At that very moment a large clock struck midday. Bonnet laughed, almost with pleasure. It was just such a deep, low, slightly cracked sound he had imagined coming from the antique clock with the painted casing in some Dutch Old Master, along with the smell of fresh herring prepared by the housewife and the sounds from the street beyond the window with its tarnished panes of glass; in such paintings there was always a clock like this one hanging on the wall.
He wanted to make Madeleine speak; he wanted to hear her voice again, her young, slightly lilting voice.
"Do you live here alone? Your husband must be a prisoner?"
"Oh, no," she said quickly.
At the thought of Benoît, a German prisoner who had escaped, she was afraid again; it struck her that the German would guess and arrest him. "I'm so stupid," she thought, and instinctively softened: she had to be nice to the conqueror.
"Will you be here long?" she asked in a frank, humble voice. "Everyone's saying three months."
"We don't know ourselves," Bonnet explained. "That's military life for you: in war, it all depends on orders, a general's whim or chance. We were on our way to Yugoslavia, but it's all finished over there."
"Oh? Is it?"
"It will be in a few days. In any case, it would be all over by the time we got there. And I think they'll keep us here all summer, unless they send us to Africa or England."
"And… do you like it?" said Madeleine, intentionally feigning innocence, but with a little shudder of disgust she couldn't hide, as if she were asking a cannibal. "Is it true you eat human flesh?"
"Man is made to be a warrior, just as woman is made to please the warrior," Bonnet replied, and he smiled because he found it comical to quote Nietzsche to this pretty French farm girl. "Your husband must think the same way, if he's young."
Madeleine didn't reply. Actually, she had very little idea what Benoît thought, even though they'd been brought up together. Benoît was taciturn and cloaked in a triple armour of decency: masculine, provincial and French. She didn't know what he hated or what he liked, just that he was capable of both love and hatred.
"My God," she said to herself, "I hope he doesn't take against this German."
She continued to listen but said little, straining all the while to hear any sounds on the road. Carts passed by, the church bells chimed for evening prayers. You could hear the bells ring out one after the other across the countryside; first the light silvery note of the little chapel on the Montmort estate, then the deep sound from the village, then the hurried little peal from Sainte-Marie that you could only hear in bad weather, when the wind blew in from the tops of the hills.
"The family will be home soon," murmured Madeleine.
She placed a creamy earthenware jug of forget-me-nots on the table.
"You won't be eating here, will you?" she suddenly asked.
He reassured her. "No, no, I've paid to have my meals in town. I'll only have some coffee in the morning."
"Well, that's easy enough, Monsieur."
It was an expression they used a lot around Bussy. She said it in an affectionate sort of way, with a smile. It didn't mean a thing, though; it was a mere politeness and didn't actually mean you would get anything. A mere politeness and, if the promise wasn't kept, there was another expression ready and waiting, this time spoken with a tinge of regret and apology: "Ah, well, you can't always do what you want."
But the German was delighted. "How kind everyone is here," he said naively.
"You think you so, Monsieur?"
"And I hope you'll bring me my coffee in bed?"
"We only do that for sick people," said Madeleine ironically.
He wanted to take her hands; she quickly pulled away.
"Here's my husband."
He wasn't there yet, but he would be soon; she recognised the sound of the mare's hooves on the road. She went out into the courtyard; it was raining. Through the gates came the old horse and trap, unused since the other war but now a replacement for the broken-down car. Benoît held the reins. The women were sitting under wet umbrellas.
Madeleine ran towards her husband and put her arm round his neck. "There's a Boche," she whispered in his ear.
"Is he going to be living with us?"
"Yes."
"Damn!"
"So what?" said Cécile. "They're not so bad if you know how to handle them, and they pay well."
Benoît unharnessed the mare and took her to the stable. Cécile, intimidated by the German but conscious of having an advantage because she was wearing her best Sunday dress, a hat and silk stockings, proudly walked into the room.
6
The regiment was passing beneath Lucile's windows. The soldiers were singing; they had excellent voices, but the French were bemused by this serious choir whose sad and menacing music sounded more religious than warlike.
"That how they pray?" the women asked.
The troops were returning from manoeuvres; it was so early in the morning that the whole village was still asleep. A few women woke with a start. They leaned out of the windows and laughed. It was such a fresh, gentle morning! The roosters crowed huskily after the cold night. The peaceful sky was tinged with pink and silver. Its innocent light played on the happy faces of the men as they marched past (how could you not be happy on such a glorious spring day?). The women watched them for a long time: these tall, well-built men with their hard faces and melodious voices. They were beginning to recognise some of the soldiers. They were no longer the anonymous crowd of the early days, the flood of green uniforms indistinguishable from one another, just as no wave in the sea is unique but merges with the swells before and after it. These soldiers had names now: "Here comes that short blond who lives with the shoemaker and whose friends call him Willy," the townspeople would say. "That one over there, he's the redhead who orders omelettes with eight eggs and drinks eighteen glasses of brandy one after the other without getting drunk or being sick. That little young one who stands so straight, he's the interpreter. He calls the shots at Headquarters. And there's the Angelliers' German."
Just as farmers used to be given the names of the places where they lived, to such an extent that the postman who was a descendant of former tenant farmers on the Montmort estate was called Auguste de Montmort to this very day, so the Germans more or less inherited the social status of their landlords. They were called the Durands' Fritz, the La Forges' Ewald, the Angelliers' Bruno.
Bruno rode at the head of his cavalry detachment. The well-fed, fiery animals pranced and eyed the onlookers with pride and impatience; they were the envy of the villagers.
"Mama, did you see?" the children shouted.
The Lieutenant's horse had a golden-brown coat, as glossy as satin. Both horse and rider were aware of the cheers, the women's cries of pleasure. The handsome animal arched its neck, violently shook its bit. The officer smiled faintly and sometimes made a little affectionate smacking sound with his lips, which controlled the horse better than the whip. When a young girl, at a window, exclaimed, "He's a good rider, that Boche, he is," he raised his gloved hand to his helmet and solemnly saluted.
Behind the young girl you could hear nervous whispering.
"You know very well they don't like being called that. Are you crazy?"
"Oh, so what! So I forgot," the young girl retorted, red as a cherry.
The detachment broke ranks at the village square. In a great clanking of boots and spurs, the men went back to their billets. The sun was shining and it was hot now, almost like summer. The soldiers got washed in the courtyards; their naked torsos were red, burned by being outdoors so much, and covered with sweat. One soldier had hooked a mirror on to the branch of a tree and was shaving. Another plunged his head and bare arms into a large tub of cool water. A third called out to a young woman, "Beautiful day, Madame!"
"Well now, so you speak French?"
"A little."
They looked at each other; smiled at each other. The women went over to the wells and sent down their buckets on long creaking chains. Once retrieved and full of shimmering, icy water that reflected the dark blue of the sky, these buckets always attracted a soldier, who would hurry over to take the heavy burden. Some of the soldiers did it to prove that, even though they were German, they were polite; others did it out of natural kindness; some because the beautiful day and a kind of physical invigoration (brought on by the fresh air, healthy tiredness and the prospect of a well-earned rest) put them in a state of exaltation, of inner strength-a state where men who would gladly act maliciously towards the strong feel even more kindly towards the weak (the same state, doubtless, that in spring causes male animals to fight one another yet graze, play and gambol in the dust in front of the females). A soldier walked a young woman home, solemnly carrying two bottles of white wine she had just pulled out of the well. He was a very young man with light-blue eyes, a turned-up nose, large strong arms.