On Leave (4 page)

“It's for my father,” Lasteyrie said, with a shrug. “He doesn't know I got demoted … He'll go on and on about it. About my getting into trouble wherever I go, being a useless individual, and so on and so forth … You don't know what he's like.”

“Don't tell the prof,” he added on the way back to the compartment. “He'll only poke more fun at me…”

Meanwhile, the train had reached the outer suburbs. There were factories, warehouses, reservoirs, and even small groups of apartment houses with ground-floor cafés, looking very Parisian.

“Here we are! That's Paname!” Valette shouted, using the Parisians' pet name for the city. He leaned forward and shook Lachaume, repeating: “Paname! Paname!”

“Calm down,” Lachaume said. “How long till we get in?” And as there were still fifteen minutes to go, he wanted to lie down again, but this time Valette made him get up and come and stand alongside him and Lasteyrie at an open window in the corridor.

“Just look!” Valette said to him. “We're home, we're back … Boy, have I been waiting for this!…” He had tears in his eyes, and he put his arm out the window to wave at passersby in the streets and at the workmen on the other track, and at a thousand suburban windows with washing hanging out, which sometimes responded to his greeting. “Hey, see that? A metro station!”

“And when you think we're not even entitled to free rides on the metro…” Lasteyrie said.

In a clatter of screeching points the train slowly drew into the station. Well before it halted, Valette and Lasteyrie were perched on the running board with their kit bags on their shoulders so as to be the first to jump off. Then they ran for the exit. The last man through the turnstile had to buy the first round. They'd agreed on that ages ago.

But Lachaume, who was taking his time and walking as if in a dream, saw his two companions in some kind of argument with an MP patrol, whose chief was checking their leave papers. That made him furious, so he speeded up, swinging his free arm and with a scowl on his face.

“What did those idiots want?” he yelled as he caught up with his buddies.

“Apparently we're lacking in decorum,” Lasteyrie said. “Running is not allowed this side of the Med.”

They came out of Gare de Lyon, down a few steps, and took their first, wary dip in the ocean of Paris. Soon they were in a café in a state of silent wonderment. Paris seeped into them through their eyes and ears. They were fascinated by the street and stood with their backs to the bar, not hearing the waiter asking them for the third time what they wanted to drink.

“It's funny,” Valette said at last, “I feel like stopping someone in the street so as to say: I'm Jean Valette, and I'm still alive, I'm okay, and here I am back again for a short break; then I'd shake his hand, just like that!”

“You might as well pick a girl if you're going to do that,” Lasteyrie said. “But where have all the pretty ones gone?” he shouted, casting his eye all the way around the café, which was empty at that time of the morning. “Seeing as we're in Paris!”

The three men drank their coffee; Lachaume settled the bill; the time had come for them to break up, but they were held back by some strange hesitation.

“Give me your address,” Valette said to Lachaume. “If you like, you could come and have lunch one day at my parents' place … With your wife, of course…”

Valette blushed, unsure whether he had done the right thing by mentioning Lachaume's wife.

“That would be a pleasure,” Lachaume said.

It took another moment to write down the address. Then since nobody could decide to be the first to leave, Lasteyrie coughed up for a round of rum, which they drank slowly.

“Come on,” Lachaume said at last. “I'm off. Cheers!”

“See you later,” Valette said.

“Ciao, Prof!” Lasteyrie said. “And if you find I'm not on time on the third, don't bother to wait for me!”

 

CHAPTER TWO

They called him Prof because after he got his first degree in English, he'd taught at a private school near Port-Royal while studying for the
agrégation
, the qualifying exam for an academic career. But for him, everything that had to do with his life before call-up seemed lost in a phenomenally far-off time. His only link with the past was his wife, whom he carried on thinking of as his out of habit, though she was about to leave him. In truth, the more he thought about it, the more the breakup seemed to be in the nature of things. What miracle could have made this love last longer than all the rest?

He was walking alongside the Seine, level with the Jardin des Plantes. The Cathedral of Notre-Dame rose up in front of him like a second-rate stage set and made him angry. He wasn't going to play a part in that comedy. But he couldn't say which part, or which play. His anger was abstract.

The sun shone that day as if it were spring, making everything look slightly artificial. Passersby put on smiles as sickly sweet as the air; at pedestrian crossings affable policemen with batons under their arms spread good cheer. Lachaume strove to banish from his mind all temptation to be sentimental.

He ended up on the rear platform of a bus he'd been in the habit of taking to go home. The route hadn't changed, and just before his stop, he saw himself as he had been three years before, at the back of a bus just like this one, with a bunch of deep red roses in his arms, going up the same steep street beside a quiet garden—that was still there, too. It was at the start of his affair with Françoise. He'd just moved in with her with his books and six new shirts in a suitcase, and a bunch of roses with thorns that pricked him through his jacket.

Lachaume had no mercy for the young man he had been: such futile memories just made him angrier. Leaning his elbows on the rear railing at the back of the bus, he drew on his pipe in sudden bursts, jutting out his chin as if he were giving a forceful diatribe. At such moments his face, with its strong and regular features, apart from his dented nose, really did look high and mighty. But nobody took any notice, because people do not see the face of a soldier at first glance. All they see is the uniform.

He was lucky enough to avoid local shopkeepers who might have recognized him and asked him questions, and he evaded the concierge of his block as well. He opened his apartment door with the key he had kept on him like a talisman ever since call-up.

It was a small two-room dwelling in a modern building; that's to say, put up around 1920. What was nice about it (Lachaume used to wax lyrical about this in years gone by) was that it did not have any other building immediately opposite, so it had a view over the tops of trees and a few low structures to the far horizon. Light poured in, and even pale sunshine made the colored glass spheres that Françoise had hung up in the bedroom (and which, as a reader of
Elle
, she called the lounge) twinkle merrily. Nothing had changed, or almost nothing: the glass spheres were where they used to be, but dustier, as if Françoise paid less attention to them now, and the bed, though it was made, wasn't covered with the bedspread that Françoise used to insist on from start of day. On the other hand, Lachaume's pillow was in its place, in the flower-printed slipcase that turned it into a cushion during the daytime.

He was struck by these details involuntarily as he sat near the window in the big wicker armchair where Françoise used to like to take the sun with her skirt raised over her beautiful thighs.

In the second room, called the office, where he had his bookshelves, he didn't notice any significant difference either, except the arbitrary tidiness of the place, which made it feel boring. It was here, in this room, which was his own room, that he first felt like an intruder, among all those books that had nonetheless been his long before he had met Françoise. He cast a cold eye over them, formed a friendly thought for them just as coolly, and then began to look for the civilian clothes he had been dreaming of for twenty-one months.

There used to be shelving inside the wardrobe where his shirts were piled high; a small drawer where you could dip in your hand and pull out a pair of socks; one side of the hanging space was where his trousers and jackets hung, and beneath them there was room for his shoes. Lachaume went from one of these spots to the other and found nothing. It was the same in the bathroom. Under the shower, blind from soap in his eyes, he stretched out toward the shelf with a gesture resurrected from the past and his hand fell only on objects he didn't recognize.

It was perfectly plausible that Françoise, who hadn't had prior warning of his return, had simply failed to get Lachaume's clothes out of the trunk where he found them in the end, in mothballs; and you could also believe that shifting toiletries was of no significance at all. You can believe what you like, Lachaume thought to himself, but it's a weird feeling all the same to be back home and to feel that you aren't.

He put on a pair of trousers that were now loose on him and a white shirt, and sat down again by the window with a small volume of Shakespeare. But scarcely had he read a couple of speeches than he could see himself reading Shakespeare in a white shirt in a wicker armchair, and the vision intensified the anger that would not let go of him. Cut it out! he thought as he closed the book. I am not Lawrence of Arabia!… And his anger turned against that artificially sunny sky, against the illusion of spring in midwinter.

Whenever the sun came out, Françoise usually came home at lunchtime and sat in her wicker chair nibbling cheese and fruit; her office job didn't require her presence at regular hours. Reckoning she would be back today, since it was sunny, Lachaume got lunch ready.

The hardest thing was to face the local shopkeepers, especially the butcher, who used to do him a favor or two. “Your lady is going to be pleased … She's been kind of queer recently…” He clutched the supplies he'd snatched from the enemy and ran back up the stairs four by four. And then time passed, and the fat on the food cooled into a coating of grease.

When Lachaume woke, night was falling. He lay on the bed watching the shadows creep across the room. It was as if the house sprite was about to fly away like an owl in the dusk. The furniture glimmered and creaked in a way that was reminiscent of the past. Above all, there was an unrelenting smell that came from everywhere and moved Lachaume, as he felt the warmth of the soft double bed beneath him. Françoise seemed to be there, he thought he could hear her walking on the other side of the partition wall, she was getting nearer, her perfume reached him first. He jumped up jerkily, switched on the light, and went to the kitchen to drink a large glass of water. He was still in thrall to abstract anger. He gobbled down the cold lunch he'd not touched at noon, then went back to the bedroom and made an effort to take stock of the situation dispassionately.

“Let's see. Françoise wrote this to me:

“Our separation has had its good side. It allowed me to look into myself more clearly. Don't you see, Georges, perhaps we were wrong about each other. In any case, we got married too young. We must have the courage to understand that, and I know you would resent it if I hid my deeper feelings from you, even if I did so because of the difficult circumstances you are in at the moment…”

Each time he had read this letter over the last month, the expression “difficult circumstances” made him furious, he didn't know why. As for the rest of it, he couldn't see anything to object to, even now. “Françoise,” he told himself, “did not marry a doughty pacifier of the Nemencha Mountains or a coarse-voiced trooper blaring out
Ta-ra-ra Boom-de-ay
—no, she married a young teacher of English who played basketball like she did, was interested in the theater, and who made her laugh. Of course, the hard slog of military service loomed before us—but I thought I would be based at Versailles, just around the corner, because of the strings I could pull. In short, I cheated her. Why should she put up with the consequences any longer? Twenty-one months is long enough for a woman her age … My only excuse is that I didn't know myself who I was. I thought I was a rooster, but what came out of the eggshell was a duck. In any case, I was only an egg …

“But let's suppose,” he went on, talking to himself, “let's suppose she'd agreed to wait for me until the end (but when will the end come?…). Suppose she was brave enough … foolish enough, it would still have been a deception, because the boy she loved—I suppose she did—is dead, well and truly dead. It might have been different if we'd changed together. But how could I ever have got her to understand what has happened over there…”

Lachaume spent the entire evening waiting to hear her footfall on the staircase. After all, nothing had yet been decided, a voice whispered inside his head. When they finally saw each other, their love would bring them back together. They would understand each other wordlessly. And his desire for that woman assailed him in those two rooms where everything bore the trace of her presence—her perfume, which would not let go of him; her little oddities, like the way she had of folding her smooth, soft woolens over the back of a chair.

“But dammit, I love the woman,” he mumbled. “She should come home now.”

When it struck midnight, he reckoned that the last metro would bring her back within the hour, and when the time of the last metro had passed, he reckoned she would be back by two, because the Left Bank bars where they sometimes used to go closed at two.

She still wasn't home at two-thirty. He got up out of the armchair with a start because a dreadful thought crossed his mind: Maybe Françoise would come back with someone else. He knew nothing about her present life, maybe she had a lover (she surely did have a lover, he corrected himself), and since she hadn't been warned of his return … He stood stock-still, hesitating, straining to hear footsteps on the stairs. What should he do? Run the risk of surprising her with the other man? That wouldn't help. (In such circumstances women dig in their heels, out of pride…)