33 Days (11 page)

“I had salvaged a jar of red-currant preserves … The Germans took it.”

Aufresne is washing and polishing his unusable car, which has a leaky piston rod. He prunes a hedge. He knows how to kill a rabbit and turn its skin inside out like a glove. He rakes the courtyard. Not just to make himself useful and to please Soutreux. This departmentstore department manager turned proprietor has remained rustic and a do-it-yourselfer. Just as leisure soothes my boredom, activity relieves his.

He contemplated the words of the Quaker pharmacist. “That man is right,” he said, “England will save us … England has mastery of the seas; Germany will be able to do nothing against a blockade organized by England.”

This is how he translated the mystical pharmacist’s providential dogma into economic terms. France had been taken, but he had the English fleet and was launching it across the seas.

I’m not mocking him. Such an emotional reaction doesn’t seem ridiculous to me. But I don’t know how to juggle mastery of the seas.

A bond has been established between the Aufresnes and us because like us they endure uncomfortably Soutreux’s hospitality, her on-and-off congeniality and hostile silence; because like us they feel the baseness of her reverse nationalism in the victors’ presence; and because like us they were ashamed by the indecent welcome she gave the German soldiers.

What a place, what circumstances for striking up a friendship! But beautiful friendships aren’t born by accident, even the most pathetic of accidents. They are prepared before the first encounter, via separate pathways. And the impact of that encounter isn’t for everybody.

I had some difficulty keeping up a conversation with Aufresne.
His kind of bourgeois knows only how to talk about business. I’m not saying he’d lost his soul; he no longer had the language to express it.

Corot’s father sold cloth. But he didn’t own an automobile and the political issues facing him were not international. And in Corot’s father’s time the newspapers still had an artisanal character: they weren’t yet mass-producing news and doctrine. The difference between articles in the
Constitutionnel
and articles in a newspaper today is the difference between a bolt-action breechloader and a machine gun.

Aufresne mulls over more ideas than a peasant, but a peasant knows much better how to weigh an idea and distinguish what is concrete in it and what is beyond knowing.

Once I was told, “The Dutch peasant is superior to the Belgian peasant because he has read at least one book: the Bible.” The descendants of Corot’s father in the France of 1940 hadn’t read a book, I mean a real book. They read newspapers and magazines. They think in captions and snapshots. This is apparent when they touch on problems of any breadth, politics in particular. Deep down they feel everything escapes them, but they don’t admit it. Then they force themselves to give shape to vague ideas, to feelings they’ve been fed. They personalize them, manipulating France or Britain like marionettes; they gesticulate, raise their voices, it’s as if all the muscles in their bodies are working, as if some towering rage or unknown despair is animating them: they want to create truth out of nothingness. When I hear my contemporaries deal with politics I often think about the madwoman in La Salpêtrière who believed the world did not exist beyond what she created, minute by minute. And “squatters” is what she called the chaotic beings she assembled to make the world and “supplement the diligence of the gods,” much like our contemporaries vainly assemble “squatters” in politics.

In the same way, Aufresne, who is the calmest of men, is agitated by history. He fears the workers of Belleville and Billancourt. If they’re at work, won’t they revolt? Who will keep them in line?

“We need to wait,” he tells me. “It’s better not to return to Paris
for a few days … not before food supplies have been organized. They can’t let us die of hunger …”

I recall he intended “they” to mean the French government. We didn’t think the Germans’ stay in Paris could last more than a few days.

At the crossroads of a byway and the Gien road, two women and two children were resting. They were coming from the Paris area pushing a cart loaded with a trunk and two suitcases. Their clothes were neat and brushed, their faces washed and fresh-looking. As I pointed this out with admiration, one of the women said to me, smiling, “But it’s perfectly normal … water and straw can be found everywhere.”

When the Germans were camping at Les Douciers, Lerouchon held a salon in front of her trailer. A couple of soldiers balanced on folding stools. We could hear peals of laughter.

Behind the house, we opened a can of food (we got a little bread from Ouzouer and Soutreux brought us some soup). Lerouchon came from her trailer offering us three pieces of rabbit. “You’re welcome to it, I swear …” My wife, thanking her, refused, saying we had enough to eat. I confess, I admire that dignity and regret the rabbit. Something of the soldier was reconstituted in me. I truly believe I would have accepted, for I have been hungry for days and hiding it heroically. And Lerouchon has such an air of a camp follower offering a bottle. So much a camp follower that she doesn’t distinguish between French soldiers and German soldiers. It’s an air she has. I don’t believe her husband, who is at the front, would have anything else to reproach her for. Anyway she speaks of him readily. “Let’s hope nothing has happened to him … No, I’m sure nothing has … I can sense it …” She repeats several times, “I sense it … I sense it … I sense it …” And you might say she senses it with her nose: She juts forward a muzzle that grimaces and sniffs.

She has a battery-powered radio in her trailer. We listen to the German broadcast from Compiègne. Chancellor Hitler … the rail
car … the 1918 monument
^b
 … No commentary. It’s sober and terrible. It’s nighttime and a cow is mooing in the meadow.

Radio-Journal de France
announces that a prefect who deserted has been dismissed and that there is fighting on the front in the Vosges and near Clermont-Ferrand.

I must look unhappy, because Lerouchon bursts out laughing, shouting in my ear.

“But laugh a little …”

What’s more, she reassures us about the fate of France.

“It will be a protectorate, like Morocco … We won’t be any unhappier; we’ll work like before …”

Lerouchon is a simple monster. Soutreux is more complicated. She isn’t plebeian, but rather a “
petite dame
,” simpering, precious and pretentious. Lerouchon ties herself into knots; Soutreux more does somersaults. I’m not searching for the origins of the German salient these two women set up in the Loiret. I only wish to describe Soutreux as I saw her day by day, kind or contemptible, hateful or ridiculous; like a domesticated animal, closer to a dog or cat than a human being. She differed from the Lerouchon woman in that she did not express emotions in simple barks; she used a few twigs, a few slivers of ideas. She told us about a conversation between two Germans. One said that he believed in God but not the God of religions. Lerouchon would be incapable of retaining and repeating such lofty abstractions.

Soutreux’s husband—I get these details from Aufresne—is of very humble origins. An industrialist, he owns millions’ worth of merchandise in inventory. He is not a talkative man, but his steadiness and loyalty are certain. I can easily imagine this businessman, who is not the kind that collects paintings, who absolutely doesn’t give a damn about Jouvet’s stage directing, who though a “naturalized” bourgeois endures not knowing the rites of high society and takes pleasure in nothing more than hunting and fishing on the weekend.

Does he know his wife’s feelings and how she behaves? It can be assumed he disregards women’s opinions, particularly his wife’s. Soutreux herself told us he spends whole days around her without speaking. But the simplest prudence or most basic decency would have led him to restrain his wife from showing herself to be so scandalously German.

This taste for Germany is her distinguishing trait. Other than that, she is maternal with dogs. She is escorted by a group of yelping beasts, and this barking seems to delight her. They sleep in her bed. I admit I don’t like the foxhound much. She bends over him tenderly, murmuring gently, “Where is my little professor?” and the foxhound instantly howls as if at the moon without ever having to be coaxed. She has pity for the rabbit she’ll eat tomorrow and says “poor little animal” to it with touching warmth. She is sympathetic toward stray dogs, and God only knows how many are wandering about. But she grumbles if her butane or firewood is used to cook the baby’s cereal. To make it, the Aufresnes build a fire in the meadow.

She’s as childish as a fifty-year-old girl, and if she tries to be imposing, she has the gravitas of a teacher’s aide on holiday.

She’s a little bohemian but not ugly, though she has thick arms and legs. She speaks French without an accent but is said to have been born in central Europe and to have relatives in Vienna. But I don’t see that, at any rate, as an excuse. As a foreigner married to a Frenchman, she might speak discreetly out of normal decency, if not prudence.

Her linguistic mistakes aren’t those of a foreigner, though. She gives words ambiguous meanings, like people who will never speak a language fluently, even their own. Wanting to show admiration for a politician to whom she attributes a great knowledge of foreign customs, she says, “He is very international.” But she has what language teachers call a vocabulary. She aspires to conversation and speaks to me with disdain about people who aren’t cultivated. Perhaps the only time in two weeks that I wanted to laugh was when I heard that word from her mouth.

“A German colonel,” she tells us with a hint of pride, “asked me for a private conversation … He told me France had been overfond
of ease but that she would pick herself up again. He told me that by his own hand he had killed twelve Senegalese prisoners, who for him are less than dogs …”

She pauses for a while, then continues in a quasi-confidential tone.

“What he wanted was information about Frenchmen’s state of mind …”

You see this scene in novels or onstage at the theater: the Frenchwoman, with all her finesse, disarming and disconcerting the barbarian. But Soutreux has no background in theater.

We often wondered whether Lerouchon and Soutreux were part of the fifth column. It always seemed unlikely to me. It’s inconceivable that a traitor would not feign perfect loyalty while in the country he’s betraying. The shamelessness, the insolence of Lerouchon and Soutreux stunned me. They were inexplicable to me then. Moreover, it doesn’t seem to me that propaganda for the enemy that was so overt and so crude would be effective. Today I believe the crazed lip service for order, even Hitler’s order, that came over part of conquered France had infected these dull souls.

When the Germans had left Les Douciers and their nearest billet was three kilometers away in the village of Dampierre, one of their trucks turned off the road and came into the courtyard. Soutreux rushed over to the cab, occupied by the driver and a noncommissioned officer. A conversation began that I didn’t understand. It was evident that the noncommissioned officer did not come under orders but for a visit. He had enormous, very white teeth. Soutreux was beaming, smiling, happy, though nothing led me to believe her happiness was anything more than speaking in German about Germany with a German.

But the following is more suspect. Two horse carts had stopped in front of the house: some peasants who had fled on the announcement of the German advance and been unable to cross the Loire at Gien had turned around and were coming back home.

“I told you not to leave,” Soutreux shouted at them, “that the Germans would do you no harm … but that those who did not return quickly would not be allowed to move back in …”

The armistice had not been signed. We had no news except what
circulated by word of mouth and was born out of thin air by spontaneous generation. That the Soutreux woman might claim several days before the Germans’ arrival that they would do no harm is explainable: to the extent that someone can love a group, a people, she loved them; for her their arrival was a blessing. Her certainty of a German victory, of their advance to the Loire, is explainable as well: she considered them invincible. But how could she have foreseen that the Germans would distinguish between abandoned farms and those that peasants had temporarily evacuated? She was wrong only on a detail. The Germans indeed ransacked only abandoned houses in this region, but they were not opposed to the return of peasants who had fled. But that’s thinking like a prosecutor.

In Dampierre, Soutreux met with a woman I know nothing about except that local people whisper that she is a “fifth columnist.” She speaks German volubly, giddily, ostentatiously. What to conclude? Except that during the last war I knew how to laugh at spies’ disguises. I truly believe Soutreux loved Germany with an exhibitionist passion.

Some attribute to young women a sentimental pity for soldiers. I think Lerouchon might have welcomed French soldiers as willingly as she did German soldiers. It wasn’t the same with Soutreux. This proves it.

On the path in front of the house is an example of those one-of-a-kind, homemade carts that before the exodus would have been ashamed to be on the highway. Next to it three young men are resting, wiping their brows. They are three French soldiers from the Forty-Sixth or Forty-Seventh Division. Taken prisoner by the Germans, they escaped. Two of them had been captured twice and twice had escaped. They have formed a band; they have linked their fates. One of them is from the Nièvre, the other two from the Jura. They were given civilian clothes, and they got rid of all their identity papers. They’re navigating by the sun and a map, avoiding the highways, taking small roads. They’d fought at the Somme. Their morale had been good. They might have held on had they seen French aircraft and been given ammunition. “Then,” they said, “we understood … The order was, every man for himself …”

They left like the rest, southward. They met a motorcyclist who
told them, “Don’t worry … they’re twenty-five kilometers behind you …” The motorcyclist, who spoke perfect French, dashed off ahead of them. Half an hour later they found German soldiers barring their route.