The Fires of Autumn (23 page)

Two months after being mobilised, Bernard found himself in a small cold, grey town in Lorraine. War had not yet begun for him; he knew only one enemy – solitude, the worst of all, the enemy that comes from deep within your heart and overwhelms you, even in the middle of a crowd. Suddenly, the world had disappeared from view, just as the curtain in a theatre closes and instantly hides everything on the brilliantly lit stage; you are alone; you have to leave the theatre that was so warm and pleasant and where you could forget about life, whether you want to or not. You find yourself back on the dark streets, in a cold wind. For twenty years he had believed himself to be showered with good luck; he had had friends and money, experienced passion and pleasure. But now, there was nothing. Everything was gone. Everything that had been enchanting, superficial, light-hearted had disappeared, abandoning him. He did not have a penny. No power, no contacts, no mistress. He was alone, in a sad little town. The street was sinister, with dim lights, a bluish cast to the windows, a dull, relentless blue that caused a kind of despair and depression in your heart. Every now and then, the sound of the air raid sirens and nearby explosions announced the approach of an enemy plane. Bernard could go to the barracks, a hotel room
or the dining room of the Grand Café. Normally, that was where he took shelter. He spoke to no one. He leafed through the newspapers from Paris; he listened to the gramophone.

It was there, one evening, that he learned of the death of his son.

He was alone; he had ordered a black coffee that he did not drink. Outside, it was raining. He was handed a damp telegram. The son of the hotel proprietor, a boy of ten, to whom he sometimes gave sweets, had not seen him come in since that morning. Knowing that Bernard often spent the evening at the Grand Café, it occurred to the boy he might find him there. He handed Bernard the telegram, smiled and looked at him shyly, inquisitively. Bernard, surprised, opened the envelope and read:

He looked up, noticed the boy who had not moved; he looked very frightened.

‘What is this lad doing here?’ he thought.

‘Is something wrong, Monsieur?’ the child asked; he liked Bernard and saw he had gone pale; the officer’s face was slowly turning ash grey. Bernard did not reply; he took a few pennies out of his pocket and mechanically pushed them into the boy’s hand. The boy ran off. Bernard picked up the telegram again. Once more his sorrow caused deep incredulity to rush through him, then, little by little, passionate denial. No! His son could not be dead. No! Not that. Not his son. Dead without honour, in a stupid accident! Why, an accident? Why the plane? Oh, he never should have allowed … He knew better than anyone why some aircraft were lost in accidents that seemed inexplicable, why there weren’t enough tanks or armoured vehicles, why they didn’t have enough weapons,
the reason there was chaos everywhere, why, why … He knew. He looked around him, horrified. He felt as if everyone had guessed, everyone was thinking: ‘He killed his own son.’ He sat there motionless, eyes staring out blankly, very pale, too weak to stand up or leave this noisy place. Now he felt despair run through him, an emotion that was barely human, something primal, savage, that roared through him in a wave. ‘My son, my little boy, my child, my only son … It isn’t possible! It can’t be you … God would not allow such a thing! Is there a God? There must be, because He is punishing me. Let Him punish me, chastise me, kill me, but not you! He must let you live! No, no, it’s too late. I can’t hope for a miracle. He is dead. I’m going mad … It’s not my fault. That business with the planes has nothing to do with this … Accidents happen every day and I never ever thought … But now that idea is haunting me, killing me …’

He threw back his head violently and noticed that the barmaid was looking at him with curiosity. She knew him well; she thought he was a handsome, likeable man.

‘Not bad news, I hope?’ she asked.

He said nothing for a moment, looking lost.

‘I’m afraid so,’ he finally replied. ‘Do you think I could telephone Paris? Can you get me a line to Paris.’

He gave her the telephone number of his apartment and waited.

An hour passed. Some officers nearby were playing dominos; others were reading; some were in the midst of noisy discussions. You could hear the knocking of billiard balls, doors banging closed in the kitchen. Someone had put on the gramophone that played an old tune, an insistent, vulgar song, with words that kept repeating:

His neighbours automatically started singing along:

Bernard was called to the phone. Inside the glass booth, with graffiti on the sides, scribbles such as ‘Titine and Suzette’ and ‘I love Lili’, with those obscene drawings and the noise from the café all around him, he heard Thérèse’s soft trembling voice; she confirmed the fatal accident (up until now he had kept hold of a frantic hope that it was all a mistake, that the cross he had to bear might be far off in the future).

‘What about his body?’ he heard himself ask. ‘Have they recovered his body?’

Yes, his remains had been saved and pulled out of the burning plane. Both his legs were broken but his face was intact and two small photographs he kept close to his heart had even survived.

‘Ah, really? Really?’ Bernard whispered eagerly, finding a kind of mad consolation in the thought that his son loved him, that his son kept photos of his parents with him, for they could not be any other photos.

‘One of you and one of me, Thérèse? Our child had our photos with him?’

‘Mine, yes,’ said Thérèse very quietly, with difficulty and with infinite pity. ‘The other one …’

She hesitated.

‘The other one was of Martial.’

‘Ah?’ said Bernard.

She could hear the husky little sob that made his voice shake.

‘I’ll see you tomorrow. I’ll ask for leave,’ he said very quickly. ‘When will we …?’

He could not say the words: ‘When will we bury him?’

She understood.

‘Thursday,’ she said. ‘Eleven o’clock.’

They said goodbye. He slowly opened the door. He heard two officers nearby speaking to the barmaid:

‘One of my friends who’s studied the question tells me there’s a group of old crates that have a fatal tendency to crash to the ground the first time they try to take off. Apparently some of the parts were bought from America and didn’t fit our planes.’

‘That poor young man,’ the other one said.

They both suddenly fell silent when they saw Bernard. He realised that the barmaid could not have resisted the temptation to read the telegram he had left on the table and had told the officers the news. They both stood up respectfully when Bernard passed by them. He saluted them and left. Outside, the street was quiet, cold, grey; the fog that drifted over the river spread a sickly sweet, damp odour over the marshland. Shadows covered the town. In the sky, tiny stars, so far away … Behind him, the shrill, tinny sound of the record that was almost finished playing:

‘Yes, every time a man said: “As for me, I actually don’t give a damn …”, every time a man thought: “If I don’t take advantage someone else will”, every time a woman whispered: “You are completely ridiculous … Look around you …”, every time, every time … and without realising it, every one of them helped to cut short an innocent life. When I blindly signed the contract that Détang drew up, when I cynically thought: “I don’t want to know the ins and outs of this deal. I’m just an honest go-between …”, every time I pocketed some money, you could say that I was
sabotaging with my own hands the plane that killed my son. But what if his accident only happened by chance? What if my conscience is making me feel guilty for a crime I did not commit? But then, there will be other planes that crashed because of me, other children who died because of me, Bernard Jacquelain, a man who was no worse and no more dishonest than anyone else, but who loved pleasure and money. Just like everyone else, my God, just like everyone else! Not wanting to be taken for a ride, refusing to make a drama out of our dirty deals, our little schemes, not accepting the worst and believing:

The army was beaten in Flanders, beaten at Dunkirk, beaten on the banks of the Aisne. There were no supplies left. It was only the civilians who clung to insurmountable hope in their hearts; in the cafés in the Lot-et-Garonne, they even tried to establish an imaginary line of defence south of the Loire, but the soldiers no longer had any illusions. The soldiers knew that the army had lost; they could even see the day approaching when there would be no more army, when amid the mass of an entire population in flight, soldiers would disappear, just as the debris of a ship sinks to the bottom of the sea during a storm. Regiments had lost their leaders; groups of soldiers wandered about, adrift among the people who were fleeing. Ten men who had miraculously escaped the enemy walked behind an exhausted officer; his bearded face was thin, his eyes burned with fever. The officer was Bernard Jacquelain.

After the battle of Dunkirk, in which he had fought with a kind of savage despair, he took the path along the sand dunes, followed by these ten men. The rest of the regiment had been taken prisoner. For four days they had lived in the dunes, without food, but suffering especially from a lack of water; never, thought Bernard, never would he forget that hideous thirst, intensified by the sight
of the sea. Just as the Germans were about to reach them, they had thrown themselves into the water, swimming along the coastline, beneath the bombs, in the unimaginable chaos of the sea: floating all around them were barrels of supplies from the British Army, wreckage from the battered boats, the living and the dead. Finally, Bernard and his ten companions had made it back to the lines still held by the French. But that very night they were attacked by enemy tanks and forced to flee, and, since then, their retreat had continued among the Belgian, Dutch and French vehicles that were beating a path towards the south, along with lost children, women forced to give birth in ditches, common criminals running free on the roads, ministerial cars carrying archives, government trucks packed so full of official files that some of the documents flew out of the windows. Cannon, carts, baby carriages, tandems, wheelbarrows, herds of cows, machine guns covered in foliage, exhausted horses, men …

Sometimes the civilians hurled insults at them; in a house where they asked for something to eat, the refugees who were camping out in the kitchen shouted that it was shameful, that the soldiers had only got what they deserved and that they hadn’t even tried to fight back. But most often, people simply watched them pass by with gloomy indifference.

In one village, right in front of an inn, a little boy who was playing in the dust got up, went over to Bernard, blushed and asked him if he would like a glass of beer.

‘My mama’s the owner of the café. She told me to offer you something to drink, because you’re a soldier, like Papa … ’Cause we don’t know what’s happened to him,’ the child said sadly.

For a long time, Bernard stared at the handsome little boy with dark eyes who looked like Yves. Or perhaps he was just seeing him that way? Everything reminded him of his son.

‘Would you like a beer?’ the boy asked again, surprised by Bernard’s silence.

‘Yes, thank you very much,’ Bernard finally said, ‘I’m very thirsty.’

The child disappeared into the house and came back a moment later carrying a small bottle of beer and a heavy glass. Bernard drank some, then took a few small coins out of his pocket, but the boy refused to take them.

‘Mama said that she wants you to have it for free.’

Bernard sat on a bench alone, in the sunshine. It was a stormy day; in the distance, thunder continuously rumbled, and anyone who thought they were hearing cannon fire was afraid.

The soldiers had found something to eat and wanted to share a melon and a hunk of bread with Bernard. But he couldn’t swallow a thing. He chewed on a piece of the bread then left it on the bench beside him. Then he covered his face with both hands and pretended to be asleep. His fellow soldiers studied him for a moment. A big lad who looked like a farmer cut his bread in slices before putting them into his mouth from the end of a knife; he stopped and looked at Jacquelain:

‘Poor guy!’

They realised that Jacquelain was crying; a tear ran down through his locked fingers. The men tactfully turned away and pretended to be telling jokes, laughing among themselves to give their lieutenant time to pull himself together.

After a few moments, Bernard seemed calmer; he lit his pipe and fell into a deep, bitter trance. An endless wave of cars streamed past along the road. He could see pale, exhausted faces covered in dust. Children were asleep, curled up in a ball on top of suitcases. A horse-drawn wagon passed by in which some old people (evacuees from an old folks’ home) were dozing on the benches, their heads resting on bundles of sheets. Then there was an ambulance, going at the same speed as the other vehicles. A small Citroën went by, full of crying children: the lad driving looked about fifteen; there was no adult with them. Then it was time to set off again. The
Germans were getting closer. They were marching towards Paris and the French Army was fleeing ahead of them. The little group formed by Bernard and his ten men also took the road to Paris. Some people were saying there would be a battle at the Seine.