“The bullet’s fiery gust grazed past you and wounded you,” Jean said.
“Same goes for you,” Marbot remarked, “I can see through your sweater.”
Jean looked down at this torso. His jacket and sweater had been torn in seven different places.
He breathed deeply, greedily sucking the air into his lungs. Claude had the same reflex. They looked at one another with the same hallucinated stare in their eyes. The terrible tension that had fused their individual fears and hopes into a single alloy persisted within them. They thought that one’s gesture should automatically inspire a complementary reaction in the other. The danger they’d just evaded, which had been more critical than any they’d hitherto experienced, had brought them together to an even greater extent.
“How did this happen, were you half-asleep?” Marbot exclaimed. “I thought both of you had a good eye.”
Their gazes met once more, but this time they both turned away. The dream they’d chased up there, under that pale sky, had come back to haunt them once the first shots had crackled and whizzed past them.
Maury thought: “Why have Hélène’s letters betrayed a great deal of anxiety ever since Herbillon’s return, and why is he so different now?”
While Jean thought: “Does Claude already suspect me?”
They were in the grips of the fear that often dulled their senses and attention spans after hours of flying. However, how could they possibly confess that to Marbot? They both replied to his questions in a vaguely dismissive manner.
They headed back to their barracks, exchanging the usual reflections on the fight they’d just been through. The emotions that had electrified their bodies wasn’t fading away. Yet far from easing the awkwardness they felt in each others’ company, their quasi-mechanical kinship actually increased their unease, because it allowed them to glimpse into each others’ souls, threatening to expose everything they wanted to conceal.
It was the hour when the mail was delivered. The envelopes’ bright colours decorated the tables in the mess hall. Standing at the door, they could already see which ones belonged to them, and Herbillon tightly clenched his jaws to conceal the turmoil he was in. There were two letters from Denise—almost side by side—one for him, and one for Claude. Even though Jean’s was in a different envelope and Denise had tried to camouflage her handwriting, Jean thought Maury wouldn’t be so easily deceived. He sped past his comrade and rushed towards the table. Seizing the letter in his hand, he exclaimed: “It’s a pleasure to see this after the danger we’ve been through.”
Then, to get rid of the envelope clenched between his fingers, he opened it, crumpled it up and threw it under the table.
He was headed towards his room when Maury held him back.
“Don’t you want to warm up a little?” he asked, pointing to the bar.
Then he added, with sad irony: “You become such a teetotaller whenever I’m around.”
The young man was seized by a profound melancholy. His comrade must have been in such despair over their friendship to want to revive it through such coarse means, which had seemed so repugnant to him not all that long ago. Jean lacked the strength to refuse Claude’s pathetic entreaty.
However, their joy at having cheated death gave them some respite from their mutual discomfort. The wine they drank had a more lively flavour than usual. The basic furnishings of the mess hall imparted a feeling of domestic security.
Maury, who’d delayed reading his letter long enough for the light to change, opened the envelope his wife had sent him. Steeped in a primal well-being, Herbillon daydreamed.
Feeling Maury’s gaze settle on him, Jean lifted his head and failed to repress a shudder. Maury’s features were so filled with fear, mixed with a desire to overcome his incomprehension, that Jean was unable to help himself and asked: “Did you get bad news?”
“Why would you ask me that?” Maury almost shouted.
“You just look so distraught.”
Claude jumped off the stool he’d been sitting on and started to walk across the mess hall. Jean was well acquainted with those gangly, robotic walks, whose sole aim was to subdue his excessive emotions. By the time Maury stopped, he’d managed to restore some calm to his features.
“No, you’re wrong, it’s just that those bullets fried my nerves.”
He started reading his letter again, but did so too quickly and too mechanically, the way one sees bad actors in a theatre clumsily pretend to utter a line for the first time when they’ve in fact spoken it many times before. Suddenly, he said: “Hélène asked me to send news of you.”
Herbillon took a long time to swallow the gulp of wine in his mouth.
“Your wife is very kind,” he finally muttered.
“You deserve all the credit; Hélène’s never usually taken an interest in any of my friends.”
“Oh, she’s just being polite,” Jean said, almost shattering the glass in his hand.
“No, I can assure you that’s not the case. Her questions betray a great deal of interest and I’m overjoyed that you’re the object of that interest,” Claude insisted.
Maury had injected such bitterness into the last words that Jean left without answering him. Claude’s dumbfounded eyes wandered around the room.
Absorbed in his daily chores and games, Herbillon failed to reflect on the situation in the manner the occasion called for until later that evening. Its tragedy only struck him fully once he was alone in his room, when the barracks was isolated by the night. He hadn’t written to Denise since his return, even thought she’d continued to send him letters expressing her fervent devotion. Having reached the end of her tether, she’d asked Claude for news of him.
Had it been a calculated move on her part to force him to answer her, or simply the end result of her intolerable anxiety? Herbillon shrugged his shoulders. What did it matter whether he knew what had prompted her? He didn’t have the right to be indignant, or even angry, especially while his fate was still bound to Maury’s, and while Jean still accepted his withering friendship. Jean was such a coward that he hadn’t even found the audacity to completely reassure his comrade on that front.
What truly mattered at this given time was the suspicion he’d read in Claude’s eyes that morning. Up until that moment, Jean’s reticence and coldness, especially his refusal to hug Maury during the medal ceremony, had instilled an atmosphere of treacherous mistrust. Yet it had become overwhelmingly clear that Claude’s distrust had solidified, and burrowed its way into his heart.
Jean’s silence had been useless. The logic, influence and strength of passions, which still eluded his young mind, was dragging him to the fatal spot which he’d wanted to avoid at all costs. He was seized by the desire to rebel against the inflexibility of a path that Jean still believed he could bend to his will.
Claude would never be able to guess the truth, unless he, Jean Herbillon, allowed him to do so. Maury could have his suspicions and bark up the right tree, but he would never be able to confirm any of them without Jean’s confession!
As such, Jean had to overcome the awkwardness caused by his sudden turnaround and recapture Maury’s frightened tenderness, resume their long conversations, have Claude confide in him and also pretend to reciprocate. He had to resume his correspondence with Denise to deaden her pain, as well as lay the trap of deception before the truth had a chance to come out. His betrayal would have to be perfect in its baseness.
However, would Jean really be capable of subjecting Claude to such constant, hateful trickery? Claude surely wouldn’t let himself be duped, even if he tried. They had become too closely interlinked and, being fellow crewmen, their bond was far too steady for such a blatant lie to pass undetected. That damned connection of theirs certainly wouldn’t lead Claude to concrete evidence on its own, but he still wouldn’t overlook what was clearly the truth at the heart of the matter.
So what should he do? The young man buried his head in his hands, seeking an elusive compromise between entirely
concealing the matter and confessing.
He suddenly experienced the same emotion he’d felt when he knew Maury had realized it was him in his cockpit.
“Here I am daydreaming,” he murmured. “I have to get some sleep.”
He stood up without, however, managing to stifle that distress call. It was as if Claude were dragging Jean towards him with such force that he unconsciously took a step towards the door. Coming round, he began undressing. The mechanical gestures involved in that process swallowed him up again and the dark feelings he’d been fighting against rose up again so powerfully that he no longer doubted what he had to do. Maury’s room was calling out for his presence.
He crossed the corridor and quietly opened the latch. Leaning over his desk, Claude had placed two envelopes side by side and was comparing them. Herbillon immediately saw that one of them was the one he’d crumpled and thrown under the table in the mess hall.
Maury welcomed him in, showing no surprise.
“I thought you’d come eventually.”
The night had fallen thickly. In the penumbra, the air was perfectly still. They talked very softly, focusing more on their expressions than their words.
“You picked up my envelope,” Jean said. “Why?”
“I thought I recognized the handwriting.”
“Your wife’s?”
Failing to reply, Claude waited. Jean was so tired that he was almost tempted not to put up a fight. Yet faced with Jean’s silence, Maury asked him, in a shamefully pleasing manner that distorted his features: “Tell me, it’s not true, right?”
Herbillon lied: artfully, sweetly, he showed Claude the childishness and folly of his suspicions. He’d only seen Hélène on a single occasion, and for a very short time at that. How could Maury think that a correspondence could have ensued from such a brief encounter, which had completely revolved around the subject of her husband anyway? And how could he substantiate the hypothesis that his wife would write to another man and then ask her husband about the very same man?
Claude listened to Jean so attentively that it made the blue veins in his forehead bulge. Then he asked Jean: “So what’s caused the distance between us since your return from Paris?”
Jean replied, chanting each word: “There’s something in you that pushes people away! Didn’t you tell me that yourself?”
When Herbillon left, Claude experienced a moment of peace and relief. After which he murmured: “He was too vicious to be telling the truth.”
Nevertheless, the officer cadet’s arguments were valid, nay irrefutable. Jean had only gone to visit Hélène the day before his departure. Nothing could have happened over such a short span of time.
Yet, in great distress, Claude realized it could also be a case of argument by reductio ad absurdum.
So as not to break up a crew which had proven itself so valiantly after being put to the test, Thélis refused Jean’s pleading request that he be assigned to another pilot. The officer cadet also didn’t want the captain to mediate the disagreement Thélis thought existed between him and Maury, so the captain added: “You’ll have all the time you need to make it up. We’re going on holiday at the end of the week.”
CHAPTER V
THE GIRLS from the village of Bacoli had dolled themselves up and turned out to witness the arrival of the pilots, and as one after the other jumped out of their cockpits, the pilots were overjoyed to see that colourful crowd, which painted a picture of the tranquil, idle days to come.
The ancient church was festooned with ivy. Nearby, there was a patrician garden around a large mansion whose windows were shut.
The billet he’d drawn at random led Herbillon to a large room upholstered in wallpaper emblazoned with modest flowers. The heavy, polished wooden furniture smelt of fresh wax. Leaving Mathieu to the task of unpacking his trunk, the officer cadet went to seek out Thélis so he could receive his orders.
“You’re on vacation,” Thélis told the assembled officers. “I’m going to take advantage of the situation and go on leave myself. Maury will be in charge during my absence. Have fun and don’t make too much of a racket.”
The soldiers took the girls out to the big park where, thanks to the July heat, the leaves were motionless and spread out to the light. The planes were kept locked inside the hangars and, in order to seduce difficult hearts, only the very young pilots would occasionally take them out to perform acrobatics that could easily have landed them with broken necks.
Herbillon quickly discovered that Bacoli didn’t really cater to his tastes. Whenever he dragged his boots over the swaying grass that slept under the trees and tried to start up an affair with one of the village’s unsavoury beauties, he would find himself oppressed by a hideous boredom. He tried to read, but he quickly realized that he couldn’t persevere with any book that wasn’t mindless, and so he began longing for the squadron’s cursory routine, where the days went by quickly and monotonously.
Maury lived in the house where the offices were situated. He signed documents, ensured the soldiers’ meals were served on time and meandered through the patrician gardens’ solitary paths. The dreams, thoughts and doubts that absorbed him rendered him immune to the passing of time. However, having examined every aspect of his new relationship with Jean, he had reached a conclusion that soothed his worries: the officer cadet had fallen prey to his wife’s charms and, uncompromising to the extreme, had decided that this new fondness was incompatible with the demands of their friendship.
Maury also allowed for the fact his wife would have fallen for his friend’s charms too. Yet their meeting hadn’t led to any complications or consequences, and thus this problem was bound to be transitory. Maury gradually reassured himself and began discovering his wife’s letters were marked by a greater tenderness and betrayed deeper thoughts and emotions.
The vacation imposed on their squadron made Maury and Herbillon less sensitive to each others’ presence, allowing them to cool down. A kind of truce was established between them.
Whenever Herbillon, shuffling along, oppressed by his idleness, came across Maury’s silhouette, he would instantly feel the need to talk to him. Yet they would only exchange a few words, which were always vague and neutral. How far their hour-long conversations had receded into the past.
After their brief meetings, Herbillon would find his boredom even more intolerable, especially since he’d imagined this leisure time would have been filled with pleasures and merry-making.
Thus, he was truly pleased when Pilot Officer Narbonne came to suggest an idea for a regular series of poker games.
This officer had taken up residence in a low-ceilinged room in the village’s only inn, which was cluttered with framed photographs, fake flowers and pious icons. That evening, Herbillon met up with Charensole, Michel, Virense and Doc in that room. Amidst laughter, they told him how Marbot, having been approached about the game, had refused with a savage vehemence. On the table was a bottle of cognac, a box of cigars and several decks of cards. The smoke had already changed the light emanating from the lamps. Herbillon breathed it in with sheer delight.
He’d thus escaped the dreariness of his nights, and had been rescued from the village’s little streets, which he’d acquainted himself with in the space of just a couple of nights, to the point where the mere sight of them filled him with nausea. He’d been saved from the lonely alcohol consumed with his elbows propped atop a sticky table. This escape pleased him to such an extent that he didn’t even bother to ask how much the chips that had been placed in front of him were worth. Narbonne, who was wealthy, showed the same reckless indifference. Their comrades took advantage of this. They only rose from their seats once the dawn had washed the night’s inky stains from the windows, when Jean eventually realized he’d lost his entire pay. Yet since his parents sent him twice that sum every month, he didn’t regret it.
He was more careful the following evening, but his impetuous nature meant he was not on a level playing field with his comrades, for whom
the game was nothing but a fleeting amusement. Jean, on the other hand, loved risk for risk’s sake, and was simply incapable of playing a hand without betting more than he could reasonably afford. He was gripped by the giddiness of the fast pace of assembling a combination of cards.
Knowing this, he usually abstained from playing, but he always succumbed the moment he actually sat down at the table.
The sound of drunken refrains and the echo of lighthearted quarrels from the room below rose through the floorboards. Being better nourished, blood flowed more abundantly through their veins. The success of a risky hand filled Jean with enormous pride and a victorious feeling that made all his other triumphs pale in comparison. A loud bell rang in his ear and a special, artificial sort of bliss ran through his entire body, like a narcotic.
From that moment on, he became a prisoner of the game. His entire life, an empty canvas, oscillated around the axis formed by the hours he spent at Narbonne’s place. He would get up very late, while the afternoons would slide past him in a monochrome haze, his eyes bloodshot from the previous all-nighter. His entire body was imbued with exhaustion, distracting him from his boredom. As the twilight gave way to darkness, his appetite for gambling would wake him up and, re-energized by an adulterated, yet powerful joy, he would climb the steps to the room where the cards awaited him. So long as he sat at that magic table, he was bewitched by a spell.
Nevertheless, he kept losing and soon enough ran out of money. Narbonne fronted him a loan, coupled with some advice to take care. Jean listened to him distractedly but, despite how difficult it proved for him to do so, he also asked his father for more money.
He lost all of it over the course of three games and had to turn to his comrade yet again. On that evening, before the game started, Doc told Narbonne: “Mercier asked me if he could join us.”
Narbonne hesitated. Wouldn’t the presence of Major Mercier, the division commander, oblige them to exercise some restraint given the latter’s stripes and seniority? Furthermore, Mercier was known throughout the entire air force as a sharp-witted, dangerous card player and, although he never placed a low bet, he always won. His presence could quickly disturb the balance of a game where, although one could lose a lot of money, excessive bets were deliberately avoided.
The Crew Page 10
