A Soldier's Tale Part 5

Here, he said, you'll do yourself an injury that way, my girl.

He sat down beside her at the table. Reaching out his right hand he gently touched her under the chin and forced her to look up. Her clear eyes were reddened and watery, and he grinned at her.

Don't you do that too often, he said, or those beautiful eyes of yours will stay permanently bloodshot. Look at you, you're a mess.

Pouring her a much smaller drink, he pushed it across and lit a cigarette for her.

Now drink that slow, he said, and I'll join you.

He sipped the dark golden liquid, feeling the fire of it travel down his throat.

Otherwise, he went on, you might wind up like an old bloke my grandad told me about, what lived on smuggled brandy-that was far back in the days of smuggling from France-from here. Regular pickled in it, he was. Well, one night he went to blow out the candle as he was off to bed, and true as I'm here, he caught fire and blew up. Straight, he wrecked a whole row of cottages. Local people talk about it to this day.

She gave a sniff of unwilling laughter, sipped her drink, drew on her cigarette and stared again at the table. He slid the snapshot across to her.

Who's this? he said.

My father.

I thought so. Got your nose. Dead?

Yes.

Germans?

No, she said, but after a long hesitation, as if she wasn't sure.

What's his name?

Alcibiade.

What?

Alcibiade. She anglicized it for him, Alcibiades.

Odd name, sounds Greek.

He was a Greek and a sort of hero. My father used to tell me about him, he was proud of the name, my father. Alcibiade lived in Athens, and he was very rich and a crook and when he was young he was-you say, 'queer'?-and had many lovers.

She drained her gla.s.s with a little animated gesture. He silently poured her another and pa.s.sed her another cigarette.

Well, you know, Athens and Sparta had a big war, like France and Germany, and there was the King of Persia too, waiting, like Stalin. Alcibiade was good at war, so when the Spartans tried to make a peace he sabotaged it and went on fighting them. But presently he got into much trouble for some kind of sacrilege at Athens, and the priests cursed him, so he ran away and fought for the Spartans. He was a collaborator, you see. But he really had fear of no one. He slept with the Spartan king's wife, and this made the king very angry. So he went back to Athens and won more battles for them. But in the end they lost, and the Spartans were the winners, like the Boches with us. So Alcibiade ran away to Persia. No one wanted him now. So one night the Persian king sent soldiers to surround the house where he lived. He was living with a wh.o.r.e, a woman who had been taken a slave in one of the wars. So there he was in bed with her, and the soldiers came and set fire to the house. But he was still a brave man. He wrapped a cloak around one arm and took his sword and he was all naked and he jumped through the fire. The soldiers were still afraid of him-imagine, one naked man-then they shot into him with arrows and spears till he died. Then his woman sold her jewels and her good dress-you know, every wh.o.r.e has one good dress-and she paid for his funeral.

Who paid for hers? he said.

She shrugged and stared down at the table and her empty gla.s.s. He refilled it and said: That was a good story.

It means that all wars are the same, she said.

The long sunlight was beginning to slide in underneath the clouds. He rose to his feet.

I'll just take a turn outside, he said. That smells good, he added, nodding at the stove.

The pots on the stove heaved and hissed. She jumped up and ran over to them and began to lift lids and peer inside and test something with a spoon and take everything off the heat because it was cooking too fast. The sad sulky woman turned into a busy housewife.

Do not be too long, she said, soon the dinner will be cooked.

At intervals, while writing Saul Scourby's story, I have been re-reading Alfred de Vigny's Servitude et Grandeur Militaires and thinking about it. He was too young to serve in Napoleon's armies and in any case he was a Royalist-he did his service in the postwar army sworn loyal to the Bourbons. But he had an extraordinary sympathy and understanding for those men who had grown old in Napoleon's endless wars, and for what he called their 'abnegation'-their selfless lives of duty and poverty, like some fighting monastic order. Listen: Well, during the fourteen years I spent in the army it was there only, and above all in the poor despised ranks of the infantry, that I found men of this cla.s.sic stamp, men who carry the sentiment of duty to its ultimate consequences, feeling neither remorse for their obedience nor shame for their poverty, simple in manner and speech, proud of the fame of their country, while careless of their own, happy in their obscurity, and in sharing with the unfortunate the black bread they purchase with their blood.

I've known men like that, especially among regular army NCOs. Saul was not the same. His patriotism was a tribal attachment to his own place; he was poor because he needed little beyond the satisfaction of his immediate needs; and his love of obscurity was the hunting animal's instinctive preference for shadow and silence. But he knew how to share the black bread of bitterness in his own way, as you'll see later.

When he came back to the kitchen, the dinner was ready. She had taken tinned potatoes, sliced them and poached them in reconst.i.tuted milk with shredded cheese to make a sort of gratin dauphinois. The tinned steak-and-kidney pudding had been taken apart and remade into a delicious stew with dumplings. There was still some cheese left over to go with biscuits and the usual ersatz coffee.

He praised her cooking and lapsed into what was, for him, an unusual silence. The woman's contempt for him after the scene in the orchard, her measuring him up against her other lovers (no Boche did that to me), made him still angry and (rare thing) unsure of how to go on. He could have slung his kit and moved off, but after all he'd promised to take care of her till Monday morning, and she was ent.i.tled to count on that. His word was pa.s.sed on it and besides, another day was another world, full of its own possibilities.

Looking up he saw that she had propped her father's photograph on the sideboard-even at the distance, he could see the family resemblance in that arrogant set of the head. Her eyes followed his, and she said: Do you want to know about him?

If you like, he said, if you-that is, he's dead, isn't he? Like you told me. You don't have to say any more, you know.

I wish you to understand, she said patiently, about the Germans. That is what killed him, at last.

While she talked she went on doing her ch.o.r.es, clearing the table and setting out the blue cups and making another pot of the bad ersatz coffee, her capable hands working away as it were on their own, quite separate from her sad brooding mind.

Once things had settled down with the Germans-this was where it all started, back in the summer of nineteen-forty-the old people were resigned but young people like the ones she knew were pleasantly excited by all these Germans, young, vigorous, free-spending, above all victorious. For her father things had been hard at first, because the firm for which he travelled had been taken over for war-production. But then there was a shortage of young men about, so many rounded up or missing after the debacle of June, and soon her father was able to take quite a good post in the syndicate of munic.i.p.al transport. She was working too, as vendeuse in the big store, Au Printemps.

At first the young German soldiers and the young French girls went by, eyeing one another and smiling at one another in the streets and squares. All the good, well-brought-up young girls, that is. There were the other kind, of course, the girls down round the docks; the conquerors found ready welcome there.

It was in July, as the long evenings began to shorten a little, that she was out walking with two friends near the little park some way from her home. The three of them often went out together because they complemented one another and, as women know, that is very flattering-one, Marie, a pale blonde, one, Yvonne, very dark, herself, Belle, a l.u.s.trous copperhead. Young German soldiers often looked at them appreciatively and longingly as they swung in step along the boulevards, watchful, provocative, caring for no man. The soldiers would hail them in broken French: Bonsoir mamzelle, vous promenade mit mir?

This time it was different. A very beautiful Mercedes purred up alongside and kept pace with them, and a voice asked in good French whether the gracious ladies would be kind to three lonely pilots. Everything would be quite as it should be, just to drive into the country, to an inn near the river, to take a gla.s.s of wine and then return just as they wished.

She turned to the agreeable voice and found herself looking straight at the driver of the car, this young fair-haired airman with eyes as blue as flax-flowers. With him, one beside him and the other in the back of the open car, were his two friends, both handsome, both dark (they were playing the same trick, but he was the one who showed to advantage by it), all in the smart blue-grey uniform of the Luftwaffe, with smiles like a private uniform too.

Marie and Yvonne held back, but she, always the bold one, stepped forward and smiled at the fair-haired airman. No, they were very kind but, it was late, people might talk- But what harm-? no one need recognize them, soon it would be dark, the inn was very tranquil.

Still, she hesitated, turned back, argued with her friends in broken sentences and shrugs and giggles. Still Marie and Yvonne held back and the young Germans waited, smiling, putting in encouraging words.

Then she, Belle, suddenly stepped up to the car, and the dark young man on the inside front jumped out and helped her in, sitting between the two of them in front, while her friends took their places on each side of the third young man in the back. There was much blushing and giggling. Then the blond driver put his foot down and the beautiful car roared off up the boulevard and presently the streets fell behind and the country breeze tossed their hair, copper, pale and black.

The driver's name was Gustav Sch.e.l.lenberg; the other beside her was Karl Altmann, and the quiet one in the back was Rudi something. So they drove out into the country and drank champagne at an inn by the river. Rudi played the piano and the young men sang together in clear loud German voices, while the locals kept away from them and stared and muttered. When they drove back the harvest moon was out, Belle found herself alone in the front seat with Gustav, while the other four squeezed in the back, all very friendly.

After that they went on meeting, three and three, near the little park when they could, not every day, for the young pilots were stationed somewhere near Rennes, and sometimes when they were on duty they came in too late to get away for the evening.

The days shortened; the summer glory faded; the young faces, looked at by loving eyes, began to show tired lines; the radios playing 'Wir Fahren Gegen England' began to have a jaunty and slightly desperate sound. One evening in September, as the nights began to chill, they saw only two heads in the approaching car, and Rudi something wasn't there. After that dark Yvonne didn't come out with them any more; they met two and two.

There was a small, quiet hotel overlooking the river at Vernon, where they went regularly. The patron and his wife were servile, obsequious, well paid. They went there at first to drink and talk as before, then, naturally enough, to keep a couple of rooms, and spend long afternoons together when they could.

One afternoon, as they drove up to the hotel, she noticed a man staring at them from the little terrace of the hotel. He had a square red face and grey hair en brosse and gold-rimmed gla.s.ses, and with him was an ugly woman, no doubt his wife. Only (by an odd flash of memory) as Gustav took her in the bed did she remember the red face and the gla.s.ses as Monsieur Beauvoisin, her father's boss. Hours later, when they came out, of course the ugly couple were gone.

At the end of the week her father came home early, looking old and very grey. He had been curtly dismissed by Monsieur Beauvoisin, whose son had lost an arm at Calais, and who thus had a better claim on the job-he was, after all, a grand mutile de guerre, while Belle's father was a mere ancien combattant.

But another job was available, behind the counter in a post office, smaller, poorer, but enough for him to hold his head up and, as winter drew in, to go down in his shabby overcoat to the cafe on the square, to meet old friends and spin out frugal cups of coffee and play dominoes and checkers with other anciens combattants, for a time. Then Monsieur Beauvoisin must have talked to someone who talked to someone.

One night-it was early in the New Year, of nineteen-forty-one, that is-he went to the cafe as usual. And then, as he walked in and the door swung to behind him, into the room full of yellow light and steam and the smell of Gauloises, the talk stopped. People, his friends, looked at him strangely, sideways. He sat down at one of the marble-topped tables. Guyot was sitting there, whom he had known since the lycee, with the checkers set out before him, the white pieces politely turned towards the chair opposite, waiting for a game. Papa hung up the shabby overcoat and sat down thankfully in the empty wooden chair, easing off the old galoshes which hurt his feet (there was slush on the pavements outside). With a familiar gesture he reached out and made the first move, looking down at the board. A chair ground on the tiles. Without a word, Guyot stood up and walked away to another table.

He had to call the boy, who came reluctantly and brought his coffee, and stood near him, obviously eager to take the cup as soon as it seemed to be empty. No one spoke, dominoes clicked on the marble; the urns hissed. The patron watched him silently over the counter, slowly polishing the zinc top.

He put on the old coat and galoshes and went home. When he tried to tell Belle about it-it happened to be a night when she was at home-he was neither hurt nor angry, only immensely astonished and shivering with cold. She left him sitting by the small gas-heater while she went into the kitchen to make him a good tisane of herbs. There was a sound like a dry cough and something fell. Hurrying back to the sitting-room she found him huddled against the side of his tall chair, the arrogant head sunk, the face drawn down at one side in a fixed, mechanical sneer.

Luckily the stroke was a light one; the job went, of course, but soon he could limp around the apartment with a stick. Belle could still get out; she was good at her job and she could claim (sometimes with truth) that she was working overtime. A near neighbour, a widow who had liked her father, could come in and sit with him-Belle thought that perhaps she knew what had happened at the cafe, but she came all the same. Belle herself began to get some odd looks around the quartier, in the shops, at the market. But the women were more cautious than the men; after all, some of them had daughters too, and in any case who would want to offend someone with a powerful German friend? Papa's income was missed, but Gustav was kind and generous, and gave her thoughtful presents-delicacies, good winter clothing, some discreet jewellery.

He had always been very considerate, dropping the girls off far enough from their homes, but in time to catch one of the late trams. Late snow came, and moonlight. One afternoon she met Gustav alone; Karl was on duty, so Marie had stayed sulkily at home. Because they were alone they were especially loving to each other. Afternoon merged with early winter dusk, and later, when she awoke from a light sleep beside him, it was nearly nine. They dressed and hurried out to the car and she settled down beside him, relaxed but a little breathless, as the car streamed through the night back to the city in the bright moonlight, with a powdering of snow on the bare fields, while below the horizon the searchlights danced over England.

Because it was so late, because with the moonlight, the cold, the wine and the love they were very lightly and ethereally drunk, they forgot the usual discretion and stopped right by the entrance that led into the courtyard of Belle's apartment house. She kissed him standing there in the bright moonlight, and waved after him as the Mercedes roared away.

Inside the house it was all dark. Letting herself in with her key, she tapped on her father's bedroom door and called quietly to him in case he was still awake, but there was no answer, so she went to bed and dreamed that she was having tea with her father in the teashop in the Rue de l'Horloge.

Next morning, huddled in her dressing-gown, she got up to make the coffee. The way to the kitchenette lay through the little salon, and when she opened the door she saw at once the crumpled figure lying on the floor by the window. The curtains were parted, and a long narrow streak of pale snow-reflected light lay across the room and the fallen body like a ruler. He must have put out the light and opened the curtains when he heard the Mercedes draw up outside, and everything must have been very bright and sharp in the moonlight, framed in the entrance to the courtyard.

It was also the last time she saw Gustav. Marie heard from Karl that he was missing over England, then reported wounded, a prisoner. After a while she went back to work, but didn't go out much for months. She lost touch with Marie and Karl, but she thought that they had been going together until Karl was sent east for Operation Barbarossa in the summer of 'forty-one.

Now again I've been recreating what Saul understood of what she'd remembered and told him, refining and reinforcing and enhancing those fogged photographs from the past. And all the time the room darkened around them in the summer twilight and she made more coffee and outside the German bombers swept in over the distant bay and the slow silent streams of incandescent tracer seemed to float up into the dark sky.

When she finished they tried the electricity but as usual it was off, so she drew the curtains and lit a candle. They opened the grate of the stove and they sat staring into the dying red glow, smoking and saying little. He watched her unmoving profile. In the oblique light from the fire the early hidden signs of age developed like a photographic plate-the wrinkles moulded around the eyes, the set lines of the upper lip, the beginnings of heaviness under the chin. Presently she yawned and went off to the bedroom, taking the candle; he finished his cigarette and followed her.

After what had pa.s.sed between them in the orchard that afternoon it might seem she would be cold to him, even not want him at all. But he could be a patient and wise listener when he wished to be, and he had listened to her story with only the kind of interruptions that showed interest and concern. Talking of her first German lover had eased her, and she was responsive enough to rouse him at once when he blew out the candle and stripped and lay down beside her in the big bed in the dark.

Why do you put out the light? she said. Am I ugly? Do you not wish to see me?

You're all right, he said, I mean really all right. I like to see you in the daylight.

My face, my hands. Not my body. Is my body ugly?

She was teasing him, but it struck on an obscure nerve, and he began to lose his potency.

It's not you, he said awkwardly, it's something else. It just doesn't seem right, to look on a woman's nakedness, to uncover a man's parts. It's not right, that's all.

Uh, you English are hypocrites, Puritans.

What about you French?

The same. I know.

What about the Germans?

She turned sharply away from him and he heard her breath catch.

Gustav loved to look at me, she said, in the bedroom at the inn. The light came in from the garden. The leaves made shadows on the bed. He said that love should be made out of doors-in nature. By the light of the sun, he said, the eye of Apollo, or the light of the full moon, the eye of Diana.

And did you?

How could we, with all those spying people? But he was so beautiful, Apollo's son. He too fell out of the sky, you know.

The cla.s.sical talk bored and puzzled him, and he lay on his back staring at the darkness. She turned back to him with one of her sudden changes of mood.

Not like you, she said. You are dark and cruel, you belong to the darkness.

She beat her fist gently against the flat hard muscles on his chest.

You go in the dark, she said, to kill, to steal, to make love.

That's right, he said in surprise. I've always liked night-time. I grew up in the country, without street lamps. I like to hide and watch. That's why I was a good hunter.

Then things began to go right again, as he turned towards her and drew her close. When he readied himself and went into her it was (in his own words) like a torchlight procession with bra.s.s bands. As they separated again, getting their breath, there was a sudden flurry of gunfire not far away, answered by a distant one from the Germans and followed by the m.u.f.fled noise of incoming sh.e.l.ls. It went on for some time, perhaps a counter-battery exercise, perhaps a luckless patrol caught in the open between the lines and hammered.

He slept deeply and struggled up out of a confused dream in which his granny was showing him the big Pilgrim's Progress book with the pictures. They came to the one she always pa.s.sed over quickly, but this time he held her hand and made her stay. It was the page where Christian was shown in the Valley of the Shadow, twined in struggle with Apollyon-Christian in his armour, scaly Apollyon bat-winged and fiery-eyed. The picture filled him with an old fear and he struggled with it formlessly and awoke to find that it was Belle who was groaning and throwing herself about like a sick animal in its throes. He pulled her against him and held her close. It was some time before she knew where she was, coming out of a kind of delirium into the warmth of the bed, and still panting, with sweat on her body, as if she had been running desperately away from some terror.

He talked to her all the while as he might to a frightened horse or dog.

There now, girl, there's a good girl now, there's nothing to fear, I've got you, old Saul's got you, ah there's a sorry girl to cry out so, don't cry now. Saul's got you, you'll come to no harm, that's a pretty girl, be quiet now, don't carry on so, there's nothing to fear.

On and on, while she sweated and trembled against him and her breathing grew calmer until she heaved a deep sigh and was quiet.

That was a bad one, wasn't it? he said, and she nodded her head in the dark.

Yes, she said, oh yes.

What were you dreaming of, girl? Tell me now and get rid of it. Then you'll sleep.

I dreamed, she said, about the prison in Rouen where they put Jeanne d'Arc. It is like a prison cell, but open all round. There were soldiers there all the time, she was never to herself, imagine, she could not even cover herself to go to the p.i.s.soire. Imagine that, like an animal. Then she was burned.

She stopped and he prompted her.

So you were Joan of Arc, in the dream? he said.

No, she hesitated, no, but like. I was in a cell but like a hospital room and with windows all round. Men watching me, Gestapo. And I was to be taken and burned. I thought how it would hurt me, and then I thought, it is like the dentist, a time shall be when it shall be finished, no more pain. If I could reach that time-but first there will be the pain of the fire.

She was silent again.

Go on, he said gently.

But that was the dream.

Oh sure, but that's not all, is it? Why do you dream about the Gestapo?

Everyone in France has dreamed about the Gestapo, from time to time.

Why you specially? What have they done to you, girl?