After the War

by Hervé Le Corre

  Now and then, Castel will pat him on the shoulder without saying anything, or stare at him and nod. Never a word of encouragement. Never does he pick out Daniel as an example to the others. Only this silent complicity between them. Oh, except for one day, when they got back to the camp: “That was good, but when the day comes, you’ll have to hold it all together. You ain’t seen nothing yet.”

  But today the sergent remains invisible, keeping to his digs the way he often does when nothing’s happening. It’s said that he can sit for hours on the ground, legs crossed, hands on his knees and eyes closed, with his weapons ranged around him. Sometimes when the men knock on his door and get no reply, they open up and go inside and find him like that, then make their excuses and leave, and tell the lieutenant what they saw. He always advises them to leave the sergent the fuck alone.

  This evening, everyone stands around the flagpole, with the flag hanging motionless in the air, as tomorrow’s missions are announced. The sergent stands at the back, hatless, unmoving, thumbs wedged in his belt, impassive behind his dark glasses. They have to find water because the level of water has dropped again. They’ll pick up a water truck in town, as a safeguard against the coming heat of summer. He asks the N.C.O.’s to choose the men who will be in the convoy. A jeep and a half-track with seven men. The lieutenant announces that he will be on the mission because he has to see the colonel. The sergent will stay here to hold the fort. Dismissed.

  Daniel is chosen. So is Giovanni. A trip to town. Already they are dreaming of a pastis and a bowl of olives. Some of the lads complain: they’re scared shitless, talking about ambushes and mines. Others are happy to go: they want to see girls walk past in the street, and they’re planning on a trip to the brothel—they have the address and the price list: it’s pretty cheap if you fuck a native. But Carlin, the caporal, remains inflexible. Meet tomorrow at 5 a.m.

  They go off to eat boiled potatoes and sardines in oil. Two or three saucissons and a few terrines of pâté that came in the post are gobbled down. And, mouths full of charcuterie, the men go on, as they always do, about how much they miss home. Fuck, what wouldn’t they give for a glass of red, a bowl of their grandmother’s hotpot, a dozen oysters with a glass of white . . . The lads sigh as they tell each other stories of feasts they’ve eaten and secret recipes. They drool and sigh again and push back their empty plates.

  Daniel can’t sleep. He tosses and turns on his pallet in the relentless heat. Irène. Everywhere he sees her face, her smile, her sulks. Her body. He sees her as she’s leaving the bathroom, rushing through the hallway, her nightgown half undone or her slip revealing the tops of her thighs. He hasn’t looked at her for a long time, but right now she is all he can see.

  Irène.

  31The H-21, atandem rotor American helicopter known as the “Workhorse,” was widely used during the Algerian War (and later in Vietnam) for the transport of troops and medical evacuations. Its characteristic curved shape earned it the nickname of the “Flying Banana.”

  20

  He has not seen Abel for nearly twenty years. Abel Mayou, a notorious fraud, two spells in prison, the last time in late ’40 for having extorted funds from the mother-in-law of a deputy mayor in Bordeaux. Five years. He spent the Occupation in the fortress of Ha, sharing his cell with Jews and Resistance fighters. They’d tried to use him as a spy, getting those assholes to talk, but it was no good. Not even the prospect of being freed, not even money could get him to cooperate. He wasn’t interested. So he did his five years and he got out in ’45, having lost quite a bit of weight, quite a lot of hair and some of his pride too. Maybe he had T.B. He certainly had no cash, and he was thin as a rake. Apparently he wasn’t such a poseur anymore when his whore, la Violette, picked him up outside the prison.

  Darlac had been relieved when Abel was locked up. Given what was happening—all these opportunities opening up for profiting from the shit heap of war—he felt happier knowing Abel was safely at a distance. He would undoubtedly have stuck his nose in wherever he smelled something fishy, and the cunning bastard would have taken a malign pleasure in thwarting some of Darlac’s most lucrative schemes. He would never have worked with the Krauts. Too rebellious, too disobedient. He hated the wealthy and the powerful too much for that. A first-rate con man he might have been, but he claimed to have moral principles, and was happy to talk about them during those Sundays by the waterfront, while laughing at the rich suckers he’d swindled. He was no Robin Hood either; he kept it all for himself: fine wines, cars, women, that house on the bay . . . The losers he invited to that place in the shade of the pines would guzzle down all his food, slurp grands crus like they were the usual gut-rot they drank in their local bars, spread foie gras on toast like it was sandwich paste, then unbutton their jackets to let their swollen bellies hang out, leaning back in their chairs or lying sated in the grass, a hat balanced over their eyes.

  Abel was too crafty to piss them off by forcing them to show some gastronomic respect or by trying to teach them about the finer things in life. They would have reacted badly to any lectures about taste or their lack of it, especially in front of their wives, whom they often brought along with them to get them out of the house, as they said. Those oafs, those losers were his eyes and ears in the city and all over its suburbs. He gave them free rein at his table in return for premium information or useful gossip. Once he’d got them drunk on Médoc or Pomerol, they wouldn’t stop talking. And Abel pampered them, letting them burp and fart to their hearts’ content, listening attentively to all their secrets, their slanders and lies, solemnly swearing not to breathe a word.

  Darlac turned up sometimes, invited by Abel, whom he’d met in the chief’s office and had then met up with again because each of them had quickly seen how the relationship could prove profitable. The thugs didn’t talk quite so freely with Darlac there, but the presence of a corrupt cop reassured them: it was good to have that kind of connection when your business was as risky as theirs. That was where he first met Jean Delbos. That was how they became friends.

  Friends. The word comes to his mind and he pushes it away and tries to defend himself, but he cannot help remembering that, for at least four years, they had seen a lot of each other, sharing evenings, girls, losses and winnings at cards, pale early mornings and hangovers. And sometimes a few confidences, when Delbos would tell him about his life, his wife Olga, her parents (Hungarian Jews who arrived in France in ’21), her friends (communists who dreamed of enrolling in the International Brigades in Spain), people with whom he seemed ill at ease, this poor, untrustworthy accountant living buttoned up tight in the straitjacket of his daily life, this night bird who could not imagine life without the daylight of his wife.

  No-one in the force has heard anything about Abel Mayou since he got out of prison. Done his time and gone straight, everyone says. None of the city’s gangsters even seem to know who Darlac means when he mentions him. The old-timers remember him as a con man from the pre-war years, but that’s all: maybe he’s dead, they say, or maybe pissed off elsewhere.

  Darlac shakes these thoughts from his head, refusing to consider them more deeply. He gets out of the car and is drenched by a downpour as he walks along the sidewalk to the house, ducking his head as he waits for the door to be opened.

  Darlac has trouble recognizing the man who stands in the doorway and whose eyes flicker from side to side, trying to spot any other cops hidden behind him. Thin, bald, dark-eyed and hollowcheeked. A sick man. Darlac does not like sick people. He mistrusts their weakness or their pig-headedness, when they start whining about their fate or philosophising about the unshakable principles they hide behind as a form of dignity in their last-chance saloon.

  “Well, well. Commissaire Darlac. And you came here alone, no cavalry? You’re taking risks.”

  “Let me in. It’s pissing down out here.”

  Abel moves out of the way to let the cop into his entrance hall and leads
him to a dim living room, lit only by a French window with rain streaming down.

  “How are you?” Darlac asks.

  “As you can see. Did you come here to ask about my health?”

  “I’m looking for Jean. Jean Delbos.”

  “Jean is dead. Olga too. End of story.”

  “He’s not though. And you know it. Olga, sure—she died in the camps. But he came back. He’s calling himself André Vaillant.”

  “Vaillant? Doesn’t sound like him.”

  “He’s killed six people. Don’t you read the paper?”

  “Not every day. Anyway, who cares? For me he’s dead, even if he did come back. Even if he came here, he’d still just be a fucking ghost. And I don’t let ghosts into my home.”

  Darlac pulls a chair from under the table and sits down. He unbuttons his raincoat and his jacket, revealing the butt of his gun in its holster. He sees Abel notice it. Sees him smile, blink contemptuously.

  “You didn’t always feel like that about him. At least not when you were trying to screw his wife.”

  Abel sits down and leans his elbow on the table.

  “I should smash your fucking face in. I should skin you alive for what you just said. But I’m tired. Anyway, I don’t attack pricks with guns cos they don’t know how to defend themselves like men.”

  He coughs, catches his breath, takes a handkerchief from his pocket and spits phlegm into it. Seeing his face turn red, Darlac wonders how long he’s got left. He thinks about that other walking corpse, Crabos, and wonders what’s become of him, down in Spain. If the cancer finally killed him off, catching him off guard one day, like a vicious bull in a corrida.

  Hand trembling, Abel points to the door. His handkerchief is rolled in a ball inside his palm.

  “Fuck off. You stink. You make me want to puke. Other people die and you’re the one that smells like a rotting carcass.”

  Darlac does not move. He just nods at this insult, eyes to the ground, and waits for the moment to pass. Abel has another brief coughing fit, and puts a hand to his chest as if this might help him breathe more easily. Just then Darlac hears the door open, someone exhaling, an umbrella being closed. A woman’s voice. Soft and muffled.

  “It’s me. Everything O.K.?”

  Almost immediately a head appears in the frame of the door. The woman is wearing a red scarf, which she unties as she stares at Darlac. She is tall and thin, almost too thin. Darlac looks for her breasts, but can’t see much under the sweater she wears. Short hair. Long, handsome face. Huge dark eyes. Little or no make-up. She looks like a portrait of the Madonna stuck on top of a pile of bones. Darlac doesn’t like feeling anything hard under his fingers. He likes the soft sweetness of flesh. She stares at him indifferently, as if he were just some door-to-door salesman, flogging Hoovers or fridges. He stares back.

  “It’s Commissaire Darlac,” says Abel. “I must have mentioned him to you.”

  The woman continues looking at Darlac, then runs a hand through her hair and moves out of sight.

  “Oh, yes. I remember. Darlac. He wasn’t commissaire before though, was he?”

  He can hear her take her shoes off, hang her raincoat on the hat stand in the hallway. When she comes into the room, her feet shuffling along the floor in a pair of old slippers, shopping bag in hand, she goes first to Abel and strokes his face, then nods at Darlac before going through to the kitchen.

  “Who’s that? Your maid?”

  “Shall I put salt in his coffee or is he leaving now?” the woman asks from the kitchen.

  “This is Violette. The woman I live with. Now, fuck off.”

  “Violette who? Does she have a surname or did you just pick her from the ground one snowy night?”

  Violette comes out of the kitchen, rummaging through her handbag, then tosses her identity card at him.

  “Marini, Violette Giuletta. Born in Nice, third of November, 1916. Parents’ names: Angelo and Anna Marini.”

  Darlac puts the document on his knee, then gets to his feet, letting the card fall to the floor.

  “A wop whore. Just what you needed. I hope she knows how to clean a toilet and cook spaghetti, cos you don’t look in a fit state to enjoy her other skills. Tell Delbos—”

  Abel stands up and moves towards him, grabbing the lapels of his raincoat.

  “I told you, Delbos is dead to me, even if he’s alive. He never deserved a woman like Olga; he was just the kind of little shit that cops like you like having up their sleeve. I don’t know what the two of you got up to together and I don’t want to know. If he’s killed people, then catch him and leave us the fuck alone. Got it?”

  Breathing hard, he lets go of Darlac. Then coughs and sits down.

  The commissaire stands motionless in front of them, staring at each one in turn, grinning at the woman’s tense, hostile expression. Then he turns his back on them and leaves without a word. Outside, under a low gray sky that is still spitting rain, he thinks about the passing of time, how it distances people from each other, like rafts drifting downriver, wrecked, rudderless ships that have survived terrible storms. And he, Albert Darlac, is navigating through this inland sea like some big, scary carnivore—a shark or a killer whale: he doesn’t really know the difference, and doesn’t care either—capable of diving through fathomless abysses or of floating close to the surface, on the scent of blood.

  Behind the wheel of his car, he lights a cigarette and lowers the window to feel the wet air on his face and to let these stupid thoughts be blown away. Fuck it: don’t think, don’t weaken. Just keep going. Act. Fuck them all.

  21

  The convoy leaves just before dawn. Inside the half-track, Daniel looks up at the haze of stars that floats above them, and Baltard—a lad from Normandy, sitting behind the .50-calibre machine gun and stroking its handles—laughingly asks him how many there were.

  “If you count them all, I’ll buy you a whore this afternoon!”

  Bernier, the caporal, chuckles as he gets into the vehicle, and Giovanni shakes his head, staring at his shoes.

  The road is mostly flat, so the men only have the dust to worry about. Dawn rises sudden and clear, as it often does here. The landscape appears almost painfully stark, bristling with sharp rocky ridges, reddish scree, chasms still filled with the blue, transparent night. The men are packed close together, sleepy, dazed by the screech of the caterpillar tracks, their faces invisible in the shadows of their helmets. The machine-gunner must have fallen asleep for a little bit: Daniel sees his skinny body jolted around in the turret, as the wheels bounced over ruts. There is a part of the journey where the valley steepens and narrows, the walls rising sharply to either side, scattered with puny bushes, where the road slows down in bends with no visibility. The drivers leave fifty meters between vehicles here, because if there is going to be an ambush, this is where it will be. And the men hold their weapons and scan the rocky slopes, watching the unsettling shapes made by the shadows of boulders. The machine-gunners turn their barrels towards the rockslides on the valley sides where nothing moves but the cold wind that rises with the sun. After half an hour, the soldiers go back to dozing like tortoises, the gun barrels are lowered, and the column rumbles forward again, lifting tons of ochre dust, in a suffocating cloud of thick, black exhaust fumes.

  They don’t see a soul on the road, apart from a gendarme roadblock where a bus is being searched. Its passengers—women, children, and old people, all of them Arabs—are herded by the roadside, hands on heads, the machine gun on the cops’ armored car trained on them. Suitcases, bundles, baskets, all have been thrown to the ground and emptied out. Clothes and utensils are mixed up in the dust. Daniel turns his head back to get a better view of these humiliated people, and is surprised, once again, that not one of them moves or protests, and it seems to him that he can see, despite the growing distance, the forty or so pairs of dark eyes unblinkingly foll
owing every movement made by the gendarmes, shining with a mixture of fear and hatred.

  He elbows Giovanni. He hisses into his ear, over the roar of the vehicle as it crunched over the rutted tarmac.

  “Did you see that?”

  “What?”

  “The search. Those people.”

  “That’s war, comrade. Haven’t you noticed? Some people even get killed.”

  “For fuck’s sake! I get it, alright?”

  “No, it’s not alright. I’m going to get out of here.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I’ll show you later. In town.”

  In the paved streets, the air becomes clear again and they stare, surprised, at the trees bordering the avenues, the passers-by on the sidewalks, the white façades of buildings. They take off their helmets and put their guns at their feet and stare up at the obvious tranquillity around them. They say hello to the kids dressed in rags who wave their hands and yell at them in Arabic.

  “They’re calling us sons of bitches,” says Giovanni.

  “Why do you say that?” asks Bernier. “Speak Arabic, do you?”

  “Because it’s true. And it’s what I’d do if I were them.”

  “Careful with that big mouth of yours, Zacco. This isn’t a fucking communist rally.”

  “Oh yeah? And what are you going to do about it, with your little stripes? Throw me in prison? Fine—at least I’ll be out of this shithole.”

  “Shut your fucking mouth. We’ve got something better than jail for pricks like you. That’d be too easy, jerking off in the shade while the rest of us get our balls cut off. There are special battalions where you’ll go out hunting fells every day, and where you’ll have to roast their bollocks with electric shocks until the fuckers sing the “Marseillaise.” And you’ll have to obey orders if you don’t want to be in the front line all the time, at the head of the patrol, ready to take the first crouille bullet that comes flying through the air. Prison? That’s too fucking good for the likes of you, buddy! You’re like those ratons in their underground dens, and you deserve the same fate as them!”