On Leave (2 page)

In Dieulefit, still only sixteen, Daniel also joined the Resistance. Unlike his father, who was a member of the Gaullist “Secret Army,” Daniel was drawn into the partisan movement, the F.T.P., controlled by the underground Communist Party. Both father and son saw action at the Battle of Montélimar in July 1944.

Daniel returned to Paris and to school in 1945. The following summer he visited Scotland with his scout pack, but failed to return home: he had got a job as a cub reporter on a Glasgow newspaper. He never earned his baccalaureate or had any further education. Returning to Paris, he joined the Communist Party and got a job on the left-wing weekly
Action
. Subsequently he joined
Les Lettres françaises
, the Party's cultural mouthpiece, edited by the poet Louis Aragon. Anselme traveled widely in the late 1940s and 1950s, covering the foreign tours of the Théatre National Populaire. It was on one of those visits to Eastern Europe that he met the socialist militant Claire Picard, who became his wife in 1954. The marriage was not a long one. Its end coincided with or was preceded by another divorce—from the Communist Party itself.

Anselme published two poetry collections when he was barely out of his teens, but
On Leave
was his first novel. In an interview (included in this volume as an appendix), Anselme said that he saw writing fiction as an extension of political struggle. But
On Leave
does not extend the struggle of the Communist movement. On the contrary, it lambastes the hypocrisy of a party whose position on the Algerian conflict had revealed it as just another colonialist force.

After leaving the Communist Party over its attitude to Algeria, Anselme never joined any other, but after May 1968 he took up the cause of trade unionism. He founded the periodical
Cahiers de Mai
, which published narratives of working-class lives in the words of the workers themselves. For a while he was prominent as a spokesman for the watchmakers of Besançon, who occupied their bankrupt factory and then ran it as a collective for more than five years. He published a second novel,
Les Relations
, in 1964, and a semiautobiographical account of his wartime experience,
Le Compagnon secret
, in 1984. He died in 1989.

Anselme was podgy as a boy and overweight as an adult, reaching 160 kg (350 pounds) by the time of his death. Throughout his life he was most often to be found holding court in one of his regular Left Bank cafés, Le Rostand or Chez Dalloyau. He was an enchanting storyteller, a raconteur, and a wit. With his great friend Albert Cossery, a Franco-Egyptian writer who spent more than forty years living in the same room in the same hotel, he became expert at persuading publishers and film and television producers to give him an advance for book proposals, film scripts, and series concepts. Only a few of them got written, and even fewer found their way into print or onto a screen.

On Leave
is not autobiographical in any important way. As a former freedom fighter Anselme was exempt from military service, and by 1956 he was long past call-up age—and far too obese to be found fit for service, in any case. The novel is not drawn from personal experience or anguish, nor does it rely on any written sources—there was very little discussion in the press of the actual conduct of the Algerian conflict, and the voices of soldiers and conscripts were nowhere to be heard. Anselme's material can only have come from imaginative sympathy with young men he saw trailing around the same bars he frequented. Anselme was not only a good raconteur: as a journalist, he was good at listening, too.

The actual outcome of the conflict that Anselme's characters expect to last all their lives long—one of them expects to keep on fighting to maintain France's hold on its African empire and to come out of the jungle somewhere near Zanzibar in twenty-five years' time—was stranger than any fiction that could have been imagined in 1957. The settler community in Algeria—known as
colons
or
pieds-noirs
—grew ever more fearful, not only of the indigenous revolt, but also of betrayal by France, and began its own campaign of terror to pressure the military into taking its side. (The depth of resentment felt by conscripts against the
pieds-noirs
, the very people they were allegedly protecting, comes out clearly in one striking scene in this novel.) Making concessions to this side and that, the government became trapped in its own contradictions. The army, bent on restoring its honor after its humiliating losses in Indochina and Suez, plotted to take power, but the putsch was deftly sidetracked by Charles de Gaulle, the former leader of the Free French. The Fourth Republic collapsed in May 1958, and de Gaulle took over as the leader of a new regime, France's Fifth Republic. As he was a soldier, too, he was fully expected to reimpose order on the Algerian situation and to maintain France's hold on its empire, as he had done during the darkest days of World War II. But de Gaulle quickly grasped that the project was untenable. The European settlers were seen by the French as outdated slave drivers, even though the majority of them were nothing of the sort, just urban poor, like Albert Camus's mother, who had not even learned to read. They were hated above all because hundreds of thousands of young men were being forced to spend ever longer periods of military service defending them against Arabs whose land they had taken. De Gaulle therefore opened secret negotiations with the Algerian nationalist movement. In the spring of 1962, he signed an agreement granting full sovereignty to Algeria from July 1, 1962. Non-Muslims with French nationality and citizenship would have the right to “return” to France. About 100,000 were expected to leave. In fact, virtually the entire non-Muslim population of Algeria relocated to France (and in smaller part to Israel) in the three-month window allowed—about 1,250,000 people in all. It is one of the largest, fastest, and least-discussed mass migrations in modern times. In 1957, when this novel was published, de Gaulle, if he was thought about at all, was a hero from the past and just about the least likely person to grant Algeria its independence. It was equally unimaginable that almost the entire European population would pack up and move out. But that is what happened. Anselme's novel takes us back to a time when the future course of real events was more farfetched than any fiction.

This spare and forceful novel speaks of the moral and human isolation of soldiers obliged to fight an unpopular war, not when they are in the field, but when they are back home. Lachaume, the bourgeois intellectual, cannot get through to his self-satisfied and pampered old friends. They have no idea what the war has done to him—and no wish to find out. Valette, the working-class lad from the suburbs, can't understand why the Communist Party has done nothing to stop the war. When the great proposal of the local Party boss turns out to be nothing more than circulating yet another petition, the cynicism and hypocrisy of the left is laid bare. Lasteyrie, the Parisian teddy-boy, is torn between his instinct for cheeky revolt and the impossibility of it. By the time their short leave is over, they know they have no friends left in France, save each other.

It's often said that the Algerian War produced no great works of literature to put alongside
The Charterhouse of Parma
(with its ironical portrayal of Waterloo),
War and Peace
(with a no less ironical narrative of Borodino),
All Quiet on the Western Front
(a novel of the trench warfare of 1914–18),
For Whom the Bell Tolls
(set in the Spanish Civil War), and the uncountable novels and films arising from the events of 1939–45. For many decades the Algerian War did not even have a memorial in France. (There is still only one, on Quai Branly in Paris, inaugurated in 2002.) Anselme's disaffected young men intuit that they will be forgotten as quickly as possible, which is why they make a mock memorial of their own, in the last chapter of this novel, on top of the plinth that celebrates the minor French animal sculptor Barye, at the tip of the Île Saint-Louis. All that remained of their living statue was an almost entirely black photograph with a vague smudge in the middle. That just about sums up France's long-standing attitude toward the half-million conscripts who fought with such reluctance to “keep Algeria French.”

Twenty-five years ago I was chatting with a French friend about the paucity of literary material on the Algerian War, accusing France of voluntary amnesia, as foreign scholars are wont to do. He reached to his shelf, pulled down a tattered paperback, and said without any words: There
was
a literature of the Algerian War, and here it is.

—David Bellos

 

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

My sincere thanks to Bernard Queysanne, Maurice Pons, André Anselme, and Mitzi Angel, without whom I would not have come across
La Permission
, learned anything much about Daniel Anselme, or been able to translate it.

Many of the facts and figures mentioned in the introduction are taken from Guy Pervillé,
La Guerre d'Algérie
(Paris: PUF, 2007).

—David Bellos

 

CHAPTER ONE

One December morning a train gave three blasts on its whistle as it plowed through white mist, pierced here and there by poplar trees quivering like arrows stuck in the gray flesh of the Department of Yonne. In an overheated compartment a young infantry corporal gazed through the patch of window he'd demisted at the gloomy and monotonous landscape, grinning from ear to ear.

His two fellows, a sergeant and a plain infantryman, were drowsing, with their jackets unbuttoned, in the two corners of the bench seat opposite, using their caps as pillows.

“Look at that fog!” the corporal exclaimed, slapping the bench seat with the flat of his hand. “Take a good look at that fog!”

The infantryman was the only one to raise an eyelid.

“What's up now?” he drawled. “What are you fussing about?”

“Just look at the fog,” the corporal said. “You know how long it's been since you clapped your eyes on anything like it? Do you know how long it's been?”

The infantryman rubbed his eyes and shrugged. He was a short, dark man with a pencil mustache and tapered sideburns. He nodded as he looked out of the window.

“Can't disagree with you there. It's a treat to see lousy weather again.”

“But how long has it been?” the corporal went on. “How long since you saw stuff like that? I'll tell you, Lasteyrie. We ain't seen it since Koblenz. When we got lost in Castortrasse, in the jeep.”

“That was a long time ago.”

“Thirteen months,” the corporal added.

“Fuck that,” Lasteyrie said, with a yawn. He stretched out and let his eyes nearly close.

“How long till we get in?”

“One hour forty,” the corporal said, doing the sum on the dial of his wristwatch.

“As much as that!” He tried to snuggle up in the corner and jiggled around until he found a comfortable position. “I'm going to sleep. Good night. I need to be in good shape for this evening.”

“This evening?” the corporal queried.

“You bet!” said Lasteyrie. “This evening I'm having a ball, and you won't see me again until the third, at the railroad station, if I get there! See if I care…”

“What about your folks?”

“I'm not asking them for anything. If they hassle me, I'll move out. I'm not exactly short of cash. In any case, I don't owe them anything. It's not as if the old'uns ever fussed over me!… C'mon, shut-eye.” And he settled back into the corner, using his cap as an eyeshade.

The corporal said nothing for a while, smiling at the thought that his own folks, right now, were thinking of him, just as he was thinking of them. He sank into the rhythm of the train wheels' clackety-clack and the hissing of the wind as it rushed past the carriage. He looked at Lasteyrie, who kept shifting in his seat, then slowly turned his attention to the sergeant sleeping at the other end of the bench with his right hand inside his loosened jacket, near his heart. He'd crossed his legs and was sticking them out obliquely, with his heels on the floor. Now and again he scowled in his sleep and took a deep breath with a facial twitch that made his sharp and dented nose look even more angular.

“You're just showing off,” the corporal said. “If you didn't still have your parents, you'd take a different view.”

“For Christ's sake, Valette, let me have a sleep!”

The corporal burst out laughing.

“Just let me sleep!” Lasteyrie repeated, breaking into a laugh as well.

The game was on. To stop Lasteyrie from sleeping now was to stop him from sleeping with the girl he hoped to pick up that evening, and thanks to the game, she was taking on a real existence. He'd already picked her up, she was waiting for him, and Valette had turned into a spoilsport. The soldiers started scrapping with each other out loud.

“You two, shut up!” the sergeant ordered as he opened his eyes.

“
Sabah el kheir
,” Lasteyrie responded, making a little bow, with his palm on his chest.

“Who closed the window?” the sergeant grunted. “We've been baking all night long. Open it.”

Valette lowered the window a little.

“You're a hard bunch, you are,” Lasteyrie said as he buttoned up his jacket. “Valette stops me from sleeping and now you'll make me catch my death. You're trying to wreck my leave, you swine!”

But the sergeant had turned away and leaned his head against the compartment wall.

“Did you see the fog?” Valette asked him.

“Fuck that,” the sergeant said, without stirring.

“Lachaume! Lachaume! We'll be there in an hour!” Valette declared, rounding down to make an impression.

“Fuck that,” Lachaume repeated, without opening his eyes.

Valette nodded as if he could see the light.