33 Days (16 page)

A soldier washing his clothes in a bucket raises his head and says to us, “England is at war with France.” This news seems grossly absurd to us. It goes without saying that we can imagine nothing of the real facts that it distorts and translates into propaganda.

He offers us a copy of
Völkischer Beobachter
. An entire page is filled with death announcements, each framed by a black line … Each concerns a soldier dead at the front, not only for Germany but “
Für Führer und Vaterland.
”

The cooks are peeling vegetables. On a chair they have set up a phonograph, which is spewing waltzes. The soldiers shout and bawl, raking up big shovelfuls of verbal rubble. The courtyard’s peace is violated. We’re no longer even masters of our own silence.

The noncommissioned officers eat their meals inside the farmhouse living room, kitchen and dining room. Abel Delaveau is no longer master, after God, of his own table. But for the moment there is no force that could chase them from that house. They pay no attention to us, and we pretend to ignore them.

But it’s not the same with the cooks. They use the oven for the “gourmet meals.” With words and gestures Madame Delaveau demanded they use their own coal and not any of hers. They gave in. They offered a little coffee, a little salt.

One evening we were all sitting on the bench in front of the house. They brought their phonograph. It’s not a concert just for them. It’s a concert for us. They’re offering us a waltz by Johann Strauss, a crass
female music-hall singer and a comic of the Ouvrard genre.
^ǁ
We form two groups with no hostility but with no connection.

One of the cooks has brought a German grammar. He is sitting next to Madame Rose’s sixteen-year-old daughter. They’re looking at a vocabulary exercise together. It was straightforward, with nothing questionable. The young girl doesn’t pose a problem. She’s not a peasant girl; she works at a monotonous job as a seamstress, dreaming, no doubt, of Paris and its big department stores. These Saxon and Rhenish soldiers are nothing to her but young people on vacation.

It’s a spectacle that would have been intolerable for revanchists, Fourteenth of July parade-goers and music-hall patriots. But those types have disappeared, and they aren’t missed. Even so, I ask myself whether in all wars there aren’t these contacts between conquered populations and victorious soldiers. Historians and novelists neglect them, because they want their texts to be edifying and discreet, because such unfortunate details break with the party line, spoil their crude imagery.

Though Abel says to me, “Individually, they are men, like us,” he feels the way I do, that any submission beyond what the enemy may force by coercion is always questionable. Madame Rose thinks more simply that past eight in the evening girls should not banter with soldiers, and she orders her daughter to bed.

We are eating, and eating well. We have rediscovered the ritual of mealtimes, momentarily forgotten. We are sleeping in a good bed. But we know nothing about our son and his two friends. Though I’m repeating to my wife that “nothing can have happened to them,” I end up imagining the worst. I see them lying in a ditch, dying of hunger or wounded. I see my errant son searching for a morsel of bread. Did they return to Paris? Are they in Tournus, Trévoux, Saint-Amour, three possible destinations where they’d be safe? No way to
communicate with them. And we are stuck, as they may be. Even if we had gasoline, where would we look for them? It’s always the same empty deliberation in a vacuum.

We’re leading a strange life that is attached to nothing apart from the kindness and sensitivity of the Delaveaus. We’re prisoners, isolated from everything. We’re receiving only information about the repairing of power lines and the reestablishment of train and mail service. The most tragic, most contradictory rumors circulate about political and military events. Convincing or crazy, they are distorted from mouth to mouth. Seemingly born by spontaneous generation, they transform politics into clichés, they’re nothing but the fabrications of fear, they stave off a hunger for certainty that nothing can feed. Machine-gun fire is less depressing.

It is said that at the Gien and Sully bridges the Germans threw cars, bicycles and baby carriages into the water to clear the roadway faster. The story has a surprising precision: at the Gien bridge, the German guarding the left-hand sidewalk removed the babies before throwing their carriages into the Loire, but the German guarding the right threw everything, babies and carriages, into the water.

Today, July 4th, a soldier shows us a German newspaper from June 29th: Paul Reynaud’s car overturned on the Saint-Tropez road. Marshal Balbo died in aerial combat. He was “a great friend of Germany.”

The smallest gift of what we call civilization is that the details of events, if not their meaning, don’t escape us. But this hamlet in the Gâtinais is as far from events as the Sahara. And never were the fates of individuals as closely tied to what we call history as during this war. Our life consists of waiting, anxiety and the passage of time.

The colossal corporal would very much like to chat with me, to tell me again in pidgin German the big events of his life, to show me the photograph of his wife again. Yesterday he told me what he counts on doing when he’s out of the service. But I couldn’t understand whether the profession he was describing with the gesture of two arms in the air and the words “
Schwarzer Mann
” was that of a miner, a coal maker or a chimney sweep. I flee. And yet I see that he’s hiding two packages of tobacco in his hand. I’ve never shown such
dignity. He is disconcerted. He salutes me formally. As he would a commanding officer. Everything is correct, a regulation salute, except the slightly disappointed smile he adds.

The best moment of the day is when Abel Delaveau brings back a cartful of forage. I help store it in the barn. Then we sit on the bench, or in the living room if it’s empty of Germans, and we chat.

But mostly I ponder time, the passing of time. Counterrevolutionaries played the clavichord in Coblentz; revolutionaries before 1914 drank tea in London or Zurich, reconstructing the world in their imaginations. History allowed them their little corners, not us.

I’ve already said how I rewrote history. Now I set up a veritable workshop for historical repairs. History obeyed my commands. Victory breaks Germany as defeat would have.

I even invented an electromagnetic device. A recurring daydream. “Isn’t my idea excellent, Saint-Exupéry?” In each airplane I placed a tube whose rays explode all motors not equipped with an equalizer tube.

I feel all the stupidity of the war weighing on me. Like between 1916 and 1918. But the other stupid war was fed by passions. Since the defeat, it seems to me the French masses contemplate events the way peasants watch hail falling. I’ve seen the face of defeat on soldiers fleeing along the roads; I have not seen it on civilians. And I had lived through only the defeat, not yet those days to come when it seemed as if a people were surrendering itself. But weren’t you an internationalist? (An idiot … as Abel Delaveau and thousands of peasants would put it.) Yes, but not since the concept lost its meaning. One can’t unite nothing with nothing. And the resignation itself was repugnant. If I had seen some other nation suddenly consent to French domination because France had been victorious, I’d have despised that nation.

There’s bliss among the German soldiers, an expansion of self. A single idea in each head, but an idea without roots, an interchangeable idea revealed each day. Each day they’re ready for a new revelation.

Walled in; we’re walled in. In the village, there’s someone who really is walled in. I could go share his prison. He is the longtime priest of Chapelon who, after thirty years’ ministry, was banned. The
woman who was the cause of his ban lives with him. She can be seen around the village, but he never crosses the threshold of his walled garden. Such is Abel Delaveau’s natural nobility that in his account of this priest’s story there is not a single coarse detail to be found, no food for scandal. And yet God knows how little Abel loves religion.

I’m becoming apathetic. Chapelon is a kind of ivory tower, or simply a burrow. My boundaries are the cannons under the orchard trees, the field kitchen in the courtyard, the haystacks and the roofs. But I can no longer look at the lines of trucks passing along the road. I close my eyes. I try not to hear. I’d like to stay like that, waiting for history to let me live.

At the door of the town hall–schoolhouse, a German officer politely makes way for my wife. He hesitates, then suddenly says in passable French, “You are afraid of us, madame?”

“Afraid? No, monsieur. But as long as you wear that suit (she points at his uniform) here, you are my enemy.”

“But our Führer did not want war. It is France that declared war.”

“I’ve read
Mein Kampf
 …”

The officer seems embarrassed and responds, “We’re changing … one can change, and the fault is England’s, which, I swear in the name of Jesus, wants to dominate the world.”

Such dialogue makes sense only through its tone and intent. The “you are afraid of us?,” the “are we so terrible after all?” were clichés uttered by hundreds of Germans at the beginning of the occupation. This one blamed only the English. But most often total responsibility for the war was attributed to the English and the Jews, or even the Jews alone. Delirious interpretations, illusions personified, fabricated scapegoats. And Gutenberg’s invention isn’t free of blame: At the behest of the worst interests, it spreads the emptiest abstractions, devoid of bone and flesh. The Jews, instigators of carnage? Why not blame raccoons or the platypus?

“The 1875 constitution is abolished. Flandin is dictator.” The farmhouse living room is lit by an oil lamp. (We have no electricity, the
lines were cut.) Its light throws deep shadows on faces. A light from days gone by. Abel and I are sitting opposite each other. This news drops between us like a fly on the table.

We agree immediately that there is perhaps a dictatorship, but not this dictator. A dictator needs a little legend and a lot of popularity, enough at least so crowds join the police in cheering when he passes by.

The ones who most praise the wisdom of peasants are the same ones who deplore the passions of politics. They suggest that peasants are spared such passions, that they draw their wisdom straight from the soil. I’ve rarely seen a peasant who wasn’t a “political animal.” True, men of the soil have a politics of butter, just as workers have a politics of wages and bourgeois have, or had, a politics of annuities. But how crude that is. It’s not true that ideas and feelings are never more than a transmutation, a sublimation of interests. At any rate, whenever I’ve chatted with peasants, I’ve always admired their political sense. They’re not fooled by reversible ideas with which workers are sometimes exalted and other times bullied. And they resist those vast syntheses that semi-cultured bourgeoisie juggle.

Chapelon is in fact divided into two clans: the whites and the reds. The Montargis newspapers were teasing out of each commune the reasons for the polemic. A boy from Chapelon, playing with the carbine from a shooting gallery, wounded a little girl. The parents of one being from the “left” and the other from the “right,” a Montargis newspaper made the accident into political vengeance.

An old man in the village, whose patriarchal courtesy I love—one of those old people who are likened to a gnarled tree stump (hackneyed but accurate)—tells me that a big jeweler from Paris had taken refuge in Chapelon. This retailer, who was traveling with gold ingots in his car, was rejoicing that the Paris police and the
gardes mobiles
were intact. This way Belleville and Billancourt would surely be kept in line. (I’d heard nearly the same words from Aufresne’s mouth at Les Douciers.)

The old peasant invited him to keep quiet and told him such language wasn’t appreciated in Chapelon.

This happened in the Gâtinais. But I know regions where the
workers are regarded as “profiteers,” where their unrest is feared and there isn’t the generosity to forgive them for having allowed fewer casualties during the 1914 war than the rural inhabitants.

I’m told that the B.’s are the area’s rich people. They have numerous farms that they rent out, and in Chapelon they raise only two cows and some chickens. They are noted, without an excess of goodwill, to be in perpetual conversation with a German noncommissioned officer who wears an aviator’s uniform. This is a very strange character who lurks almost everywhere and seems to attend roll call as if he were a guest. I believe, like everyone else, that he serves as a stool pigeon. Though I never had proof, B. is accused of … exchanging undignified words with the German and shamelessly comparing a France wholly devoted to fun with an orderly, hardworking Germany. A rumor is going round that he invited the aviator to dinner.

I think of the stories we were told about the 1870 war, about the silent and disdainful pride the enemy ran up against. True or not, these stories have the same significance. In either case they testify to how we wanted to appear.

When I was a small child, I heard the story of my aunt Léonie’s handshake told a hundred times, a story that, as in all families, was polished and definitive, perfect as a work of art.

During the 1870 war one of my uncles, an engineering officer, had been taken prisoner in Sélestat. After the armistice, my aunt was allowed to go see her husband. Here I have only my childhood memories. They consist of a historical tableau: my uncle is shut up in a fortress, a bunker or perhaps a dungeon. A German officer leads my aunt to him down gloomy corridors, opens a door, salutes nobly and leaves.

The essence is that, for a few hours or a few days, the officer relaxed the regulations. He was so humane that it posed a problem for my aunt that for another woman would have been only elementary civility and decency. But she had an austere morality, left nothing to chance, and all her feelings, including her patriotism, were uncompromising. For her this was not a problem, it was a matter of conscience. Before returning to France, should she respond to the officer’s salute by an inclination of the head? Or, to show her gratitude
and not be outdone in nobility, should she offer him a handshake? My aunt thought the laws of war authorized extending her hand. She held out her hand. Oh, her body rigid and an indication, a hint, of a handshake! But after such deep deliberation! And it was one of the family’s legends. Also, I believe that thirty years later my aunt still had qualms.