The French Art of War Read online

  ‘It’s a matter of principle. A political choice.’

  ‘A choice? Just when it had ceased to matter? When it made absolutely no difference? Choices that have no consequences are just signs. The army itself was a symptom. Didn’t you think it was disproportionate? Didn’t you ever wonder why we kept such a large army, on a war footing, pawing the ground, jittery, when it served no purpose? Keeping it completely cut off from the world, never speaking, never spoken to? What enemy could justify a war machine in which every man – that’s right, every single man in this country – had to spend a year of their lives, sometimes more? What enemy?’

  ‘The Russians?’

  ‘Bullshit. Why would the Russians have destroyed the only part of the world that just about worked, one that was providing them with all the things they didn’t have? Come on! We had no enemies. The reason we maintained a powerful army after 1962 was simply to mark time. The war was over, but the warriors were still around. So we waited for them to disappear, to grow old and die. Time heals everything, because in time the problem dies. We kept then penned in to stop them escaping, to stop them recklessly using the skills they had been taught. The Americans made a weird film about it. There is this man, a trained soldier, who gets lost in the woods. He has only a sleeping bag, a dagger and a working knowledge of all the ways to kill burned into his soul, into his nerves. I can’t remember what it was called.’

  ‘Rambo?’

  ‘That’s it, Rambo. They made a couple of stupid sequels, but I’m just talking about that first film: there was a man I could understand. He wanted peace, he wanted silence, but no one would give him space. He laid waste a small town, because he didn’t know any other way. That’s what you learn from war and it’s something you can’t unlearn. People think of this man as far away, off in America somewhere, but I’ve known hundreds like him here in France, and if you add the ones I don’t know, it must run into thousands. We kept the army to give them somewhere to cool their heels, so they wouldn’t lash out. No one realizes it, because no one talks about it. All the ills in Europe concern society as a whole. We nurse them in silence. Health is life lived in the silence of the organs, to quote an old army doctor.’

  This elderly gentleman spoke without looking at me. He stared out of the window, watching the snow fall gently, and spoke with the same gentleness, his back to me. I didn’t understand what he was saying, but I sensed he was talking about a history I didn’t know, that he was that history, and I happened to be here with him, in this godforsaken place, in the arse-end of nowhere, in a house out in the suburbs where the town sinks into the marshy fields of the Isère; and he was ready to talk to me. My heart began to beat faster. Here in the town where I used to live, the town to which I had returned to end things, I had stumbled on a secret space, a dark room I hadn’t noticed the first time around; I had pushed open the door and discovered a vast, dim attic, long since boarded up, with not a single footprint in the thick dust that covered the floor. And in that attic I had found a chest; and in that chest – who knew what? It had not been opened since it was first put there.

  ‘What was your part in this story?’

  ‘Me? Everything. The Free French Forces, the war in Indochine, the djebels of Algeria. A few years banged up, and since then, nothing.’

  ‘Banged up?’

  ‘Not for long. You know, the whole thing ended badly: in slaughter, resignation and despair. Given your age, when your parents conceived you, the whole country was sitting on top of a volcano. The volcano was shuddering, threatening to erupt, to annihilate the state. Your parents had to be blind or hopeless optimists or idiots. But people back then preferred not to see what was going on, not to listen, it was easier to live heedlessly than in the fear that the volcano might erupt. And in the end, it didn’t, it became dormant again. Silence, bitterness and time prevailed over the explosive forces. That’s why everything these days smells of sulphur. It’s the magma, still smouldering beneath the surface, escaping through the cracks. It surges slowly beneath volcanoes that don’t erupt.’

  ‘Do you regret it?’

  ‘What? My life? The silence that surrounds it? I’ve no idea. It’s my life: I cling to it no matter what it’s been. It’s the only one I have. This life killed those who stayed silent, and I have no intention of dying.’

  ‘He’s been saying that ever since I’ve known him,’ said a loud voice behind me, a sweet, feminine voice that filled the whole room. ‘I keep telling him he’s wrong, but I have to admit that, so far, he’s been right.’

  I flinched and got to my feet. Before I even set eyes on her, I liked the way she spoke, her exotic accent, the sadness in her voice. A woman was walking towards us, moving sure-footedly, her skin covered with a tracery of fine wrinkles like rumpled silk. She was Salagnon’s age and she came over to me, extending her hand. I stood, mute and transfixed, staring and open-mouthed. As she had held out her hand to me, we shook hands and her touch – gentle, forthright, charming – was a pleasurable surprise, unusual in women, who often don’t know how to shake hands. She radiated strength, you could feel it in her palm; she radiated a genuine strength, one that was not borrowed from the opposite sex, but entirely feminine.

  ‘This is my wife Eurydice Kaloyannis, a Greek Jew from Bab El Oued, the last of her kind. She goes by my name these days, but I still use the name by which I first knew her. It’s a name I wrote so many times, on so many envelopes, with so many sighs, that I can’t think of her any other way. My desire for her bears that name. Besides, I don’t like the idea of women losing their names, especially since there is no one to carry on her name; and besides, I had a lot of respect for her father, in spite of our differences, but most of all, Eurydice Salagnon sounds a bit ugly, don’t you think? Sounds like a list of vegetables. It doesn’t do justice to her beauty.’

  Yes, her beauty. It was that, precisely that. Eurydice was beautiful. I realized it instantly without having to formulate the thought, my hand in hers, my eyes staring into hers, standing frozen, foolish and lost for words. The age gap can cloud your perceptions. You think of yourself as not being the same age, as being very distant, when in fact we are so close. Our being is the same. Time flows, we can never step twice into the same stream, our bodies move through time like boats drifting with the current. The water is not the same, is never the same, and the boats, so distant from each other, forget they are just the same; they are simply displaced. Age difference makes it difficult to gauge beauty, because beauty feels calculated: a woman is beautiful if I feel the desire to kiss her. Eurydice was the same age as Salagnon. Her skin was the same age, her hair was the same age, her eyes, her lips, her hands made no pretence to the contrary. There is nothing more odious than the phrase ‘well-preserved’, and that nervous laugh, the false modesty that accompanies the observation that someone ‘doesn’t look’ their age. Eurydice looked her age and she was life itself. The intense life she had lived was present in her every gesture, a whole life in the way she carried herself, a whole life in every tone of her voice, she was filled with a life that brimmed over, dazzling, infectious.

  ‘My Eurydice is strong, so strong that when I brought her from hell, I didn’t have to look back to know that she was following. I knew she was there. She’s not a woman you can forget. You can feel her presence even when she’s behind you.’

  He put an arm around her shoulder, bent and kissed her. He had said precisely what I was thinking. I smiled at them, my mind was clear again and I could take back my hand, and my gaze stopped trembling.

  Victorien Salagnon taught me how to paint. He gave me a Chinese calligraphy brush, a wolf’s-hair brush with a lively touch, which glances off paper without losing its impetus. ‘You can’t find these in the shops,’ he said. ‘Only goat’s-hair brushes, which are fine for calligraphy or for filling in backgrounds, but they’re useless for line drawing.’

  He taught me to cradle the brush in the hollow of my hand, the way you might an egg, gripping it so lightly that a brea
th can jog it. ‘So you need to control your breathing.’ He taught me to judge inks, to distinguish between shades of black, to assess their sheen, their depth, before using them. He taught me to appreciate the blank page, a perfect expanse as precious as a moment of clarity. He taught me to value space over solidity, since what is solid can no longer move, but he taught me, too, that solidity is existence, so we must reconcile ourselves to disrupt the emptiness.

  He drew nothing in my presence. He simply talked to me and watched me draw. He taught me how to use the tools. How I handled them later was my responsibility. And what I chose to paint was my responsibility. It was up to me to paint, and to show him if I wished. If not, he was happy simply to watch how I held the brush as it made contact with the paper, or how I traced a line with a single stroke. For him, that was enough to see me on the road to becoming a painter.

  I visited often. I learned through practise, while he watched. He no longer painted. He made the most of the free time. He told me he had a series of notebooks and had started to write his memoirs.

  We were well met indeed. Men of war often pride themselves on their ability to write. They strive to be efficient in everything. Being men of action, they think they can tell a story better than anyone. And, conversely, lovers of literature think they know about strategy, about tactics and siege warfare, all those things that in real life are often deployed to disastrous effect, with consequences one cannot but regret, and yet more powerfully than they are in books.

  He talked to me about his memoirs several times, almost in passing, and then one day, unable to contain himself, he went to fetch his notebook. He wrote on a blue, ruled exercise paper in neat, schoolboy handwriting. He took a deep breath and started to read aloud. It began like this: ‘I was born in Lyon in 1926 to a family of shopkeepers. I was an only child.’

  He stopped reading, set down the notebook and looked at me.

  ‘Can you hear the boredom? Even the very first sentence is boring. I read it and I’m desperate to get to the end; and I stop there, I never carry on. There are a few more pages, but I stop here.’

  ‘Take out the first sentence. Start with the second or somewhere else.’

  ‘But this is the start. I have to start from the beginning, otherwise it makes no sense. This is a memoir, not a novel.’

  ‘What do you actually remember? What’s the first thing?’

  ‘I remember fog, a damp cold. I remember how much I hated sweat.’

  ‘Then start with that.’

  ‘But I have to be born first.’

  ‘Memory has no beginning.’

  ‘Do you really think so?’

  ‘I know so. Memory comes in a jumble, in a torrent, it has no beginning, except in obituaries. And you have no intention of dying.’

  ‘I just want to be clear. My birth makes a good start.’

  ‘You weren’t there, so it’s meaningless. Memory is full of beginnings. Choose whichever one suits you. You can be born whenever you like. In a book, people are born at all sorts of ages.’

  Puzzled, he reopened the exercise book. Silently, he read the first page, then the rest. The paper was already yellowing. He had set down the details, the circumstances and the events he had experienced, those he felt should not be forgotten. It was methodical. But it did not say what he wanted it to say. He closed the book and held it out.

  ‘I don’t know how to do these things. You start it.’

  I was annoyed that he had taken my advice literally. But I’m the storyteller. I have no choice but to tell stories. Even if it’s not what I want, even if it’s not what I aspire to, since I would much rather show than tell. This is why I’m here in Victorien Salagnon’s house, so that he can teach me to wield a brush better than I do a pen, so that at last I can show. But maybe my hand is better adapted to the pen. And besides, I have to find some way to pay him back, I have to take the trouble to make up for the trouble he has taken for me. Paying him would be easier, but I have no money, and besides, he wouldn’t take it. So I took the notebook and started reading.

  I read the whole thing. He was right, it was tedious; it was no better than those self-published books of war memoirs. Reading those books with large type and short paragraphs, you realize that, when told like this, not much happens in a single life. Whereas a single moment in life contains more than can be described in a shelf full of books. There is something about an event that is not resolved in the telling. Events pose a boundless question, which telling cannot answer.

  I don’t know what talent he thinks I have. I don’t know what he thought he saw when he looked me up and down with those pale eyes, those eyes in which I can discern no emotion, only a translucence that gives me an impression of closeness. But I am the storyteller, and so I tell stories.

  Novel I

  The life of rats

  FROM THE BEGINNING, Victorien Salagnon trusted in his shoulders. His birth had endowed him with muscles, with breath, with powerful fists, with those pale eyes that glittered like ice. And so he divided the world’s problems into two categories: those he could resolve by force – and there he ploughed ahead – and those about which he could do nothing. The latter he treated with contempt, pretending not to notice them as he passed; or else he fled.

  Victorien Salagnon had everything he needed to succeed: physical intelligence, moral simplicity and the ability to take decisions. He knew his strengths, and to know one’s strengths is the greatest treasure one can have at the age of seventeen. But during the winter of 1943 his natural gifts were of no use. Seen from France that year, the whole universe seemed utterly, intrinsically wretched.

  This was no time for faint hearts or for childish games: it was a time when strength was sorely needed. But in 1943 the young forces of France, the youthful muscles, the adolescent brains, the churning balls, could find no work other than cleaning hotel rooms, working abroad, straw men in the pay of the victors they were not, provincial sportsmen, but nothing more, or great awkward lumps parading around in shorts, brandishing shovels like rifles. Though everyone knew that the world was full of real weapons. All over the world people were waging war and Victorien Salagnon was going to school.

  When he reached the edge he leaned over; far below La Grande Institution he could see the city of Lyon hovering in the air. From the terrace he saw what the fog allowed him to see: the rooftops of the city, the abyss of the Saône, and, beyond that, nothing. The rooftops floated; no two were alike in size, in height, nor in how they were aligned. The colour of weathered wood, they jostled each other gently, beached, higgledy-piggledy, on this oxbow of the Saône, washed up like flotsam that the current was too weak to shift. Seen from above, the city of Lyon looked utterly chaotic. It was impossible to see the fog-bound streets, and the arrangement of roofs offered no logic by which to intuit the layout: nothing indicated where the thoroughfares might be. This ancient city is not so much constructed as laid down, like rubble from a rockslide. The hill to which it clings has never afforded it a stable base. At times the waterlogged moraines could hold no longer and collapsed. But not today: the chaos Victorien Solagnon was looking down on was merely an illusion. The old town where he lived had not been built straight, but the uncertain, floating look it had on that morning in the winter of 1943 was entirely the result of the weather, surely.

  To convince himself, he tried to draw it, since sketches can perceive order that the eyes cannot. He had seen the fog from home. Through the window everything was reduced to blurred shapes, like lines of charcoal on sugar paper. He had taken a pad of rough paper and a thick pencil, slipped them into his belt and tied up his schoolbooks with a strip of cloth. He did not have a pocket big enough for his sketchpad, but he did not like to mix it up with his schoolbooks or to flaunt his talent by carrying it in his hand. And he was not unhappy with the subterfuge, since it reminded him that he was going not where people might assume, but somewhere else entirely.

  He did not draw anything much. The graphic nature of the fog that had been ob
vious when framed and given perspective by the window faded when he stepped outside into the street. All that remained was a hazy presence, pervasive and piercing and impossible to record. You cannot create a picture while remaining within it. He did not take out his sketchpad. He re-buttoned his school cape to stop the damp air from penetrating and walked on to the school.

  He arrived at La Grande Institution having drawn nothing. On the parapet of the terrace he tried to give a sense of the labyrinthine rooftops. He started a line, but the sheet of paper, damp from the humidity, ripped; it did not look like anything, just dirty paper. He closed his drawing pad, tucked it back into his belt and, like the other pupils, went and stood beneath the clock in the courtyard, stamping his feet while he waited for the school bell.

  Winters in Lyon are harsh. It is not so much the cold as the revelation, crystallized by winter: the essential constituent of the city is mud. Lyon is a city of sediment – sediment compacted into houses, rooted into the sediment of the rivers that run through it; and sediment is just a polite word for encrusted mud. In winter everything in Lyon turns to mud: the ground gives way, the snow refuses to lie, the walls ooze; the very air itself, viscous, dank and cold, soaks into clothes, leaving transparent stains of mud. Everything feels heavy, bodies sink; there is no way to safeguard against it. Except to hole up in the bedroom with a stove burning, day and night, curl up in sheets reheated several times a day by a warming pan filled with glowing embers. And in the winter of 1943 who could afford the luxury of a bedroom, of coal, of embers?

  But in 1943, precisely, it seems rude to complain; the cold is far worse elsewhere. In Russia, for example, where our troops are fighting – or their troops, or the troops; no one knows what to call them any more – in Russia cold is like a natural disaster, a lingering explosion that lays waste to everything before it. They say that the corpses are like lumps of glass that shatter if handled incorrectly; that losing a single glove means death, because the blood freezes into needles that tear the hand apart; that the soldiers who die on their feet stay standing, rooted like trees all winter, only to melt and dissolve with the spring; that many die when they drop their trousers, their arseholes frozen in an instant. Rumours of the cold are recounted like monstrous horror stories, although actually they are like the tall tales of travellers, embroidered by distance. Barefaced lies circulate, mingled with a dash of truth, no doubt, but who, in France, still has the least interest, the least desire, the least vestige of intellectual and moral scruple to tell one from the other?