On Leave (9 page)

 

CHAPTER SEVEN

Is it all right to bring flowers for the lady of the house when you're invited to lunch in a Communist working-class home? The question of the proper formalities tormented Lachaume as he stepped off the train in a town on the outskirts of Paris where he'd never set foot before. A bunch of flowers, or a bottle? He inclined toward wine, which seemed more appropriate. But wouldn't it irritate these people? He hadn't forgotten being sent by his mother to see an old woman in Arras—maybe she was a washerwoman—who wouldn't stop putting lumps of sugar in his coffee. The way the old woman had of thrusting the box of cubes toward him, as if to say, “We're not short of sugar lumps!” had made a strong impression on him when he was fifteen or sixteen. His memory of oversugared coffee was pretty much all he knew about the working class.

The railway station was on a hill, some distance from the town, which really only began in the valley, on the other side of the gray-watered Seine, glinting in the pale winter sun. But Lachaume could not take his eyes off the factory chimneys soaring into the clear sky all around, even in the middle of town. For him, those soot-blackened brick columns had a religious quality. It was as if he were an unbeliever about to convert, striding smartly into town and looking up at a church spire. But he kept on turning over the same question in his mind: Flowers or wine?

His mood was not without jollity, the first he'd felt in a long time. “Let's keep our eyes open,” he said to himself. “We'll soon see if flowers are fashionable around here.” The street he was on was named for Gabriel Péri, a Communist who'd been shot by the Nazis, and the walls were covered with brightly colored posters and painted slogans:
Peace in Algeria! Negotiate in Algeria!
And it wasn't long before he reached a square called Place Danielle-Casanova, after another famous Communist victim, where he saw a woman selling mimosas and people buying them. He bought a big bunch, which without his asking was wrapped in translucent paper, and then continued along the route he'd been given. The Valettes lived in Cité Marcel-Cachin, a newly built multistory public housing development you could make out at the end of a long, recently widened street called Avenue de Stalingrad, lined with chestnut saplings with their trunks still protected by sackcloth and straw. Lachaume approached gingerly, with a shy smile on his face and an armful of mimosas brightened by the sun. The shouting and laughter of children cut through the soft, airy quiet of this holiday morning, and through open windows, now and again, parents called them to “sit up to table.” Children in clogs galloped past him, firing toy pistols at the sky. Others, noticing the bouquet of mimosas, ran away guffawing and yelling: “He's got a girl! He's got a girl!” And he shook his bouquet at them, which really looked as if it was flaming in the bright noonday sun.

Actually, the bunch of flowers was so large and spectacular that people in the street turned around to look at it. Lachaume noticed that people were curious, and that only revived his initial worries when he was almost at the door of the Valettes' block. Wouldn't he upset these people with such an opulent bouquet? He thought about dividing it in two and looked around for a place to hide the rejected flowers, but the street was bare and he was already in range of the building, where maybe Valette was looking out for him from the window. At least he managed to get rid of the wrapping paper that made the bouquet look too ceremonial—that took a comical trick to do—and tried to hold the mimosas nonchalantly, carelessly, as if he'd just picked a few blooms from a passing bush.

The concierge smiled at him as she told him which floor. Obviously, his visit had been announced and word had gone out in case anyone came across a stray academic wandering around the development. The concierge's eagerness to help was another token of the consideration Valette had heaped on him these last twenty months. But in the hallway, as he straightened his hair with one hand and clung to the flowers with the other, the absurdity of Valette's solicitude suddenly turned into a burden and a relic. It belonged to the kind of relationship that had arisen at the start, at Koblenz, between “Professor” Lachaume, whose service had been deferred to allow him to get his degree, which made him an oldie and a man of experience—and already married—and the electrician Valette, who'd been called up at the age of twenty and who'd been nicknamed Vache-qui-rit, after the laughing-cow logo on the cheese label, because he had a smile that reached from ear to ear. At that time Valette was a special case, anyway, with his unbounded optimism and kindness. As soon as he got to know you, he would share everything he had—whatever was in the parcels he got from his parents, from the city council, or from the Young Communists, as well as his sunny and strongly held convictions, which involved only a very few precise ideas. So few, in fact, that at the start Lachaume talked down to him and easily won the argument, because Valette had an immense respect for Knowledge, an almost childlike admiration that he expressed eagerly with a whistle through his teeth, saying, “You know loads of things…”—as long as you didn't contradict his beliefs head-on. Lachaume was what was called in those days a “Mendésiste,” albeit a left-leaning one; so he'd kept up with Valette, out of curiosity, and also because he liked the man, and had indeed ended up teaching the youngster “loads of things.” Attentiveness to Lachaume's needs was one of the ways Valette expressed his respect for all the “things” his sergeant knew. But when the Algerian sun had melted them away one by one, when Lachaume had collapsed from fatigue and lapped water from a puddle in the mud like the rest of them, when he'd averted his gaze from the villages they'd set fire to, and by closing his eyes permitted, if only very slightly, his men to turn dying guerrillas over with their boots, when he'd stopped up his ears to the wailing of women and children in the
douars
that his section marched through; when, at close of day, in the acrid stench of dried sweat, he'd put his head in his hands and told Valette again and again to stop asking questions because he knew nothing about anything anymore, the soldier's care for him still remained, as a homage for all the “things” the arrogant young teacher had known before, or perhaps it was an act he was putting on to dispel the terror they both felt at the senselessness in their own minds.

But you couldn't count on him to keep up the play-acting. He knew nothing now, and he wasn't entitled to any special treatment or favor. Slowly, with the bouquet in his hand, with humility, he walked up the stairs (though it was new, the block didn't have an elevator), hoping only that his gift wasn't too large and that the people upstairs wouldn't find him suspicious if he held his fork in a way that might not be theirs.

As soon as the door opened, he liked the look of the two women he saw: they smiled at each other unaffectedly when they saw the mimosas, and he liked the bright sunny room with its beige walls and the way the flowers fitted right in with all he could see. Valette's sister slipped behind him and stretched her head out the door as if she was looking to see if someone else was in the corridor. He'd worried about that, but the matter was settled straightaway: no, Madame Lachaume would not be coming. “So that's it!” the girl seemed to answer as she closed the door smartly behind him. “She won't be coming. That's all.”

Madame Valette took the flowers from his hand and said with a kind of cheerful resignation: “We haven't got a vase that's big enough. I'll make two bunches … but do come in!”

She was about forty-five, with pale eyes that lit up her broad and open face, with her fair or else graying hair (it was hard to tell which, with the sun behind her) tied in a bun at the back of her head.

“Come on in! Come on in!” she kept saying cheerfully.

Nine places had been set on the white tablecloth. Unmatched chairs, perhaps borrowed from neighbors, were pushed up against the wall so as to allow passage to the sofa bed, beside which stood a low table set with glasses laid out in a circle on a lace napkin. On the dining table, too, the cheap cutlery had been neatly laid out on glass supports with perfect symmetry. The mistress of the glasses and knives was a twelve-year-old girl with round spectacles, who blushed as she came in.

“This is Danielle,” Madame Valette said. “And this is Colette, her big sister … Jean and his father will be back shortly.”

“They've gone to fetch the oysters,” the younger girl said without turning around, as if to correct her mother's casualness, and she carried on adjusting the table settings. “They'll be back in a minute.”

“Please sit down,” Madame Valette said. “Colette, get him to sit down. I'll go and give Granny a hand … The girls will take care of you,” she said with a smile.

“Do sit down,” Colette said, blushing mildly. And as Lachaume didn't want to be the only one seated, she perched on the arm of one of the chairs by the wall, leaving the sofa bed for him. So they ended up quite far apart, with the table between them, and because the younger girl kept moving around it, they had to lean this way and that to talk to each other.

Colette was quite short and slim, but not delicate. She had a pretty, lively, and quite long neck that held her rather narrow head up straight. She had fine pale eyes shaded by the depth of their sockets and a slender, quivering nose. But even when she was seated and silent, she seemed to be quivering all over. She wore a dark blue straight skirt, a crew-necked off-white silk blouse with a rather complicated pattern of bobbles on the sleeves and all sorts of ruffling on the front. You could tell it had just been ironed with great care.

“It's lovely here,” Lachaume said, waving vaguely at the room and its sun-filled window.

“Yes,” she said. “We have a good town council.”

“He ought to see the new school,” the younger sister said, with a serious look. “We've got walls made entirely of glass.”

“And they don't stop you working?” Lachaume asked with a smile.

“Oh no,” she said firmly. “Quite the opposite. It's not so tiring on the eyes.”

With half a smile Colette said, “The kids don't want to come home from school. [What did you say that for? her sister objected.] But Jean told me you were an English teacher…”

“Yes, I was,” he muttered.

“Aren't you still?”

“I'm a soldier.”

“That's not a job!” Colette responded vigorously, as if Lachaume had claimed the opposite. “Jean's a soldier, too, but he's an electrician [she stressed the word, almost as a challenge]. Same thing for you: You're a teacher. Soldier doesn't count.”

He nodded, quite taken with the tone of certainty in Colette. It's plain common sense, he thought, and smiled at her. Let's keep things simple.

“All right,” she went on. “I know what I said was a bit rigid, but the main thing is to think clearly.”

Madame Valette had come back from the kitchen.

“I don't understand what they're up to,” she said. “The oystermonger is just next door … and Luc hasn't come, either!”

“Oh, with Luc, that's no surprise!” Colette said with a giggle. “At the neighborhood committee he made us hang on for over an hour!”

Lachaume didn't ask who Luc was. They would tell him when the time was right. Sitting on the sofa with a shaft of mild sunlight on the top of his head, he cast an unassuming gaze at the three women. At least, he was trying to be unpretentious, modest, and open, and believed that he was; at least, he was trying to believe it.

“That's their problem!” Madame Valette said as she sat down on a chair by the wall. “Pour me an aperitif, Colette.”

Colette went out, and her mother smiled as if to fill the vacuum. Her gray hair and pale eyes shone with a light that went straight to your heart.

“Jean told me you were from Arras,” she said. “Guy Mollet is the town's mayor, isn't he?… You'll have to vote him out.”

Lachaume had never thought of the mayor of Arras, who was also the Prime Minister, in such a practical and personal way. He was delighted by the specific responsibility he'd apparently been given, and the power he was supposed to have.

Colette came back in and gave him a bottle of Martini to uncork.

“Do something useful,” she said.

“But of course,” he mumbled, standing up clumsily. The natural way she'd handed him the bottle and the automatic, almost intimate way she'd spoken to him made him want to give her a hug. She stood in front of him in her rippling blouse, holding out a hand for the opened bottle. The cork sprang out. She took the bottle and filled the glasses set out in a circle on the embroidered napkin.

“That's really lovely,” Lachaume said.

“Yes, it's from Romania,” she said.

“Have you been to Romania?”

“Yes,” she said with a touch of pride. “I attended the World Festival of Youth.”

In her mouth these words struck him as new and beautiful. He wanted to kiss her neck. For no reason, he told himself, no reason except her directness and her wonderful self-confidence. He'd been right to come.

“What's Valette doing?” he said. “Why isn't he here?”

He wanted to thank him for sending him that letter, otherwise he would not have been here. He wanted to put his hand on Valette's shoulder and give him a friendly punch, since in all decency he couldn't give his sister a hug.

Colette frowned.

“We're not going to wait for Jean before we have a drink. He's the one who's missing out!”

“Excuse me,” Lachaume said. “Among us, we call him plain Valette. We don't have any other Valettes, you see … But here, that would be absurd.”

“Is it true,” the younger sister asked, “that over there his friends call him Laughing Cow?”

“Yes, that's right,” Lachaume admitted, with an apologetic wave. “Not his buddies, actually … other people. It's stupid.”