Suite Francaise (10 page)

“Let go of me, Auntie, this is not a matter for women,” he replied, pushing them away, and his lovely face flushed with pleasure: he was proud of what he’d said.

He looked at Hubert, who had dried his tears and was standing next to the window, serious and determined. He went up to him and whispered in his ear, “Are we going, then?”

“Yes, we’re going,” Hubert whispered back. He thought for a minute and added, “Meet on the road leading out of the village, at midnight.”

They shook hands in secret. Around them the women were all talking at once, begging them to give up their plan, to take pity on their parents, to hold on to their lives, such precious lives, to think of the future. At that moment they heard Jacqueline’s piercing screams from upstairs. “Mummy, Mummy, come quickly! Albert’s run away!”

“Albert, is that your other son? Oh, my God!” exclaimed the spinsters.

“No, no, Albert’s the cat,” said Madame Péricand, who thought she was going mad.

Meanwhile, the sound of deep muffled explosions reverberated through the air: guns were firing in the distance, they were surrounded by danger. Madame Péricand collapsed into a chair. “Hubert, just listen to me! In the absence of your father I am in charge. You are a child, barely seventeen, your duty is to save yourself for the future . . .”

“For the next war?”

“For the next war,” Madame Péricand repeated automatically. “In the meantime, you must simply be quiet and do as I say. You are not going anywhere! If you had any feelings at all such a cruel, stupid idea would not even have crossed your mind! Don’t you think I’m miserable enough? Don’t you realise we’ve lost? That the Germans are coming and you’d be killed or taken prisoner before going a hundred metres? No! Not a word! I’m not even going to discuss it; you’ll leave here over my dead body!”

“Mummy, Mummy,” Jacqueline kept shouting. “I want Albert! Find Albert for me! The Germans will take him! He’ll be bombed, stolen, killed! Albert! Albert! Albert!”

“Jacqueline, be quiet, you’ll wake up your brothers!”

Everyone was shouting at once. Hubert, lips trembling, broke away from the frenzied group of gesticulating old women. Did they understand nothing at all? Life was like Shakespeare, noble and tragic, and they wanted to debase it. The world was crumbling, was nothing more than rubble and ruins, yet they remained the same. Women were inferior creatures; they didn’t know the meaning of heroism, glory, faith, the spirit of sacrifice. All they did was to bring everything they touched down to their level. God! Just to see a man, to shake the hand of a man! Even father, he thought, but most of all his beloved brother, the good, the great Philippe. He longed for his brother so much that, once again, tears came to his eyes. The incessant noise of gunfire filled him with anxiety and excitement; he started trembling all over, shaking his head from side to side like a frightened horse. But he wasn’t afraid. Not at all! He wasn’t afraid! He welcomed, he embraced, the idea of death. It would be a beautiful death for this lost cause. It would be better than crouching in trenches as they did in ’14. Now they fought in the open air, beneath the beautiful June sun or in the brilliant moonlight.

His mother had gone upstairs to Jacqueline, but she’d taken precautions: when he tried to get into the garden he found the door locked. He banged on it, shook it.

“Leave the door alone, Monsieur!” protested the two old ladies who were already in bed. “It’s late. We’re tired, we want to go to sleep. Let us sleep.”

“Go to bed, my little one,” one of them said.

Angrily he shrugged his shoulders. “
My little one
. . . old hag!”

His mother came back downstairs. “Jacqueline was hysterical,” she said. “Fortunately I had a flask of orange flower water in my bag. Don’t bite your nails. Hubert, you’re getting on my nerves. Come on, settle down in this armchair and go to sleep.”

“I’m not tired.”

“I don’t care, go to sleep,” she said in a strict, impatient tone of voice, as if she were talking to Emmanuel.

His soul full of indignation, he flung himself into an old cretonne armchair, which creaked under his weight.

Madame Péricand raised her eyes to heaven. “You are so clumsy, darling. You’ll break the seat. Do stay still.”

“Yes, Mother,” he said submissively.

“Did you remember to get your raincoat from the car?”

“No, Mother.”

“You never remember anything!”

“But I won’t need it. It’s nice out.”

“It could rain tomorrow.”

She took her knitting out of her bag. Her needles clicked. When Hubert was little, she would sit near him knitting during his piano lessons. He closed his eyes and pretended to be asleep. A while later she nodded off. He jumped out of the open window, ran to the shed where his bicycle had been put away and, silently opening the gate, slipped away. Everyone was asleep now. The gunfire had stopped. Cats wailed from the rooftops. A splendid church, with sky-blue windows, rose up in the middle of a dusty old avenue where refugees had parked. The people who hadn’t been able to find accommodation were sleeping inside their cars or on the grass. Anguish oozed from their pale faces, tense and fearful, even in their sleep. They slept so soundly, though, nothing would wake them before daybreak. That was obvious. They could pass from sleep to death without even realising it.

Hubert walked among them feeling shock and pity. He wasn’t tired. His overexcited state of mind gave him strength and kept him going. He thought with sadness and remorse of the family he had abandoned. But this very sadness and remorse increased his elation. He wasn’t going into it with his eyes closed; he was sacrificing not just his own life, but the life of everyone in his family to his country. He marched towards his destiny like a young god bearing offerings. At least, that was how he saw himself. He left the village, got to the cherry tree and threw himself to the ground beneath its branches. A lovely sweet feeling suddenly made his heart beat faster: he thought of the new friend who would share his dangerous exploits and glory. He barely knew him, the boy with the blond hair, but he felt bound to him with extraordinary violence and tenderness. He had heard that, while crossing a bridge in the north, a German regiment had had to walk over the bodies of their dead comrades and that they had started singing: “Once I had a comrade . . .” He understood that feeling of pure, almost savage love. Unconsciously, he was trying to replace Philippe, whom he loved so much and who had separated himself from his younger brother with such implacable gentleness; Philippe was too strict, too saintly, Hubert thought, and with no feelings, no passion for anyone but Christ.

For the past two years Hubert had felt very lonely and, at school, had almost made a point of befriending only bullies or snobs. Also, he was attracted, almost without realising it, to physical beauty—and René had the face of an angel. He waited for him, starting at every sound. It was nearly midnight. A horse went by without a rider. Strange sights like this occasionally reminded him of the war, but otherwise everything was quiet. He pulled a long weed out of the ground and chewed it, then examined the contents of one of his pockets: a bit of bread, an apple, some nuts, gingerbread crumbs, a pocket knife, a ball of string, his little red notebook. On the first page he wrote: “If I am killed, could you please notify my father, Monsieur Péricand, 18 Boulevard Delessert in Paris, or my mother . . .” He added the address in Nîmes. He remembered he hadn’t said his prayers that night. He knelt down in the grass and prayed, adding a special Creed for his family. He felt at peace with man and God. While he was praying, the bells sounded midnight. Now he had to be ready to go.

The moon lit up the road. It was empty. He waited patiently for half an hour, then became overwhelmed with anxiety. Hiding his bicycle in the ditch, he walked towards the village hoping to meet René, but there was no sign of him. Back under the cherry tree, he waited some more, examining the contents of his other pocket: some crumpled-up cigarettes, a bit of money. He smoked a cigarette without pleasure. He still wasn’t used to the taste of tobacco. His hands were shaking nervously. He pulled flowers out of the ground and flicked them away. It was past one o’clock. Was it possible that René . . . ? No, no . . . you don’t break a promise like that . . . He’d been prevented from coming, locked in by his aunts perhaps, but he, Hubert, hadn’t let his mother’s precautions prevent him from getting away. Mother. She would soon wake up and then what would she do? They would look everywhere for him. He couldn’t stay here, so close to the village But what if René came? . . . He would wait for him until daybreak, then leave.

The first rays of sun were beginning to light up the road when Hubert finally set off. Pushing his bicycle, he cautiously climbed the hill to the Sainte woods, preparing what he would say to the soldiers. He heard voices, laughter, a horse neighing. Someone shouted. Hubert stopped, out of breath: they were speaking German. He jumped behind a tree, saw a greenish uniform a few feet away and, abandoning his bicycle, shot off like a hare. At the bottom of the hill he took the wrong path, kept on running and reached the village, but didn’t recognise it. Then he went down to the main road and ended up in the middle of all the refugees’ cars. They were driving insanely fast, insanely. He saw one (a big grey open touring car) that had just knocked a small van into the ditch and driven off without slowing down even for a moment. The further he walked, the faster the flood of cars was moving, like in some mad film, he thought. He saw a truck full of soldiers. He waved at them desperately. Without stopping, someone stretched out his hand and hoisted him up amid the camouflaged guns and boxes of tarpaulins.

“I wanted to warn you,” said Hubert, panting. “I saw Germans in the woods nearby.”

“They’re everywhere, my boy,” the soldier replied.

“Can I go with you?” Hubert asked shyly. “I want . . .” (his voice breaking with emotion), “I want to fight.”

The soldier looked at him and remained silent. Nothing these men heard or saw seemed to be able to surprise or move them any more. Hubert learned that they had picked up a pregnant woman along the way, as well as a child wounded in the bombing who’d been either abandoned or lost and a dog with a broken leg. He also learned they intended to hold the enemy back and prevent them, if possible, from crossing the bridge.

“I’m with them,” Hubert thought. “That’s it, I’m in it now.”

The surging wave of refugees surrounded the truck, preventing them from moving forward. Sometimes it was impossible for the soldiers to move at all. They would fold their arms and wait until someone let them pass. Hubert was sitting at the back of the truck, his legs dangling outside. He was filled with an extraordinary sense of turmoil, a confusion of ideas and emotions, but what he felt most was utter scorn for humanity as a whole. The feeling was almost physical. A few months earlier, his friends had given him some drink for the first time in his life. He thought of the taste now: the horrible taste of bitter ashes that bad wine leaves in your mouth. He had been such a good little boy. He had seen the world as simple and beautiful, men as worthy of respect. Men . . . a herd of cowardly wild animals. That René who had urged him to run off, and then stayed tucked up under his quilt, while France was dying . . . Those people who refused to give the refugees a bed, a glass of water, who charged a fortune for an egg, who stuffed their cars full of luggage, packages, food, even furniture, but who told a woman dying of exhaustion, children who had walked from Paris, “You can’t come with us . . . you can see very well there’s no room . . .” Leather suitcases and painted women in a truck full of officers: such egotism, cowardice, such vicious, useless cruelty made him sick.

And the most horrible thing was that he couldn’t ignore the sacrifices, the heroism, the kindness of some. Philippe, for example, was a saint; these soldiers who’d had nothing to eat or drink (the supply officer had left that morning but hadn’t returned in time) going to do battle for a hopeless cause, they were heroes. There was courage, self-sacrifice, love among these men, but that was frightening too: even goodness was predestined, according to Philippe. Whenever Philippe spoke, he seemed both enlightened and passionate at the same time, as if lit up by a very pure flame. But Hubert had serious doubts about religion and Philippe was far away. The outside world was incoherent and hideous, painted in the colours of hell, a hell Jesus never could enter, Hubert thought, “because they would tear him to pieces.”

Machine-guns fired on the convoy. Death was gliding across the sky and suddenly plunged down from the heavens, wings outstretched, steel beak firing on this long line of trembling black insects crawling along the road. Everyone threw themselves to the ground; women lay on top of their children to protect them. When the firing stopped, deep furrows were left in the crowd, like wheat after a storm when the fallen stems form close, deep trenches. Only when it had been quiet for a few moments could you hear the cries and moans: people calling to one another, moans that went ignored, cries shouted out in vain . . .

The refugees got back into the cars they’d left beside the road and started off again, but some of the cars remained abandoned, their doors open, baggage still tied to the roof, a wheel in the ditch where the driver had rushed to take shelter. He would never return. In the cars, amid the abandoned packages, there was sometimes a dog howling, pulling on his lead, or a cat miaowing frantically, locked in its basket.

17

The instincts of a former age were still at work in Gabriel Corte: when someone hurt him, rather than defend himself, his first reaction was to complain. Dragging Florence behind him, he strode impatiently through Paray-le-Monial looking for the mayor, the police, a councillor, a deputy, any government official at all who could get him back his dinner. But it was extraordinary . . . the streets were empty, the houses silent. At a crossroads he came across a small group of women who seemed to be wandering about aimlessly.

“We have no idea, we don’t come from here,” they replied to his questions. “We’re refugees, like you,” one of them added.