The Fires of Autumn (22 page)

The same man, two hours later, woke Bernard to tell him that Bernheimer had died. The Dutch financier had gambled on a drop in the value of the florin and had lost. The florin had not been devalued. Bernheimer lost everything and had just died. In his own debacle, he had dragged down many business deals that had seemed to be solid and profitable, including one that involved Bernard Jacquelain who, a week earlier, had loaned him every penny he had. As for Détang, he had blindly bet everything on Bernheimer:

‘I’m done for,’ he said to Bernard. ‘That will teach me put all my eggs in one basket. Someone offered me the chance to bet on the Dutch florin increasing in value. I refused. I trusted that foreign bastard. Trusting people will be the death of me. I should have had him deported. Are you listening to me, Bernard?’

‘I’m listening,’ Bernard replied after a moment’s silence.

‘Have you been hit hard, too? You as well?’

‘I’m going to lose everything.’

‘Ah, my dear boy, my first thought was to blow my brains out. Then I told myself that there would be plenty of time for that later.’

‘Have you known for a long time?’ asked Bernard.

‘Since five o’clock this afternoon.’

He hung up. Bernard let out a deep sigh and got out of bed. He felt the peculiar sensation of disbelief that follows the announcement of a disaster. ‘Come on now! Could something like this really happen to me? To
me
? It simply isn’t possible!’

Mankind can only easily get used to happiness and success. When it comes to failure, human nature puts up insurmountable barriers of hope. The sense of despair has to remove those barriers one by one, and only then does despair penetrate to the heart of man who gradually recognises the enemy, calls it by name, and is horrified.

‘I just have to start all over again,’ Bernard had thought. ‘These things happen. I’ll get a loan.’

Calmly, thinking clearly, at first, then more feverishly, then with desperate rage, he had tried to imagine anyone he knew who could help him. The bank in London, the Americans, that important French company. Come on, come on! He wasn’t just anybody! He was Bernard Jacquelain! But … in truth … Who was Bernard Jacquelain? Had he brought anything new, anything of value to the world? Something of genius? A considerable body of work, a new invention of any kind? No. When he thought about it carefully, he had built his fortune with telephone calls, conversations, lunches, a kind of savoir-faire, by knowing how to deal with people, the ability to talk about anything, to have the latest facts about everything, an ability that was to real work what smoke was to a flame. Ninety-nine per cent of the careers in Paris that had been established in the past twenty-five years were just like his. Bernard let out a low groan. Suddenly, the realisation of the disaster rushed through him in a wave, carrying in its wake all his fragile hopes. He was finished. The bank in London, the one in New York, the French company whose President he knew so very well, all of them would drop him, because it was in no one’s interest to save him. Quite the contrary. There had been too many
financial scandals in France in the past ten years; everyone would be afraid, fearing to become compromised by helping one of Bernheimer’s old friends … He was abandoned, ruined. He would fight. He would try to get extensions for his debts, loans. In vain! What was more, he had been happy. And that was unforgivable. Now they would make him pay for his good luck. There would not be enough mud in all of France to throw at him, to prevent him from getting back on his feet again. Who was on his side? Not his family, not a powerful collective. Connections. That wasn’t very much. Connections were all powerful in times of success, but weakest when it came to failure. There were simply a flimsy kind of support that crumbles as soon as you put out a hand to grab on to it, he knew that. A crash, a collapse. No way out. Détang, without a doubt, was dying of fear that thanks to the scandal, everyone would uncover his shady deals from the past, like the aeroplane parts, for example (how had that actually panned out? He knew he had earned his commission, but for the rest … Détang had mentioned in passing that in the end he had ‘made the Air Minister responsible for it all, but not without a great deal of difficulty, and he had had to spend more than twenty per cent in backhanders’). If that old deal ever surfaced, people would take advantage of it to bring him down – Bernard, who had played only a minor role.

For the first time, a deep sense of terror rushed through him. Perhaps what he had done, which was so commonplace in certain circles, actually deserved the punishment that was raining down on him? But he immediately banished that thought. What a joke … He had not conned anyone. He had not betrayed anyone or stolen anything. From a legal point of view, no one could be blamed for the crash itself. He had been thrown by chance among a group of men who meted out honours and wealth to each other. Almost in spite of himself, he had been pushed to the forefront. He would have been mad not to behave like the others. Why
should he have refused? Why? In the name of what? Everyone was involved in some shady business, everyone lied, everyone schemed. The only difference was that some of them were hypocrites and others were not. He had been smug and open about the scandals; he had enjoyed them; he had wallowed in the mud with joyful, cynical delight. The next generation would make him pay dearly (he was thinking of Yves) not for the sin itself but for the brazenness of the sin. Perhaps … he didn’t know … He felt very weary. He opened the window and took several deep breaths of warm air that seemed to stick to the back of his throat like tar. He thought about death. He was desperate. Renée? She had stopped caring about him a long time ago. And what about him? He had no illusions. It was so strange; he had always believed he was the only man in the entire world who had no illusions. He now realised that, on the contrary, no one had ever so carefully constructed such a wall of smoke and mirrors and lies around himself. He had believed that he was rich, powerful, loved. He discovered he was poor, weak and alone. Renée, like Détang, would drop him. He could sense it; he was sure of it. One day, Détang had told him: ‘In life, like in a shipwreck, you have to cut off the hands of anyone who wants to hold on to your raft. Alone, you can float. If you waste time trying to save others, you’re finished!’

He waited impatiently until daytime to go to the Détangs’ house. They did not let him in. He was told that Détang had gone out. Renée, too, was nowhere in sight. He rushed around until nightfall. He warned all his friends. He telephoned London and New York. He desperately tried to save himself; he could, perhaps, have got some support from Détang by threatening him with exposure, with gossip, frightening him, but he could not bring himself to do that. It was too low, too cowardly. A surge of morality put an end to that temptation: ‘Ah, no, not that, not that! That would be the final blow! I couldn’t look Yves in the eye after doing
something like that.’ Yves …‘And what about Thérèse …?’ he said very softly. He found himself out in the street. He fell down on a bench, looking so pale that a passer-by walked over to him and asked if he were ill. He said no, thanked him, stood up and continued walking. He kept going, blindly roaming the streets of Paris. He found himself in his old neighbourhood. He only became aware of it when he was on the street where he used to live, that dingy street with its lace curtains at the windows, cats wailing in the gutters, the sound of the bells of Saint-Sulpice and the fountains in front of the church.

Like a sleepwalker, he crossed the road. From his key ring, he found the smallest one, it was flat and worn, the key he had not used for three years. He called out a name to the concierge, climbed up the three flights of stairs and opened a door. He was home.

Father and son left together the day war was declared, Bernard for the Lorraine region, Yves for an Air Force camp in Beauce. Just as you go into a house where you used to live, feel your way past the familiar furniture, so the women of France, without feeling shock or making any apparent effort, fell back into the way they behaved during that other war. They recalled, for example, that you must not go with your husband to the station when he is about to leave, that the final kiss must be given at home, far from the crowds, in a dimly lit room; they remembered that the soldier would walk away without looking back and that they must not shed any tears, as if they knew, instinctively, that they needed to save their tears for the future.

In the hall, Thérèse and Madame Jacquelain (very old now, her face pale and wrinkled, still very petite with innocent, misty blue eyes) kissed the men who were about to leave. Thérèse’s two daughters, aged six and four and a half, hopped about, understanding nothing, and wanted to laugh, though they did not know why. At first, Geneviève, the elder girl, had seemed surprised and saddened by their departure. She had blond hair and grey eyes and looked like Bernard, while the younger one had her mother’s smooth, soft skin and dark eyes. Geneviève had asked in a quiet,
worried voice when Papa and Yves would be coming home. ‘Soon,’ they said. That completely reassured her and she began to laugh with her sister. Of the two men, it was Bernard who was leaving for the front, Bernard who would be in real danger, but ‘there’s the Maginot Line’, thought Thérèse. Yves would be safe for three months. After that … the danger of flying, battles in the air, bombs … God! What a nightmare! Everything felt like a sinister, hazy dream: her husband had come back to her two weeks ago. By what miracle? In response to her fervent prayers? Only God knew why. He had come home – the moment she had been waiting for, for three years, the moment she had lived for, the moment she had imagined more than a thousand times: the sound of the key in the lock, a hesitant voice: ‘Thérèse, are you there?…’, that tall masculine figure in the entrance hall and suddenly, he was by her side, his face changed through suffering … Yes, she had pictured all of that in her dreams before living it … And the night that had followed … in her arms, her husband, shaking with sobs, cruel, furious, sharp sobs, in which wounded pride and remorse were mixed with love, then his falling asleep, relaxed and trusting, and her own feeling of divine peace! How sad, how very sad – only two weeks and then the war! She had lost Bernard twice. As for Madame Jacquelain, what was horrible, inhuman about this war, she thought to herself, was that the past was returning in a way that only happens in dreams, or, perhaps, in the afterlife, the way you imagine hell. Every now and again, she got a bit confused; she turned towards her grandson and called him ‘Bernard’ in a loving voice.

Even Thérèse felt a strange, foreboding sense of reliving the past. She was herself and someone else as well, the Thérèse of the past who was still alone, married for one night and soon to be a widow. Martial … The stifling hot little entrance hall seemed full of ghosts. The dead, normally so quiet and unobtrusive, suddenly seemed alive, reclaimed the place, the importance they
had when they were still living. Everyone thought about them, missed them, whispered: ‘If only they could see this …’ or: ‘Thank goodness they aren’t here to see this.’ Everyone talked about their virtues; they would prove themselves worthy of the dead. Bernard felt a deep, inexplicable sense of shame. He preferred the way he’d left in the past, that was for sure. ‘I was innocent then,’ he thought bitterly. ‘I waltzed into that butchery as if I were going to a ball. Now, I know …’ He thought back to a time when he had faith in everything: in the great wisdom of the government, the alliance with Great Britain, the superiority of bayonets over shells. He wondered if Yves had the same illusions. He did not understand Yves. Yves hated war. It was as if he were giving his life to something higher than war, something that might not even have anything to do with war. He was simply offering up his life.

Meanwhile, they continued to exchange banalities:

‘You’ll be so hot in the train!’

‘Thérèse, you won’t forget to post the letters I left on my desk, will you?’

‘No, don’t worry …’

Letters! Business! The crash! Money! The only good thing about the war was that it interrupted all the legal proceedings. But Thérèse would have very little money on which to live.

He walked over to his wife and kissed her on the forehead and cheek without saying a word. He left first, with Yves following behind; the door closed; Thérèse fell into a chair, her teeth clenched but without shedding a tear.

‘It’s too much. Twice in one lifetime, it’s just too much!’ said the elderly Madame Jacquelain, sounding passionately resentful, as if Thérèse were to blame for the war.

The children had said nothing for a while but now had recovered and were jumping around Thérèse, trying to take hold of her hands. She gently pushed them away and felt her heart breaking.

‘Come on, Mama, come with us,’ they said over and over again, trying to pull her up. She resisted, because her legs were shaking and because she was afraid to go back into the dining room they had just left, where she would see the ashtrays full of cigarette ends, the chairs pushed back from the table, the place settings of the two men, the men the war was taking away from her. She still had the memory of agony like this from before … The clothes that have to be put away, the books with a few ashes from a pipe between their pages, the scent of lavender and cigars that gradually fades away, the cold, empty bed.

The children looked up, and seeing their mother so still, were worried. And yet, she seemed composed and calm. Age and sorrow had caused a kind of light in her to die out, or rather, to shine only rarely, a dim light where, in the past, a bright flame had burned. She finally stood up with a sigh.

‘Come along, my darlings, let’s tidy up.’

Fortunately women still had that left. Fortunately their empty hands could be kept busy with folding, with caressing the clothes and the linen. Fortunately their tears could finally fall this evening, one by one, on to the mending. Fortunately there was the shopping to do, children to care for, dinner to make … Fortunately … how very fortunate the fate of women!