Michel Déon - The Foundling's War

After dinner Claude put Cyrille to bed and Laura started to clear away. Her voice had scarcely been heard during dinner. If she spoke, it must have been to Jesús when he was alone with her, or when Jean was not present. The two men resumed their conversation before the fire.

‘So,’ Jesús said, ‘is this the one? I thought she would be more of a bomb. But not at all. She is perfec’. Round. Without angles. You wan’ to marry ’er?’

‘She’s married already.’

Jesús remarked that Jean had a taste for complications. He was in love with a married woman and sleeping with an actress who was all over the place. He was heading for endless problems if Nelly, by some accident, were to fall in love with him.

‘I judge that possibility to be extremely unlikely,’ Jean said.

Jesús suggested to his friend that he settle in the countryside with him if he did not want to be consumed by the capital. He described an idyllic life, divided between everyday activities — they would raise rabbits and hens, plant a kitchen garden — and the art for which both of them had been put in the world.

‘You want me to be like you, dear old Jesús, but I don’t have a gift for anything. Everything is easy for you, now that you’ve discovered you can live outside society. This is your vocation. Mine is to live inside it, and if it suffocates me, tough luck. I’m rather less brilliant at the role than Palfy is. Just think: the bloke that I met on a road in Provence, disguised as a priest and stealing cars and collection boxes to pay for the trip, must be about to pass his first hundred million. I don’t know what his racket is exactly, but he’s found an opening and he’s amassing a fortune. He’ll lose it in the end, with his usual elegance, the way he lost the others. Really and truly it’s the risk he enjoys. He’s got Kapermeister and Rocroy in his pocket …’

Jean turned round, conscious of having uttered two names he should have kept to himself. Laura was putting the glasses away. He was sure she had heard everything. Claude appeared. They clustered around the fire together, until there were only embers left. At ten o’clock Jesús yawned and stretched.

‘In the country you ’ave to rest,’ he said in an exhausted voice. ‘Tomorrow we’ll talk again about that …’

Cyrille slept in a sleeping bag on a sagging couch next to the double bed that nearly filled the room, apart from a wardrobe and a shelf for the chamber pot. Outside the wind whistled in the trees and wrapped itself around the groaning roof.

‘Take Cyrille,’ Jean said. ‘I’ll sleep on the couch.’

‘No, I want to sleep with you.’

‘Do you realise what you’re asking me?’

‘Yes. And I am asking you.’

He switched the light off and they undressed in the dark and lay down in the icy bed.

‘I’m cold,’ Claude said.

He hugged her and stroked the small of her back through her nightdress.

She shivered. The timbers creaked at a gust more violent than the others. Jean felt Claude’s warm breath on his neck.

‘You don’t love me as much as before,’ she said.

‘How do you know?’

He did not feel he loved her less. He even thought he loved her more, but in the darkness of the bedroom he could just as easily have been stroking Nelly, who in bed suddenly became as tender and modest as Claude.

‘I don’t know why you carry on seeing me. You should leave me alone, let me go, and then I’d keep on hoping I’d see you again when I was free.’

‘You really think you’ll be free one day?’

‘Yes.’

‘Then I’ll wait. Stay where you are.’

The wind dropped and she fell asleep. Cyrille woke them up.

‘Jean, I want to go into the forest.’

He had drawn back the curtains, letting in the red glow of the winter sun. The frost-covered fields rose gently towards a birch wood. In the courtyard Jesús was pumping the handle of the water pump in shirtsleeves. Through the floor they could hear kitchen sounds: Laura was prodding the stove into life, putting bowls on the table. Jean went down first and took over at the pump. He quickly ran out of energy and realised how unfit he was. He no longer jogged across Paris; instead he ate too much in black-market restaurants and too little when he was with Claude. The cold air stung his cheeks. He came back in, breathless, with Jesús, who had already sawed a couple of dozen logs. Cyrille was drinking a big bowl of hot milk.

‘You know, Jean, it’s real milk. Jesús fetched it for me from their neighbour. She has cows that give real , real milk.’

He shook his head as he said ‘real’, charmingly, his eyes shining with pleasure. Jesús seemed to notice for the first time the grace of this child to whom, in his pleasure at seeing Jean again, he had hardly paid any attention.

‘After breakfas’ I’ll draw him,’ he said.

‘Can you draw?’ Cyrille asked.

‘A little.’

‘Why do you speak with such a funny accent?’

‘Me? An assen’? No’ at all. Is you who is an assen’.’

Cyrille thought this was tremendously funny. He burst out laughing. Laura turned round and smiled at him and her gloomy face lit up for an instant, revealing more than she usually showed. Jean decided that she was alive but had suppressed her own existence, so as only to live through Jesús. At that moment he was sure she envied Claude’s happiness in having a lover and a child, a happiness she felt to be more complete than her own. Apart from Jesús, who loved himself enough not to need anyone else, they all believed in everyone else’s happiness. Laura wanted a child with Jesús but the circumstances were not right, and Jesús showed little or no interest in children, although it was true that several of his theories had gone up in smoke in the last six months: he had the same woman in his bed, and he had noticed Cyrille, bringing over a sketchbook and starting a series of sketches of the boy, eating, drinking, laughing.

Later all five of them went out. Cyrille, as tubby as a bear cub in his suit and hat knitted by Marie-Dévote and Toinette, skipped along the path that went through the birch wood to the Yvette, exhaling clouds of white vapour. The sun clung to the last golden leaves of autumn and from the fields on the other side of the river there rose the same white vapour, a veil of delicate gauze that shredded in the cold light as they watched.

‘We are ’appy!’ Jesús shouted.

He was, without reservation, and it was visible in his face, which was usually a little tough-looking because of the way his beard, even when he had just shaved, left a blue shadow. A woodcock flew up in front of them and two hares sped away. They met nobody. The countryside was enjoying its Sunday rest and one might have thought it deserted, hibernating in the cold. Cyrille returned to the farmhouse with cheeks like red apples. He wolfed down his lunch and curled up to sleep in one of the armchairs in front of the big fireplace.

At four o’clock, just before nightfall, Laura drove them to the station and they boarded a train crowded with passengers returning to Paris, loaded down with heavy suitcases full of the results of their plundering of the countryside. At Gare de Luxembourg a barrage of police awaited them, filtering the arrivals and ordering them to open parcels and suitcases. Jean went through without difficulty, taking Claude and Cyrille with him. Newsboys were announcing a special edition of Paris-Soir all the way up Boulevard Saint-Michel. The headline filled the whole front page: ‘US PACIFIC FLEET DESTROYED BY JAPANESE AT PEARL HARBOR.’ Passers-by grabbed the paper and read the short bulletin as they walked to the cafés.

‘What’s going on?’ Claude asked.

‘The Japanese have declared war on the United States.’