A Message

I often imagine Jean-Claude being woken up at night by his memories. While he dreams, he must sometimes hear the static of radio exchanges as they reach him in his tank. A message in German between two enemy tanks that are going to attack him. Then, a warning from an American tank driver: “Hey, Frenchie, take care! There are two Panther tanks coming down to you.” Yes, be careful, Frenchie, two Panthers are getting ready to charge!

These voices die away and the old man stays sleepless for a moment, astonished by the clarity with which the reality of that ancient life is suddenly appearing before him: two radio transmissions, a few seconds apart, suspended his fate above death. His new sleep is a brief doze, light enough not to distort the bitter reality that is being reborn: a young officer pulls himself out of his tank and shouts as loud as he can over the many sounds of the battle: “Leper! Catherineau! Hold on!” A long trace of blood in the snow, the two wounded soldiers, his effort to carry them toward his tank … and suddenly, that slowness, that weakness, as if in his dream the young lieutenant has been transformed into this old man who is trying in vain to recount a past that no one wants to know about anymore.

I also imagine that in the greatest depths of those cruel nights, the old man must regret not having been able to express the truth about that other life whose light he had caught a glimpse of long ago. That autumn morning, sunny and windy, a hotel room in a city where each footstep could become fatal and, mysteriously, an infinite serenity, the certainty of having arrived at the essence of his life. He had the same feeling in that German city, on a night still shaken by explosions, when a woman he didn’t know, with a few words, had offered him a peace he had never felt so deeply. He had felt like a foreigner then, not with that young German but in the world around him filled with hatred and death. As foreign as he felt when he returned to Paris in May 1945, in the midst of a celebration of the forgetful. A woman, a nurse who had saved hundreds of lives, would show him that living away from the crowd was not a curse but a promise, the start of a path.

I remember one day, while he was talking about his premonition of that path, the old man had said, with a disconcerted smile, “But to tell that story, I would have to write another book.”

Jean-Claude’s words reverberate in me as the weeks after our recent meeting return to their usual pace. I hesitate to call him, afraid of awakening in him the sourness of the failure. After all, I was the one who had pushed him toward this book adventure. I tell myself that I will need to be patient and wait for an opportune moment. Time, with its abrasive obstinacy, eventually makes even the notches that are most brutally carved into our memory disappear.

Then comes, finally, that February evening; a snowfall erases the winter’s grayness (all while provoking a national catastrophe, as is always the case when a few inches of snow cover the Parisian asphalt). I walk, choosing small streets where this white has not yet been flattened by the coming and going of cars. Strangely, some of these streets are now linked to the memory of my last and already distant encounter with Jean-Claude, to those soldiers’ names I spoke in silence during my journey across Paris.

When I come through my front door, I find a message on my answering machine: “I’ve just remembered the name of that guy, you know, the one in the photo, the one of my guide comrades from the Fourth Cuirassiers. The one who was killed near Dunkirk. If you have the time, come and see me, I’ll talk to you about him. And also about that young woman I didn’t know in Baden-Baden—”

The message cuts off at this point. His voice has a ring to it and seems reanimated. It is a young man’s intonation.

This is probably the way that, long ago, Lieutenant Schreiber’s voice must have sounded.