Stumbling through the driving rain, the shoebox tucked under one arm, his left hand swaddled in bandages, Albert pushed open the gate leading to a small courtyard heaped with door frames, wheels, tattered carriage hoods, broken chairs, useless things, one could not help but wonder how they came to be there and what possible purpose they could serve. There was mud everywhere, but Albert did not even try to use the paving stones set out like checkers, because the recent floods had shifted them so much he would have had to leap like an acrobat to avoid getting his feet wet. The rubber on his soles had worn through, and besides, such gymnastics were ill advised for one carrying a shoebox full of glass vials . . . He crossed the yard on tiptoe and reached the tiny building whose second floor had been converted to be rented out for two hundred francs—a pittance compared with the usual rents in Paris.
They had moved in shortly after Édouard had been demobilized in June.
That day, Albert had gone to collect him from the hospital and, despite his meager resources, had shelled out for a taxi. Though, in the months since the war ended, people had become accustomed to the sight of cripples of all kinds—war had a baroque feel for mutilation—the sudden apparition of this golem, hobbling on his useless leg, with a gaping hole in the middle of his face, had still terrified the Russian taxi driver. Even Albert, who had visited his comrade every week, was shocked. Outside he seemed very different from how he had been indoors. It was like walking a wild animal from the zoo down the street. Not a word was spoken during the journey.
Édouard had nowhere to go. At the time, Albert was living in a drafty seventh-floor attic room with a toilet at the far end of the corridor, there was a cold tap and he washed himself using a basin and went to the public baths as often as he could. Stepping into the room, Édouard seemed to notice nothing, he sat in a chair by the window and looked out at the street, the sky, lit a cigarette, which he smoked through his right nostril. Albert immediately realized he would not move from that spot and the responsibility he had taken on would quickly become a real source of everyday strife.
From the first, living together proved difficult. Édouard’s huge, scrawny carcass—only the gray cat that prowled on the rooftops outside was more emaciated—took up all the space. The room had been too small for one person. With two it seemed almost as crowded as the trenches. Not good for morale. Édouard slept on the bare floor without a blanket, spent his days with his crippled leg stretched out in front of him, smoking and staring out of the window. Before leaving in the morning, Albert would prepare something for Édouard to eat, but more often than not Édouard would ignore the food, the pipette, the rubber tube, and the funnel. He would spend the whole day sitting in the chair, a pillar of salt. He seemed to be letting life drain away like blood from an open wound. Living in close proximity to such suffering was so wearing that Albert would invent pretexts to go out. In fact, he would simply go and eat at a cheap café because trying to making conversation with Édouard left him almost as melancholy as his friend.
He got scared.
He tried to talk to Édouard about his future, about where he planned to live. But though he began the conversation a dozen times, Albert would trail off as soon as he saw that forlorn face, those glistening eyes—the only living thing that remained in this disturbing tableau—with their vacant stare of utter helplessness.
Albert was forced to accept that he was solely responsible for Édouard and would be for some time, until he recovered, until he began to enjoy life again, until he began to make plans for himself. Albert thought of this convalescence in terms of months, refusing to accept that months might not be the appropriate yardstick.
He brought paper and paints and Édouard thanked him but did not even open the package. He was not a scrounger nor an idler, he was simply an empty husk with no desires, no wishes, one might almost say no thoughts; had Albert left him tied up under a bridge like a stray dog and run away, Édouard would not have held it against him.
Albert had heard the word “neurasthenia,” he made inquiries, he asked around, encountered others—“melancholia,” “depression,” “lassitude”—but words were of scant use, the truth was here before his eyes: Édouard was waiting for death—however long death took, it represented the only imaginable solution, not a change, merely a transition from one state to another, like those mute, impotent old men we cease to notice and are not surprised when finally they die.
Albert talked to Édouard all the time, which is to say he talked to himself, like an old tramp in his shack.
“I suppose I should consider myself lucky,” he would say, whisking up an egg with meat bouillon for Édouard. “I could have ended up with some fathead contradicting everything I say.”
He tried everything he could think of to cheer his comrade, hoping he might raise his spirits and finally unravel the mystery that had haunted him since the beginning: what would Édouard do if one day he wanted to laugh? At best, he produced a shrill, throaty noise, a sort of keening, that made you uncomfortable and desperate to help, the way you might say a word to help out a stutterer; it grated on his nerves. Thankfully, Édouard rarely made a sound; the mere effort seemed to tire him. But still Albert could not shake off the thought of Édouard laughing. In fact, since being buried alive, it was not the only thought that bordered on a fixation. Aside from the tension, the daylong worry, and the terror of all the things that might happen, he had troubling notions that haunted him, like his recent obsession with the head of the dead horse. He had had Édouard’s sketch framed in spite of the expense. It was the only form of decoration in the room. To encourage his friend to start drawing again or at least to do something with his days, he would stand in front of the picture, hands in his pockets, admiring it and muttering about how Édouard had a real talent, and if he wanted . . . It was useless. Édouard would sit smoking a cigarette—sometimes the right nostril, sometimes the left—and gaze out at the chimneys and the corrugated iron roofs that were the only landscape. He was utterly impassive, had made no plan since his time in the hospital, where he had expended all his energy fighting doctors and surgeons, not because he refused to accept his condition, but because he could not imagine what would come next; could not imagine a future. When the shell had exploded, time had suddenly stood still. Édouard was worse than a broken clock, which at least gives the right time twice a day. He was twenty-four years old, and a year after being wounded, he had not managed to return to anything approaching his old self. To recover a shred of what he once had been.
He had spent a long time in shock, adopting a position of blind resistance, the way some soldiers, apparently, remained frozen in the position in which they were found—huddled, hunched, curled up on themselves; it was incredible the new horrors the war had dreamed up. The target of his resistance had been embodied by Professeur Maudret, a bastard in his opinion, less interested in his patients than he was in advancements in surgery—something that might be both true and false, but Édouard was not one for nuance, he had a gaping hole in the middle of his face and was in no mood to weigh pros and cons. He had clung to his morphine, expending all his energy trying to get larger doses, resorting to ruses unworthy of him—begging, cheating, pleading, shamming, pilfering—needing ever-larger doses, thinking perhaps that the morphine would finally kill him. After months of listening to his categorical refusals to accept grafts, prostheses, and surgical devices, Professeur Maudret finally threw him out on his ear—you break your back trying to help these people, offer them the latest surgical innovations, and still they’d rather stay the way they are, glaring at us as though we’re the ones who fired the shell. His colleagues from the psychiatric unit (Soldat Larivière had been seen by several, but obstinately refused to speak to a single one of them) had various theories to explain the stubborn refusal of such men. Professeur Maudret, who had little interest in explanations, merely shrugged; he wanted to devote his time and his skills to men who were worthy of his efforts. He signed the discharge papers without a second’s regret.
Édouard left the hospital with various prescriptions, a tiny dose of morphine, and a pile of papers in the name Eugène Larivière. A few hours later, sitting by the window in his friend’s cramped apartment, he suddenly felt the weight of the world on his shoulders, as though he had just stepped into his cell, sentenced to life.
Édouard found it difficult to organize his thoughts, but he listened to Albert prattle on about his mundane worries, he tried hard to concentrate—of course they needed to think about money, it was obvious, and what was to become of him, what was to be done with his hulking frame, this was the harsh reality he could not get his head around; his concentration would trickle like water through a sieve, and by the time he found he could focus again, it was dark and Albert was coming home from work, or it was the middle of the day and his whole body was shrieking for his next injection. He made valiant efforts, he clenched his fists and vainly tried to picture the future, but it leached away through the tiniest of cracks, leaving him brooding about his past, which surged past like a river, a torrent of images with neither rhyme nor reason. The one that recurred most often was his mother. He had few memories of her now but clung desperately to those he had: faint sensations, a musky perfume he tried to summon up, the pink dressing table with its stool fringed with pompoms, her creams, her brushes, the soft feel of satin clutched one night as she bent over him, or the gold locket she would open for him, leaning down as though it were a secret. But of her voice, her words, her face, he could remember nothing. His mother had melted from his mind like all the other living creatures he had known. It was a devastating realization. Ever since his face had been obliterated, all other faces had faded. The faces of his mother, his father, his friends, his lovers, his teachers, even Madeleine’s . . . He thought about her a lot, too. Without a face, all that remained was her laugh. It tinkled and sparkled like no other. Édouard used to resort to all manner of foolishness to hear that laugh, though it had not been difficult: a drawing, a funny face, a caricature of one of the servants—they chuckled, too, since it was clear there was no malice in Édouard—but particularly his disguises, he had an inordinate fondness and an incomparable talent for dressing up, usually as a woman. Seeing him in makeup, Madeleine would be reduced to embarrassed giggles, not for her own sake but “because of Papa,” she would say, “if he saw you dressed like that.” She tried to anticipate everything down to the smallest detail. Sometimes, however, she could not control the situation, and there would be awkward, glacial dinners because Édouard had come downstairs having “forgotten” to take off his mascara. As soon as he noticed, M. Péricourt would get to his feet, set down his napkin, and demand that Édouard leave the table immediately. What? Édouard would yell, pretending to be offended, what did I do now? But no one would laugh.
All these faces, even his own, had disappeared; not a single one remained. In a faceless world, what was there to cling to, who was there to fight against? To Édouard the world now was a place of shadowy figures whose heads had been lopped off and whose bodies, as if to compensate, seemed ten times larger, like the hulking form of his father. Memories of his early childhood rose to the surface like bubbles, sometimes the delicious shudder of mingled fear and wonder at his father’s touch, sometimes the way his father would smile conspiratorially during adult conversations about things Édouard barely understood and say: “Isn’t that right, my son?” It felt as though his imagination had been reduced to clichés, and so sometimes his father’s appearance was preceded by a dark, looming shadow like an ogre in a fairy tale. And his back! That vast, fearsome back that had seemed gigantic until he grew as tall as his father and later outstripped him; that back that seemed to express indifference, disdain, disgust.
There had been a time when Édouard hated his father, but that had passed: the two men had settled on mutual contempt. Édouard’s life was crumbling because there was no longer even hatred to shore it up. Here was another war that he had lost.
And so the days passed turning over images and old hurts; Albert would leave and return. When it was time to talk (Albert always wanted to discuss things), Édouard would emerge from his daydream and find it was already 8:00 p.m. and he had not even thought to turn on the lights. Albert scurried around like an ant, chatted enthusiastically, but all that was apparent to Édouard was that they had money worries. Every day, Albert would mount an assault on the “baraques Vilgrain,”5 the makeshift stores set up by the government to provide cheap necessities for those who were truly destitute, and every night he complained about how everything simply flew off the shelves. He never talked about the price of morphine; he tried to be tactful. He discussed money in general, but in an upbeat tone, as though this was a temporary setback they would look back on and laugh about in the way that men at the front had sometimes behaved as though the war were only an extended military service, a tiresome chore they would come away from with happy memories.
For Albert, their economic worries would be magically resolved, it was simply a matter of time. Édouard’s disability pension would ease the pressure and provide support for his comrade. A soldier who had given his all for his country and would never be able to live a normal life, one of the heroes who had won the war and brought Germany to its knees: it was a topic of which Albert never tired. He sat, calculating Édouard’s demobilization bonus, the pécule, the disability bonus, his pension as a mutilé de guerre . . .
Édouard shook his head.
“What do you mean, no?” Albert said. That’s all I need, he thought. Édouard hasn’t submitted the application, he hasn’t sent back the forms.
“Don’t worry,” Albert said, “I’ll deal with it.”
Édouard shook his head again and seeing that Albert still did not understand, took the slate he used to communicate and scrawled in chalk: “Eugène Larivière.”
Albert frowned. Édouard got to his feet and, from his knapsack, dug out a crumpled folder marked “Applying for Pensions and Disability Benefits,” containing a list of documents to be filed for review by the committee. Albert lingered over those Édouard had underlined in red: Incident report relating to the illness or injury—Summary of the initial treatment at the admitting field hospital or infirmary—Evacuation papers—Medical files pertaining to initial hospitalization . . .
The shock was terrible.
And yet it was obvious. No one named Eugène Larivière had been listed as wounded and transferred to a hospital during the assault on Hill 113. There would be records detailing how Édouard Péricourt was evacuated and later died of his wounds and others recording that Eugène Larivière had been transferred to Paris, but any official investigation would quickly reveal that the story simply did not add up, that the wounded soldier Édouard Péricourt could not be Eugène Larivière who had been demobilized two days later and transferred to the Hôpital Rollin on the avenue Trudaine. It would be impossible to provide the necessary documents.
Édouard had assumed a new identity; he could prove nothing, he would get nothing.
In fact, if the authorities were to dig a little deeper, examine the register, discover the deception, the false entries, he risked prison rather than a pension.
War had inured Albert to misfortune, but this time, he was devastated by what felt like a gross injustice. Worse, like a repudiation. What have I done, he thought, panic stricken; the anger that had been welling in him since he had been demobilized suddenly exploded, he slammed his head into the wall, sending the framed picture of the horse’s head crashing down, the glass cracked down the middle. Albert found himself slumped, dazed, on the floor with a lump on his forehead that would not go down for weeks.
Édouard’s eyes were glistening again. It was best not to cry in front of Albert, because these days his own situation was such that it took very little to bring him to tears . . . Édouard understood and simply laid a hand on Albert’s shoulder. He felt utterly wretched.
They quickly needed to find a place that was big enough for two: one paranoid and a cripple. Albert’s budget was pitiful. The newspapers still insisted that Germany would pay in full for everything it had destroyed during the war, which seemed like half the country. In the meantime, prices were rising, pensions and salaries went unpaid, transportation was chaotic, supplies erratic, and consequently there was a considerable amount of trafficking, meanwhile people were living by their wits, everyone knew someone who knew someone, contacts were made and addresses exchanged. This was how Albert came to be standing in front of number 9, impasse Pers, a middle-class house that had already taken in three lodgers. In the courtyard, there was a small two-story outbuilding, once a warehouse, now a storehouse, the upper floor of which was vacant. It was rickety but spacious, a coal-fired stove heated the low-ceilinged room and there was running water just below. There were two big windows and a large folding screen embroidered with pastoral scenes of a shepherdess and her sheep that had been ripped down the middle and crudely repaired.
Albert and Édouard used a handcart to move their belongings, since vans were expensive. It was early September.
Their new landlady, Mme Belmont, had lost her husband in 1916 and her brother a year later. She was still young, perhaps even pretty, though she was so haggard it was not possible to guess. She lived with her daughter, Louise, and insisted she felt reassured to have “two strapping young men” moving in because, living in this big house at the end of a cul-de-sac, she could not depend on her existing tenants—all of them old men—if there were any problems. She earned a modest living working as a cleaning woman here and there. The rest of the time, she spent standing at her window, staring out at the odds and ends her husband had had a habit of collecting that were now rusting away in the courtyard. Albert could see her when he leaned out his own window.
Her daughter, Louise, was smart and resourceful. She was eleven years old with eyes like a cat and too many freckles to count. She could be as lively as water rushing over rocks and a moment later thoughtful and still as an engraving. She spoke rarely—Albert had heard her speak on only three occasions—and she never smiled. But she was a very pretty child nonetheless; if she was half as pretty when she grew up, she would start wars. Albert never knew how she came to win over Édouard. Ordinarily, he refused to see anyone, but nothing would stop this girl. From the day they arrived, she had camped out at the foot of the stairs, watching. As everyone knows, children are by nature curious, girls especially. Her mother had probably said something about the new tenant.
“No oil painting, apparently. So badly scarred he never goes out, I heard from his friend who takes care of him.”
Such a comment could hardly fail to rouse the curiosity of an eleven-year-old girl. She’ll get bored soon enough, Albert had thought, but no . . . Seeing her every day, sitting on the top step by the door, anticipating any opportunity to get a glimpse inside, he had thrown open the door. The girl stood frozen on the threshold, her lips set in a perfect “O,” her eyes wide, unable to utter a sound. Admittedly, with the gaping hole in the middle and those upper teeth that looked twice their actual size, Édouard’s face was a spectacle, it was like nothing in this world. In fact, Albert had told him so in no uncertain terms: “With a face like that you could scare the crows out of the trees, old man, you could at least spare a thought for others.” He had said it to encourage Édouard to have the graft, but it made no difference. Albert gestured to the door where the terrified girl had fled as soon as she saw him. Édouard sat, impassive, and puffed on his cigarette with one nostril while holding the other closed. He exhaled the smoke through his nose too, because through his throat . . . “You can’t, Édouard,” Albert had told him, “I can’t stand it. It scares me if you want the truth, it looks like a volcano erupting, I swear, look at yourself in the mirror sometime, you’ll see . . .” Albert had only been living with his friend since mid-June, and already they were like an old married couple. The day-to-day was difficult, they were always short of money, but as often happens, the problems had brought the two men closer, binding them together. Albert was truly touched by his friend’s tragedy and could not seem to get past the idea that had Édouard not saved him, and only a few days before the end of the war . . . Édouard, for his part, being keenly aware that Albert was single-handedly responsible for both their lives, did his best to lighten the burden, doing small chores around the house—an old married couple, as I said.
A few days after running away, little Louise reappeared. Albert assumed that the sight of Édouard exerted a sort of fascination over her. She stood in the doorway of the living room for a moment, then without warning, she walked over to Édouard and brought her forefinger to his face. Édouard knelt down—Albert had seen him do some strange things—to allow the girl to trace the edge of the yawning chasm. She seemed engrossed, attentive, as though this were a piece of homework, like the maps of France she carefully traced in pencil.
It was at this moment that the two struck up a curious friendship. As soon as she came home from school, she would come up to see Édouard. She managed to find old newspapers for him to read, issues that were days or even weeks out of date. This was Édouard’s sole occupation, reading newspapers, clipping out articles. Albert had glanced at the file in which he kept the cuttings, articles about those who had died in the war, about commemorations, lists of those missing in action; it was rather sad. Édouard did not read the Paris dailies, only the provincial papers. Louise always managed to find copies, no one knew how. Almost every day, she would bring Édouard a cache of old issues of L’Ouest-Éclair, the Journal de Rouen or L’Est républicain. She would sit at the kitchen table doing her homework while Édouard smoked his Caporals and cut out articles. Louise’s mother made no comment.
One evening in mid-September, Albert had come home after a tiring shift as a sandwich man, having spent the afternoon trudging the Grands Boulevards between Bastille and République carrying a board (on one side extolling the virtues of “Pink” pills, A jiffy is all it takes to cure all manner of ills, on the other, those of Juvénil corsets, Two hundred retailers in France!). As he came in, he found Édouard lying on an ancient, battered couch Albert had found some weeks earlier and brought home using a handcart borrowed from an old comrade he had met during the Somme and whose only means of survival now was to drag a cart with what little strength he had left and his one remaining arm.
Édouard was smoking, as usual, and wearing a dark blue mask that extended from just below his nose, covering the lower part of his face, and jutted over his neck like the beard of an actor in a Greek tragedy. The dark, shimmering blue was speckled with gold, as though the paint had been sprinkled with sequins before it dried.
Albert signaled his surprise. Édouard gave a theatrical wave as if to say, “Well, how do I look?” It was odd. For the first time since they had met, Édouard’s expression seemed genuinely human. In fact, Albert had to admit it was very handsome.
There came a sudden, muffled sound from his left and, turning his head, Albert just caught sight of Louise scampering down the stairs. He had yet to hear her laugh.
Like Louise, the masks were now a permanent fixture.
Some days later, Édouard was wearing a white mask on which Louise had drawn a large smiling mouth. Édouard’s twinkling eyes made him look like an Italian actor, a sort of Sganarelle or Pagliaccio. Now when he had finished reading his newspapers, Édouard would turn them into papier-mâché in order to make chalk-white masks that Louise would later paint or decorate. What had started out as a game had become a full-time occupation. Louise was the high priestess and would scour the neighborhood and arrive with paste jewels, beads, fabric, colored felt, ostrich feathers, and imitation snakeskin. Since she also had to find the newspapers, it must have been a lot of work, running around trying to find these baubles and trinkets; Albert would not have known where to look.
Édouard and Louise spent their time making these masks. Édouard never wore the same one twice; the new one would replace the old, which was hung with the others on the walls of the apartment like hunting trophies or costumes in a fancy-dress shop.
It was almost 8:00 p.m. when Albert arrived at the foot of the stairs carrying his shoebox.
His left hand, the one that had been slashed by the Greek, was throbbing viciously despite Docteur Martineau’s bandage, and he was feeling unsettled. The shoebox, the spoils of a valiant struggle, offered him some relief; getting supplies of morphine had been time consuming and took its toll on a sensitive soul like Albert, who was so susceptible to emotions of all kinds . . . And yet he could not help but think that what he was carrying could kill his friend twenty times, a hundred times over.
He took three steps, lifted the dusty tarpaulin covering the remains of a broken-down cargo tricycle, pushed aside the hodgepodge in the bin, and carefully stowed his precious shoebox.
On his way home, he had done a quick calculation. If Édouard kept to his current—rather high—dose, they would not have to worry for almost six months.