On Leave (16 page)

He stood up, smoothed out the crumpled shirt and trousers he'd slept in as best he could, and grunted that he was coming as he picked his way between the empty bottles and glasses on the floor. Valette, who'd been using the other side of the bed, sat up as well and muttered something or other.

“Georges, darling, are you there?” Lachaume recognized the voice straightaway but couldn't believe it.

“Yes, I am,” he said after a pause, trying to gain enough time to hide the bottles. He was still combing his hair with his fingers when he opened the door to his mother.

She threw herself into his arms, kissed and patted him, cooing sweetly—until she noticed Valette staring in amazement from under the eiderdown at this tall and well-built lady in a black hat.

“How did you track me down?” Lachaume asked as he rubbed his eyes glumly.

She tapped the end of her nose to signify she had her sources. It must have been a family code, because Lachaume smiled, apparently in spite of himself, because he seemed at the same time to be cross that she was making him smile.

“Who is this young man?” she said
sotto voce
, pointing to Valette (who promptly shut his eyes and pretended to be asleep).

Lachaume thought for a moment and then said, “He's a soldier who missed his train.”

“I came straightaway,” she went on, speaking quietly so as not to wake the sleeping soldier. “Oh, my poor boy, when I heard you were here all alone, that you'd been dropped by that … No need to say any more. Well, when I heard, I got the first train down.”

“But where did you hear it?”

“Now, don't take it too much to heart,” she continued without pausing for breath, looking at her son with kind, commanding eyes. “That wretched woman's behavior speaks for itself. Leaving your husband when he's away in the army is a foul thing to do, and it has to extinguish any feeling you had for her. You're not still fond of her, are you?”

“Listen, Mom,” Lachaume began in an undertone, after glancing at Valette, who was still pretending to be asleep. “It wasn't her. It was me. Mother, I don't know how to explain…”

“Don't say a word, my boy,” she interrupted, stroking his forehead. “You're just like your father. When he got hurt he went and hid in a corner and said nothing. You have the same kind of pride.” She took out her handkerchief. “Oh! My darling, I'm not blaming you, not in the slightest … for having kept me in the dark about your leave.”

“Stop crying, Mom,” he whispered. “It wasn't my fault, it just happened. Next time I'll come and stay…”

“So when are you going back?” she exclaimed.

“Soon…”

“When?”

He paused.

“In a few days,” he said eventually, and almost inaudibly, so Valette wouldn't hear him lying to his mother. But good old Valette was still pretending to be asleep, despite the sounds of voices, for which Lachaume was immensely grateful.

“I'm staying at Aunt Évelyne's, she wouldn't understand if I didn't … Why didn't you stay with her?”

“I really didn't think of it,” Lachaume answered.

“At least it's nicer than here,” she went on with a sigh. “Oh, my poor boy, what a state you're in. You used to be so neat and smart and happy … You used to…” She couldn't finish her sentence, but wiped her eyes with her handkerchief. Lachaume saw how unsteady her hand had become. It was like an old woman's hand, and it upset him.

He put his arms around his mother, it was the first time he'd done that of his own accord since he'd been in short trousers, and as he comforted her without embarrassment, he suddenly realized that his adolescence was now truly dead and buried.

“I saw Madame Le Noble, the mother of your school friend who's now a local official,” she whispered, “and she's promised me to have a word with people who work for M———. And she will, you'll see. They'll give you a job as an interpreter in Germany, working with the Americans. And the Americans will hang on to you, because you'll get on well with them; with your sports talents, they'll want to hang on to you…”

Lachaume had borrowed the handkerchief to wipe his own eyes, and he nodded gently in agreement with everything his mother was saying. For eighteen months they'd been talking about Madame Le Noble putting in a word for him, about U.S. authorities blocking his transfer to Algeria, and so on …

“Sure, Mom, sure,” he kept on saying. “It'll all work out.”

She calmed down gradually. It was half past eleven. She was having lunch at Aunt Évelyne's, where it was usually served on the dot of noon. Lachaume didn't want to go. Anyway, he wasn't ready, and as a proud mother, Madame Lachaume did not want her son to turn up looking scruffy. What with all the gossip the divorce was going to set off, she could do without that. She made him promise to come for dinner at Aunt Évelyne's that same evening.

“With your head high, young man!” she said affectionately.

But she dithered as she was about to leave. You could guess she'd had an intuition. Lachaume watched her with beating heart. Had she guessed? If she were to ask, he wouldn't be able to hide the fact that he was leaving that night, at twelve-forty. Should he tell her now, so she could get used to the idea of his going back, or should he spare her until the evening? She had her hand on the doorknob and looked at him in a strange way, unable to make up her mind.

“What's the matter, Mother?” he asked after a while. His throat was dry.

“You're going to make fun of me,” she began uncertainly, “but promise me you'll accept…”

He nodded.

“Promise me you'll accept, in memory of your poor father and to give your mother great pleasure…”

He nodded again, with a glance at Valette, who was still pretending to be asleep.

“I didn't dare give it to you when you left for Algeria,” she went on, scrabbling about in her handbag. “I was afraid that woman … that Françoise … would say something unpleasant … But now you'll not refuse to keep it on you.” And she took from her bag a small white elephant on a neck chain.

“It's very pretty,” Lachaume mumbled.

“It's a lucky charm your father gave me the day before we got married,” she said with feeling. “It will protect you … You will wear it, won't you?… For my sake…”

“Yes, Mom,” he said. “Anyway, I was born under the sign of the elephant…”

“Don't be silly!” she said, scolding him affectionately. “The elephant isn't one of the signs of the zodiac. You were born on October 25, my dear, so you're a scorpion.”

“Six of one…” he said. “I'm fine with being either, elephant or scorpion.”

She beamed with pleasure to see him accept the charm so easily. On the train from Arras she'd worried herself sick about his accepting the gift. And now her darling Georges was quite amenable to it, and was even kissing her to say thank you. Tears of happiness welled up in her eyes.

Once the door had shut, Lachaume went over to the bed. Valette was still feigning sleep.

“Well, there you are,” he said. “That was my mother.”

Since he was supposed to be sleeping, Valette pretended to wake up with a start. He was a kind man.

Lachaume was swinging the white elephant on its chain over his face.

“Take a good look,” he said. “It's our generation's emblem.”

“What is it?” Valette asked, as if he didn't know.

“Come on! Shake a leg!” Lachaume said as he put the charm back in his pocket.

Noticing there was still a drop of rum left in the bottle, he downed it in one gulp.

He washed and shaved, and as Valette tried to spruce up his uniform, Lachaume unpacked his own from his suitcase and put it on, whistling all the while.

“You're putting it on already?” Valette asked.

“Up to the hilt!” Lachaume exclaimed as he admired himself in the full-length mirror on the wardrobe door. He screwed up his eyes and sneered as if he were his own sergeant-major. No two ways about it, he thought, it is an ugly color. I am making an impartial observation. As for this yellow rope we wear on our shoulders when the Burghers of Calais were granted the right to wear it round their necks, the aiglet of our glorious regiment is merely a depressing reminder of the natural tendency of khaki to mature into a dirty yellow.

He knocked back another drop of rum.

“We must write a petition—since petitions are all the rage nowadays—to demand new uniforms,” he went on. “Anyway, khaki isn't suited to Africa.”

“Just as well,” Valette said.

“What you just said, Corporal Valette, is utterly stupid,” Lachaume declared as he swung around on his heels to admire the puffed-out back of his tunic. “One day you will see the error of your ways and add your voice to mine to express through the appropriate hierarchical channels our wish to be kitted out with apparel more suited to Africa, and so on and so forth.”

“Stop it, please!” Valette said, raising both his hands and referring to the unbearably high-flown rhetoric that Lachaume, now overexcited and unstoppably talkative, was teasing him with.

“… I would suggest fern-shaped headgear and zebra-stripe shirts, so that…”

“Stop! Stop!”

“Why should I?” Lachaume retorted with sudden anger. “You mean to say you like this uniform?”

“I don't give a damn,” Valette said. “Talk about something else.”

“Aha! You don't give a damn? Is that perhaps because you expect to part with it soon?”

As Valette gestured as if to say that maybe one day they would indeed celebrate their ardently wished-for demob, Lachaume looked him straight in the eye with an odd expression and slowly waved his index finger back and forth to contradict his unspoken assumption.

“No, old fellow,” he said. “You can't rely on that. You were born a soldier. You will remain a soldier. Like me. Like Lasteyrie. Like everyone our age. We had a few illusions about our station in life, we even chose a career, put time into studying or learning on the job, but our destiny had already been decided. We were deemed fit for service for thirty years of war…”

“You're off your rocker!”

“No, old chum, what lies in store for men our age is thirty years of war, maybe twenty-five if we're lucky. Why should it stop? For starters we're going to reconquer Morocco and Tunisia. Then the front will move into Mauretania, and then it'll get to Sudan. Then Niger will take up arms, Chad will do the same, then Ubangi-Chari, and then the rest of it … So there we'll be in the heart of Africa, pacifying virgin forest, with Arabs behind and Zulus ahead. That's when the French Resident will suddenly notice that the Zulus don't look like the Zulus he remembers from the comics he'd read as a boy. So they'll have to be pacified as well … Believe you me, Valette, there is no earthly reason why it should ever stop. If we lose two thousand men a month, then twenty-five years of war will cost barely one-third of the losses we took in four short years from 1914 to 1918. We can afford it! It's actually the last little luxury France will be able to afford—a twenty-five-year colonial war to take back Africa. That should be just about enough to guarantee the nation's great power status, and then we'll be able to rest. Our place in Universal History will be guaranteed. The African
Reconquista
—it will make tremendous reading. But who is actually going to do the reconquering? We are, pal. All of us … With a spot of luck we'll step out of the jungle in a quarter of a century somewhere near Zanzibar…”

“Where's that?” Valette asked.

“Right at the bottom.”

He left the room in silence. In the hall downstairs Lachaume leaned over the counter to speak to the black receptionist.

“Where are you from?” he asked.

“From Douala, sir. Does sir know Douala?”

“I'll be going there.”

“Soon?” the black asked excitedly.

“Ten years' time,” Lachaume answered.

“Ha! Ha! Ha! Sir must be joking,” the black said politely.

 

CHAPTER TEN

The last hours were easy.

To begin with, Lachaume and Valette looked for Lasteyrie in local hotels. Valette could remember that Lasteyrie had refused to share the room with the two of them, so he'd stuffed his things back into his case and set off to find a bed for himself. But nobody had seen him since. Lachaume went up to Lena's just in case.

“Shhh,” Lasteyrie said as he opened the door. “She's still asleep.”

He was lathered up and about to shave. He, too, had put on his uniform.

“You…” Lachaume said, offended to find him there.

But Lasteyrie's eyes made him shut his mouth. For the first time they betrayed stark and total distress, all the more because, in their unusual stillness, they seemed dilated and enlarged.

“Give me two ticks, lads,” he said softly. “So I can shave and spruce up. The main thing,” he added, “is to leave in style.”

Meanwhile, Lena had woken up.

“Ach, Laachaume, my brother,” she said, stifling a giggle from the depths of the bed deeply shaded by the curtains. She was holding her arms out for him.

Lachaume gave in. At any rate, that was his state of mind when, after glumly pacing around the room, he went and sat on the edge of the bed and took Lena's warm hand. There was a faint smell of pine wafting from the bathroom next door, where Lasteyrie had just taken a bath in water that was green from the granules that Germans like to add to their bathwater, a smell reminiscent of the Black Forest, wind-whipped cheeks, and the crunch of pine needles beneath entwined bodies.

Lena gently stroked the back of his hand. Sure, sure, we're beyond quarreling over that kind of thing … he thought, almost humming it to himself.

From that point on, the sound and melody of speech blanked out meaning. Lachaume heard everything, whether it was uttered or just imagined, as if it were being hummed to some familiar tune through closed lips by someone on the other side of a wall. Words were now as far away from him as a memory. In other words, he had already left Paris.