The French Art of War Read online

  The French Art of War

  ALEXIS JENNI is a French novelist and biology teacher. His debut novel, The French Art of War, won the 2011 Prix Goncourt. He lives in Lyon.

  Contents

  COMMENTARIES I

  The departure for the Gulf of the Spahis of Valence

  NOVEL I

  The life of rats

  COMMENTARIES II

  I have known better days and left them behind

  NOVEL II

  Going up to the maquis in April

  COMMENTARIES III

  A prescription for painkillers from the all-night pharmacy

  NOVEL III

  The Zouave regiments arrive in the nick of time

  COMMENTARIES IV

  Here and there

  NOVEL IV

  The first times, and what came after

  COMMENTARIES V

  The fragile nature of snow

  NOVEL V

  The war in this bloody garden

  COMMENTARIES VI

  I saw her around all the time, but I’d never have dared speak to her

  NOVEL VI

  Trifid, hexagonal, dodecahedral war; self-consuming monster

  COMMENTARIES VII

  We watched, uncomprehending, the paseo of the dead

  Copyright

  What is a hero? Neither the living man nor the dead,

  but one […] who infiltrates the other world and returns.

  PASCAL QUIGNARD

  It was so stupid. We frittered people away.

  BRIGITTE FRIANG

  The best order of things, as I see it, is the one that includes me;

  to hell with the best of all possible worlds if I am not part of it.

  DENIS DIDEROT

  Commentaries I

  The departure for the Gulf of the Spahis of Valence

  THE FIRST DAYS OF 1991 were marked by preparations for the Gulf War and the mounting escalation of my utter irresponsibility. Snow blanketed everything, blocking the trains, muffling every sound. In the Gulf, mercifully, temperatures had dropped; the soldiers no longer sweltered as they had in summer when, stripped to the waist, they would splash each other with water, never taking off their sunglasses. Oh, those handsome summer soldiers, of whom barely one had died! They emptied whole canteens over their heads and the water evaporated before reaching the ground, running in rivulets over their skin and immediately evaporating to create a misty mandorla shot through with rainbows about their lithe, toned bodies. Sixteen litres they had to drink every day, the summer soldiers; sixteen litres, because they sweated so much under the weight of their equipment in a part of the world where there are no shadows. Sixteen litres! The television peddled numbers and those numbers became fixed as numbers always do: precisely. Rumour peddled figures that everyone bandied about before the attack. Because it was about to be launched, this attack upon the fourth largest army in the world; the Invincible Western Army would soon begin their advance, while, on the other side, the Iraqis dug in behind twisted hanks of barbed wire, behind S-mines and rusty nails, behind trenches filled with oil, which they would set ablaze at the last moment, because they had lots of oil, so much oil they did not know what to do with it. Television reeled off details, invariably precise, delving at random through old footage. Television dug up images from before, neutral images that offered no information; we knew nothing about the Iraqi army, nothing about its forces, its positions, we knew only that it was the fourth largest army in the world; this we knew because it was endlessly repeated. Numbers imprint themselves on the memory, because they are unambiguous, we remember them and therefore believe them. On and on it went. There seemed to be no end to the preparations.

  In the early days of 1991 I was barely working. I went into the office only when I ran out of ideas to justify my absence. I visited doctors who were prepared, without even listening to my symptoms, to sign me off sick for implausible periods of time, which I made every effort to further extend by slowly honing my skills as a forger. At night, in the lamplight, I would retrace the figures as I listened to music on my headphones; my whole universe reduced to the pool of light, reduced to the space between my ears, reduced to the tip of the blue ballpoint that gradually afforded me even more free time. I would practise on a scrap of paper and then, with a sure hand, transform the symbols made by the doctors. In doing so, I doubled, I tripled the number of days I could spend in the warm, far from my work. I never discovered whether changing these symbols, falsifying numbers with a ballpoint pen, was enough to change reality, I never wondered whether there was some record other than the doctor’s certificate, but it didn’t matter; the office where I worked was so badly organized that sometimes when I didn’t go in, no one noticed. When I showed up the following day, no one paid any more attention than they did when I wasn’t there, as though absence were nothing. I was absent and my absence went unnoticed. So I stayed in bed.

  On Monday early in 1991 I heard on the radio that Lyon was cut off by snow. The snowfall had brought down telephone cables, most trains were marooned in the stations, and those caught unawares outside a station were covered with eiderdowns of snow. The people inside tried not to panic.

  Here on the Scheldt river a few scant snowflakes fell, but further south everything had ground to a halt except for the huge snow-ploughs moving at a snail’s pace, each trailed by a line of cars, and the helicopters bringing aid to isolated villages. I was delighted that this had happened on a Monday, since no one knew here what the snow was like, so they would make a mountain out of it, a mysterious catastrophe, mindlessly trusting the pictures they saw on television. I phoned the office 300 metres away and claimed to be 800 kilometres away amid the white hills being shown on the news. Everyone at work knew I was from the Rhône, the Alps; I would sometimes go home for the weekend, they knew that; and since they had no real conception of mountains, of snow, everything tallied, there was no reason for me not to be snowed in like everyone else.

  Then I went to my girlfriend’s house opposite the train station.

  She was not surprised; she had been expecting me. She, too, had seen the snow outside her window and the flurries across the rest of France on the TV. She had called in sick, in that feeble tone she could adopt on the phone: she said she was suffering from the acute flu devastating France that had been all over the news; she could not come in to work today. She was still in her pyjamas when she let me in, so I got undressed and we lay on the bed, sheltering from the snowstorm and the sickness that were ravaging France and from which there was no reason, no reason at all, that we should be spared. We were victims, like everybody else. We made love undisturbed, while outside a light snow went on falling, floating, landing, flake after flake, in no hurry to arrive.

  My girlfriend lived in a studio flat consisting of a single room with an alcove, and the bed in the alcove took up the whole space. I felt at peace next to her, wrapped in the duvet, our desires sated; we were happy in the quiet heat of a timeless day when no one knew where we were. I was happy in the warmth of my adoptive sanctuary with this woman who had eyes of every colour, eyes I wanted to draw in green and blue crayons on brown paper. I wanted to, but I had no talent for drawing; and yet only art could have done justice to her eyes and the miraculous light in them. Words are not enough; they needed to be depicted. The transcendent colour of her eyes defied description in words and left no clues. I needed to show them. But showing is something that can be improvised, as idiotic TV sets demonstrated every day of the winter of 1991. The TV was turned towards the bed, so we could see the screen by plumping up the pillows to raise our heads. Sperm tugged at the hairs on my thighs as it dried, but I had no desire to shower; it was cold in the tiny bathroom and I was happy lying next to her, and so we
watched television as we waited for desire to return.

  The big news on TV was Operation Desert Storm, a codename straight out of Star Wars, cooked up by the scriptwriters of a special Cabinet. Gambolling alongside came Daguet, the French operation with its limited resources. ‘Daguet’ is French for a young stag, a fawn, a barely pubescent Bambi just starting to sprout antlers that frisks and frolics, never far from his parents. Where do these army types come up with these names? Who uses a word like ‘Daguet’? It had probably been suggested by a senior officer, the sort of guy who goes deer-hunting in the grounds of the family estate. Desert Storm is a name anyone on Earth can understand, it bursts from the mouth, explodes in the heart, it’s a video-game title. Daguet is elegant, it elicits a knowing smile from those who get the reference. The army has its own language, which is not the common tongue, and that is rather worrying. Military types in France do not speak, or do so only among themselves. We laugh about it. We think them so profoundly stupid they have no need of words. What have they ever done to us that we should treat them with such contempt? What have we ever done that the military should want to keep themselves to themselves?

  The French army is a thorny subject. We don’t know what to think of these guys, we certainly don’t know what to do with them. They clutter up the place with their berets, the regimental traditions about which we know little and care nothing, and their ruinously expensive equipment that makes such a dent in our taxes. The army in France is silent, ostensibly it answers to the Head of the Armed Forces, an elected civilian who knows nothing, takes care of everything and allows it do as it pleases. In France we have no idea what to think about ‘the troops’, we don’t even dare use the possessive, which might allow us to think of them as ours: we ignore them, fear them, mock them. We wonder why they do it, this tainted job steeped in blood and death; we assume conspiracies, unwholesome impulses, serious intellectual limitations. We prefer our soldiers out of sight, holed up in their secure bases in the south of France or travelling the world defending the last crumbs of Empire, gadding about overseas as they used to, in white uniforms with gold piping, on gleaming boats that shimmer in the sun. We prefer them to be far away, to be invisible, to leave us in peace. We prefer them to unleash their violence elsewhere, in far-off countries inhabited by people so unlike us that they hardly qualify as people.

  This is the sum total of what I thought about the army – which is to say, nothing; but what I thought was no different from everyone, from everyone I knew; until that morning in 1991 when I allowed only my nose to emerge from beneath the duvet, and my eyes. With my girlfriend curled up next to me, gently stroking my stomach, together we watched the beginnings of World War Three on the TV at the end of the bed.

  We gazed at streets filled with people, idly leaning out of this Hertzian window on to the world, contented in that blissful calm that follows orgasm, which makes it possible to see all without thinking ill, without thinking anything, which makes it possible to watch television with a smile that lingers for as long as the programmes keep coming. What to do after an orgy? Watch TV. Watch the news, watch this hypnotic device that manufactures insubstantial time, a thing of polystyrene, with no essence, no quality, a synthetic time that perfectly fills the time remaining.

  During the preparations for the Gulf War, and afterwards, while it was being waged, I witnessed strange things; the whole world witnessed strange things. I saw a lot, since I scarcely left our cocoon of Hollofil – that marvellous hollow polyester fibre invented by DuPont to fill duvets, which keeps its shape, which insulates better than feathers, better than blankets, a revolutionary material which at last makes it possible – this is technological progress – to stay in bed and never go outside; because it was winter, because I was going through my phase of professional irresponsibility, I simply lay next to my girlfriend, watching television, while we waited for desire to return. We changed the duvet cover when it became sticky with our sweat, when the stains from the come I ejaculated copiously – and indiscriminately – dried and made the fabric crusty.

  Leaning out of this electronic window, I watched Israelis attending a concert wearing gas masks – only the violinist was not wearing one, and he went on playing; I watched the ballet of bombs over Baghdad, those fantastical fireworks with their greenish trails, and in doing so learned that modern warfare is conducted in the glow of computer screens; I saw the faint, grey outlines of buildings shudder into focus only to explode, destroyed from within with everyone inside; I watched the huge B-52s with their albatross wings that had been taken out of mothballs in the deserts of Arizona to fly once more; they carried heavy bombs, bombs with highly specialized functions; I watched missiles skim the desert sands of Mesopotamia seeking out their targets, heard the protracted yowl of engines distorted by the Doppler Effect. I watched all this and I felt nothing, it was just something on TV, like in a second-rate movie. But the image that most shocked me in those early weeks of 1991 was a simple one – I doubt anyone remembers it – but it made that year, 1991, the last year of the twentieth century. On the news I witnessed the Spahi regiments from Valence leaving for the Gulf.

  These young men were no older than thirty, their young wives standing next to them. They kissed their husbands for the cameras, cradling children, most of whom were too young to talk. Tenderly, they embraced, these muscular young men and these pretty young women, and then the Spahis of Valence clambered into their sand-coloured trucks, their APCs, their Panhards. No one knew then how many would come back, no one knew then that no Western soldiers would be killed in this war – or almost none – no one knew then that the burden of death – like pollution, like the encroaching desert, like debt repayment – would be borne by countless others, the nameless others who inhabit hot countries; and so the voiceover could offer a melancholy commentary and we were united in grief as we watched our young boys leave for a far-off war. I was shell-shocked.

  Such images are banal, they appear all the time on American and British television, but 1991 was the first time that we in France watched soldiers hug their wives and children and set off to war; the first time since 1914 that French soldiers were portrayed as people whose suffering we might share, people we might miss.

  The world had shifted slightly on its axis. I flinched.

  I sat up and more than my nose appeared from beneath the duvet. My mouth, my shoulders, my torso emerged. I had to sit up, I had to watch, because what I was witnessing – something beyond all understanding, yet in full view of everyone – was a public reconciliation on national television. I drew up my legs, wrapped my arms around them and, resting my chin on my knees, I carried on watching this primal scene: the Spahis of Valence leaving for the Gulf; some wiped away a tear as they climbed aboard trucks painted the colour of sand.

  In those first days of 1991 nothing happened: preparations were being made for the Gulf War. Forced to go on talking while knowing nothing, the television networks prattled on. They spat out a torrent of meaningless images. They interviewed experts who made up statistics on the spot. They broadcast archive footage, what there was of it, what had not been censored by one service or another, ending with wide-angle shots of the desert over which a disembodied voice reeled off figures. They fabricated. They fictionalized. They repeated the same details, searching for new ways to say the same things without it becoming tedious. They drivelled.

  I watched it all. I witnessed the deluge of images, let it flow through me; I followed its meanders; it flowed aimlessly, but always following the line of least resistance; in those first days of 1991 I was engrossed by everything, I had taken a break from life, I had nothing to do but watch and feel. I spent my time lounging in bed, to the regular rhythm of desire blossoming and being spent. Perhaps no one still remembers the Spahis of Valence leaving for the Gulf, apart from those who left and I who watched everything, because during the winter of 1991 nothing happened. People commented on this nothingness, filled this nothingness with empty air, they waited; nothing happened ex
cept this: the army was welcomed back into society.

  One might wonder where on Earth it had been all this time.

  My girlfriend was surprised by my sudden fascination with a war that never started. Usually, I affected a vague air of boredom, an ironic detachment, a taste for the intellectual flurries that I found more reliable, more restful and certainly much more entertaining than the crushing weight of reality. She asked me what I was watching so intently.

  ‘I’d love to drive one of those big trucks,’ I said. ‘The sand-coloured ones with the caterpillar treads.’

  ‘That sort of thing is for little boys and you’re not a little boy any more. Not remotely,’ she added, laying her hand on me, right on that magnificent organ which has a life of its own, which has its own heart and consequently its own feeling, thoughts and impulses.

  I didn’t answer, I wasn’t sure, so I lay down next to her again. Officially, we were ill and snowed in, and, sheltered here, we had the whole day to ourselves, and the night, and the following day; until we were breathless and our desire exhausted.

  That year, I dedicated myself to obsessive absenteeism. Day and night I thought only of ways to malinger, to shirk, to skive, to hide out in some dark corner while others marched in step. In a few short months I destroyed everything I had ever had in terms of social ambition, professionalism, my sense of belonging. Beginning in the autumn I had taken advantage of the cold and damp, natural and thus incontrovertible phenomena: a sore throat was enough for me to take time off. I skipped work, I neglected my duties, and not always to go to see my girlfriend.

  What did I do? I wandered the streets, skulked in cafés, sat in libraries reading books about science and history, I did all the things a single man can do in a city when he has no desire to go home. More often than not I did nothing.

  I have no memory of that winter, nothing specific, nothing to relate, but when I hear the jingle for the France Info news bulletin, it plunges me into such a state of gloom that I realize that this was how I spent my time: listening to the radio, waiting for the world news bulletin, which came every fifteen minutes like the ticking of some great clock, the clock of my heart which was beating so slowly back then, the clock of the world inexorably ticking towards midnight.