Dimanche and Other Stories (27 page)
“But I thought we were quite sure Papa had died in the war!”
“I’ll tell you what happened. He was reported missing
on May 27, 1917. Right up until the end of the war, Mama hoped he would come back. It was only after the Armistice that one of Papa’s friends wrote to tell us that he had seen him killed right next to him and that his arms and head had been blown off. His remains were never found. But you can imagine that in the noise and confusion of battle—and this one happened at dawn, in the rain; I found the details in the letter Mama kept and has just given me—his comrade couldn’t have been absolutely sure about what he had seen. There was a huge number of dead and wounded that day. He said so himself, and there were all those burned, crushed, unrecognizable bodies. How on earth could you put names to all those poor lads?”
He stopped and smoked his pipe silently for a moment, his head turned slightly aside.
“The Germans wear their identity tag on their chest, attached to a chain around their neck.”
“Claude?”
“Yes?”
“So does that mean … our father was a deserter?”
“You’d have to be very clever to find out. Maybe he was a deserter. He might have been one of those men with amnesia after the last war, who were claimed by several different families right up to the beginning of this one.”
“But at least we would have known if he was French.”
“Not necessarily. A uniform and identity tag can be
lost or destroyed, and those wretches with no memory had forgotten their names and had to learn to talk again, like children. Some prisoners escaped from Germany by going through Russia and if they got caught up in the revolution, it would have been easy for a man to change his identity and become French or German, just as he wished.”
“What about the war?”
“The war was over.”
“What about us?”
“Ah, us … What do you want me to say? I don’t know what to think. He was a good father, but …”
“Did he behave well to Mama?” François asked, and it was his turn to look away.
“I don’t think so,” said his older brother.
“Listen …”
“I’m telling you, I don’t think so. I was ten, wasn’t I? What would I have known? It’s an impression that’s stayed in my ears more than in my memory or my mind … There were long silences at mealtimes, a tension in their voices when they eventually spoke to each other, slamming doors, the echoes of a distant storm.”
“Servants’ gossip, perhaps?”
“Yes, that too. But I’d rather not talk about it.”
They both fell silent, overcome by a sense of constraint, shame, and anxiety. In the darkness trolleys were pushed past; trunks were still being unloaded. A train had just come into the station and a panic-stricken
crowd of people got off. The refugees wandered around on the platform, calling out to one another in anguish and confusion. It was such a clear night that one could distinctly see their haggard faces, their rumpled clothes, and pathetic bundles of ragged household linen, and among them the odd birdcage covered with a scrap of dark material, a basket with a mewing cat inside, and a stretcher.
“Are they wounded?” François asked.
Someone heard him and replied, “No, it’s two women about to give birth.”
“What an awful muddle of people,” François said after the stretcher had gone past. It was being carried by four men, shouting, “Let us through! We need a nurse or a doctor. Quickly! The baby’s coming any minute!”
“There’s another woman who had her baby two hours ago; she’s had a hemorrhage,” a voice in the crowd said. “She’s dying.”
Neither of the women on the stretcher made a sound; a porter had switched on his flashlight and one could see long, loose blonde hair trailing on the ground.
“You don’t usually think about it,” François said quietly, “but after four years of the other war, the invasion, and then our troops being posted on the Rhine, there must be other brothers facing each other as enemies.”
“They wouldn’t know about it. But since that German died, I’ve had the same dream every night: I see that dark cellar again, the half-open trapdoor, and I
know that the German is going to tip it wide open and cut my throat. I fight, I’m the stronger one, I kill the German; then, when he’s dead, I take him in my arms, undress him, and put him on Mama’s bed, the big pink bed where I put you when you had scarlet fever when you were little; then I bend over him and I don’t know if I’m seeing you or him … Oh, what a foul dream,” he muttered, turning aside with a sigh.
François twisted his hands together nervously. “You can do what you want, my dear old man, but I swear I’m never going to go and look for information in Germany. What good would it do? For a start, I still think you might have made a mistake, that the photograph is not Papa, and if, by some bad luck it is, investigating it would only disturb innocent lives. Anyway, it’s all in the past. I’m not interested and I want to leave well enough alone.”
“It’s him who won’t leave us alone,” said Claude sighing, again holding up the little identity tag on his wrist so that the metal shone with a dull gleam in the starlight. “But you’re right; it would be best to keep quiet about it.”
Nearby, a group of refugees was gathered around a fat man brandishing a newspaper. He was in civilian clothes, but his armband showed that he held some position of responsibility in the town, probably in civil defense. Occasionally he blew harsh blasts on a whistle and yelled out some orders; then he called out in a loud,
hoarse voice. He had a black mustache and a paunch; his words reached the two soldiers.
“… And if you’d seen all the equipment going up north, like I have, you’d have no worries, believe you me! This time it’s not going to be like it was in 1914. They’ll find out who they’re dealing with. They’ll cut and run, I promise you! For a start, men who aren’t fed, how can they form an army? Well, I ask you! Won’t we be fighting a bunch of men with rickets and anemia, seeing as they don’t even have enough vitamins to stay healthy? I’m telling you, with our vitamins and our equipment, our energy and our pluck, dammit, we’ll have ’em before they can utter a word!”
Claude gently shrugged his shoulders. “There are some things it’s best to keep quiet about,” he observed.
The refugees and soldiers listened to the impromptu orator and laughed and cheered him.
“Our comrade’s talking sense. He’s quite right!”
A Vintage International Original, April 2010
Translation copyright © 2010 by Persephone Books
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Great Britain by Persephone Books, London. Originally published in France, in somewhat different form, as
Dimanche et autres nouvelles
by Editions Stock, Paris, in 2000. Copyright © 2000 by Editions Stock. License arranged by French Publishers’ Agency in New York.
Vintage is a registered trademark and Vintage International and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Némirovsky, Irène, 1903–1942.
Dimanche and other stories / Irène Némirovsky ; translated from the
French by Bridget Patterson.—“A Vintage International original.”
[Dimanche et autres nouvelles. English]
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-307-73931-5
1. Dimanche—Sunday. 2. Les rivages heureux—Those happy shores.
3. Liens du sang—Flesh and blood. 4. Fraternité—Brotherhood.
5. La femme de Don Juan—Don Juan’s wife. 6. Le sortilège—The spell.
7. Le spectateur—The spectator. 8. Monsieur Rose—Mr. Rose.
9. La confidente—The confidante. 10. L’inconnu—The unknown
soldier. I. Title. II. Bridget Patterson.
PQ2627.E4 D5613 2010
843′.912—dc22
2009043711
v3.0