While the Gods Were Sleeping (28 page)

“I don’t know…” I hear the child whisper. “Sounds just like a Frenchwoman.” Two seconds of silence, then the woman’s voice, unexpectedly gruff and close: “Yes?”—I hang up.

To Rachida I said: take the keys with you. Round up your father and your brothers and your sisters and your mother. Hire a van and take everything from the house that’s portable and not fixed. Give what you can’t use away or sell it. Divide the money between you or give it to the poor, I don’t mind, but bring me every scrap of paper and every photo you can find there.

A week later she lays a folder of blank letter paper on my bed, it still smells of the drawer in which it has been dying, the last bill for gas and water, a handful of empty envelopes without a sender or a postmark, and a pair of albums containing the same photos as mine: wedding parties, excursions, trips, babies and people celebrating anniversaries—nowhere a trace or sign of
the life that must have been lived in the wings of our own, the life that was his, over which mine and that of my parents draped a cloak of silence… Not a glimpse of sweethearts, boyfriends, lovers, anything that referred to what for him must after all have been the essential thing, to the extent that there is an essence in a person, and to the extent that we could ever grasp it.

Perhaps someone else had beaten me to it. It wouldn’t surprise me if he didn’t carefully orchestrate his own disappearance without trace. He may, just before moving to that boarding house, have wiped the memory of his house clean, or given a confidant the task of doing the job for him. There were only two photos left, not much larger than visiting cards, which I fished out of his wallet where, judging by the folds and the frayed edges, they had been for years. In neither can he himself be recognized, unless one of the helmets in the background of that informal group portrait is his. Or did he take the photo himself? Is one of the men the one he was thinking of when he sometimes told me how pleasant it could be in spite of everything in the hole in the earth, while outside the inferno raged? “We even kissed, on the cheeks,” he said, “when the storm abated and we had survived it again, and there was nothing ambiguous about it. We created a god of brotherhood and a small liturgy of
tenderness
in order to have something that could raise us above the filth and the dead bodies, that was all. Don’t imagine any lewd scenes, my little gazelle, we did not want to degenerate entirely into animals.”

And yet I wonder why he himself is not in those photos. In both one face stands out above the indifference of the expressions, and I cannot shake off the feeling that he always kept those
photos with him purely because of those two strangers. I don’t know if he often looked at them, perhaps it was enough to know they were in his wallet. Nor do I know if they survived or not. They may have been killed, and he may have chosen those two from all the men he had seen die, to hang his mourning and melancholy on. I remember him telling me how impossible it was to keep feeling sadness whenever someone you knew had been torn to shreds or had succumbed to his wounds.

Is one of them the A. Duval whose ring he must have always worn on his chest? That handsome young face in one photo perhaps, among the dozen men standing in front of the entrance to their underground shelter at sunset or early in the morning. Second from the left. Arms crossed. It was foggy at the moment when the photo was taken, so I don’t know if it really is a fine bracelet, that thread of light round the wrist of his right hand, which lies clenched in the hollow of the left arm. Above it that face: not surly, but not approachable either, rather intrigued, the most intelligent in the photo, the liveliest.

Three other figures dissolve unrecognizably in the thick fog that seems to seep in over the top of the trench—a milky-white mist that always fills me with a slight horror, because it reminds me of poison gas, which is of course nonsense. In that case they would have worn their masks and no one would have been stupid enough to pose languidly for a group portrait during a gas attack. That young chap also looks too determinedly at the unknown person who took the photo, my brother or someone else, he looks at me a lot less open-mindedly than the other face in the first photo, in the second photo—that has clearly been taken early in the morning. At bottom left a corner of a field
kitchen, I suspect: a table or rack of branches tied with rope, on it tin bowls, a drinking bottle with a spout, a hunk of bread. Someone has hung a ladle on one of the vertical branches, and it hangs half in front of the chin of that face: the perky face of a young chap. Like the others, not someone who has often posed for a photo. A farmer’s son perhaps; there is an earthy soberness in his smile. The other men, five of them, look almost furtively into the lens. They have taken the butts of their cigars out of their mouths and hold them between thumb and forefinger.

Only that one chap, at the far left, looks with a kind of swank, half hidden behind that rack or table. He doesn’t seem the type that my brother would have brought with him to family gatherings or private parties at home. He seems rather to fall into the category of rascals: fellows who do not seem constantly surrounded by a cloud of language, in contrast to the well-spoken young men with whom he appeared in public, and with whom every experience first had to pass through the word, as it were—an accusation that my husband sometimes levelled at me, not to hurt me, but to make me be quiet, to seal me with his body.

We all mistrusted words. A combination of suspicion and bewilderment after years of ambiguous communiqués, lying newspapers, swollen propaganda and the inability of those who came back from the fronts to force what they had been through into an appropriate form, a vocabulary that would not distort, belittle, falsify their experiences.

I remember afternoons when I went to visit him with my daughter, his godchild, in his mansion just outside town. Afternoons spent sitting on the balcony on the
bel étage
, looking
out over the large back garden, my daughter playing with her dolls at our feet, without exchanging a word, apart from the child language we used with her, the affectionate names and made-up words. Now, so many years later, I have the feeling that we wanted to submerge language in that child, as if in the source of eternal youth. I wonder: were all the disasters that we brought down on our heads ever anything more than a semantic question that got out of hand?

I could still let loose such speculations on him with the same enthusiasm, and he could listen with the same amusement as in our youth, during our walks through the town. Except that the ironic quips with which he pointed out my contradictions were often missing. There could be an undertone of bitterness in his words when he interrupted me and said: “You’re like an armchair soldier, my little gazelle. You’ve seen the battlefields once, in sunny weather, in ideal conditions, as a tourist. That’s all.” Usually he confined himself to amused chuckling while he poured us a cup of iced tea.

In the background, beyond the high box hedge at the bottom of the garden, on summer afternoons there was generally the measured plop-plop of a tennis game, soles crunching on gravel, exclamations of triumph or defeat from the mouths of young men who sooner or later would fall giggly and exhausted into the cane chair next to us on the balcony, legs across each other’s knees, dispensing playful blows—children.

I’ve long since forgotten their names, if I ever retained them. They seemed to me completely interchangeable. After the death of my husband I could never watch their flirting without feeling my stomach turning. The very thought that my brother could
put their bodies to his lips, in passing steal something of them the way he casually plucked a grape from one of the fruit bowls in the house—while the sense of loss seethed in my bones, an ice-cold knife carved runes of mourning into the flesh of my belly, and there was so little in my growing daughter that recalled her father that I made her atone for it all her life.

With the years I have grown more tolerant. I think that he sought that youth and those bodies because their vocabulary could bring him consolation, a better translation as it were of his silences—and even if he was driven by an extremely childish desire, not so much to possess the other as to be the other, so what? Perhaps in each of those bodies he mastered a language I have never learnt, each time he sought a handful of synonyms, a metaphor of flesh and blood in which, however fleetingly, he felt his own being expressed, if not embodied.

I wish that he were still alive, that I could sit with him on the balcony, surrounded by those boys like playful cats on the cushions of his sofa. Then I would observe how he listens to me, with bored pleasure, with or without gleams of sarcasm in his eyes. I would keep an eye on the moustache on his top lip, to see whether the corners of his mouth remain stationary, whether the moustache moves left or right with his pouting lips in a grimace that expresses scepticism. I wonder whether he did not time and time again seek that moment of fear, the gulf of angst, excitement or icy fever that opens up in the first embrace with a stranger—the strangeness and the familiarity of a body that is animated in every fibre by a totally different spirit, houses different stories, different dreams. I try to imagine the twists and turns and intertwinings of the bodies of those
rascals round his, the bony frame of that farmer’s son in one of those photos, for example. The grip of those arms, the mouth that at first resists, then opens: who gives, who takes, who drinks and allows himself to be drunk—and with each caress, bite, sigh, cry what bewilderment must have tingled through his own limbs? The rapture, the hunger, the thirst that flowed through so many embraces in those years, on both sides of the lines. All those intertwinings, forbidden or not, lewd or not, for payment or not, that makes no difference. The invisible battlefield, I mean, where a reverse war took place—the mixing, the consecration: take, eat; this is my body.

I see him giggling; I’m sinning against my mother’s ban on making the dead speak. He sighs: “You’ve always liked dressing up your concerns in other people’s clothes, my little gazelle. For you the world is a blank sheet that you scribble full to your heart’s content. But when the wind of history gets up a person can set their sail in the hope of being spared or perhaps taking advantage of chance. He can try walking into the storm or look for a hiding place. Who will eventually be left standing and who will be crushed under the wheels of the Moloch, no one knows, not even our dear Lord. We are mice running in the treadmill of fate and we can either take the pace or not. No sonnet ever changed the course of history. The world is the world.”

They were childish, the excursions we undertook after the war, he and I, and my husband, and anyone who wanted to accompany us, during the annual return to my uncle’s house, the final destination of our ostensibly carefree trip. We took our time, chose a meandering route and picnicked on the way. When we
sat on the blanket and looked out over the hills, with the hamper in the grass, the cutlery, the fine plates, the ice bucket and the pâté, we regarded ourselves as freebooters, but we were aglow with a youth that could be little more than an anachronism. We looked like a medical team enjoying itself on its day off. We were wearing shrouds or doctors’ coats, textiles on which the slightest impurity was immediately apparent. We seemed to want to show the spotless aura of our bathrooms, which in those days were less and less sumptuous annexes of the bedroom with its coital connotations, and more whitewashed private chapels intended for the rites of purification, the anointment with soap and lotion, to which we devoted ourselves with the doggedness of those who suffer from fear of infection, who scrub themselves until they bleed.

Anyone who had seen us driving around the border, and deep inland, would have taken us to be town-dwellers who regarded the world of the countryside, centripetal, cyclical, as little more than a rustic decor with which our self-importance contrasted favourably. No one could know that all that inflated light-heartedness was designed to hide the deathly quiet final destination of our journeys from ourselves.

Invariably the car would finally draw up at the familiar, dull-green painted gate, by the high wall in which the small, arch-shaped windows just below the tiles stared sceptically at the outside world, the way farmers half close their eyes when they have little confidence in the nonsense you’re talking. The gate would open. Beyond it they would be waiting for us, my uncle and his family, another year older, more bent or greyer, or still more gangling, with still more offspring in their arms, more than enough of them anyway to give us the familiar
Sicilian welcome. Embraces and loud greetings. Pats on the shoulder and teasing.

They would conduct my brother and me and all those accompanying us to the table under the silver poplars, or to the big dining room. From the pantry the maid would not so much walk as stride to the table, with an air as if the soup tureen in her hands was a sacrificial lamb. Over the steaming plates they would question us about news from the north, how my father and mother were doing, and what had happened in the past year in the bends and side alleys of our extensive family network, which had its own maps, tougher than the official ones. They called us swallows because just like swallows we only fell out of the sky after the winter, town-dwellers who avoided the dark months in the countryside. The autumn and winter months that my mother and I had spent there obviously did not count as proof of the opposite. We remained northerners.

What we drank was not soup but relief. On the cutlery chest tarts with chokers of whipped cream and sugar glaze waited. When they were cut everyone knew that my brother and his companions, and often my husband too, would get up from table. With every course of dinner their impatience showed more openly on their faces, so that my uncle eventually had their portion of cake served in the smoking room, where they would withdraw after the meal.