While the Gods Were Sleeping (21 page)

“Ah,
une affairette
…” he had exclaimed, as he pushed back his chair and stood up from behind his desk in the library with an excited “
Finalement!
”, since his yearly attempt to subject me to a subversive education was obviously finally beginning to bear fruit.

“Two days at the seaside, two days at the seaside,” he said, pretending to sulk. “It’s a start, I assume. Be careful,
ma fille
, but without taking it too far… I have to say that, as ambassador of Her Maternal Excellency, but the simple libertine in me has his rights too…”

He came to pick me up early in the morning, in an open-topped car; the day was still unpolluted and smelt of grass and dew. He did not drive into the courtyard but waited a little way off to avoid the maid, Madeleine, who might be on the prowl. He had everything with him to make the cover credible: the cameras, the bags, the papers;
permis
for the cameras, for myself, passes for this and that, where necessary illustrated with the photos he had taken of me a few weeks earlier in the church—I only wondered much later, without ever asking him for clarification,
whether he had planned everything, whether our re-encounter had been so accidental. Guests were to visit the front zone that day. We never drive in a group, he said, but spread out. “I’m risking my neck, Helen.”

I replied that what he was risking would be a trifle beside my mother’s wrath if she should ever get to hear of our adventure—she never found out, never believed anything except that I went to the coast with “
ce drôle Monsieur Heirbeir
”, and there somewhere in the dunes or in a boarding house of dubious quality threw away my honour, more or less with the blind-eyed consent of her dearly beloved brother, against whom she declared a winter of discontent which lasted all the longer because she perhaps realized that she had lost the battle for my soul for ever.

The shock when, after driving for a while along deserted roads and seeing only peasants on their way to the fields, we suddenly found ourselves in a stream of soldiers, the dust, the smell of sweat and bodies, the silence, the tread of all those soles over the land and the cobbles—a stream of arms and heads, trunks and shoulders that sucked us along into the arterial system of the war, thrust along the uncountable individual blood cells which made their way between the high verges under the branches of undergrowth and trees.

Here and there, at a bottleneck or where the road made a sharp bend, the flood was checked and we could only drive at walking place. Then he manoeuvred the car between the troops, none of whom paid the slightest attention, as if they were totally focused on their destination—or perhaps it was just their limbs that were going mechanically on, their muscles and joints were taking them blindly northwards, and their thoughts
were tarrying meanwhile with what was behind them, what they could not let go of. My husband shook his head. “They live in soldier-time,” he said. “That’s all.”

When gaps appeared in the mass we could accelerate briefly, slaloming, and pass smaller troops of soldiers, not too quickly. No one waved or laughed or whistled, not a voice was raised to call out hello or even to swear. Elsewhere the road clogged up again, and the mass became so impenetrable that we drifted almost automatically towards the side of the road, and I then stood up in the car—“Careful, my lovely,” he said—and through the dust that was thrown up from the soft sand by all those soles and that drifted in a haze above the figures, caught a first glimpse of the face of the war. It did not show a uniform face, rather a countenance that manifested itself in a thousand facets, a face that was a parasite on all those faces, younger and older, one clearer than the other, which I saw as little more than separate noses, cheeks, eyelids and lips under the grey powder of the roads looming up out of that veil of dust, with which the face of this war made itself up—not to look at me but to look through me with a hollow stare.

Now and again from that sea of nameless faces a look lit up, clear as the shine on a drop of dew in the morning mist—the faint smile of a young man whose mouth, just under the sharply defined shadow of his cap, unexpectedly opened in the most radiant joy imaginable, or the rather worried-looking eye of a somewhat older man: his bushy eyebrow was raised momentarily, his head looked up automatically and he gave a resigned, almost imperceptible nod. Since then I know that a look can
have fingers, and a whole hand if necessary. Over the years my memory has contracted around those two gazes that nestled briefly in mine; everything else around becomes vague and hazy, only the eyes don’t. They stare at me ever more sharply and compress a whole life into their stare. I had sons and lovers there, and in so many eyes was the daughter of fathers I have never known.

He drummed impatiently on the steering wheel and was about to hoot, but it occurred to him just in time that it was forbidden, and tugged on my coat to make me sit down again, but there was no point. We were half on the verge, half in the undergrowth. When I craned my neck to look over the nearest figures, I saw farther on, through the clouds of dust and the sunlight refracted in them, the contours of the ammunition lorries. They looked like slow mastodons with, between them, on and towed behind other lorries, towards the bed of the shallow valley out of which that stream of weapons and men was making its way, light and heavy artillery—it reminded one of the procession of an ancient people that bore its idols and statues of divinities out of its temples through the country, their fabulous animals, their steel Cyclopses.

“The herds of Mars,” I said, and thought it ridiculous myself.

He repeated that it would be better if I sat down, but I couldn’t get the idea out of my head that it was all these men who were dragging the chariots of destruction onward, by invisible cords over their shoulders, resigned and silent—all that could be heard was the crunch of footwear. The high road verges seemed to retreat from them, just as the sea had opened for the people of Moses, although they might just as well have been Pharaoh’s
army, not suspecting that those earth banks could close again at any moment—but then he pulled so hard on my coat tails that I fell abruptly back into the car seat.

He glanced aside, gave me the grin full of reckless courage that needed only half his mouth to win me over to him for ever: “Didn’t mean to hurt you,
ma biche
, everything all right?” and put his foot down.

The peace that came over us when we turned into a side road in order to make a shortcut, the charm of the countryside the moment we drove just about 100 metres from that stream of people through rolling fields, grassland above which larks fell out of the sky and lapwings whooped, past houses where old people were selling newly harvested onions on benches against the wall under the grapevine—it was all unreal. Around the washing places on the market squares of the villages children stopped as we passed and gaped at us open-mouthed. With coarse brushes women scrubbed blue-white bleach over the thresholds of their houses. It was like a lucid dream, because almost nowhere did you see young men. The tissue of everyday life had holes in it. Ordinariness was walking around in rags but only we seemed to notice.

And sooner or later we saw from a distance that stream of figures shuffling past again—the same figures or different ones. The war created its own arterial pattern of road maps in the landscape, which coincided with the old ones where it was possible, but where necessary it carved new routes through the earth, with railway lines that branched like capillaries, temporary depots, junctions, assembly points, base camps. The fronts,
if I had been able to see them from the air, must have looked like gaping, throbbing wounds, which from everywhere, over old roads and new, sucked in flesh and blood and fodder and explosives. And even when we found ourselves on deserted roads we could deduce from the grey-white dust on the hedges that a column must have passed through shortly before—sometimes it looked like a Christmas scene, a sugary, live postcard of snowy hedgerows, above which the sun was warming a new day.

He asked me if I was hungry yet, and I shook my head. We could see the plain in the distance, where the masses of people became less dense. The front was close by, the troops dispersed, set up temporary camps in meadows and beside country lanes. Again I saw, like the year before, when I had been to town with my mother, men stirring kettles that hung bubbling over campfires, and whole trees transformed into stationary galleons, with drying shirts and trousers on the masts, which the wind caught as if they were sails.

You could smell the odour of the fires, of the fat with which the saddlery was greased, you could hear the scraping of the curry-comb on the flanks of horses, and their snorting. Someone was playing the harmonica. Children were still shooting as swift as sticklebacks past the resting men.

Older boys watched with their hands in their pockets as the soldiers cleaned their rifles, fascinated as boys are by everything that opens on a hinge, clicks, switches and ejaculates. On their faces one could read regret. Their lower lips quivered with impatience because they were still too young to join the armies. The chaos that reigned there had only at first sight a festive air. The melodies were lifeless, the jokes dour. No one waved or lost
themselves in teasing. Even the children were no longer curious, but worked the tents routinely, to the point of rudeness, to exchange an egg or a piece of bacon for some money or a jewel. The soldiers waved them away like flies. Above the treetops, the roads and the farmland hung the virtually continuous roar and thunder of the front; the sound was much less dull than at home. There was more texture, not to say architecture in the booming, which created invisible buildings in the heavens, domes, stone bubbles that immediately crumbled.

We left the hill country. Suddenly the frantic activity ceased and the plain was there, past the last board on the verge, repeating in raucous capitals the ban on hooting. The plain and its rows of trees, its slow processions of crowns. Its monk trees, its own parade of trunks. Beneath them clusters of men emerging from the crowds behind us, laden with backpack and blanket, helmet and rifle, on the way to relieve other troops. Somewhere out there, on the plain.

The plain that I no longer recognized, or only half, because it was no longer, or not completely, the plain where we used to come on excursions by coach with my uncle and the aunts, under the parasols of August, to the villages where we drank the idleness of summer from earthenware jugs, the bitter beer.

The villages with their towers, their sun-scorched squares, their ochre spires, which now seemed different villages, different towers; toy villages that had fallen out of the overfull toy box of a giant child while it had been lugging it across fields in boredom where old corn lay snapped over the earth, overgrown with grass tussocks and thistles. Roofs showed their skeletons, seemed to have rejected their tiles. Window shutters
hung loose from the window frames in walls riddled with bullet holes. Somewhere there was a bluestone door frame still standing, there was something clownish, stoical about it, keeping up the appearance of a house in a heap of pulverized bricks out of which the beams stuck like bones. The battered houses, the towers from which a huge bird had pecked a piece, lay staring at each other across the wooded banks that had been largely shot to pieces like schoolchildren still panting after a skirmish, collar ripped loose, glasses trampled underfoot, sleeves torn at the seams—everyone was perplexed.

A wall of straw bales slid between us and the landscape, a
dull-yellow
wall glided past the car in places where the enemy had an unimpeded view and without that barrier would have shot at everything that moved, certainly cars, I learnt later.

I calmed my thoughts a little, looked at him, my husband-to-be, while he kept an eye on the road, the steering wheel loosely in his hand. I liked looking at him. I liked absorbing his profile, the nose and the lips and the chin, the hair that stuck out of his kepi and, behind his ear, shaved short, lay close to his skin. I liked waiting for him to look back, turn his head half towards me and say something, it didn’t matter what.

The straw wall gave way to trees, the road cut through a low hill. It was cool and dark, and seemed to be deserted. I don’t know how many we had passed before I recognized, in the patchwork of light and shadow patches in the undergrowth, not only tree trunks and bushes. Only when I detected movement out of the corner of my eye did I distinguish their figures in the shades of brown and green that slid past us. They must have pulled back onto the side of the road to let us pass. I had not
seen them at first because they almost did not look like people, rather beings in whom transubstantiation from earth into flesh had not yet been completed. Almost-humans hiding under the trees in order to harden off safely in earthen clothing, earthen helmets, earthen cocoons.

Leaning against a tree trunk a boy with earthen fists screwed open a drinking bottle and brought it to his lips—how am I to describe the flash that animated his whole figure. The dark pupils did not look up but sparkled between the caked-together eyelashes, under the modelled eyebrows, from that face when he stopped what he was doing and raised an arm. At the moment he called something—I don’t know what, but the audible relief, the simple joy of being alive needed no language—his lips made fine cracks in his earthen mask, which flaked off and exposed the skin of his cheeks. A skin as dark as the night.

I remembered the shameless curiosity with which we had gaped at the “Negroes” when the war began and troops fairly regularly passed through the village and rested in the square in front of the
mairie
—the intimidating splendour of the cavalry with their multicoloured uniforms, their blood-red hooded cloaks and ornamentally harnessed horses, and the look in their eyes, by which every woman felt pierced as a dubious threat to her very ovaries. Even my mother proved not wholly insensitive to them. “It has to be said,” she said one day in a throwaway tone, “they’re definitely not unattractive, those savages.”