After the War Page 3

  The sidewalks are packed with people encumbered with luggage, lifting up heavy suitcases that bang against their legs, walking lopsidedly, knees buckling, arms aching from the weight of large bags that they try not to drag on the ground. Or they carry a child wrapped up in a dark, unwieldy package that they constantly have to lift up with a shrug of a shoulder or a jut of a hip to stop them slipping out of their grip. They cross the street and hurry towards the main concourse, occasionally grumbling at someone who’s dawdling in front of them or another who’s trying to push past. All these bow-legged figures, hobbling and tottering, unsteady shadows that you half expect to see swallowed up in the great mouths of their suitcases that suddenly yawn open, the locks worn out. A herd of crippled beggars, emerging from the pale bluish morning, limping along as they try to storm this profane cathedral. It looks like some of them will be catching the last train, so pathetic is their staggering progress.

  Against the current though, you can see a few solitary fellows, hands free or buried deep in pockets, who come out through the large glass doors and stop in the greyish glimmer of morning to light a cigarette then slowly start walking again, indifferent to the crush of people going the other way, upright, light-footed figures amid all this broken-backed turmoil, towering ghosts.

  Daniel imagines them driven to despair after leaving a loved one forever, roaming lost all day long through a city they don’t recognize. Or walking towards a vengeance that obsesses them, tortures them like some incurable pain. Every morning, as he rides his bike, the glimmerings of a cinematic melodrama pass through his mind, but he never takes the time to develop the plot.

  Then he sees soldiers passing, in khaki coats and side caps. Twenty or so, walking two by two, spines curved by the weight of their suitcases. Ahead of them are two gendarmes, rifles on shoulders. Daniel slows down to let them cross. They will take the train to Marseille. Get the boat tonight to Algeria. Heart heavy. Friends already gone. Hot over there. Death everywhere. So it’s said. So they say. Apparently. Words dancing. Patrols, ambushes, reprisals, massacres, mutilations. Everyone knows someone who’s died, or someone who’s lost a son or a brother and who curses the politicians and is starting to hate that race of cutthroats who slaughter the beautiful children we deliver to their knives.

  Daniel knows he’ll be leaving next month. Can’t be long now till he gets his marching orders. He doesn’t know what he’ll do over there. Or what will be done to him.

  He starts riding again, pressing hard on the pedals to move over the cobbles. He passes the bars, already packed, and thinks what a pleasure it would be, just once, to stop here and order a café au lait and a croissant at the counter . . . Or to daydream in a booth, there in the warmth, over a mug of hot chocolate. What extravagance! In rue Furtado, he sees the Neiman sign over the garage and, standing beneath it, Norbert, the apprentice, smoking a cigarette and stamping his feet. They shake hands. Daniel asks him how he is but Norbert doesn’t reply, eyes down, face consumed by the shadow of his cap.

  “What’s up with you?”

  Norbert shakes his head as he looks at the garage. He tosses his cigarette and it sizzles in the gutter.

  “Show me,” Daniel insists.

  His eye is half closed, black, the arch of his eyebrow swollen, ready to burst. His cheek too is bruised.

  “Shit, what did you do?”

  Norbert shrugs then starts to sob. No tears, just big jolts that tear at his chest. Choking with sadness and rage.

  “Was it your dad?”

  The boy nods.

  “Come on, we can’t stay out here, we’ll freeze to death. Let’s light the stove.”

  Daniel takes two heavy keys from the pocket of his sheepskin and unlocks a small door that opens within the garage door. While Norbert switches on the lights, he takes out the sign, puts it by the side of the road, then goes back into a corner of the workshop where they have a camping stove connected to a gas cylinder, a sink, and a cupboard where they keep their lunch. He cleans the Italian coffeemaker, gets it ready and places it over the gas fire. He rubs his hands near the blue flame. He’s shivering, now he’s stopped cycling, so he doesn’t take his balaclava off yet. The cold is heavy and dense, accumulated under the high steel girders in the garage. They should light the wood burner, but the boss is the only one who knows how to do it: he rummages around inside it for ten minutes, moaning about how he’s going to smash this piece of shit up with a sledgehammer and get another one, and then, just like that, it starts purring like a great big pussycat.

  Norbert busies himself in the glass-walled office where they keep the orders and invoices. There’s a paraffin heater in there: he fills it and lights it, sniffing as he wipes his nose with the back of his hand.

  They drink their coffee in the smell of the gas, sighing with pleasure as they blow on their bowls. Norbert puts three sugars in his and swallows it in big gulps, hands cupping the bowl to warm them. Then they smoke a cigarette, blowing the smoke away as far as they can, leaning back in their chairs and talking about the day’s workload. Testing the valves on a 202, the brakes on a Juvaquatre, and fixing the electrics in a Traction that the old man’s been struggling with since yesterday. And that’s their morning.

  Daniel watches the kid with his swollen face, his one good eye sparkling darkly, the self-satisfied way he smokes his Gauloise, acting like a movie star.

  “You should see a doctor about your eye. Maybe go to hospital.” Norbert shrugs then lowers his head.

  “Nah, it’s nothing. Anyway, it’s not the first time.”

  He says these words almost into his jacket and his voice dies there. For a moment, they don’t speak. They crack their necks, stretch their backs. The cold settles over them again. Sometimes there’s the sound of metal creaking in the garage. A train horn in the distance, down towards the station warehouses.

  “What happened with your dad?”

  The kid stares at his feet as he rotates them slowly. He blows smoke and contempt through his nose.

  “It’s always the same thing . . . He started yelling as soon as he got home cos he reckoned it was cold. Said my mother hadn’t put enough coal in the stove. He’d been drinking, so of course he got pissed off about it, and then he got his feet caught in the straps of my little sister’s satchel which she’d left in the hall, and that got him fuming. He grabbed her by the hair to make her tidy it away and he started calling her a whore: you’re a little whore like your whore of a mother, he was saying. So my mother started moaning, going on about how he couldn’t call a little girl, his own daughter, a whore, and he asked her if she wanted some. After that they started yelling and it all kicked off. I tried to stop him, and since he’s stronger than me and he’s got hands like shovels, well . . . this is the result. I played dead so he’d stop beating me and he eventually tired himself out; he could hardly even stand anymore cos he was so drunk. I protected my face, but after that he started kicking me, so my back took the worst of it. It’s black and blue, you should see it . . . Thank God I was still wearing my leather jacket. Anyway, at least my mum and sister were able to go next door, to Mrs. Jiménez’s house, like they always do . . . So they got a good night’s sleep, and Mrs. Jiménez has a bathroom . . .”

  He shakes his beaten-up head, then takes a drag on his cigarette and blows the smoke out noisily.

  “One day I’m going to stab him in the fucking belly and let him die on the floor, holding his guts. He’ll regret it then, the fucker.”

  “And so will you, when you’re in jail. Because of that bastard . . . He’s not worth ruining your life over. You’re talking shit.”

  “You’re the one who’s talking shit. My life . . . What do you know about my life? You’re not there, every night, wondering what’s going to happen next, how it’ll end up. You don’t know what it’s like, the fear, not daring to say anything, not even daring to look at each other cos he thinks we’re plotting against
him. There are evenings when I hope he won’t come home at all, that he’s been knocked down by a truck, or that the wheels of his bike have got stuck in the tram tracks just as a bus is coming. Or that he gets so pissed that he falls in the river. I dream up stuff like that and it makes me feel so good, you wouldn’t believe it. We won’t ever be happy in our house until that bastard’s dead and it’s just my mum, my sis and me. You have no fucking idea. Cos he’ll kill us one day, you know: either my mother, or my sister, or me. So, yeah, it’d be better if I did it to him before he does it to us.”

  Daniel nods his agreement. It’s true: he has no idea. It reminds him once again that the world is a circus where the animals have been set free, it’s an overcrowded storeroom on a boat tossed by a stormy sea, a greasy-spoon café populated by brutes, lost innocents and fallen women, run by a manager who’s wedged behind the cash drawer, one hand on the rifle he’s got hidden under the counter. And he doesn’t know why and he doesn’t understand this stubborn misfortune that never lets up and always kindles in his heart a powerless rage or that dreamy melancholy that sometimes isolates him for a brief while inside a glass cage.

  Silence. The stove ticks metallically. Then Daniel stands up, takes off the balaclava that he’d already rolled up to his forehead like a hat and starts unbuttoning his sheepskin coat.

  “Maybe we should do some work. That might warm us up a bit, don’t you think? The old man’ll be here about eleven, and he’ll have a right go at us if we haven’t finished the 202 by then: I think the bloke’s supposed to come and pick it up this afternoon.”

  They put on their overalls as fast as they can, blowing into their hands and stamping their feet. They’re in a rush to get into the workshop, to switch on the overhead lights and plug in the inspection lamps. They talk loud, amid a booming blur of tools and sheet metal, perhaps in an attempt to scare off the arctic monster that prowls nearby and holds them tight and blows its icy breath in their faces. Norbert starts an engine with a hand-crank and jumps into the front seat to slam down the accelerator pedal. The engine coughs, pops, stalls. The kid disappears under the hood, muttering insults, and becomes locked in a struggle there, groaning with the effort. Fuck, he says several times, voice muffled by anger. Looking at him with his arms tensed and his feet slipping on the concrete, you’d think he was strangling someone. “Fuck”, he whispers, through gritted teeth.

  “What’s up?” asks Daniel.

  “Nothing. The distributor. Forget it.”

  He forgets it. From where he is—by the workbench where he’s put the cylinder head, to remove the scraps of melted piston from the steel—Daniel can see only the kid’s feet, which are sometimes both off the ground as if he’s being swallowed by the huge mouth of the open hood, digested in the entrails of the engine.

  They take a break around ten, as they do every morning. Coffee. Norbert digs into the tips box then runs to the bakery to fetch pains au chocolat while Daniel gets everything ready. There’s a big puddle of pale sunlight out in front of the garage, so he pulls aside the heavy sliding door to let the light in and smokes his cigarette, blinking in this unexpected brightness.

  The first they see of the man is the shadow that he throws. There in the winter sunlight, at the center of this icy glare. He stands immobile, a leather helmet on his head, leaning against the handlebars of a large motorbike. The lower part of his face is wrapped in a roughly knitted red scarf. Daniel sighs, drains his bowl, then leaves the office, flicking ash from his cigarette. He’s expecting to have to calm down a worried client who’s come to see if his car will be ready tonight, and who’ll act as though they’d promised it would be ready yesterday. He greets the man and asks what he can do for him.

  The man does not reply. He stares at Daniel. His eyes shine. He pulls down his scarf and his mouth exhales hurried little clouds of steam that show how fast he’s breathing. He does not move a muscle, as if the cold was about to freeze him into a solid block of ice like those mammoths in Siberia. Then he starts talking about spark plugs and ignitions, about his machine that broke down not far from here, on the cours de la Marne. His voice is hoarse.

  “If you could take a look at it,” he says, still without moving.

  Daniel explains that the boss won’t be there until noon, and he’s the one who knows about motorbikes. At the moment he’s on his own with the apprentice, they’ve got loads of work on their hands, and as he says this he points behind him at the chaos of cars piled up in the garage.

  The man nods, hesitates. He seems about to leave, then he asks if he can leave the bike there, if they might have time to look at it by tomorrow or even the day after. He can make do, after all: he can take the bus.

  “Do you live far away?”

  “Not really. And I like walking. Don’t worry about it.”

  The man’s voice quivers and dies away, as if he’s short of breath. Or as if he’s about to start crying. Daniel stares at him and the man blinks and smiles weakly, and suddenly a whole mesh of wrinkles appears on his face, like those veils that old people wear to funerals. It is impossible to guess his age. His body seems vigorous, straightbacked, probably quite sturdy. But his face is an old man’s, crumpled like an old newspaper in which only bad news has been printed. And his eyes—black or navy blue?—must have read all that news before blubbering over it. He’s shaking now. The handlebars are vibrating between his hands.

  “Leave it here,” Daniel says. “Come back tonight, if you can. If it’s just the ignition, it shouldn’t take long to fix it.”

  “That’s very kind of you. Yes, I’ll come back—about six o’clock, is that alright?”

  Still his voice sounds out of breath.

  Daniel shows him where to park the bike. A Norton. Probably picked up after the war. The man takes off his helmet, hangs it on the handlebars, thanks Daniel again and walks away, taking a cap from his pocket and putting it on his head. Without knowing why, Daniel goes out onto the sidewalk to watch him disappear towards the pont du Gui, the bridge that crosses the railway tracks. The slender figure moves unwaveringly. Daniel is surprised by that quick, determined gait. He would have expected to see the man’s silhouette staggering in this ice-sharpened sunlight. A shiver makes him move again when the man vanishes at the corner of the street, and suddenly everything is empty, and silent, and he finds it unbearable.

  3

  One day, I died. We were walking on this road and we were sleeping as we walked, and we fell and others picked us up so our legs started moving forward again and we held up other men who tripped because they were falling asleep and sometimes they didn’t get back up again so the soldiers threw them by the roadside in the mud or the snow and they pushed us ahead, hitting us in the back or the back of the neck with their rifle butts. Sometimes they did it so much that a man would fall and that gave them a good reason to kill him, holding him on the ground with their boot and putting a bullet in the back of his neck. Many of the men had broken fingers from trying to protect themselves and afterwards they couldn’t even eat the few scraps of bread that still circulated along the line and that we would soften in puddles of water or in the snow. The ones with the smashed hands couldn’t even undo the string that held their trousers up when they wanted to shit during breaks so we helped them, when we could, when the cold hadn’t frozen the wet knots, or they relieved themselves crouching down, hiding their faces with their black swollen hands as if they were ashamed. As if any of us could still feel that emotion, by this point. Or maybe it was a sort of reflex, a buried and very distant memory of what we had been before being reduced to these bodies kept upright only by the stubbornness of their skeleton, these bodies for which every step taken, every heartbeat torn from nothingness constituted a victory without hope.

  I don’t know what they had to be ashamed of. I watched them gasping and sobbing in their hands and I didn’t understand. We’d seen so many dead on the latrines during the night, their bony asses
inside the fetid holes as if sucked there, their bodies caved in, already stiff and dry and cold, frozen by the ice in their final suffering. We had seen so many of them. We never dared touch them, content just to be able to get up and walk after emptying our bellies so we could flee far from what awaited us.

  Those men with the fractured hands, we also helped them to eat and we took a little mouthful of their mouthful, and they didn’t say anything and neither did we. We hadn’t said anything for a long time, in fact, because we were too tired and our dry mouths and our swollen tongues and our sore gums transformed every word we spoke into a torture, as if we’d swallowed burning oil.

  Either that or we talked in whispers. We would murmur encouragements into each other’s ears, enjoining those who couldn’t get up anymore to walk and to live, because it all went together, because walking was falling onto the other foot, the only way we knew to stay upright. We promised them imminent breaks which never came, we told them we’d be arriving soon in another camp, we whispered it all close to their sharp faces, gently patting their bones that shivered under threadbare cloth amid the screams and kicks of the S.S.

  How many days?

  Maybe several lifetimes. Interminable lives on the verge of ending. I relived mine, step by step. My dying mind, just alive enough to push what remained of my being to walk, to breathe, because it seemed possible to me that I might forget to breathe, so exhausting was this effort, because the cold and the damp that invaded my lungs with each inhalation were like an enemy intrusion, a commando attack intended to further undermine my empty fortress, my mind that no longer thought but was full of forgotten memories that crossed it now like fish wriggling at the bottom of a drained pond.

  Childhood, happiness, sunlight. The laughter of drinkers in the little café that my parents ran. The train to Arcachon. Sitting between them, I stared through the window, on the lookout for the first pines that, for me, marked the happy lands bordered by the sea. I could still feel the two of them against me, their hands on mine, their kisses. But also the autumns and the endless rain and the chestnut trees in the school playground. Faces appeared before me. Names. Lost for over fifteen years. The memory of a fight in the toilets, broken up by the teacher who dragged us back to the classroom by our ears. Smells. Wet stone, mildew in the cellar where we kept the bottle racks and the beer barrels. The cologne my father sprayed on himself on Sunday mornings before taking me, sometimes, to the Marché des Fossés on the cours Victor Hugo, among the onlookers and the smooth patter of the hucksters and the scent of cotton candy and boiled sweets.