And now, the hour of reckoning has come and I write indifferently in the two columns as if profits and losses were cancelling each other out. Result: zero. Bankruptcy? No. Just nothing. A whole life, for nothing. I think that’s how it will end. I don’t know when, or where. But it will be soon, and not far away. Here, in this hovel above a roomful of brokendown cars. Or in Bordeaux, if I manage to escape Darlac. I cannot see beyond the next few days. Maybe the next few hours. I write. At least I will leave that behind me, if anyone ever wants to read what I’ve written.
My son, maybe. I left my other notebooks at Abel and Violette’s house, and I feel more destitute, more naked than if I had fled without the clothes on my back. I’ll get them to him via Mesplet, if he doesn’t come to see me. I hope the cops haven’t found them. But of course they have. Even now, they are probing the secrets of a killer, as the newspapers will put it. Of course they are. No way out. So, these lines . . . For you, Daniel. Reaching you across time and distance, if you decide not to come.
For the last three days there have been two cops sitting in a car down there, about fifty meters away, towards the train station. Claude spotted them almost straight away. They came that first evening. They must have found out I came here when I brought the bike to be fixed. They know my son works here. They realize it’s probably the only place I could show up. Although I imagine there are cops sitting in cars outside Maurice and Roselyne’s house too. Darlac knows all this, so he’s cast his nets. I hope Daniel is well hidden, that they won’t take him. I could get out of here, through the back door, and those idiot cops would never know. Mesplet would probably lend me a few francs. But where would I go? Paris? No, don’t go back. Never go back. So I wait here and I write and I try to sleep. Imprisoned in myself.
“Don’t go out in front. Take this key. It opens the door to number 8, Passage Bardos. You know where that is—I showed it to you once. Avoid rue Furtado: there are two cops waiting there, just for you. You’ll need a flashlight. I haven’t been in that house for two years now, so be careful where you put your feet, it’s a huge mess in there. At the back there’s a wooden staircase. Don’t worry, it’s not about to collapse. At the top there’s a door. Go through that and you’ll find your father.”
Daniel takes the key and shoves it in his pocket.
“Thanks.”
“I can come with you to keep an eye on the street, if you want.”
“No. Maybe I won’t have the balls to go through with it at the last moment. I’d better be alone for this.”
Mesplet puts his hand on Daniel’s shoulder.
“As you like. He’s changed, you know.”
“No, I don’t know. I don’t even know what he was like before.”
He picks up his workman’s bicycle, an old rust bucket with a bell that doesn’t work. He had cleaned and oiled it that afternoon, dismantled it, checked the inner tubes and the tires.
Roselyne brings him something to drink.
“Are you sure about this?”
“Yeah, I think so.”
Later, in the mild night, Irène goes out with him to the sidewalk.
“Let me come with you. I won’t say anything.”
He doesn’t reply. He mounts the bike.
“Daniel?”
She walks over to him and kisses him full on the mouth. She hugs him so tight he almost falls off, because he’s let go of the handlebars.
“For afterwards,” she says.
He rides calmly along the empty docks. Occasionally a car overtakes him, and each time he wonders where they are going, these people, at night. He has always wondered about things like that—where all these figures were coming from or going to, these figures he glimpsed or passed on the street, whom he watched or captured in his little metal frame, and he would imagine little stories for them, strange fates. Sometimes he thinks he should write books about all these people, giving them a past and a future.
He can’t help staring at the moored ships. Always that curiosity when he sees an illuminated porthole, a silhouette on the bridge. Alain. Perhaps Daniel should have done what he did. But further off. Sumatra. Zanzibar. Djibouti. San Francisco. Anchorage. He barely even knows where these places are, has no idea what they’re like. He’s read a few books. Not enough. But those names resound in his mind like magical spells, powerful incantations heard whispered at the other end of the world, attracting madmen and dreamers. People always think I’ll leave one day, later, there’s plenty of time. And often they never do.
And then there is a woman’s kiss, the softness of her hair against your cheek. And it feels good, close to her.
He lets his thoughts drift as far as possible from the man he is about to meet. Sometimes, when the reason for this nocturnal trip crosses his mind, a big shiver runs down his spine and his heart starts to pound in his chest.
He makes a large detour to arrive at the garage from behind, and leaves his bicycle about fifty meters from the street. It is dark and warm in this little alley and he hears something scurry through the gutter. Sweat starts to run down his face, down his back, and his short-sleeved shirt sticks to his skin. He switches on his flashlight because he can hardly even see his own feet. The moonless sky is no help at all. The streetlights on the neighboring roads are choked by the night, illuminating nothing beyond themselves.
The key turns in the lock with a click. A hallway. Strips of paint peeled from the walls litter the floor. Daniel’s feet crunch through cement dust, or maybe it’s sand. The smell of mould, of old paper, saltpetre. Dead rats. His throat tightens in a little spasm of disgust, then he remembers three corpses swarming with wasps that he found during a patrol and the present seems less sickening. In the beam of torchlight he sees piles of chairs, a table on top of another, a sideboard with the doors wide open. A wooden crate filled with tools. He steps carefully through this jumble of objects and hears a stampede of mice under the floorboards.
Suddenly the stairs rise up before him, caught in the glare of the torch. He stops dead in front of the first step and looks up towards the landing where the staircase forks. Impossible to see any further in this darkness. He wishes a door would open, that some light would appear, but there is no illumination, no movement.
Of course, the steps creak under his feet. He senses that in the room upstairs a man he doesn’t know is listening, and that he can hear the ferocious pounding of Daniel’s heart too.
*
“My name is Jean Delbos and I am your father.”
Hearing his son’s footstep on the creaky staircase—it can only be him, because there is nothing sneaky about that slowness, it is merely shy and hesitant—he wonders what his first words will be. Or will he say “Hello, son” to reforge the connection, because Daniel knows who he is?
He can hardly breathe when he hears a knock at the door. He takes two steps forward, then stops. I’m not going to open it. Just leave all that well alone. What’s the point? Olga. She would already be in her son’s arms. Their son. And suddenly he is overwhelmed by tears and a moan escapes his mouth. How he wishes she could be there to live this moment. My little boy, come here so I can see you.
She is dead, her corpse gone in smoke up the chimneys of the crematorium at Auschwitz-Birkenau. There is no heaven, no place where souls can feel anything, caresses or vibrations in the air, no way of feeling joy or suffering. Everything is over, irreversibly so, and memory is merely an invocation without response to a fictional and incomplete hereafter. But he summons her image; the beauty of her smile, the warmth of her skin, the depth and sweetness of her gaze when she looked at him are here, with them both. Jean, my sweet darling, she used to say, in the early days of their marriage. Her voice. She would sing all the time.
He opens the door, his vision blurred by tears that he wipes away with the back of his hand, and all he can see is the blinding halo of torchlight and the figure standing before him, unmoving,
indistinct as a ghost. He takes a step back, says, “Come in.”
Daniel switches off the torch and stares at this tearful man. He closes the door behind him and walks forward and at that moment he wishes his heart would cease beating because it hurts, it’s strangling him, choking him, and he feels as if he won’t be able to say a single word.
“I’m Daniel.”
He tries to catch his breath. He feels the sweat run down his back. The man wipes away his tears again and manages to smile.
“And I’m Jean. Your father. Even after all this time.”
Daniel does not recognize this deeply wrinkled face. But the voice, yes. It hasn’t changed. And that is how he recreates the image of the man who lifted him up in his arms and took him on the merry-go-round. He was a very tanned man, with good teeth. Always smiling. He sees him again now. He rubs his eyes, feeling suddenly weightless, the walls of the room spinning slowly around him.
“Are you alright? Do you want some water to drink?”
Daniel nods without looking at this frail, unsteady man, afraid to meet his gaze.
Jean walks over to a cupboard and takes out two glasses that he fills with water from the tap. He takes a few deep breaths while he does this, shakes his head, splashes water on his face. He comes back to Daniel and hands him a glass. He can see his son’s face in this man’s. Thinner and longer, of course. The eyes bigger, dark like his mother’s. He wants to hold him. He can’t bear to remain standing like this, a meter away from him.
Daniel drinks, staring into the bottom of the glass. He wishes he could leave. He doesn’t know what to say and it disturbs him to stay here, before this man who has the same voice as his father, before this echo of the past. But he also wants the man to speak again so that everything can really come back, if that’s possible.
“I don’t recognize you. I can’t. Only your voice. It’s still like it was before, when you . . . When you took me to the fair and bought me doughnuts.”
Jean smiles and the tears fall again from his eyes. He doesn’t wipe them away this time.
“I’m sorry,” he says. “It’s completely stupid . . . I just can’t stop. It’s like a river, overflowing . . . I don’t know, I’m just so . . . How can I say this . . . Happy, I suppose, but that’s a stupid word, it doesn’t mean anything . . . And I’m so ashamed too.”
Daniel walks over and puts his hand on the man’s shoulder, and Jean puts his on Daniel’s arm, and then they hug, both of them relaxing. It is a sweet embrace, nothing manly about it: no pats on the back or hearty squeezes, just their bodies close together and each with their chin in the other’s neck, but not daring to kiss because first they probably need to get a handle on the other’s reality, their substantiality, to feel their breathing, hear them gulp as they swallow their emotions, balled up in a rough knot in their throats.
“Let’s sit down,” says Jean.
He takes a chair and invites Daniel to sit on the bed. Jean sits very straight-backed, and he wipes his cheeks again and rubs the last tears from his eyes. He is preparing to speak, to explain his embarrassment and his regrets and his sorrow, but Daniel speaks first.
“Everyone thought you . . . that you were dead, all this time.”
“I thought I was dead too. Maybe I am, in a way.”
“I don’t understand. You’re here, in front of me. I don’t believe in ghosts.”
“Me neither. And yet sometimes I feel sure they exist.”
“And my mother? Is she a ghost?”
Daniel doesn’t know where he found the strength to say that. How he scraped up enough air in his lungs to breathe those words.
“What happened to her?”
Jean stares at him, but what he sees is still Olga in the line of prisoners, held up by some woman, turning around to try and find him in the crowd, and not seeing him even though he was waving to her and calling out to her in spite of the S.S. guards screaming at him—at all the other men in the crowd who were gesticulating and yelling and crying and sometimes throwing themselves forward—to shut up, in spite of the S.S. beating them with the butts of their rifles or setting their dogs on them, the men falling to the frozen ground and curling up in a ball, no longer moving, their faces covered with blood.
After a while, he realizes that he is telling his son what he has scarcely told a soul before.
“If we’d been able to see each other one last time, if we’d been able to look in each other’s eyes, you understand . . . If I’d been able to tell her that I loved her, that she was the only one I ever loved . . . I don’t know, I think that would have made things better for her. I even prayed to God, can you believe it? I even tried to talk to that thing, but apparently if you don’t believe in him, he doesn’t respond. Some old man told me that. And when you believe in God, you realize he’s not there anymore. That he won’t be there ever again. That’s what this old Jew told me. He laughed as he said that, like he was telling a really good joke. God exists, he said, but he’s never there, the bastard.
“But we talked all the time in the train carriage. For more than two days, the two of us huddled close, all of us crammed in together. I held her, leaning back against the wall so she could sleep a bit, just a few minutes. She was shivering with fever. I told her everything I hadn’t taken the time to tell her in years. And we talked about you, and that was terrible, and sometimes we preferred not to say anything cos we would have gone mad.”
Silence. The yellow light filtered through the filthy lampshade casts more shadow than brightness. They both slouch forward as they breathe, eyes lowered.
“Sometimes I can’t remember her face,” Daniel says. “I have to look at Roselyne’s photos. But now, with your voice, loads of images are coming back to me. I’m glad you came back.”
“Are you sure? Wasn’t it simpler the way it was before? When I was really dead?”
“I prefer people to be alive.”
Jean nods, pensive. My son is right. He is on the other side, in sunlight.
“Did you really kill those people?”
“Which people?”
“The ones in the newspaper.”
“I killed some bastards. Friends of a cop I knew before the war. A cop I still hung around with during the Occupation, despite what was happening. When I let you and your mother down. His name is Albert Darlac. He promised to protect us, and then one day he just handed us over. I found a few of his friends, his relatives, and I killed them. That’s why I came back, to start with. I thought it would be easy. But then there was that kid, at the bar. I don’t know what she was doing there. She died in the fire. I didn’t know what to do then. As for the others, Darlac must have been eliminating a few inconvenient witnesses and framed me for it.”
“Is that true?”
Daniel immediately regrets asking this. Jean sits up, opens his hands in front of him.
“You’re the only one who can believe me. I don’t care about the others.”
“That’s not what I meant.”
They fall silent again. Afraid of hurting each other with words.
Daniel looks at Jean. My father. He does not really understand what that means. This man makes him sad. He wishes he could love him. He’s heard stuff before about blood ties being indissoluble, instinctive, almost animal, and now he can see that it’s not true. There’s that voice, of course, those echoes, those images coming back to life. Useless memories.
“Why didn’t you come back to get me when the war ended?”
For years he’s been asking himself the same question every day, and each time it is like a very fine needle puncturing his skin, creating an electric pain, deep and fleeting.
They jump to their feet when the door is suddenly flung open and bangs against the wall. Jean knocks his chair over backwards as he stands up and at first Daniel does not understand who this man is, entering the room with a pistol, a Colt l
ike the ones the officers in Algeria carried. He is tall, wide, solidly built. He is wearing gloves, a pale sports jacket.
“Ah, shit! I bet I’m interrupting a family reunion, aren’t I?”
Darlac points his gun at Daniel.
“You, lie on the floor. Face down, hands on your head. And do it quick, cos I’m in a bit of a rush.”
He curses himself for not having thought to bring handcuffs. He wasn’t expecting this little shit to be here too. Oh well, that’s even better. Two for the price of one. The minister’s special envoy will come in his pants with excitement. Inside his pocket, he handles Mazeau’s .30.
Daniel obeys. He tries to remember the name of the cop his father was talking about. Darnac? Darlac. He wonders what his chances are of getting up and charging into this bastard before he has time to open fire. Slim to none.
“And you, grab that chair and sit your ass on it. Here. I want you both in my line of fire. And don’t try anything.”
Moving slowly, Jean picks up the chair, sets it upright, sits down on it.
“And now what are you going to do? Are you going to kill us? Make it look like I committed suicide and murdered my own son?”
“I don’t know yet, but that’s not a bad idea. Just shut your mouth and let me savor the moment. You are my best ever arrest, you know that? And no-one cares if you’re alive or dead. I’ll have caught the murderer of nine people. If this was America, I’d be on the covers of magazines for this, pistol in hand, smiling for the camera. Can you believe the irony? Why exactly did you come back? To kill those losers and scare me? What did you think was going to happen? What were you even avenging yourself for? That old business with the camps? I bought you a one-year reprieve. That’s not too bad, is it? You thought you were on the right side cos you hung around with me and a few Kraut whores while your Jewish wife went on with her life as if everything was normal? How could you expect not to get wet when it was pissing down with rain, you dick? Jesus, how old were you? And now you come back to avenge yourself, like in a film? Look at you! You’re fucked. I can kill you whenever I want, if I want, cos you screwed it up, as usual, by thinking that you’re cleverer than everyone else.”
After the War Page 51
