Michel Déon - The Foundling's War

Claude makes coffee and toast. Cyrille is in a bad mood. Jean cheers him up and the boy does not want him to go. After that night there are others, and now Jean sleeps practically every other night at Quai Saint-Michel. Sleeps properly. Lightly, in case Claude were to get up in the adjoining room and come to him. But, as we have guessed, she does not come. Occasionally he wonders what progress he has made since the day he first sat awkwardly opposite her. In all honesty he is obliged to say: none. The curious thing is that it does not make him feel bad, and little by little he has settled for this friendly and affectionate distance that she has assigned to him, like the trinkets — a silver snuff box, an ivory sweet tray, a tortoiseshell dance card, a crystal perfume bottle — laid out on a small side table that she often strokes with her finger as she walks past, familiar mementoes of life in Russia that her mother has saved. Jean is there, just like them, though he is not from Russia.

In fact he would feel perfectly comfortable where she has put him, if he did not, at certain moments, desire her with a painful intensity. During the day she knows how to keep his desire at bay, but at night, asleep behind her bedroom door, she loses her advantage and Jean has a trio of images that help remind him of her reality: the silhouette of her body placed between him and the sun, beneath the transparent material of her dress; her knee on the train (which will stay with him for the rest of his life); and, one morning when she bent over to butter Cyrille’s bread, her dressing gown falling open and revealing a bare breast. Not both, just one; although with a modicum of imagination one could picture the other as very similar. She did not notice and Jean averted his gaze to avoid embarrassing her, but at night, as soon as he closes his eyelids, he sees again the curve and delicacy of this breast that looks like a young girl’s. It is maddening and unbearable. The funniest part of it is that his days are spent sorting, exhibiting, putting away, and selling Louis-Edmond de La Garenne’s ‘hell’, an unbelievable pornographic vomitus , an ocean of the most extreme erotica, of which Jesús is the chief supplier. In all honesty, Jean fails to understand how anyone can feel the slightest emotion at the sight of an obscene engraving, and he would need very little persuasion to consider all the customers who throng the gallery in Place du Tertre as suffering from some form of mental illness. And so, step by step, he is discovering what is particular to his own notion of physical love: almost total indifference when he is not in love, and contrarily, hypersensitivity when he is. He would not need much persuasion either to believe that all lovers of erotica must be impotent. Who among his customers would feel their heartbeat race when they looked at Claude because she had innocently worn a sleeveless dress or because, as she sat down, she had revealed her knee?

Jesús, when Jean attempts to explain these nuances, opens his eyes wide. In Spain only virginity can trigger an erotic frenzy. A married woman, the mother of a child, is totally uninteresting. Several times the discussions that follow last till dawn. The next day Jean is reeling. He accuses himself of naivety and clumsiness. Any man with any experience would already have obtained from Claude what he so passionately desires; and later, as he crosses Paris to see her again, he spends the journey making cynical resolutions he is determined to keep and every time fails to keep. As soon as she is there in front of him, he is disarmed. First there is Cyrille, who every day shows him more and more affection, then there is Claude herself, talking to him as if she has guessed his resolve and is herself determined to head it off.

‘Jean, I think you and I are going to make something wonderful, something completely unique in the world that no biologist could even think of. Born to different fathers and mothers, we are going to have the same blood.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘That you are my younger brother.’

‘Haven’t you ever heard of incest?’

‘Yes. And haven’t you ever heard of the curse that strikes down those who engage in incest?’

He tells her she is being overdramatic. She smiles and they talk of other things, of Jesús whom she wants to meet, and of Palfy, about whom there is still no news. Jean wonders if his friend has moved into the Sirène with all its comforts, continuing to dupe Madame Michette mercilessly. It is so unlike him to put up with the same fate as everyone else! No one who knows him can imagine him waiting for a visa along with three hundred thousand hopefuls waiting to cross the demarcation line and get to Paris. He has failed to reply to the interzone postcard Jean sent at the beginning of September. It probably sounded baffling to him anyway, with its series of permitted formulas, almost all to do with food or family.

The truth is that no one knows what is happening on the other side of the militarised border. When Parisian newspapers are not lampooning the Vichy government, they are dismissing it as a den of traitors coolly plotting vengeance. In Paris people live in a closed and isolated world. Beyond the palisade people might be mobilising or they might not: if the German communiqués are to be believed, in London, Coventry and elsewhere everyone has gone to ground.

The army of occupation continues to conduct its war without a scratch, a superb fighting mechanism whose resources were criminally concealed from the French. It has fuel, leather, endless supplies of machinery, perfect discipline, and all it can eat. The exotic London Jean once knew is impossible to imagine now, under a storm of steel: the majesty of Eaton Square that he loved, the doll’s houses of Chelsea, the elderly ladies in Hyde Park, the boats that steamed up the Thames to moor at Hampton Court among the oarsmen. It seems so distant now! The French are winding themselves into a cocoon, like a small child, while the Heinkel 111 bombers drone through the night towards Britain. They remain in a state of shock. The most pressing question is that of subsistence, a difficult problem for which the country is unprepared. At least love can make everything else go away. Jean does not stint himself. In the evening when he arrives at Saint-Michel there is always a package under his arm, something to make the dinner go better, whatever he has managed to extort from the grocer in Rue Lepic. Blanche de Rocroy’s cousin, who lives in the Seine-et-Marne region, sends her parcels of butter, lard and even game that she shares with Jean, who passes it on to Claude and Cyrille. The lift in their building is sealed off and he has to walk past the lodge of the concierge, a ghastly woman who wears her spitefulness on her face. Whenever she opens her door a crack, a smell of stew and decomposition fills the lobby. Jean is unaware that she has bought herself an exercise book in which she notes down the comings and goings of the tenants and their visitors. For the moment she does it because she enjoys it, with the thought at the back of her mind that one day it might be useful. Who to? The German police, or the French? She doesn’t know, but she tells herself she is a patriot and that if there had been more like her France would not be in the state it’s in now. Jean hurries up four floors. Claude’s cheek is waiting on the other side of the door.

‘You’re late!’ she says.

To excuse himself, he opens his package, which contains a hare. They skin it together on the kitchen table, an operation Jean has seen his father carry out a hundred times with an Opinel painstakingly sharpened beforehand. Alas, their own knife is far from razor-sharp and the skinning is a laborious business. The blood dries on their hands and Claude begins to feel sick. They will be cooking all evening, using up their last onions, a scrap of flour, four potatoes, some herbs and a glass of red wine. Cyrille proclaims that he does not like eating dead hare. He wants a live one. Because they have eaten late, Jean is to sleep on the couch in the small sitting room. Claude is on the other side of the wall. He strains to hear her breathing. Nothing. Not a sound. Neither the other tenants on this floor nor those on the floor above have returned to Paris. The ghastly concierge maintains they are all Jews; she has proof they are, in the form of the miserable New Year tips they used to give her before the war. In fact the only Jew is an upstairs tenant called Léon Samuel-Roth, a professor at the Sorbonne who for ten years has been writing an essay (eight hundred pages of his final draft are complete) on the Marxist aspects of the thought of Jean Racine as developed in his two Jewish plays, Esther and Athalie . At this moment Professor Samuel-Roth is hidden away in the Auvergne, missing his books terribly. Having succeeded in avoiding the increasingly widespread arrests, within four years he will nevertheless finish his essay (another four hundred pages), bring the manuscript back to Paris in October 1944, a few months after the Liberation, and leave it on a bus, a loss he will get over surprisingly easily, frequently telling his students that it was actually a fairly superficial piece of work, an academic’s distraction, and that at the age of fifty he felt the time had come instead to write a novel, whose action would be located in the same Auvergne where he lived for four years without seeing a thing, buried in his writing and with his nose, bristling with grey hairs, constantly to the grindstone. The other absent tenants on Claude’s floor are an elderly Alsatian couple, the Schmoegles, the husband a former officer in the Coloniale7 and since his retirement a technical adviser to a company manufacturing lead soldiers. No one knows what became of them when Paris fell and we shall hear no more of them; perhaps they died in the general exodus, hastily buried without anyone taking note of who they were. The fact that their apartment is empty will soon be passed on by the concierge to the German police, who will requisition it for one of their informers, who in turn will be denounced by the same concierge at the Liberation, be arrested and have his throat cut in a cellar, to be succeeded by an FFI colonel8 who will finally take his ease among the late Schmoegles’ belongings.