Daniel folds Irène’s letter and pushes it to the bottom of his trouser pocket, his heart swollen because, behind the words, he could hear her voice, her inflexions, even her laugh, and for five minutes he wasn’t in this shit heap anymore, he was torn away from this war and taken close to her. She said she’d received a postcard from Alain in Copenhagen, where it was snowing. He’s fine, he’s happy, he’s learning to speak English. He sends his greetings, his friendship. She also talks about other friends, about university and boring professors, about lecture halls with their oppressive silence, about poetry, which she is discovering with passion: not those quotes you learn at school, but real poetry, I know you don’t care, but where you are at the moment I think it would be a good way of escaping what you must be experiencing, although you don’t say much about it . . .
He does not really see how poetry could change anything here: could it relieve the heat, make the rain fall, bring the dead back to life? What words, what meanings? Peace on earth and goodwill to all men? The kind of crap that preachers spout on Sundays in church? What prick of a writer would be capable of saying anything powerful enough to jam the infernal machine that he feels roaring around him, even if it’s idling at the moment? Words melt before iron and fire. Not long ago Maurice told him about Jaurès: even he had not been able to do anything, in ’14, for all his great speeches and fine words. No-one can ever speak louder than the mouth of a cannon. So . . . poets, with their poetic ways . . . He would like to understand what Irène is saying with her poetry. He would like to agree with her, speak like her. Maybe one day. He closes his eyes. Drifts into a daydream. He hears her voice whispering lines of verse to him, her lips to his ear. For a few seconds he is no longer in Algeria. The quarters, its dust, the shouts of young men at play, the blazing sun, the exhaustion, the boredom, even the war and its weapons all vanish. Perhaps that is what Irène’s poetry can offer? The possibility of escaping from time, of no longer feeling weighed down by the world.
He should talk to Giovanni about this. He believes in words too. He’d like her letter. It’d be a good excuse to talk to him again, a way of approaching him, of finding something else to talk about other than the shit through which they’re wading. Since the ambush and the deaths of Declerck and the fellagha, his friend has been avoiding him. He barely even says hello, dodges all discussions. Daniel would like to talk to him about what happened because it would help him to see clearly through this fog that surrounds him, dense, heavy and suffocating, to try to understand what he felt when he held that man in the center of his scope. He would like to be able to find a few words to describe that perfect instant he experienced, that luminous clarity, to try to express the power that surged through him when he pulled the trigger, like an electric punch followed by a sort of K.O.
He’d also like to tell him about the dream that he’s had every night since: after firing, he rushes towards his target but his cottonwool legs are incapable of carrying him and they give way beneath him, and when he suddenly finds himself in front of the bush there is no longer any dead man there nor any machine gun, not even the faintest trace of blood, so he feels relieved and wakes up and, for just a moment, liberated of this weight, he persuades himself that he has not killed anyone and everything goes back the way it was before, calm and clean, until reality descends on him with its filthy ass, pushing him down into the canvas pallet of his camp bed. He shivers and sees again that angular face, the copper skin, the man’s fixed profile and then the torn flesh of his wound, the debris of bones and teeth, the body jolting as the sergent fires three more bullets into it. He sees again the others prodding the corpse with the toes of their boots, their first contact with the enemy, proof that he exists beyond the stories told by officers and old soldiers. And then sleep is suspended above him, in the blackness, like a cloud hovering over a dry land, from which no rain will fall.
At university, we created a committee for peace in Algeria and loads of students come to the meeting, sometimes just to talk crap, saying we should let those bougnoules fight it out among themselves instead of sending French boys to be killed there, you know the kind of thing . . . There are also discussions about independence: there are those who say we should negotiate with the F.L.N. to keep Algeria but in better conditions, with equal rights, but me and my friends, you know, Philippe and Régine, we’re for independence straight away because colonialism has done too much damage, not just in Algeria but everywhere. We have arguments sometimes and we don’t speak to each other for three days and then we make up, but I think they’ll end up agreeing with us because there’s really no other solution.
He would like to talk to them, those students in their comfy chairs, but he doesn’t know what he would tell them: the heat, the thirst, the blisters on his feet, the fear, the dust, the filth, the insomnia, the stupidity, the alcohol, the solitude and the tears and the smiles when the post arrives, depending what their letters say . . . The war? He has been here two months and he hasn’t seen any of what he imagined he would see, but is war imaginable? He has never heard heavy artillery fire, and he still hasn’t seen fighter planes screaming past over hills. They barely even got to see six banana choppers31 flying over a ridge last week before they disappeared almost immediately afterwards. No combat. Stinking corpses one day in a ruined farm, and the ambush last week. That big asshole Declerck lying face down in the sand, and the torn-off face of that fell next to his machine gun.
Apart from that, days and days to fill. Time planned out by the officers in little boxes that absolutely have to be filled out. Preparing meals. Cleaning and unblocking toilets. Emptying bins. Pouring diesel oil on rubbish and setting it on fire. Going out on patrol. Practicing shooting. Cleaning weapons. Changing the oil in the trucks and half-tracks. Changing a tire on a jeep. Going out in search of water. Writing letters home. Playing cards. Reading letters from home. Getting smashed.
Mum has looked preoccupied for the last two or three days, I don’t know why. When I ask her what’s up with her she says it’s nothing, that she’s worried about you. But I can tell there’s more to it than that. Last night, when I came home, they were talking, her and Dad, and then they suddenly went silent. They looked embarrassed. Are you telling each other secrets? I asked, and Dad laughed: Yep, big secrets, too big for a kid like you, he replied and Mum laughed too, but I know them too well not to tell that there’s something else going on. Whatever you do though, don’t mention any of this when you write to them, because they’ll have a go at me for worrying you. But I’m telling you because I have to tell someone, and there is only you.
There is only you. She’d underlined that phrase. What did she mean? She tells everything, all her moods and emotions, to Sara, who’s like a sister to her. And then there’s that friend she knew in secondary school, Régine, whom she tells everything to as well. Friends for life, until death. When they were kids, they talked all the time, him and Irène. They had their secret cabin, in a corner of a box room at the back of the courtyard, where Daniel would sometimes cry on her shoulder because he couldn’t remember his parents’ faces anymore and she would rock him, even though she was smaller than he was, understanding without knowing.
There is only you. He repeats these words to himself, sitting on a crate in the narrow shade of a shelter, watching the others play ball in the dust.
Irène.
The boys jump and shout on either side of the net hung between two posts then suddenly yell at each other, arguing over whether the ball went over the line of stones around the court, and in those moments they stop moving, panting, faces gray with dust and striped sweat, while the traces of the disputed point are examined by the most determined of them, pacing the invisible line like surveyors, complaining and swearing, all of them, that they are sure, then laughing and promising that next time they will appoint a referee.
Sometimes the sentry in his watchtower intervenes, claiming he has a better view from where he sits, like a tennis umpire, he says, and the players all laugh and tell him to fuck off and keep his eyes on the slopes of the valley that you’re supposed to watch when you’re up there, baking under the wavy canvas roof, leaning back against sandbags with only the machine gun and three flasks of lukewarm water for company.
Sometimes Sergent Castel joins the game. He just walks onto the court, ignoring the team that is standing there, and he points to one man and says, “Alright, you, fuck off, I’m replacing you,” and he starts playing without a word, without a gasp, without showing any effort at all, his knife-like face utterly impassive. Of course, when he’s there the others don’t yell as much. They complain quietly, concentrate on playing better because the sergent’s like a bloody volleyball champion: he never misses a shot, making vicious winners from impossible angles, sending over unreturnable serves. The men furtively ogle his lean, slender muscles, moving beneath his skin like a nest of snakes, and the long scar that runs across his chest and up to the base of his neck. A fragment of mortar shell in Indo, a huge stroke of luck: right next to him, another piece, a kilogram of metal sent hurtling at three hundred kilometers an hour by the gods of war, took off half of a caporal’s head, a clean cut, almost anatomical. He told them this the other night in the meeting hall, pissed out of his head, dressed only in a pair of shorts, an undershirt and a belt with a sheathed dagger hung from it. A few guys found it hard to believe that such wounds could really exist, new soldiers, virgins to the horror. The sergent stared at them gravely, his eyelids heavy with alcohol blinking over his clear eyes, then he smiled sadly before downing a can of lager without breathing and retreating to his lair to put his drunken body to bed. He walked mechanically towards the exit, kicking out of the way any chairs and tables that happened to lie in his path, and for the minute that followed his departure no-one said anything until a man from Dunkirk, known as Jeanjean, said: “Once, in the factory, I saw a guy cut in two by a steel sheet.”
The conversations had begun again, because true horrors were seen only in war, as a few of them knew. Sure, men might get crushed in a work accident, or suffocated, or ground into mincemeat, or split in half, leaving a finger or an arm or a leg inside a machine, and sure, it was the same blood that poured out. But it was as if it didn’t count somehow: dying for a boss was less significant than dying for your homeland, less chic. And they went on talking until lights out, about flesh and bones and blood and men’s sufferings, and they had all been drinking, the ones who talked, arms waving expressively, and the ones who listened, nodding or rolling their eyes. Daniel had moved from one group to the next, dazed, sickened, until he had found Giovanni, who had bought him a beer, the first they had shared since their row. But they barely said a word, too drunk, too distraught, lacking the strength to break the silence between them, a silence as dense and substantial as the fell Daniel had shot. “I don’t understand anything anymore,” was all Daniel said. Giovanni had nodded his assent then theatrically clinked his bottle against Daniel’s before downing the contents. “Me neither,” he said before turning away and going to bed.
The days pass like that. They keep busy. From time to time the N.C.O.s take groups of about twenty men on a march around the camp. They do some shooting practice, simulate combat situations. The men apply themselves, do what they’re told. They aim straight, crawl, run, climb, and jump. Clumsy, wobbly, exhausted. Castel often tells them they’re dead, but they don’t care, lying on the gravel and trying to get their breath back. Sometimes they apologize.
“Sorry, sergent, I didn’t see him . . . I screwed up.”
“Yeah, right,” he replies. “You can apologize to the fell who shoots you in the face. I’m not sure they really appreciate French politeness anymore, but it’s worth a go, I guess. You hopeless prick.”
Occasionally a few of them act like soldiers and are rewarded with a pat on the back from the sergent on the way back to the camp, while the others sweat under their helmets, panting and limping, shirts stuck to their skin, cursing the stones that their leaden feet keep tripping over, holding empty flasks over their open mouths in the hope that a final drop will fall.
Daniel can’t help loving all this. He isn’t afraid. He always tries to find the right reaction, the appropriate movement, the quickest way. He suppresses the vibrations of the machine gun in his closed fists and grits his teeth as he makes sure that his bursts of gunfire are brief and well-aimed, not ricocheting randomly from stones or tearing apart bushes like the long, spluttering, wayward farts of bullets that the others make, leaving them with lungs and magazines empty, almost relieved. He is able to hold off his fatigue until he gets back to quarters. During the training exercises he feels full of energy, lifted high above the others, and he knows this is the best he’s ever felt.
Now and then, Castel will pat him on the shoulder without saying anything, or stare at him and nod. Never a word of encouragement. Never does he pick out Daniel as an example to the others. Only this silent complicity between them. Oh, except for one day, when they got back to the camp: “That was good, but when the day comes, you’ll have to hold it all together. You ain’t seen nothing yet.”
But today the sergent remains invisible, keeping to his digs the way he often does when nothing’s happening. It’s said that he can sit for hours on the ground, legs crossed, hands on his knees and eyes closed, with his weapons ranged around him. Sometimes when the men knock on his door and get no reply, they open up and go inside and find him like that, then make their excuses and leave, and tell the lieutenant what they saw. He always advises them to leave the sergent the fuck alone.
This evening, everyone stands around the flagpole, with the flag hanging motionless in the air, as tomorrow’s missions are announced. The sergent stands at the back, hatless, unmoving, thumbs wedged in his belt, impassive behind his dark glasses. They have to find water because the level of water has dropped again. They’ll pick up a water truck in town, as a safeguard against the coming heat of summer. He asks the N.C.O.’s to choose the men who will be in the convoy. A jeep and a half-track with seven men. The lieutenant announces that he will be on the mission because he has to see the colonel. The sergent will stay here to hold the fort. Dismissed.
Daniel is chosen. So is Giovanni. A trip to town. Already they are dreaming of a pastis and a bowl of olives. Some of the lads complain: they’re scared shitless, talking about ambushes and mines. Others are happy to go: they want to see girls walk past in the street, and they’re planning on a trip to the brothel—they have the address and the price list: it’s pretty cheap if you fuck a native. But Carlin, the caporal, remains inflexible. Meet tomorrow at 5 a.m.
They go off to eat boiled potatoes and sardines in oil. Two or three saucissons and a few terrines of pâté that came in the post are gobbled down. And, mouths full of charcuterie, the men go on, as they always do, about how much they miss home. Fuck, what wouldn’t they give for a glass of red, a bowl of their grandmother’s hotpot, a dozen oysters with a glass of white . . . The lads sigh as they tell each other stories of feasts they’ve eaten and secret recipes. They drool and sigh again and push back their empty plates.
Daniel can’t sleep. He tosses and turns on his pallet in the relentless heat. Irène. Everywhere he sees her face, her smile, her sulks. Her body. He sees her as she’s leaving the bathroom, rushing through the hallway, her nightgown half undone or her slip revealing the tops of her thighs. He hasn’t looked at her for a long time, but right now she is all he can see.
Irène.
31 The H-21, atandem rotor American helicopter known as the “Workhorse,” was widely used during the Algerian War (and later in Vietnam) for the transport of troops and medical evacuations. Its characteristic curved shape earned it the nickname of the “Flying Banana.”