While the Gods Were Sleeping (23 page)

I had to swallow down a lump in my throat. I would have liked to see this house as it lay dozing on a Sunday evening like that, after hours of full sun, to see the light in the rooms fading and the decorative earthenware on the dresser lose its shine until it hung pale in the twilight—but the front room, the entertaining room, was a mess. Instead of the window on the street side there was a hole. The window, woodwork and all, had been knocked out of the house front and blown inwards, over and onto the table, where between sections of lath and plaster the crystal tears of a chandelier gleamed. Through the hole in the front wall I could see the house fronts on the other side. In the doorways the rubble lay all the way to the street as if the houses had spewed out their interiors, as if an epidemic attacking houses had moved through street after street.

I turned round. The light had faded, outside it looked rainy. Don’t ask me if it was because of the wind, which was audibly rising, or the series of bursts of fire that exploded above the roofs with a thunderous sound that seemed to rise somewhere outside the town walls from the depths of the earth, and above the roofs built a dome of pandemonium, under which the town seemed to shrink—and I don’t know either whether the gust of wind that somewhere on the upstairs floor slammed a door shut came together with the noise that made everything tremble, the walls, the floors, made the windows at the back judder in their frames and shook plaster from the ceiling in white trails of dust. All I know is that, just as I turned round, the noise above my head turned the sky to iron—everywhere doors closed and
window panes shook. In the back kitchen all the crockery fell out of the wall cupboard with a diabolical crash, the slivers jumping up the walls.

I must have screamed with the shock; the next moment I felt an arm round my waist and he pulled me away, of course worried about the ceiling. We both fell against the stairs. I could feel the treads in my back, the carpet cushioned our fall.

“It’s all right. Don’t worry…” he panted, his breath warm against my collarbone. “It’s quite a way off. It’s just the noise… They’re ours.” He seemed to be saying it just as much to himself, just as much to calm himself. He was lying half on top of me.

A second series of salvoes exploded. He made as if to get up, but I pulled him to me, put my lips against the skin beneath his ear, by the corner of his jaw—the banisters trembled, and somewhere a tread creaked.

I took his head in both hands, his lips slid over my nose. I sucked in his tongue, held his head frantically tight, his face so doggedly against mine that his kepi fell off and rolled down beside us.

I wanted to feel his living, breathing, hectically breathing, body, the ribs that in my arms under the thick military material separated when he filled his lungs, his trunk and his hips, the soft belly that pushed into mine to the rhythm, the hectic rhythm of his breath, and his tongue, the fleshiness of his lips. The thundering receded, the shock wave subsided. It became quiet.

I pushed him on his side, lifted his chin with my forefinger. He looked into my eyes; his face seemed different, smoothed out, happy.

He took my hand by the wrist, led my fingers down across his belly and put them in his crotch. I could feel his blood pulsing, the hardness of his sex under his fly frightened me. He could tell from my look and smiled sheepishly.

Then somewhere above us there was a dry bang; something shook on its hinges, followed by a slight ticking that swelled and subsided, till a second bang resounded and it began anew.

We both looked up at the same time.

Against the wall beside the section of stairs that led from the landing to the upstairs rooms, packed as closely together as a nest of bats awakening from their diurnal sleep, a dozen or so small frames, round, oval or square, with faces in them that we did not recognize—gentlemen with moustaches and side-whiskers, ladies’ necks above lace collars and toddlers with the perplexed look of owl chicks under their blond quiffs—started, whenever the window frame banged against the wall, swaying to and fro on their nails, and the corners of the frames tapped against the wall.

They came to rest, but reawakened with every gust of wind. Swaying. Dangling. Tapped frantically against the wall for a while. Calmed down.

“They’re in panic,” I said. “They’ve almost been eaten away by the rain. They’re telegraphing for us to rescue them.”

“Bet they are…” He took my hand out of his crotch, put it against his cheek and pushed his tongue into the bottom of my palm.

The window frame banged against the wall, the frames tapped.

“
Ils sont jaloux
,” he whispered, with his lips in my hand.

H
E FREQUENTLY TOOK
me on trips with him when the war was over and he meticulously documented what I call the congealing, the great levelling, in all respects after the ravages and the euphoria of peace. The smoothing-over of the tormented earth. The cemeteries where the fallen were gradually put in straighter and straighter ranks, disciplined even in death. The wooden crosses which were replaced by polished stone tombs in charming cemeteries beneath the subdued melancholy of weeping-willow leaves or pine needles—it struck me as a wry euphemism, not to say a sad paradox, that in order to keep the memory of the destruction and oceans of blood alive, they mowed the lawns immaculately, constructed solemn temples, carved mourning statues, lit eternal flames. Over the bones and the corpses and the countless shattered lives an arcadia stretched out that was itself constantly struggling against becoming overgrown, a process that would have spread like wildfire if they had not, out of piety, or out of shame, left the ravaged earth in peace and declared the whole area a cemetery.

But I also remember the rage that seized me when, in the early summer of 1919, we were in Alsace, a part of the front zone where we had not been before. En route I had been dozing in the car, lulled to sleep by the mild temperatures and the pristine green of nature renewing itself. When I woke because the car slowed down, at the bottom of the valley that unfolded before us, at some distance from the road between woody clumps
and fields, a broad scar of earth churned into hills and gullies stretched as far as the eye could see.

It was not the sight of it that I found chilling, but the swarming of scores, hundreds, of human figures, white and dark dolls that clambered chaotically over the heaps of earth like foraging ants. Young men supported their wives or fiancées as they helped them jump from ridges. Sucking contentedly on their pipes, fathers pointed out old foxholes and barbed wire, tanks stranded in the earth and abandoned artillery, or they stood on top of all those masses of ground with their hands on their hips, looking out over their surroundings.

It was that easy-going atmosphere that filled me with fury. The swarms of summer hats and parasols. The improvised signposts on the verge. The cars and carriages parked in the fields near the edge of the wood which suggested an open-air fair, complete with pedlars not offering refreshments but grenade fragments or polished bullets engraved with place names and landscapes or decorative motifs—the pleasure I mean, which was not even hidden behind horror or bewilderment. The pleasure of bewilderment in itself, the eagerness of horror that I saw there. But my husband said: “I think it’s inevitable, Helen.”

He got his camera from the case on the back of the car, opened the tripod and planted it in the soft, mild-smelling forest earth on the edge of the valley. “Are we that much better?” He prepared the camera to capture the scene.

Time gives greater complexity to the texture of the facial expressions on those prints. Their readability has become less unambiguous—like my own. Look at those two women standing there arm in arm on one of the countless paths that the stream
of disaster tourists has worn between the mounds of earth and the old bomb craters. They seem to be sisters. Perhaps twins, given their almost identical clothing and coquettish hats, and the fact that they are walking arm in arm.

But why is one of them carrying a bunch of flowers in one hand? Not a hastily picked bunch of wild flowers but a carefully arranged bouquet, as the ribbon that binds the stalks leads one to suspect—where did they lay it? In the nearby cemetery perhaps, or on the approximate spot from where a man, a fiancé, a brother or father, whose body had not been found and perhaps never would be, had sent his last letter?

And even now when I see those solid heads of families again who, holding their children by the hand, stroll between the broom and the briars as if they were at the zoo, I find it harder to get worked up than before. I know by now what weird forms desperation can take in a human being, how the pleasure of bewilderment carefully shields us from a fear or despair that might totally destroy us—what a strange emotion fear remains. The most alchemical of emotions, now turning to lead, now to gold. Isn’t each pleasure a hasty prayer, Rachida my girl, an invocation?

I’m reminded of my uncle, who every few days dropped by the
mairie
to open the official dispatches. He considered it his duty to inform the families affected of the death of a son or a brother, a father or husband.

So once every so many mornings he went “down”. In the adjacent café he first had a coffee and spirits while he went through the papers, before entering the
mairie
in order, as he only ever said out loud at home with us, to “bring in the sad
harvest”. He had several times sat on the town council and was doing it from a kind of
noblesse oblige
, a task that he took over from the official town crier who would normally convey the message, but who turned out to be drunk more and more often because he couldn’t stand it any longer.

My uncle had the envelopes cut open, at each name gave a melancholy sigh, which became more routine each month, and set forth. Eventually everyone knew what it meant when he was seen leaving the
mairie
and crossing the market square. People held their breath. What side road would he take? People soon realized that he arranged the names in his head according to the houses he would have to visit, that he turned his walk into a circular route which began in the market square and ended at our house. There he would lower himself onto the bench under the tree and did not want to be disturbed until lunchtime.

As soon as he took a particular route one side of the village breathed easier with relief—you could hear the relief creeping through the house fronts that he turned his back on. The joints in the walls seemed to expand as if the stones had braced themselves, and you could see the houses by whose door or front garden he stopped almost cringe. Because everyone knew the purpose of his knocking he did not need to say much. When the door opened and from the darkness beyond a fearful questioning look met his, it was mostly sufficient to nod—unless several men in the same family had been called up.

It is the women who take the blows, he was wont to say. Imagine the look on the face of a mother with two or three sons at the front, not exactly a rarity in large farming families in the countryside. The uncertainty behind the certainty that you are
knocking at her door to report the death of one of her children. She has seen you coming across the yard. Above the hedge of the front garden with the country flowers, which have been so immaculately hoed and raked, since weeding helps take her mind off the fate of her boys, she has recognized your hat. She has heard the gate creak. She would like her house to be an unassailable fortress, a thick shell. She sees you coming across the yard or up the garden path. She realizes that this time there is no blood on the lintel and side posts of her door, that the angel with the sword has not spared her house this time—all she does not yet know is which of her sons has fallen.

“Who?” is the word burning not so much on her lips as in her eyes, tell me who: our Jean or Arnaud or Rémi? The names shuttle as it were across her retina: which of the beings to whom she has given birth, whom she has felt pull out of her to the spasms of her abdominal muscles, the life that she saw grow up and nurtured, cared for, gave food and drink, beat and kissed, that caused her laughter wrinkles or grey hairs, filled her with pride with its school results or muscular strength, made her double up with anxiety when it had measles, or about its drinking or gambling habits—the top of the class or the sponger or the petty thief who joined up to avoid the cell and shame. Who is it, monsieur? The oldest or the youngest? Or the middle one, the apple of my eye? There were doors where he knocked a first time, and a second time. On the third or fourth occasion there wasn’t much more to be said.

What do you do when you have to tell a mother the last of her sons has died, or after her sons her husband too, and she doesn’t open up and you go round the back? You see her in her back kitchen with a basin on her lap, peeling potatoes so
furiously that she reduces them to curls. She doesn’t even look up when you come in. What do you do then? You sit down at her table and say nothing and wait.

“It’s the women who take the blows.” He repeated it more and more often when he returned from his morbid rounds and shut himself up in his garden. “Always the same old story, we let ourselves be seduced by the high-falutin’ words of the high-ups, the sweet mouth of power, but we always forget the arsehole. Don’t stare at me so angrily, dear sister. Your daughter is old enough to listen to other things than sweetly lilting quatrains. She’s not a child any more. Look at the arsehole,
ma fille
. Who gets to wave the palm branch and who catches the shit? That is the question on which the whole of history turns.”

I think of my husband. He says: “It’s inevitable, Helen.” “Inevitable,” he repeats, again and again.

His voice can still make me shudder with desire, that rather drawling accent, his intonation that was always on the point of turning into a soft groan, as if speaking were lashing him with a forbidden, sexual pleasure.