The first time he heard the sparrows, saw them in the chandeliers of the brasserie, Max thought it was some sort of joke. When questioned, the waiter answered that many customers had asked that the sparrows be allowed to come and go and tweet in the assembly-rooms, exsoldiers had asked.
‘Well now,’ Max had said, ‘I know another tall tale, another extremely poetical story, extremely, provided you give the word poetical a meaning different from the one it had before our war: the story of the Martins and the Thomases.
‘Max, they say you were with the dragoons the day they charged the Boches at Monfaubert, tell us about the charge.’
‘I wasn’t there!’
‘Where were you, then?’
‘Guess.’
‘Headquarters?’
‘Cheeky bastard!’
‘Don’t lose your rag, I give up.’
‘Yes, more to the east!’
‘I don’t see..
‘Everyone’s got it except you! Saint-Rémy! The place where Fournier was killed, I was there just before it happened, second lieutenant of dragoons, different regiment, I charged a flock of sheep.’
‘Max, stop messing about.’
‘I’m not, the Germans were firing at us, I never say Boches, I never write it either, I’ve got a friend who’s a Boche, we’ve been meeting up once a year since the Armistice, incidentally, do you write Boche with a capital or not when it’s a noun? The German artillery was firing at us, disgustingly accurate it was, we thought we were hidden by a small hill, a ridge, with something peculiar on the top, a man grazing his sheep, poor creatures have got to eat too, the shepherd must have been dead scared, we all were, but there he was, out with his sheep, brave man. We kept changing position, the Germans continued firing at us, the shepherd was in a blue funk, with your naked eye you could see him on the top of the ridge duck down each time a shell went screaming overhead, he tried to make his way back towards us, we shouted for him to stay up there, he couldn’t hear, we made signs telling him to stay where he was, he wasn’t in as much danger as us, but he changed position on his ridge when we did, staying in line with us, about three hundred metres away, a Frenchman who wanted to stay with the French, whatever the risk. We were taking a hammering from the German cannon, we kept moving to avoid their fire, and then the shells would find us again.
‘In the end the penny dropped, the shepherd was a scout, all the German gunners had to do was aim over the top of the sheep every time the shepherd stopped, he was giving them the line of fire. So we charged the sheep with lances, we liked the lance, at that stage we were about to make a better world with our lances, we carried carbines slung round our necks, but it was the lance we liked best, a joust.
‘The shepherd? We nabbed him, a spy who got two hundred francs a throw, he could have bought himself three overcoats at La Belle Jardinière for that, lined him up and shot him.
‘We got hammered in that sector, then we were withdrawn and replaced by fresh troops, infantry, they were ready for a scrap, the 288th, that’s right, Fournier’s lot, and the Germans were eager for a scrap too, that’s what Saint-Rémy was, a poxy wood and a war where you charged at sheep and writers died.’
The Frenchman at the next table with the big ears, most entertaining, he looks at me as if I were the only woman in his life, he talks in a loud voice, he comes out with some very French names, Martin, Thomas, he might be called something along those lines too, or maybe Duval. He’s watching me in one of the mirrors with eyes that drink, eat, beckon, undress, would like to bite, disappear, garrulous eyes, very French, but not stupid. Now Hans didn’t have garrulous eyes, his looked surprised, frequently surprised, if I’d made a scene about Marie-Thérèse he’d have come down to earth with a bump. He still hadn’t noticed anything or felt anything or anticipated anything, and it was the scene I’d make that would open his eyes.
We were out walking, I was holding his arm, we met Marie-Thérèse coming towards us, she hardly knew me but called me ‘dear Lena’, she stopped and chatted, Hans was being witty, she laughed and touched his other arm as she laughed, do I dig my nails into her cheeks at this point? Or when she does it again, when she leans unambiguously on his arm, with both hands, so that through my arm I can feel Hans’s body leaning away from me under the pressure of that woman’s hands.
Marie-Thérèse blushed as she stood there, she wasn’t ashamed of blushing, her neck was uncovered and her throat was suffused with red, Hans looked, he did not look openly the way you’re supposed to when people push something under your nose unceremoniously, no, he glanced at it, pretended he wasn’t looking at all, glanced at me tenderly, and then his eye sidled off again towards that bright redness.
Max raises one finger, like in school, not like a pupil but like the teacher when he wants to stress the salient point, what you need, friends, is the story of the Martins and the Thomases, names of large families.
‘Max, how can you have a poetical tale about large families?’
‘Easy,’ Max replies, ‘a dramatic story, group photos, white dresses, a swing in one corner of the photo, interchangeable names and oodles of conflict. Martin, Thomas! That’s Pierre-Emile Martin versus Sidney Thomas, decades of confrontation spent chasing each other up and down statistical graphs, Martin, a decent old cove who hailed from Sireuil in the days of Napoleon III, Catholic, qualified engineer, concerned for the welfare of his workers, more than charitable, and Sidney Thomas ten years later, an Englishman, long-standing quarrel, two names at loggerheads, each despising the other, and no sign of it all finishing, at stake world conquest, with little flags planted in the planisphere of their epic struggle.
‘And at times quite staggering profits! shush, not a word, I’ll carry on, at others catastrophic falls on the Stock Exchange, close-down, new start, cycles, crises, competing tooth and nail for markets, patent for patent, perhaps they even came near to pairing off two of their children, one of Martin’s daughters and one of Thomas’s sons, but in the end there is no marriage, production goes up and up, the women produce fewer offspring, but there are still plenty of faces in the photos, two names, competing, and so, starting from a story about iron ore, Victor Hugo…’
‘Max!’
‘Oh yes, Hugo, “O Nature, here are thy sublime beginnings”.’
‘Max, we all know you’re mad about Hugo, you even went to his funeral.’
‘You villain, I wasn’t even born then.’
‘In that case, spare us the rest.’
‘One more quote and I’ll stop: “At the sound of thy voice thy forces rise up from the glooms of the deep”, to those forces we’ve added jaw-crushers, cone-crushers, cylinder-crushers, hammer-crushers, spiral separators, hydrocyclones, clean iron ore, it’s crushed to produce molten pig-iron and clippety-clop, the carbon in the molten metal is oxidised, and then Bessemer…’
‘Max, give me back my tankard.’
‘It’s empty.’
‘Exactly, the waiter won’t be able to see I need a refill.’
‘Too bad, just drink out of my glass instead, I’ll keep your tankard, you’ll see, and Martin, no let’s have Bessemer first, actually it all starts with Bessemer.’
‘Or Cro-Magnon man.’
‘If you’re going to be like that, I’ll shut up.’
‘No, Max, you just carry on now but you can bring it to a speedy conclusion.’
‘If you want a story, you’ve got to put in the time.’