Suite Francaise (25 page)

The car swerved and a woman’s voice screamed in terror, “Watch out!”

It was too late.

“I’ve had it. I’m going to be run over! To have made it through so much danger to end up like this, it’s too . . . it’s too ridiculous . . . Someone’s playing a trick on me . . . Someone, somewhere is playing this horrible, bad trick on me . . .”

Just as a bird, terrified by a gunshot, flies out of its nest and disappears, so this final conscious thought went through Charlie’s mind and vanished at the same moment as his life. He took a terrible blow to the head. The car’s fender had shattered his skull. Blood and brains spurted out with such force that a few drops landed on the woman who was driving—a pretty woman, wearing a hat, hardly bigger than a cocktail napkin, made of two sable skins sewn together and a russet veil over her golden hair. It was Arlette Corail, back from Bordeaux the week before. She looked down at the body. “What rotten luck,” she mumbled, devastated, “but really, what rotten luck!”

She was a cautious woman and had her torch with her. She examined the man’s face, at least what was left of it, and recognised Charles Langelet. “Oh, the poor guy! . . . I was going fast, all right, but he couldn’t have been paying attention, the silly fool! What am I going to do now?”

Nevertheless, she remembered that her insurance, licence, pass, were all in order, and she knew someone influential who would fix everything for her. Somewhat reassured but her heart still pounding, she sat down for a moment on the car’s running board, lit a cigarette, fixed her make-up with trembling hands, then went to get help.

Madame Logre had finally finished cleaning the study and library. She went into the drawing room to get the vacuum cleaner. As she pulled out the plug, the handle of the vacuum cleaner knocked against the table where the
Venus at the Looking Glass
was displayed. Madame Logre screamed: the statuette had fallen on to the floor. The head of Venus was smashed to bits.

Madame Logre wiped her forehead with her apron, hesitated a moment, then, leaving the statuette where it was, put the vacuum cleaner away. After that, in a manner that was surprising for such a stout woman, she rushed silently and nimbly out of the apartment. “Right, I’ll just say the door flew open and a gust of wind knocked the statue over. It’s his fault too! Why leave it at the edge of the table? And anyway,” she said angrily, “I don’t care what he says. He can go to hell for all I care!”

30

If anyone had told Jean-Marie that he would one day find himself in a remote village far from his regiment, with no money, no way to communicate with his family, not knowing whether they were safe and sound in Paris or, like so many others, buried in a shell hole somewhere beside a road, and above all, if anyone had told him that, after France had been defeated, he would still be alive and would sometimes even be happy, he wouldn’t have believed it. Yet that was what had happened. The very magnitude of the disaster, the fact that they had passed the point of no return, in itself provided some consolation, just as certain deadly poisons provide their own antidote: all his suffering was irreversible. He couldn’t change the fact that the Maginot Line had been circumvented, or broken through (no one knew for sure), that two million soldiers had been taken prisoner, that France had been defeated. He couldn’t make the post, the telegraphs or the telephones work, couldn’t get hold of any petrol or a car to go to the railway station twenty-one kilometres away, and there weren’t any trains anyway as the tracks had been destroyed. He couldn’t walk to Paris for he had been seriously wounded and was only now just starting to get out of bed. He couldn’t pay his hosts, for he had no money and no way of getting any. It was too much for him; all he could do was calmly stay where he was and wait.

This feeling of absolute dependence on other people brought about a kind of peace within him. He didn’t even have his own clothes: his uniform had been torn and burned in places so he wore a khaki shirt and spare pair of trousers belonging to one of the farmhands. Meanwhile, he had managed to get himself demobilised by secretly crossing the demarcation line and giving a false address; so he no longer ran the risk of being taken prisoner. He was still living on the farm, but since he had recovered, he had moved from the bed in the kitchen to a little room above the hayloft. Through its round window he could see lovely, peaceful fields, fertile land and woods. At night he could hear mice scurrying above his head and the cooing of doves in the dovecote.

Living constantly in fear of death like this was only bearable if you took one day at a time, if you said to yourself each evening, “Another twenty-four hours when nothing really bad has happened, thank God! Let’s see what tomorrow brings.” Everyone around Jean-Marie felt this way, or at least acted as if they did. They tended the animals, the hay, made butter . . . No one ever mentioned tomorrow. They made provision for the years to come, planting trees that would bear fruit in five or six seasons, fattening up the pigs they could eat two years later, but they did nothing about the immediate future. If Jean-Marie asked if it would be fine the next day (the usual question a Parisian on holiday would ask), they would say, “Well, we don’t know . . . How should we know?” If he asked, “Will there be any fruit?” they’d reply, “Maybe a little . . .” looking sceptically at the small, hard green pears trained up the trellis. “We can’t really tell . . . we don’t know . . . we’ll see when the time comes . . .” An almost hereditary instinct about the tricks of fate—the April frosts, the hail that ravaged the fields just before harvest, the drought in July that shrivelled up the kitchen garden—inspired wisdom and caution within them, but at the same time gave them something to do every day. “They’re not exactly likeable but you have to admire them,” thought Jean-Marie, who had barely had any contact with the countryside: for five generations the Michauds had lived in the city.

The people of this hamlet were welcoming and amiable; the men were smooth talkers, the women coquettish. Once you got to know them, you discovered they were determined, tough, sometimes even surprisingly malicious, perhaps a result of some obscure atavistic memory of hate and fear that had been passed through the blood line from one generation to the next. Yet at the same time they were generous. The farmer’s wife, who wouldn’t have given an egg to a neighbour and held out for every penny she could get when selling her poultry, listened in dismal silence, together with the rest of her family, when Jean-Marie told them that he wanted to leave the farm because he had no money, that he didn’t want them to have to support him and that he would try to make it to Paris on foot. “It isn’t right to talk like that, Monsieur, “ she declared with a strange kind of dignity. “You’re upsetting us . . .”

“But what else can I do?” said Jean-Marie, sitting next to her with his head in his hands, still feeling very weak.

“You can’t do anything. You have to wait.”

“Yes, of course, the post will be working again soon,” the young man murmured, “and if my parents are actually in Paris . . .”

“We’ll see when the time comes . . .” said the farmer’s wife.

Nowhere else would it have been as easy to forget the outside world. Without letters and newspapers, the only link with the rest of the universe was the radio, but the farmers had heard the Germans were confiscating the sets, so they hid them in lofts and old wardrobes, or buried them in the fields along with the hunting rifles they were supposed to have handed over. The village was in the Occupied Zone, very close to the demarcation line, but the German troops weren’t stationed there; in fact, they had only passed through the village and never climbed the hill to the hamlet, which was two kilometres away along rough, rocky paths. Food was beginning to run out in the cities and certain other areas; here, there was even more food than usual, for there was no way of transporting their produce away from the village. Never in his life had Jean-Marie eaten so much butter, chicken, cream, or so many peaches. He recovered quickly. He even started putting on weight, the farmer’s wife said, and in her kindness towards Jean-Marie there was a strange desire to make a deal with the Good Lord—to save one life for Him in exchange for the other life He held in His hands: just as she offered grain to the chickens in exchange for their eggs, so she tried to offer Jean-Marie’s survival in return for her own son’s life. Jean-Marie understood this very well, but it didn’t change in the slightest his gratitude towards this elderly woman who had nursed him. He did his best to help out, doing odd jobs around the farm, working in the garden.

Though the women sometimes asked him questions about the war,
this
war, the men never did. They were all former soldiers (there weren’t any young men). Their memories remained stuck in ’14. They had had time to filter the past, to decant it, to get rid of the dregs, the poison, to make it bearable for their souls; but recent events remained confusing and laced with venom. Besides, deep in their hearts they blamed it all on the youngsters, who weren’t as strong as they, weren’t as patient and who’d been spoiled at school. And since Jean-Marie was young, they tactfully avoided judging him—him and his contemporaries.

This was how everything conspired to comfort and soothe the soldier, so he could rebuild his strength and courage. He was alone almost every day; it was the season when there was the most work to do in the fields. The men left home before dawn. The women looked after the animals and the washing. Jean-Marie had offered to help but they’d sent him packing. So he would go outside, crossing the courtyard where the turkeys were squawking, and walk down to a little meadow surrounded by a fence where two horses grazed. There was a golden brown mare and her two little coffee-coloured foals with their short, rough, dark manes. They would come and rub their muzzles against their mother’s legs as she nibbled the grass and shook her tail impatiently to chase away the flies. Every now and again, one of the foals would turn towards the place near the fence where Jean-Marie was lying on the grass, look at him with his dark, moist eyes and whinny happily. Jean-Marie never grew tired of watching them. He wanted to write a story about these charming little horses, a story that would evoke this day in July, this land, this farm, these people, the war—and himself.

He wrote with a chewed-up pencil stub, in a little notebook which he hid against his heart. He felt he had to hurry: something inside him was making him anxious, was knocking on an invisible door. By writing, he opened that door, he gave life to something that wished to be born. Then suddenly, he would become discouraged, feel disheartened, weary. He was mad. What was he doing writing these stupid stories, letting himself be pampered by the farmer’s wife, while his friends were in prison, his despairing parents thought he was dead, when the future was so uncertain, the past so bleak? But while he was thinking these thoughts, he saw one of the foals run joyously towards him, then roll around in the grass, kicking its hooves in the air and looking at him with mischievous and tender eyes. He tried to work out how to describe that look, all the time feeling impatiently curious and oddly anxious. He couldn’t find the words but he knew what the little horse must feel, how good the crisp, cool grass must taste, how annoying the flies were, the sense of pride and freedom when he raised his muzzle and ran and kicked. He quickly wrote down a few awkward, unfinished lines. They were no good, he hadn’t captured the essence, but it would come; he closed the notebook and finally sat still, hands open in his lap, eyes closed, tired and happy.

When he got back at dinnertime, he immediately saw that something important had happened while he was out. One of the farmhands had gone into the village to get some bread; now there he was with four round golden loaves on the handlebars of his bicycle and a group of women crowding round him. One of the girls saw Jean-Marie and shouted, “Hey, Monsieur Michaud! This’ll make you happy, there’s post again.”

“Really?” said Jean-Marie to the old man. “Are you sure?”

“Positive. I saw the Post Office open and people reading letters.”

“Then I’m going upstairs to write my family a letter and take it to the village. Will you lend me your bicycle?”

In the village, he not only posted his letter but bought the newspapers which had just arrived. How strange everything was! He was like a castaway who had made it back to his homeland, civilisation, society. In the little village square, people were reading letters from the evening delivery. Some of the women were crying; many prisoners had sent their news, but had also given the names of friends who’d been killed. At the farm, they’d asked him to find out if anyone knew where Benoît was.

“Oh, so you’re the soldier living there, are you?” the women asked. “Well, we have no idea, but now the letters are coming, we’ll soon find out where our men are!”

One of them, an older woman who’d put on a little pointed black hat with a rose at the front to come down to the village, was crying as she spoke. “Some of us will find out too soon. I wish I’d never got this damned piece of paper. My boy was a sailor on the
Bretagne
and they say he went missing when the English torpedoed the ship. It’s just too much!”

“Don’t you give up hope. Missing doesn’t mean dead. Maybe he’s a prisoner in England!”

But to all these attempts at consoling her, she just shook her head and the artificial flower on its brass stem quivered as she trembled. “No, no, it’s all over, my poor boy! It’s just too much . . .”

Jean-Marie headed back to the hamlet. At the side of the road he found Cécile and Madeleine who’d come to meet him; they both asked at the same time: “You hear anything about my brother?,” “You hear anything about Benoît?”

“No, but that doesn’t mean anything. Can you imagine how many letters must be backed up waiting to be delivered?”

As for their mother, she said nothing. She just shielded her eyes with her yellowish, dry hand and looked at him; he shook his head. The soup was on the table, the men were coming home, they ate. After dinner, when the dishes were dried and the kitchen swept, Madeleine went into the garden to pick some peas. Jean-Marie followed her. He knew he would soon be leaving the farm and everything seemed even more beautiful and peaceful to him.