Monsieur le Commandant (4 page)

Please try to understand my state of mind that night, Monsieur le Commandant. This was not a simple case of anti-Semitism on my part – a perspective that, while perfectly justified, has sometimes incited certain excesses of conduct.

But we French must recognise – as you in your country already have, drawing the appropriate conclusions therefrom – that, alongside liberalism and its consequences, alongside selfish capitalism and deadly revolutionary Marxism,
one always and forever finds the Jews among us!
We find them in every antisocial movement, where they thrive marvellously as they gnaw, stitch by stitch, at the fabric of our traditions.

The Jewish question has often been misunderstood. I do not criticise the Yids for their work ethic (which, among other things, allowed Thomas Wolffsohn to provide his children with ease and education), or for their notorious business acumen. As you know as well as I, the gravity of the situation is that the Jews pose a
national
and
social
threat to every country in which they are to be found. National, because the Jews are stateless and assimilate only superficially into the civilisation of the country that has nonetheless honoured them with its welcome. Social, because the Jewish mind is critical and subversive to the highest degree; its seditious tendencies, being in no way mitigated by patriotic loyalty, lead it to criticise the institutions of the country to which it has attached itself, sometimes undermining and even destroying them. That is why the Jew is always so ready to involve himself in Freemasonry, or in Marxist and terrorist organisations.

We French remember only too well how many of his co-religionists won themselves ministerial and executive positions in the ‘Popular Front’ administration of that Jew Blum, and insinuated themselves into every level of government. Jewry had already swarmed into the medical profession
en masse
and – as I am well positioned to attest – reigned supreme in journalism and the theatre.

No less pernicious is the
moral degeneracy
of the Jews, which measures up in every way to that of the Levantines, Armenians, Greeks and other dagos, be they tradesmen or traffickers.

(I would also point out that the Jews of France continue to fight their homeland from abroad – we find them precisely among the political deserters and financial émigrés aligned with the Gaullists!)

In any case, your Führer has long understood the matter perfectly, and as for us, our Government of National Revolution has finally begun to make up for lost time. But when I discovered the hidden evil at the heart of my family, it was only 1939 – that is, the days of the Whore Republic, when the Jews were knowingly shepherding us towards disaster.

At home, the disaster had already taken place, though in this case none could have predicted it. And yet, a horrible new idea gnawed at me even more tirelessly: Was not this Jewish child – or, more precisely, half-Jewish, although I have heard it said that according to its beliefs or superstitions this religion is passed down exclusively through the mother – the catalyst of our first tragedy? Had not my beloved daughter perished because of her fatal notion to take the bored child for an outing on the river? And had not the shock of that tragic death given birth in turn to the tumour that had eroded,
stitch by stitch
, my wife’s mind and nervous system? Had Our Lord not sought – through this appalling chain of events, this deadly transmission accurately
mirroring the invasion of His eldest daughter, France itself – to punish us for the sacrilege of having welcomed this impure creature into the bosom of our good Christian family?

Upon further reflection, however, the
true
guilty parties in this calamity, if there were any, were Olivier, and then Hermione, howsoever unwittingly. As for Ilse, she could be held responsible neither for the family in which she had chanced to be born, nor for the political circumstances that had led her to seek salvation, whether or not out of genuine love, in our eternal land of asylum, which had so often shown itself to be excessively generous.

For that matter, Monsieur Langeron, the former Prefect of Police, had explained to me, at the Guitrys’ wedding luncheon, how his office undertook its practice of meticulous screening, complemented by vigilant surveillance – the threat posed by undesirables being commensurate with the difficulty of identifying them – to ensure the safety and security of all, including that of the few foreigners who were worthy of the shelter they sought in our country.

In any event, it was more than clear that my daughter-in-law had little to fear from the Prefect of Police, or from her homeland, given that even the stealthy bloodhounds of the Dardanne Agency – I smiled for the first time in hours at this thought – had been unable to track her down right there in their own town! Ilse Wolffsohn, having ‘escaped’ her native Germany, had become French
in full accordance with the law
. And no one had raised the least question of her religion.

The night having borne wise counsel, it was in a slightly calmer state of mind that I returned to Andigny the next day.

I had received my money’s worth, that was certain. At least now I
knew
. That was enough; for the time being there was no need to go any further. My daughter-in-law was a Jew – but after all, there had to
be a few good ones among them! Physically there was no way to tell. As for my granddaughter, she was half-Jewish; it may have showed in certain ways, but only if you were looking for the signs. And what of it? No one other than me and my wife – who was barely able to speak at that point – could bear witness to the truth. Ilse and Olivier, naturally, would keep their mouths shut. As to my son’s in-laws, those Wolffsohns with their perhaps typical Israelite features (their racial characteristics having skipped a generation to re-emerge in Hermione), they must have emigrated to Palestine, leaving no trace of their flight. Just as well, and good riddance!

When the children returned to spend the weekend at the villa not long afterwards, I did my very best to welcome them in the most natural way, even forcing myself to play the doting grandpa with Hermione, who was rather taken aback. My daughter-in-law seemed to be grateful for that and, despite Marguerite’s illness, the friendly atmosphere reminded me of the good old days, before the tragedies. On Sunday evening, I drove my family back to Paris in the car and spent the night at their flat, having been invited for the following day to the Polish embassy on Rue Saint-Dominique (now the headquarters of your German Institute), where, in that splendid old palace built for a Monegasque princess in the seventeenth century, Monsieur Lukasiewicz, the representative of the Warsaw government, held a glittering reception. Those in attendance included Paul Reynaud, the pianist Rubinstein – another Yid – and my colleague André Maurois, alias Herzog, that tiresome plagiarist whose Jewishness, in my ecumenical good humour, I was pleased to overlook. Also present were Princess Sixte de Bourbon-Parme and Princess de Faucigny-Lucinge. Although she was mobbed, Jacqueline Delubac (the former Madame Guitry), wearing a wispy dress and a white bird of paradise in her hair, graciously consented to several dances with me. I even tried to flirt, on the pretext of consoling her on her divorce and Sacha’s ‘treachery’.
That night in Paris, the political theatre appeared – in what can only be described as an historic irony – to favour Poland, and for the first time in that unsettled month of July the sky was clear.

War broke out six weeks later.

Gas masks were distributed to the people of Paris.

Olivier was mobilised and joined an armoured regiment somewhere in the East (I learned the location of his posting only after the armistice).

My daughter-in-law enrolled in a nursing course at the Union des Femmes de France.

As a commandant in the reserves, I prepared myself to be called up. In deference to my disability, I was favoured with an appointment as assistant director of the École Militaire d’Andigny, a strictly honorific post that allowed me to remain near my wife and to enjoy her few remaining months of life at her side.

The President of the Council named General Gamelin as Supreme Commander of the Franco-British armies. While I regretted that we were at war with the Germans rather than the Soviets, like all Frenchmen I was proud to place my fate in the hands of this man, whom I had seen in combat in the summer of 1918 when, as Commander of the Ninth Division, he had valiantly defended Compiègne and closed the road to Paris to your forces. He was an officer of the old school, boasting a distinguished military ascendancy, and seemed to represent all that was most pure and selfless in that profoundly national embodiment of our strength and our civilisation – the Army, which since childhood I had deemed to be one of the greatest things on Earth.

Ilse came to Andigny with Hermione in November for All Saints’ Day. She had been given ten days’ leave. As part of her uniform, my daughter-in-law wore a dark-blue veil and a cape of the same colour,
with its white breast badge bearing a red cross and embroidered with the initials of the military first aid service. In concealing her charms, the uniform in fact multiplied them tenfold. When she removed her cape on arriving at our house, the sight of her figure elegantly outlined by her immaculate white dress was like a thunderbolt. I felt – and I have pledged to tell the full truth, Monsieur le Commandant – a wave of violent desire sweep through me. Only my sense of propriety, shame and the presence of the child restrained me from making the ill-advised gesture that, may God forgive me, I felt myself driven to commit at that moment.

That night, unable to sleep in the big bed that Marguerite no longer shared with me, I recalled the brave nurses who had cared for me following my injury, on the second floor of a castle near Toul, of which my comrades and I were cherished ‘guests’, and later in the military hospital at Vittel. In the ambulances at the front, or in the mobile surgical vans that picked up the wounded in the line of fire, nurses were sometimes badly injured and even killed in the crossfire. And behind the lines, how many died of overwork, or of diseases contracted while treating the contagious? Some sour souls have spoken severely of the flirtatiousness behind those white veils, but anyone with a perceptive, open mind would see that such womanly courage, preserving its devotion to grace even in the most difficult and least poetic of circumstances, was a most attractive and typically French quality – and one that Ilse had assimilated in her contact with our people. What praiseworthy endurance! How immune to revulsion, impatience and nerves they seemed to be in the face of horrendous bloodshed, pain and death!

In Paris in those terrible days – as I have already described in one of my books – at that indeterminate hour between night and dawn, one encountered women of a certain understated elegance slipping through the empty streets with short, rapid steps. Beneath the veil that
covered their faces, which might be worn with the exhaustion of a vigil or taut with the effort of an early awakening, one glimpsed white hair, blonde or brown curls. Mothers, young women or girls, some were coming off the night shift after treating the wounded while others were hurrying to relieve them of their duties in the ambulances and hospitals. In the old days, they would have been coming home from the ball at that time! Their sense of having accomplished a cherished duty, or their haste to bring comfort to an injured man whom daylight was about to recall to his suffering, kept them from being defeated by their fatigue. All had a son, a husband, a brother or a fiancé over there, where the dying was going on. And each was sunk in reflection as she went; each bore silently her cross.

The image of Ilse superimposed itself upon my free-floating memories, on those veiled figures bent over the beds of pain, the faces of those angels of mercy with their tightly pulled-back hair, a mutinous lock emerging from beneath the fabric. The Elsie Berger of
Mädchen in Uniform
appeared to me, too, on the mute, flickering screen of my dreams. I saw the actress with her bright, languid eyes, her small, sensual mouth, her graceful, childlike expression as she leaned over me, whispering words of sweet comfort, pulling up the sheets and blankets, sliding her hand beneath them to stroke my shoulder, my mutilated arm, my chest heaving with emotion, then towards my lower belly. Overwhelmed, in my sleep I whispered, ‘Ilse, Ilse, Ilse …’ and awoke alone in the vast moonlit room as my seed flowed.

All Saints’ Day had dawned with grey cloud cover having displaced the icy, crystalline sky of the night before, and at breakfast, served by the maid in the dining room overlooking the river, a heavy silence reigned. My daughter-in-law appeared to be crushed by the rigours of her work at the hospital; the absence of Olivier, who sent her
nothing but the occasional brief message from the front, screened by the military censor; and her separation from Hermione, who had been sent to live with a friend and whom she saw only rarely when she was given leave or could take holiday.

As for me, I was haunted by the memory of the previous night. In a funny way, I felt almost as if the solitary pleasure I had experienced – arising from a mere dream, to be sure, but brought on, too, by the physical presence of she with whom I was sharing breakfast, who slept under my roof, who called me by my Christian name, who bore my surname and who, for the past seven years, had shared a bed with a man born of my flesh – ultimately differed very little from that which I should have derived from actually being with her.

Over the course of my life, I have known, in the biblical sense, hundreds of women: girls of good family, peasants, servants, seamstresses, whores, countesses, romantic schoolgirls, middle-class matrons, nurses, aviatrixes, fashion models, stage actresses, loose women, students, lovelorn readers and so on. My literary fame, my rank, my medals, my disability – you can’t imagine how many of these creatures were fascinated by the sight or feel of my prosthesis or my stump – seem to make me an object of singular attraction. Marguerite, who was aware of only a small fraction of my indiscretions, wisely chose to turn a blind eye and not dig too deeply.

Today, I look back over my past. What remains of those intoxicating embraces, those burning kisses, those caresses, bites, groans and cries, those follies? That wild beating of our hearts, that rising of our sap, those effusions and our divine ecstasies? What remains of them?

Nothing
.

Or so little. Memories that could just as easily be illusions. Fables. Lies.

I could have made up all those liaisons I have just enumerated for
you. Or you might choose not to believe me. What difference would it make? Do I even believe in them myself? I have forgotten so many names, so many faces, so many bodies …

If my past life had so little substance, I told myself as I sat at the silent table overlooking the dreary, leaf-strewn garden that lay between us and the Seine, swollen with rain and laden with broken branches … If it was so, then whether it was Ilse’s own delicate, graceful hand that had brought me to a climax, or merely that of her shadow – was there really any difference?

Because it was her name, and no one else’s, that I had whispered. It was she whose face and body had lifted my sword. She who had ordered my old heart to beat the attack. She who made me believe I was about to die.

That night, Elsie Berger, Ilse Husson, had been mine. Whether she was aware of it or not scarcely mattered.

The memory of that rut burned more strongly – a hundred, a thousand times more strongly – than all those flimsy recollections of love that grow confused and vanish forever into the abyss of time.

The weather outside looked cold and damp, and the breakfast dragged on. Unable to tear my mind from my nocturnal delights and the feelings they continued to elicit, I took inspiration from a reference to the fetching uniform that Ilse had worn yesterday – now replaced by a diaphanous negligee that only excited me more – to direct the conversation to those charitable young women whom I had known in Vittel in 1918.

The bourgeois ladies of the resort and those who had come for the cure – mostly the forlorn wives of officers at the front – were a constant presence at the military hospital. They were well aware that men, even those condemned to idleness, and perhaps even more so under such circumstances, have physical needs. These Frenchwomen were thus intent on consoling their fallen warriors, bedridden or hobbling on
crutches, and I cited the case of one Mademoiselle de T., most likely a virgin, whose fiancé had been killed in the earliest days of the war. This rather ugly twenty-five-year-old client of the spa came regularly to the hospital, seeking out the bedsides of all without exception – even those with the most hideous facial disfigurations – and had soon earned a nickname among the patients that was so vulgar I avoided repeating it. Settled into a chair at the side of a convalescent or disabled veteran, her gaze fixed on the wall, in her sweet voice she whispered Christian words of trust and hope, while beneath the sheets her right hand …

Ilse blushed furiously, reminding me that Hermione was with us at the table. I shrugged my shoulders. What could a five-year-old understand about this tale of a hand? Her mother made a face. ‘Even so …’ I laughed and changed the subject.

Over the following days I devoted myself more assiduously to my granddaughter, who eventually rewarded my efforts with greater affection. Hermione had a lot of Husson in her, and of her mother, who was generally kind and happy. As to her faults, they could only come from those eastern Jews the Wolffsohns or the Leesers, and I strove to cure her of the defects of her race – pride, slothfulness, frivolity – and to nurture all that was best in her to maturity. Was I doing her a service, even supposing that I could succeed? I believed I could, and I considered the task to be a duty.

At the close of their all-too-brief visit, during the ritual goodbyes on the platform of Andigny station, I hugged Ilse – who had resumed the blue veil and long cape – holding her against me a few seconds longer than usual. My heart was beating fast; could she feel it? My little nurse extricated herself from my embrace. ‘Come back soon,’ I begged, turning to whisper breathlessly, ‘Promise, Hermione?’ The child nodded; Ilse took her by the hand and climbed onto the train without responding. I watched the red tail lights of the train recede down the tracks until they vanished into the dark night.

My son had left for the front in early September and had not yet been given leave for Paris. I calculated that my Jewish daughter-in-law had not enjoyed the carnal act in two months.