He waited eight days in that apartment in the company of a widow, Lydia Mourgues, who put him up in a sort of white-walled cell, lit by a dormer window that overlooked an alleyway, though all he could see of it was the bare-brick wall of the house opposite. A man who introduced himself as Ahmed had brought him here after a long confab with Robert Autin. It was the hour of the siesta, the streets were empty and the man walked quickly, without a word, without looking at him, Daniel five meters behind him in line with the instructions Autin gave him before his departure. Ahmed seemed unconcerned whether the young Frenchman was following him or not. Sometimes he would suddenly disappear around a street corner or would vanish from sight in a narrow, meandering passage between two houses and Daniel was surprised to spot his slender figure, absorbed by the shadows, creeping along the walls like a large cat.
Ahmed had knocked at a large studded door and had then slipped away without a goodbye or a backwards glance.
The widow Mourgues had welcomed him warmly, planting two loud kisses on his cheeks, holding him tight to her large chest, then had led him to what was to be his room: an iron bed, a small table, a chair. It smelt of bleach and lavender. Toilets are here. Bathroom next to it. My husband fitted it just before his heart attack. Here’s the kitchen. And that’s the living room.
Don’t look out of the window. Don’t sing. Don’t speak loudly, in case the neighbors hear you. They’re not here this afternoon, but they’ll be back in the evening. In the absence of the mistress of the house, don’t move about. Stay sitting or lying so the floorboards don’t creak. Two hours, no more than that: I just have to do the shopping. She gave him these safety instructions while pouring him mint tea and a large glass of water so cold that he thought his teeth might shatter when they came in contact with it. She spoke softly, as if someone were listening with an ear to the wall. Then she turned on the radio and songs filled the kitchen, waking the five canaries in their cage near the window, who immediately started trilling loudly.
“I hope I won’t have to keep you here too long because it’s dangerous, having a deserter in the house like this. And the neighbors are bound to notice something eventually. They were Pétainists during the war, those scum . . . and they’re even worse now. Always listening at doors, following me around. Thankfully she’s a bit deaf and he’s a boozer. It sends him to sleep about eight every night, unless they start a shouting match. He hits her sometimes. He knows my husband was a communist, and that I agreed with him of course. So we despise each other, especially with what’s happening at the moment. And as neither of us is going anywhere . . .”
Eight days, and he counted every hour. He watched each day pass through the window in the imperceptible movements of light and shadow on the façades of the buildings on the other side of the narrow street, the movement of the splashes of sunlight that fell on the floorboards then slid furtively up the walls until they faded and then died away, returning the wallpaper to its naturally dull grey color. He watched the sky pale in the cool of the morning then turn a harsher blue in the siesta hour when the widow went into her bedroom to sleep. Daniel rediscovered his mania for framing everything in his iron rectangle. Masses, volumes, colors. He examined with surprise these abstract fragments of his daily life, which was diminished by boredom. He yearned to draw, to take photographs.
Eight days spent trying to kill time. One morning, before going out to the market, Madame Mourgues had handed him a worn old book that smelt of dust and mould. The illustrated cover showed a sort of musketeer, with a feather in his hat, sword-fighting with two men. Le Capitan. Michel Zévaco. He sat down and opened the grimoire.
The next day, he ran behind the son of the Hunchback in the moats of Caylus Castle. He would have killed Peyrolles with his bare hands. The rough, porous paper smelt of the old days. Daniel lost himself in the alleys, evaded the traps set by the hateful conspirators. Galloped. Crossed swords with ten ferocious but stupid assassins, his back to the wall.
The days passed slowly. He shuddered every time the gates banged in the street or someone knocked at the door downstairs. The widow would stop what she was doing then, listen closely, and shake her head. “It’s nothing,” she would say.
Daniel wondered how she could be sure. “I have an ear for disasters. When my husband died, I heard him fall, even though I was out in the courtyard hanging up laundry. I knew straight away. I still hear him, every day. There are times when I think it would be better to be deaf.” So he put his trust in those ears capable of hearing misfortune knocking at the door, or doom walking down the street.
At night, in the heat that took its time to escape through the open window, he found himself assailed by memories and their obsessive questions as if at the center of a swarm of mosquitoes, kept awake by their wearying whine.
He had lived this incomplete life, without them, saved from a deep well at the bottom of which they had remained, often leaning over this abyss to see their faces, sometimes indistinct, mingled with the reflections of black water, and to hear the distant echo of their voices distorted by the depths of time, and he clung to the well’s edge until he was in pain, until he was bleeding, sometimes tempted to let himself fall so he could rejoin them. But he was never sure if he would be able to find them again because that darkness was so impenetrable and fathomless.
And his father was rising up from this vertiginous hole, perhaps soaked and dirty and swollen with water from having being down there so long, and Daniel could not help seeing him as a monster suddenly returned from the land of the dead, a vile corpse like the ones he sometimes saw in horror films which he would go to watch with Alain at the Comeac or the Gallia, the two specialist cinemas on rue Sainte-Catherine. He didn’t know what to do with this news. He felt neither joy nor nostalgia, only a curiosity that pricked his heart in odd moments. And why his father, after all? What about her? He buried his face in the pillow, seeking a cooler surface, and he held that soft, gentle thing tight against him, calling out to it softly.
He had been to war. He had liked it, often. He had killed, and afterwards been haunted by the images of his victims. He had thought himself a man as he crossed limits he had never known existed, had let himself be soiled by the ambient squalor, and now he called out for his mother as he hugged a pillow. He hated himself for this, despised himself for this, for being a murderer with such apparent sensibilities, and wondered who he really was: a child or a lost soldier? He couldn’t find the words to express all this. He wished Irène was there to help him name what was circling in his mind like a creaking merry-go-round full of leering riders and dead faces.
Certain mornings he saw the sky turn pale and could not tell if he had slept or not, suspended in his fog of too-fleeting memories and impossible questions. Then he would sink into a heavy sleep where the shadows would slowly disperse.
Eight days.
One Tuesday morning, Madame Mourgues came back with a plumber. From one of the two bags he was carrying, he took out a pair of overalls and handed them to Daniel. The plumber’s name was Youssef.
“You’re going. Get your things.”
The widow helped Daniel gather his few possessions, which she squeezed into a small black bag. She added Le Vicomte de Bragelonne. “For the journey,” she said. Then she folded up a thousand-franc note and slipped it into his pocket. He protested, but she told him he would need it more than her, then she held him close in her arms and warned him to be careful.
On the stairs, they passed the neighbor and greeted him, and the neighbor turned to watch them go, but as they were talking about a busted tap and a U-bend that had to be changed, paying no attention to him, he finally went back to his apartment. The street was swarming with people, and they pushed their way through the crowd with their bags. A shaky old van, grey with dust, was waiting for them, driven by the man called Ahmed. Without a word, he took Daniel to the bus station, eyes riveted to the rear-view mirror, face wet with sweat, features tensed, a muscle pulsing beneath the skin of his jaw. At the station, he handed Daniel an envelope containing a fake one-week leave on compassionate grounds (death of father), from the general staff of the Ninth R.I. The stamps, the colonel’s signature: these were real. Ahmed explained all this to him without looking at him.
“And that’s your flight ticket. Don’t lose it, or you’re fucked. You should have plenty of time: we erred on the side of caution, even if there’s a roadblock check on the road or on your way into Algiers.”
Daniel thanked him, but Ahmed shook his head and silenced him with a hand gesture.
“We’re doing this out of friendship for Robert, even if it’s risky. He was very insistent. We don’t get involved in this sort of thing. Deserters, that’s a French issue, a military issue. We have enough problems of our own. If it had been down to me, I’d have made you go back to your unit, even if it meant going to jail. I don’t care. What difference does it make whether you desert or not? There could be a hundred of you, or a thousand, and it still wouldn’t matter.”
Suddenly he stopped speaking and looked away. The conversation was over.
Daniel got out of the van and crossed the street without turning around. He saw Ahmed’s van melt into traffic, then he stopped on the sidewalk, under a tree, stunned by the noise and the heat. He entered the station concourse, which echoed with the hubbub of voices and the din of engines. There was a little kiosk there, selling newspapers and cigarettes. He bought a packet of American cigarettes, breaking into the note given him by the widow Mourgues, and he smoked a cigarette. He felt almost light-hearted, and strong, and perhaps happy to be there, at this moment in time, in war-torn Algeria, in the middle of this buzzing crowd on the main concourse.
Half an hour later, he left the last suburbs of the city behind.
That evening he arrived at Orly around midnight and passed without difficulty through two security checks conducted by cops armed with sub-machine guns. One of them, who had stripes on his shoulder, gave him a military salute when Daniel showed his fake leave form. Then he left the airport, and the coolness of the air felt good.
He woke up as the train was slowing with a deafening rumble on the iron bridge over the Garonne. A dreamless sleep broken by stops in stations, faces glimpsed on platforms, vague movements in the carriage, departures, encumbered arrivals, polite murmurs.
It is afternoon. He blinks in the soft sunlight, sees a pastel blue sky. He is drenched with sweat and when he stands up he feels his shirt stick to the back of the seat. As soon as he is out on the platform, he almost runs, and then weaves his way through the crowds trailing in the underground passage. In the arrivals hall, he goes through without looking at the people waiting and scans the door where the travelers appear. Finally, he walks out into the square, under the glass roof, and his heart contracts. He feels like walking, letting the streets swallow him up. He thinks about going to the garage and greeting Norbert and Claude—it’s very close by—if only to see the looks on their faces, hear the surprise in their voices, smell the odor of petrol and oil and grease. He wants to fill himself in one go with everything he would find there, and the images and sensations overwhelm him, but finally his footsteps lead him to the bus stop where the number 1 is waiting and he gets on and buys his ticket from the driver then looks at the people seated in rows with the impression that they have not moved in months, as if they were waiting for him, as if nothing had happened.
The city starts to move around him and the streets and the façades of houses glide past in the June sunlight: all this grayness, softening the light, he left it behind in the middle of a charcoal winter, and he realizes that he is instinctively searching for the whiteness, the harsh glare of the sun, the implacable blue of the sky, the dazzle that so often, over there, had made him blink and squint in spite of his sunglasses, made him lower the sides of his hat towards the stone path where he walked. He wishes the sun would burn down on this city to rid it of its gray crust, the way it beat down on the landscapes of Algeria, bringing them to life. He feels as if he has gone from a color film to a black-and-white documentary, and he misses the depth of the shadows, the blinding three-dimensionality of the brightness, and he knows that he will never see even the most banal things the way he did before; he knows he will always be searching for that luminous cruelty that scrapes away at the sleeping shades to make the colors blaze and shout.
He feels guilty about this regret, this frustration. He doesn’t really understand what he is missing in the moment of his return to his life and his city. He does not understand that what surrounds him is the peace of a country at war. The warehouses on the docks, the huge moored ships with their forecastles shining incongruously bright, the endless trains moving slowly past: all this background detail, which he has moved past all his life, as something immutable, could be razed by bombardments and he wouldn’t be remotely surprised. He watches those trucks maneuvering, those men at work, bare-chested, cigarettes in the corners of their mouths, with the curiosity of a visitor to the zoo or an exile returning home after years away. With the avidity of a blind man recovering his sight.
Once the bus has crossed the swing bridge and passed the wet docks and is moving past the warehouses and factories in this narrow street lined with grey walls, it rumbles and vibrates over the cobbles and Daniel doesn’t know if he is trembling because he’s entering his neighborhood or if it’s the uneven road surface shaking him as if to rouse him from his reverie. He stands up to request his stop, and hangs onto the pole as the bus brakes and he is pushed forward and the vehicle judders to a halt. He jumps down onto the sidewalk and stays standing there, breathless and covered with sweat. His street is a little further on. The sun chases him, forcing him to cross the street and walk quickly, his bag hanging on his back. Low houses, roses climbing over fences, geraniums on window ledges. Kids playing, on bikes and makeshift carts, laughing and yelling.
He knocks and almost instantly the door opens and Roselyne recoils, moaning, the back of her hand over her mouth, eyes wide, staggering slightly, and Daniel is afraid she will fall so he drops his bag and takes her in his arms and hugs her and hugs her and she surrenders to this crushing strength and finally says, “Let me look at you.”
She looks at him without a word. Her eyes are full of tears that do not fall. “I’m not going to cry,” she says. Then: “Come on.” And she leads him down the corridor to the kitchen and opens the fridge and takes out a pitcher of water, takes a large glass from a cupboard. He sits down and drinks the water in one go. She grabs a handful of cherries and starts to eat them, leaning on the sink, never taking her eyes off Daniel, who smooths the wax cloth with the flat of his hand then looks up at her. She is holding the cherry stones in the hollow of her palm. She smiles.
“I deserted. They’re probably searching for me.”
Roselyne says nothing. As if she hasn’t heard or hasn’t understood.
“You’re alive,” she says. “You came back from that war alive. Like Maurice, who came back one day out of the blue.”
She sits down next to him and takes his hands in hers.
“We were so scared. All the time.”
She shakes her head, and the tears finally fall. Daniel holds her against him and they stay like that without moving for a while, until their cheeks have dried and their hearts stopped racing.
Then Roselyne gently frees herself and looks him in the eyes and strokes his cheek.
“You’ll have to hide, again.”
He shakes his head. He wants to tell her that nothing is the same, but he gives up because tiredness falls on him like a net, along with the heat that has suddenly risen here. He feels weepy. His head is heavy.
“I’m going to sleep for a bit,” he says. “Excuse me.”
She insists on taking his bag and places it at the foot of his bed. Daniel opens the shutters and cracks open the window. He looks out at the shady garden. Pigeons cooing. The hum of traffic, further off, in rue Achard. He falls asleep straight away amid these peaceful sounds.
*
He feels Irène’s gaze on him and it hurts. She is on the other side of the table in her white blouse, hair pulled back in a sort of lopsided bun, and she smokes and pours herself more coffee, watching him as he talks with the parents. They talk about everything and nothing: the latest news of the quarter, weddings, pregnancies, births, deaths. Roselyne and Maurice talk constantly, eyes and voices smiling.
“The Courrier boy,” says Maurice, “you know, the one who was working at the S.A.F.T.? Jean-Bernard? Well, he stayed there, in Algeria. They found out two weeks ago. The funeral was Tuesday. They don’t hang around repatriating the bodies. How long is that slaughter going to continue, for God’s sake? What are they waiting for?”
Daniel purses his lips. He doesn’t know. And the little he learned over there, he won’t say. So Irène watches him as he plays dumb, as if she can glimpse, around him or in his eyes, the glow of his obstinate silence like a hidden fire.
He talked earlier, a bit. He told them about his life over there, at the station, the trips to the city, the patrols. The ambush, and Giovanni’s death. He did not tell them about the destroyed bodies, the spilled guts, the blood. “It wasn’t pretty,” was all he said. Maurice nodded: “I saw a few, in my time.” He did not tell them about the rifle with the scope, the iridescent light flickering through the viewfinder, the copper face hidden in emerald leaves.
Irène stares at him constantly. When he meets her gaze he smiles at her, but she does not respond. She looks shocked: mouth half open, seeming to breathe more quickly at times. He does not feel the same closeness between them. When she kissed him, after she came home, in the bedroom, he sensed her body pulling back from his embrace. A new kind of modesty. A question has haunted him ever since that moment: who is this other that has come between them?
They also talk about his father. About the cops who are searching for him for crimes he has committed. Jean Delbos a murderer? It’s ludicrous. There’s something else going on here. Roselyne and Maurice speak cautiously, do not judge, doubt that such a man would transform into a criminal. Not after what he must have been through. They exchange worried or embarrassed glances and sometimes fall silent in the face of Daniel’s muteness. He listens to what they tell him as if it’s a detective story, some dark, tragic Yank film with faceless actors. He would like to feel something other than this curiosity that has gradually taken over him, the way a nephew might feel about the return of a globe-trotting uncle.
“What do you think about all this?” Maurice finally asks.
Daniel shrugs. Irène continues to stare at him, immobile except for the smoke from her cigarette that flutters up in capricious curls.
“I don’t know,” he says.
Roselyne puts her hand on his arm and Irène stands up to clear the table. Daniel stands up too.
“I’m tired. I need to get some sleep.”