On Leave (13 page)

“Eat up, Jean, my boy,” she kept on saying. “Fill yourself up. Then at least the scoundrels who make war won't get it. Tuck in, laddie.”

And then all fell quiet again, to everyone's relief.

“Well?” Jean Valette asked in a drawl. “Well, so when's it going to happen, then, the end of the war? When will it come?”

“Soon,” Luc Giraud said slowly. “A war like this can't last long.”

“Why not?” Jean Valette asked.

“Because five hundred thousand young men,” Luc Giraud said, syllable by syllable, “five hundred thousand … well, that gets about in the country. Because half a million young men over there means a whole mass of French families are affected by the war. Ask your sister.”

“Yes,” Colette chipped in. “Five hundred thousand young men over there means hundreds of thousands of mothers and wives and sisters and girlfriends fearing for their sons, husbands, brothers, and lovers. And that gets around in the country.”

“Well then,” Jean Valette said, “you mean that the more we are over there, the more it gets around over here?”

“In one sense you are right,” Luc Giraud said. “It's dialectical. The more the war affects the masses, the nearer we are to peace.”

“So tell me, then,” Jean Valette said in a louder voice, “how many million soldiers do we need over there to make the masses move?”

“Jean!” Madame Valette said.

“No,” Luc Giraud responded calmly, “that is not what I said.”

“He's doing it on purpose,” Colette said.

“What am I supposed to be doing on purpose?”

“Contradicting. Contradicting just for the sake of it.”

“I'm just asking a question.”

“An anti-Party question!”

“Colette, cool down,” Luc Giraud ordered. “Let him speak for himself.”

There was a pause, and then Jean Valette asked in an uncharacteristically tentative voice, “Luc, explain what you meant … You have to explain … you have to…”

You could feel he was trying hard to hold something back, but you couldn't tell, as his face was hidden by shadow, if he was on the brink of tears or of an angry outburst.

Another pause. For the first time Luc Giraud seemed uncertain.

“It's for you to explain yourself,” he said at last, gravely, almost solemnly.

“I think what Jean meant to say…” M. Valette broke in softly.

“No,” Luc Giraud cut him off. “It's for him to speak, if he wants to.”

Jean Valette said nothing. He had his head in his hands and was looking down.

“But what is this all about?” Lachaume asked eventually. He did not understand what was going on.

Luc Giraud, to whom the question was addressed, raised his hand as if calling a meeting to order. Then, after allowing Jean Valette another moment for his last chance, he shrugged his arms as if to say, “I give up,” and smiled at Lachaume. In fact, he looked relieved, and Lachaume guessed he had as much to do with Giraud's relief as did tongue-tied Jean Valette. In his mind all these little puzzles were somehow connected to the “proposal” that Luc Giraud was going to make to him. Lachaume was still thinking, seeing, and listening to everything exclusively in the light of that “proposal.” All through the long and frequent pauses in that tense and awkward conversation, and when nothing had caught his eye through the window, the thought of the coming “proposal” had made his heart beat faster.

“Shall I switch on?” Colette asked as she stood up.

The harsh, unshaded light from the ceiling fixture fell sharply on the dining table and on the mimosas, which seemed to have died.

There were a few more phrases, higgledy-piggledy, spoken by one or the other, a few clumsy gestures weighed down by silence and then, suddenly, provoked by a joke that was instantly forgotten, Jean Valette looked up, his face marked by distress, and shouted over his sobs:

“Why did you allow us to leave? Why did you allow the troop trains to leave? Why did you abandon us when we were on the trains? Why? Why? We didn't want to go! We did everything we could not to go! We barricaded ourselves in the barracks, but they battered down the doors, dragged us into the trucks, dragged us onto the trains, we had the lot of them on top of us—sergeant-majors, riot police, but even so, we kicked up a ruckus, we made the trains stop, we got off in the middle of nowhere, we ended up lost all over the place, they had to chase after us and re-establish the units ten times over … We did not want to go! So where were you? Where were you when we were fighting? If you had all come to our aid, would we have been sent over? You should not have let us get sent over. Why did you?”

Lachaume saw that Madame Valette's eyes were shining with tears. In that instant he was Jean Valette's brother. The cry came from both their hearts, and he didn't know which of them had spoken. In the name of “the pair of them” he turned toward Luc Giraud, who had stood up from table.

“You were going to make us a proposal?” His voice quavered.

After all, wasn't he the elder of the “pair”? Wasn't it for him to keep calm? Banalities of that kind flashed across his mind while Luc Giraud went slightly pale and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.

“Drop it,” Jean Valette said.

He appeared to be saying that to Lachaume, who was about to protest, but Luc Giraud picked it up and shrugged wearily, as if to signify that he wasn't going to answer.

“No!” Lachaume yelled. “Tell us! Tell us what your proposal is!”

“Drop it,” Jean Valette repeated.

“Well, all right, then … Let's drop it,” Luc Giraud said slowly, with a scowl. “Since you are insulting the Party. Since you are insulting the Party in public, in the presence of an outsider … All right! I agree. Let's drop it.”

“We've not insulted anybody,” Lachaume said. “We have simply expressed our state of mind. Tell us, go on … It's just our state of mind,” he repeated, with an attempt at a smile so as to mollify Luc Giraud. “Just our state of mind … Maybe we expressed it a bit harshly, a bit roughly … What do you expect? They've turned us into hillbillies, so we don't know how to behave properly anymore … But tell us, do tell us…”

“What I wanted to put to you,” Luc Giraud began slowly (but on reflection, Lachaume thought he really was playing for time), “what I wanted to propose was that you should help to collect signatures on a joint Communist and Catholic peace petition…”

“And where am I supposed to do that?” Lachaume asked blankly.

“Well, in your neighborhood, for instance, or else…”

“Now listen to me, Luc!” Jean Valette burst in. “Don't you think it's about time to have a new idea? Don't you?” He was shouting. “I'm just a nobody from the Youth League, like you say in the Party. All right … but I've got a thing or two to say to you all the same. Five hundred thousand youngsters: where do you think that has the greatest effect? Among their families, or over there? Because what's getting messed up over there is us! Messed up in every way! You want me to draw you a picture?… We're losing our youth, and we'll lose the rest of our lives if it goes on much longer. I don't mean those who are already staying for good and the heaps of guys who'll end up that way soon. Listen hard: I'm speaking for all of us who will come back … What will they have got out of it if things go on at this rate?… Maybe a motor scooter from the bonus, if they save it up. But what else? What will they get out of it apart from a motor scooter? What will they bring back in their heads? In their hearts? All our youth, all our lives are being wasted away.” His voice was near to breaking. “So, don't you think it's about time that five hundred thousand young men deserved a couple of new ideas? Instead of signatures and hot-air balloons trailing slogans on signboards … a couple of simple and solid ideas. Because, don't you see, even five hundred thousand of us can't take the place of ideas that aren't there! If you look properly, you can easily see that the only idea on either side is: us guys! The settlers think, with half a million soldiers, we'll win the war in the end. And the comrades think, with five hundred thousand youngsters over there, in the long run things will start to shift and we'll be able to impose a settlement. And what about us lot, then?” He was shouting. “Our youth is being wrecked!”

He came to a sudden stop and left the room to hide his tears.

Luc Giraud was the first to make his adieux, because of an appointment he had to keep, or so he said. He'd virtually not said another word, except to wish Lachaume good luck; he shook hands around the room with a look of sad forgiveness. When he was on the threshold, Madame Valette noticed that the Romanian wine hadn't been opened and suggested he take it with him, but he shook his head and raised his hand, and then whispered that she should make a gift of it from him to Jean. In short, he was understanding and forgiving, and it came from the heart; his generosity was unaffected and sincere.

Lachaume watched him go with an almost friendly feeling, as if he'd been running after someone in the street for a long while and then, on discovering it was the wrong person, hadn't felt upset at being out of breath with a pounding heart, because the guy, despite being the wrong one, had something interesting about him. In sum, when Luc Giraud left, Lachaume was relaxed and almost happy, but as exhausted and worn out as if he had run a race.

He sat down on the sofa, free of the illusions he'd had in what now seemed like a previous age when he'd first sat on it, and looked around. There was nothing to attract his attention. The room was empty now. The women were busy in the kitchen—you could hear they weren't talking to each other—and Valette and his father were in the other room because they didn't want their reddened eyes to be seen.

Social life budded afresh in the home around five o'clock, over a cup of coffee. Shortly after, Lachaume left, with his hand on Valette's shoulder, as if he were blind, to be guided through the pitch black to the exit from the housing estate.

“By the way,” Lachaume said, “when are we leaving?”

“On the third, in the evening, of course.”

“What about Lasteyrie?” Lachaume cried out abruptly. “Have you seen him?”

“I'm seeing him tomorrow evening,” Valette said. “Come along if you like…”

 

CHAPTER EIGHT

At first glance the Café des Vrais Sportifs, in the alley that runs behind the Arena, looks more like the sort of place with a curved bar where you knock back a glass without sitting down. There was only one table in a corner of the room, and when Lachaume got there, it was already taken by customers eating dinner. It was an odd place to pick for a rendezvous.

It was eight o'clock. Lasteyrie and Valette would be there soon. He ordered a sandwich. That would have to do for dinner, because the basketball heats they were going to watch were due to start at eight-thirty.

“Would you like to sit down?” the barman asked him, waving his knife to the rear, over his shoulder.

Lachaume didn't understand.

“In the back!” the barman explained.

What he hadn't realized was that the door marked
Toilette–Téléphone
to the left of the counter actually opened onto two rooms, one behind the other. The first, smaller one had bench seats and tables, and the larger one, with a low ceiling, was where they'd put the billiard tables that made sense of the café's name.

He took a seat in the smaller room, which was empty save for a young blond woman at one of the tables. In the back room two men were playing a game at a table lit by low-hanging reflector lights; the rest of the room was in darkness.

The girl hadn't ordered a drink, as if she really was waiting for a lover. Part of the pleasure of such meetings is to order together. Hazy memories brought that back to Lachaume. Then it struck him that the girl must be waiting for Lasteyrie. She was neatly dressed and looked sad, with her lipstick, her overdone mascara, and a plush overcoat that was neither opulent nor indigent—the kind of coat worn in Paris that sets a conundrum for sociologists.

How peculiar to set up a get-together in this obscure hole, when there were so many other cafés opposite the entrance to the Arena …

Valette is the first to turn up, looking gloomy, dragging his feet. He's wearing his uniform, with his cap in his hand. He nods by way of hello and flops onto the bench seat.

“Are you in disguise?” Lachaume whispers.

Valette doesn't argue with that, and his eyes wander. “This is a real dive,” he says at long last, nodding toward the backroom. “And I bet that girl's waiting for Lasteyrie,” he adds
sotto voce
.

“Dead right,” Lachaume says.

Talking in whispers because of the girl and the silence all around made the place—the dive, as Valette called it—seem all the more mysterious. Small bars serving particular localities in Paris, especially at off-peak times in the early evening, when the owners turn down the lighting to save electricity, take on an eerie, conspiratorial air, reminiscent (for those with vivid imaginations) of the secret and illegal life of the city that Balzac once described, but for which Paris may have lost its appetite and capacity. Lachaume had spent his day walking around Paris as if he'd wanted to get lost or to disappear in it. However, ten generations of chief inspectors of police were watching over him. The jungle of hidden alleys has been tamed with great craft: only well-defined patches, like the plots set aside in parks for bushes and brambles, are allowed to subsist here and there. So he kept on finding his path ending in avenues wide enough for police vans to patrol. He came to a conclusion that put a frozen smile on his face: he needed to start his education all over again, as he'd not learned the main thing, which is how to go underground in Paris. He was just playing, of course. What else could he do?