He walks towards the watchtower, looks up at the sentry standing near the machine gun. The man waves at him. How’s it going? Fine. The man turns back, lights a cigarette. Daniel starts to cry. It happens just like that; a violent urge, like puking. He stifles his sobs, walks away, hides behind the water truck riddled with bullet holes.
He doesn’t understand anything anymore. He cannot imagine his father coming back from the dead. The postcards of his memory are suddenly reshuffled, all those faded, time-stained images thrown down on the table, for a game whose rules he doesn’t know. When the tears finally ebb and the spasms in his chest ease, he walks over to the refectory, watching his vast shadow, and wonders if it’s really him that the setting sun is projecting onto the ground, or some other man. Or if he has, as they say, become a shadow of himself, a trace, a pale reflection of what he used to be.
In the middle of dinner, Caunègre stands up at the end of the table, in front of his mess tin filled with overcooked rice and meat of indeterminate provenance covered with a strong-smelling wine sauce. Castel does the same, and the men follow suit, but the lieutenant, with a paternal gesture, tells them to remain seated and he starts to talk about what happened today, what they had to do, what they will probably have to do again because they are at war here: yes, with all due respect to the politicians, it really is war they have been sent here to wage, to this country, to this province of our country, France, ravaged by armed gangs incapable of fighting fairly. He mentions the enemy’s methods in this guerrilla war, this cowards’ war, to which they must retaliate using the same methods, but without the barbarianism of that race who, were it not for France, would still be raising a few goats in barren fields. Without the throat-cutting, the mutilations, the disembowelments, the terror. Because that’s not war, and even if things get dirty sometimes, it’s important that they keep their hands clean.
“And your hands are clean, lads,” he adds, showing them his own hands the way children do to their parents after they’ve washed them.
A few of the men look down at their fingers or ball their fists while others don’t move, just stare at their stew going cold. Most of them look at the lieutenant, who is now resting both hands on the table like an orator or a teacher at his lectern, amid a silence broken only by the buzzing of flies.
Daniel, too, listens to Caunègre, and several times he meets his gaze as the officer sweeps his eyes over the men, sometimes seeming to speak directly to this one or that, although no-one can tell if he really sees those individuals or if he is just using a technique learned during officer training: how to address your men and establish your moral authority.
When the speech is over, they scrape clean their aluminium plates with metallic screeches that set their teeth on edge and loud chewing noises and then they stand up as soon as they’ve swallowed the last mouthful and go over to toss their dishes and cutlery into vast basins full of grease-curdled water, not even glancing at the poor dishwashers who throw soapflakes into that vile cold soup.
Daniel goes out into the warm night air and looks up at the vault of stars, touching Irène’s letter which is folded in his chest pocket. But the icy moonlight that rises in clouds above does not pick out any figure or show any path. It is a sky of indecipherable beauty, a sublime chaos, a phosphorescent mist that suddenly frightens him, as if it might crush him, choke him, dissolve him.
He remembers one night in the countryside just after the end of the war, sitting with Irène on a bench, looking up at the stars. The two of them were huddled close to Roselyne, who pointed out a few constellations that she knew, while they invented others: fantastical beasts, or strange faces, or flying saucers full of Martians, lights blinking as they moved closer. He remembers Irène asking if the Good Lord really was up there and where exactly and Roselyne telling them gently that there was nothing up there, only all those stars, but that it was already so beautiful, it was enough to fill the sky. Irène had squinted, examining the heavens more closely, and after a while she’d asked if that was where dead people went, so her mother had sighed and held them both even more tightly to her as she explained that each star was a memory and that the dead might be there and that all you had to do was think about them and the stars would shine. So stars are good then. In that case Mistigri is in a star and I can still see him. Yes. Even cats, my sweet. Even cats.
Daniel remembers how he had sat there alone after Irène and Roselyne had gone home and desperately searched for his parents’ stars without finding them, because they were all the same. Perhaps he had called out to them, whispering their names, but the silence had been heavy, and him so small, until a dog had started barking endlessly somewhere in the distance.
And now here he is under the same mute stars, far from his childhood beliefs, in the same oppressive silence despite the racket of the lads getting drunk in the mess hall. The woman he killed that morning, attempting to put her out of that terrible agony, will rot underground in a darkness without stars. There is nothing beyond this material world that engulfs everything.
Then he goes off to drink with the others, because there’s fuckall else to do. He gorges himself on beer, he talks with men who laugh without knowing why or who make fum of him, saying why the long face you’re not a fucking horse, telling him to stop being such a pansy you’ll see your mother again, saying all this as they pat his back and open another can. He eyeballs the two Parisians, who are chatting at a table with the caporal, then he goes out to piss and there are four of them already, emptying their bladders, waving their cocks and talking shit: I’d jerk off, but I’m so sick of it, I’m going to end up with blisters on my palms. And they all laugh, and one of them—Daumas—laughs so hard that he pisses on his feet and swears and scratches at the ground like a dog when he’s finished. And then Daniel goes back in the mess and dives through the hot, unbreathable smog that stinks of sweat and tobacco and he starts drinking like a fish again, pouring beers down into a bottomless hole, and the thought comes that a hole is exactly what he’s become, an abyss that must be filled and drowned before he falls inside it.
All night long, the booze beats in his temples and he sweats it out through every pore in his skin. All night long, he is buffeted by a dizzying sleep that floats through his dreams until he is torn from them by nausea and he opens his eyes, unsure whether he needs to get up to puke. After a moment, he slips out of the dorm in his underwear to try to make himself puke, but all that comes out is a monstrous belch and a migraine that hits him smack in the head and rips his brain open like a bullet, so he stays there, bent double, hands on his thighs, almost falling, and he feels the cold night air on his sweat-soaked back and shivers as his entire body is chilled through.
When he goes back to bed, he curls up and counts the stabbing beats of the migraine ringing in his temples, seven, eight, nine, then falls asleep as abruptly as a boxer knocked to the canvas.
He is woken by the pale blue edge of dawn light creeping under the door. He lies in the darkness and listens to the others snoring or shifting on their beds or turning over with a mumbled groan. They’re allowed an extra hour of sleep this morning, thank you, lieutenant. Then it’s wash day. It’s now or never. The idea has been planted there in his mind now, as impossible to ignore as the flagpole in the middle of the square.
He gets up. Puts on his trousers and undershirt. Takes his camouflage jacket and his boonie hat.
“What are you doing?”
He does not turn to face the slurry voice.
“Nothing. Going for a piss.”
He hears the man sigh then turn over, probably already asleep again.
He goes out into the cool air, into the light so pale it seems as if the sun is too shy to make an appearance. Eyes closed, he savours the breeze that is already stirring up dust. He walks around the outside of the mess hall and sits on the bench where he often goes at night, on an overhang that looks out over the valley. Pockets of mist cling to the tr
eetops and hang between thickets. Cigarette. An American one. His migraine and nausea are gone, and he’s hungry. He needs to eat, before. He waits there, letting his mind fill with confused thoughts that calm him down or make his heart pound. He dozes off at odd moments, swept away by a dream in which a couple have come to a train station to welcome the little boy he has become again, a kid who’s been to war, who’s killed a disfigured woman, a kid who recognizes the faces of Maurice and Roselyne but not the people, who are his parents, his mom holding him in her arms, and the voices, the voices silent for so long are talking to him and the faces vanish so he no longer knows how old he is, his childhood has gone, and it’s at this moment of breathless disarray that he wakes, opening his eyes to the golden-brown beauty of the new dawn, as night flees the valley in ribbons of mist.
The smell of coffee reaches his nostrils and he decides to join the others. He eats stale bread soaked in sweetened coffee and a few biscuits, then drinks another bowl standing up outside the mess hall.
All morning, he pretends to be absorbed by the collar of the shirt he’s rubbing, the sliver of soap that has slid to the bottom of the trough where the men do their laundry; he brushes, he rinses, he wrings, and the others do the same, sometimes talking about the kind, brave little woman who will soon be washing and ironing their shirts for them . . . The conversations don’t get any dirtier than this, because there are too many hangovers bent over the task in hand. The men speak in low voices, concentrating, rubbing hard at the filth. But the odor of soap is perhaps too familiar. Suddenly it’s as if they’re all home again, in the ordinary days of peacetime.
Daniel notices that the door of the caporal vaguemestre—a man named Ledain—is ajar. He hasn’t seen him come out, but he tries his luck anyway. Leaving the undershirt that he was scrubbing to soak in the murky water, he walks over to the building. The door is lopsided but robust, designed to be locked with a key. Daniel knocks. Calls out. No-one answers. He goes in and walks up to the little desk next to a window, opens the bottom drawer, finds the key, and shoves it in his pocket. He hasn’t breathed for almost a minute. Ledain could arrive at any moment. He’s a sneaky little fucker. He’s been suspected of opening letters that he thinks are from women. No proof. But it seems like the kind of thing that slimy perv would do.
Outside, the circus continues. A few men start hanging their laundry on wire clotheslines that stretch across the refectory. Sergent Castel emerges from his lair, bare-chested, in shorts and espadrilles. He looks all around, sees Daniel, and observes him for quite a long time, one hand held over his eyes to shade them from the brutal sun, then he nods and Daniel salutes him, just in case, and Castel turns away, shaking his head and shrugging, maybe out of disappointment, or maybe because his head feels like a bag of pool balls clunking down a staircase.
Daniel finds his things where he hid them, under the front seat of the jeep, folded inside his dirty shirt, tied up in haste. The engine roars straight into life. He knows the jeep is in good shape: he helped change the oil the other day. A nice strong motor. And the tank is three-quarters full.
“Hey!” yells the man on top of the watchtower.
Daniel waves to him without turning around, then begins his manoeuvre. He is facing the gate, flanked by sandbags. The engine purrs smoothly. When he looks up at the watchtower, he no longer sees the sentry, who probably couldn’t care less about this jeep or the guy driving it. He puts it into gear and leaves the enclosure, driving slowly, and descends the steep little ramp that leads to the road with his foot off the accelerator. When he reaches the road, which is wider, he steps on the pedal, opens his mouth wide and swallows the air that blows into his face, and lets loose a yell, then another one, as if he wants the mountains and their rocks to hear him, then he sits back more comfortably in the seat and pulls his hat down firmly on his head so it won’t fly off. He finds a pair of goggles hanging on the gearstick, so he puts them on, well aware that they make him look like some loony just escaped from an asylum, which is pretty much the case: an asylum that breeds insanity on a mass scale, crazed killers, sexual obsessives, silent idiots and dazed pissheads; an asylum that takes their soul and returns them soiled, crumpled, stinking, shrunken, like a shirt smeared with all the shit from their body, covered with sweat and blood and vomit and piss and then dragged through the mud, their soul reduced to a tattered uniform stained with all this human vileness.
He drives as fast as he can, feeling an intoxicated freedom in his chest, swollen like a stifled sob, a freedom he has never known before. They could stop him at the next crossroads and throw him in jail, but they’ll never be able to catch him again. They will never be able to steal what fills his heart.
He drives like this for three hours, alone in the empty landscape, like the war’s last survivor. No peasants, no carts, no roadblocks. He sees smoke rising from a few chimneys in distant villages. On a curve of the road overlooking the valley, he stops and cuts the engine. He gets out of the jeep and it seems to him that the two or three steps he takes are his first. He has never felt so clearly, starkly aware of being upright and moving forward. The hot wind blows around his solid, firmly planted legs. Daniel shuffles the soles of his boots on the pebbly ground.
The wind blows silence into his ears. Whispers the peace of the world. The sky is a harsh blue, like a painted window. The steepsided valley is a hotchpotch of blinding slabs of light and caverns still filled with darkness. He opens up the dirty shirt and takes out his little frame, then unfolds it and captures the landscape in a long, slow panorama, and suddenly each stone, the slightest trace of shadow, starts to vibrate and he has the impression that everything is beginning to bake gently under the sun in a silent quivering.
He ends his shot and catches his breath. He is surprised by the width of the frame, the depth of field. He realizes that he has become used to the magnification of the rifle scope. For weeks now, he has looked for and seen nothing but targets. He stands there a moment longer on this outcrop and tries to think about all this, but suddenly becomes aware that time is passing and that he needs to reach the city as soon as possible, before they start searching for him.
He weaves through the agitation of the city at this hour, just before the shops close until the evening. He passes other jeeps, trucks with three or four soldiers slumped in the back. With his hat pulled down over his ears and his motorbike goggles, his filthy undershirt gaping under his arms, he imagines people will take him for some fierce warrior, returned from the jebel to enjoy his leave. He recalls the thirty men in a commando de chasse35 that spent one night at the base: armed to the teeth, some of them dressed in rags and each in his own style, wearing parachute jump boots. They looked more like a gang of highway robbers than a unit of the French army. The officer who commanded them, an unshaved capitaine wearing a scarf on his head like a pirate, wore no emblem or stripes. He never gave orders. His platoon acted like he did, as one, showing neither weariness nor zeal. Those men really stuck together. They sat apart and ate their Muslim rations—which everyone knew to be less disgusting than the regular ones—and they all slept in a half-collapsed building that was generally used as a garage, then left at dawn, without a word, after drinking gallons of coffee in the mess hall.
He likes the idea that all those dickheads could believe that. He abandons the jeep two blocks from the barracks where they came before to pick up supplies. He puts on his shirt and lets it hang out so he looks as little as possible like a soldier. But his canvas walking shoes, his baggy combat trousers, all that beige and khaki make it obvious that he is walking armed through the street in the middle of this indifferent but lively and colorful crowd, scattered with red dresses and white shirts.
He walks back to the café where he ate with Giovanni that day, remembering the way as he goes, then turns into the Arab part of town. Hundreds of eyes staring at him; he can feel them on his back. Dark, wide, frightened eyes. Voices whispering as he passes. Words spat in front of him.
Insults, he is sure. He wishes he could tell them. Tell them how much he deserves their insults. And ask them the price of redemption for what he’s done. Four kids follow him, jabbering away, and they ask him where he’s going and laughingly explain that the army’s not this way. And he smiles, says he knows, thank you, and he ups his pace, until a sharp voice echoes down the street and sends the kids running off amid peals of laughter.
He wanders lost for nearly an hour before he spots the carpenter’s shop and recognizes the corner of the street where Autin lives.
He knocks at the door and looks around as Giovanni did, but can see nothing at the end of this shadowy alley but the constant toing and froing of passers-by in the sunlight, can hear nothing but the shouts and laughs of children, the frenzied songs of caged birds, the whine of a saw from the carpenter’s workshop. He jumps when the bolt slams and almost recoils in the glare of the professor’s eyes when they stare at him, hostile or reproachful, weighing him up with a frown as he notices the disheveled uniform. Say something. Find the right words. Daniel senses that the door is about to close.
“Giovanni is dead.”
“Come in. Don’t stay there.”
Autin buries his hands in his pockets and leans against the wall.
“How did it happen?”
“It was on the road, the day we came to see you. An ambush. The lieutenant died too. And another guy who was in the jeep at the head of the convoy. Giovanni took two bullets in his belly. The new lieutenant and the sergent told me they couldn’t do anything to save him at the hospital.”
After the War Page 42
