Anna (32 page)

A little later in the day he went out and pinned a notice on them. The notice said that the restaurant was temporarily closed for alterations and redecorations, and would be reopening shortly, under the same management.

So the front door was closed. And Anna, M. Duvivier, and the Captain were shut in together. As Anna learned his decision and heard the bolts being pushed home a sudden fear struck her.

“Perhaps he will send
him
away now,” she told herself. “Then there will be just the two of us alone here. I shall go mad. I shan't be able to endure it, knowing that
he
is somewhere in Paris and that I can't see him.”

But M. Duvivier's next remark reassured her.

“We must be careful not to lose our lodger,” he said. “We shall need his sixty francs a week. It's all we shall have now.”

It seemed that, in the crisis of the moment, his fears and suspicions had been set at rest somehow. But with nothing else to do, M. Duvivier spent most of his time seated at his little table in the salon. He made repeated calculations on small pieces of paper, wrote letters to the landlord and to the Mairie, asking for a reduction in the rent and in the taxation, and added up the bills that were on a spike in front of him. In all this he demanded Anna's presence constantly; begged her not to leave him. And from time to time he would break off from the work that he was doing to caress her. He told her that she was the joy of his life, and promised special little dishes that he would make for her as soon as the ingredients were plentiful again. He spoke of the children they would have.

Indeed, if it had not been for the steadily encroaching presence of the Germans—and it was common knowledge that they had now brought up their largest siege guns, the real big stuff, for the demolition of the city—it is doubtful whether Anna could have been sure of one moment to herself. As it was, M. Duvivier reckoned up the number of days that Paris could possibly hold out and the number of vintage bottles that remained in his cellar. There were sixty. About thirty days and sixty bottles. Roughly two a day.

M. Duvivier recognised that he would have to do some serious drinking. And he set about zealously and painstakingly to do it.

Now that the people of Paris had given up all hope of winning, had even, it seemed, given up all intention, a new kind of impatience had become visible—an impatience to make peace and be done with it.

It was no longer the whole of France that was at war, but only the south. In the provinces there was Gambetta with his civilian army. And the voice of Bordeaux was still as brave, as defiant, as intransigent as ever. But the voice of Bordeaux deceived no one. The Parisians all felt that if they were as far away from danger as Bordeaux they could speak as bravely. And they felt also that if some of the German howitzers that were now firing into Paris could have been trained for a moment on to Bordeaux the voice of courage might have been tempered with the accent of sanity.

On the other hand, the forts of the capital were still well supplied. If the Germans were to try a direct frontal attack they would undoubtedly be repulsed—as undoubtedly, in fact, as the Germans themselves would be able to repulse any kind of counter-attack that the French might make. There had been one attempt; the sortie of Mont Valérien. It had proved an entire fiasco, had served merely to emphasize to the people of Paris the degree of their present captivity. And so the Parisians went about what work there was left for them to do, praying that the politicians would give the Germans Alsace and whatever it was they wanted, and call the whole thing off.

M. Duvivier was still counting the days; counting the days and counting the bottles. But there was a change in him. With every day—and every bottle—that passed he was becoming more sanguinary and ferocious.

“The first German I see in the streets of Paris,” he said somewhat indistinctly, “I shall kill. I shall do this to him———” And M. Duvivier drew an imaginary knife through the air at the height of a man's throat.

His patriotism even assumed other and more public forms. On one occasion, seeing from his window a procession passing down the street bearing a tricolour in front of it and carrying banners declaring that Frenchmen would die sooner than become German slaves, M. Duvivier suddenly left his wife and restaurant and joined in the procession.

It was composed mostly of men like himself, middle-aged and
elderly men, who for one reason or another had been excused military service. There was a fair spattering of white beards among them, and one man hobbled patriotically along on two sticks. People cheered as they passed down the Avenue Montmartre and on in the direction of the Chambre.

M. Duvivier marched magnificently behind, feeling that after this he too would be able to say that he had done something to save France. He had taken exactly the right amount of drink, and felt a lord, a prince of creation. But opposite the Madeleine his legs gave out. His varicose veins began to taunt him. He therefore broke away from the procession as quietly and unostentatiously as possible, and sat down outside one of the cafes. It was only then that he was able to read the wording on the rest of the banners:

“Make peace and spare the women and children,” the one at the back said. And the one beside it was no less explicit.

“Rulers of France,” it ran, “whose blood are you shedding?”

M. Duvivier turned away, his enthusiasm for public demonstrations suddenly dissipated. He felt cheated. He looked at his watch and saw that it was already long past the hour at which he should have been preparing dinner.

He remembered also that he had left Anna and the Captain alone together.

When he was sober again next morning he saw clearly enough that processions were of no use. The bombardment had by now become continuous: there was no city in the world that could stand it. Between three and four hundred shells were being poured in every day, and the houses that were hit had an oddly discouraging look about them. It seemed that even the most solid of them required only one contact with the enemy to disintegrate into a mass of laths and plaster. And it was even worse by night. The shells that came screaming over in the black-out had a terrifying quality all of their own. Everyone in the badly-shelled areas now slept in the cellars. And as the Germans drew nearer, and their field of fire extended, more and more cellar bedrooms were being prepared. M. Duvivier had begun clearing a corner of his own wine cellar: he placed a mattress and most of the restaurant crockery down there.

It was the middle of January by now, and the last of the dogs and cats had disappeared. People had died, actually died, of hunger. And it was cold. A diplomat's widow had been found frozen dead in bed.

Even the pigeons, one by one, had been snared and eaten: patriotic and conscientious housewives returning proudly from
market with a pigeon—probably the first that they had managed to get for their families for weeks—would sometimes find a message attached to the middle quill of the tail feathers. By then, of course, there was nothing that could be done about it. It meant simply that a dispatch rider in the Third Republic, a patriot like themselves, was about to be eaten for dinner.

It was naturally difficult, even impossible, for the citizens inside the gates to know what the situation really was. The Military Governor, like most military governors, was untalkative; and there were no longer the little chattering groups of deputies giving away state secrets every night in the best cafes. The one thing that was reassuring was the behaviour of the forts. Those still blared out all day and all night; and though no one had any way of knowing the effects of the fire, the authentic roar of the French cannon served strikingly to keep up the public morale. There was clearly no shortage of metal at the disposal of the gunners. And there was always the possibility that some of the shells might hit something.

The news of an Armistice came, therefore, with something of a shock. And now that there was nothing that anyone could do about it, the very people who earlier had clamoured for it, suddenly became aloof and stoical: they declared that for their part they would have been ready to endure another six months. They said that the politicians had betrayed them.

It was only Jules Favre, who was still negotiating the final terms with Count Bismarck, who knew what it meant to have achieved an armistice at all. He knew how much he had been forced to give to secure that twenty-one days' respite; what it meant that Belfort was still obstinately fighting its own battle; what would happen to Paris if Gambetta in the south refused to admit that France was beaten; what the Germans intended to make them pay.

As soon as M. Duvivier heard the news being shouted, he rushed out into the street and bought a paper. When he came back he was holding the thing at arm's length in front of him, and weeping.

“An Armistice,” he said to Anna. “That means that the Hun will be allowed inside the gates. Somewhere in the Government there is a Judas. France has been sold.”

He seemed to have some difficulty in disentangling the words from his tongue. All the afternoon he had been drinking heavily, and he was swaying visibly as he stood there.

“There will be raping and pillaging everywhere,” he announced.
“No woman under fifty will be safe, and our possessions will be snatched from us.”

Possessions! M. Duvivier remembered his cellar, and a wave of fresh terror broke over him. He had, he realised, miscalculated by approximately fourteen days: there were still twenty-eight bottles unbroken, and not an hour to be lost. He expected at any moment now to see the boulevards full of soldiers—all in field-grey, and all thirsty.

He paused. Then fumbling in the pocket of his waistcoat for the key, he began the uncertain journey down the cellar steps. He was conscious only of this one thing as he did so, and did not even stop when he saw Captain Picard descending the stairs into the restaurant. Down below there was the heavy boom of the cellar door closing upon him.

The Captain stood there, passing his tongue across his lips.

“What are they calling?” he asked. “I heard them from my room.”

Before Anna could reply, the long syllables, “Ar-mis-tice,” reached them from the street outside.

The Captain passed his tongue across his lips again.

“So it's come, has it?” he asked.

Anna nodded: each knew what the other was thinking.

He crossed over and held out his hand to her.

“Anna,” he said.

She took his hand for a moment and pressed it. Then she shook her head.

“No. You must go back to her,” she told him. “She's waiting for you.”

Captain Picard avoided her gaze. There were no secrets between them now. He had told her of the wife who was waiting for him somewhere in the south, the young wife, and the child that he had never seen.

Anna found herself alone again. The Captain was out all the time visiting the railway station, the customs-posts, the chiefs of police. The time of the first train out of Paris: that was the one question on his lips—on his lips, and on the lips of some thousands of his fellow citizens.

He came back evening after evening, weary and dejected, the cigarette in the corner of his mouth hanging there, dead and half-smoked. His undisguisable air of failure had returned to him, and he sat alone at his table with his head supported on his hands, his eyes fixed unseeingly in front of him. Even when Anna spoke
to him he did not always answer immediately. He merely shrugged his shoulders and gave a little smile that vanished again as soon as it had come.

But with M. Duvivier in the restaurant, there was little that they could actually say. At any moment he would come out of the door leading through into the kitchen, his apron rather dirtier than it should have been, and place in front of the Captain some new concoction that he had just mixed over the stove. For the past week, Captain Picard, not liking the look of the suspiciously small bones in the hash, had left most of his dinner uneaten. Like Anna, he now lived mostly on a diet of bread—the butter had given out long ago—and a little wine. M. Duvivier consumed the remnants of the dishes out of sight in the scullery afterwards.

But as the days went by, M. Duvivier, however, appeared less and less frequently. Sometimes whole evenings passed without his coming through into the restaurant at all. And when he did come he was not really in a condition to notice anything.

He still told himself that he was drinking to spite the Germans; and he had even grown to believe it. It was only somewhere at the back of his mind that he suspected that he was really drinking because he couldn't stop. He went about with the startled, slightly incredulous expression of a man suddenly dragged back from drowning. There were circles under his eyes. His hands shook and his voice had gone. The fact that Anna and the Captain were left so much alone together no longer seemed to trouble him.

And one evening, when M. Duvivier was lying upstairs on his bed asleep and Anna was seated at the Captain's table, something of Captain Picard's old spirit returned. He was smiling again, and he suggested that they should go out together; anywhere, he said, so long as they got out of that suffocating atmosphere.

Anna shook her head at first.

“It's too dangerous,” she said.

But Captain Picard only laughed at her.

“It's our last chance,” he said. “The train may be running tomorrow.”

His voice was quite casual as he said it, and he began pulling his overcoat loosely across his shoulders. It seemed that somehow he had succeeded in putting himself at one remove from his own misery.

“Only for half an hour,” he urged. “No one will see us.”

They found a café in the Place Clichy. The lights in the streets had been put on again and people were beginning to emerge from their hiding-places. There was a human, inhabited look about the
pavements. It was as though, after being a fortress, the city had become Paris again. It seemed, too, as though miraculously their lives had come together in a simple pattern at last. They sat beside each other and forgot the future, and were happy.