33 Days (10 page)

I admit that we, Aufresne and I, were accomplices in this mass salvaging, this stockpiling. I complied out of weakness, out of obedience to the feudal lord, owner of the land where we were taking shelter, out of false politeness. Anyway, at that moment I didn’t realize the obsession with accumulation and the cupidity of our hostess. This filching of bicycles is of little interest, it might be said. We’ll see later on that I could not have passed over it in silence.

We left Paris two weeks ago. We’re living in a prison, walled in by uncertainties. We have no gasoline; we don’t know the general situation or the possibilities of getting around. We’re receiving no news.

My son left Paris a few hours before us. He is fifteen and left in a car with two friends, the younger of whom is fourteen and the older not yet eighteen. For more than a month we’ll know nothing about them (and thousands are experiencing the same anxiety). Is their car broken down? Have they been machine-gunned? In fact, they were allowed to take the Fontainebleau road and arrived that same evening without problems. But we did not know that.

I open the trunk of the car. I pull out an old blazer of my son’s.
That’s enough to stir up and intensify the constant anxiety that has taken his place. A garment retains the shape of a person, a shape without foundations or reference points, a shape that is, in a way, immaterial. This presence, this copy, is sometimes unbearable. Because this shape without flesh, which both compels our senses and evades them, which death itself does not destroy, isn’t a proof of life.

Bread can now be found in the village of Dampierre, three kilometers from Les Douciers. Soutreux and Lerouchon bring back word from German soldiers. “It’s over with France, but not with England … A soldier said that.” For these women each of these soldiers is a bearer of truth that needs no verification. “A soldier said that.”

“The armistice was signed this morning, at five …” Soutreux reports.

Lerouchon adds, “The armistice is signed but there’s still fighting in the Vosges.” They say this as if announcing the start of the hunt. The moment they no longer hear cannons, they no longer feel their destiny connected to events.

I ask, “Who told you that?…”

They respond, “A woman on the road.” Lerouchon doesn’t resent my question. But Soutreux cannot excuse me for it.

“Yes … a woman on the road. I’m repeating what she told me …” She has some fairly complicated mechanism for loosely comprehending that this unknown woman is not exactly the face of historical truth. But to Soutreux, this truth is verbatim, and my doubt visibly exasperates her.

“The news,” the old gardener tells me, “that comes out of the mouth, nobody knows where it comes from.” But his wisdom quickly turns into incoherence. At Dampierre a few French refugees’ cars were seen driving toward Paris; they flew a white flag. He tells me, “That is a sign that Frenchmen and Germans are equals.” I can’t get any further explanation from him, and he talks to me at length about a “Frenchman from Gien who was a
Boche
officer.”

Soutreux’s maid announces peace for the twenty-first of the month. “It was on a parchment that her mother-in-law saw …”

A rumor goes around that traffic is unrestricted in the occupied zone but can’t pass from the free zone into the occupied zone. So
it seems our freedom of movement will extend beyond the occupied zone. An awful way to think, perhaps. But that’s what we’ve come to!

We are waiting. Our thoughts swing from the event to our personal fate, from the heights back to ourselves. A historical panorama is unfolding before me without my being able to do anything about it. The French in 1914 waited, those in 1920 waited. And this collapse: I can only imagine how within a few weeks homegrown moralists will attribute the defeat to abandoning the soil, a taste for ease, disdain for work. It seems to me that France stopped thinking, in the most basic sense of the word. Hypnotized by Hitler or by Stalin, France stopped thinking for itself. When a people don’t think twice or no longer think, a Hitler or a Stalin thinks for them. Will the tandem of Hitler and Stalin take over Europe and France with the consent of this sort of Frenchmen, dedicated to a patriotism from newspapers and giving France no face but that of their own complacency?

France always took nourishment from abroad. This assimilating is its whole history since at least the 16th century. But since 1930, part of France, faced with a brutalized Europe, has been in a state of hypnosis; sometimes from admiration, sometimes from horror.

Madame Charroux, who was in tears the other night because in front of the Germans two Frenchmen forgot the dignity of the conquered, is speaking to me today about Communism. Fear of Communism puts her in a trance. But she fears only a word. What she knows about Communism comes from newspapers. She doesn’t know that Stalin killed it. And I wonder whether her hatred of the distant Stalin doesn’t equal that of the nearby Hitler.

Our current distress momentarily overcomes my self-centeredness.

What is real? The war, politics, man, God? God exists, perhaps, but at more of a distance than religions put him. As he is represented to us, he’s an easy answer, good for peace, good for war, good for saints and for common criminals. It makes me think of those allin-one tools that mechanics disdain—crowbar, pliers, hammer and screwdriver at the same time.

For the moment, the only civilization I’ve been deprived of is that
of matchboxes. Matches are no longer to be found … That doesn’t bother me. I have a lighter. The childishness of mankind! I’m fond of this lighter and no other. I prefer it out of sentiment. I’m the man with a lighter. I’m a pathetic thing tied to his habits, his quirks, clinging to my pipe and my lighter. My lighter is not just primal fire, the fire of a savage. It’s a lighter in a thousand, an amulet, a fetish. If I lost it, I would lose my entire past with it.

I won’t go to Ouzouer with my wife to find bread. Thanks to the mayor, who is an old man, and a young baker, the village has bread. But I haven’t the strength any longer to go looking for history, the repercussions of history, in a hamlet. I’m waiting for history to come to me. I’m wandering around the courtyard among the cars and the well.

I’m inventing battles, clever strategies. The Germans are allowed to advance as far as the Loire. On the opposite bank, our cannons await. Behind the Germans, our forces advance. The Germans are caught in a crossfire. They try to escape toward their flanks, but our aircraft fly over their lines, ranging between our forward units on the right bank and our artillery on the left bank. Our planes work like plows digging a furrow. Bodies are falling on top of bodies, the same motion as earth turned over by a plowshare. Pleading arms reach toward the sky. They are mowed down. And, no more than a reaper can spare a stalk of wheat once his scythe is swung, our airmen cannot spare the supplicants.

I remake history. Hitler, defeated, is being guarded by a group of sturdy artillerymen, the ones we met outside Lorris who were going to fight at the Loire. Carbines slung over their shoulders, they surround him, this man in a trench coat, a rat in a trap, a rat who can’t turn back. An irritable Parisian hurls a “So, little man, it didn’t go the way you wanted?…” at him. But the others keep their distance and remain impassive: a wall of men surrounding the beast.

Stretched out on the straw with no other view than the plaster on the wall, shutting my eyes to the world like a sick animal, I give myself over to stupid ruminations that have the ease and flow of dreams. Could what we call history be anything more than men’s vainest illusions? What we attribute to history in wartime and to the powerful in
peacetime, isn’t it a sign of our own incapacity? We make history as the sick make sickness. We’re responsible for history like the insane are responsible for the creation of asylums.

Maybe Spengler is right. Lucien Febvre quite rightly ranked him, with Count Keyserling, among philosophy’s journalists, who made history a thing in itself. Only it is real; men are nothing but empty exteriors. History is God’s chessboard. The Germans are playing and winning.

But no … nations exist only in their comic-opera aspects, their picturesque qualities, their legends, their books: the Italy of painters, the Spain of dances, the France of Descartes.

A country’s characteristics, are they real or fabricated by historians, which is to say, by history’s journalists, who are worth no more than the others?

There will always be wars, say those who think in proverbs. But what stupidity to think that war will always be the last resort of history or of men!

I knew the pre-1914 Weimar. Weimar, “capital and residence,” which meant that, as capital of the Grand Duchy of Saxony-Weimar-Eisenach, the city had the honor of being the residence of the grand duke. Count Kessler invited me. There we discussed only
Kultur
and
Bildung
.
^a
At the Goethe Archive, old people, or young people who could be mistaken for old people, were studying Goethe’s grammar and philosophy. The Nietzsche Archive was a shrine. Nietzsche’s sister, Madame Förster-Nietzsche, was keeper of the temple. There I met Professor Andler; bright Viennese; Norwegians, who resembled shepherds; and Swedes, who dressed in Poiret.

The grand duke had “modern” ideas. On the advice of Count Kessler, he had sent for Henri Van de Velde, who, leaving Brussels and giving up Neo-Impressionist painting, devoted himself to rejuvenating architecture and the “minor arts” in the Grand Duchy of Saxony-Weimar-Eisenach. “We don’t dress the way we did in the time of Voltaire or Frederick II. We don’t want to live in the past like a hermit
crab. Our houses and our furniture should be our own.” Germanic obedience: Van de Velde designed nail heads and the manufacturers of Saxony adopted his models.

Kessler and his friends weren’t lying. Nietzsche for them didn’t awaken a greater Germany, rather he was a new master of the Ego, a Dionysian Ego as he meant it, an aristocratic Ego gorged on culture. Renoir, Cézanne, Monet, Seurat, Van Gogh were their passwords. They constituted a sort of court modeled on times past, where artists met the world’s great men.

Did they have the ulterior motive of world domination? Did they already believe in the historical necessity of a war they didn’t want? I wouldn’t know how to respond. But even if they believed that only Germany could bring order to the world, that order for them was only the order of external rules, hygiene and transportation networks. France was Greece for them. But, deeply naive, they saw in France only its classic writers and its painters after Watteau. They dreamed of a world whose sole values would be knowledge of the arts and elegant customs. In reality, they didn’t just dream of it. They created it, in part. But for themselves alone. An artificial island.

I remember the park, with its stereotypically romantic trees, belonging to the poet Richard Dehmel and Monsieur von Mützenbecher, head of the theater of the Grand Duchy of Baden.

I’m dreaming. My dream erases the years. Monsieur von Mützenbecher appears before me, not in a suit jacket or black morning coat, as I was used to seeing him, but in a German officer’s uniform. I turn over on the straw. Monsieur von Mützenbecher is saluting me. I can see that he is surprised by my reserve. These people have hardly any imagination or taste. An oaf like all the others. Does he think I’m going to jump into his arms?

“Weimar,” I say to him, “Weimar and Nietzsche and your idolatry of French painting; all that was only a fifth column.”

“No,” he responds, “the German aristocracy never loved Hitler.”

“But it serves him.”

“No, it serves Germany. Even if Germany is wrong, even if Germany is criminal; did you want us to betray her? We are not in the
days when generals committed treason without dishonoring themselves. You must admit, that is one of the effects of your democracy … Thus we, the officers, have been obligated to follow our troops. It is history turned upside down.”

He bursts out laughing, a false laughter, a philosophical laughter.

“This is the world inverted, like a glove turned inside out. But our meeting is the spark, the spark that rights the world … Look …”

And indeed I see German soldiers forming up, leaving, marching in step toward the Rhine, returning home.

I no longer saw the Loire. The Loire was no longer anything more to me than a strategic myth. From the courtyard I see shrubs, fields. I have no connection to this featureless, flat landscape, which seems laid out by chance and to which only chance has led me. And I sense clearly that I’m granted these two meters of courtyard and the straw I have for the night only reluctantly. Such as when I apologized to Soutreux for whatever trouble I might cause her, and she replied, “But no … you can certainly stay here for a day or two.” Other landscapes, old homesteads, I yearn for them, I can’t let go; I’d like to be there in the blink of an eye, by a miracle. I’ve left pieces of my life there. Such as my cousin Nicot’s house overlooking the Saône. How nicely it all comes together: the river, the old gate, the ancient garden, the welcome and hospitality, the ten-year-old Chardonnay rich as hazelnuts, the 1840 folding screen that instantly puts me into a fairy tale. The house in Saint-Amour, the house in Villars, I’ve thought about them the way thinking of fruit makes one’s mouth water.

I’d like to escape, to escape to any time, any place where I don’t know the price of mattresses, of beveled-glass windowpanes and gardeners’ hours. I hope to console myself contemplating three rosebushes against a background of locust trees. It’s a momentary pleasure. An old habit. Man isn’t only an eye. These are the war’s roses, the debacle’s roses, Soutreux’s roses.

Some German planes pass overhead, practically hedge-hopping. We’re watched even from the sky.

A rumor circulates that the Italians are in Nice. At that point I didn’t know I possessed Nice. I didn’t know I was the owner of
Nice … I didn’t realize all my proprietary instincts. Nice had just been snatched away from me.

The
vieux monsieur
comes over to me looking desperate and furious.