After the War

by Hervé Le Corre

  I was speaking too loud, so she signaled me to be quiet. The kid was asleep.

  “Impossible. He’s my friend. We’ve known each other for ten years. He’d never do that.”

  “Your friend . . . A gambler, a swindler, a thief, a Nazi cop. That’s your friend. And on top of that, he wants to have it off with your wife while you’re out, your dear Inspecteur Darlac. God, you’re pathetic. You deserve a wife who’d cheat on you with that pig. You’d make a wonderful cuckold, like those imbeciles in the films.”

  She said all of this in an even tone, her voice firm in spite of the tears that kept rolling down her face. She was lying. She was just saying all this to punish me for neglecting her, for gambling, maybe for cheating on her with those girls one evening, even if I didn’t think she could possibly know about that, not even suspect it. I felt sure that nothing had really happened, that Darlac had come round to say hello, bringing a cake or a toy for the kid, as he’d done several times before. He liked women, I knew that, but I couldn’t imagine that he would ever come on to Olga. He was always telling me how lucky I was to have a wife like her. He even wondered why I didn’t spend more time with her instead of hanging around in the back rooms of bars, gambling with all those dropouts. He had managed to remove her from the lists of Jews and protect us from the round-ups. That was surely the absolute proof of his friendship towards me and the esteem or affection he felt for her. One day he said to me, “At least this way there’ll be two people who can be happy in the middle of all this shit. I’ll protect that. You can count on me.”

  Clearly, Olga didn’t understand. She had always hated and despised him. But I was the one who didn’t understand.

  “He pawed me. He put his filthy hands on me, that bastard. Here, and here. I had to defend myself, you understand?”

  She touched her breasts, rubbed her crotch with her balled fists. It sickened me suddenly, seeing her do that. I thought it was indecent.

  “So you’re not going to do anything? You’re just going to say, go ahead, dig in, you’re my best friend, what’s mine is yours? Is that how the two of you share your whores?”

  I leaped at her and grabbed her throat. She cried out, so I hit her. A slap, and then a punch. She fell on the floor, knocking a chair over on her way down. I think I would have kept hitting her if Daniel hadn’t come out of his bedroom in tears. I found myself between the two of them, weeping and screaming, and I stood there, above them both, but in reality I was the one on the ground, suddenly laid low. Powerless, stupid, ashamed. I held the boy in my arms and I knelt next to Olga, who was rubbing her ear where I’d hit her, blood flowing from her split lip. She didn’t push me away when I tried to pull her towards me and for a moment the three of us stayed like that, them slowly controlling their sobs, me swallowing my shame and self-disgust the way you swallow some disgusting medicine, down to the last drop.

  The next day, and during the days that followed, I searched all over town for Albert Darlac. I talked to every pimp, every loser, every blackmarket dealer, every collaborator and every cop I knew through him. None of those wretches had seen him in days and most of them seemed barely to remember me. As if I’d been nothing more than a silhouette beside him, a sort of cipher, an insubstantial stooge. I think it was perhaps then that I began to understand. I needed that. Hitting the woman I loved, scaring my son, and finding myself above the void, ready to send them both into it.

  On the night of January 10th-11th, there was a new round-up. Afterwards I found out that it was the last one on that scale. At that time, however, no-one knew which way the war would go. Of course, we’d heard about Stalingrad; through her friends, Olga followed all of that quite closely. But the Germans were not relaxing their grip here. They were making arrests, executing people, deporting them relentlessly, furious till the end. La Petite Gironde carried regular enthusiastic reports on the activities of the Gestapo and the French police against “terrorist” networks. Cops, French or Kraut, were everywhere.

  Darlac never mentioned any of this. All he said was that what he did made him sick sometimes, but that he had to obey orders. It was his job. Anyway, as far as he was concerned, the war would have had to be won in ’40; now we simply had to adapt to the situation. I didn’t argue. I wanted to preserve our little life, for the three of us. The kid was born in October ’39 and I swore we would protect him from the coming chaos. I hated the Krauts; I wanted them to be defeated; I knew they were coming but I didn’t know when. I waited. And then I got into gambling, into girls. I needed those things to be able to breathe freely. It was thanks to them that I was able to love, to truly love Olga and Daniel. Olga became furious, for all these reasons. She should have hated me more than any other man. She should have thrown me out. And yet, since the day we had met, in ’37, something held us together, an animal connection, an instinct. Explosions of happiness would regularly annihilate all the obstacles that cropped up between us, obstacles that should have kept us apart forever. I still don’t understand it. We loved each other, in spite of what everyone else thought and said. And Daniel’s arrival only strengthened that connection. We might fight and scream and tear at each other’s throats like wolves, but we would still remain there for him, ready to kill anyone who threatened him. That was why Olga kept her friends at a distance, and why—after the arrests of hostages and Resistance fighters—they themselves let nothing slip about their activities. I never knew what they did and I preferred it that way.

  As the rumor of a round-up had been circulating for a few days, they offered to hide us. But Olga refused because she didn’t want to get them into trouble; they were already being monitored because they were communists. As for me, I curtly rejected their offers, assuring them that I had a friend in the police who would protect us. I remember the way they looked at me: with contempt, or with sadness. Their disappointed sighs. I remember leaving the café where we had met and seeing their faces through the window all turned towards me.

  On the fourteenth, at about half past seven in the morning, we heard cars stopping in the street and voices echoing, doors slamming, feet pounding up the stairs. They banged on the door so hard, it shook on its hinges. “Police! Open up!” We were eating breakfast. A sort of sweetened brown water for us—that ersatz coffee that was all we could get back then—and some milk for the kid. We used to dip the little bit of bread we had into our bowls. Olga had unearthed a few madeleines for Daniel.

  She rushed into the bedroom with him and got him dressed in a thick sweater and a coat. She put a big woolly hat on his head and mittens on his hands.

  “What are you doing?” I asked.

  “I’ve arranged it with Maurice and Roselyne. They’ll come to fetch him.”

  “What? What did you say?”

  She didn’t reply. The cops hammered at the door, yelling loudly. I told them my wife was just getting dressed. Two minutes. They seemed to calm down a bit and in that sudden silence we looked at each other, Olga and me, and we knew that our future was sealed now, that there was no going back. She wept as she got everything ready. She put some bread and saucisson in a paper bag. I took a flask from the sideboard and filled it with water. I looked at my son, who sat there motionless on his chair, looking so tiny with the hat pulled down to his eyes. He was playing with his mittened hands, silent and apparently indifferent, this kid who never normally stopped talking, who questioned us endlessly about everything.

  “Go up on the roof. Sit right by to the chimney. They’ll come in the morning. It’s all arranged. Madame Dubuc will tell them.”

  The cops began banging at the door again. They warned us they would break the lock.

  Olga picked Daniel up and looked into his eyes for several seconds as those bastards hammered at the door. Then she kissed him on his cheeks, on his eyes. She whispered unbearable words of love to him. I joined them and we hugged like that, the three of us together. The kid was moaning quietly. I could feel his tears on
my neck.

  I pulled him from his mother’s arms and stood on a chair in the hallway so I could open the skylight that opened onto the roof. I lifted him up there, into the freezing cold, into the wind that was blowing that morning. I hoisted myself up halfway to tell him to sit close to the chimney because it would be warmer there. He crawled away from me and sat there holding his paper bag and his flask of water. I told him that bad men were coming to the house and that he had to hide and, most importantly, make no noise. I said we’d be back to fetch him very soon and that afterwards we’d go on the merry-go-round and eat barley sugar. He didn’t move. He just nodded at everything I told him and as I went back down so I could close the skylight, I saw him waving goodbye to me with a little smile on his face.

  Olga went to open the door, pretending to finish putting a sweater on. A cop came in and forced her back towards the table, threatening her with his pistol. Two others followed, both armed, and they started searching the apartment, opening drawers, removing pictures from the wall, throwing objects all over the floor. They found a few letters and postcards in a cupboard and looked through them before dropping them at their feet. When I asked them what they were looking for, they told me to shut my mouth. Within two minutes, they had turned the apartment upside down.

  Olga shivered as she held her cardigan tightly around her.

  “I don’t understand,” I said. “Call Inspecteur Darlac. He’s a friend of mine.”

  I knew Darlac was behind all this, but still I tried to cling to this last illusion, the way you might grab a broken branch or a dead root as you slide into a hole.

  The cop who had come in first, and who was keeping us at bay with his pistol, sniggered as he raised an eyebrow at his colleagues. They shook their heads and grinned like wolves.

  “You should choose your friends more carefully.”

  After a while, they stopped searching the flat and stood motionless, all three of them, in the kitchen, looking at each other questioningly for a few seconds.

  “And your son? Where’s he?”

  “Somewhere safe,” said Olga. “With people in the countryside.”

  “What do you mean, somewhere safe?” a cop demanded. “Who gave you the right to do that?”

  “Forget it,” said the man who seemed to be their leader. “It doesn’t matter. They’re the ones we want. You have three minutes to pack a suitcase. Don’t forget your papers.”

  “Where are you taking us?” I asked.

  “Shut your face. Pack.” Then, turning to Olga: “And you—you’re a Jew? I don’t want to know why you weren’t on the list before. You are now. So here you go. For you.”

  He threw a yellow star on the table.

  “Sew that on your coat. You should be grateful. I’m doing you a favor here.”

  Olga went to get her sewing bag and she quickly stitched the star to her coat while I filled a suitcase with clothes.

  Three cars were waiting outside in the street, engines running. The air stank of exhaust fumes. Other cops were smoking on the sidewalk. One of them had a sub-machine gun strapped to his shoulder. They barely even glanced at us, just tossed their cigarettes on the ground and ushered us into two different cars. I tried to turn around in my seat to get a look at Olga, but a detective sitting next to me grunted at me not to move, not to give him any shit. We drove for five minutes through Bordeaux. I no longer recognized anything. They might just as easily have been taking me through a foreign city. The cops wiped the condensation from the windows, but nothing I saw through the glass seemed to really exist, to evoke anything. I was already far away. Gone forever, perhaps.

  They dropped us in front of what I took to be a church. The street was packed with police vans and trucks, with cops in fedoras and caps. Olga explained that this was the synagogue. I had never been here before. I knew vaguely that it was located here, had probably gone past it before without realizing. We went into that noise. That murmur of human beings crammed into a small space. Children crying, people coughing, clearing throats. The occasional sound of a kid’s laughter. Muttered conversations.

  They took our names for their register, took our papers. Then a uniformed cop said: “Over there. Find yourselves a place and stay calm.” A nun came to meet us and led us over to a mattress with a blanket.

  “Are they taking us to Poland?” Olga asked.

  “I don’t know,” said the nun. “I can’t tell you anything. You must wait. They’ll give you some food at lunchtime.”

  We sat down and for a long time we said nothing, just looked around us at the people lying or sitting, like us, staring into space, while others concentrated on trivial tasks: carefully folding a few old rags in a suitcase, cleaning a child’s face with a damp handkerchief, arranging photographs in a wallet. Men walked silently through the aisles. I saw a swindler I knew, dressed in a coat that was too big for him. Our eyes met, and he turned away instantly.

  After a little while I felt Olga shivering against me, so I got to my feet and helped her to do the same. We needed to walk to prevent the cold numbing us completely. She linked arms with me and we began to weave our way between the makeshift tents that people had set up on the floor. But the cold clung to our legs as if we were walking through water.

  “I hope Maurice can get there quickly,” said Olga, with a shudder.

  I didn’t reply because, beyond that hope, words no longer had any value.

  We spent three days in that silent abyss where the few words we exchanged found no echo. We asked each other, “Are you cold? Are you hungry? Did you manage to use the toilet? You feel better now?” Animals, if they could talk, would probably express something similar with regard to their vital functions and their survival.

  One afternoon another nun approached us with some bread and chocolate.

  “Daniel is fine,” she whispered. “Maurice says he’s safe.”

  She smiled sadly then went over to a family with a daughter who had been suffering from a fever since the night before.

  Olga and I hugged each other. We whispered sweet nothings that we hadn’t said to each other in months. The next day, she started coughing.

  Then they took us in their trains to their camps.

  I wonder, now, if I ever really came back. Came back alive, I mean. In the months since I returned to Bordeaux, I have had the feeling that I am insubstantial, perceptible to no-one. I have been forgotten. Or buried, given up for dead in the clay of Poland or reduced to ashes. Scattered. Even my bones have no weight now. And nor does my soul. Once, in the Louvre, where Suzanne had taken me, I saw an Egyptian fresco showing a priest weighing a dead man’s soul. What would he see if he put mine on the scale? I wasn’t worth much before I was deported. They call us “good-for-nothings,” men like me. During the months I was in the camp, I had time to try to work out my own worth. My value in weight. My body counted for less with each passing day, but did I have another value, over there, in my own eyes? How much does a soul cost? What price would the devil pay for one? For me, it varied between not much and dirt cheap. Later, in Paris, when I made an effort to live again, when I thought it would become easy, I realized one day that I was not worth the price of my suffering: a label stuck on me by the S.S. and deciphered by those around me. André Vaillant, former Auschwitz inmate. That was who I was, first of all. And I clung to this new identity in order to erase the old one. My memory, and my nightmares, were enough for me to know who I really was.

  Only Hélène knew. Buried, like me, in our rubble, she waved her hand through the piles of ruins like those people who are trapped alive after earthquakes or landslides, waving to show rescuers that they are not dead but that they must be freed from what holds them down, what threatens to crush them. I think when she danced she was able to defeat this fatal weight. I think she only considered herself alive in those moments.

  “Me? I dance.” That was how she replied when I asked her
how she was.

  And me, so heavy and tired.

  And now I am waiting for my son. I didn’t recognize him in the young man I saw at Mesplet’s garage. I could not manage to discern, in his face, the features of the little boy I put on the roof that day, or whom I took for rides on the merry-go-round or for walks in the park, where he would spend hours watching the rich kids playing with model boats in the ponds. He wept once, quietly, without anger, because he didn’t have a beautiful boat like that. I promised him I would buy one for him and he started laughing and jumping while he held my hand, chatting away happily as he often used to. I remember his voice. His face is lost to me, but I can still hear his voice laughing in my memory. I never kept my promise.

  I am waiting for him. He came back from Algeria. He deserted. What else could he do, apart from rebelling and shooting a few generals? I don’t know if he will come. I hope he does. So I can hold him in my arms. Say my son, my boy, my little man. Like I used to, before. So I can say sorry for these old words from an old father, kept for so long in silence. How you’ve grown. Obviously. If only you knew how I’ve changed too.

  I am waiting for him. No hope beyond that moment. Afterwards . . . we’ll see.

  36

  How could you let him get away? You’ve made a serious mistake, Darlac. Result: two more deaths. You had unlimited resources for this operation. Instead of which you go in with three men and only one car.”

  Commissaire Divisionnaire Laborde sucks at his pipe, which has gone out, and pretends to look through the report on his desk.

  Darlac shrugs. Two more deaths. The Kraut and his mother. He remembers how, the night before, when Laborde called to inform them of the bodies that had been found that morning by the baker who came to present his weekly bill, madame fell onto the sofa and wept for an hour, slumped in her tears, sniffling and hiccupping, ugly at last, showing her true face—aged now, her features subsiding, her flesh soft and saggy—and how he had been happy to be able to hate her unreservedly now that he had found a chink in the fragile armor of her beauty.