Jean Rouaud - Of Illustrious Men

His friends would probably not be expecting him so soon. He was already savoring the moment when he would knock at their door, they would open it, and, with a mischievous grin, casually adjusting his glasses behind his ears, he would simply say to his astonished hosts, “I missed the train.” He had planned his escape down to the last detail. All he had to do now was cut across to the harbor, walk along the Quai de la Fosse of ill repute, where sailors’ bars were now operating in the basements of the charming but dilapidated old mansions, and climb to the Butte Sainte-Anne, where one of his old schoolfriends lived over his father’s carpentry workshop. In the not so distant past, when he was a boarder at the Catholic school in Chantenay, one of the poor suburbs of Nantes, just a few steps away, he had many times benefited from the generous hospitality of the Chris-tophes, who already had so many people to cater to that one extra didn’t make the slightest difference. There were three generations under one roof, and his schoolfriend Michel was the eldest of twelve children. He suffered from being an only son, and when they put up a cot for him in the workshop he loved to feel part of this turbulent throng who seemed completely indifferent to material difficulties. The recipe was simple, even though it lacked variety. Madame Christophe, whose figure had become somewhat problematic after her repeated pregnancies, had no rival in praising in every possible way the virtues of the potato, which the family cultivated on a vast scale in their land allotment on the outskirts of the town. It was with her in mind that he had refused to return his ration card (as well as his tobacco card, but in this case he was thinking more of himself), although his call-up papers had demanded that he hand it in to the appropriate authority. He would give his hostess his weekly sheet of J3 food coupons, the special ones for young men over thirteen that entitled them to more liberal rations. She would start by exclaiming, “But Joseph, you’ll need them yourself, you’re only here for a few days,” but he would have plenty of arguments to persuade her, and in the end she would accept them and confess that they would help to butter a few parsnips, although for a long time no one had been able to find either the one or the other. “Save bread,” the wall posters adjured the populace, “cut it in thin slices and use all the crusts for soup” — as if the workers’ families were in the habit of throwing away the leftovers.

During the day, he would join Michel and his father in the workshop, as he had always done when he visited them before. His talents as a cabinetmaker had become apparent very early. When he was only twelve he had turned his cradle into a small table, although he’d made a pretty good hash of it. Next he had made an armchair; it had massive curves, but its seat was too narrow because he had forgotten to include the thickness of its arms in his calculations. At sixteen he had taken some friends on board a long canoe he had made and christened the Pourquoi-Pasf in memory of Captain Charcot, which didn’t evince any great optimism when you remember how its illustrious eponym had ended up, crushed to bits by the ice floe. This marked preference for working in wood was no doubt inherited from his wooden-clog-making ancestors, who had been established for centuries in the heart of the Foret du Gavre, from where the last of the line — his grandfather, whom he hadn’t known — had emigrated to open a little shop in Random, which had developed into a wholesale business after he cut off one of his fingers, and it was to this fatal, unfinished, rough-hewn wooden clog, emerging from a chunk of wood like a kind of sacrificial chopping block, that our family owed its conversion to the porcelain business. But the tools of our mutilated ancestor’s trade still hung in our workshop: the knives, chisels, and gouges with which Father had carved out the arms and back of his armchair.

Under the guidance of his hosts, the young autodidact had become a skilled worker. He had even developed his own speciality: staircases. These demand a combination of dexterity, knowledge, and improvisation: in some cases, no two steps are alike. He may even have dreamed for a moment of making them his career. On one of the false identity cards dating from his underground period, made out in the name of Joseph Vauclair, born in Lorient, Morbihan (the town had been demolished in the bombings so its records had disappeared), on February 22,1925 (by making himself three years younger, he was no longer eligible for forced labor in Germany), his Profession was given as Carpenter. This was a tribute to his adopted family and an insurance against being caught red-handed as a manifest incompetent if some foxy investigator asked him out of the blue: What’s a trying plane, a marking gauge, a molding plane? And if any such catechist, mistrustful of the tall young man’s appearance, were to suspect him of having gained his knowledge purely from books, he would only have to show his hands, which had already been hardened by farm work. Since at the end of his two weeks with the Christophes, it had been arranged that he would go and lie low in the countryside, where people of all sorts ultimately came together: volunteers, recalcitrants, outcasts, members of the Maquis, black marketeers. In this way they partially agreed with the marshal, who wanted people to go back to the land, even if the nation in peril was in the event primarily interested in the peasants’ larders and their conveniently isolated villages.

But in the meantime, between the carpenter’s shop and the farm, he had planned a detour to Random to make an unexpected appearance and perform his own kind of impromptu, in comparison with which the famous “Indian trunk” disappearing act would be no more than a feeble illusion. While everyone believed he was a forced laborer in Germany, he would reappear on stage as Planchet and brandish his fishing rods under the very nose of the occupier, only to vanish again like a latter-day Judex, leaving the astonished spectators momentarily converted to the Resistance. Momentarily, because immediately after the war was over, those very same people lost no time in refusing to consider any of the candidates who had belonged to the Resistance, preferring to reelect the existing municipal councilmen who had written such charming letters to the marshal congratulating him on his action and exhorting him not to forget Random.

The Christophes had tried to dissuade him: “Joseph, The Three Musketeers, whether there’s one more or one less, and no one even knows exactly how many they were, but in any case they can get on perfectly well without you. You’d be taking too many risks for nothing much.” But the “nothing much” in question was also called Emilienne, and that’s the kind of risk that for a twenty-year-old justifies certain extravagances.

He left Nantes by stealth and pedaled hard through the growing dusk, his suitcase fastened to the carrier, his fishing rods strapped to the crossbar. He rode without lights to avoid attracting attention — he had removed the red reflector from the rear mudguard — diving behind a hedge with his bike every time some vehicle’s headlights pierced the darkness — with a curfew in force, it could only be someone undesirable — stopping at a signpost to read it by the flame of his lighter since he had taken so many detours that he had finally gotten completely lost, arriving just as the show was about to begin, sneaking into the wings where while awaiting his entrance he put on his makeup and borrowed the poor gardener’s wig, promising to give it back before the end of the show, which he did immediately after the scene of the embarcation for England. For this was no time to hang around. He wouldn’t wait for the reward of his brilliant feat. And yet with what enthusiasm the company would have welcomed its hero. But the alarm might already have been raised. When he confided to Maryvonne, as he gave her a letter to pass on to the proper quarter, that he intended to call at the house to collect a few things and some more books, she told him that the Germans had commandeered his aunt’s little cottage and that she, as he had requested, was camping in the big house with a group of students she had taken in as boarders so that any authoritarian squatters would come up against what might be seen as a “No Vacancies” sign. Three of these would-be squatters, kept at a respectful distance by this obstinate little force, had had to squeeze into the tiny little hermitage in the garden. So he abandoned his plan and set off once again on the road to Riancé. For a few kilometers he was seized with remorse at not having spared a little time for his courageous aunt. Why hadn’t he at least left her a note? She, the ever-faithful, betrayed by her swaggerer of a nephew. All at once he felt less proud of himself. Soon it began to rain, a fine, insidious rain that, together with the coldness of the night, obliged him to look for shelter. He was far enough away, now. He spotted a barn, hid his bike, and went and curled up in the hay where, tired out, he fell asleep.