Léon and Louise (29 page)

Léon decided to resume work on the unofficial thesis he had discontinued eighteen months earlier, but he had to avoid riling Knochen. Before he produced any written work of his own, he would have to request the Sturmbannführer's formal permission and demonstrate that his research was innocuous. He felt ashamed of being pre-emptively subservient and even more ashamed of his inability to see any way of being less so.

At the beginning of February 1942, Léon received an unexpected visit from Jules Caron, an accounts clerk who had never before been seen on the fourth floor. Caron had pock-marked cheeks and tortoiseshell glasses, a snub nose and a mouth like a surgical incision. Léon knew him by sight from sporadic encounters on the stairs. They would exchange perfunctory nods, as people from different departments tend to, but had never stopped and talked. And now Caron was standing in front of Léon's desk, rubbing the bridge of his nose like a schoolboy summoned to the headmaster's study.

‘We've known each other for a long time, Le Gall.'

‘Yes.'

‘Not very well, though.'

‘That's true.'

‘What are you doing at the moment?'

‘Some statistical work. Deaths by poisoning, 1930 to 1940.'

‘I see. I've been here twelve years now. You?'

‘Since September 1918. Nearly twenty-four.'

‘Good for you.'

‘Thanks.'

‘Time flies.'

‘It certainly does.'

‘Mind if I shut the door?'

‘Not at all.' The was some filter coffee left in the jug. Léon poured two cups.

‘You must be surprised to see me here, considering we don't really know each other.'

‘Work is work.'

‘I'm not here officially. It's about, well...'

‘I'm listening.'

‘I wouldn't be here if I had the slightest prospect of...'

‘Do go on.'

‘I'm here because... Don't get me wrong, but people talk.'

‘About me?'

‘One hears things.'

‘Like what?'

‘Well, things. Look, Le Gall, I don't care what you get up to, I don't want to know. I'll make it short: Will you buy my boat?'

‘Come again?'

‘I own a boat not far from here. Nothing special, just a clinker-built cabin cruiser, seven-point-two metres long, three in the beam, twin bunks, twelve horse-power diesel engine. Eighteen years old but in good condition. It's moored in the Arsenal basin.' Caron looked round anxiously. ‘Can I talk here? No one can overhear us, can they?'

‘Don't worry.'

‘You've got to help me, Le Gall. I have to disappear – into the unoccupied zone. By tonight, tomorrow morning at the latest.'

‘Why?'

‘Don't ask. The warning I received was quite explicit. I need some ready cash for myself and my family. For my parents-in-law too, if possible. Will you help me?'

‘If I can.'

‘They say you've got money.'

‘Who's they?'

‘Is it true?'

‘How much do you need?'

‘I'll sell you my cabin cruiser.'

‘I don't want your cabin cruiser.'

‘And I don't want charity.'

‘How much?'

‘Five thousand.'

‘Will you keep your mouth shut?'

‘Nobody here will ever see me again, my train leaves at half-past two.'

Léon took the key from the bakelite tray and opened the drawer, counted out five thousand francs and added another thousand. As he slid the wad of notes across the desk, Caron held out a key ring. ‘The boat's name is
Fleur de Miel.
Pale-blue hull, white cabin, red-and-white checked curtains.'

‘I don't want your boat.'

‘It's got a diesel engine, a wood-burning stove and two bunks.'

‘I don't want it.'

‘And electric light. Take it as security and keep it in good condition for me.'

‘Put that key away.'

‘You must turn the engine over every couple of weeks or it'll deteriorate from disuse. If I'm still not back in two or three years' time you'll have to take the boat out of the water and repaint it. When the war's over I'll reclaim it and give you your money back.'

‘Forget the money,' said Léon.

‘In that case, forget the boat ever belonged to me.'

Caron got to his feet. He put the key on the desk and raised his hand in farewell.

Léon put the key in the drawer with the money, locked it up and bent over his statistics again. After a few weeks, however, he took to standing at the window more and more often, watching the river traffic. Barges now glided along the Seine only rarely and in ones and twos, but he paid special attention whenever a cabin cruiser appeared. When he asked for Caron in the accounts department, he was told that the man and his entire family had disappeared without trace.

As time went by he thought more and more often of the boat with the red-and-white checked curtains and worried about the diesel engine. He thought of rusting shaft seals and corroding plugs, crumbling gaskets and obstructed valve springs. It also worried him that seagulls would encrust the boat with their droppings if no one looked after it. Tramps would break into the cabin and leave the door open; then wind and weather and schoolboys would complete the work of destruction. He also thought occasionally of Caron somewhere in the sunny south, homesick for the milky skies of Paris and hoping that Léon Le Gall was looking after his
Fleur de Miel.

One tentative spring day at the end of the third winter of the war, Léon didn't go home for lunch but walked across the Île Saint-Louis and the Pont de Sully to the Arsenal harbour. The brown waters of the basin were rippling in the spring breeze. Three winter-proofed
bateaux mouches
were moored to their bollards and two or three dozen cabin cruisers were rocking gently in the wind. Many were green and many red, some were pale-blue and several had red-and-white checked curtains, but only one was called
Fleur de Miel.

Léon came to a halt on the quayside and studied the boat. It was covered with seagull droppings, the cockpit was full of dead leaves and the hull below the waterline furred with green waterweed, but the decking seemed to be in good order, the seams had been freshly caulked, and the paintwork was immaculate. The red-and-white checked curtains were neatly drawn and the padlock on the cabin door was intact.

The moment Léon took the key from his pocket, he felt
Fleur de Miel
become his. He had a boat again at last. He felt just as he'd felt back in Cherbourg with Patrice and Joël, when they hid the wreck in the bushes. How long ago was that – a quarter of a century? It surprised him that he'd never felt a desire for a boat of his own all those years. He had coveted a Renault Torpedo and a motorcycle, a country house beside the Loire, a Bréguet wristwatch, a billiard table and a Cartier lighter, but never another boat. And now, there it was.

He drew a deep breath and boarded the boat in one long stride. At that instant he knew for certain he would never relinquish it or share it with anyone. He would never welcome unwanted guests aboard – in fact he would never divulge the boat's existence to a living soul. He wouldn't even enlighten Yvonne, who had said she wanted nothing to do with his coffee and cash transactions, nor would this boat become a children's playground. It belonged to him alone, no one else.

Léon was in a solemn, elated mood as he made his way from the bow to the stern. The padlock sprang open with a faint click. The door stuck, being slightly warped, but it swung silently open on its well-oiled hinges when he gave it a vigorous push. The interior was pleasantly redolent of woodsmoke, wax-polished planks and pipe tobacco, perhaps also of coffee and red wine. Lying on its side in one corner of the cabin was a toy locomotive, and beside it a raffia basket containing a ball of wool transfixed by two wooden knitting needles. He decided to take the locomotive home for little Philippe and the knitting wool for Madame Rossetos. Van Gogh's
Sunflowers
hung between two portholes and there was a bookshelf holding two or three dozen books. Léon sat down in the worn leather armchair beside the stove and stretched his legs. He filled a pipe and lit it, then shut his eyes and expelled some little puffs of smoke as he listened to wavelets lapping against the hull.

July 1943

My dear old Léon,

Are you still there? I'm still here, where else? I'm drowning in water – water from above, water from below, water from ahead and behind, water from the side. Water wells out of holes in the ground, trickles down walls, falls from the clouds, evaporates on the hot soil and returns to the cold sky, only to descend once more and beat a nerve-fraying staccato on the corrugated-iron roofs. Wherever there's room to breathe between downpours, the air is filled with such a stench of mould and mildew, you feel you want to lie down and die. I can't take a step outside without sinking ankle-deep in mud. The mud oozes up between my toes and insinuates itself beneath my nails. I've already got fungi and lichen growing on my scalp and am suffering from hallucinations about maggots and worms, and my feet have taken on a terracotta tinge from the red mud which no amount of vigorous scrubbing will get rid of. In a desperate attempt to protect myself from the everlasting mud, I recently dug out my nice Paris calfskin boots, which I stowed in a chest the day I arrived, only to find that they were thickly furred all over with snow-white mildew. It's time for me to return to the chilly north. Until that day comes I'll go barefoot.

You can't imagine how fatuous my daily routine here is. I may have head lice and broken fingernails, but I still play the dauntless office girl. I emerge from the building every morning, complete with portable typewriter, to find my personal black orderly waiting for me with my personal umbrella. Then I fall in behind my two superiors and their black orderlies and our personal escort, which consists of another twenty riflemen.

First we proceed to the watchtower that stands beside the railway line a stone's throw from our fortress. A soldier props a ladder against the tower and my boss climbs up it to the doorway, which is three metres from the ground, and checks to see if the seal is still intact. Meanwhile, another soldier puts up a folding table for me and holds a big umbrella over it, and when my boss is back on terra firma – in other words, has warm mud under his feet – I sit down at my machine and record the proceedings. Rain-bedraggled hyenas cower in the bush and watch us with their tongues lolling. Wet hyenas are an incredibly pathetic sight, believe me. They're the epitome of natural imperfection even when dry, but wet? They look simply heartbreaking.

As soon as I've completed my record of the proceedings we take ourselves off to the railway station, where our little train already has steam up. We board the first-class carriage reserved for us while the native soldiers squeeze into an open cattle wagon with the farmers making their daily trip to the market in Kayes, twelve kilometres downriver, with their vegetables and millet, hens and goats. Then the train gets under way and we trundle off, first across a stream, then through some hills and into the ravine that leads to the Kayes Plain.

Our carriage looks like something out of a Mickey Mouse cartoon and the locomotive was probably built by Boy Scouts. The railway is a narrow-gauge railway, and narrow-gauge railways resemble men with small penises: it's hard to take them seriously. You can tell yourself a hundred times that length and breadth don't matter, and that truly important qualities aren't a question of dimensions, but appearance does matter for all that. Certain things simply look better full-size than in miniature, don't you agree?

The station at Kayes is a doll's-house station with splendid signals, neat stretches of grass and tracks devoid of weeds. The farmers in the cattle wagon have to stay put with their hens and goats – such are the rules – until we have got out and are past the barrier. The station's shady interior is seething with people: naked children with swollen bellies, women with lifeless eyes and faces indelibly imprinted with the pain of their ritual mutilation, and their menfolk, who regard us with hopeless defiance, covert pride, or tail-wagging subservience.