While the Gods Were Sleeping (33 page)

“Poor devils,” said my brother, who felt himself rather
hard done by with his Croix Léopold, however prestigious that decoration supposedly was; but nevertheless he had pinned the thing prominently on his breast pocket and now let himself be wheeled around by my husband and me like a reliquary in a procession. I pushed, my husband pulled with his free hand on the front of the wicker crate to guide the wheels more smoothly through the soft sand.

Everyone wanted to enjoy the September sunshine that morning. Ahead of us, far away over the broad, flat expanse of wet sand, under the supervision of a man on horseback, figures were marching to the music of a small brass band, and the sea wind carried snatches of the melody across the beach. Around us nurses were walking along, chatting arm in arm, and a child, a girl of about ten, under whose skirts only one leg stuck out and whose head, with flapping plaits, was like that of a doll with a paralysed neck, wobbled alarmingly to and fro as she limped enthusiastically on two crutches towards the beach, observed some distance away by a slim woman in an elegantly tailored coat, probably the mother.

It was quite simply a peaceful scene, and an equally peaceful, melancholy September morning, and for the umpteenth time during that war I was amazed at how quickly we, having just a few hours before hidden from fate’s wings, threw the everyday routine like a tough carpet over the craters and the dead—and I still don’t know whether I found that a form of grace, a sign of indomitability, or a kind of self-anaesthetizing, the calm of a sheep that, in the vicinity of a pack of wolves, too close to escape, summons up a glorious fatalism and looks its fate calmly in the eyes.

We found a quiet spot, out of the wind, backing onto one of the wards close to the promenade, looking out over the sand, and parked the basket chair against the wooden wall.

“Now, my little gazelle,” said Edgar, sitting up. “Your brother would like to test whether his legs can still carry him…” He spread his arms wide, signalling that he expected us to help him out of the basket.

“Is that a good idea, Edgard?” I asked, because I could see that he was weak. His face, half hidden under the gauze, had that white, fragile glow of frosted glass which long-term pain makes show beneath someone’s features and which seems to push the eyes deeper into their sockets; and when we had helped him out of the basket chair—it had been an effort, since he could scarcely move his right leg and he had raised it from the blankets with a single swing—it was now obvious that he was having a dizzy spell. He stood getting his breath back, hips leaning against that carriage, and looking around, at the beach, blinked vulnerably with his blond eyelids into the sunlight, and muttered: “Christ, vertical again at last…”

“I think we deserve a souvenir,” said my husband. He rummaged in the pocket of his pyjama tops, produced one of his small cameras and threw it to me. They stood next to each other, against the edge of the wicker basket, my husband so enthusiastically that he took my brother by the hip with his free arm and pulled him close, which produced a suppressed cry of pain from Edgard.

“Sorry, mate…”

And that’s how I saved them for posterity, one in salmon-red striped pyjamas, the other in grey and white, stuck together in
front of the wooden wall, my brother more or less overwhelmed by the tall, thin figure next to him, the angular shoulders, the slender arms, the long, long fingers in the material of his pyjama top, pale and unsteady in contrast to the healthy complexion and that aura of boyish invulnerability which would never leave him, who was to become my other half, would make him immortal while he was alive—and when my husband said: “I could kill for a puff” and I handed him the packet of cigarettes I had bought the day before at the station, and he offered my brother one and then held the burning match between them like a restless moth fluttering in the lantern of his fingers; and when the match, his last one, went out and he held his own cigarette against the glowing tip of that of my brother, who was a good head shorter—he looked like a stork chick being fed from its mother’s beak—I took another snap of them, and I saw how my brother absorbed with his eyes that serene face, the closed eyes that concentrated on the cigarette, the hand resting lightly on his shoulder, the two medals that seemed to be trying to outdo each other, one red, the other blue—he etched it on the copper plates of memory, looked lovingly at that mouth, my husband’s mouth; the lips that pursed round the cigarette end as they sucked oxygen through the glow, and then suddenly released spurts of white smoke. And I turned round, and I still don’t know why my heart swelled in my breast, why the distant sea, the jade-green sea, the white lacework of breaking waves, the constant din of the surf, the empty beach, that vast nothingness, that breath of space, filled me with almost desperate euphoria—why, why? Are my eyes wet, Rachida? Are my glasses misting up? Why? Do you know that line of flotsam on the beach after a storm, have you ever seen that? The long,
winding ribbon of pieces of wood sculpted by sea worms and cutting sand, that pure chance, that narrow congregation of bottles, the leg of a doll, the arm of a pair of glasses, the
bladderwrack
, shell grit, the sea anemones and lengths of rope at the furthest point reached by the waves the night before? As a child I tried to read them, I wanted to break their Morse code, to recognize in all that had been washed up a single sanctifying connection that would breathe life into all that had been drowned. Why can’t I free myself from that image, so long ago, that afternoon, also on the beach, the first of the many excursions that we were to make that summer, we thought, without knowing that it would be the last excursion for years? Why do I hear again the calm rushing sound, the seagulls, the ethereal rustling of the pages of the newspaper that my brother is sitting reading in his beach chair? I see only his legs sticking out of that upright wicker basket, his bare feet and his toes that are rooting nonchalantly about in the sand while, at the extremity of his rolled-up sleeves, the wind stirs the paper in his fingers. In the distance I see children in their navy-blue swimming costumes under straw hats with ribbons splashing through the tidal pools, and on the handle of the parasol that she has planted firmly in the sand my mother’s palms resting, while, leaning a little forward, she looks out with her slender neck, over the butter-yellow sand, the azure, the sea: content, not to say happy—and it is as if I hear my father’s breath, the rush of the air in his lungs, beneath my ear, under the material of his bathing suit rough with salt, my father who, so we still thought, for a little while yet, would be joining us in about ten days. And I can also hear the sigh my mother let out when, that evening, after we had dined on the promenade, eaten ice
cream, taken a last walk, she and I arm in arm, my uncle came to collect us in the coach. My uncle, not the coachman, because he had been called up—and my mother had let out that sigh.

I hear her voice; she is saying: “Ah, this is where the sunworshippers have hidden themselves…” as she comes round the corner of the ward, Miss Schliess, looking deathly tired under the white sail of her wimple, next to her with arms folded.

“I’m going to put you back in your box,” says Miss Schliess to my brother. “You must lie down. I don’t want to see you bleed again. Do you, monsieur? No? Good. Then let me tuck you in, love…”

My mother motions that I can go. “Take your knight for a tour. He likes that, I think. Can you manage by yourself, patriot?”

“Sure I can, ma’am. Sure I can…”

We walked along the beach, some way from the houses, in the direction of France, past the villas reserved for His Majesty in the silver-green dune grass.

“With any luck they’ll kick ’em back out the same way his grandfather came in,
les Boches
,” he said and took my arm.

“What do you think about my brother?”

He shrugged his shoulders. “Dunno… Will take some time to get straight… Convalescence, probably. Deeper inland. If they’ve got a job for him, at some desk or other, they’ll keep him and otherwise your mum will be seeing him again very soon. Permanent sick leave or something…”

“And you?”

“I’ll be back… Soon as I can. I’ve only spent one of me nine lives, Miss.” He looked at me and smiled. “You haven’t got rid
of me yet… Back to being the press boy. I’ve had my share of shells by now…”

We continued in silence, I liked the nearness of his body, his hip that occasionally touched my trunk, as we adjusted our gait to each other, his arm under my palm.

“I still have to thank you for being such a knowledgeable guide, the other day.”

“I’m sure the pleasure was mostly mine, Miss.”

“Should try it again then…”

“By all means…” His familiar grin reappeared round his mouth. He took a puff on his cigarette, stretched his neck, pursed his lips, blew out the smoke. “I like you, Helen… I really, really do… But I wouldn’t want to hurt you in any way… Can’t see me lingering on a sofa one day, comfy slippers on me feet, the missus boiling the kettle. Know what I mean, love?”

“We have staff to deal with that, don’t we?”

“You know what I mean, Helen.”

I knew. Every minute we had been together I had weighed his soul in my hand, tested its density, tried to detect its lightness, its darkness, and however little I knew of him, I liked his specific gravity.

“We’ll see. One thing at a time. Perhaps one day we’ll discover we’ve silently made our arrangements, without the slightest annoyance…”

He bent his head, lifted my chin with his index finger. Briefly pressed his lips on mine.

“Arrangements, Miss?”

“You know what I mean.”

We turned round and walked back along the beach. In front of us lay the old hotel. The belvedere on the roof, surmounted
by a dome. Above the wards at the foot of the building was the windowless side wall, with the lettering “
Grand Hôtel de L’Océan. Prix Modérés
.”

We both looked at it at the same time, and though we said nothing, we knew we had more or less the same thought: that the price we’d had to pay up to now had been pretty reasonable.

W
E WENT BACK
regularly later, when the pavilions had been demolished, the doors of the guest rooms had been hung back on their hinges and on the tables silver and earthenware replaced the surgical clamps and trepans. We always went at either end of the season, the loose ends of summer when in most establishments the tables and chairs were under canvas, sunk in their winter sleep, or in the last days of spring, while everything was still waiting a week or two for the great awakening. It seemed to suit him and me, and we became creatures of in-between times.

We said: in a hundred years’ time the war that was ours will have worn away as completely around the monuments, the photos, the diaries, the letters and the tombs as the bones of the dead in the ground, leaving at most a discoloration in the sand. We didn’t yet know that meanwhile the soldiers for the next conflict were sleeping in their cradles and that tomorrow’s cut-throats were hanging on their nannies’ skirts, playing with blocks or in shabby attic rooms licking their wounds and writing bitter treatises in the lethal ink of resentment. We said: if we could come back in a hundred years, we would no longer recognize the war, its elusiveness, its totality which made countless small lives dance like needles in its magnetic field, would meanwhile have been reduced to a handful of images, numbers with no flesh on their bones, place names and data—can’t we ever do anything except sooner or later tell fairy tales burdened by footnotes?

“I don’t know if I’d like to live to be 100,” said my brother, who sometimes accompanied us to the place where my husband and I had stayed; but I was the only one to experience the fact that you don’t even have to grow very old to see the silent erosion spreading, to see the veterans of that time, that ever-thinning row of crutches, artificial legs and wheelchairs, jingling with medals, give a shaky salute around an eternal flame or a cenotaph, while His Majesty, himself wobbly on his feet because of his new plastic hip, lays a wreath of mourning among the names of the dead and missing.

My husband would definitely have put his hand on mine at this point and concluded: “It’s inevitable, love. Inevitable.” On one of those trips we saw Miss Schliess again, at a table by the big window of the restaurant; against a plaster sky she was feeding spoonfuls of pudding to two babies who, with their
copper-coloured
hair and freckles, seemed to be the spitting image of the strapping fellow next to her, the type of Englishman that radiated the blushing good humour of a good side of roast beef. Obviously she had put her Henry to bed for good, and I never dared ask her if he had a grave somewhere or was one of the others whose names are engraved on a marble wall.

We need tombs, something tangible that covers the dead person, blocks our entry into Hades, a sacrificial table or a dish of incense in which we can burn the feeling of guilt after we, in the caverns of our mind, have shot the dead, who have already died once, in the back, in order to be able to carry on. How many have spent the rest of their days crying in back rooms, while working in the kitchen, in their sleep, surrounded by dead ones without a cradle because the urns burst at the
seams and the
Dies irae
sounded puny in a world which, without help from above, had brought to life with flair the horrific medieval visions of the Day of Judgement? And here I lie, on my back, on the bed, on a slow afternoon, in a distant corner of the globe where for the time being it is sunny, virtually cloudless, the streets cooled by the gentle, refreshing breeze that the weatherman predicted primly this morning, while under my window life goes calmly on somewhere halfway between nine and five—how risky and salutary our capacity for forgetting is. But how many dead people have I myself kept alive for too long and condemned to the twilight? Why are there so many absent people in my dreams? Why do they still not enter the rooms that are waiting for them there?