33 Days (15 page)

A soldier is hanging his shirt on a clothesline in the sun. He’s clumsy, he doesn’t even know how to use the clothespins that are on the line. Madame Rose shows him how to do it. That’s all. She doesn’t say a word. Does she want to win the goodwill of the conquerors? No … she can’t tolerate work badly done, she can’t help herself. But these little favors, the canned monkey and tobacco handed out, even the gesture of making the shed, which the farm uses as a little workshop, off-limits to the troops, who had already stolen some tools, all create contact, a familiarity. History is difficult. France is large. Chapelon is small. A courtyard in Chapelon is smaller still. In principle the
Kommandantur
, since the departure of the “real brute,” reprimands pilfering. Thus it’s understandable that poor people might lose the right balance between submission under pressure and their sense of dignity.

This war isn’t evolving like others. Hate hasn’t been generated through the stereotypical images. It is quite remarkable that the word
Boches
is rarely heard anymore, and that the Germans have become “the Germans.” But no less surprising to me is that the women don’t say “the Germans” but rather “the soldiers,” as if there were a kind of equivalence among all armies.

The Germans have left. We’re hoping no more will come. Obviously, with a few months’ hindsight, it was an absurd hope. But the word
occupation
did not have a well-defined meaning for us. The Germans are going back up to Paris and are going to return home. Chapelon is four kilometers from the main highway. Perhaps they’ll forget about us.

They’re gone. It’s like peacetime. There’s silence at dusk, as in all villages in peacetime. I say to Abel Delaveau, “The village resembles its old self.”

“Yes … but not completely. The squeak of a horse cart or a bicyclist returning home is missing …”

The following day, new convoys go by on the road. The trucks follow each other at distances so absolutely equal that one thinks of a geometrical parade. The rumbling is continuous, a noise like gravel on a conveyor belt. Once again I feel as if everything that passes by on the road passes over me, that everything it bears, I bear.

Some officers get out of their cars and exchange very tense salutes. They train their binoculars on the rear of the convoy and on the sky, at three high-flying aircraft.

British aircraft, perhaps. Who said that?… I don’t recall. It’s our supreme hope and so seems like a wish for a miracle.

Meanwhile, in Ladon there’s a rumor that Russia took Bessarabia, Poland and eastern Prussia. The Germans station a few cannons in a field under some trees. We conclude that they’re being hidden from aircraft; we think the officers look worried.

The cannons remain in the field. An artillery unit installs itself in the village.

The cannons are in the orchard and soldiers in shorts are everywhere. We’re under the domination of cannons and shorts. Oppression is cannons and shorts.

It’s an artillery regiment of Saxons. They all insist on letting us know they’re Saxons, but never fail to add that Saxons or Prussians, they’re all Germans. In fact they’re not as arrogant or sarcastic as the soldiers who were billeted in Les Douciers before the signing of the armistice. Nor are they completely like the soldiers who occupied Chapelon before that. But is it a difference of province or branch of the army? The others were infantrymen, these are artillerymen.
Indeed, they seem less absolutely military. They don’t arrive at the field kitchens for food in tight ranks. They’re capable of bringing their mess tins without obeying an order and without forming up in groups of four.

Although they’re Saxons, they are no less capable of astonishing military perfection when they assemble for roll call in the farm courtyard. They are perfectly straight, still and uniform when standing at attention. Their eyes-right and eyes-left are masterpieces of interchangeable mechanics. Even their enthusiasm is military. As much as left-face and eyes-left, the guttural orders and responses are prescribed by theory. At each command they all shout, “
Heil!
” (I believe!). One might think of the shouts of admiration or howls of laughter heard not long ago in mess halls or those “artistic” basement cabarets. But more forceful. More like the brutal, imperative honk of a car horn. I don’t understand what the officer is saying to them. He’s chanting, raucously, but chanting.

The field kitchen is no longer under the shed next to Madame Rose’s house. It is directly in front of Abel Delaveau’s door. They put it there to be near the well, no doubt. It is impossible to enter the house without passing the cooks, their friends or groups of soldiers getting food. That doesn’t bother them.

I go into the house from time to time to avoid seeing them, to forget them. Then I feel an instant relief, as if I were getting into a bath after a long walk. We ache from Germans.

They’re clean. They wash at the well, torsos bare. They plunge their heads into the bucket. But it’s not exactly what we call cleanliness. It’s an exhibition of cleanliness. They could put you off water forever. Civilization isn’t solely a pump, a tap or even a shower. I’d already felt this in the Far East when I saw the Europeans, so proud of their hydrotherapy facilities.

They’re cheerful, but what laughter! A laughter that comes from the perineum and that the throat amplifies like a loudspeaker. Will we ever dare laugh again?

They want to be courteous. But if they want to speak to you and you turn your back on them, they never hesitate to touch your shoulder.

The cook announces that Spain has taken Gibraltar. This is surely from
Völkischer Beobachter
.
^‡
All news they find agreeable they assume is agreeable to everyone.

Day and night a sentry, weapon slung over his shoulder, goes round the village. At night he passes right near our window. The noise of his boots drowns out the sound of the horses bumping against their stalls and the magic flute of the toads.

They march by fours wearing bathing suits, in step, singing. But their song is militarized, determined by the soldiers’ manual and orderly as a drumroll. They sing sometimes every fourth step, sometimes every eighth step. Sometimes the song gets louder and sometimes their footfalls mark time. This mixture of nudism on parade and singing brings to mind a Surrealist joke or those cartoons of a nude Negro in a top hat.

They may be ridiculous. But as the peasants say, they’re the masters. On a wall in front of the town hall the
Kommandantur
has put up an official notice in German and French. The French translation is dubious but not obscure: “To the occupied populations … Occupation troops must treat the populace with care, provided it remains peaceful.” No one had promised to treat me with care yet. “It is prohibited to listen to non-German radio stations in public or in groups, with the exception of a foreign radio station authorized by headquarters.”

A rumor circulates that an order has been given to bring all radios to the town hall. The rumor was never confirmed.

“On the wireless,” Madame Rose reports, “they said that male refugees must get back on foot, that women and children would be brought home.”

They’re saying … Now we depend on what “they’re saying.”

“Based on whether one is headstrong or not,” Madame Rose says, “one could very well go to prison …”

He’s colossal, a colossus perforated by two blue eyes. Who knows why his eyes are in the middle of his face. They could be anywhere else on his body without it being a surprise. The contours of his face
are in fact hardly more delicate than the contours of a thigh or forearm. This colossus is sitting on the bench next to me. And he’s telling me his life story. He is thirty-one. He enlisted for twelve years and has already done eight. His three brothers are soldiers as well. He’s a corporal, a longtime corporal. He is proud of his rank and his seniority in that rank. The day he was promoted to corporal was a big day … He went through Romorantin and Orléans; he did his duty, he served his country (
Plficht
 … 
Vaterland
^§
) and was lucky enough not to be wounded and to have kept his good health.

He also talks to me about the occupation of the Rhineland by the French and England, which is responsible for the war. But very little, less than the others. International politics is not his forte. He mentions it only out of consideration, in case I’m not in possession of the truth he gets from briefings, the way he gets his rations from the field kitchen. He’s sharing with me.

The next day I pretend not to recognize the colossal corporal. But in vain. He comes straight for me and brings me three packs of cigarettes … Two days later, I flee again. But he has other confidences in store for me. Pointing to his officer, he tells me the man is only twenty-one and has no experience. He tells me a rather long story, which I understand very poorly. I think it’s about a scrape, when the experienced corporal had to make up for the shortcomings of the young officer, whose knowledge comes only from schools.

Everything I will try in order to escape the colossal corporal will be in vain. He brings me packets of tobacco, packs of cigarettes. It’s only looted tobacco. But then he brings me a box of cigarettes that had been sent him by his “mamma.” And ten times he repeats tenderly, “Mamma … Mamma!…”

I have no doubts: the colossal corporal needs a confidant. He’s not finding any in his army. And it’s me he has chosen, for reasons only God knows. He’s looking for human intimacy. He is thick-skinned. No matter; I understand that in his fashion he’s looking for what Montaigne calls, “the exercise of souls, with no other fruit.”

I have to tell everything about the colossal corporal, we’ll see
why later on. We’ll see what contrasts a man can show, even a reenlisted corporal, even a German. The colossal corporal approached the bench where we were sitting. One of Abel Delaveau’s neighbors, wounded in the last war, was showing me his atrophied arm and unusable hand, which he almost always kept gloved. But he had removed the glove. The hand was white and thin, with pink fingernails, pathetically like that of a woman of leisure, while the other was a peasant’s hand, large and calloused. The farmer rolled up his sleeve: the arm was skeletal. Then the corporal, offering a comparison, smiling wide, also rolled up his sleeves, and crossing his arms made his athletic biceps bulge.

I thought: That’s Germany. And for a long time I could not resist this too-simplistic idea.

We’re being “kept.” Soldiers are handing out cans of monkey, sardines and “
zalmon
,” chocolates and candy. But they are all French brands. Everything comes from Rouen or Orléans; everything had been looted. When we were sitting on the grass with the Aufresnes a few kilometers from Les Douciers, a German soldier handed us a can of monkey. That was the first time. And we were hungry and had nothing else to eat. Had I been alone I might have refused this gift from the conqueror.

I say
might have
. In these things one shouldn’t commit lightly. One shouldn’t judge categorically or translate honor into a written code. It’s all circumstance; everything depends on nothing, on a look. That day, I didn’t have to decide for myself. I wasn’t the one taking the canned monkey from the soldier’s hand. But I ate some like everyone else.

This becomes a game. Everyone shows off the soldiers’ gifts the way they would show off booty. Rustics don’t have a casuistry for points of honor. After all, it’s not submission, it’s more repossession. Anyway, we’re prisoners of a sort, and prisoners don’t uphold honor by letting themselves die of hunger.

The field kitchen, as I’ve said, is in front of the farmhouse kitchen.
The bench is a good observation post. The colossal corporal is emptying a bottle of wine in a single draft, without taking his lips from the mouth of the bottle. He’s filling himself with wine the way he would fill a fuel tank. A soldier has a chocolate bar in one hand and a slab of butter in the other. Alternately, he bites into the chocolate and the butter.

The soldiers have stolen some eggs and some potatoes. The potato stealers must not be rurals. They’ve pulled up the foliage without digging deeper and have unearthed only some tubers the size of three pinheads.

They threw an artillery cartridge in Abel Delaveau’s pond. The fish are floating belly-up. Sometimes you complain, sometimes not. The
Kommandantur
is all-powerful. Nobody knows whether it’s better to endure or to protest.

Some beehives had been set up next to an old windmill. Its sails had long ago been detached and the old wooden beams piled next to the beehives. Some soldiers had set fire to the hives and the beams. Presumably these honey thieves were just clumsy, but why had they set fire to the windmill blades?

I went over to the windmill. The sails were still burning. A swarm was buzzing around, stranded in front of a half-charred hive.

If I’m far from the farm for long I feel doubly exiled. I can’t manage to put together this sky and those clumps of trees. The crops are so closely spaced that the countryside looks like a department store with innumerable counters of wheat and oats.

A German soldier asks to buy some milk. He’s in bathing trunks. But he is polite. He salutes with a quick nod and a bow. His costume and the bow are incongruous, it seems to me. But do the Germans have a sense of the ridiculous? And he had doubtless forgotten that he was in a bathing suit.

These Saxon artillerymen are not the same Germanic type as the infantrymen who occupied the village before them. We’re no longer seeing death’s heads topped with flax. Most of these are
brown-haired, very southern types. But brown-haired or blond, their ideas come from the same factory. Their field kitchen of news is a perfect machine. No doubt their newspapers are identical, but they digest them identically. Hitler loves peace and only England wanted war.

They are intrusive. But does the word have any meaning for them? They all ask what my profession is. I didn’t understand the word
Beruf
. By analogies and gestures they revealed its meaning to me. It was so difficult that I momentarily forgot about the war and responded like an interrogated schoolboy. I was no longer in an occupied country but in fourth grade, reviewing columns of words in an old glossary.