Michel Déon - The Foundling's War

‘You think so?’

‘I’m sure of it.’

‘An’ who decided all that?’

‘That’s the big question.’

Cyrille had gone upstairs to see his mother. He was coming back. Halfway down the stairs he called to Jean.

‘Yes.’

‘You have to come upstairs, Maman’s crying.’

Jesús looked reproachfully at Jean. Claude was crying and someone or something was behind it, even if one accepted the notion that women easily became sad. The Spaniard shrugged. Jean met Cyrille on the stairs.

‘Leave me with your maman. I can cheer her up better if I’m on my own.’

Cyrille for once obeyed without protest.

Her head buried in a pillow, Claude was sobbing. Jean covered her bare shoulders and moved his hand towards her neck, which cried out its innocence, almost a child’s neck attached to a lovely woman’s body. He told himself that a man could fall in love with Claude just by glimpsing that soft space of downy skin under her hair. A vulnerability was hidden there, but it was also the secret of her graceful way of carrying her head. For the first time he felt its tension, contracted by fear, by a quivering terror that only subsided when he placed his lips at the hairline of her ash-blond hair. She turned over and sat up in bed, her cheeks shining with tears, with such a sudden intent in her eyes that he was afraid in turn and stepped back.

‘I’m getting up,’ she said. ‘I’ll get dressed and go down. Tell them to wait!’

He held her by the shoulders and shook her.

‘No. I’m here.’

She smiled and did not stop him when he bent forward to kiss her unfeeling lips.

‘Jean, are you certain that Lieutenant Bruckett’s dead? Over there. In Russia. That he’ll never rise up from the snow and curse us with his frozen arm? You have to tell Laura it wasn’t me who killed him.’

‘No, no, it wasn’t you.’

‘The Russians kill all lieutenants. Cyrille’s never going to be a lieutenant. Promise me.’

‘I promise you.’

His heart aching with a deep and terrible anxiety, Jean released her shoulders.

‘Darling, get dressed. It’s cold.’

‘You know they held me down in a freezing bath?’

He hugged her tightly to stop her seeing his own tears and begged her, ‘Wake up!’

‘But I am awake!’

She pushed him away and made a pout of reproach as though he did not understand her.

‘Oh Jean, Jean, don’t leave me, I love you, I love you …’

She laughed through more tears, tears of happiness now, like a lover choking with joy at the beloved’s return. Night was filling the sloping-roofed room, but neither thought of lighting a lamp.

‘Where’s Cyrille?’ she asked.

‘Downstairs with Jesús. Perhaps we should join them.’

He picked up Claude’s underwear from the floor, her corduroy trousers and the sweater she had worn at lunch. She ignored her underwear.

‘Aren’t you putting anything on underneath?’ he asked.

‘No, it’s nicer being like this.’

They went downstairs. Jesús was drawing on a big piece of paper. Cyrille, sitting on the table, was watching him.

‘Maman,’ he called, ‘Jesús is doing the man in the woods for me, the way Jean saw him this morning. You’re not crying any more?’

‘No, my darling. You can see I’m not.’

‘Then why were you crying?’

‘I can’t remember.’

He lost interest in the question and leant over towards Jesús.

‘Is Laura still in her room?’ she asked.

‘Laura’s gone to see her parents.’

Claude threw two logs on the fire and slumped into an armchair. Jean opened a book he had borrowed from Nelly’s shelves. Where else? The people he spent time with didn’t read. Even Claude possessed only Russian authors she hadn’t opened for a long time. Palfy was happy with his newspapers and Madame Michette devoured spy novels. Only Madeleine was deep into Proust, but she hired her Proust from a reading room, the idea of buying a book having never occurred to her and Blanche de Rocroy not being the type to suggest it to her. He opened the book Nelly had lent him and heard her cheeky, husky voice.

‘You want a book, Jules-who? Why? You won’t read. You don’t read when you’re in love. Take this anthology. You can recite some poems to yourself and try to hear my voice. If a poet bores you, try another one, then another one, till you’ve found the one who talks to you best about yourself. Then you’ll be much happier than with a big fat novel about an illicit love affair between a man on the night shift and a woman on the day shift …’

It was a thick volume in a sandy-coloured binding that called itself an anthology of new French poetry. He opened it at random.

To you, Germans — with my mouth at last released from military reticence — I address myself.

I have never hated you.

I have fought you to death with stiffly unsheathed desire to kill very many of you.

My joy sprang to life in your blood.

But you are strong. And I wasn’t able to hate in you that strength, the mother of things.

I took pleasure in your strength …

The date of the poem was 1917. The author was called Drieu la Rochelle. Jean turned to Claude; her lips were quivering. She stared at him.

‘Do you think they’ll punish them?’ she asked.

‘I’m sure they will.’

‘That’s all right then.’

He took the hand she had let fall. For an instant he recalled the blissful moments, gathered one by one, before Claude had been his. How could he get them back? Stroking her knee in the train that had brought them from Clermont-Ferrand, the way they kissed on the cheek every time they met or parted, her dressing gown falling open to reveal her breast, her nakedness in the mirror in their hotel room at Saint-Raphaël. Did all that have to lose its meaning, just because they had made love? Did a single act reduce to childishness all the feverish, intense emotions that had fired your imagination? From the age of thirteen until he was twenty he had written down in an oilcloth notebook his reflections and impressions of the life that was opening up before him. The notebook had got left behind in the tankette they had abandoned in the village square. Monsieur Graindorge, the surveyor, had doubtless picked it up and had a good laugh reading it. Jean felt he would have liked to add another entry to his old notebook that evening: ‘One sort of love, the most beautiful and the only really precious sort, comes to an end the moment you sleep with the woman you love for the first time. The stolen kisses, her half-glimpsed body, become childish things. An enormous, superb, intoxicating but obscene adventure begins. An immense amount of tenderness is needed to stop it degenerating into debauchery. Only in idealised romantic novels is the act of love portrayed as a marvellous levitation, the earthly flight of two bodies. The reality is not so magical, and that less magical element makes everything scary. Two bodies fall to earth, suffering the vertigo of emptiness, the return to oneself, a moment of appalling indifference. Sounds, smells, precautions can ruin everything. I’d be wiser never to make love to the woman I most care for, and instead to do it very often with women I’ll never be attached to. If I’m honest, the most balanced period of my life was the time between my first night with Nelly and my first afternoon with Claude. I didn’t realise it. Now I know it. My pleasure with Nelly may be over for good. With Claude, it’s perhaps the start of a long and difficult road to the prize …’

Claude’s hand squeezed his hard, as if reminding him to protect her, but her gaze remained turned to the fire.

‘Jean … There’s someone watching us.’