Léon and Louise (25 page)

The winter of 1940 was hardest of all for Yvonne. Ever since the school authorities had thought it necessary to confine little Muriel in the coal cellar and turn her into a persistent bedwetter, Yvonne's keen intelligence had been devoted day and night to keeping her family fit and intact. The entries in her dream diary ceased, and gone were the days of pink sunglasses, filmy summer dresses and light-hearted singing. From now on her thoughts revolved around nothing save how to keep her husband and children safe until the war's end, to feed and warm and shield them from sorrow and affliction.

She pursued her aim with the guile of a secret agent, the courage of a goddess of war and the ruthlessness of a Panzer grenadier. In the mornings she accompanied her children to school one by one – even big Michel, who vainly jibbed at being escorted by his mother – and in the afternoons she collected them all again. Before she let Léon leave the building in the morning she went to the living-room window and peered in both directions, on the lookout for potential dangers; and when he was a few minutes late back from work she went to meet him and reproached him bitterly. If one of her children developed a cough she procured honey, lime-blossom tea and Sirolin cough syrup with the aid of lies, counterfeit money, and her décolletage. When the water in the kitchen froze, she felled a small acacia outside the Romanian Orthodox church, in broad daylight and under the eyes of several curious onlookers, then hauled the whole tree home and chopped it up into firewood in the inner courtyard.

The day after she heard strange noises on the stairs one night, she bought a black market Mauser 7.65 automatic plus ammunition and informed her disapproving husband that, if anyone set foot in their flat without her consent, she would shoot him without warning. When Léon pointed out that a pistol hanging on the wall in the first act of a play had to be fired in the second act, she shrugged and retorted that real life and the Russian theatre followed different rules. And when he asked why she had opted for a German pistol, she explained that if the German authorities found a German bullet in a German corpse, they would very probably go looking for a German perpetrator.

Whether these hard times welded Yvonne and Léon even closer together because they had to supply renewed proof of their mutual loyalty and dependability every day, or whether they forfeited their last hope of romantic love because they had quite pragmatically to function as comrades-in-arms – in other words, whether they grew closer under these circumstances – is hard to tell, but it's conceivable that they never asked themselves that question. What mattered was not the label on their partnership, but sheer daily survival. All metaphysics apart, time had simply created certain facts that weighed more heavily than any words.

It was, for instance, a fact that they were both over forty and had, with a fair degree of probability, passed the midpoint of their lives. It was also an arithmetical fact that they had spent half their lives together and would soon have spent more nights sleeping together in the same marriage bed than alone. It was furthermore foreseeable that their children would grow up in a surprisingly short time and go out into the world as living proof that Léon and Yvonne had been passable parents. Before long their remaining days on earth would speed by ever faster, and the sum of their shared memories would soon be so great that it offered greater comfort than any prospect of a life without each other, whatever form that might take.

Of course, something or other might one day cause Yvonne to run out on Léon or him on her. But it wouldn't be a new beginning or a new life, just a continuation of their previous lives under new circumstances. There was no such a thing as a second life; you only had the one. Although this seemed shattering at first sight, closer inspection revealed it to be comforting in the extreme, for it meant that their lives to date, far from being unimportant, were the essential prerequisite of all that was to come.

Léon was the man in Yvonne's life and she was the woman in his. She had no further grounds for jealousy. Nothing would change this even if they did lose one another in consequence of some disaster or senile folly. There simply wasn't enough time left for them to spend as many nights sharing another marriage bed with someone else as they had already spent together.

For Léon, who had long grown used to having two wives, one at his side and one in his head, nothing much changed, but Yvonne's soul found peace at last. For her too, the question of whether or not they were destined for one another had now been settled, and it no longer mattered whether they were really passionately or only half-heartedly in love, or whether they only pretended or wrongly believed that they loved one another. All that mattered was the actual status quo. It was as simple as that.

Without putting her feelings into high-flown words, Yvonne had to admit that she was still attracted – perhaps even more so than before – by Léon's stolid masculinity. She liked to hear his light-footed tread when he came up the stairs and his firm footsteps when he crossed the landing, and she liked the unaffected good nature in his voice and the strong but never acrid body odour given off by his overcoat when he hung it on the hook at the end of a day's work.

She liked it that the children, although they were really too old for it, still climbed on his lap and sat quietly there, and she liked the fact that he didn't cross his hands on his stomach as men of a certain age tend to do, and that he didn't yet groan when getting to his feet and still showed no signs of becoming a know-it-all who delivered long-winded lectures.

She liked it that malice and cruelty were foreign to his nature, and she still liked it when he wrapped his long arms around her in his sleep. And even if it happened that he sometimes embraced another woman in his dreams, the weight of the facts was on her side. In truth and actuality,
she
was the woman in his arms, no one else.

24 December 1940

My dearest Léon,

Are you still alive? I am. I've just thrown the remains of a preternaturally tough chicken over the terrace wall and into the Senegal River. Now dwarf crocodiles are tussling for them while hippos look on with bored expressions and open their jaws for those funny little birds with sharp beaks to pick strands of chewed-up waterlily from between their teeth.

Soon the sun will set and the muezzin will utter his call to evening prayer. Then comes mosquito hour. I spend it in our fortress in the officers' mess smoking room, which has thick stone walls and thick mosquito netting over the windows. The mess is the only still semi-habitable building in this dilapidated old colonial town. All the other European buildings are ruins in which young trees are growing and the Africans erect their huts. My companions in the smoking room include the fortress commander, his two sergeants, and my two colleagues from the Banque de France. Another member of the party is Giuliano Galiani, the expectorating radio operator from the ‘Victor Schoelcher'. You remember, he was assigned to us as a liaison officer (although there's nothing and nobody here to liaise with).

Until dinner we sit in cane chairs and smoke. Meanwhile, outside in the other ranks' quarters up against the fortress wall, the ninety Senegalese riflemen who guard our precious cargo (of which I'm not allowed to speak) sing melancholy songs of love, death and homesickness. When the bell sounds for dinner we repair to the dining room, where a loudly shrieking fan with rust-eroded blades rotates above the table. One day in the not too far distant future it's bound to fall from the ceiling and neatly behead us all within the same hundredth of a second.

Until that happens we sit there submissively and sweat, curse the heat, and vie with each other in fantasizing about wagonloads of chilled beer and champagne. When nothing else occurs to us, one of the men will present an account of his day's doings, its inevitable theme being the Africans' chronic unreliability and aversion to work.

Our overseers do, in fact, have great difficulty in keeping their native labourers hard at it. As soon as the sjambok is out of sight, any African promptly retires to the shade of the nearest baobab tree. I can sympathize with this, personally, because the work they have to do for us – breaking stones, carrying water, felling trees – is really no fun in a temperature of fifty degrees. This climate is enough to make the likes of us collapse under our own body weight.

It's also true that the Malinké, Wolof and Toucouleurs have never been keen competitors for the privilege of working for us, nor, to the best of my knowledge did they invite us here in the first place, bid us welcome, or beg us to stay once we were here. Even so, it surprises us every day that our overseers have to extort the requisite hospitality again and again with the aid of the sjambok.

The everlasting floggings and beatings, the screams and the blood and humiliation are a trial to everyone here – mainly to the victims, of course, but also to the floggers themselves, with whom I sit in the smoking room night after night. For the first few weeks I often wondered how these whip-wielders could bring themselves to have so little compassion and be so brutal and lacking in humanity. Since then I've realized that, if no one restrains them, floggers succumb to a sort of mania that impels them to go on flogging more and more brutally because only constantly repeated violence confirms their superiority over their victims and provides a justification for the obvious injustice of brutality.

But there's something else involved. Because I'm with my whip-wielding colleagues every hour of the day, I've got to know them pretty well. I hear them cry out at night when they're tossing and turning in their own sweat, racked by nightmares. I hear them whimper and cry out for their mothers, I hear them bellow commands and throw grenades, and I hear them running along the trenches of the Chemin des Dames to which they've returned night after night for the past quarter of a century, fleeing from German bayonets and poison gas and searching for their lost humanity.

It's particularly sad that the floggers were not on their own at the Chemin des Dames; many of their black victims were there too, side by side with their present tormentors. Even sadder is the prospect that the victims will one day rise and reach for the sjambok in their turn, and that, if no one intervenes, the flogging will be perpetuated from generation to generation.

Generally speaking, I'd say we're in much the same position here as the Germans occupying Paris. From what I hear, they're also rather sad that the French don't wholeheartedly welcome them as guests even though they've left their tanks outside the city and are behaving quite well in other respects. It's a curious fact that floggers, when they lay the whip aside for ten minutes, always expect their victims to love them at once.

One night in the officers' mess, between the starter and the main course, I expressed the idea that we in Senegal are suffering the same fate as the Germans we fled from; in other words, that we're the Germans of West Africa, so to speak. That didn't go down at all well. Since then I've learnt that it's better to keep your thoughts to yourself – or, better still, not to reveal that you think of anything whatever.

I shouldn't really be writing to you at all, everything out here still being extremely hush-hush. I suppose I was rather cheeky in my last letter, when I recounted the whole saga of our cargo in the belief that none of it mattered. Since then the commandant has given me several lectures. He impressed on me that it matters a great deal what some humble office girl gives vent to over her milk and biscuits on a quiet night when she's feeling bored, and that even a little careless talk in times like these can easily put one up in front of a firing squad. Since then I've pulled myself together and kept a bridle on my tongue because la patrie is, after all, la patrie. On the other hand, you and I still exist, and I still feel closer to you the further away from you I am.

I'd dearly like to know why this has never changed over the years. After all, let's be honest: you aren't such a uniquely magnificent individual. Anyway, I'm glad of the little pang the thought of you always gives me. For one thing, pain is comforting because only the living can feel it, and, for another, I know for sure you feel it just as I do.

Not an hour or a day goes by that I don't want to tell you this or that, and that I don't wish you were here and could see what I can see, and that I could hear what you had to say about it all. So if I'm writing you another few lines in defiance of regulations, it's because it may be a long time before such a favourable opportunity recurs: my colleague Monsieur Delaport, who has contracted yellow fever and been issued with a travel permit for Dakar, will take this letter with him and make sure it reaches the Rue des Écoles unopened.

It's six months since I wrote to you from Lorient harbour. Time goes fast, especially when lots of things are happening, and even faster when nothing is... Just as I wrote that, a bird that's driving me mad started up again. ‘Ruuku-dii', ‘ruuku-dii', ‘ruuku-dii', it goes for hours and days and nights on end. Just ‘ruuku-dii', ‘ruuku-dii', ‘ruuku-dii', with a persistence that really ought to exceed its strength, always just ‘ruuku-dii', ‘ruuku-dii', ‘ruuku-dii' until I go to sleep late at night with my nerves shredded and my fingers in my ears. That's why I can't be sure whether or not the creature takes an hour's rest occasionally. Don't get me wrong, I'm sure it's a perfectly harmless bird and just as naturally entitled to its niche in Creation as the rest of us. Its cry probably isn't especially loud or piercing, objectively speaking, but it drives me to such a pitch of fury that I've more than once rushed outside with my pistol (yes, I've got one here) and would have shot it dead if only I'd been able to spot it in the branches of the acacia where I suspect it roosts.

The bird has done me no harm. It's probably vegetarian and goes ‘ruuku-dii', ‘ruuku-dii' for laudable reasons. It may be defending its territory, hoping to pass on its genes, or simply having fun. In search of explanations for its incredible stamina, I hit on the possibility that it might be down to the avian respiratory system, which differs in some way from that of us mammals. At college I had to make pretty drawings of it in red and blue crayon, but I can't recall the details. Air flows through birds' lungs in one direction only, right? Fine, but how the hell does it find its way out again? Needless to say, there's no one here with even a smidgen of ornithological knowledge and no Larousse I could consult. Both exist in Dakar, no doubt, but that's a thousand kilometres west of here and inaccessible without a travel permit, and I'm unlikely to get one of those before the war ends.