THE LITTLE RED RENAULT rolled along the back roads, following almost exactly the same course the two German buses had taken half an hour before. The packed crowd around the French dressing room had given Jean-Paul a tremendous ovation when he appeared, and the police had to wedge a path to his parked car. Now, out in the country, with his mother beside him, the bitterness of defeat still hung over his heart.
She knew how desperately he had wanted victory in that match and how badly he felt. So she said little at first. Then, as they spun along toward Nogent-Plage, as they drew farther and farther from the stadium, from the crowd and the noise and the scarred turf, above all from the black depression which had pervaded the dressing room, he began to answer briefly.
“Yes, to play well is satisfying. I did my best. But I was playing today for France. I was part of a team.”
“The whole team played well. You deserved to win.”
“Both teams played well; both deserved to win.” There was a hardness, a bleakness about his voice. Unfortunately he was right. Both teams deserved to win and fate had not smiled upon France.
She tried to change the subject. “You know the thing that amazed me about him?” No need to explain to whom she referred. “He seems so little changed. Prison and all the years since the war haven’t greatly altered him. How did he look close up?”
“Like Gibraltar. Like the world’s best goalie. Put him on our side, and we would have won by six to ten points. Not that Georges Bosquier isn’t a good goalkeeper; he is, the best in France. But the baron today... well, I’ve never seen anything like it and nobody else has either.”
She was silent for several miles. He was right; nobody had ever seen such a goalie in action before.
“You know, Jean-Paul, I’ve always felt all my life that there was something different about the Germans, even about the Herr Oberst, even before that day.... He... you see... they’ve been our enemies....”
The young man shrugged his shoulders. “Oh, Maman, they are no different from ourselves. They want to win; they would always give anything to beat us. We too wanted to win; we gave everything to beat them and failed. As a boy I felt we would never do the things the Germans did to us during the war. Then came our colonial wars, in Vietnam and in Algeria. Oh, especially in Algeria. Tortures. Massacres. Cruelty. Dropping bombs on innocent villages. You see the point is that everyone loses control in a war. Sometimes in sport, too.”
They were coming to the sea now, and it was calm in the June evening. Madame Varin started to protest. Surely this was going a bit far. She pointed out that the Algerian war was not the same as a World War.
“You must realize, Jean-Paul, Algeria was a département of France. It had been so ever since 1830... a long time, my boy.”
He was tired, ravaged by defeat when victory had been so close he could taste it. Although he loved his mother and tried to be patient, he burst out, “Yes, of course I know. Did I not hear this repeated a hundred times in school, in books, in the newspapers! I know it all. I can say it by heart, like every French schoolboy. I learned about the army that landed at Sidi-Ferraud on June 14, 1830. About the Insurrection of 1871 and the creation of the new département of Algeria. I know it all. But what is the fact? The fact is that we invaded North Africa and colonized it. We subjugated the people....”
“But Jean-Paul, surely Algeria is different. It had been French for over a hundred years. Even the Moslems were French citizens.”
“Yes, they were French citizens, and they were allowed to serve in our armed forces and die for France. What other rights did they have? Algeria had been settled by French colons for a hundred years....”
“My boy, you forget the Marêchal Lyautey. And how the Moslems prayed for him in their mosques during the war with the Riff and how they sobbed openly in the streets at his death. Ah, you are far too young to remember these things.”
“Maman, chère Maman, I know about the marêchal. He built Morocco into a fruitful consumer for French products.”
How stubborn he was, she thought, how exactly like his father with these strange ideas of Marxism and equality. “Jean-Paul, you forget that we poured money, French money, into North Africa, and lives too, thousands of them, some of our noblest and best, men who had the interests of the North Africans at heart.”
“Spare me, Maman,” he said, fatigue in his voice. “True, we poured money into North Africa, but we took millions more from it. We....”
His mother interrupted. “Look! What’s that? Ahead, off to the right. It looks like a glow on the horizon. A fire, perhaps. Could it be in Nogent-Plage?”
He looked ahead. There was a slight glow in the distance over the cliffs. “Well, it could be. But most likely it is Varengeville. They’re forever having fires there. We’ll be able to tell when we get around the next headland.”
He increased the little car’s speed. They zipped along the empty coastal road toward the glow in the distance. Soon it became larger. Yes, it could be Nogent-Plage.