One day, I died. We were walking on this road and we were sleeping as we walked, and we fell and others picked us up so our legs started moving forward again and we held up other men who tripped because they were falling asleep and sometimes they didn’t get back up again so the soldiers threw them by the roadside in the mud or the snow and they pushed us ahead, hitting us in the back or the back of the neck with their rifle butts. Sometimes they did it so much that a man would fall and that gave them a good reason to kill him, holding him on the ground with their boot and putting a bullet in the back of his neck. Many of the men had broken fingers from trying to protect themselves and afterwards they couldn’t even eat the few scraps of bread that still circulated along the line and that we would soften in puddles of water or in the snow. The ones with the smashed hands couldn’t even undo the string that held their trousers up when they wanted to shit during breaks so we helped them, when we could, when the cold hadn’t frozen the wet knots, or they relieved themselves crouching down, hiding their faces with their black swollen hands as if they were ashamed. As if any of us could still feel that emotion, by this point. Or maybe it was a sort of reflex, a buried and very distant memory of what we had been before being reduced to these bodies kept upright only by the stubbornness of their skeleton, these bodies for which every step taken, every heartbeat torn from nothingness constituted a victory without hope.
I don’t know what they had to be ashamed of. I watched them gasping and sobbing in their hands and I didn’t understand. We’d seen so many dead on the latrines during the night, their bony asses inside the fetid holes as if sucked there, their bodies caved in, already stiff and dry and cold, frozen by the ice in their final suffering. We had seen so many of them. We never dared touch them, content just to be able to get up and walk after emptying our bellies so we could flee far from what awaited us.
Those men with the fractured hands, we also helped them to eat and we took a little mouthful of their mouthful, and they didn’t say anything and neither did we. We hadn’t said anything for a long time, in fact, because we were too tired and our dry mouths and our swollen tongues and our sore gums transformed every word we spoke into a torture, as if we’d swallowed burning oil.
Either that or we talked in whispers. We would murmur encouragements into each other’s ears, enjoining those who couldn’t get up anymore to walk and to live, because it all went together, because walking was falling onto the other foot, the only way we knew to stay upright. We promised them imminent breaks which never came, we told them we’d be arriving soon in another camp, we whispered it all close to their sharp faces, gently patting their bones that shivered under threadbare cloth amid the screams and kicks of the S.S.
How many days?
Maybe several lifetimes. Interminable lives on the verge of ending. I relived mine, step by step. My dying mind, just alive enough to push what remained of my being to walk, to breathe, because it seemed possible to me that I might forget to breathe, so exhausting was this effort, because the cold and the damp that invaded my lungs with each inhalation were like an enemy intrusion, a commando attack intended to further undermine my empty fortress, my mind that no longer thought but was full of forgotten memories that crossed it now like fish wriggling at the bottom of a drained pond.
Childhood, happiness, sunlight. The laughter of drinkers in the little café that my parents ran. The train to Arcachon. Sitting between them, I stared through the window, on the lookout for the first pines that, for me, marked the happy lands bordered by the sea. I could still feel the two of them against me, their hands on mine, their kisses. But also the autumns and the endless rain and the chestnut trees in the school playground. Faces appeared before me. Names. Lost for over fifteen years. The memory of a fight in the toilets, broken up by the teacher who dragged us back to the classroom by our ears. Smells. Wet stone, mildew in the cellar where we kept the bottle racks and the beer barrels. The cologne my father sprayed on himself on Sunday mornings before taking me, sometimes, to the Marché des Fossés on the cours Victor Hugo, among the onlookers and the smooth patter of the hucksters and the scent of cotton candy and boiled sweets.
Intoxicated by the smell and the colors of my life, I walked on through the stink of corpses and shit that we gave off, all of us, uniformly gray, from our heads to our feet, skin pasty beneath the grime, a battered troop shuffling through the endless abattoir that was this path in a world so gray even the snow couldn’t whiten it, on the lookout for the distant black lines of fires like so many landmarks stretched horizontal by the wind. Surprised and terrified when one of us collapsed puking blood, because of the sudden flash of color and because that scarlet was death carried within them like a monster and delivered in a final rattle.
And one day, I died too.
I fell on the hard, dirty snow, packed solid by thousands of feet. I was on all fours and trying to breathe, to pump in air as if I might have been able to reinflate myself and get back on my feet, but each time I had the impression I was emptying myself even more. I was on all fours and I felt my arms trembling, incapable of holding up my body, and the cold was burning my hands and knees. I had seen so many do the same and whom we’d tried to carry a few meters further, hoping that they would start walking again but whom we’d let go in the end because we didn’t have the strength to help them anymore. We had to leave them behind because there was always a guard or an SS officer who would come up to us screaming, pushing men out of the way with the point of his bayonet or whirling his stick, and who would start kicking the man lying flat on his belly or beating him with a club. Sometimes he would kill them on the spot or he would have them carried to the roadside and leave them there, maybe already dead.
Someone grabbed me under the arms and lifted me up, whispering that we were going to get in more trouble, and I was surprised to hear them speaking French; I don’t know why, there were other French men in the camp, and in our line, of course, but since we’d been walking we’d said so little that whenever we talked to someone we used, I think, a sort of pidgin made up of a few dozen words borrowed from German and French or Italian, or Polish. Survival words, essential words, without sentences or grammar. Something like the sounds that animals make to each other.
I heard the guard yelling and straight away we were pushed in the ditch before I even got to see the face of the man who’d been helping me and I fell flat on my belly, the other man on top of me, on a soft layer of snow piled up there, almost comfortable, and I thought how lucky I was to be able to die without any further suffering. Two gunshots exploded overhead, and in the moment when I felt a bullet in my shoulder, the man who had lifted me up suddenly became heavier and I was pushed down into the snow and I turned my head a little so I could take a few more breaths, then I had the impression of being pushed further down and all I felt then was the cold, nothing else, not even pain. The cold, and nothing more.
I was suffocating. I lifted my head and I spat out water and bits of ice and I cried out in order to breathe. The man’s corpse was crushing me and I couldn’t move at all now, couldn’t feel any part of my body, as if I were nothing more than a severed head. I was lying in the melted snow and I thought I was going to die of cold under this corpse that was pressing me down into the ground so I would stay with him in death. I concentrated on my hands. One was trapped beneath me but the other one was above my head and I was able to wriggle my fingers. They came back to life and then I could move my arm. It was at this moment that I heard the man moaning and it didn’t even surprise me. As the living were already dead, the dead could easily be resurrected from one hell to another. I asked him to get up because I was dying underneath him but he continued to groan, his head between my shoulder blades. I tried to push down on my free arm but I had no strength and sometimes I couldn’t even get enough breath in my lungs and I was suffocating so I started wriggling as much as I could, twisting myself under that dying body and I insulted him, you fucking piece of meat, go and die somewhere else, I spat insults at the man who had helped me, supported me, carried me, who had taken the two bullets that should have killed me.
I don’t know how long I spent twisting like a worm in that frozen mud. The man’s body suddenly tipped over and I found enough strength to crawl away from him, as if he might jump back on top of me. I sat up, leaning against the embankment, and looked at him. He had lifted himself up in a strange way, his back arched against the edge of the ditch, eyes wide open, mouth gaping and full of bloody spit. I went over to him and felt for the artery in his throat so I could take his pulse, but all I felt beneath my fingers was a tangle of knotted strings around the bones protruding under his skin. I closed his eyes, my teeth chattering. I was now nothing more than shivers and the cold took hold of me and I felt it spreading through my stomach and paralysing me inch by inch. As the man’s jacket was dry, because it had been lying on me, I took it off him and put it on, but his trousers were covered with shit and mud so I had to get up to try and find another pair.
Trembling, I took a few steps, my heart in a panic and my chest filled with pain. I rubbed my sides but that was worse: I no longer knew where it hurt and I felt that crazy pounding under my fingertips, making my skeleton vibrate with those heavy beats that would surely smash it to pieces. The injury to my shoulder was nothing in this cage of pain. Just a hole that had gone through me above my collarbone. I began walking again and found a bit of breath and only then did I lift my eyes from the paved road and look around me.
The light was unbearable. Everything was white, all the way to the horizon, dusted with fresh snow and encrusted with ice. The sun fell from above, hitting this whiteness and making it sparkle, blinding. The sky was a pure blue so deep and clear that I expected to see a few stars in the middle of the day.
The road was empty. Rows of footprints covered by snow trailed off westward, millions of hollows turning blue in the harsh sunlight. The traces of ghosts. In the still air, the silence was absolute. I could feel my heartbeat thudding against my skull, but that could only be a distant echo of life, because I was dead. I knew it in that instant. I would never return from this frozen earth, I would never leave this corpse-lined path. I would never rediscover life. I was walking down this road, on this cold, powdery ground, among the dead men abandoned by the roadside, with nothing to hold onto, with no physical substance. I was now the only one who could see me, who could experience the material reality of my spectre. For everyone else, I was disappearing into the transparency of the air. Their gazes would pass through me without ever guessing at my existence.
Sometimes the night would open around me and then only those wandering souls I passed randomly would recognize me, their eyes dead with horror like mine, their mouths wide open in their final breath like me as I suffocated, surrounded by the living. But I would glide on forever, unperceived, amid calm executioners and traitors turning their backs on the past, and they would never know who killed them nor from what hell came stealing this shadow who stared and smiled at them.
I could barely walk and I was making myself promises that were impossible to keep but it was the only thing I was capable of believing in, so I clung to that as to a shaky handrail on a collapsed staircase.