Dimanche and Other Stories (26 page)

“It’s true, it’s been cold. Where we were …”

“Yes,” Claude replied absentmindedly.

His brother went on talking but he interrupted him. “Listen, let me finish, this isn’t easy … So we went through the village without finding anything; it was just one long street. You can imagine how carefully we moved forward. When we set out the sky had clouded over and we counted on there being a mist, even a slight thaw, but as we advanced the stars shone more and more brightly. Like I said, that’s what let me see inside
those wretched houses as we went by. You can imagine how we hugged the walls. I’ve noticed that one doesn’t have much of a paunch in situations like that; even the fattest men make themselves thin.

“Eventually we were sure the village was deserted. We were about to go back, but we had a long, hard route ahead of us, part of which was a hellish frozen little stream that we had to slither across on our hands and knees. Obviously we thought about getting some food and drink before we set off. Opposite the church there was a café. The shutters were half-open, just as they were on the other houses. We pulled them wider and looked in: there were bottles from floor to ceiling; every shelf was stacked with full bottles! Unfortunately the bistro must have been restocked the very morning of the evacuation. As one of my lads, Maillard—he was always called Mailloche—said, ‘Some people get a raw deal!’ Then a couple of men climbed in through the window and the rest followed. We helped ourselves. There was a huge ham over the stove: one end of it was a bit off, but the rest seemed edible. So we’re eating and drinking when suddenly one of my men says, ‘There’ve been Germans here.’—‘How can you tell?’—‘Simple, there are empty bottles of beer. It’s quite recent because there’s still froth around the edges, and the wine in the rack next to it hasn’t been touched. Frenchmen would have drunk the wine and left the beer.’

“That sounded right to me. I was hurrying up the
lads who were still in there, pretending not to hear me, when all of a sudden one of them caught my eye as he silently pointed at a trapdoor in the middle of the kitchen. It was slightly open; it must have been over the cellar and something was shining in the dark, or rather, one could see something reflected. Mailloche had lit his flashlight to unhook a salami hanging from the joist, and its light was reflected on some polished surface in the gloom. It could have been a bottle or the metal bung on a cask, but it could also have been a belt buckle or a blade. It was a fleeting impression more than anything else, and my eyes had to get accustomed to the dark to see the pale bluish light, but as I looked closely I saw that it was moving backward and forward, then gradually disappearing. I gestured silently to show the men what I had seen. We left as naturally and noisily as we could, but once we were outside we crept up to the window through which we could see right into the kitchen; the trapdoor was in front of us.

“We didn’t have to wait very long. It was opened without a sound … by a German; he was right opposite me, although he couldn’t see me, as I was hidden in the shadow of the blind. But I could see him clearly by the light of the night sky. He had a small chin and rosy cheeks; he seemed very young. He looked all around him, then turned back to beckon to someone down in the cellar. He came out, followed by several men. I thought they would certainly attack us, either then and
there or on our return journey. The only reason they hadn’t already done so would have been because they first wanted to make sure that we were the only ones there—that they weren’t in danger of being ambushed. Their precautions showed that we were dealing with a single detachment, just like ours. They thought we had left, so we were able to take them by surprise and had to make the most of it. I say, ‘I thought,’ but you don’t think in a situation like that—you attack or you get out. The instinct to defend yourself is always the same, and on this occasion it went for attack. I leapt through the open window and the others followed. There must have been about fifteen of us altogether, French and German; the sides were roughly matched. We didn’t exchange fire and no one shouted; our orders were to remain absolutely silent in these sorts of encounters, as no doubt theirs were, too. Poor Mailloche got it first; I heard a body falling near me and recognized his voice calling me, poor man. He held on to my legs and pulled me down with him.

“Each time one of us—French or German—stopped to get his breath back, he called for the enemy to surrender, but no one wanted to give in. For a first skirmish I certainly had my fair share: four men had taken a hammering, and I had killed a German. Then one of the men jumped out of the window and the others, both pursuers and pursued, disappeared. It was incredible: such a silent, savage fight. As for me, I’d hit my head on
the corner of a marble table and was knocked unconscious. When I opened my eyes, there was an injured comrade with me, as well as Mailloche, dead, and the German. On top of everything else, someone had fired, forgetting orders, so there was gunfire from every direction. It soon stopped, but was then replaced by artillery fire, crackling on each side of the stream we had to cross. We had to keep our heads down then—we were worried that the Germans could come back at any moment with reinforcements.

“My comrade said it would be best for us to hide in the cellar, as the Germans had done. We left the two dead men where they were and staggered down below; we lowered the trapdoor and stayed there, my comrade cursing and groaning and me bleeding like a pig. We hoped that the artillery fire would stop when daylight came, but it carried on. Durand (that was my friend’s name) had made me a rough bandage. I started to feel better but I was very cold and thirsty. Gradually I began to feel a bit bolder; it was morning and the Germans wouldn’t come back now. I remembered the food in the kitchen, and a hot plate I’d seen the previous evening that still had a jug of warm wine on it. I tried to persuade Durand to come with me but he didn’t want to; he made a blanket out of some old sacking we found in the cellar, and he went to sleep.

“It was very hard to climb up again. The kitchen was bright; it was broad daylight and I was frozen stiff. I
walked around the two rooms where the bodies of Mailloche and the German lay among the wreckage and—you have to believe me, François—I hardly glanced at them. It was the first war scene I had ever seen, but when you’re so hungry and thirsty, you’re more like an animal than a man.

“Only after I’d knocked back several glasses of the sweet hot wine and felt the warmth in my body and lit my pipe did I give any thought to poor Mailloche. I knelt down beside him. Poor kid, he looked quite calm, happy to be finished with it all, with a strange little smile on his lips as if to say, ‘I know what it’s like now, but you …’

“I crossed his hands on his chest and opened his wallet to look for his family’s address. He’d told me his mother was widowed—a cleaner who lived in Saint-Mandé. He had her photo in his breast pocket, along with a bit of the rope that one of his uncles had used to hang himself after drinking too much at his own wedding. Can you believe it—my friend Mailloche thought a suicide’s noose would bring him luck! It didn’t protect him, poor lad. He still had his membership card for the Saint-Mandé football club and a few other bits and pieces. I searched for a long time for something to cover his face, but the bedrooms were all locked and anyway it was so cold it could wait until he was buried. I decided to dig a grave in the garden before we left, once Durand had woken up. Then I turned to the other one.”

“The German?”

“Yes.”

He paused for so long that François touched him on the shoulder.

“Go on, I’m listening!”

“I know.”

A train went by at top speed; sparks flew out of the wheels, and the shrill blasts of the engine’s whistle sounded like the shrieking of frantic birds.

“That’s not ours, is it?” François asked anxiously.

“Not a chance! We’ll be here till morning.”

“Go on, then. What about the German?”

“I hadn’t seen that many Germans before. As I looked at the one I had killed I didn’t feel curiosity, pity, or even hatred—it was more a sort of disbelief. It seemed incredible to see a real dead German lying there next to Mailloche; he might have been one of the men we saw passing like shadows in the dark, whom we fired at and sometimes killed, but whose bodies are never found because their comrades carried them off. We had taken a few prisoners during a raid, but that was before my time.

“The body was that of the boy whom I had seen leading the way out of the cellar. Something about him struck me; I was astonished and uneasy and I couldn’t think why. I was fumbling for something, just as you are when you try to think of a forgotten name or a tune you can’t quite remember … fumbling and irritable at the
same time. Do you see what I’m saying? He was lit up by bright, golden sunshine. Lying there on the cold floor, in his green uniform and big boots, he looked as peaceful as Mailloche, but his sharp, dimpled little chin pointed upward and made him look defiant. He was very fair; his cheeks, which were pale now, were starting to look pinched. His hand had been on his knife as he fell. If I hadn’t been quicker than him, there’s no way he would have missed me. Maybe I shouldn’t have searched his pockets, as I’d done for my comrade, but I didn’t do so with any evil intention. When the war was over wouldn’t his mother, his fiancée, or some other woman want to know how he had been killed, whether he suffered, and where he was buried? He hadn’t suffered; he had died without making a sound. He had a fat wallet stuffed with letters. I looked for a name or an address but there was nothing. There was a photograph of him in tennis clothes with a racket in his hand, wearing white shorts, his shirt unbuttoned at the neck and his hair hanging over his eyes; he seemed extraordinarily young. You can’t imagine how I felt … I had killed a man of my own age, a man who …”

“One has no choice,” interrupted François with a shrug.

“No, one has no choice. But you know, when you have kids of your own, and a younger brother you’ve half brought up—because I did half bring you up—well … There were also some photographs of a very
pretty girl, and the German had taken pictures of her in at least a dozen different poses, among them some of her sitting on the grass in the middle of a garden with a black dog on her lap. I didn’t feel upset; I’d seen the picture of Mailloche’s old mother and that put my feelings in perspective. I was about to put the wallet back, since I hadn’t found what I was looking for, when I found a photograph that was larger and older than the others; it was slightly yellow and crumpled, as if it had been carried around for a long time in a pocket or bag, rubbing up against other papers …” He stopped. “Do you have the flashlight on you, François?”

“Yes, why?”

“Switch it on, point it at the ground so we don’t get shouted at. Even though the stars are as bright as headlights. And look …”

“At what?”

“This photograph. D’you see? It’s the one I found on the dead German’s body.”

“Hang on, old man, I don’t …”

“Doesn’t it remind you of something?”

François looked at the photograph. It was a picture of a young man taken on the terrace of a country house. There was a fair-haired woman standing next to him, rather stolid-looking with a kind, placid expression.

After a moment’s hesitation, François made an effort to smile. “I’d say the man looked a bit like you, but …”

His older brother shook his head.

“It’s not me he looks like, old man. Look again; look
carefully. Look at his left hand—you can see it clearly. Can you see the scar, a deep wound going from his ring finger right down to his wrist? It must,” he went on, shutting his eyes to try and remember something. “It must have created a thick ridge on his flesh, for even though it was a superficial wound, only scratching the skin, it still left a scar that didn’t fade. You know, don’t you, that on September fourteenth, the day Papa was wounded in the thigh and groin, a shell ripped into his hand, and two years later he was wounded a second time, in the head, just above his left eyebrow, there,” he said, pointing at the photograph.

François looked at it for a long time without saying anything.

“It’s not possible …” he murmured.

“I compared this photograph with all the pictures of Papa that Mama had kept. I found the X-rays of both wounds; the one on the forehead made a wavy line and when you look at it through a magnifying glass, which I did, you can see it’s identical to the one in the photograph. You may well have your doubts, you may have forgotten Papa’s face and expression, but for me … it’s so like him, so like the way he would look over the top of his glasses; it’s his smile, and the small dimple on that narrow chin, a chin like mine—and like that of his third son,” he added in a strange voice.

“Are you sure this German was … his son?”

“Listen, the photograph is dated 1925 and higher up, can you see, there’s some more writing in German.”

“I can’t make out the gothic lettering.”

Claude read it slowly, then translated it: “
‘Für meinen lieben Sohn, Franz Hohmann, diese Büd seines vielgeliebten Vatersmöge er ihn aus der Himmelshöhe beschützen. Frieda Hohmann, Berlin, den 2 Dezember 1939.’
‘For my dear son François Hohmann, this portrait of his beloved father who is watching over him in heaven. Frieda Hohmann, Berlin, 2 December 1939.’”

“He was called François?” the young man exclaimed. “François, like me?”

“Like you, like our grandfather, like one of our uncles: it’s a popular family name. He also gave it to the German.”

François flinched.

“I’m telling you it’s him,” Claude said quietly. “I can assure you that if I had the slightest doubt, I’d never have breathed a word of it to you. But it’s such a … such an important and extraordinary thing. I didn’t think I had the right to keep it from you. I thought perhaps we could do some research in Germany, after the war. We could do it together, if we can. If not, whichever one of us survives can do it.”

Overwhelmed, François buried his head in his hands. “I’m stunned, old man.”

“Yes, I am, too,” his brother said gently. “I have dreams about it every night.”