Michel Déon - The Foundling's War

Jean slept and woke up at Burgos. He had had to shut the window to keep out the coal dust, and when he opened it the icy air of the Castilian plain rushed into his compartment. The Civil Guard, their bovine faces blue with stubble, kept watch on the platform as the same late passengers started running again, carrying their parcels tied up with string. A little old woman, spruce and with her hair in a bun, walked along the carriages carrying a clay pitcher and chanting, ‘ Hay agua, hay agua! ’ Hands stretched out, grasped the pitcher and tipped it up. Jean walked to the restaurant car, where the same travellers seemed to have spent the night smoking their rank cigarillos. There was weak coffee, stale bread and bars of chocolate on the menu. The train moved off again, and through the window he glimpsed old Castile at last, a landscape set ablaze by cold light and dotted with motionless villages beneath ochre-coloured roofs among the bare rocks. From time to time a Roman belfry, a tower, a fortress-like farm broke the deep, dignified monotony or, looming out of nowhere to startle the watcher, a peasant in black on his grey mule next to the track. Antiquated and breathless as it was, the train jarred as an absurd anachronism in this marvellously preserved landscape. Jean studied it greedily. Since the previous day, his appetite for travelling had come back to him, an appetite smothered by defeat, which had shut men like him up as if imprisoning them. He felt again something of the feverish pleasure that had quickened his spirit on his first expeditions outside France: the secret excitement he had felt in London, the sense of marvel in Italy. The lost war had closed his country’s borders to everyone except the privileged and those willing to risk the hazardous adventure of a fishing boat in the Channel or a crossing of the Pyrenees. A forgotten feeling came back to him, that there is no imagination without movement. It struck him that he could stay in Portugal. Palfy was taking a risk in sending him out of France. In short, he had trusted him … Jean smiled to himself at the idea of beating Palfy at his own game. Never, ever would Palfy have the right to criticise him for doing so, without contradicting himself. Jean walked back to his compartment. The attendant had folded the bed against the partition, put the seat back straight, and vaguely tidied up. Jean locked the door and opened the suitcase he had exchanged with Rudolf. It contained, in denominations of ten and twenty, three hundred thousand pounds sterling. Obviously it would be deadly dangerous to walk away with the suitcase’s contents and not take them to the bank where they were to be deposited. Palfy had warned Jean that Lisbon was teeming with OSS agents, the Sicherheitsdienst and MI6. As soon as he arrived he was expecting to be followed, his every move watched and noted. The vastness of the sum and of the operation put it in a different class from everything he had been used to. His percentage more than satisfied him. He shut the suitcase and began to daydream: from Lisbon he could reach England and America. He could go back to London, to graceful Chelsea and the black Thames. How he had loved London! The daydream slipped away: he was not free. Claude was surviving at her clinic because of him. If he stopped paying, they would move her to an ordinary hospital and she would disintegrate, and Cyrille would starve at his grandmother’s. Palfy had taken every aspect of the situation into account. He was not afraid. Jean would fulfil his mission and come back. One day, later …

He closed his eyes to summon an image of Claude in her barred room. Her treatment had swollen the clear, fine features that had expressed the nobility of her beleaguered soul and dulled the gaze that had once been so calm and balanced. She spoke slowly, with deliberation, and several times had implored him to take her away, to rescue her from the nurse and doctor. For a time Jean had wondered if he still loved her, knowing it was a dreadful, pitiless question and blaming it on his bitter disappointment. You cannot love someone the same way when they have a breakdown — it was as if the obstacles and barriers that that person put in the way to defend themselves were the spice of love. In fact he still loved her as much as ever, but seeing her made him miserable. The ordeal of every visit took several hours to get over, before he could salvage yet again, intact, the perfect feeling that had brought them together. Alone with her in her blue room, whose barred window looked onto a kitchen garden and a road, he did not know what to say. One Sunday, as he had walked away towards the station, she had shouted from the first floor, ‘Jean, Jean, don’t leave me.’ Her bare arm had reached out between the bars, her hand extended with her fingers spread as if she was putting a curse on him. He had turned and seen her desperate white face, so white she looked nearer dead than alive. The nurse had dragged her away from the bars, closing the window on her cries …

In the late afternoon the train, after spending hours unmoving in dismal stations, stopped at Fuentés de Oñoro on the Portuguese border. The Lisbon express, having tired of waiting, had left an hour earlier. The delay, the stormy exchanges between Spanish and Portuguese railway workers, and the confusion of officials allowed Jean to get the case through without difficulty. The most hazardous part of his mission was over and he saw himself stuck in an insignificant Portuguese town, about to spend twenty-four hours in the station waiting room, when a young man in a grey suit and a black felt hat approached him. In good French he offered Jean a lift in his car to Guarda.

‘There’s an excellent inn there. You’ll get dinner and a bed for the night. It’s better than spending a day and a night in a station.’

He had a pleasing, open face. Jean accepted this stroke of luck.

‘I didn’t see you on the train,’ he said.

‘I wasn’t on it. I work at this station from time to time … I might as well tell you straight away that I belong to the PIDE. I believe you call it the Sûreté in your country. I hope I’m not alarming you?’

He smiled. He had an old Chrysler waiting outside and took the wheel with assurance. The road climbed up to Guarda. He drove cautiously, asking the sort of banal questions one usually asks a stranger.

‘Is it your first trip to Portugal?’

‘Yes.’

‘I hope you’ll like our country.’

‘There’s no reason for me not to like it.’

It did not sound from the man’s tone as if he was interrogating him, but Jean, certain that behind the banalities the young policeman was gathering information, decided to be open with him.

‘Exit visas from France are rare,’ the man said. ‘It’s a great shame. Portugal would open its doors to all those who seek asylum.’

‘Oh, there’s nothing secret about my reason for being here! I jumped at an opportunity one of my uncles offered me: he’s very well in with the Germans. I have to see his banker. If he came himself he’d arouse suspicion. I’m just coming and going straight back. It’s good to breathe free air for a change.’

Guarda was an austere, handsome town: the pearl of the Serra da Estrela. The policeman dropped him outside the hotel.

‘I’ll probably see you tomorrow,’ he said. ‘The Lisbon express leaves at six in the evening. If you’re interested I’ll show you around. I’m free tomorrow. The dinner at the inn is good. The cook is excellent. Ask her to make you a fish pie. There’s nothing better …’

Jean’s bedroom looked out on the Praça Luís de Camões. He froze for much of the night in a huge bed. The morning market woke him. Men in thick cloth jackets with fox-fur collars strolled among the crouching vendors, black mummies of whom all he could see, apart from their headscarves knotted beneath their chins, was their angular profiles. They held out eggs, herbs, butter, or a plucked chicken. After France’s obscure misery and Spain’s rancid version of the same misery, a Portuguese market was lavishness itself. Jean was astonished that the suspicious buyers, with their ascetic faces and measured gestures, were not falling on these most rare products like wild animals.