33 Days (4 page)

In the village square a group of peasants form a tight circle, posed as if for a commemorative monument. I approach. No sign of suspicion, but they are assessing me, judging me. I’ve tumbled from the moon into a circle of country notables. Everyone looks at me. I must look very Parisian. I’m not rejected; they don’t walk away. I’m being sized up. An old man looks at me as innocently as if he were contemplating the horizon. Among this group of faces, I discern one that’s livelier, more defined. This must have been what a young Voltaire
looked like, which is to say, Voltaire at forty-five. This face shows more curiosity than the others, and more guile. His eyes aren’t sizing me up, they return my gaze.

We are the heroes of fewer than three nights without a bed. Down deep, I think a bed is a good thing. But I’m not so stupid. I too am not without guile. I know how to dissimulate when necessary. I ask only for a roof against bad weather and a little straw.

Abel Delaveau (here I’m giving his real name) was our host. I washed myself with water from his well; we shared meals at his table and slept in a bedroom of his house, a real bedroom, in a bed, a real bed. I contemplated with surprising enthusiasm the 1880 clock on the mantel, the framed photographs and the red underside of the eiderdown.

When I was a child I read beautiful stories about hospitality. The guest is sacred for the biblical patriarch, in the Greeks’
Iliad
, in the Bedouins’ tents. Abel, Monsieur Abel as he is often called in Chapelon, I had no reason to envy antiquity thanks to you. Hospitality exists in modern times and is even more beautiful because it is not a rite but a gift.

The courtyard of the farm, filled with the setting sun, with calm, with silence, is enormous and enclosed by a wall. The house, the barns, the stable, the cowshed look beautiful together. In the facade of the house a gothic fragment has been preserved, as one might respect a swallows’ nest. I was with Abel Delaveau only long enough to say thank you. A few words about the war changed everything. I’ll recount the conversation later. At this point in my story I’ll leave it. I’ll only say that we felt there was a common language between us. We both detested the war beyond just its effects on our relatives and our interests; we both faced it with surprising acceptance and both knew that if Hitler was responsible, he wasn’t as important as he was made out to be and he hadn’t invented himself without help.

I’ve often been uncomfortable chatting with laborers, never with a peasant. Sometimes a peasant picks words with his fingertips, like picking a stalk of wheat, or a single kernel. A city dweller learns from peasants to recognize wheat and oats but can’t discuss cereals. A worker learns from newspapers and city life the game of passionate
abstractions, of juggling fake weights. When in a crowd, he can’t make out the reality, the abstraction and the emotion he’s being inoculated with.

Simply put, Abel Delaveau had read. A government official, as I’ll describe him for simplicity’s sake, asked me, “Are you sure he assimilated what he had read?” and his question was quick and sharp, as if my assertion had infringed on something at the core of his being. Many French baccalaureates consider this sort of “assimilating” one of their privileges. I knew university faculty members who had assimilated nothing at all.

I thought for a moment about Émile Guillaumin,
^‡
to whose home the writer Valery Larbaud brought me one day. But I did not have time to get to know Guillaumin the peasant. I can still see him stabling a cow. The same modesty that kept us from giving in to a conversational
tour littéraire
perhaps kept him from giving a
tour paysan
. But Abel Delaveau was a peasant in full, by heritage and by choice, and an enthusiastic one. I’ve never met another like him. Especially because he is not at all immured by his work on the land.

That first evening in Chapelon I didn’t know that “return to the soil” would soon become a fashionable, prescriptive refrain. Bureaucrats and academics now utter it regularly, proving only that they have no aptitude for anything besides unskilled manual labor. What they call “the wisdom of peasants” is nothing but a reflection of their mental laziness or their preconceptions. They contrast it with workers’ excitability and are thus reassured. To tell the truth, Abel would not have satisfied them. Still, he would not have been a peasant if he had accepted revolutionary doctrine. But I don’t want to do a political portrait of Abel; I don’t even know whether I could pull it off. For now it’s enough for me to say I never knew a more agile, engaged mind.

Abel drives me to the town hall, where he had put together a library. But I’m too tired to read the titles clearly. I see some Balzac, that’s enough for me. We walk around his property. I admire the monumental hindquarters of three crossbred Boulonnais horses. The stable contains a dozen or so heifers and a bull. On the opposite
side of the courtyard are more than a hundred white rabbits, like eggs that quiver.

A little after dinner, Abel brings a bottle of Savigny up from the cellar, an excuse for us to talk about Beaujolais and Mâconnais, from where my wife was born and which is for me an adopted home. Abel tells us that in his grandfather’s time there were only winegrowers in this region, the Gâtinais. Their wine was bad and they didn’t make a good living. Phylloxera came. It looked like disaster, total ruin. The region was saved by phylloxera. Winegrowers stopped growing vines and turned to intensive farming. Now, whoever lives off the land within fifteen kilometers of Montargis lives respectably.

We ate with Abel, Madame Delaveau and their three children. Our adventures, which after all were hardly tragic, amused the whole family. We chatted late after dinner. It was almost midnight when, out of politeness, we got up. Because we were not in a hurry. Nothing was forcing us to leave early the next day. We were a hundred kilometers from Paris. So there were much more than a hundred kilometers between the fighting and us.

Stretched out between the sheets, I feel the mattress with every part of my body and sink voluptuously into a deep sleep.

I’m woken abruptly by a rapping on the door. I recognize Abel’s voice. I get up and open the door. Abel is holding a lantern from the stable. The entire room flickers in that flickering glow. “The mayor,” Abel says, “received the order to evacuate the village. The men aged sixteen to forty-five. The women can stay.”

It’s two hours after midnight. It’s dark. We deliberate confusedly. Perhaps the wise thing would be to stay, or to leave the women to guard the farm. But it seems impossible for the men to abandon the women. We know nothing about the Germans’ conduct except what they did, or what the newspapers attributed to them, in Poland. And from the courtyard we can see the glow of fires in the vicinity of Mignières. These are no doubt villages burning.

We prepare to leave. Madame Delaveau puts the mattresses on the floor and takes some sheets from an armoire. She has tears in her eyes. Her youngest daughter, little Jacqueline, a twelve-year-old, sobs, not wanting to leave without her prettiest dress.

“What should we bring?” Madame Delaveau asks my wife, as if my wife possessed the great secret of evacuations.

The light from the fires is growing. Later we would learn that French troops had set fire to the supply depot in Mignières. Abel harnesses his three Boulonnais to the hay wagons. Then he goes to the stable and untethers the livestock.

*
An open-air restaurant.

†
The main street in Old Marseille.

‡
Émile Guillaumin (1873–1951) was a farmer and writer.

II

FROM CHAPELON TO THE LOIRE.
BATTLE SCENES

Not a glimmer of dawn on the road from Chapelon to Ladon. A stopped van looks like a faint gray tapestry to me. Its headlights brighten then disappear. I turn mine on full. Some peasants or soldiers in a field nearby shout insults at me. I shut off my headlamps. I turn them on again. Four times, five, maybe more, thanks to which I was able to drive four kilometers in less than an hour.

Day breaks. We find the caravan again. We reinsert ourselves. By evening, we’ll have gone about a dozen kilometers.

The stops for bottlenecks are an hour, two hours, I can’t recall. We are stuck in front of an abandoned house surrounded by a garden. Through the fence we can see some red-currant bushes. My wife picks a few currants, bringing them back in the palm of her hand. She took great care not to break the branches. But she has just left the garden when a strapping young man in a tunic enters and returns with a trophy of branches. He is at war, one with winners and losers. Our respect for the branches of currant bushes is already anachronistic.

Some military trucks overtake us in a second file. It is a regular convoy, orderly. But their column gets stuck as well.

People from the caravan, those not asleep in their cars, wander the roadsides. An officer pacing back and forth beside a truck asks if we are hungry, if the children are hungry. He has hardtack distributed. His face is grave and sad.

An artilleryman offers me a glass of white wine. I drink it in a single draft. A motorcycle trooper keeps his balance by holding onto the door of a car and demonstrates for a comrade the rules of balancing on a motorbike, showing him which muscle groups are involved. He speaks volubly, extremely nervously. I remember that when the convoy moved off, he blurted out to me, “We’re going to do in a few.” He believed in a battlefront at the Loire.

“Don’t leave any …,” I say to him.

I’m not particularly proud of this reply. It expresses my feelings at that moment. I’d willingly have sacrificed several thousand Germans in the abstract for the Loire front not to collapse. Besides, I had said the same thing when the press and French radio announced the capture of Narvik and described thousands of enemy corpses floating in the sea.

The caravan, its peasant carts and its autos, is still stopped. Minutes, hours pass. I can’t even say they seem long. These minutes and hours are outside normal time.

From a small, tarpaulin-roofed truck—on the back of which a fifteen-year-old girl is perched bizarrely, like the figurehead on a ship’s stern—a shrewish-looking woman emerges. She is chanting: “We’ve been sold out, we’ve been betrayed …” This common accusation, which I afterward heard often on the road, seemed sufficient in itself. I never got a response to the question: “By whom?” But there is a popular faculty for divination that overwhelms the fumblings of judgment.

The shrew decided to act as the traffic police. Indeed civilian vehicles were jumping the queue, flouting order as well as courtesy. She screams, “You shit … bastards …” She stands in the middle of the road, arms crossed, and forces a car to stop. The car is driven by a young blond woman with painted eyebrows who is not exactly finding the right words.

“I’m the wife of a gunnery officer …”

Describing herself this way elicits jeers, a collective outcry. “Who gives a damn!…”

The cars are two abreast, sometimes three. A soldier detailed from who-knows-where tries in vain to unsnarl traffic. This minuscule
attempt at policing is the first since Paris. The soldier can do nothing; the harpy insults him. No one objects. The trooper, a good guy, replies that his training was not with a white baton as a traffic cop in Paris, calmly points out that he did not deserve the old woman’s insults and that she had been disrespectful to him without cause. Then her husband intervenes, his tone of voice howling in the style of classic tragedy: “With you people she will never be enough …” The shrew, now addressing the four winds, demands bread and gasoline. Bread and gasoline; it’s like the cry of a mob. I sense the beginnings of a riot on the roadway. It won’t occur.

The caravan moves a few meters, stops, moves again. Its links loosen and solidify. With a regimen of twenty restarts an hour for five consecutive days, many starters no longer engage, many batteries are dead. A boy approaches the open hood of a car and observes sadly, “It’s all these broke-down cars …” Even when there’s no mechanical failure, many cars are being pushed by hand simply to save gasoline.

Several cars overtake the caravan at great speed. They are filled with officers. Respectful of the military’s priority, the caravan docilely pulls over to the right. At first we would stand at attention for a moment, we would salute these officers who are going ahead to prepare our defense. Except we are a little surprised to see so many women in the military vehicles. But they no doubt belong to the Red Cross. One of the vehicles from the caravan veers a little to the left. An officer leans out, yelling and pointing a revolver at the tires. Stuck to the road like a snail to its rock, the caravan doesn’t react.

That’s when for the first time I see isolated infantrymen, unoarmed, heads down, dragging their shoes, sometimes their sandals, along the grass on the roadsides. Avoiding a bicyclist, skirting a stopped auto without seeming to see them. Walking like blind men, like disheveled shadows. Strangers to the peasants in their carts, to the city people in their cars, to military units, they are alone, like beggars who have renounced begging. This is the beginning of the rout. We don’t realize it. We take them for stragglers; we believe that their regiments are far ahead.

We had left Abel Delaveau’s farm before dawn. It’s six in the evening. We’ve gone about a dozen kilometers. At each restart, my wife
has to push the car. This distresses me; I’d say it humiliates me—at first.

I am prisoner of a route I didn’t choose. I have become a refugee and have no refuge. I’m sleepy. Why keep going? Tomorrow, the traffic will no doubt be better. The horse carts from the Beauce and the Gâtinais, and the cars from Paris, will all have passed. There can’t possibly be a single car left in Paris. It’s hard to imagine that Paris could have contained so many.

I give up moving with the caravan in fits and starts. I lie down on the grass beside the road. But I don’t find the hoped-for rest. The river of carts and automobiles is hypnotic. It streams along beside us, yet absorbs and overwhelms us. There is a beautiful meadow where some cars have already parked. I add ours. We decided to spend the night there.