Lieutenant Schreiber's Country

by Andrei Makine

  “I am not a writer. If I were, I would try to say what I felt at the moment Lieutenant-Colonel Poupel gave me the order to go look for one of our squadrons behind the German lines. I had already done it a few days before, alone on my motorcycle. I had to redo the mission, but in a different direction. It was a task that was clearly suicidal; a person comes out of that alive once, not twice. Poupel understood this, he knew he was sending me to my death. As he was giving me the order, he started to cry. I was overcome! Here was an officer who had fought in 1914–1918, a veteran soldier, a tough guy. And he was crying! I climbed onto my motorcycle and left. At the entrance to the village, I almost ran into a group of German soldiers. I heard them talking. I found the lost squadron and came back safe and sound. A stroke of luck. And in the end, I never knew quite how to say what a twenty-two-year-old private feels when he sees tears running down the cheeks of an old warrior who had unlearned how to cry such a long time ago.”

  Jean-Claude’s eyes become blurred with those tears, the tears of another person; his eyelids redden slightly and, in an unusual gesture for him, he pulls at the knot in his tie and loosens the collar of his shirt. As if he wants to free himself from this civilian clothing and put on his uniform from May 1940.

  He stands up with a sudden start and turns around, looking as though he wants to examine one of the photos hanging on the wall. Slowly, he passes from one snapshot to the next, meeting those young faces. The soldiers always smile in front of a lens, even if they would have to die just after the shot was taken. This is what sometimes gives the war archives that almost cheerful side.

  His gaze revives these fragments of the past, and his attentiveness leads one to believe that he is in the process of saying farewell to his photographed comrades. He is aware that at his age he will no longer have the chance to talk about their lives. Deprived of his words, they will freeze, as they are frozen in these photos, in vague and anonymous silhouettes.

  “There’s no going back now,” I say to myself, “his book has been sent to the masher. Not a trace of it in the press. Not one echo from potential readers. No longer the slightest chance to tell people what his companions in arms lived through and how they died.”

  The sense of injustice is unbearable. A paradox: there is a whole stream of chatter and images that pours daily out of newspapers, radios, and screens, but not one line, not one word that makes mention of these soldiers that are on the verge of fading into oblivion. Millions of shiny covers, innumerable clones, feminine or masculine, always flaunting the same obscenity of fashion, vacations, sports, showbiz; a vile sewer that decrees to billions of brainless humans what they should think, love, covet, what they should appreciate or condemn, what they should know about current events and history. The only goal of this mind-numbing enterprise is profit—everyone knows this—disguised with terms like “print runs” and “audience shares.” This system (Léon Bloy would call it “prostitution”) has its disciples. One of them said something like “My shows serve to empty people’s minds in order to make them available to the advertising of Coca-Cola.” Ah yes, advertising on television, dear Jean-Claude, you remember.

  No, the life of Lieutenant Schreiber is not compatible with that system.

  The old man picks up the photo on the living room table: a young woman in uniform, a German city, a row of naked trees. He looks at this shot for a long time, wipes the glass in the frame, then hangs it on the wall; this time, the loop finds the hook without hesitation and he remains motionless for a few seconds, his eyes fixed on the small gray rectangle.

  I think again about the “system,” about the indifference that managed to quiet Lieutenant Schreiber’s voice. All of those cowards who sidestepped his book should read just that one sentence in the Journal of Marches: “Thursday May 30. The tanks, under the orders of Commander Marchal, receive a sacrifice mission: that of continuing to fight in order to protect the embarkation of the North Army….”

  You, masters of media “prostitution,” lovers of minds drunk on television rubbish, try to understand what these words mean! Men, most of them very young, were going to give their lives so that their comrades could survive and continue the fight. So that their homeland could survive.

  This appeal to conscience would be a pointless and anachronistic invocation if one of those soldiers, Lieutenant Schreiber, were not still living among us. It is this same soldier who in the winter of 1944, beneath the whistling of the machine guns, climbed down from his tank and saved two gravely injured comrades. The same one who, when he accepted one of those suicide missions for himself, had seen his commander cry.

  Jean-Claude has taken the tour of his small collection of war photos. The one he is looking at now dates from June 1940: his comrades, the “guides,” Lieutenant-Colonel Poupel in the middle, and that tall soldier whose name the old man has forgotten. From now on this forgetting no longer has any importance. The indifferent people have won.

  I leave my friend and head home on foot, crossing Paris from south to north. Evening has fallen, bringing an autumn dampness with it after the summerlike illusion of the daytime. The excitement of the match that has just ended can still be heard in the snippets of conversation between people walking by: names of soccer players, opinions about the score.

  Earlier, after saying my goodbyes to Jean-Claude, I stopped in the courtyard and turned around. The old man had come out onto his balcony, and in the hazy luminescence of the twilight I made out his silhouette. Then, when he went back into his apartment, I could see his profile stand out clearly against the whiteness of the wall.

  Now the memory of an old painting I saw in my childhood comes back to me; a column of soldiers in several rows, seen from behind, anonymous. They are heading off into the night; the only part of them we can see is the rough cloth of their greatcoats. The heavy angles of their shoulders, their helmets that reflect a far-off fire but hide their faces. In this human monolith, one lone glimmer of a person: that soldier. He has turned his head toward us, as if he were awaiting our gaze or a word from us. One more second and he is going to turn around, united with the anonymity of the column. A little like Lieutenant Schreiber, I think, who gave us a sign, waited for a response, and who will now go off into the night of his past. And the whole column of soldiers is preparing to disappear into the darkness.

  As I walk, I begin to remember, one by one, the names Jean-Claude mentioned in his book and in our long conversations. I do it out of order, no longer respecting ranks, whether or not they belonged to such and such a regiment, or the chronology of battles in which those fighters took part: Parachute Captain Combaud de Roquebrune, Colonel Desazars de Montgailhard, Lieutenant-Colonel Poupel, General de Beauchesne, Officer Cadet Maesen, Captain de Segonzac.

  In my crossing of Paris, each one of these names corresponds to a street, an intersection, a section of riverbank. I am certain that Jean-Claude would have liked to take this nighttime promenade, calling out to the men whose memory his book was not able to save. Lieutenant Ville, Officer Cadet Py, Captain de Pazzis. And also the men who had received that mission of sacrifice in Malo-les-Bains in May 1940. Lieutenants de Vendières, de Ferry, Chief Sergeant Le Bozec, cuirassiers Auvray, Baillet, Péan, Le Bannier.

  I end up almost believing that such an outing would be possible before I remember the old man’s age and fragility. Besides, what will remain of these names whispered into the night? Even a book only made them survive for a few months. No, the adventure is over. Jean-Claude must be thinking this right now, meeting the eyes in the old photos on the walls. All of his old comrades will soon rejoin the column of soldiers, without names, without faces.

  A forgotten country, I tell myself. A country that no longer hears through the logorrhea of “communications,” the haughtiness of “experts,” the pronouncements of authorized thought. A country rendered invisible behind the holograms of “personality,” mascots, bubbly idols for a day, clowns of the dramatized political posturing. A country whose mouth has been forced shut but w
hose vitality can still be seen in the cracks that pierce the indifference: an editor who dares to publish an imprudent book, a journalist who—remembering the nobility of his occupation—revolts and manages to dominate his inquisitors when he is dragged before a court of law. An old man who, ignoring the quiet of a comfortable retirement, begins his final battle to defend the honor of this forgotten country.

  Lieutenant Schreiber’s France.

  A Message

  I often imagine Jean-Claude being woken up at night by his memories. While he dreams, he must sometimes hear the static of radio exchanges as they reach him in his tank. A message in German between two enemy tanks that are going to attack him. Then, a warning from an American tank driver: “Hey, Frenchie, take care! There are two Panther tanks coming down to you.” Yes, be careful, Frenchie, two Panthers are getting ready to charge!

  These voices die away and the old man stays sleepless for a moment, astonished by the clarity with which the reality of that ancient life is suddenly appearing before him: two radio transmissions, a few seconds apart, suspended his fate above death. His new sleep is a brief doze, light enough not to distort the bitter reality that is being reborn: a young officer pulls himself out of his tank and shouts as loud as he can over the many sounds of the battle: “Leper! Catherineau! Hold on!” A long trace of blood in the snow, the two wounded soldiers, his effort to carry them toward his tank … and suddenly, that slowness, that weakness, as if in his dream the young lieutenant has been transformed into this old man who is trying in vain to recount a past that no one wants to know about anymore.

  I also imagine that in the greatest depths of those cruel nights, the old man must regret not having been able to express the truth about that other life whose light he had caught a glimpse of long ago. That autumn morning, sunny and windy, a hotel room in a city where each footstep could become fatal and, mysteriously, an infinite serenity, the certainty of having arrived at the essence of his life. He had the same feeling in that German city, on a night still shaken by explosions, when a woman he didn’t know, with a few words, had offered him a peace he had never felt so deeply. He had felt like a foreigner then, not with that young German but in the world around him filled with hatred and death. As foreign as he felt when he returned to Paris in May 1945, in the midst of a celebration of the forgetful. A woman, a nurse who had saved hundreds of lives, would show him that living away from the crowd was not a curse but a promise, the start of a path.

  I remember one day, while he was talking about his premonition of that path, the old man had said, with a disconcerted smile, “But to tell that story, I would have to write another book.”

  Jean-Claude’s words reverberate in me as the weeks after our recent meeting return to their usual pace. I hesitate to call him, afraid of awakening in him the sourness of the failure. After all, I was the one who had pushed him toward this book adventure. I tell myself that I will need to be patient and wait for an opportune moment. Time, with its abrasive obstinacy, eventually makes even the notches that are most brutally carved into our memory disappear.

  Then comes, finally, that February evening; a snowfall erases the winter’s grayness (all while provoking a national catastrophe, as is always the case when a few inches of snow cover the Parisian asphalt). I walk, choosing small streets where this white has not yet been flattened by the coming and going of cars. Strangely, some of these streets are now linked to the memory of my last and already distant encounter with Jean-Claude, to those soldiers’ names I spoke in silence during my journey across Paris.

  When I come through my front door, I find a message on my answering machine: “I’ve just remembered the name of that guy, you know, the one in the photo, the one of my guide comrades from the Fourth Cuirassiers. The one who was killed near Dunkirk. If you have the time, come and see me, I’ll talk to you about him. And also about that young woman I didn’t know in Baden-Baden—”

  The message cuts off at this point. His voice has a ring to it and seems reanimated. It is a young man’s intonation.

  This is probably the way that, long ago, Lieutenant Schreiber’s voice must have sounded.

  NOTES

  A Reader

  11 Cette France qu’on oublie d’aimer, English title: This France We Forget to Love: An essay by Andreï Makine about his geographical and linguistic exile from Russia and his point of view on the French national identity, the image of France and its culture abroad, and the image that the French have of their own country.

  11 Médaille militaire: A military decoration of the French Republic for other ranks for meritorious service and acts of bravery in action against an enemy force. It is the third highest award of the French Republic. Jean-Claude Servan-Schreiber received his metal for services rendered during the battle at Dunkirk.

  A Wandering Soldier

  13 Pétain: Henri Philippe Benoni Omer Joseph Pétain, known generally as Philippe Pétain or Marshal Pétain, was a French general officer who reached the distinction of Marshal of France, and later served as the Chief of State of Vichy France, also known as the French State from 1940 to 1944. His government voted to transform the discredited French Third Republic into the French State, an authoritarian regime. After the war, Pétain was tried and convicted for treason. He was originally sentenced to death, but because of his outstanding military leadership in World War I, particularly during the Battle of Verdun, Pétain was viewed as a national hero in France and was not executed. His sentence was commuted to life in prison and he died in 1951.

  The Museum of a Man

  23 RPR: The Rally for the Republic (RPR) was a Neo-Gaullist and conservative political party in France. Originating from the Union of Democrats for the Republic (UDR), it was founded by Jacques Chirac in 1976 and presented itself as the heir of Gaullist politics. On September 21, 2002, the RPR was merged into the Union for the Presidential Majority, later renamed the Union for a Popular Movement.

  The Identity of a Soldier

  27 “thanks to the Servan-Schreibers’ extraordinary fame”: The Servan-Schreibers have been notable figures in French media for several generations, with many members becoming journalists. Émile Servan-Schreiber, Jean-Claude’s uncle, founded the French newspaper Les Échos with his brother Andre; Jean-Claude founded the weekly paper L’Express along with his cousin Jean-Jacques, before helping to create the French Publicity Board which manages the TV advertisements that show on channels run by the French public broadcasting service; and Jean-Claude’s daughter, Fabienne Servan-Schreiber, is an award-winning French film and television producer.

  28 The Hexagon: A casual synonym for the mainland part of Metropolitan France for its approximate shape, usually understood as metropolitan only, except in topics related to the foreign affairs and national politics of France as a whole.

  29 député: Members of The National Assembly, lower house of the bicameral Parliament of France under the Fifth Republic, are known as députés, translating to “delegate” or “envoy” in English.

  Beyond Wars

  50 “How many more Oradours …”: The village of Oradour-sur-Glane was destroyed on June 10, 1944, after 642 of its inhabitants, including women and children, were massacred inside the village church by the Second Waffen-SS Panzer Division.

  Impure Luck

  72 valisards: Literal translation is a “suitcase carrier,” but in context this was slang used by the Resistance to indicate a person involved in the black or gray market.

  A Character in Search of a Book

  91 “Masaryk, Herriot, Laval, and Daladier …”: Notable politicians in the years leading up to World War II. Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk (March 7, 1850–September 14, 1937) was a Czech politician, statesman, sociologist, and philosopher who was instrumental in gaining Czechoslovak independence after World War I through meetings with the Allied Powers; Édouard Marie Herriot (July 5, 1872–March 26, 1957) was a French Radical politician of the Third Republic who served three times as Prime Minister and for many years as President of the Ch
amber of Deputies; Pierre Laval (June 28, 1883–October 15, 1945) was a French politician. During the time of the Third Republic, he served as Prime Minister of France twice; Édouard Daladier (June 18, 1884–October 10, 1970) was a French left-of-center politician and the Prime Minister of France at the start of the Second World War.

  92 Autofiction: A term coined in 1977 by Serge Doubrovsky to refer to fictionalized autobiographies.