The World at Night (5 page)

“What are the Americans saying?” asked Madame Arnaud. But nobody seemed to know, and Marie-Claire shooed the conversation over into sunnier climes.

They laughed and smoked and drank enough so that, by midnight, they really didn’t care what the Germans did. Bibi rested two fingers on Casson’s thigh when he filled her glass. The
vacherin
was spooned out onto glass plates—a smelly, runny, delicious success. Made by a natural fermentation process from cow’s milk, it killed a few gourmets every year and greatly delighted everyone else. Some sort of a lesson there, Casson thought. At midnight, time for cake and coffee, the maid appeared in consternation and Marie-Claire hurried off to the kitchen.

“Well,” she sighed when she reappeared, “life apparently
will
go on its own particular way.”

A grand production from Ponthieu; feathery light, moist white cake, apricot-and-hazlenut filling, curlicues of pastry cream on top, and the message in blue icing: “Happy Birthday Little Gérard.”

A moment of shock, then Yvette Langlade started to laugh. Bernard was next, and the couple embraced as everyone else joined in. Madame Arnaud laughed so hard she actually had tears running down her cheeks. “I can’t help thinking of poor ‘Little Gérard,’ ” she gasped.

“Having his twentieth wedding anniversary!”

“And so young!”

“Can you imagine the parents?”

“Dreadful!”

“Truly—to call a child that on his very own birthday cake!”

“He’ll never recover—scarred for life.”

“My God it’s perfect,” Yvette Langlade panted. “The day of our twentieth anniversary; Germany invades the country and Ponthieu sends the wrong cake.”

Everything was arranged during the taxi ballet in front of the building at 2:30 in the morning. Bibi Lachette’s cousin was put in a cab and sent off to an obscure hotel near the Sorbonne. Then Casson took Bibi and Véronique home—Véronique first because she lived down in the 5th Arrondissement. Casson walked her to the door and they said good night. Back in the cab, it was kissing in the backseat and, at Bibi’s direction, off to the rue Chardin. “Mmm,” she said.

“It’s been a long time,” Casson said.

Bibi broke away in order to laugh. “Oh you are terrible, Jean-Claude.”

“What were we, twelve?”

“Yes.”

Tenderly, he pressed his lips against hers, dry and soft. “God, how I came.”

“You rubbed it.”

“You helped.”

“Mmm. Tell me, are you still a voyeur?”

“Oh yes. Did you mind?”

“Me?
Jean-Claude, I strutted and danced and did the fucking cancan, how can you ask that?”

“I don’t know. I worried later.”

“That I’d tell?”

“Tell the details, yes.”

“I never told. I lay in the dark in the room with my sister and listened to her breathe. And when she was asleep, I put my hand down there and relived every moment of it.”

The cab turned the corner into the rue Chardin, the driver said “Monsieur?”

“On the right. The fourth house, just after the tree.”

Casson paid, the cab disappeared into the darkness. Casson and Bibi kissed once more, then, wound around each other like vines, they climbed the stairs together.

Suddenly, he was awake.

“Oh God, Bibi, forgive me. That damn Bruno and his damn Pomerol—”

“It was only a minute,” she said. “One snore.”

She lay on her side at the other end of the bed, her head propped on her hand, her feet by his ear—her toenails were painted red. Once in the apartment, they’d kissed and undressed, kissed and undressed, until they found themselves naked on the bed. Then she’d gone to use the bathroom and that was the last he remembered.

“What are you doing down there?”

She shrugged. Ran a lazy finger up and down his shinbone. “I don’t know. I got up this morning, alone in my big bed, and I thought . . .” Casually, she swung a knee across him, then sat up, straddling his chest, her bottom shining white in the dark bedroom, the rest of her perfectly tanned. She looked over her shoulder at him and bobbed up and down. “Don’t mind a fat girl sitting on you?”

“You’re not.” He stroked her skin. “Where did you find the sun?”

“Havana.” She clasped her hands behind her head and arched her back. “I always have my bathing suit on, no matter where I go.”

He raised his head, kissed her bottom; one side, the other side, the middle.

“You are a bad boy, Jean-Claude. It’s what everyone says.” She wriggled backward until she got comfortable, then bent over him, her head moving slowly up and down. He sighed. She touched him, her hands delicate and warm.
At this rate,
he thought,
nothing’s going to last very
long.

Worse yet, their childhood afternoons came tumbling back through his memory; skinny little dirty-minded Bibi, been at the picture books her parents hid on the top shelf. What an idiot he’d been, to believe the boys in the street:
girls don’t like it but if you touch them in a certain place they go crazy—but it’s hard to find so probably you have
to tie them up.

But then, what an earthquake in his tiny brain. She
wants
you to feel like this, she
likes
it when your thing sticks up in the air and quivers. Well. Life could never be the same after that. “Thursday we all go to the Lachettes,” his mother would say in Deauville. His father would groan, the Lachettes bored him. It was a big house, on the outskirts of the seaside town, away from the noisy crowds. A Norman house with a view of the sea from an attic window. With a laundry room that reeked of boiled linen. With a wine cellar ruled by a big spider. With a music room where a huge couch stood a foot from the wall and one could play behind it.
“Pom, pom, pom,
I have shot Geronimeau.”

“Ah, Monsieur le Colonel, I am dying. Tell my people—Jean-Claude!”

From the front hall: “Play nicely,
les enfants.
We are all going to the café for an hour.”

“Au revoir, Maman.”

“Au revoir, Madame Lachette.”

There were maids in the house, the floors creaked as they went about. Otherwise, a summer afternoon, cicadas whirred in the garden, the distant sea heard only if you held your breath.

“You mustn’t put your finger there.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t think you’re supposed to.”

“Oh.”

A maid approached, the Indian scout put his ear to the waxed parquet.
“Pom, pom!”

“I die. Aarrghh.”

Aarrghh.

Bibi’s head moving up and down, a slow rhythm in the darkness. She was coaxing him—knew he was resisting, was about to prove that she could not be resisted. Only attack, he realized, could save him now. He circled her waist with his arms, worked himself a little further beneath her, put his mouth between her thighs.
Women have taught me
kindness, and this.
She made a sound, he could feel it and hear it at once, like the motor in a cat.
Now we’ll see,
he thought, triumphant.
Now we’ll just see who does what to who.
Her hips began to move, rising, a moment’s pause, then down, and harder every time. At the other end of the bed, concentration wavered—he could feel it—then began to wane.

But she was proud, a fighter. Yes, he’d set her in motion, riding up and down on the swell of the wave, but he would not escape, no matter what happened to her. It was happening; she too remembered the afternoons at the house in Deauville, remembered the things that happened, remembered some things that could have happened but didn’t. She tensed, twisted, almost broke free, then shuddered, and shuddered again.
Now,
the conqueror thought, let’s roll you over, with your red toenails and your white ass and—

No. That wouldn’t happen.

The world floated away. She crawled back to meet him by the pillows, they kissed a few times as they fell asleep, warm on a spring night, a little drunk still, intending to do it again, this time in an even better way, then darkness.

A loud knock on the door, the voice of the concierge: “Monsieur Casson,
s’il vous plaît.”

Half asleep, he pulled on his pants and an undershirt. It was just barely dawn, the first gray light touching the curtain. He unbolted the door and opened it. “Yes?”

Poor Madame Fitou, who worshiped propriety in every corner of the world. Clutching a robe at her throat, hair in a net, her old face baggy and creased with sleep. The man by her side wore a postal uniform. “A telegram, monsieur,” she said.

The man handed it over.

Who was it for? The address made no sense. CASSON, Corporal Jean C. 3rd Regiment, 45th Division, XI Corps. Ordered to report to his unit at the regimental armory, Chateau de Vincennes, by 0600 hours, 11 May, 1940.

“You must sign, monsieur,” said the man from the post office.

A COUNTRY AT WAR

The column came into the village of St.-Remy, where the D 34 wandered through plowed fields of black earth that ran to the horizon, to the fierce blue sky. The mayor waited in front of the boulangerie, his sash of office worn from waist to shoulder over an ancient suit. A serious man with a comic face—walrus mustache, pouchy eyes—he waved a little tricolor flag at the column as it passed. It took two hours, but the mayor never stopped. All along the village street, from the Norman church to the Mairie with geraniums in planter boxes, the people stood and cheered
—“Vive
la France!”
The war veterans and the old ladies in black and the kids in shorts and the sweet girls.

A unit of the
Section Cinématographique,
attached to the Forty-fifth Division headquarters company, headed north in the column of tanks, gasoline trucks, and staff cars. The unit, assigned to take war footage for newsreels, included the producer Jean Casson—now Corporal Casson, in a khaki uniform—a camera operator named Meneval, like Casson recalled to service, and a commander, a career officer called Captain Degrave. They were supposed to have a director, Pierre Pinot, but he had reported to the divisional office at Vincennes, then disappeared; averse to war, the Wehrmacht, or the producer—Casson suspected it was the latter. The unit had a boxy Peugeot 401 painted army green, and an open truck, loaded with 55-gallon drums of gasoline, 35-millimeter film stock in cans, and two Contin-Souza cameras, protected from the weather by a canvas top stretched over the truck’s wooden framework.

The village of St.-Remy disappeared around a bend, the road ran for a time by the river Ourcq. It was a slow, gentle river, the water held the reflections of clouds and the willows and poplars that lined the banks. To make way for the column a car had been driven off the road and parked under the trees. It was a large, black touring car, polished to a perfect luster. A chauffeur stood by the open door and watched the tanks rumbling past. Casson could just make out a face in the window by the backseat; pink, with white hair, perhaps rather on in years. The column was long, and probably the touring car had been there for some time, its silver grille pointed south, away from the war.

Casson had hoped, in the taxi on the way to the fortress at Vincennes, that it was all a magnificent farce—the work of the French bureaucracy at the height of its powers. But it wasn’t that way at all and in his heart he knew it. At the divisional headquarters, a long line of forty-year-old men. The major in charge had been stern, but not unkind. He’d produced Casson’s army dossier, tied in khaki ribbon, his name lettered in capitals across the cover. “You will leave for the front in the morning, Corporal,” he’d said, “but you may contact whoever you like and let them know that you’ve been returned to active duty.”

From a pay phone on the wall of the barracks he’d called Gabriella and told her what had happened. She asked what she could do. Call Marie-Claire, he said, keep the office open as long as possible, explain to the bank. Yes, she said, she understood. There was nothing but composure in her voice, yet Casson somehow knew there were tears on her face. He wondered, for a moment, if she were in love with him. Well, he hoped not. There was nothing to be done about it in any event, the life he’d made was gone. Too bad, but that was the way of the world. Over, and done. Part of him thought
well, good.

“Perhaps,” she’d said, “there are certain telephone numbers you should have, monsieur. Or I could call, on your behalf.”

Gabriella,
he thought. I never appreciated you until it was too late. “No,” he said. “Thank you for thinking of it, but no.”

She wished him luck, voice only just under control, soft at the edges. All during the conversation Meneval, the cameraman, was talking to his wife on the next phone. Trying to calm her, saying that a cat who’d run away would surely return. But, Casson thought, it wasn’t really about the cat.

Gabriella had approached the subject of
phone calls
with some delicacy, but she knew exactly what she was talking about. She knew he belonged to a certain level of society, and what that meant. That X would call Y, that Y would have a word with Z—that Casson would suddenly find himself with an office and a secretary and a job with an important title—honor preserved, and no need to die in the mud.

The column left Vincennes at dawn on the twelfth of May, a Sunday. Captain Degrave and Meneval in the Peugeot, Casson assigned to drive the truck—once again, somebody had disappeared.

At first he had all he could handle. The truck was heavy, with five forward gears, the clutch stiff, the gearshift cranky and difficult. You didn’t, he learned quickly, shift and go around a corner at once. You shifted—ka,
blam—
then slowly forced the truck around the corner. It was hard work, but once he caught on to that, to approach it as labor, he started to do it reasonably well.

Strange to see Paris through the window of a truck. Gray, empty streets. Sprinkle of rain. Salute from a cop, shaken fist from a street cleaner
—give
the bastards one for me.
A toothless old lady, staggering up the embankment after a night’s sleep under a bridge, blew him a kiss.
I was pretty, once upon a time, and I fucked soldier boys just
like you.
Up ahead, the commander of a tank—its name,
Loulou,
stenciled on the turret—waved a gloved hand from the open hatch.