The old Frenchman shuffled over with a small glass of brandy. The old man had a beard like a Jewish prophet and his teeth smelled terribly of decay, Christian noticed irritably. Was there no escaping, even in this cool dark place, the odours of ferment and mortality, the scent of dying bone and turning flesh?
"Fifty francs," said the old man, leaning horribly over Christian, his hand still cautiously on the glass.
For a moment Christian thought of arguing with the old thief about the overcharge. The French, he thought, making a good thing out of victory and defeat, advance and retreat, friend and enemy. God, he thought, let the Americans have them for a while, see how happy they'll be about it. He tossed the fifty francs, worn scraps of paper printed by the German Army, on the table. He would have little use for francs, soon, anyway, and he thought of the old man trying to collect on the printed, flimsy German promise from the new conquerors.
Hazily, Christian remembered that other bar in Rennes, long ago, and the group of soldiers with their tunics unbuttoned, loud and boisterous and rich, drinking cheap champagne. No one was drinking champagne now, and no one was loud, and if anyone talked, he spoke in a single low phrase and was answered in a monosyllable. Yes. No. Will we die tomorrow? What will the enemy do to us? Is the road to Rennes passable? Did you hear what happened to the Panzer Lehr Division? What does the BBC say? Is it over yet? Is it over? Dimly, toying with his glass, Christian wondered whatever had happened in the long years to the private in the Pioneers he had reported for improper conduct. Confined to barracks for a month, Christian thought, leaning back against his bicycle, how wonderful it would be to be confined to barracks for a month. Confine the First American Army to barracks for a month, confine the Eighth Air Force, confine all Austrians in the German Army, for improper conduct…
He sipped gently at the cognac. It was raw and probably not even cognac. Probably made three days ago and doctored with plain spirits. The French, the miserable French. He looked at the old man behind the bar, hating him. He knew that the old man had been dragged out of doddering retirement for this week's work. Probably a sturdy fat merchant and his plump, sweaty wife owned this place, and had run it until now. But when they saw how things were going, had seen the first scum of the German tide racing through the town, they had resuscitated the old man and put him behind the bar, feeling that even the Germans would not take out their venom on such a poor specimen. Probably the owner and his wife were tucked away somewhere in a safe attic, eating a veal steak and a salad, with a bottle of strong wine, or they were climbing into bed with each other. (Remember Corinne in Rennes, the heavy flesh and the milkmaid's hands, and the coarse dyed ropes of hair.) The owner and his wife, chubbily linked in a warm feather bed, were probably chuckling at this moment at the thought of the drained soldiers paying fantastic prices to Papa in their dirty estaminet, and at the dead Germans all along the road, and at the Americans rushing towards the town, eager to pay even higher prices for their wretched raw alcohol.
He stared at the old man. The old man stared back, his little pebbles of eyes black and insolent, secure and defiant in the rotting, ancient face. Old man with thousands of printed, useless francs in his pockets, old man with bad teeth, old man who felt he would out-live half the young men sitting silently in his daughter's establishment, old man roaring within him at the thought of what dire handling lay ahead for these almost-captured and almost-dead foreigners huddled around the stained tables in the dusk.
"Monsieur wishes…?" the old man said in his high wheezy voice that sounded as though he were listening to a joke no one else in the room had heard.
"Monsieur wishes nothing," Christian said. The trouble was, they had been too lenient with the French. There were enemies and there were friends, and there was nothing in between. You loved or you killed, and anything else you did was politics, corruption and weakness, and finally you paid for it. Hardenburg, faceless in Capri in the room with the Burn, had understood, but the politicians hadn't.
The old man veiled his eyes. Yellow, wrinkled lids, like old dirty paper, hooded down over the black, mocking pebbles of his pupils. He turned away and Christian felt that somehow the old man had got the better of him.
He drank his cognac. The alcohol was beginning to have an effect on him. He felt at once sleepy and powerful, like a giant in a dream, capable of slow, terrible movements, and enormous, semi-conscious blows.
"Finish your drink, Sergeant." It was a low, remembered voice, and Christian looked up, squinting through the increasing evening haze at the figure standing before his table.
"What?" he asked stupidly.
"I want to talk to you, Sergeant." Whoever it was, was smiling.
Christian shook his head and opened his eyes very wide. Then he recognized the man. It was Brandt, in an officer's uniform, standing over him, dusty, thin, capless, but Brandt, and smiling.
"Brandt…"
"Sssh." Brandt put his hand on Christian's arm. "Finish your drink and come on outside."
Brandt turned and went outside. Christian saw him there, standing against the cafe window, with his back to it, and a ragged column of labour troops trudging past him. Christian gulped down the rest of the cognac and stood up. The old man was watching him again. Christian pushed the chair away and carefully grabbed hold of the handle-bars of the bicycle and wheeled it towards the door. He could not resist turning at the door for one last encounter with the Frenchman's pebbly, mocking eyes, that remembered 1870, Verdun, the Marne and 1918. The old man was standing in front of a poster, printed in French but inspired by the Germans, of a snail horned with one American flag and one British flag, creeping slowly up the Italian peninsula. The words on the poster ironically pointed out that even a snail would have reached Rome by now… The final insolence, Christian felt. Probably the old man had put the poster up this very week, straight-faced and cackling, so that every fleeing German who came by could look and suffer.
"I hope," the old man wheezed, in that voice that sounded like laughter heard in a home for the aged, "that Monsieur enjoyed his drink."
The French, Christian thought furiously, they will beat us all yet.
He went out and joined Brandt.
"Walk with me," Brandt said softly. "Walk slowly around the square. I don't want anyone to hear what I am going to say to you."
He started along the narrow pavement, along the shuttered row of shops. Christian noticed with surprise that Brandt looked considerably older than when last they met, that there was considerable grey at the photographer's temples, and heavy lines around his eyes and mouth, and that he was very thin.
"I saw you come in," Brandt said, "and I couldn't believe my eyes, I watched you for five minutes to make sure it was you. What in God's name have they done to you?"
Christian shrugged, a little angry at Brandt, who, after all, didn't look magnificently healthy himself. "They moved me about a little," Christian said. "Here and there. What are you doing here?"
"They sent me to Normandy," Brandt said. "Pictures of the invasion, pictures of captured American troops, atrocity pictures of French women and children dead from American bombing. The usual thing. Keep walking. Don't stop. If you settle down anywhere, some damned officer is liable to come over and ask you for your papers and try to assign you to a unit. There are just enough busybodies about to make it unpleasant."
They walked methodically along the side of the square, like soldiers with a purpose and under orders. The grey stone of the buildings was purple in the sunset, and the lounging and restless men looked hazy and indefinite against the shuttered windows.
"What do you intend to do?" Brandt said.
Christian chuckled. He was surprised to hear the dry sound come out of his throat. For some reason, after the many days of running, dictated only by the threat of the onrushing enemy, the thought that it was possible for him to have any intentions of his own had struck him as amusing.
"What are you laughing at?" Brandt looked at him suspiciously, and Christian straightened his face, because he had the feeling that if he antagonized Brandt, Brandt would withhold valuable information from him.
"Nothing," Christian said. "Honestly, nothing. I'm a little tired. I have just won the cross-country nine-day all-European bicycle race, and I'm not exactly in control of myself. I'll be all right."
"Well?" Brandt asked querulously. Christian could tell from the timbre of the photographer's voice that he was very near the thin edge of breaking, himself. "Well, what do you intend to do?"
"Bicycle back to Berlin," Christian said. "I expect to equal the existing record."
"Don't joke, for the love of God," Brandt said.
"I love pedalling through the historic French countryside," Christian said light-headedly, "conversing with the historic natives in their native costumes of hand-grenades and Sten guns, but if something better came up, I might be interested"
"Look here," Brandt said, "I have a two-seater English car in a farmer's barn one mile from here…"
Christian became very cool and all tendency to laugh left him.
"Keep moving!" Brandt snapped, under his breath. "I told you not to stop. I want to get back to Paris. My idiotic driver left last night. We were strafed yesterday and he got hysterical. He went towards the American lines about midnight."
"Well…?" Christian asked, trying to seem very keen and understanding. "Why've you been hanging around here all day?"
"I can't drive," Brandt said bitterly. "Imagine that, I never learned how to drive a car!"
This time Christian couldn't keep his laughter down. "Oh, my God," he said, "the modern industrial man!"
"It isn't so funny," said Brandt. "I'm too highly strung to learn how. I tried once, in 1935, and I nearly killed myself."
What a century, Christian thought, enjoying this sudden advantage over a man who had before this done so well out of the war, what a century to pick to be highly strung! "Why didn't you get one of these fellows…" Christian gestured towards the men lounging on the town hall steps, "to drive you?"
"I don't trust them," Brandt said darkly, with a glance around him. "If I told you half the stories I've heard about officers being killed by their own troops in the last few days… I've been sitting in this damned little town for nearly twenty-four hours, trying to think what to do, trying to find a face I really could trust. But they all travel in groups, they all have comrades, and there's only two places in the car. And, who knows, by tomorrow the enemy may be here, or the road to Paris will be closed… Christian, I confess to you, when I saw your face in that cafe, I had to hold on to myself to keep from crying. Listen…" Brandt grabbed his arm anxiously. "There's nobody with you? You're alone, aren't you?"
"Don't worry," Christian said. "I'm alone."
Suddenly Brandt stopped. He wiped his face nervously. "It never occurred to me," he whispered. "Can you drive?"
The anguish plain on Brandt's face as he asked the simple, foolish question that at this moment, at the time of the crumbling of an army, had become the focal point and tragedy of his life, made Christian feel grotesquely and protectively full of pity for the thin, ageing ex-artist. "Don't worry, comrade." Christian patted Brandt's shoulder soothingly. "I can drive."
"Thank God," Brandt sighed. "Will you come with me?"
Christian felt a little weak and giddy. Safety was being offered here, speed, home, life… "Try and stop me," he said. They grinned weakly like two drowning men who somehow have contrived, by helping each other, to reach shore.
"Let's start at once," Brandt said.
"Wait," said Christian. "I want to give this bicycle to someone else. Let someone else have a chance to get away…" He peered at the shadowy figures stirring around the town hall, trying to devise some innocent way of choosing the lucky man to survive.
"No." Brandt pulled Christian back towards him. "We can use the bicycle. The Frenchman at the farm will give us all the food we can carry for that bicycle."
Christian hesitated, but only for a second. "Of course," he said evenly. "What could I have been thinking of?"
With Brandt looking back nervously over his shoulder to make certain they were not being followed, and Christian wheeling the bicycle, they walked out of the town, back over the road Christian had traversed just half an hour before. At the first turning, where a dusty road slid out into the main highway between banks of flowering hawthorn bushes, fragrant and heavy in the still evening air, they turned off. After walking for a quarter of an hour, they reached the comfortable, geranium-bordered farmhouse and the large stone barn in which, under a pile of hay, Brandt had hidden the two-seater.
Brandt had been right about the bicycle. When, under the first stars of evening, they started out along the narrow road leading from the farmhouse, they had with them a ham, a large can of milk, half a large cheese, a litre of Calvados and two of cider, half a dozen thick loaves of coarse brown bread and a whole basketful of eggs that the farmer's wife had hard-boiled for them while they were taking the hay off the car. The bicycle had proved most useful.
With full stomach, relaxed behind the wheel of the small, humming, well-conditioned car, riding past the pale glow of the hawthorns into the main road in the moonlit evening, Christian smiled gently to himself. Meeting the boy in the blue shirt on the empty road early that morning, he reflected, had proved considerably more profitable than he had expected. They drove back through the town without stopping. Someone shouted at them as they sped through the square, but whether it was a command to halt or an appeal for a ride or a curse because they were going too fast and were endangering the men on foot, they never found out, because Christian accelerated as much as he dared. A moment later, they were sliding out on the dim ribbon of road that stretched ahead of them across the moonlit countryside towards the city of Paris two hundred kilometres away.