The Fires of Autumn (21 page)

And so, one January evening, they set off together by train. When they pulled back the blind that covered the carriage window, they could see the dark countryside beneath a clear, icy sky.

‘Let’s hope it snows,’ said Bernard.

He had been counting a great deal on this first evening on the train to get closer to his son. He asked him about his studies, his plans for the future. He talked to him about politics, about women, about everything an adolescent might find interesting. ‘I should have done this sooner,’ he thought. ‘He’s not fifteen, any more; he’s eighteen. At his age, I was about to enlist.’

And the memory of his youth made him silent and shy, because between a child and his parents, the obstacle is never the man someone has become, but the man he used to be. The young man of twenty he once had been, but was no more, sealed his mouth closed, now that he was a father.

They simply exchanged the most banal words, then Yves went to sleep. Bernard remained awake in the passageway until very late that night. He smoked and watched the little blue lamp flickering on the ceiling.

He had not given anyone his address in Megève but the hotel was full of his friends. The very next day, he and Yves were invited to lunch by the wife of a well-known Member of Parliament. The men were wearing ski clothes, their fat potbellies stretching out the colourful sweaters, their cheeks red, not because of the pure air they had not yet breathed in, but because of the wine and aperitifs they had drunk at the bar. The women were thin and heavily made-up. The older men talked about Russia, Danzig, Germany, the imminent war. They ate smoked salmon marinated in dill while describing the scramble of enemy planes massing towards French cities: ‘And there’s nothing we can do, nothing. After the first night, boom, and everything will be flattened.’ While tucking into their kidneys flambé in Madeira sauce, they all spoke as one: ‘Thank goodness this is the land of miracles! As soon as we think we’ve had it, wham! We pull ourselves up and the world is amazed!’ Over dessert, ice cream swathed in hot melted chocolate, they confided to their neighbours the gist of what was contained in reports received by the Foreign Ministry: ‘All this, of course, is just between us.’ One man, with a dark beard and moustache and a Toulouse accent, pointed out that the Germans did not have enough food and so could not go to war. Everyone was in agreement about the deplorable state of chaos that France found herself in: ‘What we need is someone with a firm hand, a real leader,’ they said. Through the hubbub of voices, the clinking of glasses, the laughter, you could hear a shrill sound, like a fife: it was a woman asking a former President of the Council, ‘But why don’t you take power, Monsieur? You should, Monsieur’, as if she were offering him a slice of foie gras. The former President, who was short and well-fed, with very fine white hair, shook his head without replying, a cautious, greedy look in his eye, as if to say: ‘Well, well, why not? Take power … Hell!… I must think about it.’

Yves felt a sense of nightmarish unreality. As a child, after reading adventure stories, he had sometimes dreamt that he was in a cave full of jabbering beasts. And now he was re-experiencing the very same painful, grotesque feeling. During dessert, they lit cigars, and the smoke made him feel even more uncomfortable. He glanced longingly through the windows at the grounds covered in snow. Finally, he could stand it no longer. Let them talk if they want, let them argue endlessly, sort out Europe as they see fit, destroy Germany (verbally), make quick deals in armaments or trade stock portfolios! As for him, he no longer wished to be with them. He took advantage of a moment when his father wasn’t paying attention to slip out of the room. He gave a message to the porter: ‘Please tell Monsieur Jacquelain not to worry; I’ll be back this evening.’ ‘Do be careful, Monsieur, the weather is going to change.’ He fled in the direction of the mountains.

Yves would never forget that day he spent alone in the Savoy mountains. The weather did change, in fact. Snow began to fall, covering the trails. Some young people climbed up in front of him, skis over their shoulders. He regretted not having all the equipment like them, but what he most wanted was to be alone, to breathe the pure air and put his thoughts in order. Up until now, his inner life had been that of an adolescent: no logic, bursts of admiration or rebellion; no reflection, just blind desires. He had to learn how to think like a man. To know exactly what he wanted and to act according to his own will. First of all, he had to recognise the true characters of his mother and father, for he sensed deep down that there he would find the crux of the matter: he had to follow one or the other of them. ‘To judge your parents is bad, of course,’ he thought. ‘But they are primarily responsible for that. They are the ones forcing me to make this choice.’ He had always been, as he naïvely put it, ‘on his mother’s side’, but his reasons for leaning towards her were emotional, and that was not enough. He did not wish to be unfair. He wanted to try to understand his father. He was not an evil man. He was not a dishonest man. He had a quick, brilliant mind. He had fought bravely in 1914. Grandmother Jacquelain had made him read the
letters his father wrote from the front, when he was eighteen, nineteen, twenty, amid all kinds of danger and hardships. They were moving, delightful letters, funny and full of daring. In one of them, he talked about the son he would have one day: ‘I’ll have so much fun with him! If he moans about going to school when it’s raining in the morning, I’ll enjoy telling him: “What would you have said if you had to spend the night in the woods like your father did in 1915, soaked to the waist and your boots full of water?” He’d go to school, sheepishly, while I, I’d stretch out in bed until noon. Ah, those will be happy times …’ ‘Not everything is ugly in war,’ he continued. ‘A bomb explodes and the shrapnel forms a plume of pinkish white smoke that looks like the froth on top of a sorbet …’

Reading those lines, Yves had wanted to cry over his father as if he had died. And yet, he had not died. His father had come back and had begun to live his life with such cynicism, such bitterness!

‘All in all,’ Yves thought, ‘if anyone asked me what I think of him, I would have to say: “He is part of an evil set that out of spinelessness, blindness or deliberate treason is causing the downfall of France.” And since he belongs to those people, since he deals with them, shares their profits and their pleasures, does that make him … a dishonest man? Oh, no, that’s terrible, I couldn’t say that! And yet … That Détang, that Bernheimer … those women … And the worst part of all this is that other people are almost ashamed to judge them from a moral point of view, because they have transformed morality into something grotesque, childish, which only deserves to be ridiculed. If I said to my father: “It’s wrong to profit from a man like Détang! It’s wrong to increase unemployment in our country by buying things from abroad that we could manufacture here! It’s wrong to speculate on the devaluation of the franc, like Bernheimer is doing. It’s wrong to avoid paying taxes by sending your money outside France as you’ve
bragged about doing in front of me …” What would he say then? He’d just shrug his shoulders. What a terrible generation they are! Why are they afraid? It’s clear they are afraid, and of everything. They spend the whole time fearing: fearing for their lives, and for their money. Why should those men, who at the age of twenty willingly risked their lives for nothing, now sell their souls for banknotes?’

He walked through the snow in no particular direction, lost in thought. A bitter wind had risen up that whipped the back of his neck and behind his ears. It felt good, that sharp wind biting at his skin. He was content far away from everyone else. He had always been rather anti-social. As a child, he had dreamt of being like the sailing explorer Alain Gerbault, dreamt of escaping Europe (what appealed to him was not the peace of a desert island, but steering a boat on the high seas, the storms and the danger). Yes, he was happy when he was alone. Everything was calm. He had a perspective on people and things that was clear, tranquil, objective and implacable. His father … he had wanted to stay alive. He would never allow himself to give up his one chance at life. He had never given himself entirely to anything; he had held back a part of himself, remaining defiant, reticent, egotistical – in war, in peace, in love.

‘I won’t be like him,’ thought Yves, ‘not me. Anyone who wants to save his own life ends up losing it. I will offer up my life. I will disregard it completely. I will know how to sacrifice myself if need be, yes, I will.’

A strange, prophetic sadness took hold of him.

‘They are the ones who are offering us up to be sacrificed,’ he thought. ‘They say there will be a war, that it is inevitable and imminent. They are the ones who have laid the ground for it. They claim they fear it. I don’t know, perhaps that’s true, but, at certain times, they seem to welcome it. Or maybe they are fascinated by it? Perhaps they have now gone too far to step back and
they feel we’re on the brink of an abyss? But what is certain is that it will be the young men who are first to fall into that abyss.’

He climbed the mountain faster and faster. He stopped, out of breath. He had been walking for a long time. The short winter’s day was ending. The setting sun was red.

‘That’s a sign there’ll be a wind coming up,’ said a farmer who was passing.

There was an inn nearby where Yves ordered some milk and toast. The room was empty but for a dog and her six little puppies asleep on a bundle of hay. When Yves went to stroke them, she bared her teeth at first, then, after studying him, she left Yves with her little ones. He picked up one of the puppies, slipped it under his jacket and went outside. It was nearly dark. In certain places, the snow glistened. Yves leant over and tried to see Megève, but a thick fog hid the town. He could not even make out the waterfalls that fell down the mountain, cracking the ice; he could tell they were there only by the smell of cold underground places and their deep, solemn sound. Yves stood motionless for a very long time, stroking the warm fur of the little dog that sighed and whimpered softly. Yves was thinking of many things, some clear and sharp, others as confusing as in a dream. In the life of every man worthy of the name, there is a moment when he takes sides, when he decides once and for all whether he is for or against a certain way of life.

‘What I need is solitude,’ thought Yves, ‘and for things to be clean and clear … Something that resembles this mountain, something austere, harsh and strong. I want to live far away from cities, far away from people. If I were a believer, I’d become a priest.’

He walked a few steps in the snow and breathed in the pure, sweet-smelling mountain air.

‘I’ll become a pilot,’ he thought. ‘I know very well what my father would say … that I’m naïve, that there are as many shady deals and schemes in that profession as in any other. I know that … But the
effort and danger it demands redeems everything. And at least being a pilot is work that requires you to offer yourself up entirely. What will Mama say?’ he continued thinking. ‘Well, little dog,’ he whispered, putting him down on the ground; the puppy immediately rushed away, tail in the wind. ‘What will she say? And what would he have said … the man who so wished to be my father, I’m sure of that, the man who died, hoping, perhaps, that he had left behind a son? Yes, what would Martial Brun have said? And what will my real father say, and not the father of my dreams?’

He could hear him now:

‘But think about it, my boy. It’s all very well and good, but … there’s not much in it for you, you know? It’s true that you get women.’

Women! Making money and making love! A good steak and someone’s bed … He shook his head angrily and went back to the inn. He had a bit of cash with him; he would spend the night in a sparse, bright little room. He sent a young lad to Megève with a letter for his father:

‘Please forgive me,’ he wrote, ‘for not coming back tonight, but I can’t stand the people we met and you’re part of their world. Forgive me. I don’t wish to be harsh or insolent. But I know you won’t be angry, you’ll simply make fun of me. I have my return ticket with me. I’m going back to Paris alone tomorrow. Once again, forgive me, Papa.

‘With love,

‘Yves’

Bernard learned of Bernheimer’s death over the phone. It was a stifling hot night in August. He had spent the night at the Détangs’ place, in their house at Fontainebleau. That summer of 1939, no one left Paris. The Détangs gave a large dinner party. As soon as soup was served, the word ‘war’ was uttered by one of the guests.

‘No! That’s enough!’ cried Renée Détang. ‘You don’t know what you’re talking about! It’s not true; don’t you know that another war is impossible? My husband has seen the President of the Scandinavian Bank. It seems that war isn’t possible, because the Germans don’t have enough railway trucks. Didn’t you know that? It’s the latest news, you see. And I beg of you, please let’s talk of other things!’

The dinner party had been very lively. Détang was in particularly good form; the passing years did not seem to affect him. He was fatter and had a healthier complexion than ever. Bernard had known him for so long that he really no longer saw him. But that evening, he was struck by one of his features that he had either never noticed or had forgotten: Détang’s eyes. They were shining and completely blank. They reminded him of the sparkling surface of a mirror; they reflected the outside world, they were happy when everything around him was joyful, full of melancholy when
others were sad, but on their own, they expressed nothing. He walked over to Bernard and put his hand on his shoulder.

‘Tell me, are you coming away with us? We’re going to Cannes a week from Monday. From there, we’ll take a little trip to London.’

Then he lowered his voice to make a remark about a woman who was walking past. Whenever he talked about women, the blood flowed up his neck and behind his ears in a slow wave of deep crimson.

‘To tell the truth, women are the only thing I really like, and I like it more and more,’ he said in a different voice, a low, hoarse voice. He quickly walked away from Bernard.