He knows that Darlac will stop at nothing to make them talk, even if they don’t say anything; he will hassle them, terrorize them, send in his henchmen. André’s heart races at this thought. And then there’s Daniel. Darlac only saw him three or four times—the kid could hardly walk—but one time he brought him a red and yellow wooden horse that Daniel started pulling behind him, laughing at the sharp ringing sound that the little bell around its neck made. Yet another ruse to make Olga smile, make her notice him.
Darlac. His partner in crime. His party wingman. In those days, with Abel, the revels began at midnight and went on till dawn.
André decides to cross the road. He grips the pistol inside his pocket. He will shoot the first cop who tries to bar his way.
The apprentice crushes his cigarette butt under his shoe and nods a greeting. He tells him the boss is inside, at the back. André goes in, sees the man leaning over an engine that roars as he adjusts the carburettor. Deafening noise. Suffocating clouds of smoke. Then the engine slows down and begins purring.
André struggles to breathe. He puts it down to the exhaust fumes that fill the air.
Mesplet turns around and stares at him without showing any surprise. He lights a cigarette then holds it tight between his lips, eyes half closed because of the smoke.
“I told you not to come here again.”
“I’ve come to get my bike.”
“After more than three months? We almost chucked it. But as we’d had to fix practically the whole thing, it seemed like a waste. I decided to sell it in the end. It’s going to cost you a packet, I’m warning you now.”
“I can pay.”
Mesplet bursts out laughing.
“Oh yeah, that’s true. You could always pay. You just take cash out of your pockets and everything’s fine, your problems go away.”
André tries to think what to say in reply. The lack of oxygen makes his brain work slowly. He forces himself to breathe.
“I’m tired. Just give me the bike and I’ll go.”
He says this in a single breath. Mesplet is about to respond, but changes his mind and shakes his head. He stares intensely at André as if reading the signs of a lie in the wrinkles on his face.
“Follow me.”
The bike is on its stand. It glistens in the dark corner where it waits for him between two piles of old tires.
“The kid had fun dolling it up. He was the one who fixed it. I helped a bit.”
“How much do I owe you?”
“Thirty thousand.”
André takes the notes from his wallet and counts them.
Mesplet shoves them in the chest pocket of his overalls.
The bike is heavy. André struggles to manoeuvre it between the tightly parked cars. Going past Norbert, he hands him a thousand-franc note. “For the bike,” he says. The boy reads the note as if it were a telegram and watches the man walk away, bent over his machine. He carefully folds the note, squeezes it into his pocket and taps it as if to keep it warm. Then he holds the bike while André puts on his leather helmet.
“Where’s Daniel?” he asks.
“He’s in Algeria, Daniel.”
While he rides carefully through town, clumsy and mistrustful, he thinks about Daniel, a soldier in that Algerian shit heap, and his body trembles so hard that he worries he might fall off the bike.
He parks it about fifty meters from where Darlac lives and pretends to mess with the engine while stealthily observing the house. It is nearly eleven o’clock and he knows that Darlac’s wife, Annette, will leave in five or ten minutes, carrying a big shopping bag, as she does every Tuesday and Thursday, and get in her 4C.V. Up to now, it’s been impossible to follow her. He remembered this motorbike, an old wreck he’d bought from Raymond, the assistant, purely as an excuse for going to the garage, to begin with. He just wants to know where this woman goes, so regularly, always at the same time.
For three weeks he’s been spending his mornings in a bistro at the corner of the street. He sits at the window with his notebook and a detective novel and he reads or writes or pretends to read or write, scrawling a succession of incoherent words while staring constantly at the cop’s house. On the third day the owner asked him if he was a writer or what, and André replied that he was writing his memoirs, the war and all that, and that he needed to see people in order for it to come back to him. The owner shot a surprised glance at the four or five guys who sat there, regulars for the most part, slumped in their chairs or leaning on the counter, barely even speaking to each other after the usual greetings had been exchanged. They were alone now in front of their glass of red or white or even rum, ordering the next one with an assured, almost peremptory hand gesture, perhaps enjoying the respect that was their due, a sozzled mirage, a momentary mumbling dignity. He then explained, in a quiet voice, as if to excuse them, that they were all poor sods who’d got stuck up shit creek, not really bothering anyone, sometimes a bit simple or a bit mad, sad as stray dogs. “You know what it’s like,” he’d added, without malice, and André had looked in his eyes and seen a glimmer of humanity there that he’d liked, and he’d replied, “Yes, I know a bit about that,” and the man had smiled and nodded and sighed.
Since then, when he enters the café, the owner smiles in greeting and brings him his coffee and shakes his hand, and they exchange sincere how-are-yous and listen to the other’s answer. Like an odd little island, this dark and melancholy bar where this man, like a shipwreck survivor, holds out his hand to help anyone washed here by the ocean. André writes about him in his notebook. He writes that there are still men on this earth, that he has just met another one.
He is crouched next to the bike and he has no idea what he is going to do. He follows, observes, gets close. He watches them live. The daughter, who gives the slip, more or less whenever she feels like it, to the cretin whose job it is to protect her, and runs off to the parc Bordelais to meet a young man whom she kisses on the mouth, draped around his neck, her body pressed against his while his hands explore the insides of her sweater. The supposed great cop thinks he controls the whole city, but when he’s away his mice play.
André has the impression that he has cast his net around the cop in this way, and that he is, little by little, tightening it. He suspects that Darlac can feel this constant gaze upon him, can sense this shadow behind him without being able to evade it, and that sometimes, perhaps, he unknowingly pushes away the imperceptible touch of the spider web that is closing around him with the back of his hand.
Above all, he knows he is deluding himself. The eye was in the tomb and fixed on Cain.30 He remembers this verse, probably learned at school. But he knows that he is not the eye of God. A man had once told him, before dying, hanging on to him and shivering, that God, whom he couldn’t help believing in, was a blind and deaf chaos.
Annette Darlac leaves the house, slamming the door behind her, and walks quickly away, tall, straight-backed, somewhat stiff, dressed in a long black coat, a few blonde hairs escaping her mauve headscarf. She is carrying only her handbag, and her free arm brushes the side of her coat as it swings. The car is parked about thirty meters away. André waits for it to start before straddling his bike. She turns onto the boulevard, quiet at this time of day, and he lets two other cars come between them so she won’t spot him. She is the superintendent’s wife. It was Darlac, a long time ago, who explained to André the rules of tailing someone. All those cops’ tricks and stratagems, those convoluted methods. He feels invisible behind his goggles, under his helmet. He can feel the machine’s vibrations beneath him, running smooth as clockwork.
She turns left, onto Route du Médoc. The city gradually disappears, giving way to fields, copses, hedges. The road goes through pastureland, perched on an embankment. They could be anywhere. He falls further behind, because there is so little traffic on the road. Blanquefort is a large village, between marshland and wood
s. He crosses through its empty streets. A rural path, a low house with white shutters. He sees Annette Darlac get out of her car then push open the gate. Her blonde hair floats in the wind, her scarf now around her shoulders.
André drives past the house, stopping a bit further on at the entrance to a forest path. From here, he can see anyone who enters or leaves. A gust blows through the trees and he lifts the collar of his reefer jacket. The sky is changeable. The woods still smell of winter, of mushrooms. The scent of rain and humus. The house is small and surrounded by tall oak trees. He is dying to go inside, to surprise the woman. See her turn her frightened face towards him. And then what? The commissaire is a cuckold? He suddenly imagines himself shouldering open the door and finding a seedy bedroom farce. He no longer knows what to do. He should wait a bit longer. He has been waiting for so long that another day or another few weeks are nothing, and one day he will know what to do with the extra time that has been granted to him. Perhaps waiting itself can become a way of life. Believing that you know what you’re waiting for in order to forget what is waiting for you.
It lasts almost two hours. He has time to smoke five cigarettes, to piss, to walk over to a clearing where two squirrels are screeching. Three cars pass, and birds sing loudly at times: he tries to make them out between branches dressed in their finest spring green. The sun shines down on him, so he leans against a tree, eyes closed, and savours this gentle warmth. Two hours. But for years now he has not been able to understand how time passes. Or even if it still passes. He wonders if something, all around him, has wound down to a halt. As if all that remains of his watch face is a second hand circling back endlessly to its starting point. Days giving way to nights. The nights always blind, the days always so grey.
The woman gets into her car, makes a U-turn and leaves. André feels his heart speed up and pushes the motorbike to the front of the house, leaning it against the low garden wall. He opens the rusty iron gate, he walks on a dirt path between two rows of neatly pruned rose bushes. A blue door, flanked by two windows covered by white net curtains. He lifts the knocker, then wonders whether he shouldn’t enter unannounced, to catch whoever it is unawares. He puts his hand on the door handle, but finally changes his mind and bangs the knocker against the door, the noise of it making him jump.
Light footsteps approach. The pistol in his pocket, in his hand, does not reassure him. He stares at the door and wonders what gaze will meet his, or flee from it. A little old woman with clear, hard blue eyes and white hair held in a sort of grey headdress holds the door ajar and stares at him, then glances suspiciously behind him. She stands upright, her chin raised.
“What do you want?”
Deep, husky voice. André recognizes the German accent. The old woman is dressed in black. Long skirt, sweater. The white lace collar of a blouse around her neck.
“Let me in.”
The old woman tries to shut the door, but André blocks it then pushes it back. She retreats, standing in the middle of an anteroom with blue wallpaper and a tile floor that gleams dimly with cold light. He closes the door behind him. Doesn’t know what to say. He doesn’t understand what Darlac’s wife was doing here, in this old Kraut’s house.
“You’re German?”
The woman shakes her head.
“No. Alsatian.”
They all say that. There are hundreds of them hidden away all over France, claiming to be Alsatian.
“Why did she come here, that woman?”
The old woman’s hands move in front of her face. She doesn’t understand. She pretends not to understand. In the camp, you could be shot on the spot if you didn’t understand German.
The pistol in his pocket. He touches the trigger, closes his hand around the butt.
“What’s your name?”
He’s yelling at her, is about to stick the pistol under her chin, but somewhere in the house he hears what sounds like a chair leg scraping against floorboards, so André holds the gun and pushes the woman in front of him across a hallway that leads to a room with an open door, a flood of golden light pouring through the gap. The woman says something in German and André tells her to shut up and shoves the barrel of his gun into her back to make her walk faster. He wants to scream at her in her own language the orders he used to obey, shivering, cringing, because each enraged bark might be followed by a gunshot that he wouldn’t have time to hear. Not a sound comes from this room filled with sunlight. He grabs the woman’s neck and holds her tight against him, the pistol to her temple, and enters the room, a large bedroom where he immediately sees a dark shape against the light: a man in a wheelchair.
He turns towards André, revealing his bilious face, armless shoulder, his stump of a leg. The entire right side of his body has been destroyed. In the reconstructed eye socket, a motionless blue eye does not even pretend to resemble anything other than a grotesque marble that you half expect to see roll onto the floor. His cheek is merely a fold of racked flesh, a hole that could have been filled with meat if you yanked hard and sewed it shut with butcher’s twine. The temple is a blue-skinned eardrum pulled taut over the artery that can be seen pulsing just beneath. A few locks of hair have grown back in the crater of his trepanned skull.
And it’s alive. Suddenly realizing this, André shivers and feels his throat tighten, his chest block. He hardly dares breathe.
There is another part of this man that lives. A hand lying on the armrest of his wheelchair, a foot inside a slipper, half of a vigorous body, slender and elegant in a garnet-colored smoking jacket. His half-face is fine-featured and long, with a single green-grey eye and a well-formed half-mouth stretched to distortion by its other side.
André has seen bodies torn open before, blown up and dismembered. Pieces of men, skulls smashed and scattered in the mud. He has seen the living already dead, and dead men who seemed only to be about to catch their breath, who stared at you imploringly. He has probably seen human bodies in every state possible during the war. In the vile slaughterers’ backyard, at the edges of ditches, on mounds of human carcasses, tangles of grimaces, piled-up nightmares. In the smoke above the shelters. In those days he turned in on himself inside an impregnable refuge, an underground hiding place, the key to which he always feared losing. So his heart no longer trembled when he was confronted with horror, perhaps because it lacked the strength. But in this instant, standing in front of this living half-man, he feels every inch of his skin shudder painfully. The eye watches him, from under the pulsing eyelid.
“What do you want? Who are you?”
Faint German accent. Clear diction. André is surprised that words can emerge intact from that mangled mouth. He doesn’t know what to say. Realizes he’s still holding his pistol. The man gestures at the weapon with his chin.
“Are you going to kill me? Don’t do it in front of my mother then.”
The old woman is sitting on the bed, hands clasped between her thighs, and she looks at her son’s broken face and her gaze caresses his devastated features as if, by sheer force of will, she could veil it in a tulle mask or even remodel it into human form.
André tries to think what to say. Or he could simply leave. Abandon this man and his mother to their Calvary.
“Why did she come here, earlier?”
He already knows the answer. He remembers what Mazeau told him about Annette Darlac and the Krauts. He remembers that the young Darlac girl is not the cop’s daughter. The man lowers his head. He is in profile now, showing a handsome, thoughtful face.
“That’s my secret. I am her secret.”
The old woman says something in German to which he replies with an irritated hand gesture.
“And now, leave. I don’t know why you came here and I don’t care. Or kill me, if that will make you feel better for whatever reason. It doesn’t matter: I am dead now anyway.”
“Only half dead.”
The man sits up and sta
res at André just as he rolls up his sleeve and shows the numbers tattooed on his forearm. The woman gets to her feet and walks backwards to the head of the bed, eyes wide and mouth hanging.
“I’m dead too,” says André.
The man nods. Then smiles with his half-mouth.
“Well, no-one will get out alive, right?”
“You’re Elise Darlac’s father. Annette slept with you during the Occupation. Darlac adopted the kid when the war ended.”
“You know things. How does that help you?”
The man suddenly stiffens. His face twists into a grimace and he moans. The mother takes a step towards him and then changes her mind. He exhales heavily, several times, as if to expel the pain from his body.
“Amputated limbs have phantom pains. Did you know that? I can still feel the chilblains from Stalingrad. I left parts of myself over there, but they hurt as if they’ve regrown.”
A smile stretches over the left side of his face while the rest remains pulp, unmoved. Afterwards, he closes his eyes and calms down and his mother sits back on the bed. Outside, the sun is setting and shadows are invading the room, climbing from under the furniture and darkening the ceiling. The silence is so deep and so sudden that André can hear the blood buzzing and beating in his ears. It feels as if the world beyond has died, or as if they now exist in a pocket of time and space torn free from the rest of the universe.
André leaves the room to extricate himself from this whirlwind that has sucked him up. He takes a few steps down the hallway and then turns around, and it seems to him that there is no longer anything in the room: that Nazi officer and his elderly mother existed only in a dream from which he’s just woken. But then he hears the wooden floor creak, a dry cough, and he knows there really is something in there.
After the War Page 28
