America and Americans and Selected Nonfiction (36 page)

He laughed and said, “You know, your army sold many kinds of things after the war, clothes and blankets and pants like these. And then they were all sold, so we French are making them.” He gazed at his trousers. “I don't think they are as good,” he said.

A thin man with a pinched face took the ball then. He had been captured during the war and sent to Buchenwald. He still limped on the leg the Nazis had shattered with an iron bar. He said:

“I should think you could have made a better choice than Ridgway to take Eisenhower's place.”

We had been in Paris during the Communist rioting over Ridgway's arrival, and we were still a little sore about it. “Why?” I asked. “He's a good man. He did a good job in the East. He's a good soldier and a good administrator. And I should think you French would like him. He was the first big American general to land in France for the liberation. What have you got against him?”

A white-haired man, vice-president of the wine cooperative, spoke. “Well, with all the talk about Korea—it makes a bad impression to send Ridgway.”

“With all what talk?” I demanded. “Do you mean to say you seriously consider that we are using germs?”

“One never knows,” the vice-president of the wine co-operative said gently. “There's so much talk. How can we tell?”

I found that I was getting angry—a tactical error—and I said, “Look! Suppose you were a Communist general and your men were really ignorant, and suppose your enemy was dropping propaganda leaflets that disturbed your men and made them ask questions. Wouldn't you find it easy to tell your people the leaflets carried germs so they wouldn't pick them up? And if you had some epidemics anyway, wouldn't such a campaign do two things—excuse your bad medical service and also keep people from reading the propaganda?”

“How do we know?” the white-haired man said. “We hear so many things.”

“Whom do you hear them from? I can understand a half-literate, completely dominated people believing this germ story, but I can't understand a modern Frenchman believing it.”

Louis Gibey, the vintner-teacher, said nervously, “Who will be your next President?”

“I don't know.”

“Can Eisenhower be elected?”

“I don't know,” I said. “Do you like him?”

An old peasant said, “We like him very much. He understands us. He said we must not rearm so fast that our living standard falls. We like that. We are just now beginning to get enough to eat.”

“Suppose the time is too short.”

The old man said, “We knew starvation under the Germans. We are afraid of hunger. We don't want to spend our little gains for guns.”

“Well, if you had to choose between a little hunger and being taken over by the Kremlin, which would you choose?” I asked him.

“We don't think the danger is as great as you do. We don't want to spend our little gains.”

“I don't either,” I said. “Have you thought that a good part of the taxes I pay and all Americans pay is going to help Europe rearm? Think of the howls of rage that would go up if part of your taxes had to go to us. Would you like it?”

A jovial man, who wore a gigantic cummerbund of wool, smiled into his glass. “We wouldn't like it. But surely you don't think you are doing it for us. You are doing it for yourselves. You are using us to defend you.”

“That is more or less true,” I said, “and as realistic Frenchmen who do not believe in pure charity, you should be reassured by that. And if we go down, can you survive?”

“We don't want war,” Cummerbund said. “I was wounded in 1916 and wounded again in 1943. No, we don't want any war.”

“You didn't want it when Hitler came in—but not wanting it didn't stop him. Do you think prayer will stop the Russians? You may not like us here, but if we hadn't come you would still be under the Nazis.”

“There were the Russians,” the white-haired man said. “The Russians fought very well.”

“I've thought about this quite a bit,” I said. “I want you to imagine something. Suppose we had not come into the war, and suppose the British had not. Imagine that the Russians had beaten the Germans all alone. Do you really think you would have your free wine cooperative now, your elections, your schools, even your churches? Do you really believe you would? Or would you have been like Poland, like Romania, like East Germany? Do you know any time when the Russians have not taken over when they could? Just think about it. And where they have taken over, has any freedom remained?”

A man in a ragged hat spoke—thickly, because his front teeth had been knocked out. “It is very confusing,” he said. “But sometimes we think it might be better if you left us alone.”

“You mean you do not want ECA money?”

Gibey said, “It is badly done. You don't know what happened. The money is given only to big companies. They use it to drive small companies out of business. The big companies are growing and the little ones are disappearing. It is very dangerous. The politicians are in it. We don't trust politicians.”

I said, “I don't know the details, but it occurs to me the little companies cannot build heavier military equipment unless they get together. Have your little companies done that?”

“We think most of the money goes to the rich,” Gibey said.

“And yet you say that you are getting on your feet. Don't you think our help had anything to do with that? We don't believe all politicians are bad.”

The young man in the airborne pants said, “You have had your scandals. We read about them.”

“Sure we have. And also we have our thousands of honest men, and they are the ones who matter in the long run. The proof is that we function. The American government is not about to fall to pieces.”

“We are cynical about politicians,” Gibey said. “We remember what the politicians did during the last war.”

There was a stir at the door. A woman came in, saying, “Ticot's son is crying.”

The argument stopped instantly. Everyone got up from the table. We walked rapidly down the street among the homecoming cows, then up a flight of stairs and into a peasant kitchen. Beside the stove in a big wooden box was chained a nondescript bitch, snarling with fear and rage. From under her heavy body came a thin squealing. Three men grabbed the snapping bitch and held her down, while a fourth reached under her and brought out a tiny white pup with brown markings. Its face was deeply wrinkled, and its eyes were navy blue and sightless.

They carried the pup to the light while it cried and sneezed. An end of straw stuck out of one nostril. The man who held Ticot's son pulled a long straw out of the puppy's nose. Ticot's son yawned widely and went to sleep in his hand. The circle of men admired the little sleeping puppy.

“He is indeed Ticot's son,” they said. “See the brown triangle between the eyes. Ticot has the same mark. See those two round spots on the back. Ticot has them, and Ticot is the greatest—the greatest hunter in the whole Jura.”

“Where is Ticot now?” I asked.

“Oh, you see, no one has hunted for a week. Ticot became disgusted. He has gone hunting by himself.”

One man said excitedly: “I can tell by the sound of Ticot's voice whether he is hunting rabbits or hares or deer. He has a different voice for each.”

“Who owns Ticot?” I asked.

“Why, everyone. Everyone who goes hunting. Ticot is of this street. He is a free dog.”

“And Ticot's wife?”

“Oh! That one!” they said, and dropped the subject so quickly that I understood Ticot's wife was not above reproach.

The puppy was dropped back into the box, and Mrs. Ticot gently licked him all over without awakening him.

“Now we must go to the cave,” the white-haired man said. “You will want to see where the beautiful wine is made.”

Our party tromped down the stairs and into the ancient street. In a narrow, grass-grown road that was well traveled when the Romans came, Daniele and Lena Gibey had dressed their little sister Jenny in trailing vines and had put a crown of wild flowers on her head.

Little Jenny was pulling the petals from a white daisy, reciting as she did:

“I love you (petal), I love you a little (petal), I love you passionately (petal), I love you not too much (petal), I love you to the point of insanity (petal), I love you not at all (petal).” The last petal fell, and as Jenny looked up in triumph at her sisters, the flower crown fell rakishly over one hoyden eye.

The wine cave turned out to be a twelfth-century church of the purest Gothic architecture. It was attacked and despoiled during the French Revolution. Church authorities look at it now and then, but it would take many millions of francs to restore it, and no one has them. The round place where the rose window once was is bricked up. Inside, the triple columns rise cleanly to the groined ceiling. Under the pointed arches at the sides, the great wine barrels lay; they did not seem out of place in the cool, dusky church.

“It is cool in here,” the men said. “It is better not to waste such a good place. When the church wants it, it is here, and meanwhile we keep the roof in repair.”

The walls and columns were black with the dirt of centuries, and the sweet smell of working wine made an incense in the air.

Parachute Pants said, “The floor fell in over there and underneath we found nearly two hundred skeletons. In some of the skulls were the arrowheads that had killed them. Soldiers, they must have been, from some old time.”

An electric pump was moving wine from one great cask to another so that the sediment could be cleared.

The white-haired man said, “How can you be sure that germs were not used in Korea?”

I said, “Because we are not like that. If we wished only to kill, we could do it better with other weapons. But we have not used those weapons. We would be stupid to use germs.”

“But you dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima.”

“Yes, we did, and we believe that millions of lives were saved at the cost of thousands.”

The white-haired man said, “It is so hard to know.” And he went outside.

The man with the cummerbund said, kindly, “You see, he is a Communist. He finds it very hard to change.”

“You mean he is a member of the party?”

“I don't think so. The leaders are members of the party. He is not a leader. Most of us have changed here in Poligny, but he finds it very hard to change. He is an idealist.”

“Tell me about the change in the rest of you.”

“Well, when the Germans were here, the Communists had the best and most effective resistance. So most of us joined them, and we thought of ourselves as Communists. We were fighting to liberate France. We even thought of the Communist Party as a French party. Then the war was over, and the leaders made a very bad mistake. Maybe you remember it. They told us we must swear never to fight against the Red Army. Then we knew it was not a French party at all, and we left it. You see, we are Frenchmen, and we would fight against any army that invaded us, Red or Blue or Green. It was a very bad mistake the leaders made.”

“And the white-haired man?” I asked.

“It was his dream that men would be kind to one another and would share their goods and their work. It was a kind of heaven to him, and the Communists promised they would bring that about. He finds it very hard to give up his dream of heaven.” The man smiled. “But I'm afraid he is weakening. The leaders of the Communists are making too many mistakes. When they are trained in Moscow, they forget what Frenchmen are like. They forget that first of all they are Frenchmen. The leaders are so full of hatred. They preach nothing but hatred. And our friend there has no hatred for anyone. It is a sadness to him.”

“If what you say is true all over France, how do you account for the large Communist vote?”

Gibey said, “I think that millions of Frenchmen vote Communist as a way of protesting against the government. We think we should always protest against government. I think your own Thomas Jefferson advocated this as a way to keep governments from forgetting their purpose.”

The wine pump gagged and gasped and had to be primed. Then we drew little glasses of wine from some of the older casks and sipped the unfinished wine, not perfect but aging into excellence.

An old man with a fine, fierce, bristling mustache said, “Maybe you Americans don't understand the French, either. You must learn that first of all we are French. That is the basic thing to remember. We will not be anybody's colony, even America's.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“Our government says ‘We are for America. Vote for us or you will get no American money.' That is a pressure, and we resent it. It makes us feel that our government is under the thumb of the Americans and that we have become an American colony. Frenchmen do not like this. Many vote for the Communists because of this. I do myself.”

I said, “Perhaps you are caught between two historical forces, and you must choose between them. Maybe there isn't any third way. But consider this: We do not tell you how to plant your land, what to read or not read, whom to vote for. Your borders are not closed. You can travel in France or even leave France. You are not drafted for labor. Your crops are not taken away. There are no concentration camps, no secret executions, no secret police to listen in on your talk. You do not disappear in the night. Is Poland so lucky, or Romania or Czechoslovakia or Bulgaria? How long is it since you have seen a Hungarian tourist? All of these countries protested by letting the Communists in. But once in, the Communists do not listen to protests. You must think about this.”