33 Days (7 page)

It’s impossible to think of leaving in the pitch dark. It’s impossible to sleep in this crowd. We decide to rest in the hayloft, which can be reached by a ladder. The hayloft is cement and contains neither hay nor straw. No matter. To lie down is a luxury. But at the other end of the loft an old woman, in a voice both furious and monotonous, is shouting insults and reproaches at her daughter-in-law and son, endlessly, without pause.

Between night and dawn we decide to set off, and we leave the hayloft.

The car is trapped between the dead artillery-wagon horse and the rear end of another automobile, which is enmeshed with another, which is similarly wedged in, and so on for two hundred meters. Even if I succeed in extricating it from this inextricable line, we won’t
go far, the gas tank is nearly empty. A bicyclist is shivering in his shirtsleeves and asks whether we couldn’t give him a jacket or covering. We have only a white woolen blanket. He puts it over his shoulders and leaves on foot, bent over his machine, looking like a ghost.

We deliberate in this sooty dawn, next to the dead horse, which is now scarcely more to us than an embankment or a mile marker. We quickly decide to continue on foot. That means opening all the suitcases and gathering a little clothing in the smallest. As a household move, it’s complicated. Like all men, I’m a coward when faced with moving house. I lose interest. I have only one concern, which is to bring
Terre des hommes
. Not because it is a luxury edition—I have little regard for beautiful editions—but because Saint-Exupéry gave it to me, because the beautiful paper, the uncut pages, aren’t sumptuousness and vanity but friendship. Because Saint-Exupéry wrote in it, in his ethereal handwriting, a few words with which my friendship refreshes itself as if at a spring, a few words I would be proud of, were friendship not above pride.

I owe
Terre des hommes
as much worry as joy. When I had to ask for shelter, I entrusted my copy to the host, who hid it on the highest shelf of an armoire under a pile of sheets. Later, having thought about it, and believing I’d be able to get back on the road, I thought it would be safer if I took it with me. Unable to leave, I entrusted it to my host again; then I took it back. Saint-Ex, how you complicated our exodus!

If we have to abandon the car, we’ll abandon it farther on. In either case, it will be ransacked. Might as well use every last drop of gasoline. I can’t recall how we freed it. But a man got up on the running board and helped us. His wife and their five children disappeared the evening before, during the battle. He started out with two families who were friends; the drivers of both cars had disappeared.

Yesterday’s fight cleared the road. We’re moving freely. All I remember is a peasant screaming and rolling on the ground; a man was trying to restrain him. We arrive at Ouzouer. But in the middle of the town the road is riddled with holes from mortars and is impassable. We turn onto a byroad that also leads to Gien, the Gien bridge and the Loire, which is stopping the enemy armies.

I’ve said little or nothing about the cars abandoned by the roadside, in the roadside ditch, upright or on their sides. So I have not given an accurate image of a landscape strewn with automobiles, like a wasteland strewn with tin cans. I’ve also said nothing about those who abandoned them. But from a distance I won’t affect a pity that I no longer felt at the time and that had turned into cold observation. Men, women and children had become pedestrians. It was nothing more than a change in classification, as irrelevant as troop movements. I had acquired the indifference of a soldier or emigrant.

Past Ouzouer, carts and automobiles are returning toward Ouzouer and Lorris, that is, heading away from the Loire. People are shouting to us that the Loire can no longer be crossed and that the Gien bridge had blown up.

My wife decides to cross the Loire at all costs, no matter how, by swimming if need be. I admire her for still planning and for aspiring to influence fate. Everything seems so absolutely incoherent to me that it no longer seems possible to bring any rational calculus or human volition to bear.

The countryside is bare and seems uninhabited. We see only deserters, nomads. This area is just a desert track.

An airplane passes overhead and strafes by approximation, none too insistently. People flee into the roadside ditch and the woods.

A whimpering man in his fifties, a doctor from near Paris, abandoned his car for lack of gasoline. He brought neither suitcase nor knapsack nor bundle. There is a consolation in desperation, which is to part with everything, to be reduced to oneself. He’s not losing his misery in the misery of others. He takes refuge in his; he takes refuge in his complaints, in his tears. He is alone; he’s wandering straight ahead. Even so, he’s whining about having left behind I don’t recall what book. It’s touching and a little comic, for as I remember it was over one of those “deluxe” editions, with cheap illustrations, that were mass-produced after the 1914 war.

I had reassured two peasant women with a young girl coming from who knows where. I had told them, knowing nothing and completely at random, that we had little chance of being hit by bullets from an airplane. We tell each other our misfortunes. They suggest
we take shelter with them in a certain abandoned farmhouse well away from the road. The Germans won’t think to go there. We’ll live there “while waiting.” There are beds and, in a field next to the house, hay and potatoes. Chickens are still pecking in the farmyard and a cow, fussing in the meadow, wants only to be looked after.

Many people lived that way, for days and days. It was not an absurd plan. But the Germans neglected neither winding country roads nor isolated houses. The idea of a rustic life away from the flood of refugees tempts me. But we wanted to cross the Loire.

My wife learns from an old peasant that nearby is a mill and a ferryman. Our decision is made. We’ll beg the miller to look after the car and we’ll cross with three small suitcases, which we will make as light as possible, since afterwards we must travel by foot.

*
The Werths’ son’s nanny.

III

LES DOUCIERS.
FIFTH COLUMN

The peasant was an Arab storyteller. On his directions, five hundred meters from the Loire we find a sandy courtyard and a low house. There is indeed an old mill not far away, but nothing had been milled in it for a long time. The ferryman, there since the day before, is a refugee from Paris who had taken a few soldiers across the Loire.

I learn this from a very brunette, slightly reticent woman who makes little faces while speaking. The house belongs to her. Her husband stayed in Courbevoie, where he manages a factory. Their apartment was bombed; the bombs did significant damage to it, in particular shattering windowpanes that cost 4,000 francs each. It’s true that a man from Paris, who is an acquaintance of hers, ferried some soldiers across and will perhaps consent to take us across as well. She agrees to lend one of her rowboats provided that the other, which a refugee left on the opposite side of the river, can be brought back, because each of these boats is worth 3,500 francs, “and thirty-five hundred francs is not a sum one throws into the Loire.”

I also learn that two soldiers borrowed a ladder to cross the Loire. They got into the water holding onto the uprights. But one of them drowned.

I admired the blossoms of some rosebushes planted in front of the house on the other side of the courtyard. I genuinely admire them but say so also to be attentive, for I’m the guest, the supplicant.
I learn that they grow thanks only to the care of an old gardener, a nice old man, but one who works very slowly and to whom she pays seven francs an hour.

I am, I admit, a little irritated by this numerical evaluation of every object, by this transcribing of the world into prices. It seems too simplistic to me to see only vulgarity and a poor education here. This is irresistible and persistent, like a tic; I think it must be some sort of disease.

Moreover, Madame Soutreux’s welcome has a tense, mannered kindness, a kindness without warmth. But after all, by what right could we demand that she give us her heart? She isn’t refusing us access to her courtyard. She will introduce us to the mysterious, benevolent ferryman; she agrees that we can leave our car in her yard provided, of course, it won’t be for too long (this goes without saying and seems fair). She also agrees to watch over a few things that are precious to us.

Besides, it is she who holds the secret of the Loire; she is the goddess of the Loire. And we wish to cross the Loire at all costs. To cross the Loire, I’m prepared for any concession, any indulgence. That is why I offer to swim across the river to fetch the 3,500-franc rowboat still on the other shore.

We ready our bundles for the crossing and for our new journey on foot.

But an artillery duel begins over our heads. The French mortar shells fall near Ouzouer and the Germans’ shells hit the evacuated villages on the other side of the river. A rocket lands in the courtyard.

We no longer think of crossing the Loire.

Madame Soutreux offers hospitality. She gives us permission to stay in her courtyard and sleep in the car.

We are strangers. We appeared suddenly at this house, far from the main road, reachable only by a crude, rutted track. It is an ancient farmhouse consisting of a ground floor, level with the courtyard, and a shed topped by a hayloft. Its transformation into a Sunday pied-à-terre for Parisians is very recent. Only a single room has been furnished, which Madame Soutreux uses as both a dining room and a bedroom. The walls of the other rooms have not yet been papered
and the doors not yet painted. In one of the rooms there is a bed frame.

Madame Soutreux does not inhabit this vast, barely furnished house alone. People are moving around the courtyard and inside the house who seem familiar with the place and “fully authorized.” The most mediocre observer would grasp immediately that they form a temporary group and that they are strangely dissimilar. Some are nearly unclassifiable. The majority of novelists rely on a base of stable, well-defined mores. Their characters move toward or away from the customary. But in France since 1914, prejudices have weakened as much as their premises. Mores and social relationships have lost all solidity. Weak personalities have become incoherent, and this very incoherence lends them an apparent originality.

For eight days we lived among people some of whom seemed nearly inexplicable to us. At least surprising enough for us to be unable to readily describe them. I’m saying that only a Balzac, if that, could have brought some coherence to this group while leaving them their individuality—and would the times have let him?

Only the Aufresnes are perfectly legible to us, and their feelings are the only ones here that are not as strange to us as those of a Martian or a moon man. Formerly the manager of a department in a department store, Aufresne had set up on his own. Heavyset, he is a common type of Frenchman with average ideas who has kept his parents’ values and neither retained nor acquired any others, and who has, since 1920, known no other worry or inspiration than those of an automobile and country inns. He is measured in his speech, firm even. And not without courage. It is he who helps French soldiers cross the Loire, aware of the risk of being denounced or the sudden arrival of the Germans.

His wife had refinement and charm and, as what comes later in the story will show, a heart. They had arrived the day before with their daughter, a very young woman, and granddaughter, a two-year-old.

They had not left Paris bound for Les Douciers, but Aufresne remembered, while in the worst of a traffic jam and a failing piston rod, that he was acquainted with Monsieur Soutreux and knew the
location of Les Douciers, having spent a Sunday there. They sleep in the shed.

Madame Lerouchon, wife of a garage owner, has been staying at Les Douciers for quite some time. But she is living with her mother in a trailer parked in the field adjoining the courtyard. She is from Metz and speaks German as fluently as French. Madame Lerouchon resembles a fairground wrestler; she has the bulk and jowly muzzle of one. She doesn’t know how to speak without shouting nor how to shout without the accompaniment of a furious pantomime, a pantomime that is not only gesticulation but a simultaneous forward propulsion of her entire body, her head and the simultaneous and separate forward propulsion of her lips. She speaks the way farm dogs bark, for whom barking is not a sign of anger but of excitement, and who wag their tails at the same time as they make themselves heard. I have no reason to say this woman was disagreeable. Worse than that, or something else entirely.

Her niece resembles those “Gretchens” represented in French imagery around 1891: eyes like porcelain and blond plaits.

In the yard, in the house, a busy old man walks about always wearing a soft black hat and an off-white duster. His gaunt face resembles a skull, but a skull shorn of everything macabre, with neither death nor life, a moronic skull. His Midi accent, authentic though it may be, is so exaggerated that it seems put on. Everyone calls him “
le vieux monsieur
,” and no one knows him by any other name.

He speaks often of his son, a mechanic who is on the highway charitably repairing cars that break down.

The slow war of the first few months, as I experienced it in Paris, sometimes seemed to me like a war distant in time for the Parisians, a war refrigerated by a history textbook. During the very first days I heard a grocer from Combs-la-Ville, who the next day had to get back to his warehouse, declaring as he taped paper to his windows that he very much hoped to chop Adolf’s block off. I’m no longer hearing anything of the kind; I’m seeing only the calm of a self-possessed people. Germans no longer cut off children’s hands. The French no longer possess the slice of toast with magic jam that was going to trap the Germans like flies on glue so absolutely effectively
that all tactics and strategy were superfluous. The passions of a people aren’t easily summed up, but it seemed as if the French had clearly concluded that at this moment in history Germany was the enemy. At Madame Soutreux’s I first understood that this could be otherwise.