The Foundling's War

by Michel Déon

  Cyrille was playing with his car, crawling across the flagstones of the kitchen. Laura was lighting the stove and getting dinner ready. Claude was setting the table. The two men had their feet up in front of the fire, glasses in hand. Outside the wind whistled. A passing hailstorm pattered on the windows. Jesús said carelessly that, despite being not the slightest bit bothered by the cold, he would rather be inside a house with walls a metre thick than outside in the open countryside.

  ‘Not everybody has your good fortune,’ Laura said gently.

  She was thinking about her brother, an infantry lieutenant in von Bock’s army. The previous day in a letter he had begged her for socks and sweaters. The Russian winter was starting and the Wehrmacht had still not taken Moscow. A thousand leagues from that turmoil Jesús painted and gave La Garenne the boot, and tonight was welcoming his friend Jean. An unknown small boy was playing on the kitchen floor. Laura and Claude seemed to be getting on, busy around the stove. Apart from the hail that came to beat on the windows for several minutes, the rest of the world might not have existed. Jesús was not even aware that Laura was closing her eyes and, far from her office where she spent her day balancing figures, doing her best to forget the war. It was enough for her to know that he was working enthusiastically on a picture of which she understood little but which could only be beautiful. The future? Was there one? She didn’t believe it any more. Death struck swiftly and often. Those she spent her day with and the man she spent her nights with belonged to two different universes. She didn’t confuse them or forget them. Jesús was beginning to tell himself he no longer needed anything, that he had had enough of other women and Laura was what he wanted now, and he had seen enough of other artists’ paintings not to feel curious any longer. The moment had come to create a vacuum and only exist for himself, to discard all theories and send all the professors home, in order simply to be himself. If he went exclusively in his own direction, he would go further. Money? He would not have less than if he were working to fatten Louis-Edmond de La Garenne. In any case Laura had money. She was ready for anything. For an artist it was not a right but a duty to be a pimp. Pimp for a woman, for a society, for the wealthy. It was the greatest honour you could pay them.

  After dinner Claude put Cyrille to bed and Laura started to clear away. Her voice had scarcely been heard during dinner. If she spoke, it must have been to Jesús when he was alone with her, or when Jean was not present. The two men resumed their conversation before the fire.

  ‘So,’ Jesús said, ‘is this the one? I thought she would be more of a bomb. But not at all. She is perfec’. Round. Without angles. You wan’ to marry ’er?’

  ‘She’s married already.’

  Jesús remarked that Jean had a taste for complications. He was in love with a married woman and sleeping with an actress who was all over the place. He was heading for endless problems if Nelly, by some accident, were to fall in love with him.

  ‘I judge that possibility to be extremely unlikely,’ Jean said.

  Jesús suggested to his friend that he settle in the countryside with him if he did not want to be consumed by the capital. He described an idyllic life, divided between everyday activities – they would raise rabbits and hens, plant a kitchen garden – and the art for which both of them had been put in the world.

  ‘You want me to be like you, dear old Jesús, but I don’t have a gift for anything. Everything is easy for you, now that you’ve discovered you can live outside society. This is your vocation. Mine is to live inside it, and if it suffocates me, tough luck. I’m rather less brilliant at the role than Palfy is. Just think: the bloke that I met on a road in Provence, disguised as a priest and stealing cars and collection boxes to pay for the trip, must be about to pass his first hundred million. I don’t know what his racket is exactly, but he’s found an opening and he’s amassing a fortune. He’ll lose it in the end, with his usual elegance, the way he lost the others. Really and truly it’s the risk he enjoys. He’s got Kapermeister and Rocroy in his pocket …’

  Jean turned round, conscious of having uttered two names he should have kept to himself. Laura was putting the glasses away. He was sure she had heard everything. Claude appeared. They clustered around the fire together, until there were only embers left. At ten o’clock Jesús yawned and stretched.

  ‘In the country you ’ave to rest,’ he said in an exhausted voice. ‘Tomorrow we’ll talk again about that …’

  Cyrille slept in a sleeping bag on a sagging couch next to the double bed that nearly filled the room, apart from a wardrobe and a shelf for the chamber pot. Outside the wind whistled in the trees and wrapped itself around the groaning roof.

  ‘Take Cyrille,’ Jean said. ‘I’ll sleep on the couch.’

  ‘No, I want to sleep with you.’

  ‘Do you realise what you’re asking me?’

  ‘Yes. And I am asking you.’

  He switched the light off and they undressed in the dark and lay down in the icy bed.

  ‘I’m cold,’ Claude said.

  He hugged her and stroked the small of her back through her nightdress.

  She shivered. The timbers creaked at a gust more violent than the others. Jean felt Claude’s warm breath on his neck.

  ‘You don’t love me as much as before,’ she said.

  ‘How do you know?’

  He did not feel he loved her less. He even thought he loved her more, but in the darkness of the bedroom he could just as easily have been stroking Nelly, who in bed suddenly became as tender and modest as Claude.

  ‘I don’t know why you carry on seeing me. You should leave me alone, let me go, and then I’d keep on hoping I’d see you again when I was free.’

  ‘You really think you’ll be free one day?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Then I’ll wait. Stay where you are.’

  The wind dropped and she fell asleep. Cyrille woke them up.

  ‘Jean, I want to go into the forest.’

  He had drawn back the curtains, letting in the red glow of the winter sun. The frost-covered fields rose gently towards a birch wood. In the courtyard Jesús was pumping the handle of the water pump in shirtsleeves. Through the floor they could hear kitchen sounds: Laura was prodding the stove into life, putting bowls on the table. Jean went down first and took over at the pump. He quickly ran out of energy and realised how unfit he was. He no longer jogged across Paris; instead he ate too much in black-market restaurants and too little when he was with Claude. The cold air stung his cheeks. He came back in, breathless, with Jesús, who had already sawed a couple of dozen logs. Cyrille was drinking a big bowl of hot milk.

  ‘You know, Jean, it’s real milk. Jesús fetched it for me from their neighbour. She has cows that give real, real milk.’

  He shook his head as he said ‘real’, charmingly, his eyes shining with pleasure. Jesús seemed to notice for the first time the grace of this child to whom, in his pleasure at seeing Jean again, he had hardly paid any attention.

  ‘After breakfas’ I’ll draw him,’ he said.

  ‘Can you draw?’ Cyrille asked.

  ‘A little.’

  ‘Why do you speak with such a funny accent?’

  ‘Me? An assen’? No’ at all. Is you who is an assen’.’

  Cyrille thought this was tremendously funny. He burst out laughing. Laura turned round and smiled at him and her gloomy face lit up for an instant, revealing more than she usually showed. Jean decided that she was alive but had suppressed her own existence, so as only to live through Jesús. At that moment he was sure she envied Claude’s happiness in having a lover and a child, a happiness she felt to be more complete than her own. Apart from Jesús, who loved himself enough not to need anyone else, they all believed in everyone else’s happiness. Laura wanted a child with Jesús but the circumstances were not right, and Jesús showed little or no interest in children, although it was true that several of his theories had gone up in smoke in the last six months: he had the same woman in his bed,
and he had noticed Cyrille, bringing over a sketchbook and starting a series of sketches of the boy, eating, drinking, laughing.

  Later all five of them went out. Cyrille, as tubby as a bear cub in his suit and hat knitted by Marie-Dévote and Toinette, skipped along the path that went through the birch wood to the Yvette, exhaling clouds of white vapour. The sun clung to the last golden leaves of autumn and from the fields on the other side of the river there rose the same white vapour, a veil of delicate gauze that shredded in the cold light as they watched.

  ‘We are ’appy!’ Jesús shouted.

  He was, without reservation, and it was visible in his face, which was usually a little tough-looking because of the way his beard, even when he had just shaved, left a blue shadow. A woodcock flew up in front of them and two hares sped away. They met nobody. The countryside was enjoying its Sunday rest and one might have thought it deserted, hibernating in the cold. Cyrille returned to the farmhouse with cheeks like red apples. He wolfed down his lunch and curled up to sleep in one of the armchairs in front of the big fireplace.

  At four o’clock, just before nightfall, Laura drove them to the station and they boarded a train crowded with passengers returning to Paris, loaded down with heavy suitcases full of the results of their plundering of the countryside. At Gare de Luxembourg a barrage of police awaited them, filtering the arrivals and ordering them to open parcels and suitcases. Jean went through without difficulty, taking Claude and Cyrille with him. Newsboys were announcing a special edition of Paris-Soir all the way up Boulevard Saint-Michel. The headline filled the whole front page: ‘US PACIFIC FLEET DESTROYED BY JAPANESE AT PEARL HARBOR.’ Passers-by grabbed the paper and read the short bulletin as they walked to the cafés.

  ‘What’s going on?’ Claude asked.

  ‘The Japanese have declared war on the United States.’

  ‘What does it mean for us in Europe?’

  ‘The USA is at war with the Axis powers.’

  ‘So there’s a hope it might all be over quickly?’

  ‘Maybe.’

  Claude grasped Jean’s arm and was silent. Cyrille held her hand, dragging his feet, exhausted by his day in the open air that had so disoriented them all that they felt like foreigners in a Paris both dark and hectic. At Rue de la Huchette four German soldiers occupied the width of the pavement. Other pedestrians were stepping into the road to avoid bumping into them. They were young and neither hateful nor arrogant, weighed down by their green uniforms and probably dumbfounded by the city’s peacetime Sunday air. Jean sensed that Claude was about to refuse to step off the pavement. He squeezed her arm.

  ‘Don’t waste your energy on pointless protests.’

  She followed him, her head down, and they skirted round the soldiers.

  ‘I don’t like them,’ she said.

  ‘No one likes them.’

  ‘You have dinner with them.’

  ‘Not many. What else can I do? They’re everywhere.’

  ‘Yes, I know. Laura’s kind and yet I felt uncomfortable being with her … I can’t explain it, it’s as if she were hiding the truth from me.’

  ‘It wasn’t her we went to see, it was Jesús.’

  ‘That’s true.’

  She said nothing more until they reached the door of her building, where she hesitated.

  ‘Do you want to come up? I haven’t got anything I can offer you for dinner. I think I’ve got one egg left for Cyrille.’

  ‘Come on,’ Cyrille said. ‘Come, and carry me. My legs feel all wobbly. You can kiss me good night.’

  He lifted Cyrille onto his shoulders and climbed the four flights. As she opened her door Claude snatched up a square of white paper with ‘G’ written on it, poking from under the doormat, and slipped it into her bag. Jean realised that he was not to notice anything. Cyrille ate his supper. He looked worn out, his cheeks still pink and his eyes already dreamily unfocused. Claude put him to bed and he instantly fell asleep.

  ‘You need to go,’ she said to Jean as she came back.

  ‘I suppose I do. Who are you afraid of?’

  ‘No one.’

  ‘It’s not true.’

  She begged him.

  ‘Jean!’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I’ll tell you everything.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘Soon. Let me be on my own tonight.’

  She kissed him on the lips and pushed him towards the door. He felt as though his strength had deserted him, that he was helpless before her anxious and beseeching face. She merely added, ‘Don’t forget that I love you.’

  ‘No. I won’t forget.’

  It was all too rapid, too brutal. He went down the four flights of stairs, oblivious, and out past the door of the concierge who spied on him, noting his comings and goings. For a moment he thought he would stay on the quai and, from the shadows, keep watch on the building. It would have been a betrayal of Claude, of the trust she had placed in him. He set out along the empty quais, seized by the sadness that Paris reserves for lonely souls.

  At Rue de Presbourg he found Palfy sitting over a radio set. An intermittent crackling masked a distant voice whose affected English accent could just be made out. The interference rose in volume and the voice disappeared. Palfy fiddled with the knob.

  ‘This is exciting. What do you think?’

  ‘About what?’

  ‘Pearl Harbor. Don’t pretend you haven’t heard.’

  ‘I read a bulletin.’

  ‘It’s world war now. Don’t you find that much more interesting?’

  ‘To be honest I find it vile, and I’m beginning to understand my father. We live in a shell here.’

  ‘The Japanese have just shattered the Americans’ shell. The Pacific will be Japanese within two or three years. It’s the end of the white man in Asia …’

  But Jean could only think of one thing, of a G on a slip of paper hastily torn from a notebook. There was no longer any doubt. Another war was beginning this evening, a war that interested him far more than the war in the Pacific, an ocean apparently of infinite expanses of blue water sprinkled with ravishing atolls encircled by coral reefs that was really not like that at all.

  Palfy handed him the telephone. He had his cup of coffee in the other hand and Le Matin open on his lap, screaming in banner headlines the destruction of the US Pacific fleet. The Japanese were landing in Malaysia and the Gulf of Siam.

  ‘Someone is asking for you. A charming Russian accent. Perhaps it’s Moscow. Stalin’s private secretary.’

  Jean took the receiver and immediately recognised Anna Petrovna. Her voice was strained.

  ‘Hello? I need to see you. At once.’

  ‘Is there something wrong?’

  ‘I can’t tell you.’

  ‘Where do you live?’

  ‘I’m not at home. I’ll be at your office at ten o’clock.’

  She hung up and he heard the click of a public call box. She was probably phoning from the post office.

  ‘How is Uncle Joe?’ Palfy asked.

  ‘Don’t joke. Something’s happened. It’s Claude’s mother.’

  Palfy stopped smiling.

  ‘Is it serious?’

  ‘It must be serious for her to call me. I’ve only met her once and she made it very clear that I’m not her favourite person.’

  ‘What do you think’s happened?’

  Jean thought again of the square of paper with a G on it that Claude had found under the mat the previous evening and of the way she had asked him to leave after putting Cyrille to bed.

  ‘I’ll come with you,’ Palfy said. ‘You know nothing. I can help you. We’re going into a stage of this war where those who are on their own will be defenceless. Appalling things will happen. They are already …’

  Anna Petrovna had arrived early and was waiting in the secretaries’ office. Her pallor and the sharp, almost hateful look she gave him struck Jean.

  ‘I’m with Duzan. Call me when you’ve finished,’ Palfy said.
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br />   Anna Petrovna’s gaze followed Palfy with a suspicion she made no attempt to hide.

  ‘Would you like to come into my office?’ Jean said.

  She stood up. Her lips were trembling. He took her elbow and guided her.

  As soon as they were alone she said, ‘Claude was arrested last night.’

  Two tears trickled down her face, which was puffy with fatigue and which, for the first time in many years, she had not bothered to make up. Jean, unable to say a word, seized her hand and squeezed it hard. He had hoped it would be something else, perhaps the threats of a mother who no longer wanted him to see her daughter.

  ‘Where is Cyrille?’ he said.

  ‘With my son … He’s asking for you. It was him who gave me your telephone number. You’re stealing my daughter, and now you’re taking my grandson from me too. I would like you to know straight away that I hate you, but I have nowhere else to turn. I know you have … powerful friends in Paris.’

  ‘You’re wrong.’

  ‘On Saturday you took my daughter to see a German!’

  ‘No, to see a Spanish painter. He has a mistress who’s German. He’s within his rights. His country’s not at war.’

  She looked disconcerted for a second and wiped away the traces of her two tears.

  ‘When was she arrested?’ Jean asked.

  ‘Yesterday evening at eleven o’clock.’

  ‘Who by?’

  ‘Plainclothes inspectors.’

  ‘French?’

  ‘It seems so. But they’ll hand her over to the Gestapo. You don’t know them!’

  It was true, he didn’t know them. Until that day he had managed to avoid the drama that was endlessly being played out. Now the noose was tightening. To begin with it was insignificant characters like Alberto Senzacatso, then La Garenne. Today it was Claude’s turn. The words ‘arrest’, ‘police’, ‘interrogation’ suddenly had a meaning. Laura Bruckett, Rudolf von Rocroy, Julius Kapermeister – even if they had nothing to do with Claude’s arrest – were on the side of this invisible authority that claimed the right to put an end to the freedom and even the life of beings he loved.