The Foundling's War (31 page)

Jesús was waiting for them at Gif station in the pouring rain. They took refuge in a café, next to a glowing stove. Certain scenes haunt
us for a long time, with no explanation, and Jean was not to forget the two hours they spent in the café, its marble-topped tables, its zinc counter, the posters advertising aperitifs and the grubby waitress who refilled their glasses of red wine. Labourers came in, dripping with rain and smelling of wet leather and wool. They shook themselves like dogs and hung up their oilskins on the coatstand, under which a rivulet formed. On the door Jean read backwards

Jules! But he was Jules-who too. The memory of Nelly tugged at his heart. He would have sworn that having Claude back would erase the other’s presence so completely that he would not think of her. But Jules-who was thinking of Nelly, and the previous night they had slept together. You can’t separate everything. It’s impossible. Somehow something is always left behind. Studying Claude as she talked to Jesús, he was surprised by her face’s transformation. Her changed features bore witness to the suffering she had gone through, to an anxiety she needed constantly to be distracted from. The smallest thing upset her. Whenever someone came in, an unfamiliar face, she suddenly tensed for several seconds, hugging Cyrille to her as if the stranger had come to take him from her. Jean realised that morning how much she had truly changed. The taut skin of her gaunt face exposed the veins at her temples and the base of her nose. She clasped her hands together to hide her trembling fingers, flinched whenever someone ordered a drink too loudly, and shivered constantly despite being next to a glowing stove. The waitress laid their table and brought soup bowls, a basket of bread and a small carafe of wine. A young woman with coarse hair that was as straight as straw, wearing a black schoolgirl’s blouse, collected their food coupons and placed them in an old metal cigarette box. The waitress returned from the kitchen with a steaming
pot and a ladle. Ignoring the labourers’ banter and complaints, she filled the bowls to the brim. The soup steamed and a silence fell as they sipped the first spoonfuls, after which the men served themselves bread and wine. Jesús started sketching on a drawing book Cyrille had brought with him. Jean put his hand in Claude’s and her smile of artificial gratitude revealed to him how far removed from the present she was, how much she was still beating her lovely forehead against an imaginary barrier. During the last two days in Paris she had seemed better, but Jean suddenly gauged the fragility of her recovery: the smallest thing could break her – even the heavy atmosphere of this country bistro might be enough, the smell rising from wet clothes in the room’s Turkish bath-like heat, the man at the next table who was pouring a spoonful of red wine into his soup, a ritual that reminded Jean of his own childish disgust when Albert had sharpened his soup the same way, greedily contemplating his wine-laced bowl. The rain ran in sheets down the bistro’s windows and there was nothing to be seen of the village except, from time to time, the outline of a hastening figure. The waitress stationed herself behind the counter and opened
Le Petit Parisien
. The front-page headlines announced the British retreat in Malaysia, Japan’s attack on Hong Kong, and two battleships sunk in Alexandria harbour by Italian frogmen. The waitress closed the paper again. She only skimmed it these days, since the censors had forbidden the horoscopes because spies used them to exchange secret messages using the signs of the zodiac.

As abruptly as it had started, the rain stopped. Sunshine spread across the street, a white light so intense it was blinding on the other side of the window. Jesús hoisted Cyrille onto his shoulders and was the first to leave, singing. Jean carried a suitcase in one hand, holding Claude’s arm with the other, but he did not need to hold her up. In the crisp air her colour and will returned.

‘How it’s all changed!’ she said.

In three weeks the countryside had been transformed, shedding the last of its green. The skeletal trees in the forest stood in a thick carpet of dead leaves of beautiful shimmering gold and dark red. From the bare fields a bluish mist rose like a smoker’s breath. The house appeared at a bend in the road, set back, sheltered by an avenue of ash trees whose enormous roots clutched at the leaf mould like the talons of a bird of prey. Jesús had replaced the wobbly front door with one made of oak and two cramped ground-floor windows with a wide bay that let a golden light into the single downstairs room. The fire had gone out while Jesús had been away, and only glowing embers remained. Claude pressed her cheek to the still warm stonework around the hearth, then dropped into a tattered Louis XIII armchair whose springs poked through its torn upholstery. Jesús revived the fire with small pine logs, and flames suddenly rose so intensely that the rest of the room felt glacial.

Jesús wanted to make ‘real’ coffee. He battled with the wood stove.

‘You should help him,’ Claude said to Jean, who had sat on the floor at her feet and was playing with Cyrille.

Jean helped him. All through her life Jeanne had battled with a wood-burning stove, refusing in her latter years to switch to the bottles of gas that were taking over on the farms from the archaic stoves that used branches and small logs of resinous, scented wood. So he got the cooker going again, and they heated water for coffee. Claude dozed. Jean lay at her feet, his head turned to her, watching for the slightest movement the face of a woman who still hid the truth of herself from him and whom he had now decided he had to know completely, even if it meant becoming obsessed by her. The leaping flames coloured Claude’s features, lessening the pallor of her cheeks and her temples’ transparency. Jesús coaxed Cyrille outside.

‘We are collectin’ mushrooms and pickin’ up snails!’

Cyrille let himself be wrapped up and put on the mittens Toinette had knitted for him, and they disappeared into the birch forest. Claude
opened her eyes and saw Jean looking at her.

‘How long are they going to be gone?’ she asked.

‘I don’t know. An hour maybe.’

She sat up and pushed her hand across her brow.

‘I’d like to sleep. Come with me.’

He followed her into the bedroom, which was warm from the fire downstairs but dark, illuminated only by the dormer window that looked out onto the birch forest. Claude undressed and lay down.

‘Come,’ she said again.

He lay down beside her. She was burning. As he hugged her to him he realised that this time she was ready, that the cruel refusal imposed on her was crumbling, leaving them, at last, face to face.

‘I love you,’ she said.

Jesús’s return dragged them awake. He was tossing logs onto the fire, stoking the stove. Cyrille’s piercing voice came up through the floor.

‘So are you going to play battleships or not, Jesús?’

They listened, then the Spaniard’s resonant voice was raised.

‘Cyrille, you are cheatin’!’

‘I always cheat with Maman.’

‘If you was my son, I would smack you’ bottom.’

‘Just try it. You’re not strong enough.’

There were shouts, puffing and panting and eventually Cyrille’s victorious voice.

‘Both shoulders! You’re touching, Jesús. You lose.’

‘It’s true, I los’!’

Jean got dressed and went downstairs.

‘Where’s Maman?’ Cyrille asked.

‘She’s resting.’

‘She’s been resting a jolly long time, she must be tired …’

They had collected black chanterelles and a few snails, and some
sweet chestnuts that they were roasting in the embers. Jesús was putting up a Christmas tree, a young fir, and making cutouts of gold paper in the shape of shooting stars and figures from the Nativity.

‘That’s the donkey!’ Cyrille said.

‘No, ’e’s no’, silly boy! ’E’s Sain’ Josseph …’

‘Or it could be the Virgin Mary.’

‘If you don’ sink I ’ave any talen’ I’ll go and ’ang myself up by …’

Cyrille stretched his neck and cocked his ear to hear the end of the sentence.

‘By the what?’

‘The ’airs in my nose!’

‘All right … I thought you were going to say something else.’

Jean’s arrival put an end to the argument. Above their heads they heard the floor creak at Claude’s footsteps.

‘So is she coming?’ Cyrille asked. ‘What’s she doing?’

Claude came down as Laura arrived, laden with parcels. Jesús unloaded the car.

‘We’re goin’ to wisstan’ a sieze!’ he said.

She had thought of everything, even the candles for the tree, which was transformed under Jesús’s skilful fingers. On their earlier visit she had seemed to Jean dull and submissive. What revelation had suddenly changed her, so that this young woman, no natural beauty and charmless with it, should, against expectations, reappear as someone so extraordinary that her entrance was stunning, as though a new being had replaced the old? She kissed Cyrille, then Claude and Jean.

‘Tonight,’ she said, ‘we forget everything.’

‘Yes, oh yes … everything!’ Claude replied, taking Jean’s hand and squeezing it, communicating her joy and her serenity. The pressure of her hand brought back the events in the bedroom and the agreement Jean believed had at last been sealed between them. For a second, in the moment of sadness and dejection that follows pleasure, he had been afraid that Claude’s surrender had been a farewell. But she was
there, warm, her hip pressing against him, quiet, pacified, finally giving free rein to the tender sensuality she had held back for so long. With a finger he lifted up a stray strand of hair from her beautiful forehead. She caught his hand and kissed it.

‘Maman!’ Cyrille cried. ‘You don’t kiss men’s hands.’

‘Yes, you do, my darling. When it’s Jean’s.’

Next morning Laura did not come down when it was time to open the presents. Cyrille wanted to go upstairs and fetch her. Jesús caught his arm.

‘No, Cyrille. Leave ’er, she’s cryin’.’

‘Why? It’s Christmas!’

‘Yes, and as you are a big boy, I’m goin’ to teach you somethin’ you’ll remember all you’ life. Yes’erday, before she came ’ome to us, she found out that ’er brother ’ad died in Russia. She didn’ say nothin’ because she didn’ wan’ to spoil our party. She’s very brave.’

‘What is “died”?’

Jean felt Jesús’s emotion, his inability to explain.

‘It means,’ he murmured, ‘that she’ll never see ’im again.’

‘Never ever?’

‘Never.’

‘What did he go to do in the war?’

Jesús, his voice breaking, said only, ‘’E was an officer.’

‘German?’

‘Yes.’

‘We have to kill all the Germans, that’s what Uncle Vladi says. And Grandmother wants to see them all dead too.’

‘Be quiet, Cyrille!’ Claude cried, so pale she looked as if she might faint. ‘Be quiet, my darling.’

‘But Uncle Vladi knows those things.’

‘Be quiet.’

‘The Germans are making war on Holy Mother Russia.’

‘There’s no mo’ Holy Mother Russia!’ Jesús said. ‘There’s no’ one country that is holy any mo’.’

‘That’s very sad. So why did he died?’

Jean put his arms around Cyrille and lifted him up the way Albert had once, long ago, lifted him.

‘For nothing, for nobody. And remember something else, Cyrille: the men who’ve died don’t have a country any more. They’re all brothers.’

‘So everything’s all right at the end. Then … can we open the presents?’

For a long time the men of my generation were taught that to obtain too quickly and with too little effort the object of their desire would provide no satisfaction, not even to their self-esteem. Worse, they would find themselves tiring rapidly of the object in question. Subsequent generations have felt an instinctive suspicion for such traditional morality. Instinct – I mean the instinct of the moment, with everything wild and intuitive that that implies – instinct tells them that the desired object or person loses its desirability in the course of waiting, and so becomes devalued or degraded. In us, likewise, spent desire is robbed of its spark of energy. How can it stay alive when it is subject to fragmentation and dilution in a sea of temptation? When women were not easy (I’m talking about yesterday, not the day before yesterday, for, as we are too apt to forget, morals go through fashions of rigour and laxity in a way that ought to make us more modest in our claims about the extent of our victories in the name of liberty), when women were not easy, the gift of one of them inspired in him who possessed her a feeling of satisfaction and pride that contributed greatly to the perfection of pleasure. We speak here of love. We could be talking about houses, cars, horses, books or jewellery. In a society where temptation is all around – not a consumer society – as the overused phrase has it patience is the virtue of fools. To practise such a virtue is to be defeated from the start. Youth swiftly grasps this, by a special grace it is given. War and its repercussions, or rather the miseries of war and their repercussions, have a tendency to break the fragile bonds that linked us to our long-term desires. Tomorrow belongs to no one, and today demands thrilling, fleeting pleasures that rarely touch the heart and never the soul. Every satisfied desire
is wreathed in the glories of a farewell. It is a gauntlet thrown down. And as it is bound not to be picked up, the gambler wins or feels he has won. There is no time to reckon gains or losses. Victory is already past, its traces rubbed out. For sensitive hearts, a poignancy and sadness remain. Some detect in all this a proof of the existence of God, arguing that the act of procreation, even without the intention of giving new life, is an act of faith and a gift. But does God not feel a deep and enduring bitterness, after having created us so little and so ill in his image that the best one can say is that He’s no artist? Possession is no longer the highest aspiration of an existence, the affirmation of a personality whose guiding principle we would like to pass on. Possession is merely a fleeting desire that, once satisfied, leaves barely a trace. What? Was that it? Once more, we speak here both of love and of life’s playthings: houses, cars, horses …

Jesús was cutting wood. With his foot on the sawbuck he lengthened his saw strokes, enjoying his power, the use of his strength. He finished splitting each log with a kick of his heel. His body, fit and taut with effort, steamed slightly. Like an athlete in training he paced his breathing, brushing a rebel strand of curly hair from his damp forehead with the back of his hand. His rolled-up sleeves exposed bare, hairy, tensely muscled forearms. Jean offered to help him.

‘Go for a walk,’ Jesús said. ‘I’m sawin’ in half the fellow who killed Laura’s brother. Is my business.’

Claude was making lunch and Cyrille was colouring a book of printed drawings. Jean walked down the path that led through the birch forest. The pure icy light of Christmas Day sharply outlined the leafless branches against the sky, with the naive clarity of a Japanese
painting. It might have been titled ‘The clear morning and the dew’ or ‘The dream of the trees in the breath of the earth’ or even ‘The sun discovers a landscape that belongs to no one’. The path climbed uphill. At the top rusty bracken was colonising a clearing where tree trunks, blackened where they had been cut, lay on the ground like octopus tentacles. The sharp scent of bracken and the sweet smell of leaf mould saturated by ice-melt assailed Jean so violently that he stopped, feeling he was intruding on sleeping nature. There was a crossing of four paths here. Behind him was Jesús’s farm, a building of sturdy grey stone whose slate roof reflected the light. It looked like water spangled with silvery glints. From the chimney there rose a vertical column of smoke that the cold air dispersed immediately. The rasp of Jesús’s saw reached Jean like the rhythmic buzz of an insect, now quick, now slow because Jesús had hit a knot or got his blade stuck in green wood. There was no need to see him to picture him clenching his teeth, setting himself angrily to avenge Laura.

Ahead of Jean the ground fell away steeply among bracken, broom and brambles down to a river whose iridescent reflections winked back in Morse code at the slate roof. He walked down towards the water, which ran between well-defined banks. In fact it was not a natural river but an abandoned drainage canal. A log bridge spanned it. As Jean arrived two moorhens flew up and hid themselves in a reed bed, disturbing a couple of mallards which rose so swiftly against the light that they disappeared in its glare. Had they ever been there, had they really flown away into the milky-white sky where their plumage – at least the male’s, the female being more discreet – should have sparkled like a firebird’s? After they had gone a near-silence fell, broken only by the water flowing between the canal’s black banks, and Jean made out the quicksilver gleam of trout flicking and darting against the current.

He remembered the Marquis de Malemort pushing up his sleeve and plunging his hand into the reeds or under a rock to feel for and grab a trout that he would toss onto the bank where it would flop,
gasping, and die. Jean regretted not having learnt to poach when he could have done. Around Grangeville the woods were too formal. You encountered the hunt and, on calm days, the hinds and their wet eyes. Or Chantal exercising her mare, which would sneeze in the morning mist. Further on, a plantation of young firs made a green wall in the bruised forest. It was practically impossible to get through the wall and Jean decided to walk along its edge as far as a hedge that the winter had thinned out. Hawthorn and brambles seemed to have been pruned to leave just a circular gap at eye level. The track skirted round an octagonal hunting lodge with Louis XIII windows in which waxed paper covered the broken panes. The place could have been delightful, in the midst of a huge clearing of beeches that stretched out their gaunt branches, but it looked somehow tainted by a scorn for the lodge’s prettiness, by a contemptuous neglect and indifference that were so manifest it was only suitable for a passing vagrant. A checked shirt was drying on a line next to a pair of long johns and, oddly, a patched coat, an old rag better suited to scaring birds. The carcass of an old car was being used as a henhouse. No smoke rose from the chimney. The person living in the lodge disdained the use of a fire, and it seemed likely that he disdained most things. The forest encircled him in his small clearing and would end up stifling him. Young growth was pushing through everywhere, probably pruned the previous autumn. Someone hoped to see them growing fast.

One day soon, with the clearing shrunk to the size of the lodge itself, the trees would force their way under the eaves and the roof would fall in. Two beeches, dead from old age, were rotting inside their bark, the wood yellow, their mangled branches overrun by ivy. No one had thought to cut them down and they stood there, collapsing little by little into the loose earth, blanketed in moss, seething with woodlice, like the ancient image of giants struck down, brandishing their black roots like horrible fingers.

Jean skirted the clearing that had distracted him from his exploration of the forest. The path led into an undergrowth of fragile ash saplings,
tangled and shooting in all directions yet poised and graceful in their wild growth. A subdued light lit the ground, carpeted with leaves of a fine bronzed brown. Jean stopped to listen to the forest’s rustling, a sporadic music, discontinuous, now whispered, now repeated to the point of insistence, impossible to locate among the branches or underfoot. He disturbed a hen pheasant that flew skilfully to cover and landed a short distance away in front of some brambles into which it waddled and disappeared.

The undergrowth descended gently towards a pond of black water. Jean was back at the drainage canal, which emptied here into the bulrushes and reeds. The forest opened up to his scrutiny like a flower whose pistil he had finally reached. He stopped, startled by the encounter, so simple and so captivating, when all he had done was wander at leisure, and realised that unless he retraced his footsteps he might find himself lost before this placid mirror in which the outlines of yellow and ochre-coloured trees trembled. The world had perhaps looked like this at its very beginning, and beneath the waters of the pool there crouched in their lairs giant animals, monsters with long necks and tiny heads, fearful and shy, threatened and devoured by otters and badgers, bedecked with leeches.

It moved him to see the forest revealing its intimate self, its melancholy secrets, caught off guard in its innermost heart. Jean would have liked to console it in its neglect as well as its beauty. Sitting on a black rock crowned with white lichen, he wondered whether it was not a blessing that the forest had been forgotten by men. They had not burnt it or cut it down or shredded it with their bullets and shells. They had not hidden there in order to kill each other better. Elsewhere, over in the East, in other forests muffled by snow, soldiers slipped through the trees and shot each other like enemy game while the white sky hummed with invisible planes that blindly released their sticks of bombs, unleashing fire and death.

At his arrival he thought he detected a sort of hesitancy in the waters and the tall bulrushes, unruffled by any breeze. Everything
seemed to him preternaturally silent, as if in his presence the trees and muddy grass at the pool’s edge had suddenly fallen quiet to observe him. He had not moved for several minutes when he noticed, coming from among the reeds, two ripples disturbing the sleepy surface. A pair of teal, followed by another, emerged from their hiding place and set out across the pool, the males with their heads of maroon browny-red, flecked with green, the female flecked with brown. Coming towards the bank on which he stood, a little to his right, they could not fail to see him. He remembered their arrival in Normandy when he was a boy, at the end of autumn when, after a long migration, they rested on the beach at Grangeville for a few hours before flying on inland. It was impossible to imagine a more suspicious bird, or one quicker to put itself beyond reach. That was what made it incredible to see them out in the open, swimming unconcernedly and quacking enthusiastically. Jean followed them with his gaze. They were heading purposefully for the bank. Only then did he glimpse, half hidden among the reeds and standing up to his thighs in the water, a man, or rather a scarecrow covered in sacking, a brown hat on his head, so still he looked like a statue, like one of those objects one leaves for years in hard water and that harden like stone without losing their colour. He had been there before Jean arrived, blending into the vegetation so well that he would have stayed invisible if the teal had not swum in his direction. When they were no more than two metres from this outlandish figure, an arm came out and lobbed a handful of some kind of pellets that floated. The teal rushed to them, gobbled them up and took off, skimming across the water to hide again in a clump of bulrushes. The man clambered onto the bank. He was wearing black waders and the sacking had been stitched together with some skill to make a rough overcoat that he must have put on over his head. He rubbed his hands, protected by woollen mittens, and pushed back his hat, an old round homburg camouflaged by more sacking. Until that moment all Jean had seen was a black beard. Seeing the rest of the face, he was surprised to find it younger than he had expected. The
man came closer, walking stiffly in boots still caked in thick mud. Yes, the face was that of a man of barely forty, with shining, dark eyes beneath thick eyebrows, and a slender nose. The beard hid
three-quarters
of his face and concealed its thinness and hollow cheeks, their cheekbones reddened by cold.

‘Good morning, Monsieur,’ the man said. ‘I must say I thought because of you they wouldn’t come.’

‘They’re winter teal, aren’t they?’

‘Ah, so you know your ducks! That’s unusual. To know the names of things is a remarkable sign in a world that generally talks about thingumabobs and whatchamacallits.’

The voice was distinguished, without affectation. The get-up was at odds with the tone of the man, who turned towards the pool and pointed towards the reeds where the teal were concealed.

‘Nervous, aren’t they? You’d need centuries to tame them … and we have so little time. You don’t smoke, I hope?’

‘No. Well, hardly at all.’

‘But you drink alcohol!’

‘So little too that it’s hardly worth mentioning.’

‘That little is still too much.’

The man shook himself and Jean was caught unawares by the smell he gave off, a mixture of grime and manure.

‘Yes, still too much,’ he went on. ‘Humankind’s committing suicide. But I suppose there’s nothing new in that. It’s been going on for three thousand years.’

‘Humankind’s a suicide victim who’s doing fairly well, all things considered.’

The man scratched his beard, half amused. The tips of his fingers, poking out of his mittens, were appallingly dirty, covered in scales of filth and with black nails.

‘You think I’m repugnant,’ he said. ‘And I am. Beyond measure. But solitude makes one indifferent. To tell you the truth, you’re the first person I’ve spoken to for nearly two years. Oh, of course I’ve vaguely
seen human beings moving in the distance. Sometimes they came so close I heard their blah blah blah. Apart from their clothes – about which they display unbelievable vanity – you can only distinguish them from animals by their lack of instinct. When I saw you appear here you surprised me. You watched and you stood still. I could have sworn you were enjoying imagining the presence of a monster in this fetid pool …’