man to man. Of course, he quickly dismisses these Western-style visions; he knows perfectly well that you don’t hunt shadows with a gun. Above all, he knows that the one he is searching for—the one that is following him—will not vanish in broad daylight.

  15

  They take off their bags and drop them on the floor and lie on their beds, the sub-machine gun on their chest or the rifle by their pillow, and for a few moments the only sound is their breathing and their sighs, amid the buzzing of flies and the creaking of beds, in the darkness of the shelter where no-one thinks to close the door on the white light that has been burning their eyes and tanning their hide for the past three weeks.

  Daniel, eyes closed, listens to this exhausted stirring. He lets his body grow heavy and the canvas of the bed becomes stretched almost to breaking point by the weight of all this fatigue. On his skin, he can feel the mixture of sweat and dust drying, turning his face into a marble mask, earth-colored, like the faces of the dead they found on their second patrol in the ruins of a tiny village, two peasants with their throats cut, on whom the killers had let loose a dog. All the newbies had puked and the others had had to breathe through their mouths, scarves covering their noses, so as not to retch at the stink, because whatever they might say, laughing with a beer the next evening, they fall asleep just as often to this vision of rotting corpses and black blood as they do in the company of the girl who writes to them from time to time. Daniel remembers how they’d all had to retreat because the wasps were attacking them after being disturbed in their feast by a caporal who’d been ordered to find papers on the bodies or any other clue that would enable them to be identified, and they had waved their hands around for a moment to get the wasps off them while the lieutenant called H.Q. to report the discovery of the bodies and find out what he was supposed to do.

  He tries to rid his mind of this image of cadavers, but it surges back constantly to his memory like a rubber ball thrown against a wall that bounces crazily and returns, flashing bizarrely like those electric pool balls you see in cafés. He opens his eyes and stares at the whitewashed ceiling, a blind and silent screen. With his fingertips, he touches his rifle and the scope and keeps his hand on the warm metal as he watches the others lying on their beds like him, and his mind is empty. All he thinks about is the shower he’s going to take, the smell of the soap, the feel of a clean shirt on his shoulders. He thinks about these trivial things, these tiny details, these fleeting sensations, shutting himself away with them as if he were hiding in a secret, impregnable fortress.

  He sees the sergent sitting immobile, body leaned forward, boonie hat in hand, shoulders lifted up by his slow, deep breathing. Occasionally he shakes his head. There are beads of sweat scattered over his shaved skull, running down the back of his neck, making it glisten, trickling down over his chin. Even he seems to be feeling it now, that battle-hardened bull, lean and tough, who tells everyone that he left behind his fat and his fatigue in Indochina, sucked out by the mosquitoes and the leeches, washed away by the monsoon and the buckets of lukewarm water that they would pour over their heads, night and day, over there, as if that shitty place might, by turning them to liquid, absorb them alive into the mud in which they sank sometimes up to their thighs, flooded by their own dysentery.

  Even he was affected, this man who, after ten days of marching and shooting exercises, had wanted to punish the newbies by making them do night patrols followed by the search of a wadi, where all they managed to do was scare a flock of sheep whose shepherd was nowhere to be seen, disoriented and senseless, perhaps returned to the savage state of those sheep, like them too, pretty soon, dragging their feet and stumbling through gravel, who might become a sort of nomadic horde at the edge of exhaustion, looking to massacre something.

  Even him, the sergent, who they had all wanted, at various times, to push into the ravine below the cliff edge that crumbled beneath their feet, the stones rattling endlessly into the precipice more than a hundred meters beneath them. They had advanced, almost crouching on the hillside, hanging on to tufts of vegetation that would tear out in their hands at the slightest misstep. He went first, practically running, and then, two hundred meters further on, on stable terrain, leaning on a rock, he had cocked his sub-machine gun and looked at the peak on the other side of the valley, repeating that no-one would go to search for any cretin who fell into the abyss because there was no point exhausting themselves dragging a pile of smashed-up bones back to the camp.

  Daniel stares at him, that son of a bitch—Castel, he’s called—sitting at the foot of his bed, slouched forward, letting the sweat run off him without moving, as if he was praying . . . and who knows, maybe this man is one of those soldier monks, on a crusade in this land of infidels and unbelievers. Maybe, in the privacy of his digs, he beats himself with a belt to expiate some mortal sin . . . It was Giovanni who talked about that the other evening. Mortifications, they’re called. Loads of mystic loonies do it all over the world, sometimes in processions, to redeem men’s transgressions. So here, in the war—the supreme transgression—he can flay his skin to bits, this stupid sergent, all alone in his room, he can whip his back until the bones show, and he’s not there yet. And if that makes him pleased with himself, I can add some salt, rub it in his wounds, just to see him twist and scream and ask about his whore of a mother.

  In the evenings, they go to the meeting hall to have a few beers, about thirty of them: all those who are not on duty or doing fatigue duties or ill or already too drunk. The radio plays songs—Charles Trenet or Gilbert Bécaud—that no-one really listens to because they’re drowned out by the yelling of the tarot card players when one of them succeeds in keeping le petit until the end or because someone else still had a trump that no-one had counted, so there’s lots of shouting over at the card table and a flat cloud of cigarette smoke that floats around the dented lampshades hanging from the ceiling. You could almost believe you were in a gambling den somewhere, were it not for the crêpe-paper garlands stretched across the room as if it were a youth club party. A capitaine who occupied this old abandoned farm for the first time after an attack in ’56 had managed to get tables and chairs, a bar and some lampshades from an officers’ mess in Oran. He had knocked out the briquette walls that divided the hutches where the farm workers used to sleep. And so, since then, there had been more than a hundred square meters of space that the men took turns cleaning, maintaining and supplying with various forms of fuel.

  Daniel watched a game of volleyball for a minute, and then, when it began to grow dark—the mountainsides turning black under the golden sky—he got a beer and went to sit at a table where Giovanni and Jean-André, the platoon’s machine-gunner, are having an intense discussion in low voices. They sit across from each other, leaning forward, almost lying on the table, tense, fists balled around beer cans, hissing into each other’s faces.

  “We’re not the criminals. It’s the fellouzes21. Didn’t you see what they did to some other bicots the other day? And all of our lot with their bollocks shoved in their mouths and their eyes gouged out? Why do they need to do that, eh? And we’re the criminals?”

  “What about us French though? What good have we done since we got here? The colonists exploit them, and we come and make
war on them because they’re rebelling. We set fire to villages, we torture them, we bomb them. We’re just as guilty of massacres as they are.”

  “Oh, stop. You haven’t seen anything. I’ve been in this shit heap for a year now. The things I could tell you . . . You talk like a Commie, and you act like a know-it-all cos you went to college. So shut your fucking mouth. We’ll talk about it when you’ve seen a friend of yours die next to you. You piss me off.”

  Jean-André gets up, knocking his chair over behind him. He stands there, covered in sweat, his crumpled shirt open over his skinny chest. He drinks a mouthful of beer and points at Giovanni, waving his can around.

  “You know fuck-all, you stupid prick. It’s just theories, all that. You won’t be such a smart-ass one of these days.”

  People at other tables turn towards them, but in the chaos of chattering voices and songs bellowed out by the radio, no-one bothers to find out what they are arguing about.

  “What’s up with the wop? Shooting his mouth off, is he? Got his panties in a twist? Maybe his mama’s too busy whoring to cook him spaghetti?”

  The man who yelled this is one of the card-players. He turns away from Giovanni and grins grotesquely at his pals, who burst out laughing. His name is Marius Declerck, he’s from Roubaix, and is generally considered a decent lad, a bit slow on the uptake, whom it’s not a good idea to tease after he’s downed seven or eight pints of lager in an evening, which happens pretty often.

  Giovanni is on his feet. Daniel tells him, “Forget it, he’s a prick,” holding him back by his arm. The man’s shoulders are visibly shaking with laughter, but the conversations have gone quiet and the guys at his table suddenly stare at their cards with extreme concentration, as if they were playing high-stakes poker.

  “Say that again?”

  The man stands up too. Tall, broad-shouldered, with thick, short arms. He stares down at Giovanni, a nasty smile on his face, and in his hand an empty bottle.

  Not that Giovanni cares. He’ll sink his teeth in the guy’s throat and not let go. He’s seen little mutts hanging like that from the necks of massive mastiffs, having to be knocked out before their fangs can be extracted from the big dog’s flesh.

  “What I’m saying is that you’re hardly even French and you’re screwing up the morale of the boys. But that’s wops for you. They fuck everything up. Just look at the mess they’ve made of their own country—nothing works at all. Even the Krauts couldn’t count on them. So, I’m saying, you should go home to your spaghetti-eating pals and leave us French to do what needs to be done here.”

  Giovanni walks up to him, grabbing a chair on his way. Around him, men silently get to their feet. Some of them leave their beer on the table, others take it with them, swallowing a mouthful on the fly as if to make the sensation more intense. Someone has turned off the radio.

  “Stop it, lads. If an N.C.O. arrives, you’ll be for it.”

  “Shut your face. Let them settle it like men.”

  And with perfect timing, Vrignon, the lieutenant, makes his entrance with a caporal.

  “I’d rather not know what you’re up to, but you’d better stop this shit now. Understood?”

  Everyone sits down. Chairs scrape the floor. Radio switched back on. “J’attendrais toujours ton retour . . .”22 The vibrato is drowned out by static, but no-one cares: it soothes the tense atmosphere.

  The giant has gone back to his card game. Giovanni is trembling. Daniel asks him if he’s alright, but he remains silent, his gaze sunk into the wood of the table like a knife. Then he stands up and walks over to Declerck. The other players stop what they’re doing, look up at Giovanni, wide-eyed. One of them pushes his chair back a little.

  Giovanni is leaning in close, speaking almost into his ear. At the other end of the room, the lieutenant, leaning on the bar, cranes his neck towards them. Declerck remains immobile, eyes staring vacantly, cards in his hand.

  “You’d better watch yourself, pal. I’ll get you, sooner or later. There have been plenty of others, ever since I was a kid, guys bigger and tougher than you, who’ve regretted spouting that kind of shit to me. Got it, Komrad? Maybe you find German easier to understand, eh?”

  “Go fuck yourself,” says Hercules. “If you want to try it, you’d better make sure I’m asleep. Now piss off. You’re lucky the lieutenant’s here.”

  Giovanni puts his hand on Declerck’s shoulder, and instantly feels a shudder of repulsion that runs through the man’s entire body.

  “I love you too.”

  He walks away and sits down next to Daniel. He’s smiling.

  “What did you say to him?”

  “Nothing.”

  He’s still smiling—with his eyes as well as his mouth—and he gives Daniel a mysterious look. He picks up his bottle and lifts it towards him.

  “Cheers, buddy. Vive la sociale.”23

  They clink bottle and can together. The beer is already lukewarm, but they don’t care. Two other men walk up to them. Two Parisians. Olivier and Gérard. They join the toast.

  “You’ve got balls, Zacco. He’d have snapped you in half. That Marius is a complete nutter when he’s pissed. They had to transfer him here cos he lost his temper in Kabylie and almost kicked a guy to death.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “From that caporal—the little one, you know? Carlin. He’s a good guy. We were on guard duty the other night, and he told me.”

  “Well, nutcases always have a great time during wars,” says Giovanni. “Allowed to carry a gun and use it, allowed to kill . . . there are loads of guys who wallow in that like pigs in shit.”

  “What can we do about it?” asks Gérard. “Maybe human beings are just bastards who don’t care about each other.”

  “Not all of them though,” says Giovanni.

  The four of them fall silent as if by tacit agreement and stare vacantly around this room where the soldiers kill time, necks shaved, clothes disheveled, sweating too much beer, with their faces like kids or halfwits.

  “Yeah,” says Daniel. “Maybe not all of them, but quite a lot. Anyway, I’m going for a walk. I’ve had enough of all these jerk-offs.”

  He stands up and walks out into the courtyard, bottle in hand, and as soon as the door to the meeting hall shuts behind him the roar of chatter and laughter is scattered by the cold wind that roams the mountain and snaps the flag high up on its pole. He walks past the watchtower, stuck in the middle of the camp, and gives the password just to annoy the man on duty, half-asleep on his machine gun, and who replies by telling him to fuck off, you stupid dick. Daniel moves away and the sentry continues reeling off his string of insults, voice muffled by the sandbag barrier. He’s a Breton who had to leave his father and his uncle on their boat in Audierne to come over here and ass around. Le Goff, he’s called—Yvon to his friends—and he says he misses everything, the sea, the wind, the rain, and tells anyone who’ll listen that one day soon he’s going to get the hell out of this dump, screw the F.L.N. and the katibas24 and the general staff, this place has fuck-all to do with him, let them all die here, all he wants is to be on the boat and to catch fish and to surf waves as big as houses and to dive into the hollows where it’s almost black as night and that’s all. He says all this during marches, when they’re having a rest, and the men around him stare tiredly at the sunbleached sky, the bare hills, the scrawny bushes, the paths traced by centuries of wear that they are now the only ones to use, their supplies clattering over the bumps, and they struggle to imagine that the sea can suddenly make night fall between two mountains of water under an overcast sky. Giovanni once started reciting a Victor Hugo poem.

  “L’homme est en mer. Depuis l’enfance matelot,

  Il livre au hasard sombre une rude bataille.

  Pluie ou bourrasque, il faut qu’il sorte, il faut qu’il aille . . .”25

  The men were astounde
d that anyone could know all those words by heart, and that anyone would think of saying them here, under a live oak, arms wrapped round knees, backs soaked with sweat under their bags. The Breton had listened silently, eyes lowered, then he had thanked Giovanni. He’d said, Fuck, that was good. Victor Hugo must have been through some serious storms to talk like that.”

  Daniel dives into darkness, skirting the main farm building where the lieutenant and the N.C.O.s are quartered, and he walks through an abandoned garden where a few rosebushes are flowering, grown wild because no-one has the time to prune them. He can feel in his stiff muscles the ground slowly rising and he comes to a low wall topped with barbed wire that protects this spur of greenery perched high up, about thirty meters above a little canyon.

  No moon. Only a few stars shining and vanishing in the misty sky. Only the night so dark that you wonder how so much sunlight can beat down on this earth. Near him is an old wrought-iron garden bench that someone left here and that wobbles when you sit on it.

  But nothing moves when he leans against the back.

  “What are you doing here?”

  He jumps to his feet and stumbles over a rock, and a hand grabs the shoulder of his shirt. It’s Castel, the sergent.