The old man veiled his eyes. Yellow, wrinkled lids, like old dirty paper, hooded down over the black, mocking pebbles of his pupils. He turned away and Christian felt that somehow the old man had got the better of him.
He drank his cognac. The alcohol was beginning to have an effect on him. He felt at once sleepy and powerful, like a giant in a dream, capable of slow, terrible movements, and enormous, semi-conscious blows.
"Finish your drink, Sergeant." It was a low, remembered voice, and Christian looked up, squinting through the increasing evening haze at the figure standing before his table.
"What?" he asked stupidly.
"I want to talk to you, Sergeant." Whoever it was, was smiling.
Christian shook his head and opened his eyes very wide. Then he recognized the man. It was Brandt, in an officer's uniform, standing over him, dusty, thin, capless, but Brandt, and smiling.
"Brandt…"
"Sssh." Brandt put his hand on Christian's arm. "Finish your drink and come on outside."
Brandt turned and went outside. Christian saw him there, standing against the cafe window, with his back to it, and a ragged column of labour troops trudging past him. Christian gulped down the rest of the cognac and stood up. The old man was watching him again. Christian pushed the chair away and carefully grabbed hold of the handle-bars of the bicycle and wheeled it towards the door. He could not resist turning at the door for one last encounter with the Frenchman's pebbly, mocking eyes, that remembered 1870, Verdun, the Marne and 1918. The old man was standing in front of a poster, printed in French but inspired by the Germans, of a snail horned with one American flag and one British flag, creeping slowly up the Italian peninsula. The words on the poster ironically pointed out that even a snail would have reached Rome by now… The final insolence, Christian felt. Probably the old man had put the poster up this very week, straight-faced and cackling, so that every fleeing German who came by could look and suffer.
"I hope," the old man wheezed, in that voice that sounded like laughter heard in a home for the aged, "that Monsieur enjoyed his drink."
The French, Christian thought furiously, they will beat us all yet.
He went out and joined Brandt.
"Walk with me," Brandt said softly. "Walk slowly around the square. I don't want anyone to hear what I am going to say to you."
He started along the narrow pavement, along the shuttered row of shops. Christian noticed with surprise that Brandt looked considerably older than when last they met, that there was considerable grey at the photographer's temples, and heavy lines around his eyes and mouth, and that he was very thin.
"I saw you come in," Brandt said, "and I couldn't believe my eyes, I watched you for five minutes to make sure it was you. What in God's name have they done to you?"
Christian shrugged, a little angry at Brandt, who, after all, didn't look magnificently healthy himself. "They moved me about a little," Christian said. "Here and there. What are you doing here?"
"They sent me to Normandy," Brandt said. "Pictures of the invasion, pictures of captured American troops, atrocity pictures of French women and children dead from American bombing. The usual thing. Keep walking. Don't stop. If you settle down anywhere, some damned officer is liable to come over and ask you for your papers and try to assign you to a unit. There are just enough busybodies about to make it unpleasant."
They walked methodically along the side of the square, like soldiers with a purpose and under orders. The grey stone of the buildings was purple in the sunset, and the lounging and restless men looked hazy and indefinite against the shuttered windows.
"What do you intend to do?" Brandt said.
Christian chuckled. He was surprised to hear the dry sound come out of his throat. For some reason, after the many days of running, dictated only by the threat of the onrushing enemy, the thought that it was possible for him to have any intentions of his own had struck him as amusing.
"What are you laughing at?" Brandt looked at him suspiciously, and Christian straightened his face, because he had the feeling that if he antagonized Brandt, Brandt would withhold valuable information from him.
"Nothing," Christian said. "Honestly, nothing. I'm a little tired. I have just won the cross-country nine-day all-European bicycle race, and I'm not exactly in control of myself. I'll be all right."
"Well?" Brandt asked querulously. Christian could tell from the timbre of the photographer's voice that he was very near the thin edge of breaking, himself. "Well, what do you intend to do?"
"Bicycle back to Berlin," Christian said. "I expect to equal the existing record."
"Don't joke, for the love of God," Brandt said.
"I love pedalling through the historic French countryside," Christian said light-headedly, "conversing with the historic natives in their native costumes of hand-grenades and Sten guns, but if something better came up, I might be interested"
"Look here," Brandt said, "I have a two-seater English car in a farmer's barn one mile from here…"
Christian became very cool and all tendency to laugh left him.
"Keep moving!" Brandt snapped, under his breath. "I told you not to stop. I want to get back to Paris. My idiotic driver left last night. We were strafed yesterday and he got hysterical. He went towards the American lines about midnight."
"Well…?" Christian asked, trying to seem very keen and understanding. "Why've you been hanging around here all day?"
"I can't drive," Brandt said bitterly. "Imagine that, I never learned how to drive a car!"
This time Christian couldn't keep his laughter down. "Oh, my God," he said, "the modern industrial man!"
"It isn't so funny," said Brandt. "I'm too highly strung to learn how. I tried once, in 1935, and I nearly killed myself."
What a century, Christian thought, enjoying this sudden advantage over a man who had before this done so well out of the war, what a century to pick to be highly strung! "Why didn't you get one of these fellows…" Christian gestured towards the men lounging on the town hall steps, "to drive you?"
"I don't trust them," Brandt said darkly, with a glance around him. "If I told you half the stories I've heard about officers being killed by their own troops in the last few days… I've been sitting in this damned little town for nearly twenty-four hours, trying to think what to do, trying to find a face I really could trust. But they all travel in groups, they all have comrades, and there's only two places in the car. And, who knows, by tomorrow the enemy may be here, or the road to Paris will be closed… Christian, I confess to you, when I saw your face in that cafe, I had to hold on to myself to keep from crying. Listen…" Brandt grabbed his arm anxiously. "There's nobody with you? You're alone, aren't you?"
"Don't worry," Christian said. "I'm alone."
Suddenly Brandt stopped. He wiped his face nervously. "It never occurred to me," he whispered. "Can you drive?"
The anguish plain on Brandt's face as he asked the simple, foolish question that at this moment, at the time of the crumbling of an army, had become the focal point and tragedy of his life, made Christian feel grotesquely and protectively full of pity for the thin, ageing ex-artist. "Don't worry, comrade." Christian patted Brandt's shoulder soothingly. "I can drive."
"Thank God," Brandt sighed. "Will you come with me?"
Christian felt a little weak and giddy. Safety was being offered here, speed, home, life… "Try and stop me," he said. They grinned weakly like two drowning men who somehow have contrived, by helping each other, to reach shore.