33 Days (18 page)

V

THE COLOSSAL CORPORAL.
RETURN TO THE FREE ZONE

At dusk, the colossal corporal brings me a veritable parcel of cigarette packs. By words and gestures he invites me to bring it into the house immediately. So this is more than accepting a gift, there’s some complicity. What’s strangest is that the colossal corporal has noticed my coldness. I don’t know how he interprets it, but he accepts it. He no longer hangs around us.

He came back the following day, in the evening, accompanied by a comrade, a haircutter from Dresden who makes for an astonishing contrast. He is small, brown-haired, with lively eyes. Later I thought the colossal corporal had brought him to express by means of words and his intelligence the mute sentiments the corporal himself felt, a sort of ambassador from the realm of the soul. But this young soldier doesn’t speak a word of French, no more than the colossal corporal does. And I know less than a hundred words in German. He speaks at length. I understand that he hoped to return home soon, that a peace treaty would soon be signed and we’d see no more of these pointless wars: “
Ohne Zweck.
”
^*
But I don’t know whether he means that all war is pointless or that the Pax Germanica will henceforth render all war useless. Especially since he is leaving us to go listen to the latest news on the radio. He calls that news. I’d very much like to
tell him that’s easy to say. I settle for asking whether the news seems interesting and truthful to him. He innocently responds yes.

From
Radio de Paris
we learn at least one true fact: Marshal Pétain is the head of state. It also announces to us that France is a courageous country but shockingly gullible; that its health relies on a return to the soil; that minds must change, not just the constitution; and that the snarled traffic on the roads, the muddling of refugees with the army in flight, was England’s work. So Germany is in possession not only of France’s soil but also its airwaves. This massive propaganda has no finesse. But, alas, Germany didn’t create this linguistic game using flimsy prototypes.

I can easily tell that my wife is less and less able to endure her worry about our son. And each day I have more trouble disguising mine. This is when the miracle intervenes, the hand of God or man righting the course of things, the stagnation of the world. I was with Abel Delaveau in his garage. We were estimating the length of my route and the amount of gasoline necessary. That’s when the colossal corporal’s face appeared in the doorway. In shadow, his face was even more featureless. But his eyes, like one long blue line between the fatty rolls of his eyelids, were beseeching, imploring, like only the eyes of a faithful dog can be. His head was nearly touching the roof beams. He seemed like one of those giants who lift the globe.

Abel has a much better sense of the moment and of people than I do. And I still can’t manage to grasp how, without knowing a word of their language, he almost always made the Germans understand. Don’t say by gestures. Others also know how to gesticulate. By his expression, I think, and by I don’t know what mesmerism. The corporal grasped perfectly that for lack of thirty liters of gasoline, I could not reasonably attempt to get to my son and my house.

Abel knows that the
Kommandanturs
granted some refugees five or ten liters of gas and that in Chapelon the ordnance trucks and the field kitchen had abundant supplies of it. He asks the corporal whether some couldn’t be obtained by speaking to the lieutenant. But
the corporal replies, “
Offizier … schlimm
^†
 …” And he pulls himself up to his full, enormous height, raises a finger level with his nose and repeats several times with an air of jubilation and pride, a sort of giddiness that only men with the lifesaving instincts of a Newfoundland know, “
Ich … Ich … Ich
…”

He will bring, he says, thirty liters of gasoline to us at the woodshed behind the farmhouse this very evening. But he asks that we wait until it is completely dark. The German word
Finsternis
^‡
seems to have an incomparable poetry for me.
Finsternis
translates into sound the zigzag of lightning in the night.
Finsternis
contains the oft-invoked grace of darkness.
Finsternis
is the beautiful darkness crossed by a pale glow that guides the corporal from the reaches of the orchard to the farm’s woodshed.

A finger on his lips, the corporal also asks us not to say anything to the women. I promised, I swore: now I’m breaking my promise.

Around ten o’clock, I’m waiting with Abel in the woodshed. The corporal appears carrying a twenty-liter gas can, a gas can from an ordnance truck. Without giving us time to say a word, he puts it on the ground, signals us to hide the light and asks for a sack to conceal three five-liter cans he has yet to bring us.

The three of us are sitting at Abel Delaveau’s table with a bottle of Savigny he fetched from his cellar. We’re attempting a very strange conversation in which Abel and I are trying to explain to the colossal corporal the difference between Burgundies and bistro wines.

That is when I searched the furthest reaches of my German vocabulary. “I am not attempting,” I tell him, “to remunerate you for your heart’s good intentions or even your kindness. Those are not things one pays for. But I would at least like to reimburse you for the price of the gasoline.”

It would have been easy for the colossal corporal to let me believe he had bought it or at least had “slipped a coin” to the truck driver. But he burst into laughter, the same laughter as a French soldier had he been asked how much he paid for patience or the polishing brush
he filched in the barracks to get ready for an inspection. His eyes were sparkling with satisfaction. That is how the colossal corporal, eight years into a twelve-year reenlistment, had run the risk, the most selfless of risks, to steal thirty-five liters of gasoline from Hitler and bring them to me.

I asked for his address in Germany. I planned to send him a cask of Beaujolais after the war. Would I ever be able to?

But I already felt the awakening, like the restlessness in one’s legs during insomnia, of a shared nervous system between the car and myself; I was already anticipating the road, the trees flying by.

The following morning we leave Chapelon. Abel, like me, had seen the defeat. But from a distance we can hardly distinguish its consequences. We’re blinded by the word
armistice
, which sounds provisional. I am leaving with the illusion that I’ll see him again soon.

We roll along without a hitch. Toucy, Clamecy, Château-Chinon, Autun. We’re crossing a landscape of automobiles, sidecars and wrecked motorcycles. The fields bordering the road are enclosed behind wrecked cars. But I see only Tournus and Saint-Amour at the end of the road, a Tournus and Saint-Amour outside the space and time of the war, a Tournus and Saint-Amour outside space and time, a Tournus and Saint-Amour that are ours alone and only within us.

Having been wandering nomads and stationary nomads, we’re sensitized, as they say in laboratory terms, to familiar landscapes. The ship’s apprentice in maritime stories who cries “Land!” from the masthead, I understand the joy of his cry. The clean lines of the Yonne countryside, the tall curtains of trees, the strong contours of the land, the river without flourishes or embellishments, we recover them as if they had been stolen.

Outside Toucy, I don’t recall where, we stop to eat a few hard-boiled eggs. There had been fighting there, or troops had been harried by aircraft. Shirts, empty bottles, shoes, a pair of bloody pants. Letters, those pitiful letters, are strewn in the roadside ditch. This heap of debris stretches as far as the eye can follow the ditch.

The roads are lined with woods, winding uphill and down. Château-Chinon appears, like a fortress built in the trees, hanging from the sky. We pass through villages with bombed-out houses. We
pass German convoys and motorcyclists. As we approach Chalon, I can’t say whether the countryside is beautiful. Too many memories are attached to it. It is flat, rolling, of a slightly soft material. The eye sinks into it.

We go into a grocery store. The young grocer has the look of tender nonchalance that many women in the region have. Her
r
’s are perfectly rolled, polished, frictionless, bathed in oil. The Saône has this accent when it’s not acting like an Indochinese river near Fleurville.

I stayed in Chalon only a few minutes. But there I saw a moon man. His round face was that of a real man, an average man. He was resting his elbows on his windowsill, watching the road benevolently. I don’t know what information I asked him for, but he responded as if there had been no war, as if the Germans weren’t in Chalon, as if it were still July 1939.

“Oh, come on,” I said to him, “it looks like Chalon is occupied to me …”

He answered in a faraway voice, eyes wide, “Yes … Personally, I saw a few German soldiers … But we lack for nothing …”

Don’t go looking for an indication of the Chalonnais soul here. But I would have liked to find out whether the man had really fallen from the moon or was crazy.

We cross Chalon, arriving at the border between the occupied zone and the free zone … An officer or noncommissioned officer with the face of a pedantic jurist examines our papers. We can cross, but he informs us that we will no longer be able to reenter the occupied zone. Indeed, a long line of cars headed in the opposite direction is not moving. We feel pity for these homeless, but quickly we are no more than sixty kilometers from home.

We’re now driving in the free zone. We never imagined we could be so taken by a word. Free, we’re free. Free in France. The words make us giddy. The land is no longer covered with Germans; the land is no longer covered with defeat. We can go where we like, forward, backward, right as easily as left. We were living half asphyxiated. We are entering an aerated world. Customs are easygoing and subtler than rules. The air that enters our chests is lighter. It’s the air of
freedom; at least we think so. It makes us giddy. We’re no longer used to it. Poor Abel Delaveau in your farmhouse where the non-coms use your table.

What happens tomorrow isn’t important for the moment. We’re not calculating how much of France is under the boot and how much isn’t. The armistice is nothing but a pause, an interlude that allows a person to recompose himself. We’re not thinking in terms of history but rather in terms of our route, each of whose curves I know. Like one remembers his childhood in an old house, I recover everything that, in my life, was hope and love.

The road is narrow, bordered with hedges. It’s no national highway, but a road all the same. An old woman sitting on a campstool is there watching over her three goats. She has set up her stool half on the grass median and half on the edge of the roadway. Her goats wander from one hedge to the other. If I tried to pass, I’d crush either a goat or the old woman. Before the war, before the German occupation, I’d no doubt have allowed myself some fit of rage. At least I’d have cursed that old woman, who dared disrupt the ideal line of my route, who dared disrupt my schedule. Dear old woman, I now know that French roads are made for old women and goats, too. Dear old woman whose campstool was jutting into the road, I nearly got out of the car to kiss you.

An hour later, we arrived. We had left Paris June 11th. It was July 13th. I got back my son and the peace of familiar fields, land and sky. And newspapers, too, and human error and what must be called history. But history and newspapers, that’s another story.

*
Without purpose.

†
Officer … bad.

‡
Darkness.

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