After the War

by Hervé Le Corre

  Back at home, Darlac hears the radio on full blast. He doesn’t even bother trying to work out who’s singing in his home. He goes to switch it off before taking the time to remove his hat. Madame appears at the kitchen door. Sweater sleeves rolled up, blue apron. She wipes her red eyes with the back of her hand, which holds a knife. The smell of garlic and onion.

  “Do you really need to wail like that? You deaf or what?”

  She turns her back on him and immediately he hears her humming something as she opens a cupboard. He undresses, feeling the usual dull, bitter throb of anger that stabs through him whenever he walks in his own door. He puts his pistol in a drawer of the sideboard and locks it with a key. For some time now, he’s stopped removing the magazine. He always leaves a bullet loaded in the chamber. Fuck safety recommendations. The only safety recommendation he believes in is to be in a position to open fire first, or at least to be able to retaliate effectively and shoot your enemy. Whether you survive or not. But he feels sure that he has a better chance of getting out alive, even if he’s badly wounded, if he kills the other guy. He is certain that death always chooses the one who is least determined to escape him because he doesn’t know him, the one who has never yet seen that darkening, the sudden grey light of an eclipse, the instantaneous chill in the air that announces death is about to strike.

  He opens his bar—an old writing desk with inlaid ivory and ebony doors and drawers, picked up a long time ago at a storage unit piled high with wonders—and he hesitates between two bottles: Cinzano or cognac? Cognac. He needs to feel it burn. He pours it into a balloon glass and downs a large mouthful that makes him gasp and brings tears to his eyes. He exhales. Christ, he needed that: the devastating wave of alcohol flooding through his whole body. He walks over to the living-room area and sniffs the drink, the way he knows it should be done. He has seen bigwigs from Paris do it, even a minister once, holding the glass like an expert, rolling this liquid gold around the sides. But all he can smell is alcohol fumes. He doesn’t care about the rest. The Kraut officers had the same habit in the common rooms of the prefecture, but some of them just gulped it down like schnapps while others went into raptures with members of the cabinet. He takes another drink and now he feels the heat rising up inside him giving him strength. Suddenly he is sure of himself again, belligerent and panting like a fierce dog.

  He hears the floorboards creak above him, so he finishes his drink and exhales again, shaking his head to rid himself of the sudden dizziness, and he climbs the stairs, holding onto the banister until his head stops spinning. Standing outside Elise’s door, he puts his ear to the wood. But he hears nothing so he knocks, twice, and abruptly enters. The girl, leaning over her notebooks, illuminated by a reading lamp, with a textbook open in front of her, slowly lifts her head to him and gives a tired smile. She blinks, eyes shining. Her legs are stretched out under the desk and her shoeless feet move in navy-blue tights, and Darlac doesn’t know if it’s the light and the shadows it paints on her face, in her eyes, but suddenly she looks like a young woman, smiling in her white, open-necked blouse, her blonde hair spilling over a cheek. He walks closer and his heart beats faster. That’s normal, he thinks: it’s the alcohol, the fatigue. But, standing very close to the girl, he is embarrassed by what he feels, and he leans down to kiss her as he always does and she moves her lips towards him and he feels them touch his cheek.

  The desire to plunge his hand down the cleavage of her blouse and to feel the roundness of a breast inside his palm is so powerful that he brusquely moves aside, his throat knotted, watched by the girl who looks amazed and asks him if he’s alright. Yes, he replies breathlessly, yes, he’s fine, just a bit of dizziness, it’ll pass, and when she stands up and moves close to him and touches her fingers to his burning, sweat-soaked neck, he grabs her hand so tightly that she cries out in pain and he says, no, I told you, I’m fine, leave me alone, so Elise steps back, holding her arm, you hurt me, what’s the . . . ?

  He leaves the room, practically bent double over his throbbing erection, a rutting beast escaping now to the bathroom where he frees this tension at the first contact with his fingers, groaning, his face twisted in the mirror, grumbling obscenities at the girl he imagines pressed against him.

  Afterwards, he looks in the mirror at his pale face glistening with sweat, the deep lines an arrow of disgust and contempt. He shakes his head, trying to rid himself of that bad dream, but succeeds only in giving himself a migraine that feels as if it will smash open his skull. Acid rises up the back of his throat and he has to close his eyes and hold on to the edge of the sink, just above the streak of his semen stuck to the porcelain.

  So he splashes water over all of this—his face, his heavy-lidded eyes, the milk-white cum purged from his body—and leaves the bathroom, feeling groggy, before returning downstairs. In the kitchen, he sees his wife from behind, immobile, arms hanging, in front of the gas cooker, the black seams of her stockings running up under her skirt towards that perfect ass where he will pour out his rage later, and he can’t understand what she’s doing there, head high, body frozen, knife in hand.

  19

  Daniel folds Irène’s letter and pushes it to the bottom of his trouser pocket, his heart swollen because, behind the words, he could hear her voice, her inflexions, even her laugh, and for five minutes he wasn’t in this shit heap anymore, he was torn away from this war and taken close to her. She said she’d received a postcard from Alain in Copenhagen, where it was snowing. He’s fine, he’s happy, he’s learning to speak English. He sends his greetings, his friendship. She also talks about other friends, about university and boring professors, about lecture halls with their oppressive silence, about poetry, which she is discovering with passion: not those quotes you learn at school, but real poetry, I know you don’t care, but where you are at the moment I think it would be a good way of escaping what you must be experiencing, although you don’t say much about it . . .

  He does not really see how poetry could change anything here: could it relieve the heat, make the rain fall, bring the dead back to life? What words, what meanings? Peace on earth and goodwill to all men? The kind of crap that preachers spout on Sundays in church? What prick of a writer would be capable of saying anything powerful enough to jam the infernal machine that he feels roaring around him, even if it’s idling at the moment? Words melt before iron and fire. Not long ago Maurice told him about Jaurès: even he had not been able to do anything, in ’14, for all his great speeches and fine words. No-one can ever speak louder than the mouth of a cannon. So . . . poets, with their poetic ways . . . He would like to understand what Irène is saying with her poetry. He would like to agree with her, speak like her. Maybe one day. He closes his eyes. Drifts into a daydream. He hears her voice whispering lines of verse to him, her lips to his ear. For a few seconds he is no longer in Algeria. The quarters, its dust, the shouts of young men at play, the blazing sun, the exhaustion, the boredom, even the war and its weapons all vanish. Perhaps that is what Irène’s poetry can offer? The possibility of escaping from time, of no longer feeling weighed down by the world.

  He should talk to Giovanni about this. He believes in words too. He’d like her letter. It’d be a good excuse to talk to him again, a way of approaching him, of finding something else to talk about other than the shit through which they’re wading. Since the ambush and the deaths of Declerck and the fellagha, his friend has been avoiding him. He barely even says hello, dodges all discussions. Daniel would like to talk to him about what happened because it would help him to see clearly through this fog that surrounds him, dense, heavy and suffocating, to try to understand what he felt when he held that man in the center of his scope. He would like to be able to find a few words to describe that perfect instant he experienced, that luminous clarity, to try to express the power that surged through him when he pulled the trigger, like an electric punch followed by a sort of K.O.

  He’d also like to tell him about t
he dream that he’s had every night since: after firing, he rushes towards his target but his cottonwool legs are incapable of carrying him and they give way beneath him, and when he suddenly finds himself in front of the bush there is no longer any dead man there nor any machine gun, not even the faintest trace of blood, so he feels relieved and wakes up and, for just a moment, liberated of this weight, he persuades himself that he has not killed anyone and everything goes back the way it was before, calm and clean, until reality descends on him with its filthy ass, pushing him down into the canvas pallet of his camp bed. He shivers and sees again that angular face, the copper skin, the man’s fixed profile and then the torn flesh of his wound, the debris of bones and teeth, the body jolting as the sergent fires three more bullets into it. He sees again the others prodding the corpse with the toes of their boots, their first contact with the enemy, proof that he exists beyond the stories told by officers and old soldiers. And then sleep is suspended above him, in the blackness, like a cloud hovering over a dry land, from which no rain will fall.

  At university, we created a committee for peace in Algeria and loads of students come to the meeting, sometimes just to talk crap, saying we should let those bougnoules fight it out among themselves instead of sending French boys to be killed there, you know the kind of thing . . . There are also discussions about independence: there are those who say we should negotiate with the F.L.N. to keep Algeria but in better conditions, with equal rights, but me and my friends, you know, Philippe and Régine, we’re for independence straight away because colonialism has done too much damage, not just in Algeria but everywhere. We have arguments sometimes and we don’t speak to each other for three days and then we make up, but I think they’ll end up agreeing with us because there’s really no other solution.

  He would like to talk to them, those students in their comfy chairs, but he doesn’t know what he would tell them: the heat, the thirst, the blisters on his feet, the fear, the dust, the filth, the insomnia, the stupidity, the alcohol, the solitude and the tears and the smiles when the post arrives, depending what their letters say . . . The war? He has been here two months and he hasn’t seen any of what he imagined he would see, but is war imaginable? He has never heard heavy artillery fire, and he still hasn’t seen fighter planes screaming past over hills. They barely even got to see six banana choppers31 flying over a ridge last week before they disappeared almost immediately afterwards. No combat. Stinking corpses one day in a ruined farm, and the ambush last week. That big asshole Declerck lying face down in the sand, and the torn-off face of that fell next to his machine gun.

  Apart from that, days and days to fill. Time planned out by the officers in little boxes that absolutely have to be filled out. Preparing meals. Cleaning and unblocking toilets. Emptying bins. Pouring diesel oil on rubbish and setting it on fire. Going out on patrol. Practicing shooting. Cleaning weapons. Changing the oil in the trucks and half-tracks. Changing a tire on a jeep. Going out in search of water. Writing letters home. Playing cards. Reading letters from home. Getting smashed.

  Mum has looked preoccupied for the last two or three days, I don’t know why. When I ask her what’s up with her she says it’s nothing, that she’s worried about you. But I can tell there’s more to it than that. Last night, when I came home, they were talking, her and Dad, and then they suddenly went silent. They looked embarrassed. Are you telling each other secrets? I asked, and Dad laughed: Yep, big secrets, too big for a kid like you, he replied and Mum laughed too, but I know them too well not to tell that there’s something else going on. Whatever you do though, don’t mention any of this when you write to them, because they’ll have a go at me for worrying you. But I’m telling you because I have to tell someone, and there is only you.

  There is only you. She’d underlined that phrase. What did she mean? She tells everything, all her moods and emotions, to Sara, who’s like a sister to her. And then there’s that friend she knew in secondary school, Régine, whom she tells everything to as well. Friends for life, until death. When they were kids, they talked all the time, him and Irène. They had their secret cabin, in a corner of a box room at the back of the courtyard, where Daniel would sometimes cry on her shoulder because he couldn’t remember his parents’ faces anymore and she would rock him, even though she was smaller than he was, understanding without knowing.

  There is only you. He repeats these words to himself, sitting on a crate in the narrow shade of a shelter, watching the others play ball in the dust.

  Irène.

  The boys jump and shout on either side of the net hung between two posts then suddenly yell at each other, arguing over whether the ball went over the line of stones around the court, and in those moments they stop moving, panting, faces gray with dust and striped sweat, while the traces of the disputed point are examined by the most determined of them, pacing the invisible line like surveyors, complaining and swearing, all of them, that they are sure, then laughing and promising that next time they will appoint a referee.

  Sometimes the sentry in his watchtower intervenes, claiming he has a better view from where he sits, like a tennis umpire, he says, and the players all laugh and tell him to fuck off and keep his eyes on the slopes of the valley that you’re supposed to watch when you’re up there, baking under the wavy canvas roof, leaning back against sandbags with only the machine gun and three flasks of lukewarm water for company.

  Sometimes Sergent Castel joins the game. He just walks onto the court, ignoring the team that is standing there, and he points to one man and says, “Alright, you, fuck off, I’m replacing you,” and he starts playing without a word, without a gasp, without showing any effort at all, his knife-like face utterly impassive. Of course, when he’s there the others don’t yell as much. They complain quietly, concentrate on playing better because the sergent’s like a bloody volleyball champion: he never misses a shot, making vicious winners from impossible angles, sending over unreturnable serves. The men furtively ogle his lean, slender muscles, moving beneath his skin like a nest of snakes, and the long scar that runs across his chest and up to the base of his neck. A fragment of mortar shell in Indo, a huge stroke of luck: right next to him, another piece, a kilogram of metal sent hurtling at three hundred kilometers an hour by the gods of war, took off half of a caporal’s head, a clean cut, almost anatomical. He told them this the other night in the meeting hall, pissed out of his head, dressed only in a pair of shorts, an undershirt and a belt with a sheathed dagger hung from it. A few guys found it hard to believe that such wounds could really exist, new soldiers, virgins to the horror. The sergent stared at them gravely, his eyelids heavy with alcohol blinking over his clear eyes, then he smiled sadly before downing a can of lager without breathing and retreating to his lair to put his drunken body to bed. He walked mechanically towards the exit, kicking out of the way any chairs and tables that happened to lie in his path, and for the minute that followed his departure no-one said anything until a man from Dunkirk, known as Jeanjean, said: “Once, in the factory, I saw a guy cut in two by a steel sheet.”

  The conversations had begun again, because true horrors were seen only in war, as a few of them knew. Sure, men might get crushed in a work accident, or suffocated, or ground into mincemeat, or split in half, leaving a finger or an arm or a leg inside a machine, and sure, it was the same blood that poured out. But it was as if it didn’t count somehow: dying for a boss was less significant than dying for your homeland, less chic. And they went on talking until lights out, about flesh and bones and blood and men’s sufferings, and they had all been drinking, the ones who talked, arms waving expressively, and the ones who listened, nodding or rolling their eyes. Daniel had moved from one group to the next, dazed, sickened, until he had found Giovanni, who had bought him a beer, the first they had shared since their row. But they barely said a word, too drunk, too distraught, lacking the strength to break the silence between them, a silence as dense and substantial as the fell Daniel had shot
. “I don’t understand anything anymore,” was all Daniel said. Giovanni had nodded his assent then theatrically clinked his bottle against Daniel’s before downing the contents. “Me neither,” he said before turning away and going to bed.

  The days pass like that. They keep busy. From time to time the N.C.O.s take groups of about twenty men on a march around the camp. They do some shooting practice, simulate combat situations. The men apply themselves, do what they’re told. They aim straight, crawl, run, climb, and jump. Clumsy, wobbly, exhausted. Castel often tells them they’re dead, but they don’t care, lying on the gravel and trying to get their breath back. Sometimes they apologize.

  “Sorry, sergent, I didn’t see him . . . I screwed up.”

  “Yeah, right,” he replies. “You can apologize to the fell who shoots you in the face. I’m not sure they really appreciate French politeness anymore, but it’s worth a go, I guess. You hopeless prick.”

  Occasionally a few of them act like soldiers and are rewarded with a pat on the back from the sergent on the way back to the camp, while the others sweat under their helmets, panting and limping, shirts stuck to their skin, cursing the stones that their leaden feet keep tripping over, holding empty flasks over their open mouths in the hope that a final drop will fall.

  Daniel can’t help loving all this. He isn’t afraid. He always tries to find the right reaction, the appropriate movement, the quickest way. He suppresses the vibrations of the machine gun in his closed fists and grits his teeth as he makes sure that his bursts of gunfire are brief and well-aimed, not ricocheting randomly from stones or tearing apart bushes like the long, spluttering, wayward farts of bullets that the others make, leaving them with lungs and magazines empty, almost relieved. He is able to hold off his fatigue until he gets back to quarters. During the training exercises he feels full of energy, lifted high above the others, and he knows this is the best he’s ever felt.