The Words for Another Life

And then comes that August evening, an indecisive storm that ends up pouring out a fine rain tinted by the sunset. I arrive a little early, and having come up too quickly I see the old man straining to lift himself out of his armchair.

Three months have passed since the book’s release. The bookstores are going to return the unsold volumes to the publisher, who in turn will send those “stocks” to the paper masher. When the new titles appear in the fall, the book will no longer exist.

I prepared myself to tell him, organizing a whole arsenal of stylistic devices. I must play on several registers, starting with the one we use most often: “Listen, Jean-Claude, we have lost a battle, but we have not lost the war!” Then I’ll also talk about “long sellers,” books with an unexpected longevity that rival the success of bestsellers inflated by fashion and publicity. But most importantly, Charles Dupêchez promised me that Jean-Claude would never receive that atrocious letter sent to writers to inform them that, in view of a “reduction in stocks,” their book is going to be sent to the paper masher.

Yes, we must spare this young ninety-two-year-old author.

As I enter his home, I notice right away that he is no longer wearing his “combat outfit”; no blazer, and no tie, either. The evening is very hot, this is true. Nor are there any more archive pages on the table in the living room. At first, there aren’t even any words. The storm that can’t decide whether or not to dissolve over the city furiously shakes the branches in front of the open windows and fills the room with a rustling of leaves, preventing either of us from speaking without raising our voices.

Dressed in a short-sleeved shirt and summer pants, the old man is allowing a fragility to show. At his age, it recalls the leanness of adolescents. The bony relief of his shoulders, the skinny molding of his elbows and wrists … growing old, beneath life’s polar latitudes, is as rapid as childlike growth. And yet, since I have known him—more than four years—I have never detected any sign of a slump, an alteration of features, a warping of his gaze. This is the first time that, suppressing an influx of pain, I say to myself, “Now he’s really gotten old!” This verdict is absurd, considering it’s being applied to a person making a start on his tenth decade, but at the same time it is accurate: a sudden change, impossible to deny, marks the contours of his face, his silhouette, his gestures, and the expression in his eyes.

A voice in me repeats, “Age, yes, age,” but the certainty that I would like to silence at all costs is undeniable: in telling his story these past few years, in remembering himself in his book, he has lived in the midst of an atemporal past, in rhythm with the young lives that it resuscitated in him. In the body of Lieutenant Schreiber. That August evening, the years that had been kept at bay had broken through the dam. Time had reclaimed its due with the violence of a tidal wave. The young soldier had been frozen on a book cover destined to be reduced to paper dust. The old man had put away his clothing for grander days, put away his letters and the photos of his comrades, and without protesting, had opened his life to the years that had arrived late.

The storm skirts around Paris, ending with a calm rain that fell from an almost cloudless sky. From the courtyard rises the smell of dampened earth, the breath the plants can take again after the furnace of the day. Jean-Claude stands up to draw aside a curtain and his gaze lingers on that photo: a small grayish snapshot in which a young woman is adjusting her curls, snatched by a gust of wind.

He starts telling me the story I know: early in the morning on November 11, 1942, he fled his parents’ home in the company of his friend Sabine. A long walk close to German tanks, the arrival in Tarascon, the missed train to Marseille, and the happy decision to take refuge in a hotel where their pursuers would never come looking for them.

I never interrupt when his tale takes another tour through events he has already related to me. With each repetition, a new detail emerges, a forgotten person passes through the field of vision, the composition changes. The density of our memories relies predominantly on the number of these double exposures.

This time, it is not a question of details: the scene is relived in an entirely different way. In fact, it is also told in a very different tone. The speed of the plot (flight, anxiety, refuge) cedes its place to slow-paced words interrupted by long pauses, allowing this murmured narration to include the sunset that is bathing the rain behind the windows with color and that other rain, just as light and sun-colored, that shone in the small opening between the shutters of their hotel room during that strange morning of November 11, 1942. On that day there had been, of course, the deadly tension of the game they were playing, and the novelty of those embraces just steps away from the streets where their pursuers were circling in their cars, pleasure sharpened by danger, the somewhat crazy joy of having dared to take the gamble and having perhaps gotten away with it.

Today, these emotions hardly emerge in Jean-Claude’s story. Instead, what seems more intense is the astonishment that had struck the young man back then and is now finding its way, amplified, to the old storyteller seventy years later. It is a difficult sensation to express: those two lovers whose happiness hung on a single careless word from the hotelier, those two particles thrown into the monstrous avalanche of history, those two young desperados who were able to free themselves from it, thanks to their love. The young woman falls asleep and her friend stays awake, more and more aware that what he had mistaken for a brief reprieve is revealing itself to be a new life, unsuspected, the essence of what he has to live. He tries to understand it, but his thoughts are only of that autumn sun, that light with which the yellowed leaves of the plane trees illuminate the room; the warm wind that passes and makes the shutters move; the presence, so touching in its abandon, of this young woman; and minutes that had never before known such transparency, this slowness given rhythm by the brightness and shadow of the parading foliage that morning.

The old man is sure to have spent time inside this other life, and the words simply have not yet been found to say it. There was also the night in a city liberated at the cost of bloody fighting, that Baden-Baden unrecognizable in its warrior décor. And that woman who welcomed him in, whose tenderness interrupted his soldier nightmares. She spoke the language of the enemy and yet … in actual fact, it was not just a night of love. It was … how to explain it?

Yes, an exhilarating freedom, the feeling of no longer playing. Exactly like after his return to Paris in May 1945. A festive city, effervescent, crowds excited by the end of the dangers. And his own solitude, the almost physical impossibility of approaching other people, of speaking to them, of telling them what he had just been through … and those few days spent with the woman he didn’t have to explain anything to because she had been through the same war. Thanks to this uselessness of words, they had very briefly lived like foreigners, emancipated from the world’s playacting, discovering a life off of the merry-go-round.

The daylight has died out; only the tops of the trees in the courtyard keep a bit of the paleness of the setting sun. Jean-Claude stands up and turns on a lamp.

“Actually, what I’ve told you, those weren’t really love stories.”

An irritation resonates in his voice: he most certainly does not want to give the impression that he is drawing up a list of his conquests! No, the moments he has just mentioned have nothing to do with a seducer’s prize list. Those loves were of an entirely other nature: they did not drag the lovers into the thickness of the bonds of desire and possession. Quite the contrary; they were freeing.

He has an inkling that he will not know how to say it. How could he express that distant feeling of being reborn into a different life? Of no longer belonging to a world where, beneath the windows of the hotel where the lovers are hiding, gloomy individuals in leather coats are walking by? A world that at night makes the tank tracks squeal in front of the house where an unknown young woman whispers tender words to a soldier struggling in the depths of a nightmare. A world that swirls around those forgetful Parisian crowds who are happy to find lightness again, the merry-go-round of life, and who don’t even notice the couple (a young officer and a nurse) who silently fade away in the midst of a city in celebration.

I sense in him the fear of appearing sentimental, of rewriting his war as if it were the chronicle of a dashing hussar who, after each battle, rushes into a new bed of love. His features harden, and in the twilight he seems to see the shadow of days that he alone is still able to examine.

“It was in Alsace. We had spent three days unable to leave our tanks. We’d been living inside this hovel of steel, suffocating on the exhaust of the shells we were firing; the Germans were attacking relentlessly. We no longer felt hungry, we had very little water left, we were only sleeping in snatches, and also … you already know this: war is not very romantic. We had to relieve ourselves in shell cartridges and empty them through a slit. The movies never mention those kinds of details. At the end of the third day, we started losing our minds. There were five of us crammed into this armored tomb that bullets were ricocheting off of all the time. We focused on each other with our burning, wild eyes; we were aware that each minute could turn our bodies into a pulp of flesh and blood; yes, a single shell would have been enough. Usually, one doesn’t have time to see death coming. And there, we had seventy-two hours to think about it. Well, I was in no mood for mulling things over, I felt everything all at once, like a prisoner sentenced to death: these five bodies, five souls with their unique destinies, their memories, their hopes for love, their dreams of the future; in a few seconds all of that would be clumped together in a pile of meat from which would emerge arms, bones, torn-off faces, burst eyes, shouts, groans, the hissing of blood on burning metal. And in this pile, there would be this me, with my skin, my breath, my thoughts, the reflection in me of the people I loved, the worn sheet of the last letter I’d received from them … all of this, in that organic heap. The idea was so horrible that I acted out of instinct. I pushed open the turret, pulled myself out of the tank, jumped into the snow, and started pacing beneath the sights of German barrels.

“Each mouthful of the air’s coolness made me so intoxicated that I had the sensation I was biting into it. My body was living like never before, or rather it was rediscovering what life could be if men had dared to exist differently. Yes, if they had dared to be reborn into that new life, to free themselves from the insanity that shut them inside the steel coffins of their tanks. On this snow-covered field, somewhere in Alsace … I felt almost divinely powerful and, at the same time, very weak, because I knew I was incapable of telling other people what I had just understood. The most incredible thing was that during the twenty or so minutes of my ‘stroll,’ not one shot was fired. It was as if I had truly found myself in a fundamentally different dimension.”

He is quiet for a moment, then murmurs with a smile, “But to tell people about it, I would have to write another book, wouldn’t I?”

I know that on that evening he expressed the essence of this new existence, the possibility of which he had hinted at several times already. A confinement within a situation, a trap of history, or in a role, and suddenly, this liberation, the serene certainty of being somewhere else.

It is this revelation that he had so wanted to share with those who, like him, had remained imprisoned in the bowels of the tank. And throughout his entire life, this thought had possessed him. To the point where, in it, he had come to see the very definition of the human condition: a long series of confinements; a slew of penitentiaries interrupted by the hope of pushing away a sheet of steel, of jumping to the ground, breathing that snowy chill and finding the sight of the barrels pointed against one another ridiculous.