The Foundling's War (37 page)

The train began to move.

‘I’ll come,’ he said. ‘This summer. Definitely.’

He walked beside the carriage. Antoinette was smiling and crying at the same time. Their fingertips touched. Jean stopped and soon saw only an arm and a hand waving a handkerchief. The reader already knows that there was no return to Dieppe in the summer of 1942, when the Canadians landed. Jean did not see his adoptive father again. As for Joseph, it is the author’s turn to know more than the reader and to anticipate the story. The former bookseller, who has had no further impact on Jean’s life after being his first mentor, has resurfaced in his mind almost by accident, one afternoon on a station platform. Yes, he is Antoinette’s lover. Flimsy, furtive encounters that only bring them, because of their blindness, a brief elation that disguises a reality both mediocre and without a future. Lacking any experience, Joseph has set up an intelligence network that he has christened, with some pomp, Light and Truth. The network is composed of amateurs whose best weapons are faith and naivety. Each day Monsieur Cliquet provides a breakdown of the German convoys bringing equipment and troops to the Normandy coast. The Allies will take no account
of this information that summer and find themselves massacred quite unnecessarily. Aside from Monsieur Cliquet, transport expert, the network’s other members know no more than Madame Michette, but Marceline is supervised, used by professionals whom she obeys as only women who wield authority themselves know how to obey. Joseph’s team, knowing nothing about secrecy, take grossly innocent risks that for six months produce a number of results. With the disaster of the butchered Canadians, Joseph learns his lesson. The Allied high command has refused to listen. In disgust he decides to dismantle his network. But it is too late. A woman has been arrested by chance. Within minutes she provides the names of the entire Light and Truth network.

Monsieur Cliquet dies in the carriage taking him to Germany and Joseph is deported with his companions, apart from the woman who so kindly betrayed them and who is then turned to work for the Sicherheitsdienst. As he already speaks German and knows the conditions in the camps, Joseph survives; the only one. At the end of May 1945 he is repatriated and parades through Dieppe with other former prisoners in their striped uniforms under a banner that reads, ‘Never again!’, a declaration all believe in, until the moment the world is covered in new concentration camps which humankind’s finer feelings this time forbid it from describing in such terms.

But Joseph has come back too late. The scramble for the spoils is over. The gluttons have scoffed the lot; the jobs are all taken and Antoinette has married Pierre du Gros-Salé, a squire from thereabouts, a widower as we foresaw with six children who need to have their arses wiped and their noses blown and be brought up without, of course, displaying a scrap of gratitude. Joseph is a decent man. He will not bother her. His consolation prize is a post as tutor at Dieppe’s lycée. For a moment he believes himself to be a guide to young souls to be moulded, but rapidly discovers that they are frightful brats who like to mock his skeletal thinness, imitate the lisp he acquired when the Gestapo knocked all his teeth out and which
he cannot afford to fix because he has no money for dentures, and make fun of his ugly demob suits and hollow, hacking cough. So he leaves, for black Africa where he has discovered that his status as ‘resistant and deportee’ is enough to earn him a headmastership. Here he feels for a time that he is contributing to the radiance of France and introducing its values to the young and awakening intelligences of his pupils. It does not take him long to realise that this too is a mirage. The ‘young, awakening intelligences’ are only interested in kicking him out, him and his radiant France. He will die stupidly in Douala in 1956 from a scorpion bite, mourned by his companion, a pretty Fula woman with copper-coloured skin who has given him a daughter they christened Antoinette. Exit Joseph, whose life is remarkable in one respect, that it is as touching and insignificant as it is a failure from start to finish. In short, he is one of those beings from whom those of a superstitious bent do well to keep their distance: he brings bad luck, and worse, poor man’s bad luck. He himself realises it in the few minutes before he dies, in one of those dazzling visions the grim reaper apparently allows, like a condemned man’s last drink. Lucid at the finish, he is relieved to slip away. His daughter, his honey-coloured baby, is brought to him and he smiles at her but refuses to kiss her, for fear of contaminating her with his bad luck. His precaution is wise: at the age of twenty, named model of the year in New York, Antoinette Outen will marry Peter Kapp III, heir to the fashion stores that bear his name. At the time of writing, after three months of marriage she has divorced and is making her first film. There lies the proof: Joseph Outen’s life was not completely pointless.

I hear you say that this is a long digression about characters who, in this second part of Jean’s life, no longer play any part. Yet a tree only grows if one prunes it. Two branches have been cut. Jean is still not truly free, he still has new steps to take, but he already knows the value
of these symbolic separations. When one is no longer tempted to lean on anyone, the future takes on a sweet taste of adventure. Driven by necessity, he has set out on a hard path, and that is our subject now. Do I mean the gallery in Rue La Boétie? No. We shall barely refer to that any more than the production company where Jean spent a few lacklustre months working for Émile Duzan. He has a handsome office and two salesmen, both experts on the Impressionist period. His clientele is mainly composed of a particular group of
nouveaux riches
that in times of scarcity thrive on other people’s misery. The black market is the only economic force in France. It controls everything. But money earned too fast by those who have been hard up burns a hole in their pocket. No one is taken in by the fiction of price controls. The new rich no longer keep the money launderers in business. They invest in haste in reliable commodities: paintings, gold,
objets d’art
, jewellery, property. Easy to dupe and flatter, like those drunk with rapid social success they step delightedly into an antique dealer’s or a private gallery, talk headily in hints and whispers with a moneychanger, or visit a chateau for sale. You see them driving in cars, taking the sought-after places in the few sleeping cars still operating on the main lines, lunching and dining in restaurants whose supply chains the economic police turn a blind eye to, because the other half of their clientele is German. In fact a large-scale and still hardly noticeable revolution is taking place. France is being transformed because wealth is changing hands; a class of owners is disappearing, gradually ruined, selling its traditional possessions, lovingly amassed and preserved from generation to generation, and another class is taking its place, vast, infatuated, its pockets filled with cash, over-made-up, its women dripping with costume jewellery. There wafts around this new category of French citizens an atmosphere of happiness and
self-confidence
that provokes endless supplicants to line up and cadge a favour or money. Jean sees it all, indeed had observed its beginnings before the war at the time of Antoine du Courseau’s sale of La Sauveté to the Longuets. He watches and says nothing. It is not his job to mix
with the customers. If he were to listen to them, he would be unable to stop himself from throwing them out, these philistines snapping up a Bonnard because the subject is a nude next to her bathtub (‘for our bathroom, darling, don’t you think, over the bath’), a Matisse (‘it’ll amuse the children’), a Renoir (‘for my wife, she does love her roses’). He has been put there to certify transactions that benefit a clique whose names he affects not to be aware of. At its head stand Palfy, Rudolf, Julius. He lends his name and will be the one who pays if anything goes wrong. He knows it, but at the end of the month there is the cheque that just covers the bills for the clinic where Claude lies sedated. We shall return to Claude. She is there, she exists, from time to time Jean can see her, gaze back at her heavy, imploring eyes, kiss her warm mouth. She does not know, she will never know, he swears to himself, what he has got himself involved in to bring her back to life. Before we do, we must speak of the other business proposed by Palfy, and of Jean’s first journey.

Rudolf von Rocroy was pacing up and down the platform at Gare d’Austerlitz, less aristocratic in a suit than in his colonel’s uniform. The war, even though he has done his best, successfully until now, not to get mixed up in it, was what gave him his brilliance. His return to a synthetic flannel suit, tasteless tie and starched collar was a reminder that the officer in gleaming uniform concealed a gentleman of slender means who had difficulty making ends meet and then not always in a dignified manner, for he too belonged to a doomed class under Germany’s National Socialism. His cowardice and dishonesty had been the price of his survival. Jean found him pitiful and inexcusable. Rudolf caught sight of him and turned his back, the sign they had agreed. They had reserved seats in the same compartment of the same carriage of the Paris–Irun express and no longer knew each other. Rudolf buried himself in a French book. The other travellers were
of no interest. Jean watched through the window as the landscapes of a France he had never seen before slipped past. Where was war or occupation to be found in these green contours of Touraine, Limousin, Charente, Bordeaux? He could only see the peace of fields and woods, the promises of springtime and hamlets warmed by the beautiful day’s sunshine, the little roads that wove a network of friendship between farms and villages. The blitzkrieg had left no wounds here, or if it had they had been dressed: reconstructed bridges, roads cleared of the endless detritus of an army fleeing the enemy. Only the mainline stations and their German railway workers in their curious caps proclaimed the poignant reality: at its nerve centres France was no longer itself. An insidious shadow shrouded it.

Between Bordeaux and Bayonne he fell asleep. He opened his eyes in the Basque country, awakening in him thoughts of Paul-Jean Toulet, whom he had discovered thanks to Salah on the eve of war. Between banks of rhododendrons he caught sight of Guéthary, where the poet had died. If Nelly had been with him, she would have recited his lines on Bayonne:

After the war he would find Salah again and take him to hear Nelly. But what did ‘after the war’ mean? No one had any idea when it might be. And where was Salah living, now that Geneviève was alone in Switzerland? When he heard about her liaison with Palfy, which was now official, there would be fireworks. The unusual Nubian was the prince’s executor, managing the fortune Geneviève had inherited. Incapable of adding two figures together, she had had to put herself entirely in his hands. Jean imagined Salah’s cold rage. He would try to destroy Palfy. But this time Palfy was forewarned. He would not
allow it to happen, and there was no doubt that he was of that breed that always knows how to put a former servant in his place.

At Irun, long checks delayed the train.
Feldgendarmen
, French police, Gestapo and customs officers went through the hundred or so passengers with a fine-tooth comb. Rudolf was to spend the day at San Sebastián. Despite his rank and the fact that his mission documents were in order, he was subjected to almost as rigorous an examination as Jean. With their papers stamped, they still needed to present themselves to customs. This time Rudolf’s curtness had an effect. Jean was searched, but the suitcase, which at that moment belonged to neither of them, remained in the luggage rack, untouched. Jean grabbed it and carried it to the Spanish train, where he had a sleeping compartment reserved. The hardest part was over, and he was surprised to have been so calm and indifferent, even wondering if an arrest and interrogation wouldn’t have troubled him less. Rudolf disappeared. He was alone. Spain as seen from Irun station hardly aroused enthusiasm. He remembered his arrival in Italy a few years before, the intense pleasure he had felt at crossing the frontier, and he would have liked to encounter Spain in the same fashion, with a haversack on his back and a bicycle, but his adolescent passions were out of time and he was not entering the country to visit it with his Théophile Gautier in his hand, the way he had visited Italy aiming to follow in Stendhal’s footsteps. It was a dismal beginning: at the sight of his French passport the Spanish police had become even more unpleasant, and now the train was delayed for an unknown reason. Travellers who had counted on the delay kept arriving, running along the platform with parcels tied up with string in their hands. Night fell. The station lights went on. They were wretched and yellowish, but the effect was like a party after France in the blackout. At last the train rolled slowly through the town, its suburbs and industrial estates, and
plunged into a long tunnel before speeding up slightly and panting along an uneven, jolting track. The ancient engine could be heard labouring at the front, puffing a plume of golden flecks into the night. There was a dirty, smoke-filled restaurant car that stank of cooking oil and served cold omelettes and rancid biscuits. Jean sat down at a table. Three Spaniards sat around him, voluble and self-assured, swallowing the unspeakable tortilla without blinking, ordering bowls of coffee and smoking foul cigarillos. The train toiled on through a mountain pass. Several times it seemed as if it would run out of breath and stop, and then with a last effort it was over the top, and descending in a hellish squeal of steel.

Jean slept and woke up at Burgos. He had had to shut the window to keep out the coal dust, and when he opened it the icy air of the Castilian plain rushed into his compartment. The Civil Guard, their bovine faces blue with stubble, kept watch on the platform as the same late passengers started running again, carrying their parcels tied up with string. A little old woman, spruce and with her hair in a bun, walked along the carriages carrying a clay pitcher and chanting, ‘
Hay agua, hay agua!
’ Hands stretched out, grasped the pitcher and tipped it up. Jean walked to the restaurant car, where the same travellers seemed to have spent the night smoking their rank cigarillos. There was weak coffee, stale bread and bars of chocolate on the menu. The train moved off again, and through the window he glimpsed old Castile at last, a landscape set ablaze by cold light and dotted with motionless villages beneath ochre-coloured roofs among the bare rocks. From time to time a Roman belfry, a tower, a fortress-like farm broke the deep, dignified monotony or, looming out of nowhere to startle the watcher, a peasant in black on his grey mule next to the track. Antiquated and breathless as it was, the train jarred as an absurd anachronism in this marvellously preserved landscape. Jean studied it greedily. Since the previous day, his appetite for travelling had come back to him, an appetite smothered by defeat, which had shut men like him up as if imprisoning them. He felt again something of the
feverish pleasure that had quickened his spirit on his first expeditions outside France: the secret excitement he had felt in London, the sense of marvel in Italy. The lost war had closed his country’s borders to everyone except the privileged and those willing to risk the hazardous adventure of a fishing boat in the Channel or a crossing of the Pyrenees. A forgotten feeling came back to him, that there is no imagination without movement. It struck him that he could stay in Portugal. Palfy was taking a risk in sending him out of France. In short, he had trusted him … Jean smiled to himself at the idea of beating Palfy at his own game. Never, ever would Palfy have the right to criticise him for doing so, without contradicting himself. Jean walked back to his compartment. The attendant had folded the bed against the partition, put the seat back straight, and vaguely tidied up. Jean locked the door and opened the suitcase he had exchanged with Rudolf. It contained, in denominations of ten and twenty, three hundred thousand pounds sterling. Obviously it would be deadly dangerous to walk away with the suitcase’s contents and not take them to the bank where they were to be deposited. Palfy had warned Jean that Lisbon was teeming with OSS agents, the Sicherheitsdienst and MI6. As soon as he arrived he was expecting to be followed, his every move watched and noted. The vastness of the sum and of the operation put it in a different class from everything he had been used to. His percentage more than satisfied him. He shut the suitcase and began to daydream: from Lisbon he could reach England and America. He could go back to London, to graceful Chelsea and the black Thames. How he had loved London! The daydream slipped away: he was not free. Claude was surviving at her clinic because of him. If he stopped paying, they would move her to an ordinary hospital and she would disintegrate, and Cyrille would starve at his grandmother’s. Palfy had taken every aspect of the situation into account. He was not afraid. Jean would fulfil his mission and come back. One day, later …