Men in Prison (24 page)

Moure got the coveted job. The lazy darting of the goldfish excited different dreams in a different brain. Alone with himself, Moure became transformed, like someone possessed. He had always lived burdened with unavowable mysteries, but never had his life been so filled with them as now. In the calm hours of the afternoon, pretending to make clean copies of the
Statement of Supplies Delivered,
Moure opened his secret envelopes. They contained strange little locks of stiff hair, rolled into tight curls; a strange, musty odor clung to them. They were of different shades; and some were attached by white ribbons to paper tags on which was written, in a careful, round hand: “Georgette, November 26”; or “Lucienne, my cute little c … my adored one, f … on the second day of Easter.” These girls’ names were always derived from boys’ names. In his handwritten inscriptions, Moure liked to link the most brutally obscene insults with love words and coquettish diminutives. Eyes half closed, nostrils flaring, he inhaled the nauseating odor of dried human sperm; lost in his private reveries, his gaze followed mechanically the goldfish swimming in the pool. The soft, sweet face of a corrupted adolescent, with wide eyes and greedy lips like soft strawberries, would form in the reflection of a cloud on the smooth water. A young man’s deliciously immodest hands would offer a hot flower of virility to his kneeling lover. Moure then slowly wrote in a date, followed by tender words of affection: “Antoinette, my sweet, my pretty little darling.” Then, his mouth slightly twisted, his lower lip trembling, he added some harsh words, obscene to the point of cruelty.

And so the days, the seasons, the years dissolved like thick fumes of smoke, slow to dissipate, but leaving behind no trace.

Spring was the bittersweet season. In April, with the first buds on our stunted trees, the first clear skies, the first warm days, such a powerful
call seemed to come from the very heart of life that we all felt we were emerging, our nerves raw, from some great lethargy. April quickened our old, dormant sufferings; but even more, April quickened our failing energies. Three hundred wooden shoes beat more smartly against the pavement in our round; broken marionettes began to straighten up again; gray faces were uplifted … Sometimes I wrote poems while marching; I felt so victorious over the Mill …

“Only twenty more months!” whispered Gilles, his face radiant, as he passed by.

I REMEMBER THE IMPLACABLY BLUE SKY OF ONE SUNDAY
. W
E SPENT THE DAY
on benches along the whitewashed walls of a wide, tree-planted courtyard. Our furtive glances kept watch over the guards, slumped in their chairs in the heavy heat. The sun scorched the grass; you could see the hot air vibrating. The immobility, the heat, the relentless, oppressive brightness were all focused on a new and astonishing thought: war. We had just found out about it, as we always learned about great historic events, through unknown channels. My mind was blank. I tried to imagine the monstrous reality of millions of men marching against each other all over Europe, with their rifles hanging in their fists like the stone axes of their ancestors. A few paces away from me was a German, an ordinary lad, simple, strong and straightforward. From time to time, everyone’s eyes would turn toward this man, our brother, like all the others, our pal who had suddenly become, without even knowing it, an enemy who in any other place would have been ripe for killing. (We soon learned to say
“Boche,”
but I don’t think that term was ever applied to him; he was too real to us, too much like us; hatred, especially the hatred of crowds, needs a certain distance in order to work its distortions.)

That evening Miguel, who seemed feverish, managed to get close enough to stuff a wad of paper into my hand.

“I want,” he wrote, “to be outside so I can be the first killed. I want to be in the first battle to throw myself between the French and the Germans shouting: You’re all mad, you’re all brothers! Everyone called up with me is going to be killed. I belong to a dead year. I already feel like a condemned man the world has accidentally overlooked …”

Events presented themselves to us with incomprehensible simplicity. The war burst suddenly out of the void. We knew nothing of its preliminaries. We were thus, through the cruelest of ironies, perhaps the only men in Europe in those mad days, to look at it with the detachment of
inhabitants from another planet. We were quite certainly among the few Europeans who were not carried away by the terrible war fever of those first days …

At night, in our cells, we could hear strange rumblings coming from the nearby town: the “Marseillaise” clamored by delirious crowds in stations filled with departing soldiers, the sudden train whistles, the muffled playing of bands. We would listen, straining, taking in that vague, contagious enthusiasm, then terribly saddened to fall back into the silence, the emptiness, the useless anguish of our nights.

Rumors of victory were circulating. Rollot got a letter which began, like a poem, with these words: “Tonight is a night of victory; I am a happy woman …” He read it, blushing, with a twisted smile. He wrote an answer in the margin, for himself. “You are mad. There are only disasters, disasters.” The names of conquered cities were whispered about: Mulhouse, Thann, the Cossacks on the outskirts of Berlin. Later we spoke of cities lost and destroyed: Liege, Mauberge, Charleroi, Lille. Defeat passed over the prison like the shadow of a sulphurous cloud. No one knew any details. The guards, questioned at every opportunity, kept quiet. The proofreaders used to listen at the door of the civilian manager’s office. They reported this comment on a victory communiqué in which it became clear that Compiègne had been occupied by the Germans: “One more victory like this one, and they’ll be in Paris!” Rumors of treason ran rife. People talked about generals turned traitor being shot down in the middle of General Staff meetings. What intrigued our little group of revolutionaries the most was the fate of our comrades. Had they tried to resist? Had they been shot? We imagined them trampled by angry mobs, the war passing over their dead bodies. One of us received a visitor. We primed him with questions to ask. He returned from the visitors’ room dumbfounded, understanding nothing:

“Nothing happened … nothing … Seems that Hervé has enlisted. Almereyda too … Anatole France too.
⁹
All the comrades have joined up. Some of them have already been decorated …”

Men whose homes were in the North stopped getting letters.

Then the military prisoners began to arrive. A strange joy glittered in their eyes. “Stop complaining!” they said. “You can’t imagine how well off we are here!” “I’d rather do five years than go back to living that life at the front, with death at the end of it, and what a death!” The horrors of war were fresh in their minds, and they brought them home to us graphically. Deguy, a police inspector’s son with a tiny albino head at the end of a long neck, made a lunge in pantomime: “My bayonet got stuck in this guy’s guts and I had to use my feet to get it out …” Minot, a deserter arrested in the Pyrenees, his fake pass covered with numbers (“the more there are the better it looks”), told us what happened when he was sent with some buddies to bring back the chow and walked into the Company kitchen. “The whole room was red, yellow, and black; there were no more men; there was nothing left but flesh and scraps of cloth swimming around in the soup and blood on the floor … A piece of 155 fell right into their chow cannon; you can guess what it was like …” These refugees from the front found our slow torture a soft life. “No; really, you’re a lucky bunch of bastards!” Our whole notion of life was thrown into disorder.

The battle moved closer to us. At night a rumbling as of distant thunder came from the horizon: artillery. At noon, when the machines were silent, we could hear the thud of faraway batteries firing across plains and hills where rows of helmeted ants were moving forward in parade-ground order … The town fell silent. Anybody who could run away, ran. Our civilian foreman, Monsieur Fouquier, a nasty, plump little
rentier,
moved among us haunted by a phantom; his only son had just been killed at the age of twenty. “Now he’s really going to be a bastard,” said Guillaumet. “He’ll hate us just for being alive.” This prediction did not come true. Heavy wrinkles lined Monsieur Fouquier’s flabby triple chin. A new pity appeared in his eyes. In a dark corner of the storeroom he showed one of us a snapshot of a beardless young soldier.

An order from the Ministry, so it seemed, forbade the evacuation of all prisons. The guards’ faces were damp with fear. “The Germans will be here by Sunday.”

Would there be a battle on the river? It made a natural line of defense for the retreating army. Our church steeple seemed to us a perfect landmark for artillery. Poule, terrified, asked me: “Do you really think they’ll shell us?” “Naturally,” I replied. I lived
alone,
feeling the
fear spread from one man to the next. I felt a sort of exaltation which gave birth to a great serenity. The old world was being smashed by the cannon. The Mill would be crushed by the cannon. The law of kill-and-be-killed was reaffirmed for my generation. I would have preferred to take my part in the action, the common suffering, to fall like the others, friends and enemies (for me they were only men bent under the same law); but any end is a good one for the man who takes it standing up, who accepts; each man must fulfill his destiny. Marcus Aurelius taught me acquiescence: “Several grains of incense are on the same altar: one falls sooner, the other, later: no difference … Whatever suits you, O world, suits me!” There was profound joy in thinking about this resurrection of the world through the cannon, which had at last interrupted our round.

The cannon moved closer. We stayed in our cells for three straight days; they were immensely serene days. No more rounds of beating the pavement. The Mill had stopped grinding. The Mill, resigned, was waiting for that shell, that great millstone which would grind it up in turn. The guards, terrified, left us alone. I had received an encouraging letter. I was reading the life of Luther. I was alone with my serenity.

During those days, in the neighboring woods, they arrested some spies who were perhaps nothing more than deserters. One of them, a gnarled old peasant caked with mud from head to toe, was brought into the penitentiary before being sent to the court-martial. The orderly, Ribotte, a stool pigeon, was ordered to clean him up. He drove him to the shower room with jabs in the ribs. For the first time in his life he had in his clutches a human being he could martyrize, to whom he was allowed to do anything he pleased. He doused him with near-boiling water. “I says to him: ‘Wait and see, this is nothing yet, you bastard! When they tie you to the stake, then you’ll really make faces … And don’t worry, those twelve bullets are waiting for you; you won’t miss out on them.’ When I gave his balls a good twist, he gave out such a yell that Ironsides came in to see what was happening. I had a big bristle brush in my hand and I was scraping the bastard’s belly.

“‘What’s going on?’ says Ironsides.

“‘Mister Spy thinks my brush isn’t soft enough,’ says I.

“‘Give him a shot in the mouth,’ says Ironsides.

“You can bet I didn’t miss the chance. These spies,” concludes Ribotte, “just send ‘em to me. I know how to take care of ‘em.”

The battle moved away, the endless round began to turn again. Our daily hunk of bread was cut in half, reduced to 300 grams of brown dough full of straw, beans, and worms (at least they were cooked). Hunger, already an old friend, moved in with us to stay. We were supposed to know nothing of the war. The system added total isolation to total silence: Nothing from the outside was to reach us. The mutilated country bled through countless wounds: Those of her children who were in prison were to know nothing. There were fathers whose sons were fighting, brothers of soldiers, poor devils whose villages were now only heaps of stone still being pounded by the cannon: No one was to know anything about it. We nonetheless had an idea of how monstrous this war was. It reached us even through the bars, the mists, over great distances. The Battle of the Falklands, the English surrender in Mesopotamia, the Russians in the Carpathians … Bits of news drifted in to us; all the maps of the world seemed bloodstained to me. Rollot, who had heard about the shelling of Reims Cathedral, told us. Beaugrand, the firebug, ratted on him. My comrade was summoned before the three silver-braided
képis
of the “disciplinary tribunal.” The Warden, angry, was drumming on his desk with nervous fingers:

“You seem well-informed, Rollot. Where do you get your information?”

Silence.

“You’d better learn to answer when you’re spoken to. Where do you get your information?”

“From the moon, Warden, Sir.”

“Oh, so it’s that way, eh! I’ll put you back in step, my friend. The black hole until further notice.”

We were supposed to be ignorant of everything, even the destruction of the most ancient, holy stones of France. We were the only men on earth forbidden to know about the war; but, though we read nothing and could only glimpse, through the double smokescreen of war and administrative stupidity, the general outline of events, some few of us were blessed with exceptional clear-sightedness. I knew enough about the inner decay of the Russian Empire to foresee, at a time when the Cossacks still incarnated the hope of several old Western countries, its inevitable fall. Long before Europe ever dreamt it, we were discussing, in whispers, the coming Russian Revolution. We knew in what part of the globe the long-awaited flame would be born. And in it we found a new reason for living.

Nothing changed. The cannon reigned over all of Europe. A million corpses piled up in the valley of bones at Verdun. France, bleeding through her gaping wounds, avidly absorbed the new strength of Canadians, New Zealanders, Hindus, Senegalese, Portuguese. In the Mill, six hundred men continued their senseless round, attesting to the permanence of order—stronger even than a social cataclysm. We formed an unbelievable island, cut off from the movement of history.