On Leave (19 page)

“That way, what?” Lasteyrie cut in with an odd look in his eye.

“That way I'll be seeing you a little while longer,” Valette said.

So they trooped back to Rue de Constantinople, without a word. In the meantime, Aunt Évelyne's shutters had been closed. Thévenin's sleek Jowett could be seen parked a little way off.

“What if we all went up?” Lachaume said.

“Ach! Laaachaume! That's not possible,” Lena said, after being silent and docile for so long. “You should not bring strangers into a family gathering.”

“It's not just family.”

“No, no,” she repeated vehemently. “You should not! Those people want to make a fuss over you by themselves.”

“She's right,” Lasteyrie said. “Just give me my kit.”

Lachaume went and got the two kit bags. He left the suitcase behind. Lasteyrie had asked him not to bring it.

“Leave it there?” Lachaume exclaimed. “You'll never get your stuff back. You don't know Aunt Évelyne!”

“I do not have the honor,” Lasteyrie said. “But she may donate all my things to the poor.”

“The only poor man who'll get to wear them will be my cousin Paul. I can see him ten years from now still shod in your moccasins made of the skin of who knows what.”

“Made of sealskin,” Lasteyrie said, with a wag of his finger. “It's very fashionable … When you see him wearing them, think of me … So long! Have a nice evening!”

They peeled off on their way to Saint-Lazare, while Lachaume fumbled for the doorbell with eyes still on their backs. Lasteyrie walked in the middle, wobbling from Lena to Valette and back again, with the kit bag on his back; all of a sudden he puts his arms out as if to steady himself, then puts his hands on their shoulders and dips his head. Lachaume runs after them when they've not gone more than a few paces.

“Pull yourself together, man!” he shouts.

“Yes, Sergeant,” Lasteyrie says with a wink, leaving his hands on his friends' shoulders nonetheless.

At the station where Valette had to catch his local train and Lachaume should have parted from Lasteyrie and Lena, they still couldn't split up. So they allowed themselves a last glass.

“Where do you want to go?” they asked Lasteyrie, who stood there, slightly hunched, worriedly watching the pair of them with his darting eyes.

“To the … Grands Boulevards?” he said eventually, with hesitation, as if he risked losing all by asking for too much.

But Lachaume and Valette agreed straightaway. Lena was the only one to object.

“What about the turkey they've cooked for you?” she said to Lachaume. “It'll have gone all dry…” She wagged her finger at him.

They went along Chaussée d'Antin, where the high-class tarts, seeing they were soldiers, didn't say a word, and from there to Boulevard des Italiens.

What's wonderful about the Grands Boulevards is that so much artificial lighting can still be so gentle on the eyes. Fairground stalls set up cheek by jowl halved the width of the pavement, and the crowds squeezed slowly in between the bright cinema entrances, shop windows, and bars on one side, and, on the other, strings of fairy lights swaying in the wind over pot-shot booths with fancy-colored feather targets, shiny Paris souvenir stalls, and sweet stands displaying secret recipes for all to see.

The lights wrapped themselves around the trio and bore them forward through the smell of warm praline.

It was early evening. Couples, alone or in groups, were going into the cinemas. You could see most of them hadn't yet eaten and were going to dinner after the film, so as to have a topic for conversation. Lachaume used to adore suppers of that kind, enlivened by the show they'd just seen on empty stomachs. They would debate Hitchcock and Beckett with unending passion. Memories that brought back the taste of ice-cold oysters and grated onion …

Other couples, on the other hand, were going out to dine. Perhaps they would go to see a film afterward, at the ten o'clock showing, or to a club on the Left Bank or on the Right? Anyway, other people were determined to go home earlier. Tears welled up when he saw the real closeness between a man and a woman who were walking in front of him. People coming toward them constantly forced them to move apart, then they came back together to touch each other's hand before they were separated by another wave of pedestrians. You could not stop yourself thinking of when the two of them would finally have their arms around each other, at closing time, when the last metro went—at a time when Lachaume and the others would have their foreheads against the window to watch the last lights of the city outskirts fade away into the distance as the express train bore them south. Everything he could see beginning at this early hour of the evening reminded him with ever-increasing force that he would no longer be there when it ended.

They drank no less than three stirrup cups at The Interval, a bistro–cum–snack bar on Boulevard Montmartre, next door to a theater. It was a full-dress gala night. Students from Polytechnique stood outside the theater waiting for the start of the show, and with their two-pointed black hats and their swords at the hilt, they became a focus of attraction themselves.

Lena sat near the window of the bar, lost in thought, watching the comings and goings of the gala audience, while Lasteyrie stayed at the counter, where his glass was never empty, as if to put off any sudden move to leave. His head was sunk between his shoulders, his brow was furrowed, and he seemed to be on the lookout for something.

Without moving away from the counter, he insisted in a loud voice that Lena should buy another round of shots of rum. Lachaume objected, since he thought he should pay; Lena in turn raised an objection.

“I owe you a thousand francs in any case. I lost at cards the other night,” she said, taking a thousand-franc note from her purse.

“Not at all!” Lachaume protested. “I lost. I owe you.”

“No! No! You were as drunk as a fish,” Lena said. “That's why you won.”

“Not at all. I remember losing very well,” Lachaume riposted, taking a thousand-franc note from his pocket.

“I'll settle up between you, all right!” Lasteyrie said. He grabbed the two notes. “We'll drink them both.”

“Give that back!” Lachaume yelled.

The burst of anger made his hands shake. Lasteyrie was leaning on the counter in a mocking pose, staring cheekily at Lachaume.

“Another round of the same,” he said to the waiter in a slow drawl. He held up a thousand-franc note with two fingers.

“Give that back!” Lachaume shouted. “I cannot bear having things torn out of my hands.”

“He can't bear it!” Lasteyrie said. “He's so sensitive!”

Two drunks at the other end of the counter smirked at them; Lachaume shot daggers at them with his eyes.

“Ha ha! The sergeant's getting robbed,” one of them said, clapping his hands.

“What's the matter with you two?” Valette asked glumly. He was blinking, as if the light hurt his eyes. “What's up? What's got into you?”

“What you are doing is disgusting,” Lachaume said to Lasteyrie in a quieter tone. He meant to refer to the grinning drunks, who seemed to be in cahoots with Lasteyrie.

“Disgusting!” he repeated, with disproportionate feeling. He went to sit with Lena by the window.

There were four students standing in the street just outside, constantly fiddling with the position of their hats and making sure their swords were set at the correct angle, swaying on their feet in a manner that was casual and military at the same time. Lachaume could see the face of only one of them, a baby-faced adolescent. Another was taller and stouter, wearing a square-cut black mustache that added to his years. A fifth student from Polytechnique came up to them. The one with the mustache, whose pudgy face and double chin beamed with good cheer, was the first to stretch out his long and easy arm to shake the newcomer's hand, and it was easy to see that he would do it in exactly the same way in twenty years' time, when he'd be Minister of Construction.

“I'm sure I lost,” Lachaume said. “I can see the game in my mind…”

“Well then, you're seeing double!” She laughed. “You were as pissed as a newt.”

Taxis and chauffeur-driven cars were pulling up in droves outside the theater. Men in formal attire and women in ball gowns, wearing fur stoles, got out, alongside more students from Polytechnique with hats under their arms and swords at their sides.

“I'm telling you, I lost!” Lachaume said again.

Lasteyrie came up with a glass in his hand.

“You should have something to drink,” he said, “because it's on your tab, anyway.”

Lachaume knocked it back in one gulp.

“You are disgusting!” he said.

A student with some urgent business went up to a policeman, who saluted him, paid respectful attention to what he had to say, and then accompanied him promptly as he held on to his hat with one hand and his sword with the other.

“Well, I know I lost,” Lachaume said, with a shake of his head.

“You're as pissed as a newt.”

Four more serious-looking students piled out of a small taxi and stopped in front of their mustachioed colleague and his friends, but as they got no response, they went on their way submissively. The space vacated by their taxi was immediately taken by a black limousine. The chauffeur hurried out with cap in hand to open the rear door. From it emerged in slow motion a tall brunette in an emerald-green ball gown and a suave and tall student from Polytechnique. Behind their backs, the chauffeur gave a wink to a plain-clothes policeman, in mockery of his own simulated servility.

“Come on, have another,” Lasteyrie said.

The tall student and the girl sauntered past the one with the mustache, who was waiting to be acknowledged, but he wasn't sure whether they would shake hands with him. All he got as they went by was the merest wave of a hand.

Lachaume went to the counter to fetch his glass, which had been topped up meanwhile, and when he got back to his window seat, he could see the tall student standing still on one side while the girl in emerald green put the wing collar on his black tunic on its hook.

His sallow skin, bony nose, black almond-slit eyes, and large cheekbones made his face vaguely Napoleonic—disenchanted and skeptical in addition. Like a Bonaparte whose life had started on Saint Helena.

“What are you looking at?” Valette asked as he came toward the window.

“At France!” Lachaume said, raising his elbow so sharply that the rum splashed onto his hand.

A bell rang inside the theater for the start of the show, and the pavement cleared.

“Forward march,” Lasteyrie said.

They dawdled their way to Porte Saint-Denis along Boulevard Bonne-Nouvelle, and then Lachaume, as was his habit, stopped dead in his tracks and shook his head indignantly and waved his arms about as if he was about to make an important announcement.

“Have you seen this?” he finally uttered. “Have you ever seen anything like it?
Ludovico Magno
…”

What had made him furious was the arch of the Porte Saint-Denis with its bas-reliefs and its legend in Latin.

“Forward march!” Lasteyrie repeated.

“What about that thing?” Lachaume argued, meaning the ceremonial arch. “Are we going to leave it standing?”

Lasteyrie took him by the arm and tried to drag him away.

“Go away and leave me alone,” he shouted, jerking his arm free. “I'll do it all by myself!”

He stepped into the roadway and wove through the cars toward the arch of the Porte Saint-Denis. Lasteyrie, Valette, and Lena shouted at him from the pavement. At last he turned around, standing in between two lanes of fast-moving cars, and made a sweeping, cynical gesture that told them to leave him alone. Then, holding his head up and his neck straight, he strode to the other side and onto the traffic island, where he could be seen leaning his head on the blackened stonework of the arch as if he was trying to head-butt it to the ground.

“Go get him back,” Lasteyrie said to Lena.

When she got there, he was in the same position, with his forehead on the stonework, keeping himself upright by holding on to the hoof of one of the horses on the bas-relief.

“Ach! Laachaume, my brother,” she said with a little laugh, “you'll have me crying as well…”

“Leave me alone,” he said, without budging. “I don't need anybody else, you'll see.”

She stroked his neck as if by accident, then slid her hand between the stone and Lachaume's face to wipe away his tears, with tenderness that was neither simulated nor unintentional.

Then Lasteyrie took them on down Boulevard de Sébastopol toward the Seine.

It's a straight, ill-lit thoroughfare over a mile long. So they took almost an hour to get from the Tour Jean-Sans-Peur to the Tour Saint-Jacques, the two monuments at either end of the boulevard.

Lena moaned: “What about your mother, Laachaume? Aren't you going to give her a hug?”

She was hanging on his arm with her cheek on his biceps.

“Laachaume, Laachaume! They've put out your plate, they're waiting for you, the goose has been served … Ach! Laachaume, everything on the family table has gone cold…”

“Shut up,” he kept saying.

She took up the same fight with Valette.

“What about your folks? Don't they want you to kiss them goodbye? To say ‘good night' and give them a hug? Haven't they made your favorite dish? Aren't they wanting you to come home?”

“Then they shouldn't have let me go,” Valette said, with a shake of his head.

Lena abruptly decided to go no farther and flopped down onto a bench.

“
Mein Gott!
It's always the same,” she said, putting her head between her hands. “The other guys drank like fish as well. The other guys bad-mouthed their mothers as well. Why? Why?”