On Leave (6 page)

“What's he up to?” Lachaume asked. (The deputy prefect was a childhood friend.)

“He's deputizing on all four cylinders!” Thévenin boomed, in top form. “Hey! Look at that brunette,” he said in a whisper, “the one sitting by the fireplace. That's L.B., the journalist on
L'Express
…” And he tapped the side of his nose in a way that suggested he had designs on the girl. “This place is a hotbed of supporters of Mendès-France. Mendès even comes here himself from time to time.”

“Do you know the Prime Minister?” Lachaume asked, with a spark of excitement. “Have you argued with him?”

“Yes, a bit. I'm on the Radical Party's local committee for the second sector,” the young doctor added, raising his eyes to the ceiling. “What a chore that is!”

The Seafood Medley arrived, and Lachaume finally grasped where the sour smell in the room came from. What he now had beneath his nose was a large wooden platter bearing twenty small pots, each containing a different variety of salted, marinated, or pickled fish, labeled as if they were on display in the Trocadéro aquarium. The Market Greens, on the other hand, consisted of a plate of raw vegetables served unpeeled, so as to give them an authentic touch.

“Have you ever seen anything … But have you ever seen…” He shook his head in disbelief as he held out a peapod, as if there were nothing more comical and heartrending on earth than a pod of fresh peas. “Have you ever seen anything…”

“That's Paris for you.” Thévenin smiled. “Is there any other place on earth where you would willingly pay a hundred and fifty francs for that thing?”

“That's not enough,” Lachaume said. “Nothing is ever expensive enough.”

Thévenin looked at his friend in that calm and attentive way that was now taken for a professional look but which he had always had with Lachaume. He took his four years' seniority very seriously.

“So, tell me about it,” he ordered through a mouthful of Dutch herring.

“About what?” Lachaume grunted, in panic at the idea of talking about the war in Algeria within earshot of these almost silent diners who all hoped that their neighbors' conversations would be more interesting than their own. No, he had nothing to say to them, to people like them, for whom he had no sympathy and no spite, either. At the next table a pretty and exquisitely well-made-up woman leaned her head smilingly to one side as she crunched a raw leek. Each bite made her long Venetian earrings tinkle, creating the illusion that she was quivering from head to toe from some hidden pleasure. To speak of Algeria to such a beauty would be so completely absurd that the idea made Lachaume smile in spite of himself. In bed, after sex—well, perhaps, he thought, feeling dissatisfied with himself straightaway for coming up with something so banal, especially as he was no more inclined to bed the woman than he was to tell her about the clans of the Nemencha. But Thévenin would not let up.

“So tell me all about it. You're leaving Françoise?”

How stupid of me! Lachaume thought. That's what's important, when you see the situation from Paris … And indeed, the beauty with the Venetian earrings was now paying him that discreet attention that men who have just returned to the market deserve.

“Yes, I think so,” he said after a long pause.

“But do you have someone else?” his friend asked in a whisper.

It felt as if ten pairs of ears were on alert for the answer he would give.

“Yes,” he said, to keep things simple.

“May I know who?”

“No.”

“But I'm not asking for a name!” Thévenin protested, putting his hand on Lachaume's sleeve. “I'm only asking, what kind of woman…”

“She's German.”

“Ah! Of course!” the medic exclaimed, leaning back in his chair. “You met her last year in Koblenz, you sly fellow, you…”

“Yes, that's right,” Lachaume said.

“Ah, I see,” Thévenin said. Such huge satisfaction spread across his face as to embarrass Lachaume.

Why am I lying and hiding things? he wondered. Why is my mouth going dry? Why do I turn my eyes away from my oldest friend? What can it be…?

“How long have you still got?” Thévenin asked. “Six months?”

“Why six months?”

“But it
is
six months! I read a piece in
Le Monde
, and it reminded me of you…”

Thévenin was priceless! He had memorized all the dates and numbers from the last Ministry of Defense circular! Juggling the unit serials like a recruiting sergeant, and therefore knowing that cohort 55–1 would have to serve twenty-seven months, he announced to Sergeant Lachaume that he would get his demob on next September 1, say September 15 for safety, the ideal date for a quick trip to Saint-Trop' to dip his feet in the Med, because the summer crowds would have left by then. “I'll take you down,” he promised, “as long as Mr. Heart Attack gives me time off.”

For the first time Lachaume did not cower under the flood of facts and figures.

“Why are you smiling?” Thévenin asked, with a look of mild anxiety.

“No reason,” Lachaume said. “Because it's nice to see you … You're an odd bird, really.”

The medic frowned and glanced down at his red mohair tie, as if that was what was making his friend smile. He wasn't sure how to talk to him anymore. All the clichés about war turning young men into old went through his mind, and a momentary panic struck him at the thought that such banalities might be exemplified by a living person—by a friend, to boot. That was hard to take. He looked at his watch.

“Twenty-five to. I have to run in ten minutes.”

“Another patient?” Lachaume asked.

“No, the union. We're holding a war council…” He realized straightaway that he should not have used that word. “But it's true,” he went on. “I have to be there, I have to report back…” And because Lachaume started to take an interest, Thévenin launched into a detailed explanation of the Gazier Plan, named after the minister of the day, who wanted to subject doctors' fees to an official scale of charges. “It'll have a negative effect on quality,” Thévenin opined. “To make up the difference, doctors will just take on more calls. And anyway, why should health be nationalized when steel and finance haven't yet been touched?” He was using his friend to rehearse what he was going to say to his colleagues a few minutes later. Rather than listening, Lachaume watched him talk, as if he were at an army film show with an almost inaudible sound track. The restaurant's muted background music increased his impression of being at the cinema.

“Ten to: I have to dash.”

Thévenin's lips had stopped moving.

Well, that's over, Lachaume thought as he waited on the pavement outside while Thévenin retrieved his loden from the cloakroom. “Goodbye, Dr. Thévenin!” he muttered to himself in English.

“Can I drop you off anywhere?”

“No thanks,” Lachaume said, with a shake of his head. “Off you go, old man.”

They submitted themselves to a few ridiculous pats on the back and shook hands clumsily. Lachaume couldn't wait for him to be gone. What's the point? he thought. Goodbye, dear sir! The Jowett thundered away, but screeched to a halt after twenty yards. Thévenin stuck his head out the driver's window.

“Eh?… What?…” Lachaume grunted, frowning as if he hadn't heard the call, and went up to the car unwillingly.

“Hey, listen…” Thévenin said, gripping Lachaume's arm. “Where will you be around midnight? There was no way of having a proper talk in that hostelry … See you at midnight, okay?”

“What?… What?…” Lachaume mumbled with a scowl. “Midnight?… If you like!…”

He was now in a state of permanent fury. The herring he'd had for dinner had given him an unquenchable thirst. He went into bars with his pipe clenched between his teeth and downed pints and chasers in any old order, angry with all he saw and heard simply because he could see it and hear it, angry from head to toe, but letting none of it escape in a glance or a gesture, with his tongue clamped beneath the stem of his pipe. He drank until midnight, pulling crumpled banknotes out of his pocket and putting them down on the bar stiffly, with rigid fingers, betraying in his eyes not a glimmer of the black fury that the banknotes provoked in him. His pockets were stuffed full of them, and even through the sweat-drenched fabric of his trousers they stuck to his skin like pieces of filth.

The smooth white face that he saw when he entered the bar they'd picked to meet in at midnight alarmed Thévenin. “He must be drunk,” he told himself by way of reassurance. “As pickled as a newt in a jar…” He forced himself to see only Lachaume's inebriation; he undid his shirt collar and ordered a double filtered coffee. Lachaume submitted with eyes in which Thévenin chose to see only an alcoholic glaze.

Then he spoke to him the way you talk to a drunk, that is to say, if you are tolerant, the way you talk to a dog that's lost its keeper.

“Goddam!” Lachaume suddenly burst out in antiquated English. “If I hear you aright, my liege, just as you would speak pidgin to the natives, to the trooper you chin-wag in trooperese! Do me the honor of constructing a few coherent sentences, and then … gimme a drink!” And he slammed his fist on the table.

Thévenin laughed nervously.

“What news from the Mehdi-Kal Brigade?” Lachaume resumed in a funereal voice. “Will Abdel Gazier be punished for his Krim?”

“Well, if the government isn't booted out in the next month…” the doctor began, not having grasped his friend's desperate wordplay.

“Boot out the government? How impolite is that? Has France lost its manners?”

Lachaume went on for a while, cracking gloomy jokes like a Shakespearean gravedigger; his face bore that white, blank look that wasn't pallor but the color of anger condensing like steam on an icy windowpane. Then he stopped speaking, just like that, and the strange look in his face slowly faded. He's going to drop off, Thévenin thought, still clinging to his diagnosis of drunkenness.

He comforted him by telling trivial anecdotes, and surprised himself to discover he was indeed in possession of a heart, smiling benevolently at this lanky lad whom he loved, so he told himself, like a younger brother. “Poor old Georges! If he'd done his service before studying for his teaching qualification, he wouldn't have got tangled up in this ghastly business.” But the idea that a misfortune of that kind could affect himself in the slightest particular didn't even cross Thévenin's mind. The Algerian War was reserved for the under-thirty-twos, just as silicosis was for miners. Thévenin was in no danger in either respect.

Lachaume had been trying to say something for a while. He raised his hand, he opened his mouth, but then gave up, shaking his head like a foreigner who can't find the right words. Lachaume realized that Thévenin had diagnosed his problem as drunkenness. He thought that was irritating and pathetic, so he carried on, going over the check pattern on his friend's jacket sleeve with his fingernail with a trembling hand.

“Listen,” he said at long last, in a rough voice that wasn't his usual tone. “Listen … I'm going to ask you one thing … just one!” He paused for the last beat, as if he was tongue-tied from exasperation, then blurted out:

“When and how is it going to end?”

He said it once more, louder:

“When and how?”

Thévenin didn't dare meet his eyes. He could almost feel the cold light they cast straight opposite him. As he tried to find an answer that he knew he didn't have, Lachaume's two questions went on echoing in his head: “When and how?”

“And how in heaven's name should I know?” he answered indignantly. “I'm not in the government.”

But what did the government know about it, anyway? In a flash he saw the shiny face of the Minister of Health, wiping his chin with a white handkerchief that still had its red laundry ticket on …

Standing next to his car, he gave Lachaume a last weary pat on the back.

“See you in six months' time,” he said.

“Six months,” Lachaume replied. “Or six years.”

 

CHAPTER FIVE

First there's a song. It spreads around the hall as if the singer were slowly moving among the tables, singing a bit of her song here and there, at so much song per square meter, like a perfume spray. But the comparison with perfume is no good, because this song has the same effect as rough spirits. It shakes you up, from top to bottom.

Here's the chorus, sung in a coarse and common voice, with an emphasis on each syllable, angrily:

Java!

What's he doing there

With his hands in your hair

That accord … ionist?

Of course, if instead of hearing it sung you were to see such trivia in print, you would feel let down. But what power it has when it's sung to the beat of a
java
! There's no escaping its grip if you're hiding some secret bitterness in your heart, if someone has maybe cheated on you, or if something you don't quite grasp seems to upset the normal order of things.

So there's this song spreading through the room, but there's no performer, contrary to what you might have thought at the start. The song is coming from a jukebox, and in front of the jukebox there's a young man standing on one leg like a gloomy flamingo, a young man whose face can't be seen because that part of the room is ill lit. Who cares? His only role is to jingle a small pile of change in his hand which he'll use at the end of the song to get it to play again.

Java!

What's he doing there

With his hands in your hair

That accord … ionist?

Then there's the snack bar (half of which is in darkness), the muffled noise of the last conversations, fleeting shouts and laughs, humid heat laden with kitchen smells, glasses tinkling here and there.