The Foundling's War

by Michel Déon

  Rudolf von Rocroy was pacing up and down the platform at Gare d’Austerlitz, less aristocratic in a suit than in his colonel’s uniform. The war, even though he has done his best, successfully until now, not to get mixed up in it, was what gave him his brilliance. His return to a synthetic flannel suit, tasteless tie and starched collar was a reminder that the officer in gleaming uniform concealed a gentleman of slender means who had difficulty making ends meet and then not always in a dignified manner, for he too belonged to a doomed class under Germany’s National Socialism. His cowardice and dishonesty had been the price of his survival. Jean found him pitiful and inexcusable. Rudolf caught sight of him and turned his back, the sign they had agreed. They had reserved seats in the same compartment of the same carriage of the Paris–Irun express and no longer knew each other. Rudolf buried himself in a French book. The other travellers were of no interest. Jean watched through the window as the landscapes of a France he had never seen before slipped past. Where was war or occupation to be found in these green contours of Touraine, Limousin, Charente, Bordeaux? He could only see the peace of fields and woods, the promises of springtime and hamlets warmed by the beautiful day’s sunshine, the little roads that wove a network of friendship between farms and villages. The blitzkrieg had left no wounds here, or if it had they had been dressed: reconstructed bridges, roads cleared of the endless detritus of an army fleeing the enemy. Only the mainline stations and their German railway workers in their curious caps proclaimed the poignant reality: at its nerve centres France was no longer itself. An insidious shadow shrouded it.

  Between Bordeaux and Bayonne he fell asleep. He opened his eyes in the Basque country, awakening in him thoughts of Paul-Jean Toulet, whom he had discovered thanks to Salah on the eve of war. Between banks of rhododendrons he caught sight of Guéthary, where the poet had died. If Nelly had been with him, she would have recited his lines on Bayonne:

  Bayonne! A walk beneath its arches,

  No more need one bear

  To leave one’s inheritance there

  Or one’s heart dashed in pieces.

  After the war he would find Salah again and take him to hear Nelly. But what did ‘after the war’ mean? No one had any idea when it might be. And where was Salah living, now that Geneviève was alone in Switzerland? When he heard about her liaison with Palfy, which was now official, there would be fireworks. The unusual Nubian was the prince’s executor, managing the fortune Geneviève had inherited. Incapable of adding two figures together, she had had to put herself entirely in his hands. Jean imagined Salah’s cold rage. He would try to destroy Palfy. But this time Palfy was forewarned. He would not allow it to happen, and there was no doubt that he was of that breed that always knows how to put a former servant in his place.

  At Irun, long checks delayed the train. Feldgendarmen, French police, Gestapo and customs officers went through the hundred or so passengers with a fine-tooth comb. Rudolf was to spend the day at San Sebastián. Despite his rank and the fact that his mission documents were in order, he was subjected to almost as rigorous an examination as Jean. With their papers stamped, they still needed to present themselves to customs. This time Rudolf’s curtness had an effect. Jean was searched, but the suitcase, which at that moment belonged to neither of them, remained in the luggage rack, untouched. Jean grabbed it and carried it to the Spanish train, where he had a sleeping compartment reserved. The hardest part was over, and he was surprised to have been so calm and indifferent, even wondering if an arrest and interrogation wouldn’t have troubled him less. Rudolf disappeared. He was alone. Spain as seen from Irun station hardly aroused enthusiasm. He remembered his arrival in Italy a few years before, the intense pleasure he had felt at crossing the frontier, and he would have liked to encounter Spain in the same fashion, with a haversack on his back and a bicycle, but his adolescent passions were out of time and he was not entering the country to visit it with his Théophile Gautier in his hand, the way he had visited Italy aiming to follow in Stendhal’s footsteps. It was a dismal beginning: at the sight of his French passport the Spanish police had become even more unpleasant, and now the train was delayed for an unknown reason. Travellers who had counted on the delay kept arriving, running along the platform with parcels tied up with string in their hands. Night fell. The station lights went on. They were wretched and yellowish, but the effect was like a party after France in the blackout. At last the train rolled slowly through the town, its suburbs and industrial estates, and plunged into a long tunnel before speeding up slightly and panting along an uneven, jolting track. The ancient engine could be heard labouring at the front, puffing a plume of golden flecks into the night. There was a dirty, smoke-filled restaurant car that stank of cooking oil and served cold omelettes and rancid biscuits. Jean sat down at a table. Three Spaniards sat around him, voluble and self-assured, swallowing the unspeakable tortilla without blinking, ordering bowls of coffee and smoking foul cigarillos. The train toiled on through a mountain pass. Several times it seemed as if it would run out of breath and stop, and then with a last effort it was over the top, and descending in a hellish squeal of steel.

  Jean slept and woke up at Burgos. He had had to shut the window to keep out the coal dust, and when he opened it the icy air of the Castilian plain rushed into his compartment. The Civil Guard, their bovine faces blue with stubble, kept watch on the platform as the same late passengers started running again, carrying their parcels tied up with string. A little old woman, spruce and with her hair in a bun, walked along the carriages carrying a clay pitcher and chanting, ‘Hay agua, hay agua!’ Hands stretched out, grasped the pitcher and tipped it up. Jean walked to the restaurant car, where the same travellers seemed to have spent the night smoking their rank cigarillos. There was weak coffee, stale bread and bars of chocolate on the menu. The train moved off again, and through the window he glimpsed old Castile at last, a landscape set ablaze by cold light and dotted with motionless villages beneath ochre-coloured roofs among the bare rocks. From time to time a Roman belfry, a tower, a fortress-like farm broke the deep, dignified monotony or, looming out of nowhere to startle the watcher, a peasant in black on his grey mule next to the track. Antiquated and breathless as it was, the train jarred as an absurd anachronism in this marvellously preserved landscape. Jean studied it greedily. Since the previous day, his appetite for travelling had come back to him, an appetite smothered by defeat, which had shut men like him up as if imprisoning them. He felt again something of the feverish pleasure that had quickened his spirit on his first expeditions outside France: the secret excitement he had felt in London, the sense of marvel in Italy. The lost war had closed his country’s borders to everyone except the privileged and those willing to risk the hazardous adventure of a fishing boat in the Channel or a crossing of the Pyrenees. A forgotten feeling came back to him, that there is no imagination without movement. It struck him that he could stay in Portugal. Palfy was taking a risk in sending him out of France. In short, he had trusted him … Jean smiled to himself at the idea of beating Palfy at his own game. Never, ever would Palfy have the right to criticise him for doing so, without contradicting himself. Jean walked back to his compartment. The attendant had folded the bed against the partition, put the seat back straight, and vaguely tidied up. Jean locked the door and opened the suitcase he had exchanged with Rudolf. It contained, in denominations of ten and twenty, three hundred thousand pounds sterling. Obviously it would be deadly dangerous to walk away with the suitcase’s contents and not take them to the bank where they were to be deposited. Palfy had warned Jean that Lisbon was teeming with OSS agents, the Sicherheitsdienst and MI6. As soon as he arrived he was expecting to be followed, his every move watched and noted. The vastness of the sum and of the operation put it in a different class from everything he had been used to. His percentage more than satisfied him. He shut the suitcase and began to daydream: from Lisbon he could reach England and America. He could go back to London, to graceful Chelsea and the black Thames. How he ha
d loved London! The daydream slipped away: he was not free. Claude was surviving at her clinic because of him. If he stopped paying, they would move her to an ordinary hospital and she would disintegrate, and Cyrille would starve at his grandmother’s. Palfy had taken every aspect of the situation into account. He was not afraid. Jean would fulfil his mission and come back. One day, later …

  He closed his eyes to summon an image of Claude in her barred room. Her treatment had swollen the clear, fine features that had expressed the nobility of her beleaguered soul and dulled the gaze that had once been so calm and balanced. She spoke slowly, with deliberation, and several times had implored him to take her away, to rescue her from the nurse and doctor. For a time Jean had wondered if he still loved her, knowing it was a dreadful, pitiless question and blaming it on his bitter disappointment. You cannot love someone the same way when they have a breakdown – it was as if the obstacles and barriers that that person put in the way to defend themselves were the spice of love. In fact he still loved her as much as ever, but seeing her made him miserable. The ordeal of every visit took several hours to get over, before he could salvage yet again, intact, the perfect feeling that had brought them together. Alone with her in her blue room, whose barred window looked onto a kitchen garden and a road, he did not know what to say. One Sunday, as he had walked away towards the station, she had shouted from the first floor, ‘Jean, Jean, don’t leave me.’ Her bare arm had reached out between the bars, her hand extended with her fingers spread as if she was putting a curse on him. He had turned and seen her desperate white face, so white she looked nearer dead than alive. The nurse had dragged her away from the bars, closing the window on her cries …

  In the late afternoon the train, after spending hours unmoving in dismal stations, stopped at Fuentés de Oñoro on the Portuguese border. The Lisbon express, having tired of waiting, had left an hour earlier. The delay, the stormy exchanges between Spanish and Portuguese railway workers, and the confusion of officials allowed Jean to get the case through without difficulty. The most hazardous part of his mission was over and he saw himself stuck in an insignificant Portuguese town, about to spend twenty-four hours in the station waiting room, when a young man in a grey suit and a black felt hat approached him. In good French he offered Jean a lift in his car to Guarda.

  ‘There’s an excellent inn there. You’ll get dinner and a bed for the night. It’s better than spending a day and a night in a station.’

  He had a pleasing, open face. Jean accepted this stroke of luck.

  ‘I didn’t see you on the train,’ he said.

  ‘I wasn’t on it. I work at this station from time to time … I might as well tell you straight away that I belong to the PIDE. I believe you call it the Sûreté in your country. I hope I’m not alarming you?’

  He smiled. He had an old Chrysler waiting outside and took the wheel with assurance. The road climbed up to Guarda. He drove cautiously, asking the sort of banal questions one usually asks a stranger.

  ‘Is it your first trip to Portugal?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I hope you’ll like our country.’

  ‘There’s no reason for me not to like it.’

  It did not sound from the man’s tone as if he was interrogating him, but Jean, certain that behind the banalities the young policeman was gathering information, decided to be open with him.

  ‘Exit visas from France are rare,’ the man said. ‘It’s a great shame. Portugal would open its doors to all those who seek asylum.’

  ‘Oh, there’s nothing secret about my reason for being here! I jumped at an opportunity one of my uncles offered me: he’s very well in with the Germans. I have to see his banker. If he came himself he’d arouse suspicion. I’m just coming and going straight back. It’s good to breathe free air for a change.’

  Guarda was an austere, handsome town: the pearl of the Serra da Estrela. The policeman dropped him outside the hotel.

  ‘I’ll probably see you tomorrow,’ he said. ‘The Lisbon express leaves at six in the evening. If you’re interested I’ll show you around. I’m free tomorrow. The dinner at the inn is good. The cook is excellent. Ask her to make you a fish pie. There’s nothing better …’

  Jean’s bedroom looked out on the Praça Luís de Camões. He froze for much of the night in a huge bed. The morning market woke him. Men in thick cloth jackets with fox-fur collars strolled among the crouching vendors, black mummies of whom all he could see, apart from their headscarves knotted beneath their chins, was their angular profiles. They held out eggs, herbs, butter, or a plucked chicken. After France’s obscure misery and Spain’s rancid version of the same misery, a Portuguese market was lavishness itself. Jean was astonished that the suspicious buyers, with their ascetic faces and measured gestures, were not falling on these most rare products like wild animals.

  A small maid in a lace apron and starched collar, with a sallow serious face, entered, bowed as she murmured, ‘Com licença,’ and placed coffee, a jug of milk and toast on the table. She indicated by gestures that a senhor was asking for him downstairs. She meant of course the PIDE official.

  ‘I hope you slept well. I forgot to tell you my name: Urbano de Mello …’

  ‘And mine’s Jean Arnaud.’

  ‘I know. I saw your passport … You might like to know that I’ve had a telephone call from Lisbon. I have to go there this afternoon. I’ll be driving, and if you like I can take you.’

  Jean was no longer in any doubt that someone was particularly interested in him. The important thing remained to get to Lisbon. There was no safer way of getting there than with the young policeman.

  The Chrysler laboured through the Serra da Estrela. Its valves clattered painfully.

  ‘Our petrol’s very bad,’ Urbano said.

  He drove unhurriedly along narrow roads edged with mimosas and Judas trees in bloom, commenting on the sights.

  ‘It’s a shame we don’t have more time. There are churches and some beautiful palaces I’d like to show you. Have you heard of Coimbra?’

  ‘There’s a university there, isn’t there?’

  ‘Dr Salazar taught political economy there before taking over as head of the government. He’s a quite remarkable man. He has saved the country from ruin and anarchy and this time once again he has kept us out of the conflict. Peace is an incalculable asset.’

  Jean did not doubt it. While Spain, even glimpsed from a train window, seemed barely to have recovered from its exhausting civil war, Portugal radiated a prosperity and sense of easy living that the rest of Europe no longer knew and might never know again.

  They stopped at a restaurant at Coimbra, near the university. Students in frayed black gowns were talking animatedly, crowded together around several tables. Urbano declared that they served the best salt cod in all of Portugal here. He went on to elaborate a multitude of different gastronomic approaches to cod and ways of serving it. Jean listened to him, amused, wondering how, after playing cat and mouse with him for twenty-four hours, he planned to keep up his surveillance in Lisbon. Whatever happened, there was no doubt that in the capital Jean had been judged sufficiently interesting to assign him a bodyguard who would not let him out of his sight.