by Alexis Jenni
The shop is loathsome. It had always been foul, now it is hateful, too. The thought occurs to Salagnon coming home after school on one of those winter days when afternoon is night.
Coming home from school is not Salagnon’s favourite moment of the day. In the darkness a viscous cold rises from the ground; it feels like wading through water. Coming home on winter afternoons is like walking into a lake, heading home to a sleep like drowning, to numb unconsciousness. Coming home is like denying you have ever left, it means giving up on a day that might have been the start of a new life. Coming home is like crumpling up the day and tossing it aside like a botched drawing.
To come home in the afternoon is to throw away the day, thinks Salagnon, as he tramps the streets of the old town, where the huge wet paving stones glow more brightly than the street lamps that are too far apart. In the ancient streets of Lyon it is impossible to believe in the constancy of light.
Moreover he hates this house, though it is his home; he hates this shop with its wooden frontage, its storeroom at the back where his father piles his wares, the loft space above where the family live, his mother, his father and himself. He loathes it because the shop is hateful; and because he comes back here every afternoon as though it were his house, his home, his personal fount of human warmth, whereas it is no more than the place where he can take off his shoes. But he comes back here every afternoon. The shop is hateful. He says it over and over, and he goes inside.
The bell tinkles, instantly the tension mounts. His mother calls out before he has time to close the door.
‘You took your time! Run and give your father a hand. He’s snowed under.’
The bell tinkled again, a customer came in bringing a blast of cold air. With astonishing reflexes his mother turned and smiled. She has the same reflex as a gentleman passing a young woman with interesting curves: a reflex which precedes thought, a swivel of the neck triggered by the bell. Her forced smile is perfectly convincing. ‘Monsieur?’ She is an attractive woman with an elegant bearing who looks customers up and down with an air that everyone finds charming. They want to buy something from her.
Victorien ran to the storeroom, where his father was perched on a stepladder, struggling with boxes and sighing.
‘Ah, there you are!’
From the top of the stepladder, glasses perched on the tip of his nose, he handed down a bundle of forms and invoices. Most were crumpled because 1943 paper cannot withstand Monsieur Salagnon’s impatience, his sudden rages when his calculations go awry, the clamminess of his hands when he gets frustrated.
‘It doesn’t add up, the invoices don’t tally. I can’t make head or tail of it. Here, you’re good with figures, you look over the accounts.’
Victorien took the sheaf of pages and sat on the bottom rung of the stepladder. Dust hovered, suspended in the air. The low voltage lamps are not up to the task, they shine like tiny suns through dense fog. He could not see properly, but it did not matter. If it was just figures he had only to read and add them up, but what his father is asking is not simple bookkeeping. The Maison Salagnon keeps various sets of books and they change from day to day. Wartime requires negotiating a bureaucratic labyrinth without getting lost or injured; it entails making a careful distinction between items of various categories: those whose sale is permitted, those tolerated, those restricted, those that are prohibited but incur minor penalties, those prohibited and punishable by death, and those that have escaped legislation. The Maison Salagnon dabbles in all aspects of the wartime economy. The entries in its ledgers are a jumble of the real, the hidden, the invented, the plausible-just-in-case, the unverifiable that dare not speak its name; there are even a few accurate entries. Needless to say, the boundaries of the various categories are vague, agreed in secret, known only to father and son.
‘I’ll never be able to sort it out.’
‘Victorien, there’s about to be an inspection, so I’ve no time for your moods. The stock has to tally with the accounts and with the regulations, otherwise we’re dead. You and me both. Someone informed on me. Bastard! And he did it so subtly I don’t know who struck the blow.’
‘Usually you come to some arrangement.’
‘I did come to an arrangement: that’s why I’m not banged up. They’re just coming to take a look. Given the circumstances, that amounts to favouritism. It’s all change at the préfecture: they want everything shipshape. I don’t know who to deal with any more. In the meantime, there can be no errors in that stack of papers.’
‘How do you expect me to sort it out? It’s all fake, except what is true. I don’t know any more.’
His father fell silent and stared at him intently. Being higher up the stepladder, he looked down on him. When he finally spoke, he articulated every word.
‘Tell me, Victorien: what’s the point of you studying instead of working? What is the point if you’re not capable of keeping books that look real?’
He has a point: what is the point of studying if not to understand the intangible and the abstract, to learn how to disassemble, reassemble and repair the mechanism that regulates the world? Victorien hesitated and sighed, and that is what he felt bad about. He stood up with the crumped bundles and took from the shelf a large notebook tied with cloth.
‘I’ll see what I can do,’ he says, his voice barely audible.
‘Be quick about it.’
Taken aback, he stops at the door, weighed down with documents.
‘Be quick about it,’ his father says again. ‘They could come and inspect the place tonight, tomorrow, any day. And the Germans will be with them. They can’t stand seeing their loot being diverted. They suspect the French of doing deals behind their backs.’
‘They’re not wrong. But that’s the rules of the game, isn’t it? Taking back the stuff they take from us.’
‘They’ve got all the power, so there are no rules in this game. The only way to survive is to be clever but careful. We have to live like rats: never seen but ever present, weak but cunning, nibbling at our masters’ food right under their noses at night, while they’re asleep.’
Clearly pleased with his simile, he gives a wink. Victorien curls his upper lip. ‘Like this?’ He bares his incisors, rolls his eyes in a shifty, worried way, giving little squeaks. His father’s smile disappears: the rat, so well imitated, disgusts him. He regrets his simile. Victorien relaxes his features; he is the one smiling now. ‘If we have to bare our teeth, better a lion’s than a rat’s. Or a wolf’s. It’s easier and just as effective. I’d like to bare my teeth like a wolf’s fangs.’
‘Of course you would, son. So would I. But we don’t get to choose our nature. We have to follow the instincts we are born with, and from now on we’ll be born rats. It’s not the end of the world, being a rat. They thrive as well as humans, and at our expense; they live better than wolves, even if it is away from the light.’
Away from the light, that’s how we live, thought Victorien. The city is dark enough already, with its narrow alleyways, its black walls, the fog that hides it from itself; and now they impose a blackout, paint the windows blue, keep the curtains drawn day and night.
In fact, there is no daylight. Only shadows where we can scurry like rats. We live like Eskimos in endless polar night, like Arctic rats moving from inky darkness to murky twilight. Maybe I’ll move there, he thought, to Greenland, whoever wins this war. It might be dark and cold, but outside everything will be brilliant white. Here, everything is yellow, a sickly yellow. The dim streetlights, the roughcast mud walls, the packing crates, the dust from the shops, everything is yellow, even the ashen faces utterly drained of blood. I dream of seeing blood. Here it is so well protected it no longer flows. Not from wounds, not through our veins, we no longer know where blood is. I want to see crimson trails in the snow, just for the dazzling contrast, to prove there is still life. But everything here is yellow, murky; there is a war on and I can hardly see to put one foot in front of the other.
He almost tripped. H
e caught the sheaf of papers just in time and trudged off, muttering, dragging his heels, in that sullen way that teenagers have at home, two steps forward, one step back, then suddenly stopping altogether. Though he has boundless energy when outside, at home with his parents he scarcely moves; it does not suit him, but he doesn’t know how to overcome it: within these walls he plods, he feels a yellowish fever, a hepatic malaise the colour of a piss-poor painting lit by a faint glow.
It is past closing time and Mme Salagnon has retreated to the back of the shop, where they live. Victorien looks at her from behind, the curve of her shoulders, the arch of her back and the thick, protruding knot of her apron. She is bent over the sink – women spend a lot of time making things wet. ‘This is no place and no position for a boy,’ she would often sigh; and that sigh changes, sometimes weary, sometimes outraged, but always strangely curiously satisfied.
‘I want you downstairs early,’ she says without turning. ‘Your uncle is coming round to dinner tonight.’
‘I have to work,’ he says, waving his exercise book at his mother’s back.
This is how they communicate, through gestures, never looking at each other. He goes up to the loft with a spring in his step; he likes his uncle.
His room was exactly his size; his head brushed the ceiling when he stood up, a bed and table were enough to fill the space. ‘We had planned to use it as a cupboard,’ his father would say, half joking, ‘and when you’re gone, it’ll be a junk room.’ A carbide lamp cast a bright glow on the table just big enough for an exercise book. It was enough. The rest of the room needed no light. He lit the lamp, sat down and hoped something would happen to stop him finishing his work. The hiss of acetylene sounded like the constant chirrup of crickets, making the night deeper still. He sat alone in front of this circle of light. He looked at his motionless hands in front of him. From birth, Victorien Salagnon had had large hands attached to sturdy forearms. He could clench them into heavy fists and pound the table, hard; and he could strike true, because he had a keen eye.
In other circumstances such a trait would have made him a powerful man. But in the France of 1943 there was no outlet for such strength. You could be touchy, short-tempered, give the impression of being reckless, you could talk about action, but it was all a diversion. Everyone bent with the times, made themselves as small as possible so as to give no purchase to the winds of history. The France of 1943 was closed up like a country house in winter, the door bolted, the storm shutters secured. The wind of history could seep in only through the cracks, cold draughts that would not fill a sail; just enough to catch pneumonia and die alone in your room.
Victorien Salagnon had a gift he had not wished for. In other circumstances he might not have noticed it, but having to spend so much time holed up in his room meant staring at his hands. His hand could see, as an eye can see; and his eye could touch like a hand. Whatever he saw, he could trace in ink, in brush, in pencil, and it reappeared in black on a white sheet of paper. His hand followed his eye as though joined by a nerve, as though some cord had been laid by accident at the moment he was conceived. He was able to draw anything he saw, and anyone who saw his drawings recognized what they felt when they looked at a landscape, at a face, but were unable to understand.
Victorien Salagnon would have preferred not to tie himself up in subtle shades of meaning, he wanted to attack, but he had a gift. He did not know where it came from and it was both gratifying and frustrating. This talent manifested itself as a physical sensation: some people hear a ringing in their ears, see spots in front of their eyes, have pins and needles in their legs; Victorien Salagnon felt the heft of a brush between his fingers, the viscosity of ink, the grain of the paper. Superstitiously, he attributed these feelings to the properties of the ink, which was black enough to contain a host of dark designs.
He had an enormous inkwell carved from a block of glass, which contained a reservoir of this miraculous liquid. It sat in the middle of the table; it was never moved. It was so heavy it was probably bombproof; even after a direct hit it would have been found unscathed amid the human remains, its contents unspilled, ready to capture the deeds and actions of another victim in its gleaming pitch.
The sensation of ink was like a pang of emotion. Forced by circumstance in 1943 to spend long hours shut away, he nurtured this gift that he might otherwise have ignored. He allowed his hand to move restlessly, bounded by the edges of a page. The restlessness served as an outlet for the inactivity in the rest of his body. He vaguely thought of moulding his talent into art, but it was a notion that stayed within his room, never leaving the circle of light, wide as an open book, cast by the carbide lamp.
The sensation of the ink eluded him; he did not know how to follow it. The perfect moment was always the desire that came just before he picked up the brush.
He opened the lid. The dark mass in the hefty glass inkwell did not stir. The Indian ink gives off neither movement nor light; its perfect blackness has characteristics of a vacuum. Unlike other opaque liquids, like wine or muddy water, ink is impervious to light, lets none pass through. Ink is a chasm whose true size is difficult to know: it could be a single drop the brush will suck up or an abyss into which it will disappear. Ink confounds light.
Victorien thumbed through the invoices, opened his exercise book. From a pile, he dug out a rough draft of a Latin translation. On the back of it he sketched a face. A gaping mouth. He had no desire to deal with the dubious accounts. He knew exactly what he needed to change to make it look convincing. He drew a pair of round eyes and closed each with a blot of ink. All he had to do was to try to remember which entries were fake. Not all of them. He was the one who had made up the invoices in the first place. Behind the head he painted a shadow that extended to one side of the face. There was a sense of mass. He excelled at doing two things at once. It’s like tensing antagonistic muscles simultaneously: it is as tiring as working; it gives you pause to think.
Suddenly a siren erupted; others joined the wailing chorus, ripping the night like a crumpled tissue. The building was in uproar. Doors slammed, loud cries in the stairwell, the shrill, grating voice of his mother already fading: ‘We have to tell Victorien.’ ‘He will have heard,’ came his father’s voice, barely audible; then, nothing.
Victorien wiped his nib on a piece of cloth. Otherwise the ink cakes; the liquid glue that gives it its sheen dries to a thick crust. Ink is actually a solid. Then he extinguished the lamp and walked up the main staircase. He groped his way, but he encountered no one else, heard nothing but the brassy chorus of sirens. As he reached the top, they fell silent. He opened the little window overlooking the roof. Outside, the world was still. He struggled through the opening, which was scarcely wider than his shoulders, and cautiously crept along the roof, crouching, testing the tiles with his feet as he moved. When he reached the edge he sat down, letting his legs dangle over the side. He felt nothing but his own weight resting on his buttocks and the icy damp of the terracotta through his trousers. A six-storey abyss yawned in front of him, though he could not see it. Fog enveloped him; faintly luminescent, it was not bright enough to see, but cast enough light that he knew his eyes were not closed. He was sitting in an emptiness. A space that had neither shape nor form. He was suspended; below him the notion of the void, above him, the incoming planes laden with bombs. But for the cold, he would not have believed he was there at all.
A faraway rumble came from far up in the sky; there was no source, merely the generalized resonance of the heavens rubbed with a finger. Suddenly, shards of light appeared, groups of them, long wavering reeds, feeling their way through empty space. Orange blots blossomed as they reached their peak, dotted lines trailing behind; a moment later he heard muffled explosions and crackling. He could now see the roofline and the dark gulf beneath his feet; anti-aircraft guns were firing at the planes laden with bombs he could not yet see.
He felt a hand on his shoulder; he flinched, slipped, felt a firm fist pull him back.
‘What are you playing at?’ his uncle breathed in his ear. ‘Everyone is down in the shelter.’
‘Given the choice, I’d prefer not to die in a hole. Can you imagine a direct hit? The whole building collapses and we all die in the cellar. It would be impossible to tell my remains from my mother’s or my father’s or the tins of pâté he’s got stockpiled. Everything would be buried.’
His uncle did not answer, nor did he take his hand from Salagnon’s shoulder; he often held his tongue and waited for the person speaking to run out of steam.
‘Anyway, I love fireworks.’
‘Idiot.’
The sound of the planes dwindled, headed towards the south, then there was silence. The spears of light suddenly guttered out.
The all-clear sounded. He felt his uncle’s hand relax.
‘Come on, let’s get you down. Careful not to slip. All you did was risk falling off the roof. You’d have been picked up and tossed into a mass grave of those who died of unknown causes. No one would have known anything about your bid for independence. Come on.’
In the stairwell, the lights had been turned on again and they encountered pyjamaed families. Neighbours called out to each other, carrying their unfinished dinners back up in baskets. The children were still playing, whining about having to go inside again, and required a clip round the ear to send them back to bed.
Victorien followed his uncle. His presence, even if he did not speak, changed things. When he returned their son, his parents said nothing, but took their places at the table. His mother was wearing a pretty dress and had put on lipstick. Her lips quivered and she smiled when she spoke. Her father read the label on a bottle of red wine aloud, stressing the vintage with a wink at the uncle.
