While the Gods Were Sleeping (11 page)

“Poor devil…” I said.

“He’s one of the lucky ones,” was the reaction of my brother, who like me had sat and observed the whole scene.

I thought that by the less fortunate he meant the dead. But he shook his head and said. “That’s something else. Dead is dead. They have wounds. They can blame their misfortune, strange enough perhaps, on the arm or leg they are missing. Or on their scars, like”—he smiled faintly—“this old horse here next to you.”

He shifted position. Planted his walking stick deeper in the gravel and leant on it with both hands, presumably to take the weight off his trunk a little. He gave a subdued groan. “Never thought pain could be a blessing, my little gazelle. The others, who supposedly have nothing wrong with them, they’re real poor devils. They never get the bombs out of their body.”

It got chilly. He wanted to get up. The blond chap on the other side of the pond had smoked his cigarette and ground out the glowing end under his one shoe sole.

As I helped my brother up, I saw them exchange a glance.

The chap sent him a smile, broad and long enough to call ambiguous. I was gradually beginning to crack the code.

“You can have a prize if you want,” I said.

“Always,” grinned my brother, and offered me his arm.

W
AR WAS IN THE DAYS
when my body swelled up and ripe was one of the words that I stored in what I imagined as a biscuit barrel in my head: a play memory that housed the last remnants of my children’s verses, alongside the words that mainly fascinated me since they permanently resisted the demon of my curiosity. Repeat any word for long enough and sooner or later it will unwrap itself from all its connotations, and stand before us, threatening in its naked mystery, but “war” had that quality automatically. It appeared to me now too light, then too weak. Although the sound suggested something gigantic, it seemed at the same time as light as a feather: in itself immense, but too lacking in density of composition to attract a clear meaning. Or on the other hand it appeared a word of infinite weight, a sound-shaped black hole that sucked in all thoughts in order to swallow them up as definitions of its unquenchable self.

In that first year the war seemed something wonderful, the heartbeat of a great event that sounded in all things. I could feel the roar of the gun barrels vibrate through my midriff like pressure waves, and saw the clouds of dust hanging over the fields when I peered out of the attic windows in the summer house in France, towards the land of Artois—my beloved Artois, with its rolling fields of grain, spread out between the wooded banks like ever larger sheets, the more dazzling as the stalks ripened, and the roads that meandered half buried through the fields. You could trace their line in the landscape from the
hedges bordering them and the trees towering over them. You could tell from the clouds of dust where the soldiers who were heading for the front were.

When I was allowed by my uncle, my mother’s older brother, to use the telescope, which stood up in the attic under a tarpaulin, I could see in those clouds of dust, in places where the roads came up to the same height as the fields, lances reflecting the sunlight, rifle barrels as fine as needles gleaming above a mass of figures marching over the cobbles, or the bustling horses’ hooves of the cavalry, and that dust they dragged behind them like a threadbare veil.

Sometimes the horses were pulling heavy artillery, which from the undergrowth fired short bursts of light at me and left green spots on my retina.

“Look closely,” said my uncle. “There goes history,” and with a sigh he added: “For the umpteenth time.”

He was holding the tarpaulin in both hands, ready to drape it quickly back over the telescope. It was a slightly suspicious instrument in times when everyone was suddenly seeing spies everywhere, but I looked through it at length and excitedly, at the hamlets with their ramparts of trees, above which the spire of the church scarcely rose, at the drinking pools for livestock and the duck ponds, and the roofs of the surrounding farms behind fringes of elder and ash, and again I sought out the great river of men, horses, cannon and rifles, the caravan of dust above the deep green and yellow of summer—and it was as if the war consisted in the first place of a mysterious substance, a kind of spice that mingled with the light and made everything more intense, because I remember I said to my uncle, without looking up from the lens, that what I was seeing was so beautiful.

And he smiled, with the tarpaulin in his hands, an embarrassed smile full of regret that glowed in his beard. “Splendid,” he nodded. “Splendid, but a shame.”

One day I drove with my mother by coach through the fields to the nearby town. She had business to do, purchases to make, but she also wanted to be away for a day or two from the house, which for nearly a year now had of necessity been our home. It must have been late May, perhaps early June. Between the soldiers’ shirts hanging out to dry in the branches of the elder at the side of the road, unripe berries were beginning to swell the almost faded flower clusters. When after a bend the coach unexpectedly drove under that canopy of branches and drying shirts, I saw the amused mockery in my mother’s eyes. We rolled under the drying washing as if we were a medieval royal couple making their
joyeuse entrée
into a town and being welcomed by the banners of the patricians.

From everywhere in the surrounding fields and fences plumes of smoke rose up, from fires above which hung bubbling kettles. Everywhere soldiers were lying outside their tents lazing about or polishing their boots, or helping each other shave. I don’t know what is most poignant when I think back to those scenes: the indifference of the summer, the light-heartedness of the soldiers as they cooked, did their washing, lazed about, or the flirtatious atmosphere, with all those men with bare torsos while they waited for their shirts to dry, or is it the confrontation with my own naivety?

I was intoxicated by the sight of all those bodies, and by the bustle that the presence of the armies caused in the farmland, the
delightful unreality of a countryside that was suddenly flooded with the din of a metropolis. In the villages the schoolchildren flocked around the soldiers, who had pitched their tents in the orchards or bleaching fields. They peered into the kettles above the fires, tried to wangle sweets out of the soldiers or goggled at the rifles that were being polished, the greased saddle equipment that gleamed in the sun.

Soldiers at the side of the road got up when they saw our coach approaching and started cheering us as a joke. I waved back and giggled. My mother shook her head with a grin. I seldom saw her playful, but the frivolity of the situation seemed to inspire even her.

“Hélène, child,” she nagged. “If you wave, at least do it with a bit of dignity. Like this…” She waved stiffly with her gloved fingers, in the manner of a princess regent in a victor’s coach—and I burst out laughing.

If this was history, which according to my uncle I must study well, then history was a delight. I could smell the leather of the boots, the shoe polish, the grease and the scent of those bodies, pale, young, tender. And again I see those good-natured faces, the eyelids that narrow, the sparks of pleasure that glow in them while the lads cheer us, and the hair under their arms when they raise an arm to wave. But I also sensed in my mother that same touch of regret that I felt with my uncle when I stared through the telescope at the blood vessels of the war, which day and night pushed those bodies towards the meat-grinder, to an idiotic death in the trenches or the foxhole.

On arrival we had coffee in the establishment where we were staying, in a side street close to the market square on one of the
slopes of the hill on which the town was built. At the window the jovial bustle of a seaside resort in high season lapped past, true, flooded by mainly British tourists, all in the same grey uniforms.

We were almost the only civilians in the restaurant, and we must have looked strangely precious among all that khaki, with our dainty hats, our puffed sleeves and cuffs, the brooch my mother had put on the lapel of her cream-coloured overcoat and not least our gloves, mine in satin, hers in crochet, which gave a certain rococo twist even to the simple gesture of bringing a cup of coffee to your lips.

We attracted attention. Around us, at the other tables, officers—I presume, since I’ve never had a clear idea of military ranks and hierarchies—were casting furtive glances at the two of us, sideways, as they drank their glass or cup, or looking up supposedly by chance when they cut their cakes.

My mother shook it off. Straightened her shoulders. Looked around. I could see that she wanted to wallow in the illusion of a more or less normal state of affairs—everyday life with its familiar routines, even though almost all the waiters who were manoeuvring their way between the kitchen and the tables with trays full of crockery and cutlery or portions of tart were older men, older than the majority of the uniformed customers, beneath whose whiskers they arranged silver jugs of cream on the tablecloth, poured tea, juggled with carafes or piled empty plates on their forearms as if performing a circus turn. Their helpful manner, perhaps no more obtrusive or artificial than usual, acquired a mocking edge, though those young men scarcely seemed to notice them.

I saw my mother enjoying herself. I saw how she relished the sight of the maid who, in front of the cupboard for the cutlery
and the napkins, was polishing knives and forks with a downy cloth and laying the napkins in piles. The child was probably not much older than me, though a head shorter, slimmer and blonder, with a flannel cap on her hair so big that it resembled a washed-up jellyfish that had accidentally been stranded on her crown. She seemed frightened of the tall matron who, in a corner of the restaurant, close to the door, resided behind a tall lectern and whose task was for some reason to prevent hungry customers from looking for a table on their own initiative, a task which had grown into a true passion. With an imposing choker rising from her voluminous bosom, and in one hand the pen, which regularly made mysterious notes in a register on the lectern, the other pointing a guest to a table, she combined excellently and seamlessly the functions of gatekeeper and cornerstone: half a caryatid, because of that hairdo that towered to just beneath the low ceiling, as though she had to support the whole building, and half a Theban sphinx, only prepared to admit within her ramparts those who gave the right answers to her riddles.

I saw how my mother was enjoying herself, and I was too, but actually not properly until now, long after the whole decorum of the bourgeoisie has wasted away in the props store of time. The most important rituals are those whose symbolism we know has definitely faded. The whole tissue of signs, the map of our soul if you like, in which they were embedded, has worn away around them, but we ascribe to them, literally against our better judgement, a short-lived significance—just as I can only fundamentally believe in God when I feel that the world, down to my own cells and bones, exudes His death: death in
the afternoon, when Rachida blesses the floors and cupboards down below, and the caustic soda in her buckets deconsecrates my house until everything lies there white and naked, filled with nothing but its own emptiness.

“Don’t sit there gawping, child. You’ll attract lightning,” whispers my mother, above the cup of coffee which she keeps in front of her mouth for an unnatural length of time so as to be able to have a good look round. And when I stare at her indignantly, I see she is sitting giggling, in a rare fit of self-mockery.

It might be one of the countless incidents that you forget, one of those hundreds of thousands of moments that glide through us without leaving a trace, or one of those scarce moments that on the contrary you remember all your life without really knowing why: memories that have the intensity of revelations, but without a clear message, except for the consolation of their triviality.

However, I remember that afternoon so vividly because my mother had scarcely uttered her playful reprimand when the panes in the window frames around us started to tremble. On all the tables teaspoons vibrated in cups and saucers to the rhythm of a swelling rumble that seemed to spread not only through the air, but also through the ground, through the table legs, the legs of our chairs, through our legs, up to our midriffs. Meanwhile an unearthly din mounted. Somewhere huge shutters seemed to be tumbling off their hinges, steel gates to be slamming shut with a massive clang, followed by clattering, like a hailstorm releasing all its stones at once.

My mother and I looked at each other, half astonished, half bewildered. Around us life came to a complete standstill very
briefly, it can’t have been more than eight seconds or so. Forks with pieces of cake on them froze halfway between table and mouth. A coffee jug hung in the air from the motionless hand of a waitress beneath the tinkling candelabra. The matron at her lectern raised her eyes to heaven, to the creaking ceiling, as if she suddenly doubted whether her monolithically constructed coiffure could cope with the weight of the rattling cosmos. By the crockery cupboard the maid stood looking at the shelves, on which plates were trembling, carafes were trembling, milk jugs were trembling, while in the drawers spoons and forks spread a gentle panic. Doggedly she fastened her gaze on the silver and porcelain, perhaps in the hope that by staring intensely she could keep everything in its place, if the crockery were to dance towards the fatal edge of the shelf.

As soon as the shaking ebbed away and the din had moved over us, into the valley, across the immense plain to the coast, and the panes in the window were the last to come to rest, suddenly the hubbub broke loose again as if at a sign. The waiters manoeuvred between the tables and the maid was once more folding napkins, with the same mechanical sleepiness as before, reintegrated into the hypnosis of normality.

Perhaps it was because of the juddering, which was still ringing in my ears and in my midriff, but as I sat looking round me, at the good-natured banter that went on lapping round us, as though there had never been that interval, I had an uncontrollable laughing fit. I tried to keep myself in check, but the tension built up in my midriff and before I realized it I burst into a laugh that took me so totally by surprise that I got cramp in my abdominal muscles. I heard
myself, to my horror, not so much guffawing as cackling hysterically.

At the tables next to ours heads turned. The matron, I just saw, before my sight grew dim with tears, was staring at me as if she would have liked to turn me into a pillar of salt on the spot, and I heard the decided click with which my mother put her cup down—one of the gestures in which she could concentrate her universal disapproval. But before she could say anything the whole episode began again from the beginning. The panes started ticking softly and a few seconds later that long-drawn-out salvo boomed through the whole room, where life again froze.

I saw my mother put her fingertips on the edge of the table, as if to calm the clattering. A second spasm of laughter went up through my intestines, and I heard myself drowning out the noise with my cackling.