‘Were you really in jeeps?’
‘No, there have been stories about jeeps but we didn’t have any, I was on one of those vehicles with tracks called “Bren-gun carriers”, one metre fifty high, you could get five men in it, didn’t offer much protection but it would go anywhere.’
Three times de Vèze drove over the mines of Bir Hakeim, a way through had to be opened up, de Vèze, take one of the Brens and go for it, and when you’d gone for it and were still alive to tell the tale, you came back, got into another Bren and went for it again until there was a way through.
De Vèze has never talked about it in detail, not through modesty, but because he didn’t like the Brens, what he would have liked was a plane and to be anywhere but Bir Hakeim, he’d have liked to start earlier in the war, whiff of knights of old, a fighter pilot over London, a Spitfire, like Mouchotte, when a few hundred men aged between eighteen and twenty succeeded in stopping Hitler, Battle of Britain, a dream, or with the Americans, the Naval Air Service, Battle of Midway, at the same time as Bir Hakeim, about ten in the morning, in just a few moments several dozen pilots sank the Japs’ aircraft carriers and it was all over, Japan had lost, and he knew now that it was just a question of time. Each time, just a handful of men with everything depending on them.
In Africa it was different, a very small cog in an army of two hundred thousand men, it could be heroic, but not decisive, still Bir Hakeim wasn’t a bad show even if it was a retreat, it was also an Adventure, it paved the way for El-Alamein, the real turning point, a lot of rocks, two armies.
‘War in its purest form,’ says Max, ‘sand and gravel, soldiers, no civilians, a story that can be told, with radar, more and more radar.’
Without really wanting to, de Vèze stares at Max’s ears. And Max smiles at de Vèze. He quite likes de Vèze, thinks he has a few too many illusions, heroism, an illness, not real war, we’re having dinner, not the moment for Max to bring out his tales of racking coughs, purulent gobbets of tracheal mucous membrane expelled at a rate of knots by the coughing, large lumps nestling in armpits and groins which peel raw after two days, not to mention internal swellings, ars abu lhawa, the jackal and his wedding, didn’t know how right they were, crafty Abd el-Krim, he succeed in re-grouping them, in a land where quarrels are so vicious that men are forbidden to go to the souk, only women, children and a few old men are allowed there.
Valleys of archaic violence, eye for an eye, where there could be a hundred dead in vendettas every year, a man has insulted my honour, I kill him at some family gathering, his brothers come looking for me, the old men discuss, they weigh the arguments, I pay the tribe a fine, nothing will happen to me, and the host of the party where the man was killed also receives compensation, the relatives of the murderer lay down their rifles in full sight of the tribal council, a value is put on them, the relatives of the dead man say ‘more!’
The murderer’s relatives add two or three rifles, then the elders cry ‘enough, let us recite the fatiha over them’, those who surrendered their guns may now buy them back, the remaining guns are auctioned off, when the sale is finished a deduction is made for the cost of the ox which was sacrificed for the meeting of the assembly, the cost of the oil for cooking it, the balance is shared out between each clan, and the assembly breaks up while the crier proclaims ‘there is no God but God, we are all brothers, we hate no one except the Spaniard!’
Sometimes the relatives of the victim may continue to take their revenge on the relatives of the murderer, the dead man’s brother has the right to kill my brother, and if the victims are women or children the blood debt cannot be redeemed, if the murderers have run away the injured party waits until their children are old enough to carry weapons and then kills them, cursèd be the nation in which each man behaves like a nation!
Actually Monsieur Goffard, it’s even more complicated than that, the agent for Native Affairs told him, archaic violence, it’s easy to say, but it’s primarily about honour, it has to be defended when insulted, but the man who offends another man’s honour is not only a delinquent, it’s something he must do, he has to issue his challenge, if these people are archaic it is because they’re forever challenging and defending, Abd el-Krim tried to turn all that into a republic, with phones and machine guns and honour and press releases, forbidding them to wage vendettas, we should add a few love songs for our female readers, ‘O mother dear, it was written, for whom did I wash my dress? For a man with beautiful eyes, but he did not see me, tonight I’ll throw myself into the sea’s blue waves.’
Max, opposite de Vèze, ears like cauliflowers, now pink with drink and conversation:
‘I’m very happy with my ears, a guarantee of a long life, like Picasso, he’s got big ears too, when he was painting Helena Rubenstein, he said: “Helena, you’ve got ears like an elephant, they’re as big as mine, how old are you?” and she said: “Pablo, you know very well I’m older than you,” and he said: “Helena, elephants live for ever and so will we,” and I’ll be like Picasso and Helena Rubenstein, the Venerable Company of Jug Ears, I shall live for a long time yet, even if the world is getting less and less entertaining.’
Taking aim with his fork over his lobster mayonnaise, Max emits a laugh which he hopes sounds cavernous, as if it came from outside his body, from the very bowels of the earth, he looks straight at de Vèze and says:
‘The Great Adventure is buggered!’
A cavernous voice, like a lesson from a place of darkness, with the waggish glee of some comic valet in a farce who has suddenly popped up out of the shadows, shot up from a world that is so dense, so elemental that de Vèze cannot recognise any of the things he has always believed in, a pool of magma in which great bubbles rise and burst one after the other and all the bubbles are of equal size, discord and betrayal all the way to the grave, chivalrous Adventure, Adventure is dead and gone for ever, the artful place their trust in the stars, Max punctuating his assertions with the rumblings of his stomach, oooh! aargh! groan, growl.
The sounds didn’t come from the back of his throat or his nose, it was more a spasm of the abdomen, the muscles of the abdomen, but not a command transmitted to the muscles of the abdomen, muscles which instinctually respond to something which comes from the entrails, a place where time does not exist, snatches of an ancient voice in the depth of me, it’s not my voice, I’ll tell you everything, the truth is a bitch, a voice from before my time, a voice trying to get out, Max is not listening now, he is no longer looking, he is absorbed into the voice, that voice from before, and the dead people in my life, mud in mouths, the man is talking to you and next moment you’re stuffing his right leg into a bag, a pal hands you something small, muddy, hairy, his moustache, stuck to what’s left of a rifle butt.
He had no right to go away like that, taking with him whole chunks of what you are, of what you had shown him, without him you’re nothing, what a mess, the kids, when they opened the doors of the cattle-trucks at Novosibirsk, gulag kids, rigor mortis well set in, you don’t take notes because you know you have to make them forget you’re a journalist, you say to the Red Army officer: war never kharacho, a show of fatalism you put on for him, actually you think it’s as normal as he does, though maybe he doesn’t find it at all normal but he hides it too, a fatalist, roll on peace, comrade journalist, we must be steel so that the bread of the future may finally be baked.