29

WATERLOO – TRIUMPH FOR SOME, DISASTER FOR OTHERS

Sylvia has long left for England and I have the key to the apartment. My free time is my own and I wander long hours in the street, thinking she’s going to come back and get me. When I finally realise she won’t, a strange, awful freedom pervades my childhood.

One day I come home from school and my mother ushers me up to her bedroom. She and my father both perch on the end of their high bed and tell me that he has to go to hospital or he will lose his eyesight. He has to lie three weeks in darkness after an operation on his retina.

They speak to me as if we were all on a train platform. Poum’s bedroom has the atmosphere of a Russian novel. We stare at each other. My father’s smile is already at a remove. I cannot imagine him immobile, not jumping up, not bursting in or out, not running towards something. It just isn’t real. He has to leave that very night. My mother’s eerily nimble fingers pack him a light suitcase. I stare as the necessary items are laid down gently, evenly, with no unnecessary comments, no fretting or taking everything out again at the last minute. The clasp is clicked. She’s calm and grave. All will go well, she knows. She has a new dignity, nearly a peace, as if a catastrophe were, in a way, a relief. What she fears most has happened, and Alexandre is still alive – the chariot of fire is not going to take him away. Not now. Not yet. She knows.

The hospital where he is operated on is a nunnery. He lies there in a white bed the next day, separate, remote – a bandage over his eyes. He speaks, but as if it were not to me. Poum is there, still grave, still peaceful. They have distanced themselves together – as if they shared the bandage, the darkness, the long hours in the white room.

Once he’s home, he has to be calm and relaxed. He moves more slowly, more carefully. We amble in the park. I feel important holding his hand, as if only I were stopping him from falling, even though he is walking normally, just more pensively, more soberly.

Then suddenly, on one of those walks, his mood changes. He takes my hand and hits his chest with it.

‘You know, I’ve got the heart of a football player. The doctor couldn’t get over it when he took my blood pressure.’

So, to celebrate, he proposes: ‘Let’s go and see Napoleon!’

My mother is resting. She needs to rest in the afternoon, just as footballers need to exercise.

‘I’ll drive! Just tell me when cars are coming on the side.’

People blow their horns as much as usual. Alexandre blows a kiss at them and screeches to a halt at the Invalides. Soon we are in the marble church. I follow him around as he breathes in the air of death and defeat. The tattered flags hang, motionless, above. Yet it seems to invigorate him. His old step is nearly back.

‘Ah, little one, it’s so nice not to be lying in that bed anymore!’

It’s as if he’s suddenly realised. It reminds me of the story of a fish he once told me. Somebody once gave him a fish in a bowl and he drove all the way to the beach to put it back in the sea. Gently tipping it into the water, he stayed looking at it. It continued turning round and round in circles as if it were still in its bowl and then, suddenly, it shot off in a straight line.

He looks up at the vaulted ceilings.

‘Don’t you think it smells of cannon powder here?’

I sniff the air.

‘Yes, it does!’

We sit down near a particularly fat column, underneath a particularly bedraggled, blackened flag. I look at his eyes: they’re still as pale, as blue as ever. Nothing is changed, nothing. He’s just considering me in a different way, as if he saw me, instead of staring through me.

‘Do you know, Catherine, I keep thinking of that field between the two armies, the German and the American. I keep seeing the sun on that man pushing his plough so peacefully, so doggedly, as if part of me was left there.’

I hold on to his arm. I want no part of him missing, not a hair. He smiles as if my thought had been spoken aloud.

‘Leaving the German soldier to retrace his footsteps carefully between the mines with his plan, I continued driving …’

I realise he’s going to finish the story he told us in Mont Saint-Michel about General Bradley. I always pick up the thread; there’s no need for transitions between us.

‘… I drove and drove until we reached the American checkpoint. It was so strange to be with Americans again. They asked us what we were doing there. I explained the situation and begged to see General Bradley as soon as possible. We were with Bradley himself within minutes. There’s no fuss with Americans. They know how to get to the point. Bradley was stunned. They were holding back, worried about the population of the city, when in fact what was needed was for them to hurry in before Paris was burnt to the ground. In a way it was all over bar the shouting. He asked me to come with them. He even proposed to give me a uniform and make me an officer in the American army, but I refused, saying I wanted to inform the Général de Gaulle. Finally Bradley gave me a car and a driver and I went off to find the Général in Rambouillet.’

I notice he has a funny way of pronouncing Général de Gaulle. Suddenly, he sighs.

‘Do you think I’m old, little one?’

‘Old?’ I’m flabbergasted. ‘You’re not old! Of course not! Not at all.’

I squeeze his hand.

‘No, no! Absolutely not.’

What else could he be but a Carthaginian, a Roman, a Trojan, an American general all wrapped into one? What else could he be but himself, a force, a river, a smile, who crosses avenues with his eyes closed, who pulls me into cupboards so we can hide from my mother’s friends, who has so many children and yet knows what to do and has time to be my very own father and to hold my hand in churches full of gunpowder, battle smoke and stampeding horses? He could lie down for a hundred years like Sleeping Beauty in a white room with bandaged eyes and would not change, no, not one bit.

Taking a deep breath, he dives back into his story.

‘Then I got to de Gaulle’s headquarters. It took longer to see him. Finally after waiting, though not so long as with the Germans, I was ushered by a soldier into his presence. He was writing at his desk. I stood by the door. He lifted his head and shot at me: “What are you to Mother Marie de Saint Phalle at the Sacré-Coeur?” “Well, she’s my aunt, Général,” I answered. “She brought me up,” he barked. I then delivered my information and he dismissed me. That was the end of it. I went back to Paris. Very soon afterwards, the Liberation was in full swing. Last-minute Resistants sprouted up everywhere. Their big business was to punish women who had slept with Germans.’

He smiles slowly, nearly painfully, and kisses my hand.

‘I flashed my Resistance card, slapped these guys around a bit and scattered them like rats. There’s nothing uglier than victory, Catherine. During that period I saved four women from having their heads shaved. Those poor women … Some had sincerely fallen in love; others were just surviving. There were so many stories. I wish I could have helped more.’

He sighs.

‘That was when I became a minister in de Gaulle’s government because of my role in the Resistance.’

‘Was it fun?’

‘Well, it didn’t last very long. I was only a minister for two weeks. You see, von Choltitz contacted me again through Nordling. He wanted safe passage for himself and his family in exchange for the liberation of all the inmates of two prison camps. These camps were full of Resistants, Jewish and non-Jewish. I passed on the message to the Général but there was no response. I thought there was some mistake. I sent a barrage of messages, trying every possible avenue. I sat in waiting rooms for hours expecting him to come out. No answer. “The Général is in a meeting.” “The Général is busy.” “The Général is out of town.” Finally, a soldier came to my doorstep with a verbal answer from de Gaulle. “Could the Count de Saint Phalle please go for an amble along the lanes of his estate?” I looked at him and told him that if the Germans hadn’t managed to make me leave Paris during the Occupation, I wasn’t going to go now.’

‘But why didn’t he free those prisoners?’

‘Because, Catherine, he preferred letting those men and women, who were all heroes, possibly die in that camp, just so he could march down the Champs Élysées with von Choltitz behind him as a prisoner of France.’

‘But it takes half an hour to walk down the Champs Élysées and those people were going to die.’

‘Yes, little one.’

‘De Gaulle sounds like a dreadful person altogether.’

‘He thought he was France.’

It feels like Julian the Apostate all over again. Except the Général wasn’t the one to be saved … The Général wasn’t the one urinating into a copper bowl … It was the other way round – it was his people who were dying.

‘Was there really nothing you could do to help them?’

He shook his head.

‘What about telling the Americans?’

‘The Americans knew how touchy he was. He kicked up a terrible fuss to be the first to enter Paris after liberating it from the Germans. He hated Anglos – and they had won the war for him.’

‘Couldn’t the English do something?’

‘The English had had him in London like a bee in a bottle during the Occupation. They knew all about him. He was a difficult man to cross. They didn’t want to cause a diplomatic rift with France right after the war.’

We sit there without saying anything. My father is right. Napoleon’s tomb is helpful. There is something about the bedraggled grandeur of it, the useless miles of marble, the Pyrrhic victory of ambition that leaves you feeling fresh and ready for anything.

‘Would Napoleon have saved them?’

‘Of course! Without a doubt.’

‘But what about all the soldiers that got killed during his wars?’

He frowns.

‘You see, Catherine, in those times war was a fact of life. Death was in the air they breathed. But you looked after your own, you honoured your duties to those who depended on you with your own life if necessary.’

He looks at me.

‘Napoleon was an extraordinary quirk of history. He appeared out of nowhere, created a world and disappeared. He was the link between the feudal spirit and the modern world of today. Do you know that he slept a few hours a night and could sleep anywhere for a few minutes and awake completely refreshed?’

‘Like you!’

Alexandre smiles modestly.

‘Yes, like me!’

Then he takes a deep breath.

He pats my shoulder, back in full gear, he marches us to the car. He has the habit of walking with a hand under my elbow as if he were steering me, gently pushing me beyond my own courage, beyond my own fear, out there, as far as he could dream. But I know there is still Saint Helena ahead, there is still Elba island – and I know that salt will be poured on the ruins of Carthage.