The Avignon Quintet (130 page)

He would, he thought, give orders for time fuses to be set along the whole length of the train, and these they could light as they departed. He imagined himself, some miles off in the hills towards Nîmes, suddenly hearing the dull, ground-rocking boom of the explosive and seeing the sky behind him grow white suddenly, as if drained of blood, and then red, deep red! How he hated this town – and more so now when everything was shut and bolted with not so much as a cat on the streets. Half the population lived in the cellars underneath the cathedral, secure from bombs but with no sanitary facilities. Moreover they seemed unable to organise themselves in any fashion whatsoever. What filth, what misery!

But the fuses would entail special knowledge, and the only sappers left in the command were a small Austrian unit whose job would be to sink the ferries and dynamite the eastern approaches to the town. He decided that he would call upon them to prime the train. But when they were driven down to the bridge and learned what was expected of them they suddenly mutinied and flatly refused to be a party to such an act which might inflict incalculable damage on the town. This severe blow illustrated how low morale had fallen in the occupying force and it could only be met in one way, according to Fitter’s military code. The sappers were pinioned and set against a wall in the inner fortress which had already – to judge by the traces of bullet marks along it – served as a point of execution. So as the long column tapered away into the night, crossing the river and taking the road to Nîmes, it left behind fifteen more dead and the silent train. The grateful townsfolk later buried them in consecrated ground and covered their graves in roses.

In the town nothing stirred; most people had either gone underground or taken to their heels with whatever provisions they could lay hands on. All the doors and gates of the fortress hung open. The departing troops had expressed themselves in a manner which had become for them conventional in war. Everywhere, there was excrement, on tables, on chairs, in doorways, on stairs. And of course notices warning of booby traps, another speciality of the German army. Smirgel had spent his last few uniformed days in an unconspicuous manner, though it was clear that he, like all the other agencies around him, was winding up his affairs and preparing to move off with the regrouping. He had allowed his cipher clerk to pack up the impedimenta of his modest office, burn all standing instructions and late messages, and load whatever remained into the army lorry which was at his disposal. He himself would come on later in the little staff Volkswagen which was his. Instead, however, he found his way to Montfavet, and burying the car in the deepest recesses of a convenient grange changed into the anonymity of civilian clothes and resumed his despatches with all the calm of a provincial recorder reporting upon his home town. Avignon had practically become that for him after so many adventures. He had been up to the mess to pick up his small kit, plus the precious volume of
Faust
which he always anchored beside his bed – a verse or two at night secured a good sleep, he was wont to say with a chuckle. Everyone had gone. The last orderly was putting the finishing touches to the baggage. He was a bullet-headed Swabian corporal with a sense of humour. He saluted and said, “Shall I show you something funny, sir officer?” and when Smirgel agreed led him into the garden and opened the door of the earth closet. Surprisingly there was someone sitting on the roost and it was Landsdorf. At first you did not realise that he stayed upright because he was leaning back against the wall. His chin was raised like a chicken drinking. He was dead. He had shot himself through the soft palate with his service Luger. The corporal burst out laughing, and Smirgel nervously followed suit though his laughter ended in a croak and a sigh. He had liked old Landsdorf.

But the German was not the only one. Up in Tu Duc there had been little enough movement, except at night by small groups; the main troop movements had been along the great highways, the bombing mostly across the river. Blaise could, if he wished, watch everything without taking part, simply by climbing the hillock in the wood and overlooking the town from the open glades at the summit. At night he went to ground like a fox, locking everything up very carefully and extinguishing every gleam of light. How then could he have not heard the fusillade which cut short the life of the honey man Ludo? The ambush into which he had strayed with his one-horse caravan was barely three hundred yards away up the forest road. Blaise heard nothing, and would have known nothing had not a passing woodcutter whom he knew come stealing out of the wood to borrow a light for his cigarette butt and told him that he had just passed, higher up the road, a mutual friend of theirs, done to death by the Resistance – a presumption based on the fact that the overturned caravan which lay half in the ditch was liberally daubed with red paint proclaiming the victim to have been an informer. The woodcutter told his tale with angry emotion. Such an error seemed almost inconceivable. It always does. Yet in war as in peace it is like that – one is hurt by one’s own side.

Like good Provençaux they knew they must bury their friend, and with a heavy heart Blaise called his wife and marshalled spades for the three of them. “Take some sacks,” said the woodcutter, “for he is all in pieces.” They walked in grim silence up the road until they came to the site of the calamity: the caravan half on its side in the ditch, the dead horse and the pool of honey mixed with blood. The man was just ahead – he had fallen with outspread arms, as if he had tried to protect his horse, to explain, to plead. His body appeared to smoke, but it was just the carpet of sleepy bees which covered his bloodstained frame in its tattered shirt and scarf which stirred from time to time, giving a fictitious life to the still form. The machine-gun had traversed the whole interior, quite riddling the hives. It had cut its target into several separate pieces. The woodcutter was right, the old olive-crop sacks were useful. In them they assembled the fragments of their friend and the head of his horse and carried them a little way into the forest until they found a suitable place for the long slow dig. The caravan they dragged off the road and hid in the bushes, also the body of the horse. The bees did not sting, they drowsed on in the bloody honey, as if shocked. Nor was there any trace of the little boy, the son of Ludovic of whom he had been so inordinately proud. Happily? Yes, perhaps he had escaped. In affairs of this sort there is always a missing child. In this way history manages to perpetuate itself.

It was going to be a long dig. The earth in this forest glade was not too soft. But the wife of Blaise had had the forethought to bring a supply of bread and cheese, two cigarettes, and a small bottle of fiery
marc
. They rolled up their sleeves, and marked out the grave of Ludo. But before beginning to dig the wife of Blaise put her arms round her husband and kissed him on the mouth with all her determination – something she had never done before.

With method, slowly, they worked late into the night, while always to the left came the shock of distant explosions and stabs of white light waxing and waning as the bombers came swishing in like great winnowing fans to release their loads.

The crisis was ripening like some ugly fistula. At the asylum Jourdain woke one morning to find that the kitchen staff had vanished, leaving no stocks of food for his lunatics. It was critical, something would have to be done, but what? The telephone had gone dead. There was nobody to appeal to. In order to calm himself he sat for a moment cross-legged before the full length mirror in his flat and performed a couple of yoga postures with the appropriate breathing. Then, in order not to waste the last of the hot water, he took a long and leisurely shower and shampoo. He donned his college blazer and dressed in formal fashion with a dark shirt and a college tie. Beside his bed lay the proofs of his new book on schizophrenia, at which he gazed lovingly. It had taken ages to formulate these scattered observations drawn from his flock and to translate them into theory. He read a passage to himself in a whisper, frowning with critical pleasure: “My proposition is, then, that the state of schizophrenia is not one of mental disorder, but one in which a different sort of order rules. When you shout ‘Go away’ to a fly, are you presuming upon its knowledge of French? And if it goes away dare one suppose that it in fact has understood? For the schizophrene …”

He sat down on the bed and reflected on his plight with bitterness; here he was, with a hundred and fifty mental patients to feed and wash, and with no staff to help him perform this miracle, and no food in the kitchen. “
Merde!
” he cried aloud after a moment, solacing himself with an echo from the exasperated soul of Cambronne. “
Triple merde!
” But he realised that this would not get him very far. Then he heard steps in the corridor and the insect-like pecking of the spy’s machine. The main generator still held for a while, but for how long? Its charge would soon expend itself – three hours was the most! Then even the spy’s little apparatus would be silenced. He listened grimly for a moment. Then he took his last whisky bottle from its hiding place and selected the two glasses from the bathroom before making his way to join Smirgel.

At this moment the stick of bombs fell on the house and the gardens with a mind-swamping roaring that abused all consciousness. A vast pall of dust rose now – he saw himself standing there with a bottle, and with his clothes apparently smoking, as if he were on fire. An invisible hand pinned him for ten full seconds to the nearby wall and then released him so that he fell like an unjointed doll first to his knees, and then flat, with a scream that he himself hardly recognised. It took an age for the dust to settle and for him to verify that he was physically unhurt, and that the precious bottle remained unbroken. As for the howling and drumming of his charges, the screams and laughter, he was used to these sudden waves of feeling, often provoked by nothing tangible. Here at least there was a good excuse; half the building was peppered with holes, holes which seemed like new magical doors through which one could get “outside” – the symbol of prime reality to a prisoner of any category. He joined Smirgel and without another word they drank down a life-giving draught of alcohol, listening gloomily the while to the noise of falling rafters and crumbling masonry. The distant cannonade of the town had diminished now; it was they who were in the centre of the stage. Yet apart from that one fortuitous stick of bombs nothing more fell upon the asylum. Nor was there any need, for the one salvo was destined to change their whole lives, the pattern of their behaviour. It had blown holes in every ward wall, and it had shaken every door off its hinges. How open the world seemed to Quatrefages, who had also been blown to the wall of his cell and had cracked his skull on the iron bedrail. But from the window now he saw them all emerge, walking with circumspection, on tiptoe, gazing about with wonder at “outside” from their “inside”, being born again. The square was slowly filling up with them, each with his personal vocabulary, the triumph of his destiny over reason! The Crusaders of the new reality!

The main gates still stood, but only just, for the hinges had been blown to pieces. How slowly the inhabitants emerged into the quiet square under the trees, some of which had fallen! The silence was brand-new after the thunderclap. The two men, Smirgel and Jourdain, watched from an upper window, glass in hand but forgetting to drink, so preoccupying was the scene. The whole staircase leading to the Dangerous Ward had gone, leaving a theatrical looking arch through which the hungry inmates were now making a surprised entry upon the life which they had abused and rejected. Smirgel’s flesh crept, he was terrified of lunatics like all deceitful people; it was as if these criminal ones with their pious and deceptive air were poisonous snakes set suddenly free in a bathroom. “My God!” he said. “Your Dangerous Ward!” But the doctor’s professional interest had been awakened and he leaned forward eagerly to watch, as a supporter watches the home team, full of sympathy. “It will be most interesting to see what they do,” he said, and the German stared at him as if he were mad. Now everything suddenly fell into place, reality reasserted itself for them thanks to the bombing.

The asylum, set in green land, abutted upon two farms, and often the inmates were encouraged to help the farmers with the agricultural work, while the series of vast cellars and stables were rented out to the farms. The doors of these caves had been stoved in, and they revealed the four animals, two horses and two cows which shared their labours. They shyly ducked and snuffled in the gloom, dimly aware that something unusual was afoot for it was late for ordinary work, and the clients seemed unduly numerous. A vague indecision hovered in the crowd, their purpose in seeking the light had not been yet revealed. It was Quatrefages who condensed everything, who now endowed them with a purpose and a coherence. Raising his arms he gave a few imploring cries and beckoned them to follow him into the stables whence they dragged the four long carts, old-fashioned hay-wains which so often had brought in the harvest with their sincere aid. “
Allons, mes enfants!
” he cried with such fervour that everyone was galvanised, everyone rushed to join him with chirps and moans of happiness. They felt the beauty of function, the beauty of belonging to method. The doctor at the window watched them carefully, jealously; the dangerous and the harmless together, what did it matter? But the dangerous were his special possession, he treasured them. “Baudoin!” he shouted suddenly. It was Baudoin de St.-Just, the notorious murderer who looked so quietly pious – all those years he went to confession and never once mentioned the fact! The man looked up and waved merrily like a schoolboy. “The harness is on the wall inside!” the doctor told him, and the man turned away obediently into the darkness to find it. Out came the cattle in a sort of foam of agitation. They smoothed and patted them, some curried them with leaves; and under the leadership of Quatrefages they harnessed them to the wains with shouts of indifference. Then there was a scramble to get aboard, though no fighting as with normal people, just a few in tears and one with stomach-ache. “Are they all there?” said Jourdain with keen interest. “I don’t see Tortville the butcher nor Jean Taillefer. O yes! There he is. Where did he get that knife I wonder? What people! He will be troublesome tonight.” Smirgel: “But not to us I hope.” Raynier de Larchant was preaching a sermon – he was never dangerous when allowed to play on a piano. Moreover you knew where he was. His mother confided as much before he … Molay, Pairaud were looking dazed and sullen which was not so good. The wains were harnessed. With one single push the great courtyard gates tumbled over and quivered in the dust. A shout went up from every throat. The wains were chock-a-block. Vaguely the crowd sensed the similarity of the situation to half-forgotten harvests and fairings, to village fêtes and dancings on the famous old bridge. Quatrefages mounted a horse and started to lead them. He looked around him, joyfully, childishly, and brandished a pick-helve like a broadsword. “We will find food and water in the town,” he informed his forces, and they set up a ragged cheer. He caught sight of Jourdain on the balcony and swept him a mock bow as he cried again, “To the town!” But to the doctor he shouted, “I will lead them to Rome!” and curiously enough the occupants of the wains and those who tagged along overheard and took up the cry. “To Rome!” they shouted, growled and piped. “Onwards to Rome!”