A blood bank gets to travel. Jean-Marie Meyer-Decker was a nurse, cook, gofer, singer of lullabies, alibi, driver, bike, catamite. Most of all he was Bruno Berg’s blood bank. The customised reservoir of AO–1.
Wherever Bruno Berg went he took his ambulatory vial of top-up. Jean-Marie waited on Bruno Berg. He waited for him. He sat in rented villas in towns whose names he didn’t know. He rehearsed chords in gardens he had never seen beyond, in houses he had arrived at by night, whose exteriors he could only guess at. He sat demurely in many brothels whilst Bruno Berg pumped semen imprinted with HoTLoVe, into hired mouths, into wombs by the hour, into the mothers of gits who grow up to be SIDA drinkers, bibbers of the bad apple. Sometimes he knew the name of the town, sometimes a girl would tell him: Evian, Oran. He wasn’t used to knowing. Sometimes a maid would tell him: Colomb-Bechar, Toulon. Sometimes a maid would tell him how beautiful his hair was.
At the age of sixteen be owned a Steyr. 455 pistol, two Belgian passports (in the names Jean-Marie Houart and Jean-Marie Meyer-Decker), one French passport (as Berg), suits that he had never worn, four collarless Cardin jackets, a cigarette lighter shaped like a pebble, two Rolex Oysters, a pair of cufflinks decorated with trout flies, a suitcase full of records et al. Whether Bruno Berg was away for a day or three hours he always had a present for Jean-Marie when he returned. A Lambretta: not to be ridden. A knuckleduster. A hairdryer.
Twice they escaped over roofs.
One rainy dawn, early summer of 1963, the phone in a bungalow in the Lyonnais suburb of Champagne au Mont-D’Or woke Berg. He ran along the little corridor, pulled Jean-Marie from his bed, hustled him through a window, across the tiny garden and over a prefabricated concrete wall. They were less than three hundred yards away when they heard the explosion, saw the hail of reformed familiar objects and the rolling boles of smoke.
Berg supervised Jean-Marie’s diet. He proscribed, at one time or another, milk, eggs, sugar, smoked fish, aniseed, tea, most cereals (thus pastry, biscuits, bread, pasta), tomatoes (save unripe ones), nuts and nut oils, fruits with stones, rice,1 pumpkin and squash, mace. His valetudinarian appetite for magazine articles on food and fitness was unflagging. He always had faith in the last one he had read; he amended Jean-Marie’s regime accordingly. He demanded blood of the highest quality, blood free from the impurities associated with, say, ‘cooked’ cheeses such as gruyère. He demanded (the next month) blood boosted by ingestion of ‘cooked’ cheeses such as gruyère. He overturned his orders with such alacrity that Jean-Marie often forgot what he should and should not eat. When the boy got it wrong Berg would weep or scream or accuse him of plotting slow murder. The boot of Berg’s Panhard was filled with false numberplates and clipped dietetic articles whose inevitably contradictory counsel worried him because he believed in all of them as another genus of sucker might believe in variant horoscopes. Jean Marie’s permitted staples were liver, spinach, endive.2 From October 1962 till April 1963 he was forbidden to eat anything other than ewe’s milk yoghurt.
Bruno Berg believed he ran on blood of the highest quality – ‘super sang, extra sang, mon Marie’; he needed such blood (top octane, haemin rich) in his line of work. Such blood has to be made, and nurtured; it is no more a fortuity than is wine. Wine’s aptness as transubstantive is thorough and inviolable. No wonder Jean-Marie despised wayward eucharists. He was proud of his blood; his blood defined him; you are what you bleed. You march on your blood. It’s corporeal current. It’s currency: early on Jean-Marie rejoiced in the strangeness and uniqueness of his relationship with Bruno Berg whose very life depended on his. He did not give his blood. He was no mere donor of corpuscular rectitude. He sold it, bartered it for goods, for a series of roofs, for money. He was kept. He rarely slept with Bruno Berg; there was little enthusiasm on either side. It was Jean-Marie’s blood that attracted Berg; not his body; not his potential for belligerence; not his eagerness to further assert his coming manhood with explosives and hidden bombs; not even his loyalty – Berg never deluded himself that it was anything but bought. He never took a chance with it, hence the incessant stream of presents, treats, carrots. Loyalty is like love; those afflicted with a capacity for either are not invariably constant in their choice of objects (p. 143). Bruno understood loyalty. It is temporal. He had once been loyal to his other blood brother, Léon Deroose, but that had changed. He was loyal to every dietician whose secrets he read. He was loyal to every mineral water whose label analysis he read. Certainly nostalgia and patriotism did incline him towards Spa – but if Contrexéville was to come up with the right price, then he’d be loyal to that small town in the Vosges, he’d swear to the nephrological certainties invested in its water, to every one of its hepatic boasts. Bruno Berg understands loyalty: and Jean-Marie is still shaking off the infirmity called childhood, he is (interminably) at an age when the world reshapes itself. New idols. New nous. He looks at this boy who is his saviour, this sanguinary coincidence whose fingers spread over an entire keyboard, and he wonders: how long?
Whenever he rents another flat (Annecy, Bab el Oued) he is as concerned about Jean-Marie’s preoccupations (the view, shower pressure, TV reception, bed comfort, complement of ashtrays etc.) as he is about the usual things – access, security, closed-off chimneys, triple locks, neighbours, covert exits, previous occupiers. His inspection procedure is thorough: Jean-Marie climbs on his shoulders to scrutinise the tops of wardrobes and cupboards. He unscrews floorboards, prises up parquet, jemmies wainscot, peeks, overturns mattresses, reaches behind boilers, never trusts a loft, never trusts a concierge: Berg follows them to cafés, taps their phones. He sits all day in the car logging the comings and goings at his new apartment block; at night he smothers boot polish on his face and hands, scales fire escapes, drainpipes, ascends to attic storeys in order to spy on the neighbours at his new apartment block.
Paranoia is a full-time occupation which requires organisation, administration, planning if it is to be done well; like any job it gives shape to a life, purpose too, and it has its satisfactions (a hunch proved right; the discernment of pattern in a street’s behaviour; a duplicated gesture; the moustache and homburg who spends too long by a news-stand; an overexercised dog – no poodle demands six trips round a block; the pair of furtive plumbers; the headlights of a parked car that flash dip-dip-full; gloves in summer; a workman’s clean hands; the streetwalker who turns away a John). The greater Berg’s zeal, the more justifiable appear his fears. And he does have much to fear. He has not been forgotten. Bruno Berg understands loyalty and so understands that he will not be forgotten. Bruno Berg will pay with his borrowed blood. Bruno Berg, la balance (the grass, the canary). Sing or you die, squeal or you bleed – there will be no blood bank in gaol, you’ll expire in a puddle on the cell floor, you’ll measure the life left to you in litres per hour, you’ll watch the mortal spillage and wail at your impotence to stem it.
So he sang. He was less than a line in someone else’s song, a makeweight in a chorus. But add that to his fingerprints on the washer; he was detained on the morning of Sunday 22 December 1963. One sunny moment he is rubbing his gloved hands together and crossing rue Oberkampf, Paris 11ème towards the little bakery where Jean-Marie is waiting to buy pain azyme (unleavened – yeast is off this month), the next he’s being strongarmed into the back of a black DS which has turned the corner into rue de la Folie Mericourt and disappeared by the time that Jean-Marie has pushed his way out of the shop.
Jean-Marie did not go back to their apartment down the street. Indeed he walked past the peeling building without any acknowledgement of it. And he kept walking, never looking behind him, clutching the loaf, across Avenue de la République, uphill towards Ménilmontant; he is walking quicker now, and on the far side of the Boulevard de Belleville he turns from the pavement beside a cigarette booth and runs down a flight of steps into the Cour du Labyrinthe. Apt name. He does not know where he is running to. He rushes along alleys so that cobbles snap at his insteps, so that walls barge him, corners jostle him with brickbats. He finds his way barred by a metal gate whose scrolled top may represent a pelican, in its piety, plucking its breast to feed blood to its offspring. He ran winded, in terror of invisible possibilities. Here’s a church. Here’s a leaning tower of crates. Here are two bullnecked men who remove themselves from his path: there is danger in his panic, savagery in his face. At Place Gambetta he ran into the metro. He inhaled ozonic must. He skulked at the far end of the deserted platform reading, re-reading an advertisement for Denicotea cigarette holders, willing the train to arrive.
Three people descended to the platform in quick succession: a man of indefinable age, indistinct appearance, unmemorable features, a man who might blend in to any crowd, unnoticeably, and was thus an object of high suspicion; a bespectacled woman with a flick-up hairdo, check stirrup-cuff trousers and a wicker animal basket which, going by the ease with which she swung it, contained no cat, no yappy little griffon – so why carry it?; a gangly youth, hardly older than Jean-Marie, with big problem skin, a bronze mac (very 1962), a book and a bandage tied tight around his head so that his dirty blond hair rose from it in tufty fascicles. The youth is stooped, consumed by his book, blind to the world beyond words. The man stares at a circus poster. The woman clutches her basket, cradles it, as though cosseting the ghost of the creature that once inhabited it. One of them, all of them? Two? If so, which?
The woman gets off at Parmentier.
Jean-Marie walks through the tunnels at République to the Charenton-Ecoles line.
Nondescript man: whereabouts unknown.
The youth, bandaged head in book and now displaying myopia, walks the same tunnels, waits for the same train – reasonably, given the multiplicity of correspondences at République, there is a seven to one chance of his doing so. They do not travel in the same carriage. At each station – Filles du Calvaire, Chemin Vert, Bastille, Ledru-Rollin, Faidherbe Chaligny, Michel Bizot, Porte Dorée, Liberté etc. – Jean-Marie opens the doors to see if he has disembarked. He has not. He disembarks at the end of the line, at Charenton, still reading, turning a page to prove it, following Jean-Marie across Place de l’Eglise (wrought metal, a lupine dog barking on a roof, visible breath, shutters against the wan winter sun, the distant raucity of a bal musette, old Flanoche gesticulating in Le Petit Caporal – all the usual). He moves like an automaton, finding Jean-Marie’s path in the book from which he doesn’t divert his eyes. Jean-Marie has suffered two years’ tutelage in paranoia, in the tireless mutation of neutral tropes into imagined threats, in ascribing hostile meaning where none is due. This circumstance is without the confines of that discipline which is also a full-time occupation. No mutation required. Unequivocal meaning. Pursuer and quarry cast long enfeebled shadows across the square. Tired walls are buttressed by bare forests of stanchions: they’re tired, too – they have to lean. The archaeology of poster art may be studied on Vernier’s shop’s side. No time: Jean-Marie hurries towards his destination, proceeds according to Bruno’s instructions in response to Contingency iii.
He arrives at the embanked road beside the confluence: barges’ milty wake; damp nip; stove-pipe smoke; river mist; the power station’s big plumbing that lustres across the wide water. It is at the bridge that he thinks like a soldier, like the soldier he is (a uniquely important member of the secret army, the blood warrior of the Eighth (Paris) Cell); he is among his people; signs of his tribe have been daubed with increasing frequency the further east he has ridden and walked. At Liberté, for example, when he craned out the carriage, he saw no bronze mac but renewed scrawls of the three vital letters. He takes his decision, the decision, to act alone whilst standing beside a wall which the traitorous agents of traitorous government have failed to clean. Instead of crossing the bridge towards Kermarrec’s place, instead of inculpating Kermarrec and his wife (40 stone the pair), he walks east towards Joinville. They look at him, the girls do, at his round loaf and corvine hair, as they make their way from church to café. It is on a mud road to a riverside café that Jean-Marie aboutfaces. The Marne is a river that men fish in; fishermen require metal stakes to support their rods whilst they drink un pot de rouge, un coup de calva, whilst they munch their jambon beurre all which help them think of lunch. They are now taking lunch, talking pike, at Le Buffet Sur L’Eau (Chez Didier), a gastroshack. The road has become a path. Cars are parked on a terrace higher up the bank. Jean-Marie curses the mud on his shoes, and its cause. From where he stands with a metal stake in one hand and his loaf in the other he could jump onto Didier’s corrugated roof whose pagodal chimneys reek of eel bound with pig’s blood, Ile de France speciality no doubt. Jean-Marie saunters towards his pursuer, stake as staff. The youth’s smile is wide and welcoming.
‘Par là?’ he smiles, wide and welcoming, indicating the wooden staircase down the bank to Didier’s. He is armed? He has chosen the place of execution? Jean-Marie advances on him – one of his eyes has been recently bruised, it’s taken the yellow road to recovery. He is still smiling when Jean-Marie drops the loaf3 and takes the stake in both hands, hoofs the mud with it, points it like a halberd, swishes it through prenatal December. The Bronze arm lifts the yellow covered book, wide and welcoming: Soeur Jésus4 (by) Edouard Manneret. Jean-Marie believes the book is a gun/grenade/bomb. He throws the stake, he ducks. The youth’s bemusement is such that he doesn’t move till he’s made to move by the metal that strikes his thigh. Side down in the mud he smiles and recovers his book. He waves it with that same smile, with an arm that iridesced and now doesn’t, that reaches from the mud. He points (towards the loaf). Jean-Marie Meyer-Decker picks up the stake and crushes his ribs with it. The youth grunts after he has exhaled and has the time and the instinct to cover his head: ‘T’as pas lu?’ He holds up the book. Jean-Marie strikes his femora. Puzzled. He tries to get up, tries to run. When Jean-Marie hits his head the bandage unfurls, his hair flops and his chin drops. When Jean-Marie pushes him down the bank into the river he protests, truthfully: ‘J’sais pas nager.’
Big fish, but the fishermen’s eyes are elsewhere. Jean-Marie hurls the stake into the river so that it may or may not descend on its victim who already has enough to cope with in these difficult moments; bubbles, brownness, the flavour of mortality. When Jean-Marie crosses the bridge into Alfortville and his immediate future, he recalls a page in France Soir, the B-side of a diet programme, which claimed that the majority of Seine suicides are, in fact, Marne suicides – but owing to the latter’s strength of current at Conflans …
He got the keys from Jaci Kermarrec at Pourquoi Pas Chez Les Kermarrec. He refused anything to eat or drink, save a glass of Cacolac in order to regularise the transaction in the eyes of the customers. The wall abutting this bistrot à vin had had its archaic graffito restored – oas toujours. The inscription is painted over the top of a municipally removed one. The car, a twelve-year-old Panhard (unnoticeable) was in a garage in a lane of workshops that were all rust and rot. It starts first go – Yves Kermarrec has earned his exalted fee. He backed it out, checked the boot (t’es un vrai pote, Yves), drove east-south-east for six hours, stopping for petrol at Bar sur Aube, spitting as he passed the sign welcoming him to Colombey-les-Deux-Eglises. He turned off the N19 at Chaumont and drove through the dark, along unknown roads, past signs to mineral water towns, past signs to cheese towns, up and down hills of increasing gradient, round hairpins. There are the lights of a village in the sky; there are the lights of another a thousand feet beneath him. Arboreal canyons, pine naves, birch’s pinchbeck bark in the orange beam, mossy banks, a stoat, a rabbit, a broken wooden sign nailed to a trunk: ‘Etang de Pr …’ He stopped, reversed, took this track.
For four nights he slept in the old Panhard. He daubed it with mud. He stuck leafmeal and twigs to it. He covered it with boughs. When he awoke the first morning he discovered that he had parked across the source of a stream, in a crevasse beneath bluffs of lichened rock. The sun shone on frost-stiffened leaves, the sun made chiaroscuro of the profound forest, there was no mean between dazzle and obfuscation, there was an excess of silhouette, the noises were more horrible than those of the dangerous city. Jean-Marie locked himself in the car for hours at a stretch. His breath froze on the windscreen. The radio received aerial flotsam. From within fifty yards of the car he could look down on two lakes: Pr … and one of whose name he was even more ignorant. He dared not walk to them lest he fail to find his way back.
The jar of fat and fibrous meat stew had evidently been in the car for weeks. The Kermarrecs were paid to ensure that the vehicle was fit for a self-imposed siege. They had failed. (T’es un vrai saligaud, Yves.) Jean-Marie was sick. He picked some purple berries and ate them. He was sick again. He missed clothes, mirrors, warmth, presents, comics, musical instruments – he missed those most of all, even more than comfort and gangster films on TV and Bruno Berg – whom he hardly missed at all though he did miss what he unfailingly provided. Jean-Marie had never been anything other than kept.
He was more than a kept boy. He’d met them. Some of Bruno’s friends (not really friends, inevitable victims of acquaintanceship in their covert milieu) did have kept boys. Jean-Marie was Bruno’s twin, the chance winner in a chemical lottery, a blood date, his life line.
He half woke the fourth day from dreams of drowning and transfusion. He writhed in the snug sleeping bag (victoire, Yves). He regretted that he had all this within him and only one person to give it to, and that that person wasn’t with him, wasn’t prepared to die with him in the gloom of this crystalline translucent cell which belonged to dreamtime till he realised it belonged to a different, external genus of terror and that he was about to be admitted to the mysteries of submersion and suffocation.
The car has been moved was his terrified thought – how easy he had been to track down. The car has been buried was his next: tracked down and interred in his sleep by unseen hands. The cunning, the expertise, the deft resourcefulness. He turned his head on the back seat and found that it was covered by fine white powder. Every window was entirely obscured, the car’s eyes were blinded. The segmental back window, the windscreen, the four windable windows and the two quarter-lights. The windable window whose handle his crown had wrestled with and lost every night was no longer movable. The door would not budge. Glue? Weld? Bolts? His nose bled, from fright or something. He lifted his legs in the sleeping bag that was a straitjacket and kicked the other door. He kicked till his heels ached. The silence of this grave made him long for the rustle of the little stream that had at first dogged him but which he had grown fond of as it spilled into his dreams. He wriggled out of the sleeping bag. His nose bled again. The car’s ignition was dead. None of the other windows would open, nor the doors. The cold was excessive. It is unnecessarily cold he told himself: they didn’t have to add that, but he was so deep down that the world’s heat could not reach him to comfort him in his terminal prison.
He stared in the rearview mirror at his face which he had smeared with mud the first day. He was a secret soldier of the secret army. He was a daubed warrior. He would resist death with martial rigour and succumb with martial grace if resistance was not enough. He stared in the mirror. He looked at the speedometer, at the biscuit packets, at the litter in his coffin. He could see them all. He was a soldier, he thought like a soldier. Since there was a vestige of light in the car he deduced that he had not been buried in earth. Snow! He had never in his life seen snow. It was as strange to him as was adobe to an eskimo: Snow! According to The Universal Fount Of Likenesses (J. Greenford, ed., London, 1985) snow’s usual similes are ‘blithely disregarding of its treacherousness, its dangers, its potential for chaos; they portray snow in terms of cosiness, as the climate’s contribution to the cult of the picturesque, as a sort of eiderdown that the world tucks itself up in. Germans dote on snow.’
Jean-Marie had of course seen pictures, icing sugar representations, glitter on Christmas cards from ‘our country’, films with ski chases and cablecar drama. But he had not witnessed it without such mediations; he had not been in snow’s presence. He had not been within it, had not been surrounded by millions of hexagonal crystals. When he broke the windscreen with a jack the fine powder poured into the car, stung him; its malevolence fazed him.
The blizzard in the southern Vosges that began on the evening of Christmas Day resulted in snow falls of up to 1.06 metres with drifts of up to 6 metres at Gérardmer. Jean-Marie’s Panhard lay beneath approximately 300 kg5 of snow and the volume increased all day, it blew into the east-facing crevasse, powered by a wind that owned the voice of an animal. White-out, trial by blankness. The transformation of the plot of land that he had familiarised himself with during the previous three days was entire. Nothing remained. He didn’t know till then how much snow hurt, nor that it made the world mute, that it rid the world of accents: the homogenisation was a wicked marvel, a tyranny of uniform, a climatic joke about purity.
Did you ever push through a drift that came up to your chest? You know then the way dry snow reforms around you, you know there’s always more waiting to blow into your nose and make it bleed again, you know how it has its revenge for every drop of septal blood that stains it, how it sends for reinforcements that arrive quick as the wind and how they just want to spread the word, share the party with their friends back home who’ll call in sure enough, gatecrashing on a blinder, the locusts of the north. It hurts his eyes, his ears, his chest – he’s dressed wrong, he’s dressed for crossing a Paris street to buy a loaf, he’s dressed for cursing Bruno Berg’s Contingency iii. Mishaps don’t run according to plan. Two scared roes startle him.
Scott with his head down, Hudson floating inexorably towards his death, Pym in a clipper among marine Matterhorns, children burnt by rink ice (p. 55) – the gulf between actuality and representation (even photographic representation) increases the lower the temperature goes. Thermal deprivation is unusually resistant to evocation. Jean-Marie might list the ills the weather did him (purple ears, broken skin, nosebleeds, gripless red fingers, sinus percussion, iced eyebrows, bully on his chest, communication problem with his feet); but the parts could never suggest the whole which is dulling, desensitising. Gangrene is painless – though Jean-Marie’s frostbite, which didn’t go that far (his teetotalism was a boon here), stung a bit. He trudged, he fought for each step, he fell repetitively, he fell before he had got up from the last fall, he fell down a gully. He had no idea where he was going save that it was sure to be white when he got there. He slid down a slope with a child’s glee at the discovery of such means of motion; he didn’t exactly smile but no doubt came closer to it then than at any other moment since Sunday morning. He had, indeed, very little to smile about. The hostility of trees and people; this new element that stored up bad surprises; his dislocation; his multiple uncertainties; his realisation that Contingency iii was specious, a plan devised for its own sake, a martial fantasy that took no heed of weather nor of his lack of woodcraft and his signal unsuitability. But Bruno Berg was not an imaginative bleeder; he didn’t understand that Jean-Marie’s pulse beat to rhythms different from his own, that he might have no appetite for starry solitude, for crawling, for boiling moss, for purging slugs, for that rudimentary exploitation of nature that allows you to vanquish nature, to fox the old drab, to come through, to survive.
Jean-Marie’s methods of survival repudiated the rules that Bruno had persistently and earnestly tried to inculcate, rules that were stubbornly professed creeds and soldiers’ superstitions, rules founded under circumstances of war and occupation, rules which allowed Bruno to dignify criminal activities as political/patriotic/revolutionary/counter-revolutionary; as the exercise of natural justice; as adjustments to the cosmic machine, adjustments whose beneficent ramifications might not be felt for a generation or more.
The abduction and elimination of Ben Malek, the unhappily necessary ‘suicide’ of Ferniot, the lessons that had to be taught to judges Gutrin, Donnard and Wanecq: they might all – in the short term and in the myopic eyes of those unblessed with inspirational presentiment – possess certain regrettable attributes (harshness, wanton brutality, treasonable intent, anti-nomian arrogance). And there was too the regrettable ineptitude of civilians, spectators who stray onto the pitch, whose ignorance exposes them to the firing line, who lack the nous to keep out of men’s way. Don’t they know there’s a (secret) war on?
Paramount among Bruno’s rules was that which stipulated subterfuge, covert breathing, solitude, furtiveness, no trace, existence through non-existence. Lie low, live as in sewers, hide, head below, no third light because there’s not been a first, watertight seclusion. You have no being. You are not. All actions should aspire to invisibility.
Example: the bicycle. Not the bicycle that Jean-Marie rode at Njili (p. 174). The bicycle Bruno Berg works on in a bungalow in Annecy in the summer of ’63. He rides out into the mountains in his cycle rig of shorts and Anquetil cap worn widdershins. He is one of hundreds seeking saddle satisfaction on a Sunday, one of hundreds curving his spine, vex or cave according to the toss of the gradient and the cut of the breeze. Ah the blessed blue sky, the crisp air, the extreme green of happy fields! He is hidden among the hundreds, he is typical – really he is, he is not that old, he is typical of those with growing bellies who ride on Sundays and dream of taking a stage in in the Tour or the Flèche Wallonne: the capacity for sporting fantasy extends to those beyond the age at which such fantasies might reasonably be fulfilled just as the colonialist, France-Intégral fantasy extended long after Algeria’s separation had been effected. The typicality of Berg the cyclist was not entire; his bicycle was also a .22 rifle – the crossbar was a barrel, the saddle was a butt, a Simplex gear lever an ad hoc trigger. It was an ingenious machine which might, with sufficient practice, be transformed to its covert ballistic function in half a minute. It was with this weapon that Bruno Berg shot and injured (shattered his right scapula) the former Capitaine Mousnier whose information had gained him exemption from prosecution and had occasioned sixteen arrests. The modern house in which Mousnier was living at Bout du Lac, at the southern end of the Lac d’Annecy and about eight miles from the town, was close to the round-the-lake route taken every Sunday by hundreds of saddle fantasists. Bruno Berg lay in a wood on the hill that rose behind the garden. When he shot at Mousnier the perfidious traitor moved to pick up a pair of secateurs resting on the rim of a tub of asters. He cried and fell down a flight of crazy paved steps leading to the back of the basement garage. The noise attracted his wife and one of the guards, who came round the corner of the house at a sprint, holding a hand gun. Berg cursed the crossed thread which slowed the re-assembly of the bicycle. Another guard appeared and opened fire with an automatic weapon. Berg pulled his bike along a ditch. It wasn’t until he was half way back to Annecy, among a group of almost twenty cyclists, that he noticed play in the handlebars.
It was his prints on the missing washer that inculpated him, that led to his arrest six months later, that forced him to follow Mousnier’s example. The bicycle was not, then, invisible – but it had come close; and had it not been for Mousnier’s fatuous desire for secateurs, had he behaved as he was meant to behave, had he played his (unknowing) role without getting the moves wrong … Why, yes, the utility of Bruno’s murderous vehicle would have matched its cunning.
Jean-Marie shuffled through the afternoon on feet that grew muter by the moment. When he saw the house at the far end of a blizzard – it was, unmistakably, a house, a tiny house cloaked in a velvety mantle of deep and crisp, no doubt the very house that gave snow a good name on postcards, enough of a house in its soft outlines to be instantly recognisable even if its every detail is blanked out – when he sees the house it is not merely his eagerness to spite Bruno and to deride his paramount rule that makes him approach it, find the front door and bang on it with the immemorial anxiety of stranded travellers, of babes lost in woods. It is also the need for warmth, shelter etc.; thermal sybaritism is as potent a force as self-determination, the longing for snugness matches the longing for independence. This house is a resort for body as well as for brain. It will be when someone answers. It was – after he forced open a metal roller shutter and window behind it. TV reception – poor. Heating – radiators in most rooms, but switched off; he placed two electric fires beside each other. Water – frozen pipes. Cooking – bottled gas ring. Provisions – the house was evidently not continuously occupied: a cupboard in the kitchen which was itself little more than a cupboard contained tins of sauerkraut, pork and beans (cassoulet), ham knuckle with peas etc. Furniture – uncomfortable, scuffed, neglected. Each of the four rooms had at least two beds in it. Beds to let? Or was the house not large enough for the family which occasionally used it? He lay weighted by blankets, dazed and sated by rich food and cocoa made with melted snow.
He planned his future in the spiral orange elements of the fires – not, perhaps, as conducive to truly deep thought as embers but an adequate substitute. There would be embers, on the last day, when the electric fires fused and he burnt the furniture in the hearth. He burnt it as much to signal his presence as to generate warmth. By then he had decided, if nothing else, that he no longer wished to participate in the grave game, he wanted to come out into the open, he wanted to discover the humility of a humdrum life, to abjure his exotic incarceration, to rupture the symbiotic contract, plumb the illusion called normality. Any vampire’s well would harbour fantasies of the commonplace. What Jean-Marie discovered was that he was entrapped by his very enslavement, that he was institutionalised, that his wish-fulness was no more than that. He was stunted by the weight of his dependence. When he was arrested (forced entry, theft, criminal damage – the smoke had been spotted by a prying neighbour) he was taken to a cell at Bains-les-Bains. He was obstinate in his refusal to give his name, address, date of birth etc. He declined to cooperate.
A fat policeman with a dewlap offered him a Craven A; he patted the box of 50: ‘Cadeau de Noël. T’es pied noir?’ The tutoyage was a gauged slight which had its effect and did make him feel a boy; and his accent did retain a vestige of guttural broadness. Jean-Marie had received no Christmas present. He was on the run – not from a penal institute, no; but, equally, he did not know who from. Only Bruno Berg and his captors could answer that. Only Bruno Berg could stand surety for him. Was Bruno Berg his next of kin? This was a matter hitherto unconsidered; a second policeman, hungover and rheumy, who had sought the name of his next of kin, shrugged sadly when he didn’t reply.
Jean-Marie rued his failure to answer the civil questions put by these two civil men, resented his adherence to Berg’s dicta among which was the vacuous apothegm that: ‘Pourvu qu’il la boucle c’est le taulard qui boucle le taulier.’ (So long as he keeps his mouth shut it’s the con who’s got the screw banged up.)
The next morning, in distant defiance of Berg, he asked for and was given the cigarette he had refused. He gave his real name, and the address on rue Oberkampf; he told them about the abandoned Panhard; shown on a 1 cm:1 km map where it was that he had been arrested he assisted and identified the car’s probable position – equidistant from the hamlets of Moscou and Jerusalem (laughter). He did not mention that – how many days ago? – he had pushed a young man into the Marne. At noon the fat one brought him potato soup, chicken with rice, a Duralex beaker of red wine, a second cigarette, a paternal smile. At half past noon the other, hungover again and still rheumy, unlocked the cell to ask Jean-Marie the registration number of the Panhard. A few minutes on and the first returns.
His demeanour is different. He looks at Jean-Marie with contemptuous distaste, he picks up the metal tray, he says nothing, the light is extinguished from outside; the day is all dusk now till it’s really dusk and then it’s night.
Jean-Marie bangs on the door of the cell in the basement of the hôtel de ville in this small town where the snow stretches across streets with no disturbance by tyres or feet. A street lamp’s adulterated lustre smears one wall by way of a window high on another. There is a holed pail in the corner. The cell’s light is switched on soon after 5 am; there are voices outside; the sleepy dewlap, tousled as a boy, glares and gestures to him to follow; at the end of the corridor, by the door to the yard behind the hôtel de ville a hook-nosed man extinguishes a cigarette, grinding it into the snow.
He takes Jean-Marie by the arm, hardly acknowledges the dewlap’s flaccid salute. He opens the rear door of a Peugeot for Jean-Marie, gets in after him. The driver doesn’t turn his head. The fulgent streets, the slithery ascent from the town, the silhouette of a chapel, the starry sky, the factory rhythm of chained tyres on snow. ‘Bains-les-Bains,’ says the man beside Jean-Marie. He smells of coffee and women. ‘Bains-les-Bains,’ agrees the driver, ’ouais – c’est pas demain la veille …’ Neither of them speaks again until an hour later when the driver expresses his approval for the Dutch practice of eating cheese at breakfast. By now a murking dawn is seeping over the peaks across the valley; the snow is grey, the canal is black, the mist off the Moselle is white as steam, a train of high-sided wagons pulls alongside the car to shut out the local monochrome. Wipers smear the greasy screen. The north is where the lorries live, they loom out of slush fountains, bellowing and shining. Jean-Marie sleeps with his head on his forearm, dreaming of ghost ships in fog, wincing at their foghorns, wondering why there are pins beneath his eyelids. He tries to cling to dream when they wake him, abort him from sleep’s solace.
Sleet. A steep hill, paved with cobbles, parlously perched terraces – the ubiquity of brick is total, the absence of trees is total. Jean-Marie recalls ‘our country’, the smell of Liège, iron in the air, coal smoke and penury. The cobbles are shining, there is no snow, the sleet is absorbed by the sheen. He gets out of the car and stretches, the damp cold percusses his forehead. The hook-nosed man rings the bell beside a door in a brick wall topped by cheveux de frise. Jean-Marie looks over mean roofs, meagre strands of household smoke and taped-up dormers towards forges, hoppers, chimneys, gas cylinders, the elemental geometry of manufacture. Incuriously, he asks the driver standing tight beside him: ‘On se trouve où?’
‘Pompey,’ he replies, ’un beau coin, hein? Pompey.’
Pompey is where Jean-Marie fell in love for the second time. Pompey is where the Meurthe meets the Moselle, where both rivers conjoin the Marne-to-Rhine canal. This is the deep heart of France, France’s deepest heart: Lorraine crosses, mysticism about the very earth, every grain of soil through your fingers is French. Pompey is Nancy’s port: the rough-tough Nancy boys work here, and the stevedores and the drivers and the lock guys (with their patriotic tattoos)6 whose mistrust of strangers … This is the heart of France precisely because it is so close to Germany: invasions foment nationalism.
They should have been all right here, they had been fighting for France, and they would have been all right had it not been for Jean-Marie’s amorous rashness.
He walked up the chequer path to the house between beds of dead flowers. Hook-nose and the driver followed him, jocularly greeting nôtre Hervé who had admitted them. The front door is open. All three wave him on into the house, they seem to hang back, preoccupied with bonding through joshing.
He is no longer scared: he is a familiar of the unforseeable, used to freefalling through climatic novelties and loveless landscapes. Orientation is no longer a staple, but a luxury that he can do without. He enters the tessellated hall with its old, oxidised gasoliers and enfeebled pot plants and chipped jardinières. It is lit by an unprotected bulb that pushes like a lipoma through wrinkled, discoloured wallpaper. The bowel-brown paint on the dado and achitraves is crazed and matt. This hall, this whole house maybe, has aged no better than humans do. It wears its years like an infirmity. Heaped on a crumpled chaise longue there are clothes, boxes, suitcases, a guitar case, an accordion faced in plastic ruby. He scrutinises them for some moments before opening the guitar case, running his hand across the perpendicular instrument’s neck; holding up (as though to ascertain its size) a collarless black corduroy jacket. These are his possessions. He turns to the three men who stand on the house’s threshold.
Hervé points to a room off the hall: ‘Par là. A gauche.’ He is inured to spatial achronia, temporal dislocation; they are what happen to him; but they are meant to be serial, episodic. This is cyclical. His instruments, his clothes, his pistol (?), his passports (??). The driver is attempting to make three fingers of his right hand stand whilst the little one crouches in shame. Jean-Marie’s collection of horizontally-striped ties droops from a hidden hanger. His life has moved beside him, in parallel; material normality is waiting to greet him, in the wrong place; the solace of chattels is lessened by their transportation: and they are tainted with the house’s drabness – they add up to no more than a pile of bribes. This is what he has been worth. His price. Bought by chrome and wood, plastic and metal, gewgaws and clothes whose moment has passed. He opened the door that Hervé had indicated.
A man who was a version of Bruno Berg sat at a table, gripping the chestnut velvet cloth with his bandaged hands; he sat as though he had been there for ever, as though he were part of the gloomy room; as though waiting for a meal that would never be served. He looked up at Jean-Marie. Pain. His gaze returned to his hands and to the mottled material they took comfort in. This new Bruno Berg can divine patterns in nap the way other philosophers can in electric fires, embers, clouds, running water. This new Bruno Berg is an older Bruno Berg.
Ten days ago, on 22 December 1963, when Jean-Marie last saw him, he was thirty-seven years and six months of age. Now he is the other side of fifty. He was darkhaired, the new Berg’s hair is grey. His facial skin was lightly tanned. His complexion is now multicoloured – gamboge, gravy, yolk, mauve, many many crimsons – and it’s freshly textured, resurfaced with lesions and welts and highgloss patches where the skin shines like buffed ochre. There are burn holes, blanket stitches, droops of withered tissue. One eye is partially closed, its lid is as swollen as an udder. Berg’s body of boastful muscle and bonded sinew has been replaced by a flaccid apparatus hardly able to bear its diminished weight. Berg looked again at Jean-Marie with inextinguishable shame. The right eye, whose lachrymal organs were intact, poured a viscous and continual tear over the furrowed site of his cheekbone. When he attempted a smile (of greeting, recognition, regret that he was still alive) a bulb of blue tongue lolled between smashed incisors and blistered gums. He spoke like an animal whose tongue is yet unadapted for language.
Jean-Marie winced: how could he now abandon his dependant who wrestled with his organs to overcome para-aphasia, to wring from them a hardly decipherable ‘Mon Marie … mon Marie’?
How could he abandon this traducement of his familiar who tried to acknowledge him from the far side of the chasmic table which was the untrespassable boundary between life and dark.
Bruno was a caller from purgatory – which is an unshakable carapace the tortured are bound to carry all their days till they go beyond. Bruno might have had concrete (béton) brutally poured in his mouth.
They hadn’t thought of that, the shadow servants of France charged with the extinction of the OAS who had seized on Bruno Berg as their Christmas treat. He had been tortured for six days by men whose offices, rank, agency, very existence was not acknowledged by governmental executive. Men who took their work seriously yet enjoyed its creative side, derived pleasure from their base inventions, from their ad hoc transformations of quotidian, pacific instruments: there is nothing, from pencils to soft furnishings, from books to perfume atomisers, that won’t fit the bill. Shoes, shirts, ladders, bones. You name it. These men enjoyed double function items – the bottle they could first drink from, the cigarette they could smoke, the spiny crustacean whose meat they could suck, the belt that would again be holding up their trousers when they went home on Christmas Eve for Mass and boudin blanc, bearing gifts that had come in handy during the day (that was little Alain’s new bicycle pump).
And the elements – how they loved the elements! Water and fire in their varieties excited them. And don’t forget the wonder of electricity, its secret powers, its ubiquity, how it comes through the wall to the aid of the inquisitor who’s just a little browned off by this evasion, by that silence, that exhausted silence which has lasted, oh, ten seconds too long. We can all avail ourselves of these gifts. We can all learn from the CRS’s imaginative conversion of magnetos into instruments nicknamed les gégènes (generals; these magnetos enjoy that degree of authority). Berg’s genitals were burnt and bruised by this means, a live wire was inserted into his urethra by a cross-eyed man smoking a Royale Gout Maryland and humming as he laboured. Berg pleaded that he was Belgian. The other torturer (hair en brosse, horse face) put down his newspaper and performed a sight gag about a Belgian knotting his shoelaces. (He lifted one foot onto a chair, leaned forward and attempted to tie the laces of the shoe that rested on the floor.)
The cross-eyed torturer murmured: ‘Le beau-frère de ma cousine est pharmacien à Ostende … J’espère que toi tu n’as pas la vérole mon Belgico.’ He looked with worried pride at his handcraft, at the wire invading the bound man’s shrivelled penis. He scrupulously washed his hands over a basin in the corner of the windlowless room before he flicked the switch and kicked Berg’s very core.
In the late afternoon of 27 December the colonel commanding the barracks at Vincennes was informed of the interrogation that was being conducted, illegitimately, in the subterranean cells. He instructed the adjudant-chef that ces espèces de barbouses7 should be immediately removed, with their prisoner, by force if necessary: Horse Face remarked to the adjudant-chef that the colonel was thus undoubtedly revealing OAS sympathies and that they might be back for him. Bruno Berg was driven, blindfolded (not necessary, he was unconscious), across Paris to an office block at Gennevilliers leased by the BEL8 in the name of The Brazilian Yerbama Company of London SA (someone’s little joke). The site determined and limited methods of interrogation; it was a steel-framed structure whose thin curtain walls were not soundproof. Screams could be heard in the adjacent blocks of flats. It encouraged a considered approach to torture; it was consequently avoided by the more eager agents who resented the time taken in taping and then un-taping the mouths of victims. The BEL’s executive was consistently importuned by its operatives who claimed that work rate could only be improved by a move to a traditionally constructed building, one with loadbearing walls a metre or more thick: Vauban understood the exigencies of the interrogative art. The success of Berg’s inquisitors at Gennevilliers served only to convince the executive that the majority of agents were blaming their habitual shortcomings on the building rather than themselves.
Berg talked: quality bubble, and lots of it. When he regained consciousness he found himself in a carpeted room, teak panelled, with spindly-legged ebonised furniture that was comfortable, despite its angularity. An uncurtained window led to a balcony. It was night. Horse Face and Cross Eyes had brought their kit with them or had obtained similar, but they had no recourse to it. They’d have liked to have used it as they’d have liked to use certain of the gifts they’d received: little Alain, a father’s boy, understood paternal needs, longed to enter the forbidden and unmentioned family trade – his present had been a stapler so strong springed that it took a fist to deliver the twin tines. Sorry, son, he didn’t need it, your dad. He talked instead. He persuaded Berg that the loyalty to be overcome was not to a cause already lost, nor to the organisation9 that had professed that cause, but to the idea and practice of secrecy itself. He persuaded Berg that the only interest he shared with those whom he had fought alongside, bombed alongside, was the habit of covertness. He argued that were Berg to cooperate he would be freeing himself from the figurative sewers; that once he had crept out from behind the wainscot of history he would be giving himself the opportunity to spend he rest of his life (after, that is, a brief period in protection until all those named by him, who were thus potential assassins, had been apprehended) in the light, in the open, in the extra-pure air that is available only to those who are redeemed by confession. The grass’s grass is greener.
The alternative to such exalted rehabilitation was crudely alluded to: ‘Le destin tragique de Bastien-Thiry.10 Ça fait réfléchir, non?’ Whilst he was being tortured, cooked and aged Berg transcended fear of death. But now even the second of pain that might accompany such a formalised release was too much to court: firing squads hurt, and Bruno Berg never wanted to be hurt again, so long as he lived, not even in the very passage of his extinction, not even were he to have no subsequent lifespan in which to suffer and recall the pain of the eight ventrical bullets whose simultaneity is impaired by the varying distances from him of the ranked muzzles and by the inconsistent speeds of reaction to the order to fire: the bullets from the centre of the line should strike first – but the advantages of proximity might be overcome by slow reflexes on the part of those guns. And had not Degueldre taken fifteen minutes to die? Had he not required five coups de grace? Bruno Berg gripped the soft covering fabric of the solacious chair he sat in; he never wanted to be uncomfortable again. Despite the damage to his speech organs he talked initially for six hours. Sulphurous dawn was creeping from beyond the distant roofs of St Denis by the time that he asked if he might be allowed to sleep. Over a period of twenty hours Berg told his inquisitors more than enough to gain them promotion. This information included:
The names of the three former soldiers who had executed fourteen bank robberies in Algeria and Metropolitan France between February 1961 and March 1963; their current whereabouts; the names of some of the personnel involved in eight further such robberies.
The precise locations in Metropolitan France of six caches of arms and explosives. The names of the men and women in charge of ten other caches.
The names in which OAS/CNR deposits were held in Madrid, Saragossa, Alicante, Bern, Freiburg.
The names of five companies registered in Jersey and Andorra which had been used for the purchase of arms, ammunition, explosives, vehicles, safe houses etc.
Details of two separate plans to purchase armoured vehicles from Italy.
The name of the CRS officer who had tipped him off that his bungalow on the outskirts of Lyons was to be raided (p. 326).
A scheme to persuade sympathetic Spanish army officers to supply armoured vehicles to an OAS cell in Perpignan.
A list of officers of the Gendarmerie Mobile who had accepted bribes in Algiers, Oran, Orléansville and Biskra.
A list of officers of that organisation who had served the OAS unpaid and had provided information, ammunition etc.
A list of officers of that organisation who had never betrayed it but against whom he held personal grudges (he knew that the scope and depth of his knowledge was such that a certain amount of playful misinformation could be safely included).
Four prospective plots to assassinate de Gaulle – their code names (Guêpier, Stégosaurus, Cyprès, Mac Beth (sic)), their authors, the circumstances under which they might be prosecuted.
The names of two pied noir irrigation engineers now reduced to working as plumbers who had devised a means of poisoning the water supply of Colombey-Les-Deux-Eglises.
A list of forty-one foreign politicians, statesmen, journalists etc. whose proclamations in favour of Algerian independence had amounted to attempts to interfere with and to influence internal French matters and who were thus under sentence of death.
Berg admitted to four robberies, two abductions, two attempted murders in which he had himself played an ‘integral’ role. He admitted to supplying explosives, detonators, timing devices on fourteen occasions. He admitted to constructing six bombs, one of which failed to explode (Nevers 2.5.62). He admitted to having been ‘quartermaster’ for the attempt to release Lieutenant Roger Degueldre from La Santé three days before his messy execution. He admitted only to those crimes which he suspected he was suspected of. Thus he made no reference to the random shootings that he had carried out from the windows of stolen cars driven by Jean-Marie Meyer-Decker through the warren of Muslim streets north of Barbès Rochechouart (La Goutte d’Or); after all, there were so many patriots out there taking pots at the Halals that he had no idea whether he’d scored any hits let alone bull’s eyes, and he wasn’t going to boast even though he was affected those few days in that room by an unprecedented candour and confessional daring.
He talked profusely about his blood, about Neild’s Syndrome, about the need to track down Jean-Marie, the blood he carried and the Panhard that probably carried him, reg 8928 ET 75. He told them about his dependence on the boy. He didn’t tell them about his part in a bullion robbery in Lille because some local smalltimers had been arrested and convicted and who was he to tip the cart of justice?
He heard himself ask for a comb. He scourged his scalp. When, five days later, Jean-Marie entered the sombre room in the house where Berg had been brought for his own safety he had a metal comb in his pocket. He tugs at his newly grey hair, he combs it hard, renders his crown the furrowed site of a self inflicted punishment, a topological analogue of the capital punishment which the many men and women whom he had betrayed will inflict upon him if they have the chance – and they may have, for betrayal does not inevitably result in arrest; moreover, the betrayed have their allies, those (spectral, peripheral) third persons with vengeful arms who are destroying not a life but a mere name. A name whose face they may never have seen till it appears at the end of a sight, at the middle of a cross, a face that is nothing more than a target.
By the time that Berg was arrested and tortured the OAS/CNR had been reduced to a dis-organisation devoted to the extinction of its former members and associates who had betrayed it; that was its exclusive preoccupation. And as more were betrayed and arrested and tortured into talking so the number of potential targets grew; it should have been a golden age for assassins and freelance guns but, of course, the more who talked the fewer there were left to stalk and snipe at. So the average freelance was faced by an embarras du choix, and the chances of survival for those who had talked increased exponentially. And one blessed day everyone would have talked. There would be no one left to torture, no one left to hit, no one left to do the hits: a Utopia will have been created by betrayal which is also a form of loyalty, a new start in loyalty to a different code/faith/gang.
Nonetheless Bruno Berg lived in fear in the gloomy house in Pompey where he poured a monocular tear, where he had tried to hug Jean-Marie but couldn’t because every muscle in his body was tender to an embrace’s pressure. Jean-Marie gave him a transfusion instead, a kiss in blood, vein to vein (via the mediation that would become habitual – a nurse from Nancy called Paul Hellman who never took longer than half an hour to arrive with his spikes, tubes, drips, phials of coagulant Factor VIII). Jean-Marie gave him that transfusion the morning they re-met even though he didn’t need it. The boy’s pity was that strong. His devotion was that deep, and sanguinary emission was its expression. Berg was uncheered by the rush of blood and by those that succeeded it. He rarely ventured into the garden. He combed his thin grey hair, he dabbed at his scalp with rubbing alcohol, he referred to himself as a coward unfit to share the earth’s air with those whom he had informed against, he persistently accused the men who guarded him of using him as bait to entrap greater patriots still at large. Representatives of the government agency which did not exist assured him that he was free to leave whenever he wanted. He wept. He climbed to the attic storey and gazed through an oeil de boeuf window towards a scythe of silver river whose destination was Germany: he thought about it. He read dietetic articles and one book – La Noblesse Des Salades by Jules Lagrange, former salad critic of Sud-Ouest and author of Du Vin, Du Vin Et Encore Du Vin. He reread old articles that had been brought from rue Oberkampf; in the corner of the crepuscular room stood a pile of them, tall as a man at prayer; beside it were Bruno Berg’s albums and mementoes of his martial and secret lives. A warrior remembers – with pride, more often with bitterness. He places objects on the velvet-covered table – a desiccated finger (Philippeville 1957); the kitchen knife with which he had scalped Florence Deroose (p. 142); a crinkle-edged photograph of an erect penis (Hannoy 1953); another photograph, of a naked, flat-chested girl who might be a boy with his genitals clutched by the cache-sex of his arse (Brussels 1960); book matches from Le Robinson, Léopoldville. It is septuagenarian warriors who are meant to look back, not those in early middle age. Madame Graber calls him to lunch. He is not strong enough to confront her. Mammilophobic, he despises this heavy-chested chatterer, this lactic animal whose incuriosity fazes him – who does she think he is? He abhors her chirpy cheeriness in the face of a life which has tipped shit on her. He abhors her lack of gravity, her cosy diminution of evil’s wonders to the naughtily commonplace. He abhors her breezy disregard for his dictates: he fears that she cooks pollutants for Jean-Marie – cream and onion flans, cured pork, brains. He warns Jean-Marie that ingestion of brains contaminates man with the memory of a slaughtered animal, that it abases man, makes him dream of meadows and of the terminal truck to the abattoir. Berg fears too that the meat she stews for him is lapin sans tête (butchers’ euphemism for cat); he is convinced that she serves him donkey instead of horse (a noble animal). The men who guard him mock his remonstrations. He slumps slighted; fingers gripping the edge of the oilclothed kitchen table; he drags a comb through his old man’s hair; his wounds don’t heal; his polychrome face is here to stay; his sores are perpetual; caffeine fails to keep him awake; his vision is impaired. He even mistrusts Jean-Marie: he mistrusts his newfound fondness for the blues, which idiom the boy rehearses every morning; he especially mistrusts his daily sorties from the house (he has given up pleading with him to stay home play cards).
Most every afternoon Jean-Marie dresses in one of the suits he had never worn and bids him adieu, saying he’s taking the bus into Nancy. Berg is too scared, too exhausted, to go along; he doesn’t realise or doesn’t acknowledge that the greater patriots (who must be out there on the streets and in the pissoirs, at café windows with guns packed beneath the table) would not recognise in this enfeebled frame the man who shopped them. He mutters something about slave music, jungle rhythms, the primitivism of twelve bar (though he doesn’t call it that); he rants hoarsely about everything he fought against – the Nazis whose mythology was Indo-European, not ours; the Muslims, a few of whom even formed an SS brigade; the apologists for négritude who would undo everything that a pan-European such as Berg was heir to; the physiognomical affinity between the St Louis bluesman Laird-Moncrieff Brown and the ape they’d thrown poppers to in Basle zoo. Jean-Marie shrugged and left, this day and the day before, the day after. Some days he did go to Nancy, to the cinema, to the gardens of La Pepinière (poetry of naked trees in Jan and Feb), to the streets west of the railway whose facades (wanting right-angles, stony, bonelike, a tectonic ossuary, a premonition of houses built from mass death) unlocked a key into toddler time when he’d held his mother’s hand in Ixelles all those years ago, before there were hot reptilian rivers and fraudulent fathers and parish songs untouched by the nerve of need. He was still proud though to see one of Albeau’s records on sale in Salut Les Disques, rue des Carmes. ‘Je me souviens de …’ – but his memory of cheapskate memoriousness would be broken by the wail of blues guitars from the shop’s speakers: Laird-Moncrieff Brown’s sincerity got to him. He was at an age when throat cancer plus steel strings equalled depth.
Some days Albeau’s ‘son’ never took the bus into Nancy; he walked that way sure enough, towards the bus stop – out the metal gate and right, in case Bruno was watching (he was). Then, at the end of the road, he turned into a steep brick alley, made his secret way through terraced allotments then up a ragged track on the forest’s edge to the asbestos roofed shack where Madame Graber lived with her washing-line of brassières like serial airsocks and with her son who worked foundry shifts, who had the big bones, blond crop and horrible choler of his father, a one-night bosch in Nancy in ’44. Less than a night in fact, but Madame Graber sought to dignify the relationship by adding a few hours to its duration. And by giving him a name (Hansi) and a cv. She had never married. No one would have her.
It wasn’t so much her disgrace: there were many such – a girl has to pay for the drinks bought her, that’s understood. It was the form her disgrace took: Bernard. A Swabian-blooded child who grew into a violent, myopic man. He hated his mother. He despised his bottle-glass spectacles. He loved France, the country his mother had betrayed with her womb. He loved France so much it said so on his arms in skin pictures, cutaneous legends. He loved his patch. He could not see (literally, too) further than Pompey. Centre of Bernard’s world. A world away from Frouard on the other side of the Moselle (they’re different in Frouard), let alone from Nancy, Maxéville, Malzéville, Jarville-La-Malgrange – places up to ten kilometres away where they exhibited traits such as cunning, ostentation, strangeness. Not to be trusted, those from outside Pompey; not to be trusted, and to be treated with hostility, silent animosity (a speciality, that), to be frightened off with imbecilic stares, with the belligerent slab of Bernard’s forehead which had been granted him as an instrument of assault, as compensation for its lack of contents. So Jean-Marie only visited Madame Graber when this creature was at work.
She made English tea for him, inducted him into the rites of (comparative) gerontophilia – she was fifty, she owned a brightside memory for every month of every year, she remembered Albeau, she tra-la’d the chorus of ‘Plus Belle Que Toutes Les Aubes’, she turned over half this shack which was an album of her life, of a half-century’s crazes, before she found a photograph torn from a magazine: Alban Meyer-Decker’s sharkteeth gleamed for the camera. She held it up for swivel-headed comparison. She nodded knowingly: ‘Les joues, ouais, les joues.’ He didn’t disabuse her, he didn’t want to mar her pleasure; of course she had faith in the transmission of bone structure, it was only through the twenty-year development of her son’s face that she could recollect the panting father’s. She never asked who Bruno Berg was or why Jean-Marie was with him. She pushed coke into the metal stove. She stroked the cats that left a hair mat all over. She showed him gewgaws and told the story of each (alarm clock with boxing hares, antimacassar poker-worked with a haloed saint, plastic bottle in the form of a cactus etc.); she recalled rubbish piles, gutters, markets, employers. There had been an Englishman (very nearly a milord, an eminent man in the import of agricultural machinery, lovely manners) who rented a stately apartment in Place de la Carrière in Nancy – so much wood to polish her arm was always numb. He had been tickled that she should live in Pompey. When he returned home he sent her souvenirs of the English city of that name and cuttings from newspapers about its famous soccer team. She sat beside Jean-Marie on the undulating sofa. She gave him a china man o’ war to hold; two lead battleships; a beer mat printed ‘Blighty’s Best Does Pompey Proud’; out-of-register postcards of a war memorial, a sailor’s hat, half-clothed people on a beach, a fairground that seemed to rise from the sea – the cheap exoticism heightened by the site. He told her he’d like to ride that roller coaster above the briny. She nodded: ‘Luna Parc-sur-mer.’ She placed her hand on his penis the way she always did. Whilst he inspected a 1954 calendar photograph of seated footballers whose faces spoke of the famous English diet, whose hair gleamed with cooking grease, whose shirt badges (star, crescent moon) suggested sodales of a cabbalistic society, she kneaded and squeezed his balls. He was used to it, but still shocked. Her procedure was invariable. She unzips his trousers, compares him to Bernard: ‘T’es bien monté, tu sais. Ca, c’est une grosse bite. Très jolie … Mon pauvre Bernard, il n’a que ça.’ Here, with finger and thumb against his bulging urethra, she indicates the measure of her son’s shortfall. ‘Et sa jute – ç’est triste à dire. C’est pas du grand cru.’ A brute in all departments save the one that matters. She does not let Jean-Marie touch her.
Froggatt, Dickinson, Harris, Henderson – the eyes of Englishmen with grotesque hair gaze into his as she rubs and slaps and grips and strokes. She does not let him lie on the familial bed (there in the corner) that she shares with her son. The cats watch too. She stokes the internal fire. He closes his eyes: the red labia of that far-off foreign Pompey greet dicks home from sea; they plough the sea like conning towers, they’re enveloped on the shore by vulval waltzers, by carmine octopi, big wick dippers, pleasure-flesh rides; the tars, the tarts, oily hair, red tongues; the screams of bed and fairground. Madame Graber pushes his hand from her breast. Hot hydrant, intolerable pleasure. She insists that he take away the sodden handkerchief. They drink more tea, she takes a shot of rum in hers, savours it, makes no further allusion to the few minutes’ friction, his meat treat. She is reverently enthusiastic about Bernard’s appetite for pork stew and cider. She tells Jean-Marie that tomorrow will be a wonderful day because she can feel it. She warns him that if he washes his hair too often it will lose its lustre.
It was Estevenin who saw him. The dribbling old drunk was digging celeriac from his allotment plot the first time he saw Jean-Marie, in the lane, at dusk, beyond the leafless hedge. Four days later Estevenin was hacking a frost-bitten cabbage from his patch of God-given, dung-rich, patrimonial, sacred soil. He hawked an orb of phlegm, noticed that the boy started at the sound, wondered at the way he scampered down the crisp rutted track between the precipitous terraces.
Bernard, staring into the irremediable opacity of his cider11 at the bar in the irremediable gloom of Le Pommier De Pompey, listened to Estevenin then took him by the throat. The first man he’d taken by the throat since leaving work that day. Estevenin swore on his mother’s stove, bought Bernard more cider, repeated what he said with full complement of placatory hand signals, left the bar.
Next morning, before daybreak, Bernard accompanies his mother to her work. The two guards nod. They know him: the four-eyed moron who hefts the veg, the veg who hefts the crates. They hardly notice that this morning he carries nothing. They do notice that Madam Graber’s jaw is bruised and that her lower lip is lacerated but they think nothing of it. The guards are twitchy; Berg’s suspicion that he is bait is indubitably correct. The guns are jumpy. Word of Berg’s whereabouts has almost certainly been leaked, almost certainly by design: if police agencies know where he has gone to the mattresses then it follows that his putative assassins know too – the information had only to be imparted to, say, Captain —— of the CRS at Chaville for it to be sure to find its way to a desired destination. The guards hardly notice that the moron pushes his mother up the path to the house, that he prods her flank, snatches at her coat sleeve, that he manhandles her through the front door as though she’s a bulbous parcel, that he kicks it shut so that the glass panes rattle in their frozen frames.
Two minutes pass before they hear the screams, the oaths, the visceral moans, the repeated thuds. They run inside. Bernard Graber had taken the wrong man. Jean-Marie was asleep in his attic room, he heard nothing. Bernard had dragged Bruno Berg cowering from his bed, kicked him, picked him up, butted him, banged his head against a marble washstand, filled the curtained room with northern violence, with dull might like smog and cold, his fists were boulders, he hurt, he maimed, he was double himself with cuckold’s fury. He broke Berg. There was blood on the ceiling, bone on the chandelier. The wrong blood, the wrong bone, the wrong man, the wrong death – which was itself the wrong result. Bernard Graber’s intentions (hardly self-articulated) had been less ambitious. He merely sought to deter his mother’s lover, speak to him in manual esperanto, teach him a crash course. Had, that dark dawn, he taken the right one he would not have had a life on his hands: Jean-Marie was swift, fit, cunning. Bruno Berg was an invalid, stripped of all will to fight mortality by children’s toys and signals magnetos. He had not, sure, expected to die this way: this brute’s was not the last face that he had anticipated, this was not the means of execution that he was meant to suffer, this was unfitting, improper, this was a bad joke. He had thought about death every day since he arrived in Pompey at this house which was to be his last. His betrayals had bought him an extra two months and five days. Were they worth the posthumous opprobrium? They weren’t good times. They were the worst of times, in Pompey, in captivity. And at the end of it, a prank, an indignity, a despatch unworthy of a soldier.
Bernard Graber made no mistake, and he was not the victim of either his myopia or his alcoholism. Estevenin’s account had included no description of the man he had seen. As she cowered among the papers and trashed vases and uprooted souvenirs and blasphemed bondieuserie that her ranting cider-driven son had swept from the shack’s shelves Madame Graber had the wit to realise that she could achieve two in one by protecting Jean-Marie, inculpating the misogynist with the comb and resolving the problem of her son the bosch. It was Madame Graber that did for Bruno Berg, that took away Jean-Marie’s dependent buttress.
The boy was to be an orphan for a second time: during the eleven days that Bruno lay in a coma Jean-Marie hardly left his room. He gave blood, he gave thanks in blood to the insentient man who’d given him purpose, suits, the lost Lambretta, guitars, adventure.
When Bruno died they removed his body in a burlap sack. He was buried two days after Jean-Marie’s eighteenth birthday, across the river, beside the steel mills at Bouxières-Aux-Dames (yellow sky, ragged horses). Jean-Marie’s nose bled that cold afternoon. Madame Graber stood beside him. No one else attended.
Bernard Graber was charged with the murder of Bruno Berg and with membership of an illegal organisation; later he would be charged with the murder the previous autumn of another informer; he didn’t understand what was happening to him.
Jean-Marie was allowed to take his genuine passport and his possessions. He carried them in a wheelbarrow to Madame Graber’s shack. He greeted Estevenin whenever he saw him. Madame Graber cuddled him, cooked for him, addressed him as ‘mon fils’. Her expression of sexual intimacy never varied. The nurse Paul Hellman arranged for him to sell his rare blood once a week at the Clinique Lallement-Gaudry. He had troubles with his work permit. He loaded barges, swept stairwells, shot animals at the abattoir on Boulevard d’Austrasie. The trusting eyes of kine! They trusted him not to do them harm, and he smiles into the bullock’s stupid slow eyes the second before he makes its head erupt. He joined a rock band called Les Corvairs. He left. He joined another called Les Wisconsins. The first song he wrote was ‘Luna Parc-sur-Mer’. The first line of the first song he wrote is: ‘Le port de Pompey est très bizarre.’ Les Wisconsins became Nos Cheveux Verts. They made a kind of living. They toured. He sold his blood all over France. He always returned to the shack above the allotments at Pompey, he always had a souvenir for Madame Graber – something from Angoulême, Narbonne, from distant Alicante where they played to an audience of pieds noirs who demanded a reprise of ‘Mais Où Sont Les Plages d’Antan?’, a hymn of resentment towards the bicots and bougnouls occupying ‘our’ beaches, cafés and houses around Oran. In the general amnesty of 1968 Bernard Graber was released since his crime(s) were ‘act(s) of war’.
Jean-Marie had all his things out of the shack before the myope arrived home from Mulhouse. He feared that Lorraine was no longer safe for him. He tried to persuade the rest of the band to leave with him for Paris. They were loyal to their soil.
He played a few gigs in Brussels with Le Jardin Biologique. The longer his hair grew the more it shone. He tried to trade on Albeau’s name, get a recording contract that way. Albeau was forgotten – and, besides, these songs, well …
He followed an Irish band to London. But it was unsatisfactory. It lasted three weeks. He missed Madame Graber, the security, the bulk, the heavy-breasted warmth.
He was queuing with his guitar and grip at Victoria Station for a boat ticket, a ticket back to a misery where he at least spoke the language, when he noticed a poster showing a man o’war, a battleship, a fairground rising from the sea.
That rain-shiny autumn night he strolled along the front at Pompey; there were lights across the water. He leaned against a lamp-post outside the deserted fairground, felt the kiss of the Spithead Bite, liked it, decided to stick around a few days: this might be England’s deep south but it felt like the quintessence of the north to him. He grinned at Nelson’s statue. He was on his way to find a cheap hotel when he heard an an electric band at work. A stencilled notice beside the door to the Remember The Hood’s public bar announced ‘tonite – rider’. The pub’s back room was all hash smoke and kohl, sexual menace and swollen pupils, violet irises and mauve velvet. He felt unaccountably happy: he breathed deeply, joined the congregation, drank a glass of rum. The band played protracted and amorphous improvisations on a riff they’d long forgotten. When they stopped the bassist grunted: ‘Back in ten minutes. See you.’
As he came down the three steps from the stage clutching a sleever of Guinness Jean-Marie approached him. He looked surprised, he glanced at the big hands and plectrum nails, he shrugged: ‘Why not?’ He led Jean-Marie, his guitar and grip onto the scuffed boards.
‘What’s your name man?’
‘Jean-Marie Meyer-Decker.’
‘Come again.’
‘?’
‘Say it again, your name.’
‘Jean … Marie –’
‘OK. People. People. People. We got a guest artist,’ yelled Sonny Butt into the microphone. ‘He’s called Mary.’