At a certain moment almost the whole line was suddenly ablaze. Red and green flashes flared up from the coast to inland, new bullets drew tentacles of light through the night.
Someone behind us muttered, “Poor buggers,” realized there were ladies present and collected himself. “Poor chaps…” It seemed more intended to marshal what we knew with our intelligence against the fairy-tale beauty of those polyps of light, to remove us from the enchantment.
“Mon Dieu, mon Dieu,” repeated my mother.
We waited, he and I, while the others descended the steps. The sentry relaxed and, indifferent to the light show that was in full swing down below, lit up a cigarette, inhaled and blew out a cloud of smoke.
My mother was already on her way downstairs, too upset to keep an eye on me.
“What’s wrong with madame?” he asked.
“My brother’s at the front, monsieur. Somewhere there perhaps. The last thing we heard was that he had to go to Le Havre. We don’t get much post. My brother isn’t a letter-writer…”
He nodded. “Le Havre?”
“We’re Belgian, monsieur. And we can’t go home, to my father…”
“Sorry to hear that,” he said, as he closed the door behind us and the sentry bolted it on the other side.
I shrugged. “You get used to everything, monsieur.”
The rest of the party was stumbling downstairs some way below us. It was dark in the stairwell, after the moonlit night on the terrace.
He noticed that I was moving uncertainly down the steps. Occasionally our hands touched. I giggled and he giggled back, and I was glad it was dark as I felt foolish.
Somewhere on a landing he took me by the arm, I thought in order to guide me downstairs, but he pushed me unexpectedly against the wall. It went too fast for me to protest, or even to be surprised. I could feel the buttons of his uniform pushing against my ribcage through my overcoat and his own ribcage swelling and contracting to the rhythm of his breathing while he put his head next to mine and rubbed my cheek with his, and his breath blew warm in my ear.
I had put one hand on his back in astonishment, while he kept the other wedged against the wall, with his palm over mine. The only other man to whom I had been so physically close until then was my father, when I was a child, during the afternoons at the seaside, when he wanted to protect me from the waves or a biting wind, but my father had cherished me. His body had never hungered or sought for anything,
There was something childlike about him. I moved my hand from his back to the nape of his neck and stroked the back of his head.
He was trying not to kiss.
Just standing there.
Stroking my cheek with his.
I smelt his smell, which condensed on the wall behind us and in the hair on my neck.
Then he let go of me and went downstairs. “I’m sorry,” he whispered, and it sounded as if he had a frog in his throat.
I heard him stop on the landing. The rest of the party must have reached the ground floor by now as the stumbling faded away.
“I’m sorry,” he stammered again when I had caught up with him. “So sorry. I didn’t mean to, Miss, I mean madame… mademoiselle.”
I sought his hand in the dark. “It’s all right,” I said.
WE HAD LEFT the summer before on 28 June, early in the morning, in splendid weather, the beginning of a Sunday like a generous almsgiving. In accordance with the annual custom my mother, together with Emilie, had filled all kinds of cabin trunks and suitcases weeks in advance. A stream of luggage had gone on ahead and the day after our arrival a second stream would follow us, besides what we took with us on the day itself. My mother was not someone who went on trips, she moved as it were with atmosphere and all. Once the first stream of cases was delivered, the maids in my uncle’s house, who after the death of the matriarch were in charge of business matters, would unpack our clothes, put our sheets on the beds and store our table linen in the chests of drawers in the guest quarters, so that as soon as we ourselves arrived she could move into a world governed by her familiar natural laws.
She had looked breathtaking that morning. She had been in a good humour for weeks. In the months before our departure her menstruation pains had subsided from rancorous symphonies to string quartets full of rainy melancholy. It was no longer unknown territory to me. Just over a year previously I myself had started bleeding, very late according to her, but nevertheless in synch with budding nature and the mid-Lent fair. I still attribute it to the roundabouts. Their centrifugal forces unleashed my chemistry, opened the polonaise of the molecules. My mother had reacted with a strange tenderness. She immediately put me to bed for three days. Perhaps she secretly hoped that I would join her monthly revolt, but did not turn into a monument of irritability, until later after the birth of my daughter.
I myself had thought the business at times stupid and at other times a melancholy premonition of death. I leaked periodically like a draughty sow. I felt mushy, overripe, a sack of rust-coloured blood which was torn somewhere. My body was no longer a body, it had become a carcass. I cried easily. I was suddenly a sentimental booby, and I was annoyed with myself.
Emilie came to my room every morning to fill the water jug. “From now on, mamzel,” she said the first time, “you’ll have to put up with that misery every four weeks.” She called it “ministrations”. I think it was a bastardized form of “menstruation”. She had spoken the word in a tone that betrayed complicity. We were now clearly sisters.
My mother too had come and sat two or three times a day on the edge of my bed, taken my book out of my hands to be able to stroke my cheeks unimpeded and look me in the eye with a beatific pity that I had never suspected in her and distrusted, since in my view it contained an implicit form of triumph, as if she were rubbing it in: “You see. You too. Look at you there, with all your castles in the air. Look at woman, shackled to her treacherous body.” But of course she had said something completely different: “The fresh air will do you good, my child.”
She had called the approaching holiday “our last summer”. My brother had left school at Easter. After the hot months he would start work in my father’s warehouses, to gain experience and, my parents hoped, to acquire a taste for bourgeois life before he had to do his military service. As far as I was concerned, she felt that I had spent long enough under the skirts of the nuns to be able to behave like a well-brought-up young lady, knew sufficient foreign languages to say my piece everywhere, and though my French conjugations and sewing left something to be desired, my periods had made it clear that I had entered irreversibly the phase of life in which, as she put it with some aplomb, “a woman becomes a woman”.
She was crazy about circular reasoning, trains of thought that by way of conclusion wound up at their starting point. The tension there has always been between us was based on a fundamental difference in the way our souls were constructed. Ideas for my mother were a kind of lid, her medium was tautology, while the engine of my own mind is driven by the hydraulics of paradox, in which thought, how shall I say, can release its excess pressure — more or less as a steam machine is equipped with valves with which it can discharge to prevent it being destroyed by its own power. And when I think back to our departure, it would be nonsense to try to convince you or myself that, hidden behind the easy-going bustle of that glorious morning, I suspected the crash of the whole machinery that kept our world in existence, the fatal forces that were piling up, so that the whole system of communicating balances was imperceptibly at the point of exploding. I would be doing violence to the truth and above all be seeing the outbreak of the misery that was to hold us hostage for four years as a natural given: some physiological phenomenon or other, like a sneezing fit or a fart, unique to the organism of time or history, and it was not. It was a stupidity such as only our species can commit.