The Crime of Julian Wells (7 page)

10

But Julian had had perhaps as good a friend in René Brossard.

They’d met in Africa, when Julian was researching the Paul Voulet outrages, and had subsequently traveled together to some of the remote outposts where those atrocities had been committed. According to Julian, Brossard had a lingering aura of old crimes, though the nature of those crimes had never been revealed. Even so, there was a hint of violence both suffered and inflicted, Brossard’s one of those lives that had both struck and received a blow.

I’d met him in Julian’s company a few times, though he’d made certain to remain in the background on those occasions. Whether this had been the product of Gallic manners or simply that he was slow to warm to strangers had never been clear. Of course, it might equally have been the outward evidence of some inner furtiveness, for there was surely something veiled about Brossard.

He had aged quite a bit during the intervening years. Where before his hair had been sprinkled with gray, it had now gone white. His eyes were more webbed and the lines in his long face had deepened. The muted light of Charles de Gaulle Airport added a layer of grayness to his unexpected pallor.

“I was very sad to hear of Julian,” he said as he offered his hand.

“It came as quite a shock.”

“Hmm,” René said.

We exchanged a few pleasantries, then René led me to his car, and we set off for Paris, where I’d booked a small hotel not far from l’Opéra.

It was early in the morning, but I’d slept on the plane, so rather than bid René a quick farewell and go up to bed, I asked him to join me for a cup of coffee so that we could begin to discuss whatever itinerary he thought appropriate for my stay.

“I am sorry to say, but there is a delay in getting you into Julian’s apartment,” he informed me. “It is my fault that I did not tell you before, but I did not learn of it until this morning.”

“What’s the problem?” I asked.

“The one who owns the building, he has gone from the city for a few days, and I cannot get the key,” René said. He shrugged. “I only come to the building to get Julian’s mail. I never have a key to go inside.” He smiled. “Perhaps he was not so good at the keeping house.” He drew a pack of cigarettes from his jacket pocket, thumped one out, and lit it. “But he was a good writer, Julian. Very good.” He seemed at the end of what he knew of Julian. “Always writing. Tap, tap, tap. Day and night.”

“But no one can write twenty-four hours a day,” I said. “He must have gone out from time to time.”

“Sometimes, yes,” René said. “Mostly to this little bar, Le Chapeau Noir.
In Pigalle.”

“Yes, I remember Julian writing about that place,” I said. “He seems to have gone there quite a lot.”

“It has cheap wine, and Julian was always lacking in the money,” René told me. “But, me, I do not like it. It is full of refugees and émigrés. Africans and Arabs, people on the run from bad things.”

“What kind of bad things?” I asked.

“Crimes,” Brossard answered. “There were such places in Algiers. Criminals are like chickens, they crowd in upon each other. In a place like Le Chapeau Noir, there is blood on every hand.”

“Except for Julian’s, of course,” I said.

“Except for Julian’s, yes,” Brossard agreed.

“Then why did he choose such a place?” I asked.

“It was near his apartment,” Brossard said. “Perhaps it was the first door that opened to him.” He shrugged. “He was a sad man, Julian. They are often in this way, such people. I saw it early. He was drawn to darkness. This I saw at Oradour.”

“Oradour,” I said as an idea occurred to me. “Since I can’t get into Julian’s apartment, would you mind taking me there?”

“It is only a destroyed village,” René said. “But, okay, when do you want to go?”

“Tomorrow morning?”

“So fast? You are not wanting to sleep tomorrow, for the jet lag?”

“No,” I answered. “I’ll be rested by morning.”

“Okay, tomorrow we go to Oradour,” René said. He took a draw on his cigarette, then crushed it out. “I remember that Julian, he was not so interested in the Germans. But the Malgré-nous, these interested him.”

He saw that I did not speak a word of French.

“It means ‘despite ourselves.’ The Malgré-nous were from Alsace, these men, but the Germans drafted them. A few were at Oradour, and so they were made to do what they did, as they say, ‘despite themselves.’”

It struck me that this was one of Julian’s abiding themes, the sudden intervention of some event that without warning reveals a previously hidden element of character and by that means leaves a man forever the victim of a dark surprise.

“He talked to a few of them,” René continued. “Old men. Dead now.” His smile was wily, a ferret’s grin. “It would be just so in one of those books, no? A thriller? The hero seeks a witness, but when he finds him, this witness is dead?”

“In pulp fiction, yes,” I said. “But about that bar, the one Julian frequented, was there anyone he spent time with?”

René thought a moment, then said, “A priest. They spoke Spanish. This man, he was from Argentina. Julian said that he had been to his country during a bad time.”

“The Dirty War, yes,” I said.

René nodded. “I remember one night, Julian spoke of a woman he met there. He was very moved by this woman. Julian did not often show his feelings, but this night, I saw that for this one, a pain was left with him.”

“Her name was Marisol,” I told René. “She disappeared while Julian and I were in Buenos Aires.”

René shrugged. “Lots of women disappeared during that time, no?”

“Yes, but they were kidnapped by the junta,” I told him. “Marisol, on the other hand, wasn’t in the least political.”

René laughed at what he seemed to consider my naïveté. “Not political? How do you know?”

The question was simple, but it surprised me anyway, for, in fact, I didn’t know whether Marisol had or had not been political. At least, not for sure.

With that recognition, a small crack appeared in the wall of what I’d always assumed about her. True, she’d only once mentioned the situation in Argentina, and even then only generally:
Argentina es un país perdido.

But in what way had she thought it lost? I wondered now.

Marisol had never said.

One thing was clear, however. Although she always listened attentively when Julian spoke, it had been with an air of critical attunement, as if, because he was a privileged American, she should be wary of him and his worldview.

It was a distrust that surfaced one afternoon as we strolled down Calle Florida. Julian had begun to talk about the many far-flung places he hoped to visit in the future, one of which was Calcutta.

“The Black Hole of Calcutta is one of the places I’d like to see,” he said. “I always thought that phrase referred to the city itself, that it was hopeless and impoverished. A pit.”

Marisol listened to him in that highly attentive way of hers, as if seeking to understand not only the words, but what might lie between them, in the manner of a translator always in search of some new idiom or nuance in a language not yet fully mastered.

“But it was really an event,” Julian added. “A mass murder, really.”

Then, with characteristic detail, giving the precise date and location, Julian told us how Indian troops had crammed scores of British subjects into an unventilated room, where they’d died of suffocation or been trampled to death during one long night’s ordeal.

“What did the British do after that?” Marisol asked.

“They decided that the Indians were savages,” Julian answered. “And the subjugation of India became less—”

“Gentle?” Marisol interrupted softly.

I’d never heard her interrupt anyone. It simply wasn’t her style. There was an unmistakable edge in her tone, too, though one so subtle I couldn’t tell if it reflected anything more than the general anticolonialism any young person might have embraced at the time. Certainly it was not enough for me to conclude that Marisol was political in the sense that I’d used the word with René, something that would have caused her to be a target of the Dirty War.

René was quiet for a time after I related this small exchange to him. Then he said, “Anyway, you were safe. You and Julian, I mean. He made much of this, that despite all that was going on in Argentina, the two of you were safe.”

“Yes, Julian and I were safe,” I said, and thought of the legions of the disappeared, the marches their mothers made each day in the Plaza de Mayo. Still, I could not place the Marisol I’d known—so very quiet and lacking any visible political ­position—among the ranks of those who’d later been caught up in the Dirty War’s repression. From those clutches, she’d always seemed as safe as Julian and I, and because of that, it had never occurred to me that she might have ended up in some dank cell, bruised and battered and lying in her own excrement, listening, with whatever consciousness remained to her, for the dreadful footfall of her torturer’s approach.

“You have been silent for a long time,” René said.

His voice seemed to come to me from a far less perilous world.

“Really?” I said. “I didn’t realize.”

René drained the rest of his coffee. “Tomorrow we go to Oradour.”

We left Paris the next morning, a warm day but rainy, the city streets shrouded in a gray mist that gradually dissipated, so that we were in bright sun within an hour or so.

The way to Oradour was south from Paris, and it led into the heart of what had once been Vichy France, where the French had been permitted to rule—or pretend to rule—during the German occupation. Here Pierre Laval had signed the infamous order deporting non-French Jews to their deaths, for which, among other of his collaborationist acts, he had been executed by firing squad after the war.

Julian had touched on all this in a letter written while working on Oradour, and in recounting Laval’s death, he had offered an unexpectedly sympathetic portrait of Laval’s final hours, how he’d bungled a suicide attempt by not shaking the bottle before drinking the poison it contained, the way he’d worn a tricolor scarf to the execution site in a twelfth-hour effort to grasp the laurel of patriotism, his final love-of-country declaration, shouted just before the shots rang out:
Vive la France!

It was the seamless combination of scope and detail that Julian brought to all his later books, and thinking of it as we closed in upon Oradour, it renewed my admiration for him as a writer, one all the more fortified by what I’d learned from René the day before: the solitary life Julian had led in France, the habitué of a seedy bar in Pigalle, the way he’d made himself companion to the alien and the lost.

We reached Oradour in the early afternoon. My plan was to walk through it slowly, absorbing the place in increments as the day waned, so that I would reach the end of my tour at the very time of day when, according to the final passage of his book, Julian had left it for the last time, his research completed, his many hours of interviews and of walking the town’s ghostly streets finally come to their end.

We parked just outside the town by the visitors’ center, and for the next few hours I carried Julian’s book with me as I slowly ambled among its ruined streets, René at my side, looking faintly bored. Along with a scattering of other tourists, we strolled among the shattered buildings and stood in the charred nave of the church in which so many had been burned alive, the rest shot as they attempted to escape. I paused at Hotel Avril, where the three Pinède children had hidden, their village burning around them, its smoke and fire finally driving them from their hiding places. Behind the hotel, I saw where, in the midst of their flight, they had encountered an SS soldier who had unaccountably permitted them to escape.

Toward the end of my walk, I paused at the well into which the bodies of several villagers had been tossed. Julian had no doubt stood here, and so I tried to imagine what he might have been thinking as from this vantage point his own eyes had observed the ruins of Oradour.

Surely he would have considered how, for a few hours on June 10, 1944, Oradour had truly been a hell on earth, for in his account of it nothing of that horror had been lost. He’d tried to see the tragedy from 642 angles, but it was his own eyes, at the end of the book, that had seen the town in its grief-stricken repose. That final view had been glimpsed on the Champ de Foire, so when I at last came to that part of town, I opened Julian’s book and read, softly but aloud, its concluding passage:

Twilight fell on the Champ de Foire. The car Dr. Desourteaux drove into Oradour that afternoon still rests where he left it, though no longer in the same state. Time has stripped away its paint and its metal has gone to rust, for even a ruin cannot be spared the assault of further ruin. So also fade the killing sites, the barns at Laudy, Milord, and Bouchole, the Beaulieu forge, the Desourteaux garage, the little wine store on the road to St. Junien, the church where the women and children were gathered, and whose shattered belfry still looks down upon the road that, but for the terrors of that day, those same women and children might later have taken to distant, spared Limoges. The signs that designate these once unheralded spots have begun to peel and soon must be repainted. The bolts that hold them to Oradour’s stone walls will likewise need to be replaced. For ruins, too, must be restored, and with every restoration, Oradour, the town, slips further into Oradour, the event, a process that will reach its end when the last of those who survived those fearful hours pass beyond all further restoration, and the last eyes to have seen Oradour as something other than a martyred village will at last be closed.

After a dramatic pause, I closed the book and looked at René.

“Okay,” he said. “So, we go now?”

A few minutes later we reached the hotel René had booked for us. It was in a neighboring village, small, quiet, with a restaurant that served us politely, though the waitress appeared somewhat surprised when René, so thoroughly French, asked for ketchup for his
pommes frites.