At the Other People’s Party

He arrives in Paris on the evening of May 8, 1945. The city is light, festive, teeming with people, and most definitely far ahead of the time in which the lieutenant is still living—those winter days in Alsace, in Germany, and those long hours of fighting when his tanks destroyed the frozen earth with their caterpillar tracks.

Forgotten smells intoxicate him: the various foods people are eating while peacefully sitting on the restaurant terraces, women’s perfumes, the greenery of boulevards, and the florists’ bouquets. Female bodies assault him with their dancing gait and the whiteness of their décolletage, the troubling closeness of this flesh that is no longer hidden beneath the dirty clothes of refugees in the bombed cities, the tatters of survivors coming out of the camps, or the immobility of dead bodies.

Everything around him is moving too quickly; people catch him in their sights and look away, he intercepts greetings that are not meant for him, responds to smiles by mistake, and hears scraps of chatter in which he thinks he recognizes a comrade’s name, the timbre of a familiar voice. The rapid dispersion of these faces is already reconstructing a new backdrop with other actors, other bodies, other promises.

He feels like running to catch up with the rhythm of this springtime merry-go-round so he can be accepted into one of the groups of young people, squeeze the waist of the woman brushing past him, talk to her, borrow a little of her happiness, her insouciance, and tell her what he did during those years that separate him from their beautiful Parisian evening. Yes, tell her who he is.

But wait … who is he to these people whose whirling is making him dizzy?

He hunches his shoulders to try and pass unnoticed through this colorful mob, adjusts the collar of his peacoat, then sits down, choosing a chair at one end of a terrace, and orders a glass of wine. To his left is the open door of a bar, and inside the entrance are steps leading to the basement. Through the darkness, he makes out the silhouettes of a few entangled couples, the fine curve of a female waist being gently bent by a man’s hand. The trailing sounds of a saxophone flow breathlessly over to the sidewalk. To his right, around a small table cluttered with cups of coffee, three young men and women are noisily arguing, waving their arms, mentioning names he’s never heard of: “Sartre, Camus …” One of the debaters brandishes in her hand, as a symbol of faith, a book that is thorny with page markers. Glancing discreetly in her direction, the lieutenant manages to read the title: L’Invitée (The Invited).

He smiles, recognizing himself clearly in this description; he feels like a guest who has arrived at a party too late.

There is a great desire in him to dissolve into this human swarm, to slip into the conversation these young people are having, gesticulating all the while, about … A curious thing! Exist-ential-ism. Never heard that before … what could it be? He could talk to them about his own existence during those six years of war, about tanks on fire, about his involvement with the Resistance, about the weapons he gave to Jean and Simon, both of whom were younger at the time than the people who are now arguing around the table, and also about the concentration camp in Miranda de Ebro, about landing in Provence, about the soldier, Francis Gilot, age eighteen, who died on the outskirts of Toulon for the liberation of France.

He would have so much to tell! But he imagines that his life would not fit inside the skillfully demarcated boxes of their ideas. “Essence, existence, engagement, liberty …” He listens to these words as if they are in a foreign language.

“To live is to get old, nothing more,” a young woman exclaims, quoting the book placed amid the cups. One of the boys pompously retorts, “To live is to bring the absurd to life!”

The lieutenant understands that these words are simply a game, a new game invented by society for people who judge life while sitting on a café terrace.

Had he heard the echo of these new theories when he arrived in Paris in May of ’45? Or was it one year later when he returned to Berlin? Or did it happen, perhaps, in the years that followed, when a formidable intellectual spell would deify a few precocious thinkers whose names he had learned on that sweet Parisian evening? The exact chronology of this discovery does not really matter, after all. His memory holds onto what is most important: the war is over, and his reunion with Paris is marked by an intense feeling of loneliness. There is a new generation of youth to which he no longer belongs, a new language he doesn’t know, and another way of understanding life—the “existentialist” view—that has little interest in his own life, his battles, his wounds, or the death, often heroic, of his comrades.

Today, Jean-Claude expresses this feeling of rupture in terms that all lost soldiers have used, from Remarque to Hemingway: a warrior latecomer who has returned to a time of peace that is populated by indifferent and forgetful individuals.

“Walking down the streets of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, I wondered if any of the people passing by had really fought against the Nazis. I was sad and overwhelmed.”

What more is there to say? And how could it be said, after Balzac and his immortal Colonel Chabert, the magnificent revenant from the old guard whose bravery and panache were so ill-suited for the bourgeois world of his treacherous wife? Between the grumbling Chabert, literary hero, and Lieutenant Schreiber, real man, there is only a single step.

This step, beginning with the return of peace, requires a kind of splitting in two. In order to fit into his new life, the soldier must forget his war, forget the person he was during the war, accept the history that is in the process of being rewritten, and not speak too much about his comrades in arms, because the rancor of the defeat in June 1940 hovers over all of those young lives that were sacrificed. He must become an “other,” renounce himself. Above all, he must accept a revision of what he lived through, reread his past according to the new intellectual fashion, and redesign himself in accordance with what the café philosophers say about engagement, choice, and liberty.

Balzac would not ask this of Colonel Chabert!

What strikes him upon his return to the capital is that an entire theory of existence has been hatched during the years when, every day, he ran the risk of no longer existing. A school of thought, born within the narrow perimeter of a Parisian arrondissement, has developed while he was fighting a war, helping the resisters, and crossing through towns in flames. A doctrine has colonized minds, books have been published that kindle shrewd commentaries, and plays have been performed and lauded by the public, all in a perfect disconnect from the life and death of soldiers in the Fifth African Chasseur Regiment of the First Armored Division.

Lieutenant Schreiber is unable to absorb the idea that he will have to consider this state of affairs to be normal.

This is how it works: to be admitted into the backdrops of the postwar, he is ordered to act as if everything seems logical and legitimate to him. If he plays the game, then his youth will be returned to him. Once his uniform is stowed away in the coatroom, he will be offered a role, he will be able to enter the scene, and he will even be allowed to join the circle of young polemicists glued to a small café table. He will show himself to be intelligent and modern while he juggles three-cent aphorisms that they will delight in—yes, one of those “to live is to bring the absurd to life.” As he recites them, he will feel the young woman’s thigh push against his own, heavily lined eyes will caress his gaze, and a hand will open its fingers to receive his fingers into their breadth.

He is twenty-seven years old and has spent six of them at war. Still young, but no longer truly young. And with this bitter thirst for love! No one has explained to him that the world continues its routine after the soldier’s departure. This is the eternal naiveté of fighters: all of them think that in their absence, the country holds its breath, suspends the passing of the days, waiting to see them the way they were when they left for the front, “smiling and fearless children,” twenty-one years old, like the young Officer Cadet Schreiber in the autumn of 1939.

No, the world has not stopped turning: a new generation has replaced the one that was fighting, and when the survivors come back, inevitably, as in every other country in the world, in every era, they feel unwanted. To leave is to die a little bit, is it not?

Jean-Claude says this without bitterness: it is a reality, both ordinary and hurtful, that even in his youth he knew how to tame.

In May 1945, at the beginning of his Parisian stay, he goes through his gear and rereads the small notebooks he used for taking notes between battles, taking advantage of the breaks. And he finds what he was looking for, hiding even from himself the true reason for his search: the address of a friend, Marie-Andrée, a nurse he met in North Africa and who had accompanied his tank squadron during the landing in Provence and the rough climb along the Rhône.

The young woman is in Paris. They see each other again, relive their shared memories, and enjoy each other. For a few days, these two beings, tested by war, distance themselves from the world in which they feel so foreign. They don’t dare to admit it to one another, but their country is that time of war, those cities with streets streaked with gunfire, those words a person told themselves a minute before death, those faces that smiled and disappeared in the fire. A life that had no need for gaudy aphorisms to be full, intense, and true.