After the sisters had joined us at table under the beech tree, where my uncle had prepared a small evening meal, they pressed cloths smelling of lemon verbena oil to their delicate ankles, to keep off the mosquitoes that buzzed high above our heads in the last warmth.
My uncle was meanwhile discussing “that incident” and whether it would have consequences.
“A lot of fuss is what we’re going to have,” exclaimed my brother, who had not denied himself the umpteenth glass of wine.
“Doubtless,” replied my uncle. “But where? As long as they’re at each other’s throats in the east, to be honest, I’m not going to lose any sleep.”
“If you have any fuss, comrade, it’ll be with me,” interrupted my mother. “That’s your last glass. Understood?”
“Oui, mon capitaine!” cried Edgard, making a clumsy salute.
“Leave him be,” soothed my uncle, and to my mother: “If you’d like to go to bed, dear, your room is ready. I’ll keep an eye on them…”
“That’s very reassuring…” she replied, and no one could fail to hear the sarcasm in her voice, but nevertheless she got up, tugged my brother’s blond quiff by way of a good night kiss, whispered, “Brigand…”, gave me and my uncle a pat on the shoulder and withdrew into the house.
A little later the light of a paraffin lamp flickered at one of the upstairs windows. Only downstairs was there electricity, but not even there in every room, only in those where the sisters and my uncle spent a lot of time.
“Cigar, Edgard?…” he asked conspiratorially.
“Oh, why not?” replied my brother nonchalantly, stretching in his chair.
My uncle retrieved a small cigar-holder from his inside pocket, snapped it open and offered it gallantly first to my brother then to me.
I declined. I always found his fixed intention, carried out each year with varying success, to teach us a few of the vices that add spice to life, as he put it, sufficient unto itself. The sins one doesn’t taste keep their aroma longest.
The sisters took one too, which they shared after they had lit it. “Nothing better against the mosquitoes, isn’t that so, Josine?” cooed my aunt.
“Absolutely, Yolande,” echoed her sister.
We were silent. Around me three orange points of light glowed whenever the sisters, my uncle and my brother puffed on their cigars. I enjoyed their pleasure and listened to the sounds of the night. A cow coughing somewhere beyond the stables. The first call of the owl. The high-pitched, ethereal squeak of the bats which sailed round the tops of the beeches and the crunch when an insect was ground up in their jaws. Only above the roofline at the far end of the inner courtyard was there a band of fading light.
“We’ll have to wait and see what tomorrow brings,” said my uncle at last. His voice suddenly sounded deeper, because of the tobacco.
He exhaled. “Wait and see…” he said again, more softly this time.
I looked on as they finished their cigars and saw how their faces glowed briefly as they sucked oxygen into the tobacco, and how afterwards darkness took possession of us all.
LESS THAN SIX MONTHS later at least one in three of all the servants who greeted us on the evening of our arrival would be dead. I could list their names, erect on paper my private monument with the inscription “Mort pour la Patrie”, but memorials are leaden euphemisms: sacrificial dishes or garlands of flowers that we place on altars to drown out the stupefaction in all those bodies. I have always made it a point of honour to read the lists of names on each of those monuments, even the tiniest villages I visited, and invariably their orderliness left me with a wry aftertaste. They stood there, chiselled row on row in bluestone, an alphabetical litany, like the words in a dictionary, but without the slightest explanation, except for their year of birth, and the date of their death, which broke off their oh-so-young etymologies.
There should be mausoleums and extensive cemeteries for the torn-off limbs, the amputated arms or legs, the missing organs. Headstones should be carved under which rest, for example, the hands and feet of Sylvain Gaillac, youngest son of Mr and Mrs Gaillac, who right next to the town hall in my mother’s home village ran a wine and liqueur business and who dismissed with typically French nonchalance the fact that their good-looking youngest son was in favour with the girls at the fairs — till he came back without hands or feet. A suckling pig or sacrificial lamb ready for the spit, that’s what he looked like, a man-sized infant whom Maman and Papa had to push round in a wheelchair at fairs where not even a milkmaid would give him a second look. He, Sylvain Gaillac, single-handedly responsible for several deflowerings in the undergrowth behind the roundabouts, late at night during the midsummer ball, now had to be fed three times a day as one feeds an orphaned thrush chick, spoonful by spoonful, mouthful by mouthful, and for the rest of his days couldn’t even wipe his own arse. There should be a burial chapel commemorating without inflated heroics the right arm of our groom Adelin Rivière, very popular because of the only talent he was able to develop before the front decimated him: his sensitivity during the freeing of a calf from the inside of a cow that threatened to die in calving, the clairvoyancy of his hands, as if, as my uncle said so often, that fellow could feel with his hands how the calf was twisted in her abdomen, and how to release it unharmed. And where is the grave for the left hand of his cousin Hubertin, who had no special merits and was only missed on a farm where manpower was always useful when that hand wasn’t there any more — and that was how the war gave countless men back: withholding an arbitrary percentage of flesh. It should have its own cemeteries, rows of tombs for arms, legs, feet, fingers, toes, or a wall for urns with, under small stone covers, for example the testicles of Olivier Douilhet, waiting to be reunited with the rest of Olivier Douilhet, who, it was whispered, took a feeble pride in the fact that some ladies were curious about his absent sex and sporadically rewarded a few by dropping his trousers and showing the fold between his thighs, and how he could make water with it like a woman. Olivier Douilhet grew old, since eunuchs are long-lived, and all through his long life he counted himself luckier than his mate Claude Outremont, for whom the same grenades that unmanned Olivier had spared his balls but had mashed up his cock — there should be memorials for anonymous lumps of flesh, missing in action: bits of rump, thigh muscle, bum and prick, and ossuaries for the splinters of bone of men like François Hautekier, who was a son of the smith, ready to succeed his elderly father above the glowing coals and the anvil, but in whose hip the doctors artificially created a gaping hole so that they could easily cut away fragments of bone with forceps, when gangrene attacked the bone and the microbes reduced it to black mush.
In those cemeteries for fractions of bodies I wouldn’t erect a cross, or a statue of a grieving soldier leaning on a sword with head bowed. In a column or a wall I would insert in glass niches the eyeballs of everyone who has lost an eyeball, including at least four eyeballs from local lads, so that the past would continue to gape at us without a fringe of eyelashes ever closing over those icy stares — a grotesque, obscene memorial, certainly, but one which also commemorates, just not eloquently or in hushed reverence, but mockingly or cynically, silently shrieking.
I understand why my brother said later that those who were wounded were usually the lucky ones. I understand that their wounds — the cavities that may or may not have closed, the membrane of skin where jawbones had been shot away, the missing knuckles, the eye socket in which soft new flesh replaced the vanished pupil — left a mark in those young bodies, even if in the form of an absence, which had, as it were, hewn out a tabernacle in which they could house their disaster, just as in the medieval reliquary shrines the toenails of martyrs or splinters from the Cross were stored and on certain occasions shown to the faithful. Their misfortune, to use my mother’s love of tautology for once, was their misfortune.