The Foundling's War

by Michel Déon

  Jesús was cutting wood. With his foot on the sawbuck he lengthened his saw strokes, enjoying his power, the use of his strength. He finished splitting each log with a kick of his heel. His body, fit and taut with effort, steamed slightly. Like an athlete in training he paced his breathing, brushing a rebel strand of curly hair from his damp forehead with the back of his hand. His rolled-up sleeves exposed bare, hairy, tensely muscled forearms. Jean offered to help him.

  ‘Go for a walk,’ Jesús said. ‘I’m sawin’ in half the fellow who killed Laura’s brother. Is my business.’

  Claude was making lunch and Cyrille was colouring a book of printed drawings. Jean walked down the path that led through the birch forest. The pure icy light of Christmas Day sharply outlined the leafless branches against the sky, with the naive clarity of a Japanese painting. It might have been titled ‘The clear morning and the dew’ or ‘The dream of the trees in the breath of the earth’ or even ‘The sun discovers a landscape that belongs to no one’. The path climbed uphill. At the top rusty bracken was colonising a clearing where tree trunks, blackened where they had been cut, lay on the ground like octopus tentacles. The sharp scent of bracken and the sweet smell of leaf mould saturated by ice-melt assailed Jean so violently that he stopped, feeling he was intruding on sleeping nature. There was a crossing of four paths here. Behind him was Jesús’s farm, a building of sturdy grey stone whose slate roof reflected the light. It looked like water spangled with silvery glints. From the chimney there rose a vertical column of smoke that the cold air dispersed immediately. The rasp of Jesús’s saw reached Jean like the rhythmic buzz of an insect, now quick, now slow because Jesús had hit a knot or got his blade stuck in green wood. There was no need to see him to picture him clenching his teeth, setting himself angrily to avenge Laura.

  Ahead of Jean the ground fell away steeply among bracken, broom and brambles down to a river whose iridescent reflections winked back in Morse code at the slate roof. He walked down towards the water, which ran between well-defined banks. In fact it was not a natural river but an abandoned drainage canal. A log bridge spanned it. As Jean arrived two moorhens flew up and hid themselves in a reed bed, disturbing a couple of mallards which rose so swiftly against the light that they disappeared in its glare. Had they ever been there, had they really flown away into the milky-white sky where their plumage – at least the male’s, the female being more discreet – should have sparkled like a firebird’s? After they had gone a near-silence fell, broken only by the water flowing between the canal’s black banks, and Jean made out the quicksilver gleam of trout flicking and darting against the current.

  He remembered the Marquis de Malemort pushing up his sleeve and plunging his hand into the reeds or under a rock to feel for and grab a trout that he would toss onto the bank where it would flop, gasping, and die. Jean regretted not having learnt to poach when he could have done. Around Grangeville the woods were too formal. You encountered the hunt and, on calm days, the hinds and their wet eyes. Or Chantal exercising her mare, which would sneeze in the morning mist. Further on, a plantation of young firs made a green wall in the bruised forest. It was practically impossible to get through the wall and Jean decided to walk along its edge as far as a hedge that the winter had thinned out. Hawthorn and brambles seemed to have been pruned to leave just a circular gap at eye level. The track skirted round an octagonal hunting lodge with Louis XIII windows in which waxed paper covered the broken panes. The place could have been delightful, in the midst of a huge clearing of beeches that stretched out their gaunt branches, but it looked somehow tainted by a scorn for the lodge’s prettiness, by a contemptuous neglect and indifference that were so manifest it was only suitable for a passing vagrant. A checked shirt was drying on a line next to a pair of long johns and, oddly, a patched coat, an old rag better suited to scaring birds. The carcass of an old car was being used as a henhouse. No smoke rose from the chimney. The person living in the lodge disdained the use of a fire, and it seemed likely that he disdained most things. The forest encircled him in his small clearing and would end up stifling him. Young growth was pushing through everywhere, probably pruned the previous autumn. Someone hoped to see them growing fast.

  One day soon, with the clearing shrunk to the size of the lodge itself, the trees would force their way under the eaves and the roof would fall in. Two beeches, dead from old age, were rotting inside their bark, the wood yellow, their mangled branches overrun by ivy. No one had thought to cut them down and they stood there, collapsing little by little into the loose earth, blanketed in moss, seething with woodlice, like the ancient image of giants struck down, brandishing their black roots like horrible fingers.

  Jean skirted the clearing that had distracted him from his exploration of the forest. The path led into an undergrowth of fragile ash saplings, tangled and shooting in all directions yet poised and graceful in their wild growth. A subdued light lit the ground, carpeted with leaves of a fine bronzed brown. Jean stopped to listen to the forest’s rustling, a sporadic music, discontinuous, now whispered, now repeated to the point of insistence, impossible to locate among the branches or underfoot. He disturbed a hen pheasant that flew skilfully to cover and landed a short distance away in front of some brambles into which it waddled and disappeared.

  The undergrowth descended gently towards a pond of black water. Jean was back at the drainage canal, which emptied here into the bulrushes and reeds. The forest opened up to his scrutiny like a flower whose pistil he had finally reached. He stopped, startled by the encounter, so simple and so captivating, when all he had done was wander at leisure, and realised that unless he retraced his footsteps he might find himself lost before this placid mirror in which the outlines of yellow and ochre-coloured trees trembled. The world had perhaps looked like this at its very beginning, and beneath the waters of the pool there crouched in their lairs giant animals, monsters with long necks and tiny heads, fearful and shy, threatened and devoured by otters and badgers, bedecked with leeches.

  It moved him to see the forest revealing its intimate self, its melancholy secrets, caught off guard in its innermost heart. Jean would have liked to console it in its neglect as well as its beauty. Sitting on a black rock crowned with white lichen, he wondered whether it was not a blessing that the forest had been forgotten by men. They had not burnt it or cut it down or shredded it with their bullets and shells. They had not hidden there in order to kill each other better. Elsewhere, over in the East, in other forests muffled by snow, soldiers slipped through the trees and shot each other like enemy game while the white sky hummed with invisible planes that blindly released their sticks of bombs, unleashing fire and death.

  At his arrival he thought he detected a sort of hesitancy in the waters and the tall bulrushes, unruffled by any breeze. Everything seemed to him preternaturally silent, as if in his presence the trees and muddy grass at the pool’s edge had suddenly fallen quiet to observe him. He had not moved for several minutes when he noticed, coming from among the reeds, two ripples disturbing the sleepy surface. A pair of teal, followed by another, emerged from their hiding place and set out across the pool, the males with their heads of maroon browny-red, flecked with green, the female flecked with brown. Coming towards the bank on which he stood, a little to his right, they could not fail to see him. He remembered their arrival in Normandy when he was a boy, at the end of autumn when, after a long migration, they rested on the beach at Grangeville for a few hours before flying on inland. It was impossible to imagine a more suspicious bird, or one quicker to put itself beyond reach. That was what made it incredible to see them out in the open, swimming unconcernedly and quacking enthusiastically. Jean followed them with his gaze. They were heading purposefully for the bank. Only then did he glimpse, half hidden among the reeds and standing up to his thighs in the water, a man, or rather a scarecrow covered in sacking, a brown hat on his head, so still he looked like a statue, like one of those objects one leaves for years in hard water and that harden like ston
e without losing their colour. He had been there before Jean arrived, blending into the vegetation so well that he would have stayed invisible if the teal had not swum in his direction. When they were no more than two metres from this outlandish figure, an arm came out and lobbed a handful of some kind of pellets that floated. The teal rushed to them, gobbled them up and took off, skimming across the water to hide again in a clump of bulrushes. The man clambered onto the bank. He was wearing black waders and the sacking had been stitched together with some skill to make a rough overcoat that he must have put on over his head. He rubbed his hands, protected by woollen mittens, and pushed back his hat, an old round homburg camouflaged by more sacking. Until that moment all Jean had seen was a black beard. Seeing the rest of the face, he was surprised to find it younger than he had expected. The man came closer, walking stiffly in boots still caked in thick mud. Yes, the face was that of a man of barely forty, with shining, dark eyes beneath thick eyebrows, and a slender nose. The beard hid three-quarters of his face and concealed its thinness and hollow cheeks, their cheekbones reddened by cold.

  ‘Good morning, Monsieur,’ the man said. ‘I must say I thought because of you they wouldn’t come.’

  ‘They’re winter teal, aren’t they?’

  ‘Ah, so you know your ducks! That’s unusual. To know the names of things is a remarkable sign in a world that generally talks about thingumabobs and whatchamacallits.’

  The voice was distinguished, without affectation. The get-up was at odds with the tone of the man, who turned towards the pool and pointed towards the reeds where the teal were concealed.

  ‘Nervous, aren’t they? You’d need centuries to tame them … and we have so little time. You don’t smoke, I hope?’

  ‘No. Well, hardly at all.’

  ‘But you drink alcohol!’

  ‘So little too that it’s hardly worth mentioning.’

  ‘That little is still too much.’

  The man shook himself and Jean was caught unawares by the smell he gave off, a mixture of grime and manure.

  ‘Yes, still too much,’ he went on. ‘Humankind’s committing suicide. But I suppose there’s nothing new in that. It’s been going on for three thousand years.’

  ‘Humankind’s a suicide victim who’s doing fairly well, all things considered.’

  The man scratched his beard, half amused. The tips of his fingers, poking out of his mittens, were appallingly dirty, covered in scales of filth and with black nails.

  ‘You think I’m repugnant,’ he said. ‘And I am. Beyond measure. But solitude makes one indifferent. To tell you the truth, you’re the first person I’ve spoken to for nearly two years. Oh, of course I’ve vaguely seen human beings moving in the distance. Sometimes they came so close I heard their blah blah blah. Apart from their clothes – about which they display unbelievable vanity – you can only distinguish them from animals by their lack of instinct. When I saw you appear here you surprised me. You watched and you stood still. I could have sworn you were enjoying imagining the presence of a monster in this fetid pool …’

  ‘I was.’

  The man scratched his armpit. Jean thought he must be infested with lice.

  ‘That’s the great problem: where have all the monsters gone? There’s one here. I’ve seen its tracks. Animals aren’t innocent. No more than men are. They’re nasty, brutish and cruel. We have to teach them.’

  Jean was stirred: a few moments before he had pictured a monster lurking in these depths, and now this man was talking about it as if it was a reality. Between his beard and his eyebrows his eyes shone, sharp, mad, amused.

  ‘What do you feed your teal on?’ Jean asked.

  ‘I collect worms in the mud and mould them into balls.’

  ‘So really you’re encouraging their carnivorous tastes.’

  ‘Not bad! Not bad! Well thought through. No doubt about it, I’m a lucky man: the first human I’ve spoken to for two years is a thinker. He thinks! A miracle! Yes, Monsieur, it’s true, I sacrifice worms to teal, but the teal are innocent. You … you are not.’

  ‘And you?’

  ‘Me? You won’t be surprised: I was falling apart before I hid myself away in the forest. By the way, where are we with the war? Is Danzig still a free city? Has Poland pulled through?’

  He scoffed and held up a hand to forestall an answer Jean hesitated to give him.

  ‘Don’t disappoint me! Don’t disappoint me, Monsieur!’

  ‘I shan’t disappoint you,’ Jean said. ‘Danzig remains a free city. Poland is free, Austria has expelled the Germans. The Sudetens booed Hitler at a parade and, because they annoyed him, he gave them back to Czechoslavakia, which has returned to being a fine, proud republic with a socialist government. Italy has put good King Zog and his pretty queen Geraldine back on the throne of Albania. Mussolini has offered his apologies to Haile Selassie and given him back his throne at the same time as Victor Emmanuel renounced the title of emperor. General Franco has opened his borders to the remaining Republican army for a festival of reconciliation. Oh, I forgot to mention that Hitler has stepped down as Chancellor of the Reich to devote himself full-time to oil painting. The great dealer, Braun-Lévy, has signed him up exclusively for his first exhibition, which will take place this spring.’

  ‘Marvellous! I did well not to get involved and I was right to run away from these neighbourly disputes. I’d have been a complete spare part. I bet no one’s even noticed I’ve gone.’

  ‘It’s true; no one’s said a thing to me.’

  The man smiled indulgently and sat down on a tree trunk mouldy with slippery brown mushrooms that squashed beneath his backside.

  ‘What’s your name?’

  ‘Jean Arnaud.’

  ‘Arnaud with an “l”?’

  ‘No, without an “l”.’

  He looked disappointed and subsided into a reverie that lasted two or three minutes, while Jean waited unmoving, the better to observe him. The man scratched himself and tugged on his beard with his thin and dirty fingers. It would have been interesting to see him shaved and his face revealed.

  ‘And my name is Pascal. Blaise Pascal. Does that mean anything to you?’

  ‘Yes, but you’re not Blaise Pascal.’

  ‘What do you know about it?’

  ‘You don’t look like him. He was clean-shaven and neatly dressed.’

  ‘You’re talking about my physical appearance. What about his soul? I’ve run into his soul here, Monsieur, wandering in the damp woods of the Chevreuse valley, lingering by the noisome waters of these pools. I have merely given it a body, my own. His soul is warm there; it no longer wanders cold and alone, and I’d go so far as to say that it’s enjoying itself. I grant you it’s not inventing wheelbarrows, problems of geometry or pulley systems to draw water from a well, but it has other amusements. We discuss grace and the world’s folly and talk to the animals.’

  He stood up and raised his hat, revealing his baldness and a dirt-encrusted scalp.

  ‘It’s been my pleasure, Monsieur Arnaud.’

  ‘Mine too.’

  He took three steps and paused.

  ‘That’s not just a figure of speech. I have greatly enjoyed our conversation. Perhaps I’ve exaggerated to myself the inanity of intercourse with my fellow men. Where do you live? Oh … don’t worry … I’ve no intention of visiting … Purely curiosity.’

  ‘A Spanish friend has bought an old farmhouse behind the birch forest. He’s a painter.’

  ‘Are you talking about that tall hairy fellow always in his shirtsleeves? I’ve seen him sawing wood. A painter? Now that’s interesting. I find art to be window dressing. I mean the art of today. I once had a collection of paintings, can you imagine? And you have no idea how easily one can do without. Adieu! Or perhaps au revoir. Who knows? If you’re passing my house – a delightful Louis XIII hunting lodge – tap on one of the few remaining window panes. I’ll always be happy to see you. You have a pleasing face. We’ll talk of those “gentlemen”, o
f Mother Angélique25 and Saint-Cyran26 … What formidable intelligence! And we’ll speak ill of the Jesuits … I hope you weren’t raised by them …’