Monsieur le Commandant (14 page)

There was something theatrical about the scene which lay before me, beneath the glittering light of a chandelier.

The high walls of the enormous room were hung with
nineteenth-century
family portraits that had been slashed with a knife. The room was furnished only with an armchair and a few upright chairs; a metal bucket and suitcase sat on the floor. And in the middle, a handsome young man of good height in the tailored black uniform and boots of an SS officer, wearing a cap that was too big for him and armed with a riding crop, stood contemplating the prisoner.

A third person – the one who had opened the door for us – of very small stature, almost a dwarf, dark-brown complexion, stubbled chin, his repulsive ugliness accentuated by one blank, blind eye, chuckled as he swung what looked to be a sock filled with sand that served as a truncheon.

The face of their victim was swollen, his torso marbled with long purple streaks. Naked and bound, the boy could not have been more than twenty years old. His features, despite the signs of the violence that had distorted them, reminded me of someone I had known a long time ago … But who? I was too disturbed to be able to focus on the question.

The SS officer fixed us with a hard but intelligent gaze and spoke French with Norman intonations, and I realised that the only German thing about him was his uniform. His name, Monsieur le Commandant, is Martin Laugnac. Later that night, Detective Cuvelier explained to me that he is deputy to Hauptscharführer Harald Heyns (also known
as ‘Bernard’) in the Gestapo security office in Caen. Laugnac was a junior tax clerk before the war. His admiration for the Maréchal, and his attraction to the German uniform, drew him to the company of the officers of the Feldkommandantur. As a speaker of your language, he was soon recruited as a police interpreter.

The young man seemed to be on close terms with Simon and the Club, as he and the dwarf welcomed them with much laughter and joking. Having saluted the detective, the French SS officer shook me by the hand, with a certain degree of respect, and called me ‘Commandant Husson’, adding that he had read my novel
The Ordeal
. His brown eyes, deeply sunk in their sockets, shone with a strange fervour.

Pointing to the only armchair, the officer politely invited me to sit down.

He turned back to the boy in handcuffs and ordered him to introduce himself.

The prisoner, who seemed to be all but drained of strength, raised his head. I again had the feeling that I recognised his face.

‘Your surname and Christian name,’ Laugnac repeated impatiently. ‘My Parisian guests are waiting.’

He emphasised the command by lashing him across the chest with the crop. In a weak voice, the young man muttered, ‘Pin, André.’

‘Born in?’ the officer went on.

The boy shuddered.

‘Fresne-l’Archevêque.’

I knew the village – as do you, of course, since it is only about ten kilometres from Andigny. But the name ‘Pin’ also rang a bell. I combed through my memories, one of which, leaping suddenly to mind, alarmed me.

‘What is your father’s profession, my poor boy?’ I asked him gently, leaning forward in the armchair.

‘Constable,’ he answered.

Drops of sweat broke out on my forehead as I silently calculated, dredging up old dates.

‘Your maternal grandfather,’ I went on. ‘What is his trade?’

‘He had a café in the village. He died just before the defeat.’

‘And … your mother’s Christian name?’

With a sob, he said, ‘Madeleine.’

It wasn’t possible. And yet, I was already saying ‘tu’ to him.

‘What year were you born?’

‘Nineteen twenty-two.’

A heavy stone with sharp edges tore at something within my chest. Now I understood why his face had looked so familiar.

He looked just like me when I was twenty
.

Madeleine’s features slowly swam into focus as I stared at the wretched young man in the chair. A brief affair, unknown to Marguerite, in the years after the Great War, with a café owner’s daughter. She fell pregnant and I had arranged for her to marry the local constable, a strapping man as yet unmarried. I never saw Madeleine again after the wedding … The others in the room had no idea; judging by their obtuse or curious expressions, I deduced that the theatrical scene had not been staged with the ironic and perverse aim of bringing father and son face to face as prisoners of this dreadful place. It was just another, cruelly treacherous stroke of the fate that had been cleverly toying with me for years.

From the next room came the sound of a slap, followed by a jostling of bodies. I thought I heard a woman’s voice cry out. We all turned our heads in that direction. The door opened, and two new people entered the room.

A tall young woman with long, curly chestnut hair was shoved in by a scrawny kid with a light moustache. Her hands were cuffed behind her back. She wore only a white underskirt and a brassiere of the same colour, and on her feet a pair of burgundy high heels. I noticed that,
oddly, her hands were gloved – rather elegant short gloves of
cream-coloured
leather.

The girl had a black eye, and blood ran down her thighs.

I knew the young man with the moustache. He was an activist in the Andigny PPF whom I had seen running the propaganda and recruitment programme for the Legion of French Volunteers. In a triumphant voice he declared: ‘The girl woke up. It was great, lads! She still had her cherry, at twenty-three …’

Then he saw me and shut up, embarrassed.

The wall-eyed dwarf uncuffed the young woman, made her sit in a chair, tied her arms behind her back with a rope, and then strapped her by the chest, keeping it arched against the back of the chair. The dwarf’s movements were remarkably quick and precise, as were his knotting skills. His prisoner let out a moan. She stared at each of us in turn with a wild look on her face, still in shock from the defilement the poor child had just been subjected to. Tears had left tracks down her swollen face. It was a rather pretty face. Detective Cuvelier sniggered beside me.

Martin Laugnac then turned to my son – for that is what I shall call him from now on, young André Pin whom I had never seen until this moment, as an adult. The SS officer punched him squarely in the face, knocking his head backwards.

Laugnac asked my son, whose nose had begun to bleed, where the Allied airmen who had been shot down near Mesnil-Raoul were now hiding. He replied in a whisper that he didn’t know anything about it.

The officer slapped him twice across the face, and said, ‘Too bad for her.’

‘But good for us,’ Cuvelier cackled, eliciting laughter from the others.

Laugnac walked over to the suitcase and opened the lid. Inside, I saw more rope and various implements, scissors, hammers and spikes. He
withdrew a large scourge, which had been customised with a series of knots to augment its efficacy – as he was pleased to point out. He then began to lash the legs, thighs, forearms and shoulders of his female captive. The blood quickly began to flow, and wherever the blows fell twice in the same place they flayed the skin, exposing raw flesh. The young woman screamed until I thought my heart would break. I wanted to get up, put an end to the horrific scene, but Simon continued, with a smile, to point his automatic at me. The officer rested; his arm was tired.

‘Surname, Christian name,’ he ordered, panting.

Her head on her chest, his victim sobbed. Grabbing her by the hair, he pulled her face upwards.

‘I won’t say it twice …’

‘Lelouarn, Yvonne.’

‘Address.’

‘Avenue du Maréchal Foch, number eleven … In Evreux.’

‘What does your father do?’

‘He’s a pharmacist …’

‘What’s your network?’

‘I’m not in the Resistance! I swear!’

The SS officer raised his voice above hers.

‘What about the false identity cards we found on you?’ (He then called her by names that I shall not transcribe.)

‘Someone gave them to me … I was helping out …’

‘Do you think we were born yesterday? So who gave them to you?’

She lowered her eyes without answering. Laugnac punched her. Blood spurted from her mouth.

The officer bellowed: ‘We know you’re in the Rainbow Network! Filthy terrorist c**t! Give us the names!’

He continued to hurl insults at her. The scourge fell again, tearing off strips of flesh. The blood streamed across her white skirt, down
her legs … Sitting in the armchair, I trembled. I saw many dreadful things in the Great War, Monsieur le Commandant, but I had never seen a woman being tortured. My heart beat furiously, I felt sick to my stomach, my knees knocked together, my hands trembled. I beseeched the good Lord to put an end to her suffering.

Beside himself, Laugnac threw the scourge across the room. He bent over, tore the shoes off Yvonne Lelouarn and began to stamp on her bare feet with his heavy boots. I closed my eyes, and I heard him break her ankles. Immediately afterwards, he shouted, ‘She’s all yours, José.’

The dwarf approached the young woman, delicately took her one hand, and then the other, and pulled off the gloves. I watched him select a long lancet from among the implements in the valise, take the index finger of her right hand and plunge the instrument under its nail. The poor wretch howled like a wounded animal. We all watched in silence – horrified in the case of André and myself, fascinated in that of the others. When the wailing tapered off, the dwarf took up a second finger and inserted a second lancet. Leaving it in, he grabbed hold of the nail and ripped it off.

‘Stop,’ Laugnac interrupted. ‘Let’s first ask Pin if he wants José to do all the fingers … and then the other hand.’

My son was weeping quietly. The young man in uniform bent over him. It occurred to me that they were more or less the same age.

‘Where are the airmen? If you tell me where they’re hidden I’ll stop the whole thing. We’ll take Mademoiselle Lelouarn for treatment in the infirmary at Caen prison. I will ensure that she is seen to. In a month or two, she’ll be free to rejoin her family in Evreux. We are not monsters. Personally, it saddens me to see a young compatriot who was naïve enough to fall for propaganda being treated this way because of those bastards who chuck bombs at French homes … Do you have
any idea how many civilians have been killed? Bodies torn to shreds? Women, children …’

André did not respond.

‘Call yourself a man?’ Laugnac muttered. ‘How can you bear to see that girl suffer because of you? When all you have to do is say two words to save her. The name of the farm. The name of the village.’

My son shook his head. The officer stood up straight and sighed.

‘José!’

The dwarf returned, with his lancets.

Four bloody fingernails had been flung to the floor before my son cried out for them to stop.

He gave the names of a farmer and a village.

Laugnac ordered the youngster from the PPF to take notes.

‘And then you’ll take down the other names,’ he added.

I didn’t understand. Cuvelier chuckled behind me.

‘Once they start to sing …’

The Club stepped forward. The dwarf removed the handcuffs from André’s wrists. The giant picked up my son, dragged him to the door that led to the next room, and raised him up. Cuvelier and Simon grabbed one arm each and raised them towards the lintel of the door. The dwarf ran up with a chair.

Laugnac had taken a mallet and two long black nails from the valise. He stepped onto the chair. I made as if to stand up, but the PPF fellow drew a pistol and forced me to stay seated in the armchair.

How can I write this?

Monsieur le Commandant. They nailed my son’s hands to the lintel.

The blood-drenched girl, tied to the chair, wailed and wept.

I stood. The little fellow with the moustache hit me with the butt of his gun and I fell forward. I passed out.

When I opened my eyes, I was back in the armchair. I heard a series of steady blows.

Detective Cuvelier grunted as he lashed my son, still hanging, across the back with a belt. The buckle had turned his back into one great open wound of bleeding flesh, in which the shredded muscles were clearly visible. André seemed to be unconscious.

The dwarf amused himself by circling the young woman and pricking the skin of her neck and throat with the tip of a long kitchen knife. Simon ordered him to step aside and emptied the bucket of water over Mademoiselle Lelouarn. Detective Cuvelier stopped lashing the suspended André for a moment and turned to watch. Laugnac approached his prisoner, who dripped with water and blood. He gave her two sharp slaps.

‘Now, give us the names of your accomplices in the network. If you don’t, we’ll kill him, take him down and nail you up there in his place. Talk now before it’s too late … Before we get
really
mean.’

Simon, the former policeman, approached in turn.

‘I’d talk if I were you, sweetie. These Gestapo boys from Caen are tough. I’ve seen them cut strips of skin off the soles of their suspect’s feet. And the really stubborn ones who still resist – well, it’s too bad for them. Laugnac and José reward them by sewing their mouths shut with wire. Is that what you want them to do to you? Think of your poor mother …’

He waited, gazing at her mildly. He stroked her cheek. A few seconds later the girl mumbled a name. An address. Then another name. And another address …

The PPF fellow feverishly wrote in his notebook. Sometimes she went too fast for him. Laugnac rubbed his hands together.

When she had finished, they took André Pin down. They laid him out on his stomach to spare his ruined back. I prayed under my breath. I said the Our Father. Then I got up and went to kneel by my son, stroking his head. I looked at his hands, punctured like those of Our
Lord. My tears fell, and I could do nothing to stop them. I cried for my son. For Yvonne Lelouarn. For Ilse and her children. For the French, and for myself, too.

The men dragged the young woman into the next room. They raped her one after the other – all except Martin Laugnac, who stayed in the large room, sitting across from me and studying me in silence – before bringing her back, naked and dishevelled, covered in blood and semen. They had to hold her by the underarms because of her broken ankles. Her eyes were completely unfocused. Stupefied, she was already gone, far away.