A wall of straw bales slid between us and the landscape, a dull-yellow wall glided past the car in places where the enemy had an unimpeded view and without that barrier would have shot at everything that moved, certainly cars, I learnt later.
I calmed my thoughts a little, looked at him, my husband-to-be, while he kept an eye on the road, the steering wheel loosely in his hand. I liked looking at him. I liked absorbing his profile, the nose and the lips and the chin, the hair that stuck out of his kepi and, behind his ear, shaved short, lay close to his skin. I liked waiting for him to look back, turn his head half towards me and say something, it didn’t matter what.
The straw wall gave way to trees, the road cut through a low hill. It was cool and dark, and seemed to be deserted. I don’t know how many we had passed before I recognized, in the patchwork of light and shadow patches in the undergrowth, not only tree trunks and bushes. Only when I detected movement out of the corner of my eye did I distinguish their figures in the shades of brown and green that slid past us. They must have pulled back onto the side of the road to let us pass. I had not seen them at first because they almost did not look like people, rather beings in whom transubstantiation from earth into flesh had not yet been completed. Almost-humans hiding under the trees in order to harden off safely in earthen clothing, earthen helmets, earthen cocoons.
Leaning against a tree trunk a boy with earthen fists screwed open a drinking bottle and brought it to his lips — how am I to describe the flash that animated his whole figure. The dark pupils did not look up but sparkled between the caked-together eyelashes, under the modelled eyebrows, from that face when he stopped what he was doing and raised an arm. At the moment he called something — I don’t know what, but the audible relief, the simple joy of being alive needed no language — his lips made fine cracks in his earthen mask, which flaked off and exposed the skin of his cheeks. A skin as dark as the night.
I remembered the shameless curiosity with which we had gaped at the “Negroes” when the war began and troops fairly regularly passed through the village and rested in the square in front of the mairie—the intimidating splendour of the cavalry with their multicoloured uniforms, their blood-red hooded cloaks and ornamentally harnessed horses, and the look in their eyes, by which every woman felt pierced as a dubious threat to her very ovaries. Even my mother proved not wholly insensitive to them. “It has to be said,” she said one day in a throwaway tone, “they’re definitely not unattractive, those savages.”
I was reminded of the hidden pride of Madame Gaillac after one of those dark chaps had come into her liqueur shop one afternoon and with a resolute gesture had laid twenty-five francs—“twenty-five!” she repeated at every opportunity, appropriate and especially inappropriate — on the counter under his rusty brown palm. The resulting confusion was only cleared up when the North African, with a gesture of the hand about which Madame Gaillac had for the sake of good taste to remain vague, indicated that he was interested not so much in a bottle of chartreuse as in Madame Gaillac herself, who, she said could “of course” not take up his offer—“What was he thinking, that sultan?”—but nevertheless found it very flattering that at her age her virtue was still worth a pretty penny.
The wood thinned out, and in the landscape that stretched out beyond it a stone cloud formation loomed up on the horizon, at first merging bluish in the sky above the rolling landscape, but more and more tangible the closer we came. A grotesque castle in the air seemed to have become so dense that it had plunged down to earth from the sky. Only because since childhood I had looked up at it almost every summer and had eaten ice cream in the shadow of the tower in the market square, did I recognize the contours of the age-old cloth hall. Iron-coloured and dark, the building no longer rose to the sky, but seemed to have begun a slow process of dripping downward. Window openings had expanded into holes, side towers and pointed arches had lost their sharpness. The erosion of dozens of centuries seemed to be concentrated in the sky clouding over above. This must be the capital of a new kingdom that was running wild over the old land, forcing its root system, its threads of mould between the joints of the walls, picking its way down to the foundations and blooming in devastation and, everywhere where it branched out over the old roads, spread its provinces and prefectures of decay.
The noise of the weapons, the salvoes, the shots could only euphemistically be called displacement of air. Walls of tangible sound clattered through the heavens. In the cloudy sky even more ruins seemed to pile up, and then crash down on the earth, set foot on the ground and coincide with the crenellated contours of the houses of the town. The deepest growl made the muscles of my abdomen quiver.
We passed the sentry post that controlled the access road. In the distance two other cars were heading for the suburbs. The sentry waved us through, probably assuming we were part of the column. My husband saluted. The sentry saluted back; it was more of a nonchalant wave. “One of ours. The French are worse. And the gendarmes in the hinterland. Corrupt as anything…”
“Aren’t we all?”
He looked at me sideways with a louche gleam in his eye. “Don’t tell me what you’re thinking of, Miss Demont… Not onions, I hope.”
The thunder subsided, the clouds drew great patches of shadow over the town, reducing the profile of the cloth hall to a black, burnt-out cinder which, however, flared up in deep bronze colours whenever the sun shone through the clouds. As we approached the silence seemed to lose its massive quality and to relax. Birds sang, wind whistled through the willow leaves that bordered the road on both sides. But when we reached the first suburbs and the narrow streets enclosed us, the purr of the engine found dozens of sounding boards in the emptiness behind the house fronts by which it was echoed.
There was no logic in the destruction, no system in the alternation of house fronts pounded totally into rubble and others that apart from the empty window frames seemed intact. With other houses the façade had been blown away but the interior had survived. Wherever the shadow of the clouds lifted, the glow of the afternoon sun flooded the surface of wall cupboards, beds and washbasins which had congealed snow-white on tables, licked at wallpaper, and brought a gleam to dusty bell jars, under which saints’ images balanced on a chimney piece as if on the edge of a ravine. The clouds seemed to be teasing us, chased their shadows ahead of us over the cobbles, cast the boredom of a summer afternoon over the town, although the smell of plaster, dry wood, dust, the irritating reek of desolation, strongly penetrated my nostrils.
A lorry drove ahead of us for a while, and four soldiers peered out from under the tarpaulin that covered the back and clapped their hands as soon as they caught sight of us. The air was filled with cries like, “Matey, havin’ a good time, are ya?” and they started to sing: “My name’s Johnny Hall, I’ve only got one ball…” The melody crumbled in a tide of rowdy laughter.
I rolled my eyes and looked away, at the houses sliding past, in the hope of suggesting the disapproval that they were probably hoping for.