After the War

by Hervé Le Corre

  They put their memories in order, shared them sometimes, admitting their nostalgia, their regrets, their remorse, their inconsolable pain, and as time went by André felt his obsession with vengeance wilting as his words built the story of his life and finally allowed his hurt to cry out. He felt as if he were escaping a dark, silent cave and hearing what he had kept quiet about, seeing more clearly despite the blinding daylight. There was no consolation or relief though, in this enlightenment. His pain was there constantly, throbbing, like a toothache, with occasional darts of intolerable agony.

  When André—from now on he is Jean again, for good, as he was before—wakes up every morning, after the dazed feeling left behind by his nightmares has dissipated, and feels the same bite in his guts, the same racing of his heartas he thinks of Darlac, of their corrupted friendship, of his betrayal, of his crime. He can still find any number of reasons to kill him, but he struggles to find the strength to do it. Getting dressed, he thinks of his two absent loves: Hélène on the dance floor, long legs and crazy hair, mouth half open as if she were hesitating between a scream and a smile; Olga walking in the distance, turning back to look for him without seeing him, scanning the crowd with her fever-bright eyes.

  He smiles alone at their shadows and he looks at his hands, which can touch them no longer.

  There’s a knock at the door. Six in the morning, by his watch. This is just after he has heard two gates bang in the street. “Jean!” Violette calling him from the bottom of the staircase. The bag in the wardrobe. The notebooks are there. He shoves clothes in there, lifts it to his shoulder. Puts on a pair of espadrilles, trips over and falls to his knees by the window. Downstairs, they are hammering at the door. “Police! Open up!”

  He jumps into the garden, lands on a concrete terrace. He can see nothing around him but high walls. Behind, inside the house, the sounds of doors slamming, furniture being tipped over. Through the open windows he hears yelling. Violette insulting the cops, their deep voices abusing her. André throws himself against a wall, gets a grip on the top, pulls himself up and swings over to the other side just as the French windows behind him are smashed by a shoulder charge. He falls in the middle of a rose bed, his hands scratched, the strap of his bag caught by thorns, tearing off flowers as he pulls it free. He runs a few meters through this long, narrow garden and he feels something stuck in his ankle hampering his progress, and he has to remove the spiky branch hooked to the cloth of his trouser leg before stepping over another wall, at the back of thegarden, between two palm trees, and slumping into a spruce pine hedge and rolling across a lawn and getting up and running towards a terrace where a man appears in front of a garden table with a coffee pot sitting on it. The man yells, out of surprise or fear, and André grabs him by his shirt collar and shoves him into the iron chairs where he collapses, and suddenly it’s still the darkness of morning in this house cluttered with sombre furniture and the air thick with the smell of polish and coffee and cold ashes.

  There is a large key in the lock and the door bangs loudly and then he’s in the street. He goes right, slowing down when he loses an espadrille and has to put it back on while hopping. He can’t hear anything now, and can’t work out where he is because he has hardly left the house in the last month and the neighborhood is unknown to him. Turning on the street corner, he sees the boulevard and its traffic. He stops running because he’s exhausted: his legs tremble and his breathing is a painful wheeze; he has to cough and spit in the gutter. He starts walking again and rummages around in his pockets and his bag, in search of some cash—just a few coins so he can catch a bus—but he does not find anything, and realizes he has left everything behind: his wallet, papers (real and false), money, and the pistol hidden under the mattress. He walks along the sidewalk, in the shade, beneath a summer sky so pure that he instinctively starts taking deep breaths, as if he could absorb it whole. He knows he is at their mercy now: tomorrow his photograph will be in the newspaper again and every cop in the city will be after him; every bar owner and every waiter and every hotel receptionist will have his picture on their counter, close to the telephone, ready to help the police.

  He enters the labyrinth of streets, changing direction and sometimes doubling back in order to lose anyone who might be tailing him. And then he says to himself that they are not interested in following him anymore, because all he can lead them to is himself; what they want is to catch him and get rid of him, with a bullet in the head if need be, to avoid all questions, close the case and allow the newspaper to publish a front page with the headline dangerous criminal shot by police after an exchange of gunfire, thereby selling more papers to all those people who like reading stories of blood and crime. He’d be found, without a doubt, pistol in hand, the barrel still smoking, the stink of burned gunpowder. Darlac would have a credible crime scene that no cop would dare denounce and no judge would question. He thinks about all this as he crosses the city, sticking to the edges of the sidewalks, imagining he could still escape them, inventing boltholes through which he might flee, unexpected hiding places, just as he used to when he was a kid playing cops and robbers in the playground.

  No more shadows around him. Only the brutal reality of the city, the transparency of an indifferent summer morning. He is no longer being followed by the dead nor by his memories.

  He crosses the city, heart in his throat whenever he hears a police siren or whenever a car slows down or stops in front of him. He watches figures reflected in shop windows, turns around, stops, scans the street in every direction. More than once he thinks about turning back and returning to Abel’s house to attempt one final gesture, returning there by chance, attacking Darlac and grabbing his throat in the hope of finding some sort of blade to hand so he can slit it open up to his chin like he did with that scumbag Penot. He shivers at this thought: he can see himself, almost feel himself, covered with blood, kicked and punched by the other cops, beaten to death maybe, but he won’t let go of the commissaire’s twitching corpse until he himself sinks into unconsciousness, and it won’t even matter because the satisfaction he feels will be absolute, and once he’s accomplished that all his desires will drain away, even the desire to live . . . He realizes that the conversations with Abel did not change anything. They calmed him at the time because death, prowling the room, stealing the sick man’s breath every time it passed close, had forced him to lay down his weapons, had made his deepest hatreds and rawest griefs seem meaningless. At the edge of the abyss where Abel teetered, he didn’t dare move. Too relieved not to fall into it again.

  When André arrives within sight of the garage, Claude Mesplet is standing in front of the door, talking with a customer, close to a car with an open hood. He walks over and the mechanic sees him. Mesplet turns away and continues explaining to the customer that it should work now, then bangs shut the hood. The customer hands him some cash and gets in. The car moves away. It’s almost noon and the street is hot, without a shadow to be seen.

  “What do you want?”

  Mesplet stands in front of him, hands in his overall pockets. Sleeves rolled up. Thick forearms, soiled with grease.

  “The cops are after me. I was staying with a friend. They came this morning. I don’t know where to go. I left everything back there. My papers, everything.”

  “You want money, is that it?”

  Mesplet looks down at his grazed ankles, the bottom of his trouser legs stained with blood.

  “No. Not money.”

  “Come in. It’s hot out here.”

  They go into the garage. The apprentice is refitting a wheel. He looks up, recognizes André and smiles at him.

  “How’s the bike?”

  “It’s good. Runs like a dream.”

  Mesplet stands over the filthy sink and washes his hands.

  “You can stop,” he tells the apprentice, without turning around. “You got what you need?”

  “Yeah, I’m fine. My mother
made me lunch.”

  The boy goes to the office to fetch a small navy-blue bag and sits on a heap of tires in a shady corner near the door.

  The boss wipes his hands on a black-stained cloth. André leans against the side of a 403. Dizziness and nausea. Mesplet pretends not to notice how pale he is, nor the sweat running down his face.

  “Let’s sit down in there,” he says.

  They enter the glass-walled office, decorated with calendars advertising Motul, Cinzano, Dubonnet: happy motorists and pretty girls smile from their pages, holding glasses. Mesplet pulls a chair from under a desk covered with files and bills and pushes it towards André. He sits on a stool, then takes a bag from a nearby cupboard. The clinking of bottles inside.

  “You’ll have to make do with what I’ve got.”

  Bread, saucisson, tomato salad, cheese. They wash it down with wine mixed with water. André forces himself to swallow. He chews but it seems to get stuck in his cardboard-dry gullet. He remembers mess tins shared between three or four people after the camp was liberated, hesitant hands wiping the juices from the bottom of metal bowls. The rations the American soldiers secretly gave them in spite of orders not to overfeed the survivors. He starts shivering. Almost knocks his glass over when he puts it down.

  “Are you cold?”

  “It happens sometimes. It’s nothing. It’ll pass.”

  Winter. Rain, snow and wind. He feels as if he’s back there now, in the same destitution, the same solitude. He thinks about Abel again, his frightening thinness, death pulsing under the skin of his belly like an unborn animal. He sees the fleshless bodies again. The comrades who couldn’t get up, could hardly move, deaf to the words of freedom, of the end of the nightmare. And in their eyes it still shone, glassy and noxious, the glare of that unbearable dream. André is back there again. Sucked into the past by a whirlwind. The pain is the same, a pain he hasn’t felt in years. The hunger less so. It grips him like a fever.

  The mechanic gets up and grabs a bottle of cognac from an old sideboard cluttered with paperwork and spare parts. He pours some into a glass and gives it to André.

  “Here. This’ll warm you up a bit.”

  André swallows a mouthful, then coughs and spits. He feels a hot shudder run through his body and he clings to the chair to stop himself falling to the floor. Watching Mesplet through his tears, he catches his breath.

  “We talked about you, me and Maurice and Roselyne. That cop Darlac, he’s after you, and he went to their house. Came here too. For all those murders. Is it true you killed all those people like it says in the paper? Those collaborators, and that cop?”

  “No . . . It’s complicated. Anyway, what difference does it make to you?”

  André does not have the strength to tell his story again. He gets to his feet. No longer cold. Able to stand.

  “I’m going to leave now. Thanks for the food.”

  Claude Mesplet stands up too.

  “Where will you go?”

  “I don’t know. I need to think.”

  He thinks that if he starts walking something will come to him, that it will all become clear. He wants to leave this office, this clammy, airless heat. Wants to feel air move over his face. In front of him, Mesplet hesitates, swaying heavily.

  “I can’t let you go like that. I’ve got a little flat upstairs. A bed, a sink. A scullery with a camping stove. It’s clean. I lived there with my wife when I first took over the garage. I’ll bring you some clothes and something to eat.”

  André looks into his eyes and the two men stare at each other, unblinking and silent, for several seconds.

  “Why would you do that?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe cos you’re Daniel’s father, no matter what, and I don’t want you to go to jail without being able to defend yourself. And also maybe cos you had your reasons for all that, that I can’t understand. I’ve always been a bit heavy, a bit slow. I don’t know . . . We talked about it with Maurice and Roselyne. They say what you’re doing is up to you, cos of what you suffered, and we shouldn’t judge you. And if Olga chose you, and she stayed with you till the end . . . well, you must be worth something . . . There, you see? I’m talking crap again.”

  He takes a key from a drawer and opens a door that is almost invisible, hidden behind a panel with tools and timing belts hanging from it.

  The staircase is dark and cool. Mesplet opens the door to the apartment and a smell of dust and mouldy paper escapes instantly. The floorboards creak under their feet. It’s a large room, with two windows overlooking the street. Thin strips of sunlight creep through the louvred shutters. A large bed, a table, three chairs.

  “The toilet’s downstairs, in the workshop. I’ll bring you whatever you need in the afternoons. What do you reckon? If you want to think, you’ll be better off here than in the streets like a tramp.”

  “Thank you. I won’t bother you for long. Just enough time to make a decision.”

  André puts his bag on the mattress. Mesplet pushes open the shutters. Dust dancing in a flood of daylight. As the mechanic is about to leave, André asks him:

  “Have you heard from Daniel?”

  To start with, Mesplet shakes his head, looking down. Then he meets André’s eyes.

  “He came home last week. He deserted. He’s in hiding. Like you.”

  The door closes, and André sits on the bed and stays there for some time, head in his hands, incapable of moving, convinced that he will never be able to stand up again, as if he’s been chained to a wall. He can see that everything is coming to an end. He knows that this refuge will be his last. I’m going to have to die now, he thinks, and this resolution seems reasonable to him.

  He lets himself fall to one side and thinks about his son. He can’t summon any image of him, except the vague memory of a little boy with big dark eyes, always very serious-looking. His son, hiding somewhere in the city right now, just like him. His son, whom he can’t approach without dragging the ghost of the boy’s mother behind him. So he starts to cry. Softly at first, and then with deep sobs. He has not cried since the first night in the camp, after a man—an Italian—told him what had become of the women who arrived in the morning. Since then, nothing and no-one has been able to bring a single tear to his eyes. Even when he heard about Hélène’s death. All he’d felt was that bitter tightening in his throat, which came over him sometimes, but which he quickly swallowed, turning away and taking huge gulps of air.

  And now he’s soaking this dusty mattress bawling like a kid because he doesn’t want to die without holding in his arms, even if he pushes him away, the son he could have had.

  33

  Those two idiot detectives hesitate when faced with the woman standing in the hallway, arms outstretched to bar their way, but Commissaire Darlac pushes them past her and the cops are free to spread throughout the house while two guards stand watch in the street. He tells them to go upstairs and he drags the woman along with him, grabbing her shoulder by the light fabric of her dress and pulling so hard that the top buttons are torn off and her breasts are exposed as she falls to the floor, banging against the kitchen table and knocking over a chair. He tells her to shut her mouth, threatening her with his huge shovel-like hand. Another cop calls him from the living room. “Come and look.” He says, “What?” in an irritated voice. Then, glancing at the woman in tears, collapsed on her chair, and judging that she is unlikely to try anything, he goes into the living room and finds that bed close to the window, with a man’s gaunt face staring at him sadly from above the sheets, eyes ringed with sickness and death.

  Darlac recognizes Abel, and for a few seconds he forgets where he is and what’s happening because at that very moment the two detectives yell from the floor above, shouting out the usual warnings and then saying, “Fuck it, that son of a bitch!”. The commissaire rushes up to the bedroom and finds them gesticulating at the window, guns in hand
. He chucks them out of there, ordering them to take a car and try to trap the fugitive in the parallel street, you fucking morons; he’ll go through the gardens and come out on the other side. And call for reinforcements, for Christ’s sake. And hurry the fuck up. The two coppers bound downstairs and he starts tearing through the contents of the wardrobe and the chest of drawers: a few clothes, bathroom towels, sheets and pillowcases. He lifts up the mattress—standard practice in these cases—and hits the jackpot: a pistol, the one Delbos stole from Mazeau. Carefully picking it up with his handkerchief, he wraps it up and slips it into his pocket. In the drawer of the bedside table he finds a wallet with real and fake papers inside. He takes a good look at Delbos’ face and wonders if he’d have recognized him had he walked past him in the street. “Now it’s just you and me, you piece of shit.” He goes back downstairs and finds Violette plumping the pillows behind Abel’s head. Inspecteur Lefranc is conscientiously, and very noisily, emptying the cupboards and sideboards. From time to time he breaks a plate or a glass, and each time he says “shit,” the word barely audible above the racket he’s making.

  “Nothing here,” he says, standing over the sink. “I’ll take a look in the cellar.”

  The commissaire watches the woman as she lifts the sheet over the sick man’s frail chest and smooths it flat with her palm.

  “So it looks like I got here just in time.”

  Abel gently pushes Violette out of the way. He tries to lever himself up on his elbows, but finally gives up and falls back into the softness of the pillows, eyes closed.

  “No . . . You’re too late. He got away and you’ll never catch him. He’s the one who’ll get you.”