33 Days (13 page)

So that evening we became gypsies, a flying column again, in a corner of the courtyard. The Aufresnes brought us soup. My wife didn’t want to touch it, even though the broth was made from our chicken. But Madame Aufresne insisted so gently that we completely disregarded whatever opinion Soutreux would have of us. Those who have never been nomads on the roads in a disaster will say, of what
interest is the soup? The Aufresnes truly proved here that they had nobility and courage. Their fate depended on the Soutreux woman. A little cowardice … they might have distanced themselves from us. They did not do so. And when they’d had dinner with Soutreux, they came to chat with us a moment longer.

*
Derogatory slang for Germans.

†
Sad.

‡
Military slang for corned beef.

§
Another government.

ǁ
Technical sergeant.

a
Culture … education.

b
On June 22, 1940, France signed an armistice dictated by Germany. On Hitler’s orders, the signing took place in the same rail car—jackhammered out of a local monument—and at the same location, near Compiègne, where Germany had signed the armistice ending World War I.

c
Headquarters.

IV

CHAPELON UNDER THE BOOT

We drive toward Chapelon. On the road we pass only a few cars, which are transporting German officers. They are French makes, and the Germans have painted them dark gray. We see the dead horses again, the horses from the battle scenes. But their bellies are swollen and they give off a stench.

We again pass through the places where we were witnesses of a battle in miniature; where some French artillerymen surrendered and where others, under fire, tried to get a caisson back on the roadway from the roadside ditch; where an artillery horse crashed down on the fender of our car. This landscape had been distorted by battle, noise, violence and danger. It had all been there: helmeted Germans, French artillerymen cut off from their units, frightened civilians, horses rearing, horses down, horses upside down. But the battlefield and this landscape were separated as if by a frame, with a little sky on top. Our memory can’t find its place in these empty spaces, where a few accordioned cars seem to have been swept into the roadside ditch and evoke nothing more than an accident, a collision. The road, the fields, the woods, the house are no more than topography. A farmhouse on the near side of the road, a flat expanse, that’s all.

“The opposite of childhood memories,” my wife says. “The gardens we thought were enormous seem minuscule. Here, everything is empty and more vast than we thought.”

What will Abel Delaveau’s farm be like? Untouched? Ransacked?
Has he returned? How sad if I find the farm abandoned or Abel Delaveau in an empty house, his barn without cows, his stables without horses.

Everything is intact. Abel Delaveau and his carts took the same route we did. But he turned around after two days on the road.

I’ll say nothing about your welcome, Abel Delaveau. Many years ago, I nearly drowned in the ocean. When I felt land under my feet, it was as if I’d been reborn into a new life. Seeing you again, I feel the same safety. Being back with you, I find a human quality again, which is indispensable for me and which I’d been deprived of since the night when, at the same time as you, I left Chapelon. I’m relieved. I can worry, feel sadness, but no longer despair. It seemed as if you expected us. So much so that it seemed completely natural to have come to ask you for shelter, you whom I still barely knew. There was no false effusiveness between us. You and your wife were simple, as simple as I’d like to be. I’m about to offend you perhaps; I know you are touchy on the subject of peasants. You have a certain peasant pride. Well, I tell you this … the idea, widespread in cities, that peasants always have a patriarchal simplicity is false. Above all, I know peasant women whose manners are as affected as city women’s. Simplicity is not the privilege of a single class, even the peasant’s. I was your guest; I’m not thanking you. One gives thanks for a present, or even a kindness, but not for a fraternal gift.

Your wife takes us to the bedroom where we had slept for a few hours. The mantel is decorated with a clock, two candelabras and a framed photograph under glass: It is you, in a frock coat, with your wife on your wedding day, holding hands. It’s only a photograph, and an old-fashioned one, but it has the charm of an old song.

We are no longer tourists separated from a caravan, which was still rolling along in the unoccupied territories. We are no longer transient guests. We are prisoners of a sort. We have no more gasoline at all and don’t yet know the conqueror’s wishes with regard to road travel.

Because of the farm work, we’d be a nuisance for Madame Delaveau if we ate at her table. We’ll board with Madame Rose, the wife of a road mender who was called up; she lives with her daughter and
son in a house a hundred meters from the farm. When I came back from the Far East, it wasn’t a shock to return to Marseille and France. But coming from Les Douciers to Chapelon, I truly had the feeling of a homeland regained, a feeling strong enough to be mixed with surprise. I don’t know how we would have endured had we been prisoners in Germany. At Soutreux’s we endured an atmosphere of ambiguity, where anyone who showed sorrow for France’s defeat was suspect. While eating the soup prepared by Madame Rose, I want to scream, “I’m in France …”

I would discover later that Abel had left with his horse carts and his two cars in tow. Besides his family, he took Madame Rose, her daughter and an old man and his wife who were dragging themselves along, having set out on foot. Near Lorris, because aircraft were strafing, they took shelter in a ditch. An old peasant remained sitting on the road, dangling his legs in the ditch. He was exposing himself to machine-gun fire and bomb shrapnel. He had reached the limit of despair. Abel urged him to take cover. “No,” the old man said, “it’ll be better if I’m hit, it’ll be over.”

While Abel is sheltering his caravan in some woods, the Germans cross through the same woods … The women are worried. Abel reassures them. “Give me a break! Can’t you see these are Englishmen?”

The Germans had only passed through Chapelon. Here are a few remarks reported by Madame Rose and that I didn’t confirm. Some soldiers entered an evacuated farmhouse and emptied all the drawers. They took watches and jewelry. Elsewhere, they slapped and hit a woman who was alone in her house, forcing her to show them where she had hidden her money. They took 3,000 francs. The woman, or another one, complained to an officer, who said to her, “This is war … Do you take care of our dead?…” After the armistice was signed, the Germans danced all night in Ladon. And two women from the town, who had not previously been “loose,” danced with them; this even though in Ladon itself they had shot thirteen French soldiers and eight civilians.

We had only one day without Germans. The next day, they were in the village.

It was after dinner. Two soldiers came in. They were looking for
bedrooms. Madame Rose told them her house is small and she has no beds other than hers and the children’s. But one of the soldiers put his hand on the doorknob of the door between the kitchen and bedrooms.

“I want to see (
I vant to zee
) …,” he said.

We knew we were “under the boot,” but at that moment we felt it inside our skins.

They looked through the house and left without saying anything, without even looking at us.

I don’t need a dictionary to describe the difference between force and authority. I’m nothing more than a member of a captive tribe.

They’re next to us, up against us and all around us. They’re outside the house and inside the house, which they enter whenever they like.

The peasants are more shocked than we are to see them now wandering around nearly naked except for shorts or even bathing suits that look like old-fashioned pajamas. A strong movie culture has accustomed us to such collective nudism. Onscreen, that’s how people procreate. But the Germans aren’t naked only for gymnastics and aerobic exercises. They’re naked all the time, naked to eat, naked to clean their rifles, naked to smoke. They’re naked and they yell. On the other hand, I know if I understood their language well, I would be less sensitive to the sound of it. But when they speak, it always seems to me as if they’re yelling. Particularly so because when addressing us, they shout louder to make themselves better understood.

A soldier is sprawling on the grass in front of Madame Rose’s house, a few meters from us. He’s in the sun doing his total-nudism cure; even in wartime he’s pursuing his nudist dream, his nudist meditations. Lying on his back, he is exposing himself completely. Madame Rose calls him a son of a bitch, disgusting. He doesn’t understand the words, but he understands the intent.

We’ll see him again, in regulation dress, accompanied by a
Feldwebel
, who speaks French and practices finesse.

“It is better,” he tells us, “that you not understand what he told me …”

But he doesn’t hesitate to give us a faithful summary of their conversation.

“Morality is lower in France than in Germany …”

He leans to one side and drops his hand toward the ground to better demonstrate the low level of morality in France.

At first I think he simply wants to humiliate us with this overview of two systems of morality, Eastern and Western. In fact, it’s more nuanced. He alludes to the nude women in our magazines and, above all, to the lewd photography, some of which is excellent.

I’d be tempted to agree with him, bearing in mind that he has not indicted a morality but only a few examples of veiled pornography legal in France and banned in Germany. No doubt he’s implying that Germany is virtuous and France dissolute, but I pay no mind.

Still, it’s true that if Frenchmen were sensitive about the squalid or the frankly ugly, magazines of pornographic “artistry” would have no readers. Laws against pornography would be unnecessary. Which leads to contemplating the war and politics generally. In an ideal civilization, politics would concern only hygiene. And war would seem absurd. As much so as resolving a discussion about biology or a dispute about poetry with the use of force.

Meanwhile, in the courtyard another soldier, also dressed only in shorts, is playing hoops with a bicycle wheel and a tire pump. He is certainly older than thirty.

He’s as serious as a judge. He’s not excusing himself with a smile. He’s playing alone, with a ferocious gravity.

While we’re having lunch, the hoops player stretches out in a folding chair that had been left in front of the door. He’s whistling, full-throatedly, nonstop, for a long time. He’s giving himself a concert. He’s whistling. He’s not embarrassed.

Are they “badly brought up” or insolent?

They liberally distribute French hardtack (to animals) and cans of monkey meat. Their cars are full of it. They also distribute Algerian tobacco and packs of Gauloises bleues. They smoke only cigars and their straw cigarettes. It must be said that they offer these leftovers of requisitioning, or ransacking, simply, without arrogance or ostentation.

We’d finished dinner. Madame Rose lit an oil lamp from 1900 that has a black onyx base (the power lines had been cut). A soldier
enters. We know him: we’ve often run into him at the well; he gave chocolate to Madame Rose’s three-year-old nephew. He sits in the only wicker chair. This one is not dressed in shorts. He’s wearing pants with suspenders—and no shirt. He settles into the chair and starts whistling, without worrying about us. I’m beginning to think that the art of whistling is peculiar to Germany. He’s whistling: it’s hard not to imagine some deliberate insolence. But no … He confides to us the reason he whistles. It’s because he’s always in a good mood: “
Ich bin immer lustig
 …”

He asks Madame Rose’s permission to use her table to write a letter.

“
Meine liebe kleine …
”

“Hurry up and go back to her already!” Madame Rose shouts at him. But he doesn’t understand a word of French.

He writes with care, filling every inch of the page. When he’s finished, he remains seated at the table. He seems to feel as if he’s among family. And I swear that at that moment there’s nothing that could be called malicious about the man. But he stays. We have to gesture to him that we’re going to bed. I never saw one of those Germans who thought he was “de trop” anywhere.

The next day, he travels to Paris by truck. He returns in the evening stuffed with revealed truths: “The peace will be signed in a week to ten days … London is nearly destroyed …” I wonder whether he senses that such news isn’t completely agreeable to us … I don’t think so. I should add that at this point, the beginning of July, I had not met a French citizen other than those women in Les Douciers who accepted with pleasure the idea of a peace dictated unilaterally by Hitler. We had no news other than through a few German newspapers given us by the soldiers and editions of
Le Matin
and
Parissoir
brought from Ladon that by all indications were written by the
Kommandantur
. (I’ll say nothing of the news that sprang from thin air.) That’s how it was announced to us, even before the armistice, that the constitution of 1875 had been abrogated and replaced by a dictatorship. False news can have a premonitory quality, at least as much so as dreams.

News given us by German soldiers is amazingly consistent. And
not only the news but the commentary and opinions of the soldiers. Doubt doesn’t seem to be a German virtue. It’s true that if a German had doubts, he would keep quiet. It is said that news is transformed according to those who peddle it. That’s not true for these German infantrymen. What they had been told in briefings, what they read in their newspapers and hear on their radios is repeated identically, without alteration, like a daily catechism, like a movement in a military drill. We never know their intent. Do they want to humiliate us? Do they want us to join in their joy as victors? Or to dissolve ourselves with them in some dream of a Pax Germanica? Do they want us to celebrate the end of the war with them? They are the victors and about to return home. At least they no longer risk being killed. Maybe they can’t imagine that their joy isn’t ours. A happy man can’t stand the sadness of others, he nullifies it, to him his joy seems to project onto the universe.