Jean Rouaud - Of Illustrious Men

Nina, the eldest, takes it upon herself to telephone. In vain. The line seems to be out of order. The storm. Then your mother drums on your bedroom wall, calling your cousin Rémi, who sleeps on the other side, to come and help. She is shouting and crying, still hammering on the wall with her fists. Rémi hears her and opens his window. After a frenzied exchange of words that are immediately snatched away by the wind, Mathilde, who has joined him and is also leaning out the window wearing a net over her white hair, says she’ll run and fetch Dr. Maubrilland. Swathed in her dressing gown, with one of Rémi’s jackets thrown over her shoulders — in her haste she grabbed the first thing that came to hand — her head in a scarf securely knotted under her chin, she dashes out into the gale, with slates flying all around her before they shatter on the ground, bent double against the wind, the sides of her dressing gown flapping like the wings of a birdman. In the meantime, Rémi runs to alert Aunt Marie in her dollhouse; that is, he runs as best he can, hobbling along with his lame leg, which he seems to have to drag out of the uneven ground with every step he takes. Soon they both come in from the garden, Aunt in the lead with her hurried little gait, her black coat over her nightgown, and the moment they get through the door the whole village is plunged into darkness. Rémi has his windproof lighter, with which he regularly warms the tip of his nose when he’s relighting his hand-rolled cornsilk cigarettes for the twentieth time. In his beautiful strong voice, which qualifies him to be chief chorister at the great liturgical ceremonies, he tells the household not to worry, he knows where the oil lamps are kept. He does know, but only vaguely, it would seem, judging by the commotion in the cupboard. He asks Marie to bring him a chair so he can reach the top shelf, tells her to hurry up because he’s burning himself with his blowtorch-lighter. An exasperated little argument in an undertone. Soon, a faint glimmer of light makes its way up the stairwell. Your mother goes down to meet the savior. In the halo of his lamp, Rémi catches sight of her poor, scared face, and with an affectionate gesture puts his free hand on the future young widow’s shoulder. “The doctor will be here in a minute,” he says.

But he wasn’t. Since his bell isn’t working, Mathilde throws stones at the doctor’s windows, but he doesn’t hear because his bedroom is on the garden side. Or he doesn’t want to hear. For a long time afterward you will suspect him of having turned a deaf ear when he claims in his defense that he had attributed the machine-gunning of his windows to the storm. In the meantime, Rémi has put an oil lamp on the chest of drawers in the bathroom as near as possible to the body, whose death rattle is now gradually subsiding. Your Aunt Marie takes all three of you into the larger of the two bedrooms overlooking the street. Your sisters’ books are still open on the bed at the fateful page. The feeble flame of the candle in its red ceramic holder on the bedside table doesn’t throw any light on the complex structure of stovepipes comprising the ingenious paternal heating system. So when she goes over to the window to watch for Mathilde, your little aunt is most surprised to bump her forehead hard against a pipe running diagonally; being so pocket-size she’s not used to having to lower her head. Half stunned, she mumbles “Joseph,” but you don’t know whether she’s grumbling about his talents as an inventor or calling him to help her. Even if Joseph has heard her, he has only just enough breath left to make a little circle of mist on the mirror held in front of his mouth. When she’s made sure that the great tubular contraption doesn’t look likely to collapse, still rubbing her forehead she gives each of you a rosary. Her rosaries — her pockets are full of them and they get tangled up in her handkerchiefs — are of the austere type: black beads with silvery links. She casts a disapproving eye on the three of you huddling together in the same bed as she falls on her knees on the mat beside it, her knee joints cracking, her arms outstretched, her head raised up to the heavens (that is to say, the ceiling), her eyelids lowered, before starting, with your participation, on a kind of prayer marathon: “Our Father who art in heaven hallowed be thy name,” followed by “Hail Mary full of grace the Lord is with thee” recited ten times, then back to Our Father followed by another ten Aves (which makes the woman’s place ten times as important), the rhythm accelerating as her rosary revolves, so that you lose count and are rewarded with an irritated remark when you get out of time and recite an Ave when it should have been a Pater.

You hear steps on the landing, and a commotion that you imagine means the doctor has finally arrived. Mathilde puts her head through the door to confirm this. As a result your little aunt steps up the pace, as if she had decided to unite her forces with those of the professional to engage in the final battle. She invites Mathilde to join your group, and then Rémi, who has come to see how you are. Both, though, consider that they’ll be more useful if they stay with your mother. But this is the sort of rational argument that carries no weight with your Marie. She is so convinced of the power of prayer that she would almost be prepared to hold them both responsible if by any chance things were to turn out badly. So then, to make up for the disastrous effect of this desertion, she raises her voice and you soon reap the benefit of this intense spiritual activity: the lights come back on. You leave the candle burning, however, fearing a further cut, even though it looks as if the storm is beginning to subside. Encouraged by this first victory, the little aunt makes a spurt, and this time you get completely lost, quite incapable of keeping up with the whirling dervish speed at which she’s spinning her rosary. You let her carry on with her long-distance invocation on her own, sustained by the heavenly powers and the hope of salvation. Although the bed is so high that her crumpled little face is only just visible over the mattress, she seems to you to be levitating; so much so that you dart a quick glance to check that her knees haven’t left the ground. Lulled by the monotonous rhythm of the prayers, you gradually fall asleep. You wouldn’t be able to say how much time has passed since the tragic fall when someone, you’ve forgotten who, pushes the bedroom door open and, after a silence, simply announces: It’s over.

This is a vague expression and could be adapted to a thousand situations. And yet you spontaneously understand that on this twenty-sixth of December nineteen hundred and sixty-three, at the age of forty-one, your father has just died.

H E WAS CERTAINLY one of those people who had the least to lose, except his life, but you wondered whether he really cared so much about his life when you remembered All Saints’ Day 1941 and the tall, sad young man in the mourning overcoat leaning over his family grave, incapable of tearing himself away from the magnetic power of the granite tombstone on which the names of his parents were carved on either side of the recumbent cross, together with the guillotine-blade dates of his recent misfortune. Fifteen months had gone by since then, during which he had learned to live alone with his dark memories, when one February morning, on his twenty-first birthday, he received a notification from the Nantes Prefecture informing him that an official committee had detailed him for forced labor in Germany. This was a recent measure. He was one of the very first to benefit from it. Their factories were short-handed, since their workers had been called up to close the gaps on all fronts, so the German authorities had invited the Vichy government to “compile a register of Frenchmen whose work was not of national importance.” The same committee had decided that one person who answered this description was the sad young man who, without any great enthusiasm but because the times didn’t have much to offer and you have to live, was now running the little shop inherited from his parents, which the village could certainly do without.