33 Days (5 page)

My wife goes to a farm two hundred meters away to buy a chicken. But the farmwoman’s cart is harnessed and she has already taken up the reins. The cows have been let loose, left to themselves, and don’t know where to go. The farmwoman shouts to my wife, “Take all the chickens you want.”

Two young people who left Paris yesterday evening by motorcycle abandon their machine for lack of gasoline. The news they give is reassuring. “We left in no hurry by the Porte d’Italie. We didn’t see any Germans. Maybe there were some at the Porte Maillot, but there were none at the Porte d’Italie …”

One of the young people kills the chicken. But he is inexperienced; he did not drain its blood. And we eat the blackish meat, which has a vaguely gamy taste.

I go into a neighboring field to fetch some straw. We arrange it in our meadow to fashion a comfortable bed. It’s a beautiful night, moonlit, but not silent. The passing of military vehicles is ceaseless. The rumbling is continuous, like the sound of a waterfall. The night consists of only the moon and the trucks. The following day, Sunday, June 16th, we depart again. To restart after stopping on an incline, I’ve been getting a push by the car behind me. But the driver warns me that he will no longer be able to help me this way because doing so increases fuel consumption and he is nearly out of gas.

Some policemen and firemen are walking single file on the left-hand side of the road. This is an indication only of the precautionary evacuation of Paris. But the military stragglers are more numerous. Limping, slouched, they are recognizable only by their forage caps as having been soldiers.

For lunch, to eat the rest of the chicken, we stop on a very wide part of the roadside quite near a beautiful farmhouse fronted by two long lawns and surrounded by woods.

We share our meal with a policeman. He had been sitting on the grass. He was coming by bicycle from I don’t know where, going I don’t know where. We exchange a few words about the current mess. He concludes: “When you see things like this, you ask yourself whether …”

And he says no more about it. But the worst of circumstances cannot stifle the genius of those who know how to use people and events in the right combinations. A driver, one of thousands in this bloated caravan, approaches the policeman and says to him, “This can’t continue … It’s a disgrace … There is no police presence … If you like, I’ll load your bicycle onto my car; get on the running board and you can unsnarl the column of traffic.”

The policeman accepts and the car drives off alongside the line, passing by like a command car and disregarding the caravan.

A group on the grass, beside a small van, is lunching on canned food. The tone, the accent reek of Paris, or rather the Paris suburbs. A woman in her fifties is very agitated and no longer knows how to speak without shouting. Her words contain all the contradictions of the suburbs and of history itself: “The Germans are people like us. I can never be made to say that the war isn’t crap … Neither we nor the English are little saints … remember how the English treated the Boers … That doesn’t stop me from having wept when I learned that the Germans were in Paris …”

On the road, the traffic jam hasn’t eased. Two-wheeled carts, cars lined up for three hundred kilometers with no one directing traffic. But yes … there is a police presence, a sergeant. I’ve never seen brutish like this braying, gangly brute. I don’t know whether he’s drunk with fright or power. He shouts “To the right” at drivers whose cars
are in the roadside ditch. He flings himself into a momentarily empty car, starts the engine, tries to put it into first gear and cannot because he is pushing the accelerator to the floor. By making the gears screech, he imagined he would unsnarl traffic on the road. He abandons the car and attempts to reestablish order generally with another local expedient. A peasant cart driven by a young girl is not completely on the right-hand side of the road. He doesn’t give the girl time to turn her horse. He lunges at the animal’s head, seizes the rein and pulls on the bit brutally, stunning the horse, frightening the girl and managing to move the cart only a few centimeters to the right.

Then he disappears. This kind of man is no fan of danger. Indeed some airplanes are passing overhead; they drop bombs and fire their machine guns. People lie down in the roadside ditches, hide in the woods or cling to trees in the farmyard. Some children grab their mothers’ skirts; the women circle the trees and hide their faces in their arms, like a boy avoiding a slap.

I make out the corduroy pants of a wagoner hiding beneath his wagon. I study their color and the ribbing. My longstanding desire for corduroy pants to wear in the country has reached its climax.

The airplanes have disappeared. We learn that the farmhouse cellar contains two barrels of cider and a cask of eau de vie. So a veritable resupply operation is organized. Those carrying empty bottles cross paths on the lawn with those carrying full bottles. It looks like a labor requisition.

A magnificent procession enters the courtyard: wagons pulled by trains of horses, carts hitched to four or six oxen. But these carts and wagons were not loaded with a miscellaneous freight of mattresses, hay and bicycles like the carts in the caravan. They parade in as if for an agricultural fair, they parade in like the Merovingian chariots of feudal kings in old history textbooks. This impressive procession belongs to the M. family, which owns, it’s said, thousands of hectares in the Beauce. It is led by two booted horsemen on sport horses. I didn’t know whether they were the owners or the managers of the abandoned estate.

Some drivers, immobilized by lack of gasoline, are begging them for a tow. Nothing could have been easier. Their wagons are very
lightly loaded and some are pulled by six oxen, as I mentioned. But they refuse with a disingenuous reluctance, they refuse without saying no, they refuse politely but without warmth. They had a calf slaughtered for them and their drivers, but they weren’t concerned about children who for three days have been fed nothing but a little curdled milk.

Fatigue and despondency are keeping us in this somber courtyard. Evening is coming. We have traveled four kilometers since morning. We should go on nonetheless, go somewhere. It appears that the caravan is being directed toward Gien. From Gien, heading east, we could no doubt get to Auxerre, Avallon. But I’m nearly out of gasoline. There’s only one solution left: being towed by a truck or horse cart. We would travel as quickly and more surely than if the motor were running. But it’s not easy. Many cars are already going in pairs. The military trucks are no longer towing civilian vehicles, as they had the first few days. The peasants’ carts are fully loaded with people and things, and their horses couldn’t pull anything more. And the cart drivers are reluctant to stop to hitch up: they don’t want to lose their place in the crowd.

A dazed, sleepy old man perched high on the seat of an uncovered flatbed cart that is barely loaded agrees to stop. We offer him 500 francs to tow us as far as Gien. He accepts. He brings his rig into the courtyard. To tie up the car, I solicit the help of a peasant. He’s Polish. Where is he coming from? He leaves the bridle of his horse with his wife and very skillfully knots the old rope I hand him. He refuses any tip forcefully and with real dignity.

There’s nothing left but to set off. We water the horse. We give him some fodder. We watch the horse’s meal respectfully, like watching the meal of a lord. The horse is not very docile. “Understand,” his master tells me, “it’s not that he’s mean, but he is crazy. And I don’t know how to drive horses … This horse belongs to my son, who is a scrap-iron dealer … And my son told me to take the horse to Carcassone.”

I assume that once he is on the road, the horse will follow the line. But before the roadway there’s a ditch on the right that worries me and does not seem to worry the old man on his seat. Nevertheless,
the horse, the cart and the car get under way. This horse is crazy, but he’s courageous. Here we are en route, in line. We travel some hundred meters in the dark. I’ve rarely felt such contentment at the wheel of a car. But the caravan stops. Restarting, the rope breaks. I call out in the dark for the old man to stop his horse. We reattach the rope; it breaks again. But this time the old man, who is asleep on his seat, doesn’t hear me. I never saw him again.

I can hardly expect to continue on my own. At this speed the radiator is sure to boil over. I leave the car to my wife and Andrée F.
^*
I stretch out in the field; the caravan passes by like a nightmare. I fall asleep.

I’m woken. Some soldiers, sent from Lorris no doubt by some vague police authority, want to push my car to the shoulder. I sit at the wheel. They push so hard that had I not violently hit the brakes, I’d have gone into the ditch.

The car is stopped halfway on the grass and halfway on the edge of the shoulder. Because of the shoulder and the wheels buried in the grass, my wife and Andrée F. won’t be able to move the car. Plus it’s nighttime, the cars in the caravan are blind, which is to say it’s impossible to catch the attention of a driver, to kindle the slightest innate sympathy, the slightest wish to help.

The caravan to our left stops. I plead with the driver of a cart who is holding his horse by the bridle to tow me at least up onto the roadway. He hesitates, he parleys with his wife, who is driving the following cart. But in the meantime he entrusts me with his horse. I take the bridle. But this enormous beast will not stop lifting its muzzle toward the sky. “He’s not mean; he’s stupid,” the peasant told me. I’m unlucky: the other horse was crazy; this one is stupid. Even though I’m very scared of the horse, I remain bravely at my post, I stay for a long time. It’s one way to woo the farmer, who’ll perhaps agree to help me. He returns. I understand clearly that he would like nothing more than to help me. But his wife does not want to. Standing in her cart, she invokes the Loire, the Loire that they must reach in order to at last be safe from all harm.

For the Loire is now the desired goal, fluvial and strategic, that the collective soul of the caravan has set for itself. “The moment we cross the Loire, we’ll calm down …” a peasant woman said. It seems all the peasant women in France had taken courses at the War College.

Dawn is breaking. We left Paris seven days ago. Two young men, mechanics, free me from my grassy slope. A wagoner driving a tumbrel harnessed to two horses agrees to tow me. Since Montereau the landscape has seemed featureless to us, sparse, faded, miserable. Maybe it was the effect of our fatigue, of our interrupted sleep.

Our wagoner stops his horses. He has seen a dead horse in a meadow. Calmly, taking his time, as if he were at a blacksmith’s, he removes its horseshoes. This wagoner may not know war, but he knows the road and he knows horses. He’s in no rush. Neither are we. We are sleepy.

But the caravan, until then patient, is now aggressive, shaking with fear, mistrust and hatred. The motorists complain that the horse-cart drivers are slowing progress; the horse-cart drivers criticize the motorists for thinking they have the right to do anything, “and yet it is we who provide you with food …”

The caravan is inhabited by two moral entities called the Loire and the fifth column. The Loire is the guardian angel that awaits some thirty kilometers away. The fifth column is the free-floating entity, a detestable divinity that incarnates and disincarnates, appearing and disappearing ten times in five minutes. The fifth column is everything (beings and objects), everything that stands between the refugees and the Loire. The fifth column is the frenzy of intolerance in this once-sedentary population suddenly become nomads.

The caravan has stopped among meadows that rise upward toward a horizon of thin woods, that rise on dreary slopes like the oblique planes of some elementary geometry. Some automobiles, in order to overtake, are crossing the fields. Everything is bottlenecked. A refugee, sweating, with a lost look in his eyes, runs alongside the caravan, his briefcase in hand, shouting to us as he passes, “It’s too much, they called me a spy.”

Behind us a sort of emaciated, disheveled sibyl prophesizes in obscure terms. My wife approaches to put some questions to her.
She replies, “I beg you to go your own way … I have nothing to say to you and you well know it. Take your precautions as I have my safeguards. I know what is and what it’s all about … You know better than I where you come from and what your obligations are. I ask you to make way.”

Otherwise, these people aren’t crazy enough to invoke tutelary deities and beasts of the apocalypse. Everything since Paris is inexplicable by the laws of reason. We are made to take roundabout routes, to trace gyrating kilometers around towns and forests in order to leave the highways to military convoys. Nonetheless, we are constantly mixed together with military convoys … We even wonder why the enemy aircraft bomb and strafe so moderately. Perhaps because bombing, in halting a section of the caravan, would take the place of the absent traffic police, reducing the congestion, disorder and chaos. This free-for-all is so total, so enduring, so absolute that it cannot be entirely attributable to our headquarters no matter how unstrung it might be, nor to the planning of enemy spies, however numerous or organized they might be.

I’m sleepy. Hundreds of thousands of evacuees, of refugees, driven out by the authorities or departing voluntarily, hundreds of thousands of impromptu nomads are sleepy like me. I proceed, towed by the tumbrel’s two monumental horses. I have never seen such a landscape, a landscape of ashes. It is vast, spare and pathetically macabre. I hesitate to use the word
macabre
, which forcefully implies something horrible, something emphatic of death. Maybe it’s the tree limbs, not pallid and limp but rather etched in spindly lines. It’s nothing but a field, the dreariest of all the fields in the world. Two immobile horses gaze out at the road, meditating rather, taking in the endless line of traffic that no longer surprises but still hypnotizes them. One of the two, upright on its four hooves, its harness tied to a tree, is dead.

The tumbrel moves on, pulling us along for three or four kilometers. (I can say that today, having consulted a map.) And we are three or four kilometers from Ouzouer-sur-Loire. But I no longer reckon distance in kilometers nor time in hours. I perceive only alternations between immobility and movement, between day and night.