Irène Némirovsky - Suite Française

In the little hotel, below the room where Hubert was still sleeping, the main room echoed with songs and shouting. The Germans had immediately demanded champagne (Sekt! Nahrung!) and corks flew from their hands. Some of them were playing billiards, others went into the kitchen carrying piles of raw pink pork cutlets which they threw on to the fire; the meat sizzled and let off thick smoke as it cooked. The soldiers brought bottles of beer up from the cellar, impatiently pushing aside the waitress who wanted to help them; a young man with a rosy complexion and a mass of golden hair was cracking eggs open on the edge of the stove; in the garden, someone else was picking the first strawberries of summer. Two half-naked young boys were dipping their heads in buckets of cold water drawn from the well. They ate their fill, gorged themselves with all the good things the gardens provided; they had cheated death, they were young, alive, they were conquerors! Their excitement spilled out in urgent, rapid chatter; they spoke bad French to anyone who would listen to them, pointing to their boots, saying over and over again, "We walking, walking, comrades falling and we always walking…" The clinking of weapons, belts, helmets filled the room.

Hubert could hear it in his dream and, confusing it with his memories of the day before, imagined once more the battle on the Moulins bridge. He tossed about, sighing and moaning as if in pain, fighting off some invisible person. When he finally woke up, he was in a strange bedroom. He'd slept all day He could see the full moon shining through the open window. Hubert started, rubbed his eyes and looked at the dancer who had come in while he was asleep. He muttered his thanks and apologies.

"You must be hungry," she said. It was true, he was famished. "You know, perhaps it would be better if you had dinner here with me? It's unbearable downstairs; there are soldiers everywhere."

"Soldiers!" he said, rushing towards the door. "What are they saying? Are things looking any better? Where are the Germans?"

"The Germans? But they're here. It's the German soldiers who are downstairs."

He leapt away from her in surprise, as fearful as a hunted animal. "The Germans? No, you're joking?" He tried in vain to find some other words and then repeated in a low, shaky voice, "You're joking…?"

She opened the door; the smell of thick, acrid smoke rose up from the room downstairs, along with the unmistakable sound of a group of victorious soldiers: shouting, laughter, singing, their noisy boots, the clanging of heavy guns thrown on to the marble tables, the crashing of helmets against metal belt buckles, and the joyous roar from a proud, happy crowd, intoxicated by their victory, like the winning team at a rugby match, Hubert thought. He found it almost impossible not to shout out insults or collapse in tears. Rushing to the window, he looked outside. The street was starting to empty, but four men were walking abreast, rapping on the doors of the houses as they passed, shouting, "Lights out!" One after the other, lights were submissively switched off. All that remained was the moonlight, which cast a dull blue glow as it shimmered off the helmets and grey gun barrels. Hubert was shaking; he grabbed the curtain with both hands, pressed it against his mouth and burst into tears.

"Come on, now," the woman said, stroking his shoulder and feeling mildly sorry for him. "There's nothing we can do about it, is there? What can we do? All the tears in the world won't change anything. There are better times ahead. We have to live to see the better times, first and foremost we have to live… to go on… But you acted very bravely… If everyone had been as brave as you… and you're so young! Almost a child…"

He shook his head.

"No?" she said, lowering her voice. "Are you a man, then?"

She fell silent. Her fingers were trembling slightly and she dug her nails into the boy's arm as if she were grabbing hold of some fresh prey and kneading it before biting into it to satisfy her hunger. "Don't cry," she said very quietly, her voice faltering. "Only children cry. You're a man. When a man is unhappy he knows what he needs…"

She waited for a response but he said nothing and lowered his eyes. His mouth was closed and sad, but his nose wrinkled and his nostrils quivered slightly. So she said in a very quiet voice, "Love…"

In the room where the Péricand children were sleeping, Albert the cat had made his bed. First he'd climbed on to Jacqueline's small floral quilt and started to paw at it, gnawing at the cotton fabric that smelled of glue and fruit, but Nanny had come in and chased him away. Three times in a row, as soon as she'd turned away, he'd returned with a silent, graceful leap, but finally he'd had to admit defeat and so had curled up at the back of an armchair under Jacqueline's dressing gown. Sleep filled the room. The children were resting peacefully and Nanny had fallen asleep while saying her rosary. The cat, absolutely still, stared intently with one green eye at the rosary gleaming in the moonlight; the other eye remained closed. His body was hidden by the pink flannel dressing gown. Little by little, extremely quietly, one leg emerged, then the other; he stretched them out and felt them tremble slightly, all the way from his shoulder joint-that steel spring hidden beneath a soft, warm fur coat-right down to his hard, transparent claws. He sprang forward, jumped on to Nanny's bed and stared at her for a long time without moving; only the ends of his delicate whiskers quivered. He stretched one paw forward and started playing with the rosary beads; they hardly moved at first, but then he began to enjoy the smooth, cool feel of these perfect, tiny balls rolling between his claws; he swiped at them harder and the rosary fell to the floor. The cat took fright and disappeared under an armchair.

A while later Emmanuel woke up and started crying. The windows and shutters were both open. The moon lit up the rooftops in the village; the tiles glistened like the scales on a fish. The garden was fragrant, peaceful, and the silvery light seemed to shimmer like clear water, gently rising and falling over the fruit trees.

The cat poked his nose through the fringes of the armchair and studied the scene with a dreamy expression. He was a very young cat who had only ever lived in the city, where the scent of such June nights was far away. Occasionally he had caught a whiff of something warm and intoxicating, but nothing like here where the smell rose up to his whiskers and took hold of him, making his head spin. Eyes half closed, he could feel waves of powerful, sweet perfume running through him: the pungent smell of the last lilacs, the sap running through the trees, the cool, dark earth, the animals, birds, moles, mice, all the prey, the musky scent of fur, of skin, the smell of blood… His mouth gaping with longing, he jumped on to the window sill and walked slowly along the drainpipe. This was where a strong hand had grabbed him the night before and thrown him back to Jacqueline who was crying in bed. But he would not allow himself to be caught tonight.

He eyed the distance from the drainpipe to the ground. It was an easy jump, but he appeared to want to flatter himself by exaggerating the difficulty of the leap. He balanced his hindquarters, looking fierce and confident, swept his long black tail across the drainpipe and, ears pulled back, leapt forward, landing on the freshly tilled earth. He hesitated for a moment, then buried his muzzle in the ground. Now he was in the very black of night, at the heart of it, at the darkest point. He needed to sniff the earth: here, between the roots and the pebbles, were smells untainted by the scent of humans, smells that had yet to waft into the air and vanish. They were warm, secretive, eloquent. Alive. Each and every scent meant there was some small living creature, hiding, happy, edible… June bugs, field mice, crickets and that small toad whose voice seemed full of crystallised tears… The cat's long ears-pink triangles tinged with silver, pointed and delicately curly inside like the flower on bindweed-suddenly shot up. He was listening to faint noises in the shadows, so delicate, so mysterious but, to him alone, so clear: the rustling of wisps of straw in nests where birds watch over their young, the flutter of feathers, the sound of pecking on bark, the beating of insect wings, the patter of mice gently scratching the ground, even the faint bursting of seeds opening. Golden eyes flashed by in the darkness. There were sparrows sleeping under leaves, fat blackbirds, nightingales; the male nightingales were already awake, singing to one another in the forest and along the river banks.