Waiting for D-Day

The person who replaced me as Jean-Claude’s confidante fulfilled his task with the utmost professionalism. For long hours, he listened to the old man, recording his story, discussing the composition of future chapters with him, and undertaking the necessary corrections. It was patient, painstaking, and prodigiously difficult work, for inside a short book they had to scroll through a whole century that had grafted one soldier’s destiny onto the greater outline of history. This was an effort made even more commendable because the name of this writer was not going to appear in the published book. Far from playing a “ghost” writer, the man had made himself a phantom listener whose mere presence could enliven the tale, keeping it from echoing into the void.

The editor rarely intervened, paying most of his attention to deadlines, manufacturing details, and organizing the launch.

After six months of work, the manuscript was ready. I read it with emotion: how would this voice I had listened to so often be transferred into a written form? And had the writing itself, having banished the rough edges of conversation, produced a text that was too smoothed out and sanitized?

I knew that either way I would be a bad reader, too interested in finding what these pages could not show: Jean-Claude’s smile, his gestures, the distant moments gazing at the photos he would show me, the turning of the seasons behind the windows in his apartment.

Naturally, I stumbled upon sentences that should have probably been cut out. That quick burst of wit with which Malraux (perhaps as a victim of a hallucinogenic plant plucked from inside a Khmer temple) introduced Jean-Claude’s mother, Suzanne Crémieux, as a nymphomaniac whose sensuality had toppled every politician in the Third Republic. I would also have removed the sequence dedicated to the legendary Jean-Jacques, Jean-Claude’s enemy cousin, a dashing former presidential candidate who, in the manuscript, had received too many arrows shot in his direction. It would have been simpler to say “Rest in peace.” There was also at times a little bit of detachment lacking in the pages that talked about the Servan-Schreiber dynasty. But in a way, I told myself, this smoldering of passions perhaps prevented the clan’s legend from becoming frozen in the hagiographic chill of a modern myth.

The rest—what was essential—was transcribed just as Jean-Claude usually told it: a human reed struggling in the gusting wind of wars. The Battle of France, fighting as a member of the Resistance, the prisons in Franco’s Spain, landing in Provence, Liberation … the storyteller’s style had been respected, as had the outline of great events in which, as if on top of snow or sand, Lieutenant Schreiber’s stubborn path could be recognized.

“I’m thinking about publishing this book in the beginning of May. Around that time, we might have a chance as far as the media goes. Between May 8 and June 18, a book talking about the last war and that references de Gaulle shouldn’t go unnoticed.” Charles Dupêchez summarized this plan of action in a tone that betrayed a cheerful regret: we would have to make do with days of remembrance, the French people’s commemorative fad.

The eve of our battle was beginning. Everything would be decided, therefore, between the day of the victory over the Nazis and the muffled echo of de Gaulle’s decree.