CHAPTER SIXTY-FOUR

In the Boiler Room, 2

IN A TINY PLACE with walls full of meters, manometers, and pipes of every calibre, adjacent to the room where the boiler itself is installed, a workman squats, poring over a plan on tracing paper placed on the bare concrete floor. He is wearing leather gloves and a jerkin and seems moderately angry, no doubt because he is obliged to carry out the stipulated terms of a maintenance contract, realises that this year cleaning the boiler is going to take longer than he had anticipated, and knows that therefore his profit will decline proportionately.

This was the hideout where Olivier Gratiolet set up his radio in the war, as well as the alcohol duplicator on which he printed his daily newssheet. It was a cellar in those days and belonged to François. Olivier knew he would have to spend long stretches down here and set it up appropriately, insulating all the exits with old doormats, rags, and bits of cork which Gaspard Winckler gave him. He used candlelight, kept out the cold by wrapping himself in Marthe’s rabbit-fur coat and a bobbled balaclava, and for feeding himself brought down from Hélène Brodin’s flat a little lattice-work larder in which he could keep for a few days a bottle of water, a bit of salami, some goat cheese his grandfather had managed to get to him from Oléron, and a few of those wrinkled acid-tasting cider apples which were just about the only fresh fruit you could get at all easily at the time.

He would settle into an ancient, oval-backed Louis XV–style armchair which had no armrests and only two and a half legs left, using a whole system of blocks to keep it stable. Its faded violet upholstery depicted a sort of Nativity scene: there was the Holy Virgin holding in her lap a newborn babe with an unnaturally large head, and, standing in for both the bearers of gifts and the Magi – and in the absence of the ass and ox – a bishop flanked by his two acolytes, all set in a surprising craggy landscape leading down to a sheltered harbour with marble palaces and hazy pinkish roofs.

To pass the long hours spent waiting during radio silence, he would read a bulky novel he had found in a chest. Whole pages were missing, and he had to try to find the links between the episodes he had. They concerned, amongst other things, a wicked Chinaman who snarled; a brave girl with hazel eyes; a big, quiet fellow whose knuckles turned white when someone really annoyed him; and someone called Davis who claimed to come from Natal, in South Africa, but had never set foot in the place.

Or he would rummage through the heaps of remnants that were piled up in burst wicker trunks. In them he found an old diary dating from 1926, full of obsolete phone numbers, a wasps’ nest, a worn watercolour depicting ice-skaters on the Neva, and little Hachette editions of the French classics, which brought back painful memories of Corneille

Rome n’est plus dans Rome, elle est tout où je suis

and Racine

Oui, c’est Agamemnon, c’est ton roi qui t’éveille

and the celebrated muddle of

Prends un siège Cinna et assieds-toi par terre

Et si tu veux parler commence par te taire

and other gobbets of Mithridate and Britannicus which he had had to learn by heart and recite straight off without grasping a word. He also found some old toys which were certainly the ones François had played with: a clockwork spinning top and a little Negro of painted tin with a keyhole in his side and no breadth to speak of, just consisting of two more or less fused profiles, and his wheelbarrow now all bent and broken.

Olivier hid the wireless set in another toy: a chest whose slightly sloped top was pierced with holes that had originally been numbered – 03 was the only number still visible – into which you had to try to throw a metal quoit; the game was called barrel or frog, because the hardest hole to get was made to look like a frog with a huge gaping mouth. As for the duplicator – one of the small models used by restaurateurs to run off menus – it was hidden at the bottom of a trunk. After Paul Hébert’s arrest, the Germans, led by the air-raid warden Berloux, came to search the cellars, but they scarcely glanced at Olivier’s: it was the dustiest and most cluttered of all, the one where it was hardest of all to imagine a “terrorist” hiding.

During the Liberation of Paris, Olivier would have willingly fought on the barricades, but he wasn’t given the chance to do so. The machine gun he had kept in reserve under his bed was set up, in the first hours of the Capital’s insurrection, on the roof of a block at Place Clichy, and entrusted to a team of experienced marksmen. As for him, he was ordered to stay in his cellar to receive the instructions flooding in from London and all over the place. He stayed there for more than thirty-six hours on the trot, without sleeping or eating, with nothing to drink save some atrocious ersatz apricot juice, filling notepad after notepad with enigmatic messages like: “the presbytery has lost none of its charm nor the garden its splendour”, “the archdeacon is a past master at Japanese billiards”, or “all is well, Marchioness”, which cohorts of helmeted couriers came to fetch at five-minute intervals. When he emerged next day in the evening, it was to hear the thunderous peal of the great tenor of Notre-Dame and of all the other church bells, celebrating the arrival of the armies of Liberation.

END OF PART THREE