Читать книгу The Foundling's War - Yasmina Khadra - Страница 5

Jean’s view of the band as it turned into the avenue leading to Place de Jaude, was obstructed by Palfy’s nose. It had always been of noble dimensions, with nicely arched nostrils that quivered particularly sensitively at the smell of grilling meat or a ripe Camembert but never, never before had it aspired to block an entire avenue. From the front, Palfy’s nose suited his bony face, and its bump, emphasised above its bulbous tip by a white scar, actually seemed somehow cheerful and promising. But then suddenly, seen from the side, it underwent a curious mutation: protruding, it transformed Palfy’s expression utterly, turning him into a sort of predator, a gourmand (or sensualist, if you like) of an extreme and quite possibly sadistic kind. Abruptly his eyelashes seemed too exquisitely brushed, his eyes to retreat into their orbits, exaggerating the pink, living caruncle into a pustule at the corner of the eye, and his arched nostril revealed the cartilage inside, as smooth as the wall of a cavern.

Jean told himself he must never really have seen his friend’s face in profile before, which was both a pretty peculiar and pretty improbable state of affairs, given that they had known each other for three years and been through nine months of fighting together, eating from the same mess tins, sleeping on the same straw, throwing themselves down in the same mud. He had had to sit at a café terrace in Clermont-Ferrand on a July morning in 1940 to discover Palfy’s nose for the first time. How long would it take to get to know the rest of his face? Jean closed his eyes and tried to imagine Palfy’s hands. His attempt to conjure up a precise picture of them was unsuccessful and when he opened his eyes again the band, having filed past Palfy’s nose, had arrived at the café. Children dashed along the pavements. Women in sleeveless dresses waved. One of them stopped in front of the café terrace, and through the thin blue lawn of her dress the sunlight outlined soft thighs, delicious hips, and a slim back. For a second or two she stood without moving, offered to their gaze, an unknown, fragile-looking young woman with ash-blond hair falling over her cool neck. She turned to walk away and her face appeared with its childlike nose, pale lips and sun-lightened eyebrows.

‘Did you see?’ Jean said.

‘Yes. We are visited by grace herself.’

‘Fleetingly!’

‘However fleeting, she must always be acknowledged. And we shall see her again.’

‘She might be really stupid.’

‘I guarantee she won’t be!’ Palfy declared, in a tone that brooked no contradiction.

Sergeant Titch was passing them now, chest out, marching stiffly, tossing his beribboned baton high above his head. The band followed, drummers first, ahead of the buglers, whose instruments festooned with blue pennants embroidered with a red design – a devil and his lance – glinted in the sunlight. These gaitered, white-gloved cherubs, cheeks bulging under their greased and gleaming helmets, were being menaced from behind by Pegasone, the strawberry roan mare of Colonel Vavin, a fine figure of an infantryman on horseback. Mounted uneasily in his saddle, the colonel, knowing the mare hated the cacophony of brass and drums, feared she would throw him at any moment. And behind Pegasone lay further danger in the shape of the baby-faced subaltern who, flanked by heavily decorated NCOs, was carrying the regimental standard at far too acute an angle, threatening Pegasone’s hindquarters with its metal spike. One false move and she would be off.

‘Come on!’ Palfy said.

Jean looked for a waiter to pay for their beers.

‘What are you doing?’ Palfy asked.

‘I can’t see the waiter.’

‘Don’t you know that we won the war? Have you ever seen the winning side pay for its drinks? Let’s get out of here.’

They dived into the crowd, which grew thicker as they approached Place de Jaude.

‘I think you’re overstating it,’ Jean grumbled. ‘We didn’t win the war. In fact I don’t think we can ever have lost a war as shamefully as we did this one.’

Palfy shrugged.

‘We must have won. At the last minute it all worked out for us. The miracle of the Marne. La furia francese. Otherwise they’d never dare parade like this.’

The regiment flowed into the square, its companies marking time as they waited to take up their positions in front of an empty stage backed with red curtains that looked like an open mouth. Squeezed into khaki jackets buttoned to the throat, trussed up in cartridge belts stuffed with bread, chocolate and tobacco, and weighed down by new cleated boots that threw sparks as they hit the ground, the soldiers looked as though they were on the verge of apoplexy. Company sergeant-majors, lieutenants and captains scuttled back and forth, issuing orders to their companies that were raggedly obeyed. Rifles were stacked, and at a signal from section NCOs each man pulled a rag out of his cartridge belt to polish his boots. An admiring ‘ah!’ of astonishment ran through the crowd massed on the pavements, held back with some difficulty by a police cordon. A new era was dawning. Groomed and gleaming, newly issued with MAS-36 rifles (prudently kept back during the fighting to make sure the old rifles from 1914–18 were used first), the regiment with its distinctive red epaulettes and dashing, self-important officers seemed to have survived its recent battles without so much as a scratch or losing a single one of the buttons Gamelin had promised to the government.

When the boots were polished, the rifles were unstacked and companies lined up once more. An official in a black-edged jacket, stiff collar, striped trousers and bowler hat appeared on the platform. He scrutinised the two rows of chairs, looking for the one with his name on. He looked like a clown or a tiny Jonah, about to be swallowed by the curtains’ open mouth. Having found his seat, he settled himself, mopped his brow, and suddenly saw that more than a thousand spectators had him in their sights. Swiftly replacing his bowler, he disappeared as if swallowed by a trapdoor, followed by a wave of laughter.

Moments later, the prefect made his entrance. Instructions rang around the square and battalion commanders ordered their men to shoulder arms.

Jean and Palfy found themselves in the front row, among the ex-servicemen, who wore their berets tugged down over their ears and carried children on their shoulders. Jean could have named nearly every officer and NCO now standing to attention in the square, but the veterans of the regiment – the men who had still been fighting three weeks earlier – had been redistributed among the re-formed companies, which had then been joined by the last contingent to arrive. He and Palfy recognised Hoffberger, fat as ever, and the huge Ascary, little Vibert, still furious-looking, the seminarian Picallon, their friend the boxer Léonard, and Negger, the pacifist primary-school teacher – all of them easily distinguishable from the young recruits drummed up after the armistice by their visibly casual way of standing to attention.

‘I can hear Ascary swearing, “God oh God oh God in heaven”,’ Palfy said.

‘And Hoffberger going “hmmph”.’

‘Good to see they’re both still with us.’

‘To tell you the truth,’ Jean said, ‘I’d prefer to see that nice blonde, the one we saw just now with the sun behind her.’

‘Is that all you can think about?’

A general was inspecting the regiment. When the inspection was finished, it was time to award the decorations. Colonel Vavin added a bar to his Croix de Guerre, which already reached his belt. Three captains and four lieutenants received the official embrace. Next it was the NCOs’ turn. A dozen sergeants fell out.

‘You see, we won the war. No question about it,’ Palfy said.

Next to them, an ex-serviceman curiously sporting a faithful copy of a Hitler moustache hissed at them, ‘Shut up, you bloody layabouts!’

‘Forgive me, Monsieur,’ Palfy said contritely, ‘I was only joking.’

‘This is no time for jokes.’

Jean’s elbow connected with Palfy’s ribs. One of the sergeants, good-looking in a thuggish way, was taking his three paces forward to receive a Croix de Guerre.

‘It’s Tuberge! They’re giving Tuberge the Croix de Guerre! They’re out of their minds!’

‘Not that bastard who trousered my watch!’

There was movement and a murmuring around them. The ex-serviceman put up his fists.

‘Now you’re insulting our heroes!’

‘I make a hero like that every morning,’ Palfy said.

‘Shut up!’

‘Oh, belt up, you old fart.’

The ex-serviceman attempted to grab Palfy’s shirtfront. Shoving him back, Palfy broke free and, cupping his hands around his mouth, yelled, ‘Sergeant Tuberge! You’re a fairy! Coward! Bastard! Looter! Murderer! Shit! Thug!’

The general, about to pin on Tuberge’s medal, stopped dead, although he did not deign to turn towards the heckler. Nor did the colonel, who beckoned to an aide-de-camp. In the reverential silence that reigned across the square, Palfy’s shouts had been heard by everyone. Tuberge himself, fists clenched, appeared to be about to dive into the crowd towards his tormentor, who was now brandishing his fist, having just shoved the infuriated ex-serviceman to the ground.

The ex-serviceman was shouting, ‘Arrest them! Arrest them! They’re agitators.’

The aide-de-camp ran over to a police sergeant. In the ranks of his old battalion Jean could see Ascary doubled up with laughter, Hoffberger scarlet with amusement, and Negger, who had put his rifle on the ground to underline his pacifism. Despite the many hands trying to restrain him, Palfy was not finished.

‘Bloody coward! Bloody bugger! Bloody … navvy!’ he went on shouting.

‘Let’s get out of here,’ Jean begged him.

The police were running towards them. Ducking low, they shoved their way back through the crowd, which watched them dumbfounded. Breaking free, they found that they were face to face with a garde mobile,1 who tried to grab their arms. They tripped him and he fell.

‘This way!’ Palfy said.

They ran down one side of the square. No one tried to stop them, but several policemen in the square were still following them, running parallel to the crowd, which might have thinned out enough to let them through if it had not been distracted by a new development. Overcome by heat, weakened by dysentery, three soldiers who had been standing presenting arms for ten minutes crashed to the ground. They were followed by a fourth. A bugle call and a series of drum rolls covered the yells of the police and the growing noise of the crowd. Reaching the corner, Jean and Palfy found a narrow cobbled street that led up to a church. They had left the garde mobile a hundred metres behind them. Palfy swerved right. Jean was following suit when he suddenly saw, directly in front of him, the young woman with ash-blond hair. Their eyes met. The woman’s were amused. Jean was lost for words, feeling the same inexpressible emotion he had felt when she had innocently stood in front of the café terrace with the sun shining through the light lawn of her dress.

‘What’s your name? Tell me!’ he blurted out.

She stopped, and smiled.

‘Quick!’ he said.

‘Claude.’

Not hearing his friend behind him, Palfy spun round and shouted, ‘Jean!’

‘I’m here!’

The garde mobile was gaining on them. The young woman was still smiling. Jean, wrenching himself away, caught up with Palfy and together they ran up to the church then turned left into a small square where an area had been roped off for some roadworks. Palfy stepped over them, put his shoulder to the door of a small wooden hut till it gave, and pulled out two pickaxes and a pair of straw hats.

‘Take off your shirt!’ he said.

Seconds later they were breaking up the earth with their picks as the garde mobile and a dozen policemen arrived.

‘Oy! You lads! Did you see a couple of men scarpering like rabbits?’ the sergeant asked breathlessly.

‘That way!’ Jean pointed to a side street.

The sergeant mopped his brow and turned to his men.

‘They’ll be the death of us! Right, let’s go!’

The group jogged out of sight. Palfy dropped his pickaxe and pounded his bare pectorals.

‘Now,’ he said, ‘given the combined brain power of a middle-aged police sergeant and a youngish garde mobile, I reckon it will take them a good five minutes to work out that no one works on the roads on a Sunday and that actually we are Sergeant Tuberge’s tormentors. So no need to hurry. Put your shirt on, my fine friend, and let’s get out of here and find a drink.’

‘I’ve met one of the women of my dreams,’ Jean said.

‘Your little shadow puppet in the blue lawn dress?’

‘How did you guess?’

‘I have a talent.’

‘I spoke to her.’

‘Are you going to have many children?’

‘We’re going to make love endlessly, but we’ll only have two children, and not until several years after we marry.’

‘I want to be godfather to the eldest.’

‘You shall.’

They put their rough wool shirts back on and left the roadworks behind. The streets behind Place de Jaude were deserted, the citizens of Clermont-Ferrand having gathered en masse to watch the parade. The army, decried and scorned for years, had again become a symbol, one of the values the French were trying to cling to. The first parade by Jean and Palfy’s regiment since the armistice belied the merciless thrashing Germany had inflicted on it and cast a pious veil over the missing, the million and a half prisoners who at that very moment, crammed into livestock wagons or straggling along distant roads, were being herded to camps in Silesia and Poland.

Palfy seemed to know where he was going. Jean followed him, but so absentmindedly that his friend stopped and said, ‘Hello! Where are you?’

‘A small part of me’s with the lovely Claude, the rest is with our friend Tuberge. The look on his face …’

‘Yes, we mustn’t forget it. One day, Tuberge, one day I’ll have your guts for garters. When I think about that poor priest …’

The night had been calm except for a few volleys of tracer rounds fired over the canal, mostly either to let off steam or soothe nerves, or just for the pleasure of emptying a magazine and watching a salvo describe a clutch of luminous parabolas like a storm of meteorites in the warm June air. Early dawn light spread along the canal’s banks. A trickle of water carried with it planks of wood, a hat, a dead cow with a monstrously distended stomach and a pair of corpses, two men tied together at the wrist and obligingly floating on their stomachs to hide their mortified expressions. Then, from out of nowhere, a fat, bare-headed priest appeared on the enemy side of the canal, walking along the towpath and reading his prayer book. His incomprehensible appearance seemed to cause time to stop, forcing a respite at the exact moment when the fighting was due to restart.

‘It’s a truce from God!’ Picallon, the seminarian, said, and for once no one laughed at him.

A damp freshness enveloped the numb men in their hastily constructed dugouts. Mosquitoes had devoured their hands and exposed faces. Lance-Corporal Astor had woken up blind, his eyelids swollen and stuck together with pus. He was led off to the command post, where a hypothetical ambulance was waiting. Jean and Palfy, smeared with lemon juice, had escaped the onslaught and subsequent wholesale itching. The priest followed the towpath, hard by the water’s edge, as far as a destroyed footbridge, where he turned round and, with his nose still in his prayer book, retraced his steps. The last shreds of grey night were drifting away in the sky. The cleric’s florid face was visible, as was his unkempt white hair and too-short cassock that revealed a pair of skinny calves ending in stout ankle boots very like those worn by the abbé Le Couec.

Behind the group to which Jean and Palfy belonged, Sergeant Tuberge and Lance-Corporal Pomme had dug themselves a comfortable hole which they had reinforced with planks and sandbags. Thirty metres to the rear of his men, Tuberge claimed it was a good command post because he could receive orders from the main CP without endangering a runner. In reality it was clear that his location would, at the first sign of trouble, allow him to take to his heels down a well-protected trench, at the end of which lay one of those elastic positions so beloved by communiqué writers at headquarters. But Tuberge, a loudmouth well skilled in the boasting arts, still managed to impress with his physical presence and underworld vocabulary. A one-time lathe and milling-machine operator at Renault, he had prepared himself for battle by wreaking havoc among the female population of the villages where the regiment had been billeted during the phoney war. Jean and Palfy had not been surprised to find that the first shots fired in anger had revealed the sergeant’s possession of a hitherto unsuspected virtue: enormous caution.

The priest once again about-turned, impervious to the threatening silence that accompanied his reading and private prayers. He was like a tightrope walker exorcising his vertigo at the war to right and left and keeping his balance on the high wire with a long pole, in this case, his prayer book, the word of the Church. At that hour, with the day still undecided, a priest’s innocence and the word of the Church seemed truly supernatural. They held the guns silent, forbade bloodshed, and returned to its state of French grace the whole tract of peaceful countryside whose colours were beginning to awaken. Everyone felt the moment, except for Tuberge, who grumbled something about fifth columnists and parachutists disguised as priests, then picked up a light machine gun and raked the black cassock with a volley of fire. The priest’s hands flew to his flushed face, and his body, after a moment’s hesitation, toppled into the canal, joining the dead cow whose horns had become tangled in the weeds. As the echo of the machine gun died away a sudden breeze sprang up, rippling the surface of the canal. The cow moved off again, dragging the priest behind, his wet cassock floating just below the surface.

‘Bastard!’ Picallon yelled, standing up in his dugout and shaking his fist at Tuberge.

‘You shit, it’ll be your turn next!’ Palfy shouted in the sergeant’s direction.

Tuberge prudently kept his head down, but shouted back, ‘The next one to complain gets a bullet in the back of the neck from me.’

‘Do we shoot him?’ Jean asked in a low voice.

‘He won’t show himself,’ Palfy answered. ‘He may even be making his way to the rear at this very moment.’

Five hundred metres away on the far bank, from behind a half-ruined wall, a machine gun fired several rounds and jammed. Silence fell again between the lines, as if death were taking a last deep breath before exhaling its fire across the meadow and through the willows. Everything looked frozen: the cumulus clouds in the pale sky, the canal’s greenish-black water, the leaves in the trees and the tall grass stained with the red spots of poppies that had been winking there since sunrise. The stillness might have carried on for an eternity if a crow had not suddenly swooped low over the canal, attracted by the corpses that floated there. Someone muttered that it must be the priest’s soul, as the crow settled on a willow branch, but the priest’s soul must have been as cursed as his body. The first mortar struck the willow, splitting it in two, and the blast scattered black crow feathers in every direction. Shells began falling far beyond the canal, behind Jean and Palfy, shredding trees and blasting funnel-shaped craters out of the meadow. Then a salvo hit the canal, sending up geysers of brackish water. Progressively the range was adjusted until at last it started pounding the bank held by the French in their foxholes. For an hour, shells arced through the sky, emitting soft whistles as they fell. They could be seen climbing merrily, twisting as they rose, then gliding and hesitating, as if choosing their targets, and boring their way down through the air to land in a spray of earth, grass and stones, their dull thud as they burst putting an end to fear.

For no discernible reason, the mortars fell silent. The Germans failed to show themselves. Trees and bushes were ablaze. At eight in the morning the sun was already sweltering. Packed into their foxholes, their necks protected by their packs, Tuberge’s group was sweating as much from fear as heat. The corpses of the cow and the priest had disappeared. In their wake drifted dead branches, a boater, and a cutter with a smashed gunwale. Palfy raised his helmet on the tip of a bayonet, but no one shot at it and he crawled gingerly out of the foxhole. On the far side of the canal, in the deserted meadow, the wind was bending the tall grass.

‘Tuberge,’ he called.

Nothing.

‘Maybe he’s been blown to bits,’ someone said with unconcealed joy.

‘I’d hate to miss that,’ Picallon said, crawling towards the sergeant’s shelter.

There was no one in the shelter but it was piled high with tinned food, wine and ammunition. On a plank Tuberge had pinned a photo of a donkey with an erection sodomising an enormous Hindu woman.

‘They’ve cleared off!’ Picallon shouted.

‘Try and get hold of the command post.’

The seminarian disappeared down the trench. He returned two minutes later.

‘Scarpered! With the 75.’

The 75’s disappearance was no news to anyone. Ever since war had been declared the self-propelled field gun, commanded by a reservist officer cadet, seemed to have had as its principal objective staying out of sight of the enemy. With three shells it could have silenced their mortars, but that would have meant risking an artillery piece destined to feature in a museum with a caption that read: ‘75mm cannon, having succeeded throughout the war of 1939–40 in not aggravating relations – already very bad at that time – between Albert Lebrun’s France and Adolf Hitler’s Germany’.

‘We’re buggered!’ Noël, a railway worker who was always depressed, said. ‘`We’ll have to surrender. Who’s got something white we can wave?’

‘Not on your life,’ said Pastoureau. ‘The Krauts don’t take prisoners. If I have to die either way, I’m for scarpering too. But who’s going to take command?’

‘You, Palfy, you’re the oldest!’ Joël Tambourin, a Breton, declared.

‘All right,’ Palfy said, having expected the nomination. ‘Jean will be my NCO.’

‘What’s happening?’ Picallon called from his hole. ‘What are we doing?’

‘Palfy’s taken over command!’ Tambourin yelled back with the joy of a man who had been liberated. ‘We’ve got a chief!’

Palfy smiled and murmured, ‘The frogs need their prince.’

Jean crawled across open ground to the next foxhole. For some incomprehensible reason, the Germans were holding their fire. The other group was dug in about twenty metres away. Jean hailed them. Getting no answer and tired of crawling, he got to his feet, ran and jumped into the hole: into a tangle of pulverised heads and crushed faces, of men whose spilt guts were already attracting flies. Two, possibly three mortars had fallen directly into the shelter and Jean found himself floundering in a pulp of blood, shredded flesh, and pieces of bone. His right boot finished the job of crushing a man’s chest. As he pulled it free, he pulled white ribs away with it and squashed the heart, from which thick black blood trickled. A ghastly nausea gripped him, and his whole body seemed to turn over in an excruciating pain that affected his arms and legs, as if his own life was being dragged out of him by giant pincers. He vomited not just the hunk of bread and corned beef he had eaten during the night, but all the food he had ever eaten, all his innards, his blood, his saliva, his snot. Intolerable throbbing drilled into his temples as he shut his eyes and clawed at the parapet to try to get out of the hole and flee the horror. Standing up, casting all caution to the winds, he wanted to run but collapsed, his foot caught in a length of someone’s guts. A machine-gun volley rattled over his head and his mouth was filled with earth.

‘Crawl, you bloody idiot!’ Palfy shouted.

Jean disentangled his foot and, green and trembling, let himself drop into the foxhole, where Palfy broke his fall.

‘Well …? Oh, I see. Right.’

Palfy in turn crept to the nearest position in the opposite direction, which was better protected by a parapet, but there the men had decamped, abandoning kit and ammunition. Another machine-gun volley punctuated his return.

‘Nothing for it but to do the same.’

‘Forget it. I’m not moving,’ Boucharon said. ‘All things considered, I’m all right here. Demob!’

‘I’m going,’ Palfy said. ‘If I make it to Picallon I’ll cover you.’

He climbed out. The enemy machine gun fired, kicking up dry sprays of earth around him, but he reached Picallon and set up the light machine gun.

‘Doesn’t fill me with joy,’ Noël said.

‘You’d have to be mad!’ Boucharon added.

‘Would it fill you with joy if I get across?’ Jean asked.

‘Maybe.’

Jean got across. A bullet ricocheted and hit his heel, another holed his jacket.

‘Three of us! The holy trinity!’ Picallon said, laughing uproariously and helping Jean back to an upright position.

‘Your turn, Noël,’ Palfy called.

The machine gun scythed through Noël’s spine when he was halfway across. He did not even flinch, just fell with his face flat on the ground. His fingers untensed and slid away from his rifle. Tambourin, whose turn it was next, hesitated at the shelter’s edge, then scrambled forward, crawling level with the immobile body. Palfy’s light machine gun discharged a magazine over his head towards the invisible German machine gun, which responded with a volley of bullets that riddled the earthwork of Tuberge’s shelter just as Tambourin was sliding into it. Palfy caught a dead man in his arms. He placed him in the bottom of the foxhole and sat him up. His face was already waxen, his lips pulled back to reveal his gums.

‘Palfy?’ Boucharon called from the shelter.

‘Yes.’

‘What happened to Tambourin?’

‘You want to know?’

‘Yes.’

‘Dead.’

‘In that case, all things considered, I’m staying put. They’re not cannibals, the Germans, after all. Demob!’

‘Please yourself!’

And so Boucharon, who had been expecting to throw away his uniform that day, kept it for another five years. On the other hand, he travelled and got to know the camps of Poland, Silesia and Württemberg where, working as a farmhand, he impregnated the wife of a farmer who was freezing at Stalingrad. Not the worst life he might have had, as he admitted, free of worries, his board guaranteed, and plenty of available women. He talked about it for the rest of his life after he got back to his family in Creuse, over whom the war had passed without a trace. From time to time, he still roared, ‘Demob!’ when he had drunk a bit too much at the Café des Amateurs, but no one knew what demobilisation he was talking about, and nor did he. For a few years after he got back he dreamt of his German companion, of her delicious breasts and her strong smell of milk after she had been milking, but the memory gradually faded and he arrived by degrees at a princely state of apathy for everything that did not belong to his little world of food, wine and work on the farm, where he lived alone with his dogs, cows and two pigs. In which case let us speak of him no longer (in any case his role in this story is about as episodic as it could be) and return to Palfy, Jean and Picallon who, having bid Boucharon, huddled in his hole, farewell, reached a long hedge and then a clearing that they crossed on their stomachs, and finally a sheep pen next to a duck pond. This had been the command post. A table set up outside the door was still strewn with tins of corned beef and sardines, red wine and country bread, and cigars.

‘I’m hungry,’ Picallon said. ‘I could eat a horse.’

‘Eat, young priest, eat. I shall keep you company. What about you, Jean?’

‘No thanks.’

He would never again be able to swallow another mouthful. The smell of blood and human flesh clung to him, and he gagged again, all the more painfully because his stomach was empty. He leant against a tree and stayed there for a long time, staring at a landscape as blurred as the sea bed. Picallon gobbled down three tins of corned beef, a litre of wine, and an entire loaf of bread. The enemy machine gun, still close by, was regularly audible, firing at random in the direction of the canal bank where Boucharon had decided to see how events turned out. Turning away so as not to see the other two gorging themselves, Jean walked into the house. A headquarters map was spread out on the kitchen table, dotted with white and red flags as if for a lesson at the École de Guerre. In their scramble to retreat the staff had left behind the stock of flags, a pair of binoculars, a swagger stick, even a monocle attached to its black string. Jean looked for their canal position on the map and understood why the Germans had not attacked. They had settled for a flanking movement via a bridge ten kilometres downstream. Alerted, the command post had ordered a withdrawal so hasty that only the NCOs had known about it. But the map indicated the local paths as well, and the enemy could not be in possession of all of them. If they moved at night or kept to the woods, they would eventually rejoin the French lines. As propositions went, it was optimistic but not so absurd as to be impossible. Nor would it be the first optimistic proposition formulated by members of the French army since 10 May 1940.

Lacking communications and at the mercy of idiotic wireless broadcasts and a hopeless romanticism, France, its retreating army and its refugees lived in a whirlwind of rumours and lies that, despite the majority being instantly refutable, ricocheted from village to village and unit to unit. The strategic discussions at a thousand Cafés du Commerce had never been blessed by such a unanimous belief in success before, and as the retreat gathered momentum a veritable torrent of misinformation received the same serious consideration: the very night of the German forces’ entry into Paris, Hitler had gone to the Opéra to hear Siegfried and gliders had dropped a battalion of parachutists disguised as nuns on the outskirts of Tours, where they had taken control of the aerodrome without firing a shot; other parachutists disguised as farm workers were giving false directions to the French armoured division and sending it straight into the lion’s den; Roosevelt was about to make available to France and Great Britain five hundred fighters and more than a thousand bombers, with aircrew; a famous singer had been shot: her coded songs broadcast on the wireless had given away troop numbers at the Maginot line; two trains filled with gold ingots were going to buy Mussolini’s neutrality; the German armoured division had only a day’s fuel left and the bombing of the Ruhr was causing strikes in the armament factories; some units were already running out of ammunition; in any case, the president of the Council had announced with a tremor in his voice that ‘Germany’s iron supply line has been cut’ and it had not a gram of steel left.

Jean went outside again, map in hand. Using a spirit stove Picallon was heating up some coffee he had found in a flask, and Palfy was coming back, smiling broadly at his discovery: a hundred metres away, in the shelter of birch woods, were two working tankettes with trailers stuffed with mines, sub-machine guns and ammunition. The tankettes, with which the French army had been supplied in abundance for want of battle tanks, had been assembled at high speed at arsenals to the south of the Loire and lined up under the proud gaze of sergeant-majors to be counted and re-counted. They had proved utterly useless. They looked like cartoon tanks, the kind of thing rich men’s children might play with on the family estate. What terrifying toys they could have been in childish, cruel hands, flattening hens under their tracks, crippling the children of the poor!

With the turret raised, there was room for two inside each one. Picallon could not drive and in any case his height – close to six foot three – made him too big to fit into a tankette. He settled himself on the bonnet of Jean’s instead, accepting, as a consolation, a new sub-machine gun still covered with the oil applied by the regimental armourer, who must have relinquished it only under the most extreme duress.

The convoy jerked into motion, heading south on a forest track through the woods. The tankettes advanced slowly, doing ten kilometres an hour at best. Sheltered by summer foliage and twice cutting across roads that helped serve as landmarks, they reached the edge of the forest where they were forced to move without cover through a hot, empty landscape in which the hay roasted by the June sun was starting to wilt. Three Stukas passed overhead, way up, at well over a thousand metres, mission accomplished, dazzling birds in the midday sun. The road led through a deserted hamlet, then a second where, suddenly, a scarcely human form emerged from a doorway, a ball of sound slumped in a wheelchair. The man was working the wheelchair’s wheels desperately, trying to get away from a pack of excited dogs. Picallon slid off the bonnet and walked towards the invalid. He had been abandoned there with a plate of rice and bread and water that he was protecting, groaning inarticulately, from the starving dogs. At twenty paces he reeked of excrement and urine. Picallon stepped back.

‘What do I do?’ he asked.

‘Kill the dogs before they make a meal of him!’ Palfy ordered.

The sub-machine gun silenced the wheelchair’s famished attackers, and Picallon nudged the corpses into a ditch with his boot. The man shrieked with joy and clapped.

‘That’s enough, young priest, you can’t do any more!’

‘It’s disgusting.’

‘No going soft. Come on.’

They set off again, and the man in the wheelchair tried for a moment to follow them, burping and coughing in the cloud of dust and exhaust gases. Re-seated on the tankette’s bonnet, Picallon began to heat up as if he was being grilled and started to pray aloud to St Lawrence, offering his apologies for not hitherto having appreciated his martyrdom. Jean, having familiarised himself with the tankette’s various directional levers, was following the tracks made by Palfy, who had dived into a series of dusty paths bordered by yellowed, overripe wheat and parched grass. The harvest of 1940 was superb, but there were no men to take it in. From time to time across the fields they saw the distant figures of women in white headscarves, cutting wheat by hand and forking the crop into carts drawn by Percherons whose coats trickled with sweat. But no one turned to watch the two strange vehicles lurching noisily into and out of view in plumes of dust. Jean felt an intoxicating sense of freedom. No more yapping NCOs to order pathetically inadequate defensive fire or a premature withdrawal. He and crazy Palfy were going on holiday, to tour France’s agricultural heartland and discover its bistros where the patronne, in vowels as round as her hips, served ‘her’ pâté de campagne, ‘her’ beef stew, ‘her’ local wine and the pears from ‘her’ garden. But the farms looked like the Mary Celeste, the famous brigantine discovered still under sail in the middle of the ocean, without a crew, with breakfast served on the table, the fire still lit in the galley and not a soul on board. They stopped at some of these farms and called out, and no one came. There might be a dog barking, pigs snuffling in the rubbish, cows with swollen udders mooing in the pastures, but apart from the few women they glimpsed, busy bringing in the wheat, France had been emptied of its population by the wave of a magic wand, with the single exception of a disabled man in a wheelchair whom the pigs would eventually deal with too, for lack of anything better to eat.

His mouth painfully dry from the dust, his stomach empty, his head burning, and still with the taste of his exhausting nausea on his tongue, Jean’s mind began to wander. The war was ending just when it could have become amusing and comfortable, riding in this tracked contraption after having marched themselves to a standstill ever since the Ardennes, chasing the ghosts of promised trucks that would miraculously allow the regiment to rest and re-form. But the trucks had archives of documents to save, tons and tons of archives that headquarters were relying on to exact their revenge one day.

The first evening they broke open the door of an abandoned farm. A slab of butter still sat on the pantry shelf. Picallon, brought up in the country, milked the cows and brought a jug of cream to the table. They found ham and saucisson in the cellar, and some bottles of light red wine and apples. Unmade beds told of a hasty flight. Palfy went looking for bedsheets and found piles of them in a cupboard; picking up a sheet, he rubbed the linen between his thumb and index finger.

‘Obviously it’s not satin, and there’s no trace of a monogram. But the mistress of the house washes her own linen and hangs it to dry in the meadow. Even in London you won’t find whiteness like this any more. We must make do. In any case we have no right to ask for too much, my friends. I must remind you that there’s a war on, in case you’ve forgotten, for youth is terribly forgetful.’

‘You’re amazing,’ Picallon said. ‘You’ve seen everything, you know everything. Without you we’d either be dead or have been taken prisoner.’

‘Perhaps I’m actually God!’ Palfy suggested, modestly.

‘No, definitely not, I know you’re not Him. I may be naive, but I’m not that naive.’

Night was falling. They lit candles and stuck them in glasses on the big table in the main room.

‘Look at us, back in the good old days at Eaton Square all over again,’ Jean said. ‘All that’s missing is Price and his white gloves.’

Picallon was astonished that his friends had seen so much of the world. He was particularly dazzled by Palfy, who was way beyond the experience of a country boy from the Jura. He watched in amazement as Palfy laid spoons to eat the melons that he had cut in half and scooped out.

‘My dear Picallon,’ Palfy said, his voice tinged with regret, ‘I know that at your seminary no one would ever have dared to serve melon without port. Unfortunately I’ve run out. My butler drank it one evening when his boyfriend cheated on him. I sacked him of course, but the damage is done and there’s not even a drop of white wine left to help you save this melon. Just this red which, incidentally, as you’ll note at once, has the same lightness as your Jura wines. I hope you won’t be cross with me for inviting you and offering you such simple fare …’

Picallon was not cross with him at all. He found the entire dinner marvellous, down to the candles that cast the room’s soot-blackened chimney, post office calendar and portrait photo of a lance-corporal in the engineer corps into gloomy oblivion. The war had been banished and no longer filled their thoughts. Around midnight they stumbled on a bottle of what they thought might be plum brandy.

‘When you’re a bishop—’ Palfy said.

‘Me a bishop! Not ruddy likely. I don’t like tricky situations. As you’re my witness, I shall be a priest and stay a priest …’

‘You lack ambition.’

‘Ambition is a sin.’

‘Picallon, you’re an imbecile.’

‘Yes, maybe I am, but you’re too clever, you know too many things. Doesn’t he, Jean?’

‘No. Palfy doesn’t know anything. He guesses it all. And because he doesn’t know anything, he dreams up fabulous schemes that make him a multimillionaire one day and a conman the next.’

‘Conman is harsh,’ Palfy said without irritation.

Picallon, his mind opened to life’s great adventures by the plum brandy, wondered whether the things he had been taught at the seminary still meant something. The invader was trampling France – the Church’s elder daughter – underfoot, and of his only two friends one was disenchanted and the other a conman. His mind a little fogged by alcohol, he tried to work out whether it was all a very good joke, or a dream inspired by the Great Tempter.

‘You’re mocking me, both of you,’ he said. ‘You’re incapable of being serious …’

And he went to bed, in a bedroom that smelt of wax and straw dust, which was a reassuring atmosphere for a country lad from the Jura.

We shall not elaborate now (or later for that matter) on the conversation that took place between Jean and Palfy after Picallon had gone to bed. More serious than usual, it went on until around two in the morning, after a last glass of plum brandy. The bottle was empty. To find another they would have had to break down the cellar door and they were neither vandals nor looters, just soldiers abandoned by a republic in flight. A minimum of careful thought was vital. Where had the French army gone? Even in the absence of official news, it was plain to see it had evaporated. The worst part was that there did not seem to be a German army either.

Standing on the doorstep, admiring the warm starry night that enveloped the farm and the countryside, Palfy sighed.

‘If we were genuine optimists,’ he said, ‘we’d be imagining that both armies have put the wind up each other. The Germans have turned round and nipped back across their beloved Rhine to stroke their Gretchens with their blond plaits, and the French have laid down their rifles and put in for their paid holidays, a month’s leave on the Côte d’Azur …’

‘I wouldn’t mind going down to Saint-Tropez myself …’

He thought of Toinette and the sweet letter she had written him when he enlisted. But dreaming was forbidden! Palfy reminded him of it every time he weakened, and did not fail to do so this time as well.

‘My dear boy, one doesn’t sleep with one’s aunt. It’s no more unhealthy than sleeping with anyone else, but it may bring misfortune on your head. Now is the time to be superstitious again, believe me. I would not have messed up my last two projects in London and Cannes so stupidly if I’d paid attention to certain signs …’

‘You’ll never fail to make me laugh,’ Jean said. ‘Let’s go to bed. Tomorrow—’

‘Mañana será otro día.’

‘Don’t get clever with me. I know those are the only four words of Spanish you know.’

‘Mm, they’re all I need. In them lie all the hopes of the world.’

*

Tomorrow was indeed another day. The tankettes had to turn out onto a short stretch of departmental road that might be used by the Germans. As soon as they were under way they glimpsed a motorcyclist in the distance, bent over his handlebars and riding flat out in their direction, like a fat cockchafer. The insect swelled disproportionately and they made out a green jacket, black boots, a sort of large, gleaming kettle crowned with insignia and, beneath it, a face grey with dust. The rider did not slow down, acknowledging them with a friendly wave as he flashed past and immediately disappeared behind a hill. Palfy, driving in front, stuck out his right arm, indicating that they should turn onto a dirt track between two large fields. The track led to a barn and a ruined farm. Picallon jumped down, opened the gate, and the two tankettes concealed themselves behind the barn’s stack of hay.

‘That was a German!’ Picallon yelled, as soon as the two engines cut out.

‘Thanks for telling me!’ Palfy sighed. ‘I came to the same conclusion. I must say, strong emotions make me hungry and thirsty.’

They found some shade and sat down to some saucisson and the two bottles of light red wine they had liberated unrepentantly from the farm that morning.

‘It should be drunk cooler than this!’ Picallon observed, the taste of the light wine reminding him of haymaking time on his father’s farm.

‘I say, young priest, you do know how to live!’

‘Don’t make fun of me, Palfy. I went straight from my farm to the seminary and from the seminary to the army. You’ve seen the world; I haven’t. So perhaps you know why that German didn’t stop and didn’t shoot at us.’

‘It’s probably perfectly simple: a humble soldier on the winning side finds it impossible to imagine that behind his army’s lines are three chaps in French uniforms out sightseeing on a couple of tankettes.’

‘Are you saying he took us for Germans?’

‘Precisely, my dear young priest. In which case, it also occurred to me that a semblance of thought might run through his fat head and perhaps cause him to turn round and come back. Which is why we are sitting eating saucisson in the hay in the shelter of a barn while there’s a war on somewhere.’

‘All right,’ Picallon said, ‘I get it. We’re in the hands of divine Providence again …’

Providence was no slouch. From the haystack they watched the road for more than an hour. It remained empty. They set off again in the summer heat. Their tracks chewed the soft tarmac. Picallon sat cooking on Jean’s bonnet while the tankette advanced at a stately pace and Jean alternately dozed and watched anxiously as the fuel gauge neared zero. They had been on the move for two hours when they glimpsed a village whose church pointed a tentative spire into a sky empty of aircraft. Palfy held up his arm and they halted outside the mairie. The tricolour hung despondently from its pole. There was not a soul on the street, not even a stray dog. A grocer’s had been looted and the Café des Amis had barricaded itself behind wooden shutters. It was an ordinary French village, pleasant, neither ugly nor handsome, lacking all arrogance as it lacked all pretension. Windows closed, it slumbered quietly in the warm afternoon. On nameplates they read: Jean Lafleur, solicitor; Pierre Robinson, doctor: surgery hours from 2 p.m. to 4 p.m. and by appointment; Auguste Larivière, contractor … Where had they all gone, these peace-loving citizens, exiled one morning in panic from their village, from their memories, their family portraits, the little gardens you could picture behind their houses, tidy and neat, with an apple tree, a few rose bushes and some geraniums? Crammed into wheezing cars, they had fled the war without thinking that the war would travel faster than they could on the congested roads. The single petrol pump was, predictably, padlocked, and hung with an unequivocal sign: ‘No more petrol, so don’t ask.’ The situation seemed perfectly simple: they would have to continue on foot.

Palfy said bad-temperedly, ‘God, what fools you French are!’

Picallon’s hackles rose. ‘You’re French as well.’

‘I do apologise, young priest, I haven’t regaled you with my life story yet. My mother was English, my father Serb. I’m wearing the same uniform as you are merely because I happened to be born at Nice while my father was trying out an infallible system at the Casino on the Jetée-Promenade.’

‘An infallible system?’

Palfy raised his arms heavenwards and called Jean as his witness.

‘Must I explain everything? Listen to me, Picallon: my heart belongs to France. I could have steered clear of this war, but it amused me and came at the right moment, when I had one or two problems as well—’

Jean interrupted him, pointing his finger at a window on the first floor of a grey house with a shale frontage.

‘I saw the curtain twitch and a hand, just a hand …’

A cat sauntered calmly across the square, walked up the stairs to the mairie, and sat down to watch them.

‘The curtain twitched again!’ Picallon said.

Someone was watching them from a window. The village was not entirely dead. A hand and a cat still lived here, and things began to look more lively as a breeze rustled the leaves of the ash trees shading the avenue with its inevitable war memorial, which for once was reasonably discreet, an obelisk decorated with bronze laurels beneath which was inscribed the fateful date ‘1914–1918’, followed by a list of names. At a second gust of wind a door creaked, and the three startled men whipped round: one of the doors of the church had swung open onto a dark space streaked through with reddish flashes of sunlight from the stained-glass windows.

‘Blimey!’ Picallon said, crossing himself.

The seminarian went in, crossing himself again after dipping his fingers in the font. Jean did the same, and both felt the incense-scented coolness of the holy place buffet their hot, dry faces. Picallon knelt to pray while Jean, moved by the silence and innocent simplicity of the church, which reminded him of the abbé Le Couec’s at Grangeville, stayed standing in the nave. A splintering sound distracted him. Palfy was trying to force the poor box underneath the Sulpician statue of St Anthony. Their gazes met. Palfy shrugged and went out.

‘Why do you keep doing that?’ Jean asked, following him outside to the porch. ‘It’s like an illness with you. I thought you’d got over it.’

‘I’m not harming anyone. I believe I explained it to you years ago, when we first met. What’s in the poor box is for the poor. And we’re poor: twenty-five centimes a day is nowhere near enough to live on. Particularly as our government no longer knows where we are.’

‘You’re forgetting the postal orders Madeleine sends you. And that I always share the ones Antoinette sends me.’

‘Money from women doesn’t count. It’s dishonourable. Can only be spent on things you shouldn’t spend it on. The only money I respect is the money I earn.’

‘By stealing?’

‘There are risks.’

‘Not in churches.’

‘Jean, you’re being tiresome.’

Picallon was still praying. They walked back to the square. Again the curtain fell back. Someone was spying on them. Approaching the front door, they read the enamelled nameplate ‘Jacques Graindorge, surveyor’. Palfy rang the bell. They heard chimes: three notes repeated three times. The house remained silent.

‘Perhaps it was the wind twitching the curtain,’ Palfy said. ‘Or just a mirage. I don’t know how many days it’s been since we saw a civilian, apart from that handicapped chap in his wheelchair, whom the pigs must have eaten by now.’

‘I saw a hand the first time.’

The cat, licking its paw on the top step of the mairie, stretched, arched its back, and padded towards them. An ordinary cat, black spotted with white or white spotted with black, in no hurry, pausing to bat playfully at a piece of paper before proceeding with remarkable casualness across the deserted square. Jean watched it closely: it was clearly well fed, so there was no question of it making do with rummaging in dustbins or hunting mice. No, this was definitely a proper, bourgeois moggy, returning from a short stroll after its lunch. Nothing surprised it, not even the two men in khaki shirtsleeves who had arrived from another planet in their big noisy toys that were resting further down the avenue. It walked between Jean and Palfy, lifted a paw to push a flap that swung back in the bottom of the door, and hopped through it. The flap closed automatically.

‘There’s someone inside,’ Jean said.

Palfy rang the bell repeatedly. The only reply was the sound of meowing. The cat did not like the noise of the chimes.

‘I know what to do,’ Palfy said, walking back to the tankette and pulling out a machine pistol. Of course, the classic tactic: a quick burst to shoot the lock and you push the door open.

But there was no need: above them the window opened and an anguished voice called out, ‘Kamerad! Kamerad! Don’t shoot! Me friend Germans. You speak French?’

‘Like your mother and father,’ Palfy said calmly. ‘My friend too. Open this door or I’ll shoot it open.’

‘I’m coming! I’m coming! Don’t shoot!’

The house suddenly came to life. A door slammed, hurried steps made their way downstairs. A chain was slipped and a key turned in a lock. In the doorway stood a man in his forties, his red hair tousled, his lips pale and quivering in an almost purple face.

‘Gentlemen, forgive me, I thought you were French soldiers. I swear’ – he put out his right arm – ‘I swear I’m a friend of the Germans, a friend of Grossdeutschland and its leader, the Führer Adolf Hitler.’

Palfy put on an interested expression.

‘So you’re definitely not hiding any Frenchmen?’

‘I’m the only Frenchman in the village.’

‘You don’t listen to the lies on the English wireless?’

‘Never. Anyway I don’t understand a word of English.’

Palfy turned to Jean and said to him in English as guttural as he could make it, as though it was spoken with a German accent, ‘This bugger deserves to be taught a lesson. Go and get Picallon, and tell him not to utter a word of French.’

In French he said to the surveyor, ‘That’s all very well, but we’re an advance force. The regiment is following behind and we’re here to start the requisitioning. What do you have for lunch?’

Monsieur Graindorge raised his arms heavenwards.

‘Requisitioning! What an awful word, Messieurs. You won’t be requisitioning anything here. You are my guests. My maid – a very stupid woman – has gone off pushing a pram filled with everything she holds most dear. But I can do without her. Give me an hour and I’ll have the pleasure of offering your German palates – a little basic, I’m sure you won’t mind me saying – a lunch worthy of French discernment and quality. I trust you accept?’

‘Of course, Monsieur Graindeblé,’ Palfy answered with blithe artlessness.

‘Graindorge!’ the surveyor corrected him. ‘Strangers do sometimes muddle up my name.’

Blushing and still trembling, the man was sweating with unctuousness. Jean went to warn Picallon, who was where he had left him, on his knees, communing with himself before the altar, thanking God for having saved his life and entrusted it to such resourceful friends, even if they did not seem very promising at first sight. Jean’s hand on his shoulder roused him from his reverie.

‘Are you hungry?’

‘Very,’ the seminarian said.

‘Come on then.’

As they crossed the square he explained the situation.

‘I’m not setting foot in there!’ Picallon said indignantly. ‘He’s a traitor.’

‘I thought you said you were hungry?’

‘Yes, but such a man’s bread shan’t pass my lips!’

‘You only have to open your mouth and eat.’

‘You’re both mad.’

Palfy was in the sitting room, stretched out in an armchair, his feet on a velvet stool, holding a glass in his hand.

‘What are you drinking?’ Picallon asked, thirst getting the better of him.

‘Monsieur Graindemoncul’s pastis. Help yourself. The bottle’s over there and the water’s cold.’

‘Where is he?’

‘In the kitchen, knocking us up a chicken fricassee.’

Picallon helped himself to a glass of pastis and stared around the sitting room, finally exclaiming, ‘It’s really nice in here!’

‘Personally, I think it’s revolting,’ Palfy said. ‘I wouldn’t live in a room like this if you paid me. The worst of French bad taste …’

Picallon was quiet, suddenly anxious. The black furniture polished to a dusky red, the dresser and its shelves of travel trinkets, the reproduction Corot that was so dull it made you want to throw up, the bone china on the mantelpiece had astounded him, but Palfy’s confident and violent antipathy cast doubt on all of it. He turned to Jean, who saw his discomfiture.

‘Listen, I grew up in a kitchen. My father’s a gardener, my mother was a washerwoman and a nanny. A house like this would have been the height of luxury to them. My father would say the same as you. He’s an honest, good man and I’ll never be ashamed of him. You stick to what you think, Picallon.’

‘But what about you, what do you say?’

‘I say the same as Palfy, but I’ve been lucky, I’ve learnt how to live.’

They heard footsteps. Palfy put a finger to his lips.

‘You got the message, Picallon? Keep mum. You don’t speak a word of French.’

Their host entered, smiling and happy. He grasped Picallon’s hand and shook it vigorously.

‘I hear you don’t speak French. Your comrades will translate. You are welcome in my house. I am a friend of Germany.’

‘Don’t waste your breath, Monsieur Graindorge,’ Jean said, ‘our comrade is an excellent soldier but a complete dimwit. The only thing he’s interested in is eating.’

‘In that case just give me half an hour, and forgive me for receiving you like this, with whatever’s in the larder …’

The surveyor was wearing a blue pleated apron much too big for his narrow waist and he had turned up his cuffs, revealing pale, skinny wrists.

‘What do you think of my pastis?’

‘Drinkable!’ Palfy said without enthusiasm.

‘For German throats it must be a novelty.’

‘Don’t you believe it, Monsieur Graindavoine. Before entering France like a knife through butter, we had an intensive course in French language and customs. We were taught to appreciate garlic, red wine, accordions and women who wear little silk knickers … Don’t laugh, Monsieur, I’m not making it up. Our Führer is very far-sighted. Helmut here is quite different from my friend Hans and me. He may be a giant and rather crude-looking, and he may not have followed the course we did, which was somewhat beyond his intellectual capacity, but instead he was taught how to kill and he now belongs to a commando unit that specialises in terminating suspects with extreme prejudice. I’ve never seen anyone kill as cleanly as Helmut does. You can trust him, he eliminates without fuss, and if you like, if you have an enemy, I don’t know, anyone, just let me know, don’t be shy, all I have to do is lift my little finger and Helmut will get rid of him for you …’

Picallon, furious, was about to explode with indignation. Jean gripped his arm and urged him to drink. The so-called Helmut’s sullen expression fully convinced Monsieur Graindorge, who quivered with excitement and fear at having such a redoubtable fighting machine as a guest in his house.

‘As you see, the village is deserted,’ he said. ‘So I have no enemies here any more. In peacetime it was a different matter … The mayor was a leftist and a warmonger. No one would mind seeing the back of him … but as I say he’s not here … We’ll talk some more. I need to see to my saucepans.’

Jean thought of his father. Albert Arnaud would definitely not have left Grangeville. At the beginning of the phoney war his pacifism had made him several enemies. Now his leftist ideas would make him a sitting duck for the Graindorges of the world.

‘I’ll have you for this,’ Picallon said to Palfy. ‘If you take the piss out of me once more—’

‘Drink your pastis, young priest, and belt up. You are about to eat like a prince and we’re about to empty this ass’s cellar.’

‘Then what?’

‘Then we’ll see.’

‘It will end badly.’

‘Everything always ends badly. So if it’s a bit sooner or a bit later than expected, who cares?’

Monsieur Graindorge was a competent chef, though it was hard to judge on the basis of a hastily prepared chicken fricassee in which he had had to use tinned mushrooms. His sauce lacked body.

‘Forgive me—’

Palfy interrupted him.

‘Monsieur Graindemaïs, let me say that we are listening to you with the closest attention. The truth is that you are our first real contact with the French population. But on Adolf Hitler’s instructions – very strict instructions – we were ordered categorically never to say “Forgive me” but “I beg you to forgive me”. I can’t believe our Führer would have made a mistake on such a point …’

The surveyor blushed deeply. He was not an ugly man, having an average nose, mouth and eyes, but the rush of blood to his cheeks and forehead and around his neck, in large splotches, coloured his face so violently and artificially that it looked like a mask tortured by fear and anxiety. Have I mentioned that this was a man who had only just turned forty and was therefore in what is commonly referred to as his prime, and what is more a bachelor, which in general keeps you young; that he enjoyed a level of material comfort as a result of his technical abilities, which were sought after in the region; that he was a gourmet, a trumpeter in the village band, always jockeying for position on official occasions, but unhappily secretly undermined in his pleasure by a deficiency that, at another time and place, would have earned him highly trusted status in a harem? I’ll admit that that is a lot to reveal about the character of a man whom the author will feel obliged to leave behind fairly swiftly. Jacques Graindorge, then, was ignorant of the subtleties of the French language that Palfy was disclosing to him with a calculated ingenuousness. Querulous, he started to stammer, then, feeling his self-importance rapidly slipping away, made a superhuman effort to get a grip on himself and hide his petulance.

‘Your Führer is right … I have made a mistake in French and what you have been taught is absolutely right … but look, you must excuse me. So as not to seem like a pedant in this village, inhabited by honest but unrefined citizens, I tend to adjust my speech to stay in tune with them. Stupidly, in your company, I forgot myself …’

‘I’m not annoyed,’ Palfy said, ‘because our Führer is right on this point. I’m not aware that he has made a single mistake in his life.’

Picallon was shovelling down his lunch, apparently devoting himself to the pleasures of his plate. He served himself a second helping without a word or gesture to his host. Monsieur Graindorge ventured a timid smile.

‘Your killer has a healthy appetite, anyway. It’s a real pleasure to see him eat. What a face! A real animal. I expect he was born in some remote province in Germany …’

Under the table Palfy applied sudden sharp pressure to Picallon’s foot, sensing he was about to explode, and to calm him served him a third full plate of fricassee. Monsieur Graindorge noticed nothing. Crouched at his sideboard, he was looking for a box of cigars that was so well hidden that for a moment he suspected his housekeeper of having made off with it in her pram. He eventually discovered it under a pile of napkins. Palfy sniffed one with suspicion.

‘Hm,’ he said. ‘Rather dry … Well, there’s a war on.’

The surveyor offered him the flame of a petrol lighter. Palfy drew back in surprise.

‘Well, well … that is remarkable … We were taught that the French were as painstaking about their cigars as they were about their wine, and they only lit them with wooden matches … Might our Führer have been mistaken?’

Picallon grabbed a cigar from the box uninvited and chewed a piece of it before spitting it on the floor. Graindorge rushed to pick up the flakes of tobacco scattered over his flower-patterned carpet. Picallon took advantage of him bending over to make an expressive gesture, placing his hands around an imaginary neck and wringing it.

‘Once again,’ the surveyor answered, ‘your Führer did not deceive you but, well … I haven’t any matches left. The tabac is closed, and a fortnight before you arrived my fellow citizens panicked and started hoarding matches.’

‘This is extremely serious!’ Palfy said. ‘You are aware of course that looting and hoarding are both punishable by death. Our comrade here – who I would agree is a little coarse – is responsible for executing all summary verdicts by courts martial. It seems to me he would have his hands full in this area. What sort of brandy do you have?’

‘I haven’t a very big selection.’

Palfy cast a suspicious eye over the bottles and glimpsed an unlabelled one behind the run-of-the-mill brandies.

‘Thank you, no, this gut-rot isn’t for me; I look after my health. But tell me what’s in your bottle there.’

‘A raspberry liqueur,’ Graindorge said, looking devastated.

‘What brand?’

‘There’s no brand.’

‘Interesting! Interesting! Then I suppose it must be the gift of a private distiller?’

‘How did you know?’

Palfy waved his hand disdainfully: he was hardly going to go to the trouble of explaining. Graindorge served them with a sinking heart and made to put the bottle back in the sideboard. Picallon took it from him threateningly. The surveyor, who was partial to his raspberry liqueur, tried to reason with Jean.

‘You shouldn’t let your comrade get drunk. Men like him, real forces of nature, they don’t know their limits. When a brute like him gets alcohol inside him, he’ll be unstoppable and very dangerous.’

‘We have him well under control, Monsieur. He only kills to order.’

A ray of sunshine cutting across the dining room splashed onto the tablecloth. In the golden light the curls of cigar smoke stretched out languidly, forming silvered snakes and mobile geometric shapes. Picallon was indeed drunk, but the naive and good-hearted seminarian was more ready to burst into tears than fly into a rage at the role he was being forced to play, of a poor country lad among the ways of gentlemen. Their host, he saw, was a proper bastard, and there is always something sad about the first bastard you ever come across, about discovering the multiple ruses by which Satan attaches himself to a human being. One day when the war was over and the seminary reopened, he would unburden himself of all these thoughts to his spiritual director, the abbé Fumerolle …

The reader is already aware of the author’s warm feelings for Picallon, who reminds him of the parish priest at Grangeville, Monsieur Le Couec. Between the country boy from the Jura and the elderly Breton there exists a certain bloodline: a now vanished race of French priests whose only reasoning was their brazen faith and who lived among their parishioners in poverty, charity and hope. They taught children their catechism in simple, idealised pictures that seemed fascinatingly magical. And yes, in their sermons Jesus was always a great magician, whose feats would never cease to dazzle the world. At the time this story begins, the integrity possessed by young men such as Picallon is already under threat, but so far our seminarian has been immune to the new order. His model is the village priest who awoke his own vocation, just as for Jean, already half disillusioned in faith, the model priest will always be the abbé Le Couec, that rough Breton ‘exiled’ to Normandy. Picallon of course is fated one day to confront the influences of his community, but we shall not see him in those circumstances. Meanwhile he is here, in this bourgeois dining room in a French village with a full stomach and a dry mouth, and it is too late to stop the game his comrades are intent on playing. The afternoon wears on, the bottle of raspberry liqueur is emptying, and now and then Picallon rocks back on his chair and lifts the white tulle curtain to keep an eye on the still-deserted square and the two tankettes parked on the avenue with the surveyor’s cat asleep on the bonnet of one of them. Palfy is on his third cigar, Jean has excused himself twice, and the dreadful noise of a toilet chain that refuses to flush properly has been heard. Picallon would like to go too, but is unsure of his ability to remain upright, and in a foggy dreamlike state he recalls the wedding feasts in his village at which the laziest would slip an empty bottle under the table and use that. He has hiccups, pins and needles in one leg and above all he is sick of listening to the nasal tones of Jacques Graindorge, surveyor, toady and coward, watching his every move with a terrified expression. When Picallon finally gets to his feet, the dining room sways and without Jean’s steadying hand he would have fallen over. Moving gingerly, he reaches the front door and there, in the middle of the square, opens his flies and sprinkles the cobbles as he gazes gloomily at the flag drooping from its flagpole.

‘What do you think of it?’ he asks Jean, who is still holding his arm.

‘Of what? What you’re doing?’

‘No. The flag.’

‘It looks a bit limp.’

‘And what about liberty, equality and fraternity?’

‘I’m afraid the moment for them is past.’

‘Why are you holding my arm?’

‘So you don’t fall down.’

‘Am I drunk?’

‘Not half.’

‘It’s the first time in my life and it’ll be the last, but I want it to be a drunkenness I’ll never forget, one befitting the Apocalypse. We’ll empty that stinker’s cellar, and anything we can’t drink we’ll smash up.’

‘All right, old chap …’

‘We’ll smash it up, we’ll smash it up!’

Picallon, his bladder much lighter but suddenly distracted by his obsession with smashing up what could not be drunk, forgot to put his organ away and, supported by Jean, remained standing unsteadily there, limply facing the erect flagpole on the mairie’s pediment.

It was in this posture that he was first observed by Unterscharführer Walter Schoengel as he arrived at the village square in an armoured car, his body emerging from the green turret, ramrod straight in his black SS uniform, his face darkened by the sun beneath his peaked cap. Jean, for a second, imagined that in this victorious warrior he was seeing his friend Ernst, his companion from his famous cycling tour of Italy which had taken them to Rome in 1936, but – as we already know – Ernst and Jean will never meet again, and no chance meeting in the long war now under way will revive the friendship born four years earlier between a young Frenchman indifferent to politics and a handsome member of the Hitler Youth with straw-coloured hair.

Unfortunately this particular warrior was not Ernst, but a run-of-the-mill SS NCO with no sense of humour whatsoever, who was greatly offended by the sight of these two men in khaki shirts and trousers, staggering and with flies undone. Leaping athletically from his armoured car, revolver in hand, he walked up to them, barking a sharp order. Jean understood and put his hands up. Picallon remained bewildered. The Unterscharführer barked again. Jean translated.

‘Put your hands up, you idiot, otherwise he’ll shoot us.’

Picallon did as he was told, forgetting his open flies and limp penis, which was enjoying its exposure to the fresh air with an utter lack of curiosity for the events unfolding around it. The puddle on the cobbles bore witness to what had occurred only moments before. Walter Schoengel circled it with disgust and patted both men down. Reassured as to their inoffensive character and that they were a couple of strays, he sniggered and delivered a good kick to both their backsides. The driver of the armoured car had raised his goggles and was observing the scene with ill-concealed ribaldry as the square suddenly began to fill with motorcycles and sidecars, a further two light armoured cars and an open-topped car on whose rear seat sat Obersturmführer Karl Schmidt, his face hidden in the shadow cast by a gleaming helmet adorned with the SS lightning flashes. Schmidt was a lieutenant with a plump face and small, piercing grey eyes, and to begin with he paid no attention to what was happening. With a gesture he motioned to a young Obergrenadier to lower the French flag, then ordered a house-to-house search. Jacques Graindorge’s door was still open. Two grenadiers jogged into the hall and returned with the surveyor and Palfy, who were propelled forward by the rifle butts in their back and then lined up with Jean and Picallon. The Obersturmführer knew a few words of French.

‘You ambush behind Wehrmacht! Shoot you!’

Jacques Graindorge realised that there had been a mistake and smiled apologetically.

‘Mein Herr, I believe you are mistaken. These three men are some of your comrades. They are German soldiers. I invited them to lunch. I’m a friend of Germany.’

The SS lieutenant reddened with fury.

‘Shut up, pig. Shoot you as well. Harbouring irregulars.’

The grenadiers quickly broke down the doors of several houses. They were empty. They reported to their section chief, who nodded and set sentries to hold the square against fire from all four corners.

Palfy yawned in a way too forced to be real and said to Jean, almost without moving his lips, ‘Now’s the time to produce your famous letter from the prince.’

‘It’s in my tunic pocket.’

‘And your tunic?’

‘In the tankette.’

Soldiers were searching the tankettes and had already removed several pots of jam, chocolate biscuits, and three sub-machine guns. Jacques Graindorge was shaking so much that he was on his knees. A soldier forced him to his feet with a rifle barrel to the ribs. The Obersturmführer studied the square in search of a wall against which he could line up his four captives. The firing squad could not do its job with the sun in their eyes. But behind him his grenadiers were doubled up with laughter and, wanting to understand what had caused his men’s hilarity, he scrutinised his prisoners until he noticed Picallon’s ill-adjusted uniform. A roar of laughter blew across the square and the Obersturmführer summoned Walter Schoengel who walked over to Picallon and, with the barrel of his revolver, flipped the flaccid member back into his trousers.

‘Pig!’ the officer repeated, putting into the one insult of which he was confident all the scorn that seethed inside him.

Picallon was sobering up slowly. He was regaining his lucidity and faith at the same time, already glimpsing his final moments, for which he was better prepared than his two friends. He began, under his breath, an act of contrition: ‘My God …’ Palfy told him to shut up and then Jean told Palfy to shut up. Karl Schmidt was enjoying the unprecedented moment. In Poland, where his section had advanced into a zone already cleared by the Wehrmacht, he had never been favoured with a moment as dramatic as this. The French campaign was at last offering him an opportunity worthy of him. He dispatched a grenadier to fetch his camera. When it arrived he took several pictures of his prisoners. The surveyor, his throat constricted, attempted to explain the appalling error that had been made, but not one articulate sound emerged from his mouth, which was distorted by a rictus that the Obersturmführer interpreted as insolence. Handing his camera back to the grenadier, Karl Schmidt walked up to Graindorge and slapped him twice, hard. Blood flowed from the corner of the surveyor’s mouth and he fell to his knees again.

‘Pig too!’ the officer said. ‘Get up!’

Palfy helped the foolish man to his feet.

‘I thought—’ Graindorge said.

‘We fooled you, you stupid twerp,’ Palfy said. ‘All three of us are French. Now you’re paying for your stupidity.’

‘Quiet!’ the Obersturmführer said.

‘No!’ Jean retorted. ‘We’re not irregulars. And you don’t shoot prisoners. Now, if you like—’

‘May God forgive you!’ Picallon finished his sentence, then lowered his arms and put his hands together in prayer.

The SS lieutenant pointed to the façade of the Café des Amis, and the grenadiers shoved the four men towards the wooden shutters. The sun was going down. A pink light bathed the square and fell gently on the church porch. Graindorge’s cat jumped from the bonnet of the tankette and followed its master, its back arched, its tail bristling. Walter Schoengel selected the twelve men of the firing squad.

‘It’ll all be over very quickly,’ Palfy said gloomily.

‘Yes,’ Jean answered.

‘The raspberry liqueur was really good.’

‘It’s a consolation. There’s none left for them.’

‘They’ll be pardoned!’ Picallon said.

‘Not by me!’ Palfy said.

Karl Schmidt made a sign to a grenadier to bring him the cat, which let itself be picked up and settled in the Obersturmführer’s arms.

‘Schön!’ the officer said tenderly. ‘How he called cat?’

Graindorge started with indignation.

‘It’s not a male, it’s a female. She’s called Sarah.’

‘Sarah! A Jew name!’

The Obersturmführer threw the cat down, tried to kick her but missed, unholstered a revolver and emptied its magazine at Sarah, missing her again as she dashed to hide under an armoured car. A ricochet hit the Obergrenadier who had taken down the French flag, injuring him in the calf. The lieutenant paled, pressed his lips together and swore at the man, who stood to attention with blood flowing down his boot. Jean, Palfy, Picallon and Graindorge lined up in front of the wooden shutters of the Café des Amis. Karl Schmidt issued a brief order and a grenadier ran to his car, from which he returned carrying a violin case. The firing squad took up position under the orders of the Unterscharführer, who then inspected them. Karl Schmidt took out his violin and bow with an ecstatic smile, pressed the instrument against his cheek and tuned it before walking over to the Frenchmen.

‘Do you like Brahms?’ he asked, a delicate smile lightening his porcine features.

‘No!’ Jacques Graindorge shouted, seized by convulsive trembling and convinced this was another trap. He would never like anybody again.

‘Don’t listen to him, Lieutenant,’ Palfy said. ‘He’s a fool who knows nothing about music. I can assure you, and I speak for my comrades too, that we all like Brahms very much, and that if you were to do us the honour of playing his Sonata No. 1, Opus 78, we could die happy.’

‘You know?’ Karl Schmidt said, astonished not to be dealing with brutes.

‘Obviously the piano will be lacking, but I feel sure that playing solo will allow your musical temperament to be given full expression. We are your humble audience.’

The grenadiers stood to attention. The officer advanced between them and the prisoners, legs apart, eyes lowered to concentrate before his first bow stroke. Karl Schmidt was a fine violinist. Before joining the Waffen SS he had been second violin in the Stuttgart city orchestra. His father was a virtuoso and his two sons played the flute and viola respectively in a Hitler Youth orchestra. Since being commissioned he had missed playing in public. Not any old public. One that was thoughtful, contemplative, ready to feel the music’s emotion. Who could be a more attentive audience than four condemned men? Four was not many, but the future promised bigger audiences, much bigger, and one day Karl Schmidt would have the great public his talent deserved. Music transfigured him. Under podgy skin that shone with heat and effort the fine features of a blond child could be discerned, a little German boy who could have been generous, trusting, enthusiastic. The little German disappeared with the last bars of the sonata.

‘Clap!’ Palfy whispered to the others.

They lowered their arms and clapped with a fervour that surprised Karl Schmidt so much he straightened and bowed his head as if he were on stage in a concert hall. The sight of Graindorge’s pasty face brought him back to earth. The surveyor was not applauding. He was dribbling. He no longer existed, he was already dead, his back slumped against the shutters of the Café des Amis, a village amenity he had always scorned.

‘You, not happy?’ Schmidt yelled.

Graindorge heard nothing. His brain was no longer functioning. Palfy came to his aid.

‘I think he is a little overcome by the situation we find ourselves in.’

‘Overcome? What is overcome?’

‘The idea of dying.’

Karl Schmidt roared with laughter and turned to the firing squad to explain in German that the Frenchman on the left was afraid of dying, then turned back to Palfy, whom he had identified as the leader of these outlaws.

‘My soldiers, they not fear to die! Heil Hitler!’

The squad responded with a unanimous ‘Heil Hitler’.

‘Would you play us another piece?’ Palfy asked politely.

‘Shut up!’ Jean muttered.

‘Another? Nein!’ the Obersturmführer said contemptuously. Where did these bandits think they were?

‘Play for time,’ Palfy hissed at Jean.

Picallon seemed lost in thought. He was praying. Jean envied him his ability to escape so far from the world, to see nothing of the scene that was unfolding: these soldiers in black uniforms that bore the silver lightning flashes of the SS, the lengthening shadow of the church, the swallows darting over their heads. It looked like a film set into which actors destined for other roles had strayed. Where had the real actors gone? The mayor with his tricolour scarf, the priest in his round hat, the teacher in his black jacket, the drummer in his blue shirt, the children in the choir, and the few scattered old men and women to occupy the benches that lined the avenue in the shade of the ash trees. Instead, an absurd misunderstanding, had placed, like a screen across the deserted square, still warm from the setting sun, a row of black statues masked by shadows, their lips tight and jaws tensed, stretching their chinstraps. The shadows of these men had in turn lengthened beyond the lead actor, violin in hand, almost to touch the condemned men. The real actors meanwhile wandered the roads, lost, crushed by fatigue more than sorrow, their feet bleeding, their mouths dry, their stomachs empty, driven by a fear whose incommensurable futility they were just beginning to understand.

‘Our comrade would like to take our confessions!’ Palfy said.

‘Confession?’ Karl Schmidt repeated, unfamiliar with the word.

‘Yes, before he gives us absolution. He’s a priest.’

‘A priest?’

The SS officer looked Picallon up and down, staring incredulously at this emaciated beanpole who a few moments before had stood in front of him with his flies undone, offering a sight of his sleepy organ to all and sundry.

‘The pig is priest?’ he repeated.

Picallon made a gesture as if to deny the description: he was neither a pig nor a priest, just a seminarian. Jean’s expression beseeched him to shut up as he knelt down first.

‘Listen to me, young priest,’ he said in a low voice, ‘first make the confession last as long as you can, then you’re to ask God to forgive me for two things: I caused pain to my father by joining up instead of deserting, and I caused pain to my dear guardian, the abbé Le Couec, by showing myself to be a very poor Christian.’

‘You’re already forgiven,’ Picallon said.

‘No, that’s too quick—’

‘Schnell!’ Karl Schmidt yelled.

Palfy knelt down in turn and murmured, ‘You’re going too fast, you numbskull. We have to play for time …’

‘The ways of God are impenetrable.’

‘Shut up, for God’s sake, get down on your knees and let’s all pretend to pray together. That means you too, Graindorge …’

‘I’m … a … freemason!’ the surveyor stuttered.

‘That’s all we need!’

The Obersturmführer was growing impatient. He summoned a grenadier, handed him his violin, and marched up and down in front of the firing squad, repeating, ‘Schandlichbande! Schandlichbande!’ Picallon got to his feet and smiled at him. He was ready.

‘It really upsets all my plans, having to die!’ Palfy said.

‘I’m starting to panic!’ Jean admitted.

They lined up again in front of the Café des Amis. A gust of wind swept the square, raising a dry cloud of dust which got into Karl Schmidt’s eye. He called an orderly, who cleaned his eye with gauze. Rubbing it, the officer barked a rapid order at the Unterscharführer and walked back to his car with a disgusted expression. The grenadiers stood to attention …