33 Days (3 page)

I leave the war behind me. I say that sincerely. I give myself permission to relax. Since September of last year, I have tried not to lie and not to lie to myself. I accepted the role of Don Diègue. And I believe that civilization is over, for centuries, if soldiers don’t, as General Weygand said, hold their ground. Just this week I tried to picture holding on, to put myself in the shoes of a soldier standing fast. I endured this consent to heroism. This enduring alone consoled and reassured me.

Porte d’Italie, Villejuif, Thiais. The traffic is like any weekday. Soon the road is overcrowded, like a Sunday evening. I stop at a gas station. This woman who holds the gas hose overhead with raised arms, I soon have the feeling that there is something else between her and me than the traffic in fuel. She waits for me. Immobile, she holds the hose over her head; she doesn’t take a step toward the car’s gas tank. Her eyes look into mine. She tells me, “Russia declared war on Germany …”

Her eyes fill with tears. Mine too. How distant the arguments about Stalinism and the revolution seem! Russia launches her armies and the Germans, whether in Compiègne or Pontoise, turn home as if nipped at the heels.

A historian may laugh at my gullibility if he likes, but we so badly need news like that! Of course other news had already circulated in Paris, running along the streets, reaching into concierges’ lodges, into bistros and into houses through windows. But that news wasn’t false, it told of a disaster verified the following day.

And that piece of news, as you can easily understand, I swallowed with some reluctance. I approached a stopped truck. There
were three men in the front seat: “Is it true that …? Have you heard that …?”

“Russia …? Yes.”

Russia entering the war, I encountered it all along the road, when the overcrowding became a traffic jam, when the cars advanced four rows across, and at nightfall it was waiting for me, it was hiding in a little village, a little backstreet village far from the route of the exodus.

At Plessis-Chenet the road to Fontainebleau is barred to us and we turn toward Pithiviers, or Orléans, I don’t recall. But we are stuck in an endless caravan. We are just one link in a chain that stretches slowly along the road at ten, five kilometers an hour … At six in the evening, in the village of Auverneaux, we are forty kilometers from Paris. We find a room. Some courageous people who left Paris on bicycles are already there. In front of a radio, a woman is crying: The
Radio-Journal de France
said nothing about Russia.

We leave the following day, June 12th, at four in the morning. We didn’t think anyone got up so early. But again we find the caravan. We roll along with the motor strangled in second gear, more often in first, twenty meters at a time. Then there’s a stop of six or seven hours, I don’t remember. Six or seven hours in the sun. But among the crowd clogging the roadsides, this elongated crowd, this crowd spread out as if by a rolling mill, there is not yet a trace of ill humor, nor even impatience. It gives way, it believes in giving way, to military needs. And gradually the rumor spreads that some munitions trucks are passing on a crossroad up ahead.

As evening falls we stop in Milly. We have gone sixteen kilometers in fifteen hours.

There are many cars stopped in the town square, at rest or broken down. The hotels, the cafés are full, but the crowd isn’t anxious. Traffic is being directed. The local commandant has established a little repair shop where an engineering unit, with kindness and good humor, is helping drivers whose cars have broken down. And Monsieur Popot, a mechanic by trade, sure-handedly measures out for us the mixture of petroleum and oil that an old Bugatti needs to lubricate its transmission.

The market is covered by a handsome roof of old tiles. We find refuge in a café that resembles a
guinguette
.
^*
The dining room is vast, like a café in the Klondike from the movies. The mirror, the palm trees, the yellow walls, the brown baseboards, the tables covered with red enamel make up the decor of a fairground decorated for a wild party. A warlike blonde, the owner, is behind the bar, and the waitress, a mischievous brunette full of sharp repartee, dashes around the room. There is no longer anything to be found anywhere for dinner. But we’re allowed to bring our can of sardines.

At the other end of the dining room two soldiers are seated facing each other. The table and a bottle of red wine separate them. They are together but not speaking to each other. They are absolutely still in their chairs. They don’t look at one another and their gazes are fixed on different points on the floor. They have an air of timelessness about them.

The hotels are full. We sleep and, the following day, have lunch at the home of a grocer, a “cheese tender.” We are welcomed at the family table. Two days has been enough to make us feel uprooted; we’re already conscious of the value of rest, refuge, hospitality. It’s not that of customers; it’s not that of lodgers. The grocers resisted when, out of decency, we wanted to double the price they asked.

We resume our place in the caravan, at a snail’s pace. The road to Nemours is closed. We try to get to Joigny by way of Château-Landon and Saint-Julien-du-Saut. But we are redirected toward Malesherbes.

The cars are squeezed together as if at a tollgate. Pedestrians overtake them. No engine likes this speed. But a three-liter 1932 Bugatti protests. The water in the radiator boils. We stop, we start again, but each restart becomes a problem. Because this clutch has every virtue except smoothness. I finesse the clutch. After several hours it’s exhausting. It’s nerve-racking. The gravity of the moment means little. Less so as the gravity of the moment and mechanical worries combine. We are afraid of breaking down.

After we cross the road to Pithiviers, the water in the radiator boils again. The shoulder is wide enough for an automobile. I pull
out of the caravan. I park on the right. The road runs along a wood. The caravan files past. Old cars have emerged from their caves in the suburbs or a coachworks museum or the camps where the Roma winter. They are mixed in with the powerful ten-horsepower bourgeois cars covered with suitcases and mattresses. This is the kingdom of mattresses. One would think France is the land of mattresses, that a mattress is the Frenchman’s most precious possession. In many of the cars old women lie flat, no longer looking at anything outside themselves, and children sleep as if dead. Commercial trucks are filled with luggage and passengers, like emigrants in steerage, sometimes terraced on piles of baggage, sometimes under a tarpaulin and arranged in rows like the audience at a theater. Through the windows we see dogs, cats, caged birds. A monkey is leashed to a radiator.

One car tows a tiny cart in which an old laborer sits, legs dangling. He has brought only a few bundles and a fishing net. But the cart is not attached to the car by a simple rope for temporary towing. It is attached artistically. A system of ropes, spikes and metal cables connects the two vehicles for the long term, uniting their two destinies. These acts of kindness, this readiness to oblige, will have disappeared by tomorrow.

The caravan of cars is overtaken by cyclists, male and female, and by limping pedestrians. Their heads seem pulled toward their feet. Some carry a travel bag; others have one or two suitcases in hand. Imagine how exhausting this walk is with a valise at the end of your arm. Others push baby carriages—loaded with children, bundles or their most important possessions—or the strangest vehicles cobbled together by handymen out of wooden planks and old bicycle wheels. A woman is seated on the lid of a three-wheeled delivery cart, which a man pedals. An old man on a bicycle, alone, is leading his dog on a leash.

The line of cars moves at the speed of a man on foot, a hundred, fifty, five meters at a time. I can’t even let myself contemplate this halting river. My reflex as a motorist compels me to scrutinize its droplets. Mechanically, I evaluate the make and horsepower of the automobiles. The caravan moves and creaks like the chain of a well. It has neither beginning nor end. I’m obsessed by this idiotic phrase:
“The horizon is an imaginary line at the intersection of the sky and the infinite line of cars.”

A car stops, driven by a young woman. Like a caterpillar, the caravan flows around it. Inside the automobile there is another woman and an old man. The driver leans against the steering wheel, then raises her arms in desperation. Her engine has stalled, her starter is broken and she has no crank handle. “Put it in gear, step on the clutch … we’ll push you; when you pick up some speed, let out the clutch …” She’s asleep, she can’t understand me, like a sleepwalker; she confuses in gear and out of gear. We push her car again, the motor turns over, the car starts and then falters momentarily on the road.

Enormous two-wheeled peasants’ carts from the Seine-et-Oise and Seine-et-Marne are mixed in with the caravan. They are pulled by massive horses, often by two horses harnessed in line. They are loaded with bedding and sacks of grain and fodder. On one of them is a foal with little appreciation for the joys of being on a wagon. It kicks with all four hooves—now the front, now the rear—and starts bucking epileptically. The dogs leashed underneath the carts wag their happy tails even more.

A farm is nearby. Some people are organizing themselves to spend the night there sleeping on straw. They are tired but not panicked. The battle is far behind them, far behind Paris. They make the best of this involuntary picnic, this camping trip. Tomorrow the roads will be clear.

We arrive in Puiseaux at night. We managed twenty-five kilometers today. We find free space in a beet field. We spend the night in the car. Some military convoys pass by on a distant road. The horses’ hooves hitting the ground make a sound like raindrops falling on a roof.

At five in the morning my wife goes into town, lines up until eight o’clock in front of a bakery and brings back a pound of bread. Two hundred meters from the beet field there’s a fountain. I had forgotten the miracle of water, the miracle of far-sighted municipalities. I can still feel that water running over my hands. I find a pack of tobacco in town. A few minutes later, the tobacco shop will be closed.

Puiseaux has the shape of a breast, of an anthill, at the summit of which there must be a church. I’m sleepy. It seems to me the winding streets climb to the sky. I’m lost. It will take me an hour to get back to my beet field. The streets are filled with refugees, those with cars, those with wheelbarrows, those from the Nord, those from Paris, those from the Seine-et-Marne. It’s part of the caravan, of the caravan dismantled. This crowd resembles nothing I know. Near me someone says: “It’s the Canebière.”
^†
But here one feels a mute anger, an accumulated impatience in the crowd.

In the street a group is gathered in front of a half-open window listening to the radio. I approach. I couldn’t possibly remember what news the circumlocutions of
Radio-Journal
were communicating. It had hardly concealed the German advance. I believe that morning I heard a strange “behind Paris,” which reminded me of earlier reports of “fighting west of Brussels” that had not yet announced the capture of Brussels. Nonetheless, for the nomads that we had become, the German advance was still only newspaper headlines. They advance, they cross the Somme, the Oise. Even if they cross the Seine, all is not lost. They will be fought on the Loire. We do not lack rivers, and strategy is the science of rivers.

Meanwhile, a captain, a tall young man with the face of a Bedouin, addresses the crowd, urging it to be hopeful and pointing out that our temporary retreat is the fault of the political half of France, of which he is not part.

I enter a café. Refugees, like flies around a packet of sugar, crowd around the proprietor, who half fills the glasses they hold out to him with pale coffee. For the first time I hear the words, uttered by a drowsy woman with a sullen face: “France is betrayed.”

We leave the beet field. In the neighboring car an elderly woman meticulously does her blond hair. We try in vain to take the Château-Landon road to reach Auxerre and the Paris-Lyon highway. We are directed toward Montargis. I hear that at Beaumont we can find gasoline. But news about gasoline is like news about the war. Myths circulate, coming from who knows where.

A platoon of infantrymen is resting in an empty space between two houses. Some are lying down, asleep. Others, standing, indifferently contemplate the caravan disaggregating in the village. I approach. They were at the Somme. I’m expecting some clarity from them, some hope. But before me are only cryptic, resigned soldiers. In them, I am searching for spirit, depth, volition, desire. They’re not handing over their secret. They speak like soldiers. They’re tired. From them I get only, “Don’t worry …”

The invisible authority that is worried about neither traffic jams nor bread nor gasoline vigilantly watches over our itinerary. It redirects us toward Corbeil-en-Gâtinais and Lorcy by way of winding local roads. At nightfall, we arrive in the town of Ladon. We’ve gone about twenty-five kilometers during the day, at one or two kilometers an hour. We can’t bear this anymore. I see a signpost at a crossroads: Chapelon, four kilometers. The road is empty. In my memory it appears dark and rural. I abandon, I extricate myself from this caravan that advances in fits and starts. I take the Chapelon road, where at least we’ll find some silence and fresh grass to sleep on.

Why confess this search for refuge in the countryside and this concern for comfort? It’s anecdotal and uninteresting. But had we not decided on this detour through the hamlet of Chapelon, we would not have encountered the same circumstances or the same people. We would have run fewer risks, or more. We would not have known some things that I’d dare say put us in touch with historical secrets, that revealed to us a few junctures between history and man.

Four kilometers of empty road, of driving at full speed, of being the brain of the car, of feeling it as one feels one’s own body, of feeling the car’s chassis as an extension of one’s own body, of gliding.