Authors: Irene Nemirovsky
The priest motioned to the children who started to climb out.
“I’m terribly sorry, Father,” the officer repeated. “A school, is it?”
“An orphanage.”
“I’ll send the truck back to you if I can get any petrol.”
The children—teenagers between fourteen and eighteen—each carrying a little suitcase, got out and formed a small group round the priest.
Maurice turned towards his wife. “Are you coming?”
“Yes. Wait a minute.”
“What is it?”
She was trying to catch sight of the stretchers moving one after the other through the crowd. But there were too many people: she couldn’t see anything.
Next to her another woman was also standing on tiptoe. Her lips were moving but she made no sound: she was praying or repeating someone’s name. She looked at Jeanne. “You always think you see yours, don’t you?” she said.
Jeanne sighed faintly. There was no reason at all why it should be her son rather than another woman’s who appeared, suddenly, there in front of her eyes, her son, her own, her beloved. Perhaps he was in some peaceful spot? The most terrible battles leave some places untouched, protected, despite being surrounded by fire.
“Do you know where that train was coming from?” she asked the woman next to her.
“No.”
“Are there many dead?”
“They say there are two carriages full of casualties.”
Jeanne gave in and let Maurice pull her away. With great difficulty they made their way to the railway station. In places, they had to step over stone slabs and piles of broken glass. They finally made it to platform 3, where the train for Tours was getting ready to depart, a small local train from the provinces, peaceful and black, puffing out its smoke.
13
It was two days since Jean-Marie had been wounded: he was in the train that was bombed. He wasn’t hit, but the carriage caught fire. In his attempt to get out of his seat and make it to the door, his wound reopened. When he was picked up and hoisted into the truck, he was only semi-conscious. He lay motionless on his stretcher; his head had fallen sideways so that, at each jolt, it banged hard against an empty crate. Three vehicles full of soldiers were moving slowly down a road that had been machine-gunned and was hardly passable. Above the convoy the enemy planes flew back and forth. Jean-Marie came out of his delirium for a moment and thought, “This is how birds must feel when the hawks circle above them . . .”
In his confusion he could picture his nanny’s farm, where he used to spend the Easter holidays as a child. The farmyard was bright with sun: the chickens pecked at grain and hopped friskily about in the ash pile; then his nanny’s large bony hand would snatch one of them, tie its feet together and five minutes later . . . that stream of blood and that little gurgling sound. Grotesque. Death. “And me too; I’ve been snatched and carried away,” he thought, “. . . snatched and carried away . . . and tomorrow, thin and naked, tossed into a grave, I’ll be as ugly as that chicken . . .”
His forehead banged against the crate with such force that he let out a faint protest: he didn’t have the strength to cry out any more, but it caught the attention of the soldier on the next stretcher, wounded in the leg, but not too badly. “Hey, Michaud? What’s wrong? Michaud, are you OK?”
“Give me something to drink and get my head in a better position and get this fly away from my eyes,” Jean-Marie wanted to say, but he only sighed. “No.” And he closed his eyes.
“They’re starting again,” groaned his friend.
At that very moment more bombs fell around the convoy. A small bridge was destroyed: the road to Blois was cut off; they would have to retreat, clear a passage through the crowd of refugees, or go through Vendôme, but they wouldn’t make it there until nightfall.
Poor lads, thought the Major, looking at Michaud, the worst off. He gave him an injection. They started moving again. The two trucks carrying the minor casualties crawled towards Vendôme; the one carrying Jean-Marie took a path through the fields to shorten the journey by a few kilometres. The truck soon stopped, out of petrol. The Major went to see if he could find a house in which to lodge his men. They were away from the mass exodus here; the river of cars was moving along the road down below. From the top of the hill, in the periwinkle-blue twilight of this peaceful, tender June night, the Major could see a black swarm from which arose a troubling sound—distinct from the sound of car horns, cries and shouts—a muted, sinister murmur that pierced the soul.
The Major saw a row of farms. They were inhabited, but only by women and children. The men were at the front. It was into one of these farms that Jean-Marie was taken. The neighbouring houses took in the other soldiers. The Major found a woman’s bicycle and said he was going to the nearest town to get help, petrol, trucks, whatever he could find . . . “If he has to die,” he thought, as he said goodbye to Michaud who was still lying on the stretcher in the farm’s large kitchen while the women prepared and warmed up a bed, “if he can’t go on, he’s better off between two clean sheets than on the road . . .”
He cycled towards Vendôme. It took him the whole night and, when he was about to enter the town, he fell into the hands of the Germans who took him prisoner. However, realising that he wasn’t coming back, the women had already rushed to the village to warn the doctor and nurses at the hospital. But the hospital was full of the victims of the last bombing, so the soldiers remained in the hamlet. The women complained: with the men gone, they had enough work to do in the fields and looking after the animals without having to take care of these wounded men who’d been dropped on them!
Jean-Marie, burning with fever, painfully opened his eyes and saw an old woman with a long, sallow nose at the foot of his bed, knitting and sighing as she watched him: “If I could just be sure that my old man, wherever he is, the poor bloke, was being looked after like this one who means nothing to me . . .” Through his confused dream he could hear the clicking of the steel knitting needles. The ball of wool was bouncing on his blanket; in his delirium he thought it had pointed ears and a tail, and he stretched out his hand to stroke it. Now and again the woman’s adopted daughter would stand close to him; she was young, with a fresh, rosy face, slightly heavy features and lively brown eyes. One day she brought him a bunch of cherries and put them next to him on the pillow. He was not allowed to eat them, but he pressed them against his burning cheeks and felt content and almost happy.
14
Corte and Florence had left Orléans and were driving towards Bordeaux. Things were complicated, however, by the fact that they didn’t know exactly where they were going. First they had headed towards Brittany, but then decided to go south, to the Midi. And now Gabriel was saying that he wanted to leave France altogether.
“We’ll never get out alive,” said Florence.
What she resented, more than the weariness and fear, was her anger—a blind, maddening rage that rose up from inside to suffocate her. She felt that Gabriel had broken the tacit agreement that bound them together. After all, for a man and woman in their position, and at their age, love was a contract. She had given herself to him because she hoped he would take care of her—not just materially but emotionally. Until now she had been dutifully repaid: he had given her wealth and prestige. But suddenly he seemed to her a weak and despicable creature.
“And would you care to tell me just what we would do abroad? What we would live on? All your money is here, since you were foolish enough to have the whole lot sent back from London, not that I’ve ever understood why!”
“Because I thought England was more under threat than us. I had faith in my country, in my country’s army. Surely you’re not going to reproach me for that? Besides, what are you so worried about? You know I’m famous everywhere—thank God!”
He stopped speaking suddenly, pressed his face against the window and jerked his head back, annoyed.
“What is it now?” mumbled Florence, raising her eyes to heaven.
“Those people . . .” He pointed to the car that had just overtaken them. Florence looked at the people inside. It was the group they had spent the night parked next to in the town square in Orléans. She recognised them right away—the dented car, the man in the cap, the woman with the child on her lap and the one with the birdcage whose head was wrapped in bandages.
“Oh, stop looking at them!” said Florence wearily.
Corte had been leaning on a small travel case decorated in gold and ivory. Now he struck it forcefully with his hand several times. “If events as painful as defeat and mass exodus cannot be dignified with some sort of nobility, some grandeur, then they shouldn’t happen at all! I will not accept that these shopkeepers, these caretakers, these filthy people with their whining, their malicious gossip, their vulgarity, should be allowed to debase this atmosphere of tragedy. Just look at them! Look at them! There they are again. They’re honking at me, for goodness sake! . . . Henri, drive faster, won’t you!” he shouted to the driver. “Can’t you shake off this riff-raff?”
Henri didn’t even reply. The car moved forward three metres, then stopped, caught up in the unimaginable confusion of vehicles, bicycles and pedestrians. Once again Gabriel saw the woman with the bandaged head only a short distance away. She had thick, dark eyebrows, long, white, closely set teeth and hairs dotted about her upper lip. Her bandages were bloodstained, her black hair matted on the cotton wool and cloth. Gabriel shuddered in disgust and turned away, but the woman was actually smiling at him and trying to make conversation.
“Hey! It’s not moving very fast, is it?” she said politely through the lowered window. “But it’s still a good thing we came this way. You should see the damage the bombing’s done on the other side! They’ve destroyed all the châteaux of the Loire, Monsieur . . .”
She finally noticed Gabriel’s icy stare and went silent.
“You see,” he muttered to Florence, “I can’t get away from them!”
“Stop looking at them.”
“As if it’s that easy! What a nightmare! Oh, the ugliness, the vulgarity, the horrible crudeness of these people!”
They were getting close to Tours. Gabriel had been yawning for some time: he was hungry. He’d hardly eaten anything since Orléans. Just like Byron, Corte used to say, he was a man of frugal habits, content with vegetables, fruit and mineral water; but once or twice a week he needed a large, filling meal. He felt that need now. He remained motionless, silent, eyes closed, his handsome pale face ravaged by an expression of suffering like at those moments when he conceived the first neat, pure sentences of his books (he liked them as light and rustling as cicadas at first, then passionate and sonorous; he talked about his “violins”—“Let’s make my violins sing,” he would say). But other worries took hold of him tonight. He pictured with extraordinary intensity the sandwiches Florence had offered him in Orléans: they had seemed rather unappetising then, a bit soggy because of the heat. There had been some small sweet rolls with foie gras, black bread garnished with cucumber and lettuce, which would be deliciously cool and refreshing. He yawned again. Opening the case, he found a dirty napkin and a jar of gherkins.
“What are you looking for?” asked Florence.
“A sandwich.”
“There aren’t any left.”
“What do you mean? There were three of them in here a while ago.”
“The mayonnaise was runny, they were ruined, I threw them away. We can have dinner in Tours . . . I hope,” she added.
They could see the outskirts of Tours in the distance but the cars weren’t moving; a barricade had been set up at one of the crossroads. Everyone had to wait their turn. A whole hour went by like this. Gabriel was growing paler. It wasn’t sandwiches he was dreaming of now, but light, warming soup, or the buttery pâtés he’d once had in Tours. (He had been coming back from Biarritz with a woman.) It was odd, he couldn’t remember her name any more, or her face; the only thing that stuck in his memory were the smooth, rich little pâtés, each with a slice of truffle tucked away inside. Then he started thinking about meat: a great red slab of rare beef, with a curl of butter melting slowly over its tender flesh. What a delight . . . Yes, that was what he needed . . . roast beef . . . sirloin . . . fillet . . . a pork cutlet or mutton chop at a pinch. He sighed deeply.
It was a light, golden evening, with no trace of wind or heat—the end of a divine day. A soft shadow spread over the fields and pathways, like the shadow cast by the wing of a bird. From the nearby woods the faint perfume of strawberries wafted up now and then through the petrol fumes and smoke. The cars inched towards a bridge. Women were calmly washing their clothes in the river. The horror and strangeness of recent events were softened by these images of peace. Far away, a watermill turned its wheel.
“There must be fish here,” Gabriel mused. Two years before, in Austria, he had eaten fresh trout near a small river as clear and rapid as this one. Their flesh, beneath the bluish, pearly skin, had been as pink as a small child’s. And those steamed potatoes . . . so simple, traditional, with a bit of fresh butter and chopped parsley . . . He looked hopefully at the walls of the town. Finally, finally, they were there. But as soon as he put his head out of the window he saw the long line of refugees waiting in the street. A soup kitchen was giving out food to the hungry, they were told, but there was nothing to eat anywhere else.
A well-dressed woman, holding a child by the hand, turned towards Gabriel and Florence. “We’ve been here for four hours,” she said. “My child won’t stop screaming. It’s awful . . .”
“Awful,” Florence repeated.
Behind them the woman with the bandaged head appeared. “There’s no point in waiting. They’re closing. There’s nothing left.” She made a small dismissive gesture with her hand. “Nothing, nothing. Not even a crust of bread. My friend who’s with me, who just gave birth three weeks ago, hasn’t had anything to eat since yesterday and she’s breast-feeding her kid. And they tell you to have children, dammit. Children, sure! Don’t make me laugh!”