The Museum of a Man

The apartment, located on the third floor of a building overlooking a courtyard, has nothing exceptionally appealing about it, except perhaps for this pretty balcony, which overhangs a bouquet of shrubs and flowerbeds in bloom, vestiges of the rustic life between the Alésia and Plaisance stations in the old fourteenth arrondissement.

The true originality of the residence is archeological: nine decades of a rather full existence are stacked within these rooms, blending the owner’s ages, the stages of his career, and the evolution of the family clan. A summary of places, travels, houses lived in at another time, of couples solidly built then divided, of faithful friendships, celebrations, funerals, and moments of solitude. Paintings, statues, old pieces of furniture, family photos, and a large amphora perched on its pedestal.

The first impression is one of bourgeois comfort; a snug space, affluent and soothing.

The notion of a trompe-l’œil comes after a more attentive observation. Of course, if all of the codes of the bourgeois habitat are respected, a person should live well, isn’t that right? But the more familiar one becomes with these walls, the more their décor reveals the hidden traces of an entirely different life.

First are the little rectangles strewn here and there, simple snapshots of mediocre quality. One doesn’t immediately notice these pictures taken during the war. A young woman in uniform on a street riddled by shrapnel; soldiers who have just torn down the enormous swastika emblem from a pediment and left it on the ground. Among them we recognize a young Lieutenant Schreiber. This same officer, inside a tank, is trying to shoot down a Stuka (legend has it that the plane was on its sixth dive-bomb attack). There are also the daggers, hung very high (probably so children wouldn’t be able to reach them), which were trophies taken from the enemy. “The SS used to carry these; very useful in takeovers and hand-to-hand fighting,” the resident of this “bourgeois” apartment casually explains.

And then, a Sherman; a tiny model of the American armored tank aboard which Jean-Claude commanded his platoon, all the way from the Mediterranean to Bavaria.

A more bizarre presence is the ceramic statuette, a decapitated nativity figurine stained with dirt at the site of the break. An uninteresting piece of rubbish? Yet this scrap seems to have a suitably assigned place, one perhaps even more significant than those given to the paintings and bronzes. I don’t dare ask about the origin of this talisman.

For some time now, our meetings being more frequent, I have been telling myself that an explanation for the figurine will come naturally, following the chronology of the narrative, its turns backward, its meanderings, its variations. I would certainly not like to press my friend for secrets. His words are paced by the shifting of the months, the light of the seasons that colors and then dulls the trees below his balcony. Such slowness parallels the breathing of this long past that is coming to life again, instant by instant, and that seems to have an eternity to be told.

I hold onto this feeling of unlimited time until the day I learn that the old man has been admitted to the hospital.

“Nothing serious,” he tells me one week later, “annual motor maintenance.” (With his hand, he taps his chest.)

I realize then that I have completely forgotten his age: almost ninety! I have gotten used to seeing the young Lieutenant Schreiber in him.

This time, I observe the “museum” of his apartment with new eyes.

Each of us possesses a few humble relics whose significance is unknown to other people. Pieces of our personal archeology, minuscule fragments of existence that even those closest to us, if we were to disappear, would be unable to date or connect to a specific memory. The people in our photos would become anonymous; a pebble collected long ago on a beloved shoreline, a simple little stone.

And this decapitated nativity figure—mislaid in the living room of a Parisian home—a piece of junk to throw away.

In truth, there is an intimate language involved, one whose words, materialized in these slivers of our singular mosaic, rapidly lose their meaning as soon as the voice that speaks their syllables fades away. Without the testimony that Lieutenant Schreiber imparts to me, this young woman in uniform will freeze, impersonal, a being without a future, without a soul, a silhouette reduced to that slightly worried gaze (the street where she is standing still resounds with the echoes of gunfire). Abandoned to her mute anticipation, her photo will arouse in other people a vaguely impatient pity: “Come on, we can’t hold onto all these old things! That little soldier, no one even remembers who she was, so …”

This is how the language contained in objects dies. Silence creeps in. A whole world becomes unreadable.

I notice the weight of this silence the day that Jean-Claude, while commenting on a photo, begins listing his comrades from the “guide platoon,” a unit that was part of the Fourth Cuirassiers. “There, in the middle, that’s Lieutenant-Colonel Poupel who led our regiment. On his right, Lieutenant Toupet. That one, that’s Brigadier-Chief Bigorgne…. That’s me, loaded down like a mule with all my gear….”

The snapshot is a little blurry; the hand of the person holding the camera must have moved. Jean-Claude’s gaze, though, recognizes these faces down to the slightest expression; they are imprinted in his memory with the power of those moments that separate the life and death of a soldier. Yes, many of those whose names he mentions were killed only a few days or a few weeks after this was taken. “That one, that’s Bossard, a very brave guy. The other one, with the motorcycle goggles, that’s Le Huérou, François. He was taken prisoner. And him, that’s—”

His voice breaks off suddenly, and in the look he gives me I catch a flicker of culpable dismay, a brief shimmer of panic.

He has forgotten the soldier’s name!

A tall man standing in the second row, his head leaning to one side, looking at once attentive and pained.

“That’s … what was his name again? Wait … he was from Belfort, I think. A really good guy … killed near Dunkirk by a shot from a Stuka. His name was … ah!”

This has nothing to do with a gap in his memory or, worse, the menace of Alzheimer’s. Jean-Claude’s lucidity and his capacity for recollection have always fascinated me. I have often told him that if we were pitted against one another in a memory test, he would beat me hands down. And besides, who doesn’t forget a name once in a while?

Still, the anxiety I intercept in his eyes is far deeper than what we feel when a word escapes us. He must have a sense that this is not some trivial slip, the kind that everyone can allow themselves. Everyone except him. For if he is unable to remember his comrade’s name, this man will be, from now on, just that slightly tilted human outline; an unknown person misplaced in a grayish snapshot, an extra in a war which is itself somewhat forgotten. More than sixty years later, survivors of that June in 1940 are few and far between. The military archives are hardening, from year to year, like geologic strata under the weight of ages. And his descendants—if by chance this soldier’s face appeared in a photo album found in the attic—would at most experience a small awakening of idle curiosity: “Hey, that must be my grandfather when he was young! Or maybe my great-uncle…. By the way, that was during which war again?”

This is what Jean-Claude must be telling himself right now, settled in his armchair, mechanically repeating, “Wait, it will come to me … this boy, I knew him very well. He had a kind of curious accent … so his name was … ah!”

I formulate my proposal in a careful tone, almost as if I were giving him a hint that would make it easier for him to remember. “You should go back in your memories to the beginning of the fighting. This comrade, was he already with the regiment in May of ’40 or not? Try to remember the first time you met him, when he introduced himself, or if you saw him at roll call or during a drill. In fact, perhaps you should write down the names of all the soldiers in your guide platoon … or even a list of your missions, day by day.”

Clearly, I am speaking to him about the book he should write, an idea I have expressed several times and which he has always refused, saying he is too old or too lazy, arguing that there is too little interest among the public today in those ancient events. I set out on the charge once more and then give it a rest, guessing that there might be a hidden reason for his refusal, the pain of which he probably wants to silence with arguments of old age and laziness.

This time, though, he hedges with less conviction. “A book? Yes, maybe…. Except, at my age, you know … I no longer have enough time in front of me to write something that would be sufficiently complete. And also, as you’ve seen, I’m starting to forget names. No, it’s too late now.”

I launch an attack with all the persuasion I am capable of. But no, age doesn’t mean anything! Look at Lévi-Strauss! And besides, what’s most important is to start. Then the chain of events will unroll all by itself. As for the public, there are still true readers out there, even if one only considers those who experienced the war years themselves at a very young age.

Jean-Claude ripostes, but not as firmly as usual. I know the argument he’s going to put forward, and he does: so much has already been written about the Servan-Schreiber family; in fact, thirty years ago, he himself published a short narrative recounting the history of his family and his own professional career.

I counterattack: That is precisely the point; in the book he had talked too much about his career, which for all its luster was nothing in comparison with the human density of the work he had done as a younger man! He narrated his encounters with the politicians of the time: one day he explained to Pompidou how advertising should be organized on television, another time he managed to put Mitterrand through to the second round during I don’t know which Homeric election in the Nièvre—actions that are certainly memorable, but which to me show more than anything else the terrible speed with which politics expires and devalues, losing its pompous currency. Yes, like the question, oh how burning, he was asking himself all those years ago: should a true Gaullist support Jacques Chirac’s brand-new RPR? Prehistory!

“As far as your glorious affair in television advertising, if I were you, dear Jean-Claude, I wouldn’t be in such a rush to take credit.”

He bursts out laughing, admitting that the things that had seemed so important to write back then seem quite unimportant today. Ads on TV, phooey!

I take advantage of his mirth to drive in the nail.

“On the other hand, what you’ve recounted far too briefly, in passing, without attaching any importance to it—yes, your memories as a soldier—all of that can only take on more value with time. Just like a wine that improves. Because those themes are eternal: the life of a human being who looks death in the face ten times a day and, in spite of that, continues to hope, to see beauty, and to love.”

I am far from being sure whether my very inspired argument won Lieutenant Schreiber’s assent. He is not someone whose hand can be forced. I think he wanted, very simply, to remember at all costs the name of his young comrade from the regiment, the twenty-year-old man who, on a beautiful sunny morning in the spring of 1940, lived the last instants of his life.

Those instants were well worth a book.