On Leave (17 page)

Lasteyrie's civilian suit, which had been so splendid, lay on the floor in a corner. But those yards of crumpled fabric didn't suggest the excitement of an encounter with a woman; time had already washed the erotic away. What was left were the remains of something blue that reminded Lena of those other remains in khaki she'd glimpsed the night before. Things had come full circle. No point in struggling anymore. Anyway, Lasteyrie had given up the struggle.

He even wanted Lena to take a snapshot of the three of them. “Believe you me,” he said, “a shot of three prize idiots like us will be worth its weight in gold…”

They left the hotel in the early afternoon, with their cases and kit bags. With her camera on a shoulder strap, Lena looked like a tourist. She followed behind, obediently.

Paris got them in its grip once they reached Pont Saint-Michel. They sauntered along the left bank of the Seine toward Pont-Neuf. The sky was gray; the trees of Vert-Galant, on the Île de la Cité, were bare and spindly; the Seine, dull and dishwatery—yet the beauty of the city got them in the guts, because it comes from the sudden vistas, the proportions of the buildings, the quais and the river, and the volume of air between the two banks. Along that riverside walk, Paris is at the limit of what the eye can take in at a single glance without having to wander. The dose has been cleverly calculated to bring anyone who really uses his eyes to the brink of intoxication. But you have not much more than a hundred yards to drink in all the heart-wrenching beauty that stings your insides like strong spirits. You either lower your eyes or take it neat.

When they got to Pont-Royal, their hearts clenched with jealousy at the sight of a tree they could see on the opposite bank. It was a large plane tree whose roots had outgrown the space it stood in. However, the Highway Authority hadn't balked at enlarging the space for the tree on the riverside, at the expense of spoiling the alignment of the quai with a bulge. Workmen had built a semicircular wooden coffer of the kind used for building bridges and filled it with a lot of soil. The job was almost done; a few men in boots were still lovingly raking the fresh earth around the plane tree with its regally graceful crown of branches.

“A fancy job!” Lasteyrie said.

They were standing side by side with their elbows on the parapet and a feeling of unfairness in their hearts.

“It's logical,” Lasteyrie said eventually. “A tree like that isn't as easy to replace as a trooper.”

“And it costs a lot more,” Valette said. “Do you realize how much work went into it?”

“Everything you can see is worth more than a trooper,” Lasteyrie said. “Look at that lamppost. It's worth more than the three of us put together.”

“Not quite,” Lachaume said. “Apparently keeping a soldier in Algeria costs 100,000 francs a month.”

“Okay, let's see,” Valette said. “That means the three of us would have already cost four million…”

“You don't know the first thing about business,” Lasteyrie went on wearily. “A hundred thou isn't cost price, it's the turnover they make off our backs. Now, what would be interesting to know is what the markup on troopers is. A small-scale garment maker takes twenty percent. In bars you can take as much as forty percent. But who knows what the cut is on men in the forces. That's the real official secret.”

“By that reckoning,” Valette said, “we're important customers. They should look after us the way they look after that tree.”

“But there's no shortage of customers in this trade,” Lasteyrie said.

They'd started walking again, following the river, toward Place de la Concorde. The cars to the left of them swept down into a tunnel, and the pedestrian path rose up over it. For the first time Lachaume realized that there were ups and downs between Saint-Michel and Concorde. He'd learned to observe the terrain. Paris was alive beneath his feet.

Gusts of wind swept clouds of grime and dead leaves before them. On the Seine, two big pink sheets—heart-wrenchingly pink—flapped noisily on the drying line of a shiny potbellied barge moored near the Pont du Carrousel, the
Maria-César
, property of K. Van Canteire, Antwerpen.

They read it out in turn as if to learn it by heart. As if one day it might be a matter of life and death for them to find the
Maria-César
in Antwerp's labyrinthine canals.

“How about a photo of you all in front of the barge?” Lena said.

“What would that make us look like?” Lasteyrie said broodily.

“Ach, Robert,” she exclaimed, pointing at the barge. “Don't you think those pink sheets are just a-ma-zing?… Laachaume, Laachaume,” she persisted, “don't
you
think they're pretty?”

Passersby turned their heads with stern or ironical expressions, because of Lena's accent.

“No, it's just us,” Lasteyrie said as he took her arm. “We're what's not pretty.”

“May I alert you to the fact that standing orders forbid you to be seen in public with a woman on your arm,” Lachaume said after a few paces, intending to sound humorous.

Lasteyrie gave Lachaume a funny look and moved ostentatiously away from Lena, as if he wanted to make Lachaume ashamed of having irritated him.

On Quai Anatole-France, the plane trees were more numerous and formed a shimmering arch overhead. The blackened seedpods hadn't yet fallen, and the gusting wind made them tinkle like a thousand bells. Then the Parliament building loomed before them, with its colonnade and blank front wall, and the solitary bayonet protecting it on the rifle of a lonely guardsman calmly pacing up and down in the small raised garden.

This they did not joke about, nor did Lena suggest taking a photograph with Parliament as a backdrop.

Three close-set lanes of cars made their way over the hump of Pont de la Concorde and poured into the chaos of the square, where the wan reflections of their bodywork against a backdrop of gray stone spoke confusedly of the boredom and emptiness of the lives their drivers led. It was hard to believe that each car was on its way to a different destination. It was Lachaume's undoing to start looking at the people inside the cars and to catch the eyes of people walking past. They were all manifestly indifferent to him. And worse. He just had to look at a young woman for an instant for her to move out of his way. Three soldiers out on the town can be extremely vulgar, after all. Paris likes its soldiers only when they're parading tamely on the other side of white crowd-control barriers. But it looks down on them and doesn't want to see them when they're close up. In no other city are people so full of crude nationalist bluster and yet so easily ruffled, so refined, so tasteful, and so selfish. Paris, being elegant, is ashamed of its badly dressed soldiers: yet it constantly consumes whole cohorts of them, painting itself with their blood, morning, noon, and night, like a tart using lipstick. That's what was going through Lachaume's mind as he crossed Pont de la Concorde.

Lasteyrie was dawdling behind them, and he kept on turning around to look back at the Left Bank as if he would never see it again. Valette was ahead, with Lena, who wanted to take a snapshot of them at the foot of the obelisk. She would not take no for an answer.

“How subtle!” Lachaume said with an unpleasant laugh.

But constant waves of traffic broke on the gray roadway and blotted out the sound of his voice. He suddenly realized he would never forget how the grinding of the motors as they accelerated over the humpback bridge summed up in one sound the utter indifference of the city.

Why had they gone up the Champs-Élysées? Why, for ten hours at a stretch, had they fallen in behind Lasteyrie when he pointed down a street saying “This way!” or when he'd told them to do something crazy? Lachaume and Valette would not understand until later, when they could think back on Lasteyrie as he was on his last day. He'd been jittery, whimsical, and overexcited; he flew off the handle at the merest slight, then sneered and shrugged his shoulders—but Lasteyrie, who'd always strutted about with a straight back like a peacock, could switch in an instant to being affectionate, too affectionate even, and he would lean on Lachaume's shoulder, run his fingers through Valette's hair, and flop about with one, then the other. Lena was the only one who perhaps guessed what was gnawing at him and tearing him apart.

The proportions of the buildings and of the public spaces on the Champs-Élysées are handsome, too. Seen from Place de la Concorde, the rising incline of the avenue produces a delightful perspective where street and sky merge. The huge mass of the Arc de Triomphe seems to hover weightlessly in the distance. It looks as flimsy as a party decoration hung on the
beaux quartiers
that surround it, worn provocatively or with assumed gravity, depending on whether you approach it face-on from the Champs-Élysées or at a slant, from one of the radial avenues. But the view is always spoiled by afterthoughts.

Paris may put on an air of grandeur along the quais, but that's because there's a river flowing alongside; the Seine itself accounts for the monumental design. But what is there to justify the pretentious excess of the Champs-Élysées? What is the great breadth of the roadway for?

All of it, Lachaume thought, is related to motorcars. That's the sense in which the whole of France “can't take its eyes off the Champs-Élysées” (it's something he'd heard people say in Arras). The smile he smiled at that moment might have gone to the heart of a passerby, but nobody takes any notice of the face of a soldier unless it's been badly messed up. Anyway, the only thing people were interested in were the cars, which aroused passionate and contradictory feelings in them. Whether an American sedan went down the avenue with a rear end as proud as a peacock's fan or a sleek Jaguar swished away in the other direction, people's faces expressed envy and desire of every shade and variety, from hatred to disdain, by way of amusement and xenophobia, as well as admiration, amazement, sadness, aspiration, and hope. When one of the cars mounted the pavement, scattering the crowd to make a parking space for itself, the proximity of the motor aroused even stronger feelings. Respectable gentlemen went so far as to hit cars with their walking sticks, in fits of indignation, and knots of people gathered around. People who normally never expressed their opinions in public addressed each other angrily, while leather-jacketed youths with James Dean hairstyles smirked sadly and slipped off through the crowds, who were looking alternately at the cars in the street and in the showroom windows, mixed with buyers coming out of the showrooms with new keys in their hands and beaming, self-satisfied customers going in to settle down in their seats at the sales counters, shifting their legs so as to show off their trousers to best advantage. And then there were people with children in tow who were teaching the youngsters the names of all the different makes.

“At the end of the day,” Lachaume said, “the only problem we have to solve is to decide which car we're going to buy when we come back.”

“Yes,” Lasteyrie said. “The big question is: Simca Aronde or Renault Dauphine?”

They'd been talking in loud voices. People turned their heads, and someone cracked a joke … that simply can't be repeated.

The three of them went white as sheets and, with Lena following behind, turned off the Champs-Élysées down a side street which got them to Avenue de Wagram without going past the Arc de Triomphe.

“They ain't half got a sense of humor!” Lasteyrie finally said. “You just can't imagine how funny Parisians can be.”

His voice was breaking.

They tumbled into a bar on Place des Ternes. Mirror-walls reflected their image on all sides. They kept their heads down, drank, and took turns playing pinball on a machine that happened to be there. Digits appeared with a chiming sound against a background of windswept girls in pink swimsuits water-skiing on bright blue ocean waves. Each time a pinball dropped into the hole in the middle labeled
Central Park
a bird lit up and waggled its tail in the waves, and the counter located in the sky clicked up numbers in the hundreds of thousands. Once you'd been to Central Park, you had two options: you could either try to light up eight birds that popped up in the seascape as you went along or else “make a score” by nudging the machine until the number 4,725,000 appeared on the counter in the sky. In fact, there was another winning combination involving both birds and numbers, but Lasteyrie was the only one who understood how to work it.

“Your turn,” he said to Lena, handing her a coin (they were taking turns, and Lena's followed his). Lena said nothing as she took her place and put her finger on the flipper button. As she bounced the first two or three of her balls, they had a drink at the bar and then wandered back to the flipper to see how the last pinballs were going. Lasteyrie was almost the only one to say a word.

“Gently does it, flash on the three…”

But Lena was losing: she didn't have enough birds in the sea, nor did she have 4,725,000 in the sky.

“You have to feed the machines for a while before you can win” was what Lasteyrie said.

He nodded to Valette, since it was his turn, and as he started, the other two went back to the bar.

“3,450,000 in three goes,” Lasteyrie said on coming back to the game. “Only 1,275,000 to go.”

But the last two balls shot straight down to
Way Out
.

“I got to 3,625,000, all the same,” Valette crowed.

“The birds are easier,” Lachaume opined as he took his turn at the game. But he only managed to summon up seven of them, instead of the eight that were needed. Lasteyrie took over. He came up only 150,000 short of a win. He gave a coin to Lena.

“Is it my turn?” she asked.

“Over to you,” he said, pointing to the flipper, and she went back to it eagerly.

“Why do you always say yes?” Lachaume suddenly protested. “Why always yes?”