Léon and Louise (2 page)

The front row of pews in Notre Dame was vibrating with suppressed excitement. Could the new arrival really be Mademoiselle Janvier? Had she really dared to turn up? The womenfolk looked rigidly to the front again and stiffened their backs as if the coffin and the eternal light over the high altar were their sole focus of attention. But we men, who knew our women, realized that they were tensely listening to the staccato click of the little footsteps that made their way sideways into the central aisle. They then performed a ninety-degree turn and, without the least hesitation, without any
ritardando
or
accelerando
, pressed on with the regular beat of a metronome. Those of us who were peering out of the corner of our eye could then see a little woman, light-footed as a young girl, climb the two red-carpeted steps to the foot of the coffin, rest her right hand on the side, and silently move along it to the head, where she at last came to a halt and remained for several seconds, almost like a soldier standing at attention. She raised her veil and bent over. Spreading her arms and supporting herself on the sides of the coffin, she kissed my grandfather on the forehead and rested her cheek against his waxen visage as if intending to stay there for a while. She did so with her face in full view, not protectively averted in the direction of the altar. This enabled us to see that her eyes were closed and that her red, carefully made-up lips were curved in a smile that grew steadily broader until they parted to emit an inaudible chuckle.

She released the dead man at last and resumed her erect stance. Taking her handbag from the crook of her arm, she opened it and quickly removed a circular, dully glinting object the size of a fist. This, as we were to discover soon afterwards, was an old bicycle bell with a hemispherical top whose chrome plating was threaded with hairline cracks and had peeled off in places. Having closed the handbag and replaced it in the crook of her arm, she rang the bell twice. Rri-rring. Rri-rring. While the sound went echoing down the nave, she deposited the bell in the coffin, then turned and looked us in the eye, one after another. Beginning on the far left, where the youngest children were seated beside their fathers, she surveyed the entire row, her eyes lingering for perhaps a second on each individual. When she got to the far right she gave us a triumphant smile and set off. Heels clicking, she hurried past the family and down the central aisle to the exit.

M
y grandfather was seventeen when he first met Louise Janvier. I like to picture him as a very young man in the spring of 1918, when he strapped a reinforced cardboard suitcase to the luggage rack of his bicycle and left the parental home for ever.

What I know about him as a young man doesn't amount to very much. A surviving family photograph of the period shows a sturdy lad with a high forehead and unruly fair hair eyeing the photographer with an inquisitive air and his head on one side. I also know from his own accounts, which he delivered laconically and with feigned reluctance as an old man, that he often skipped secondary school because he preferred to roam the beaches of Cherbourg with his friends Patrice and Joël.

It was on a stormy Sunday in January 1918, when no sensible person would have ventured within sight of the sea, that the trio discovered, amid flurries of snow, the wreck of a little sailing dinghy washed up on the furze-covered embankment. It was holed amidships and slightly scorched overall. The boys dragged the boat behind the nearest bush. In the weeks that followed, since the legal owner never got in touch with them, they personally and with great enthusiasm repaired and sanded and painted it until it looked brand-new and was unrecognizable. From then on they spent every spare hour out in the Channel, fishing, dozing and smoking dried seaweed in tobacco pipes carved from corn cobs. And when something interesting was bobbing in the water – a plank, a hurricane lamp from a sunken vessel or a lifebelt – they went off with it. Warships sometimes steamed past so close that their little craft skipped up and down like a calf turned out to graze on the first day of spring. They often remained at sea all day long, rounded the cape and sailed westwards until the Channel Islands appeared on the horizon, not returning to land until dusk had fallen. At weekends they spent the night in a fisherman's hut whose owner hadn't had time to board up his little rear window properly on the day he was mobilized.

Léon Le Gall's father – my great-grandfather, in other words – knew nothing about his son's sailing dinghy, but he was somewhat concerned to note his habit of gallivanting on the beach. A chain-smoking, prematurely aged Latin master, he had chosen to study the language at an early age purely to cause his own father as much vexation he could. He subsequently paid for this pleasure by spending decades in the teaching profession, becoming mean, hidebound and bitter in consequence.

In order to justify his Latin to himself and continue to feel alive, he had acquired an encyclopaedic knowledge of the relics of Roman civilization in Brittany and cultivated this hobby with a passion in grotesque contrast to the limited nature of the subject. Agonizingly monotonous and wreathed in cigarette smoke, his endless classroom lectures on potsherds, thermal baths and military roads were not only legendary but dreaded throughout the school. His pupils compensated by watching his cigarette, waiting for him to write on the blackboard with it and puff at the piece of chalk instead.

That his asthma had exempted him from military service on the day general mobilization was proclaimed he regarded as a blessing on the one hand and a disgrace on the other, because he found himself the only man in a common room full of women. He had flown into a terrible rage when informed by these female colleagues that his only son had hardly been seen in school for weeks, and his lectures at the kitchen table, designed to convince the boy of the value of a classical education, had been interminable. Léon, who merely sneered at the value of a classical education, tried in his turn to explain why his presence on the beach was now indispensable: because the Germans had recently taken to disguising their submarines with wooden superstructures, coloured paintwork, makeshift sails and fake fishing nets.

His father thereupon demanded to know where, pray, was the causal connection between German submarines and Léon's absence from school.

The disguised German U-boats, Léon explained patiently, would sneak up on French trawlers undetected and sink them without mercy, thereby worsening the French nation's food supply situation.

‘Well?' said his father, trying to stifle a cough. Any form of agitation could bring on an asthma attack.

Extremely valuable jetsam – teak, brass, steel, sailcloth, oil by the barrel – was washed up every day.

‘Well?' said his father.

These precious raw materials, said Léon, had to be salvaged before the sea washed them away again.

While their argument headed inexorably for its dramatic climax, father and son continued to sit there in the seemingly relaxed and nonchalant pose characteristic of all Le Galls. They had stretched out their legs beneath the kitchen table and were leaning back so far that their buttocks had almost lost contact with the seats of their chairs. Being tall and heavily built, they were both extremely sensitive to gravity and knew that the horizontal position approximates most closely to a state of weightlessness because each part of the body has to support itself alone and is unencumbered by the rest, whereas sitting or standing stacks them one on top of another. They were angry, and their voices, almost indistinguishable now that Léon's had broken, were shaking with barely suppressed fury.

‘You'll go back to school tomorrow,' said Le Gall senior, struggling to quell a cough that was ascending his throat from the depths of his chest.

The national war economy was heavily dependent on raw materials, Léon countered.

‘You'll go back to school tomorrow,' said his father.

Léon urged him to think of the national war economy. He was worried to note his father's laboured breathing.

‘The national war economy can kiss my ass,' his father gasped. Conversation was thereafter interrupted by a paroxysm of coughing that lasted a minute.

Besides, Léon added, beachcombing was a nice source of pocket money.

‘In the first place,' his father wheezed, ‘it's illegal, and secondly, the school's truancy rules apply to everyone, you and your friends included. I don't like you taking liberties.'

Léon asked what his father had against liberty, and whether he had ever reflected that any law deserving of obedience should be subject to interpretation.

‘You take liberties just for the sake of it, growled his father.

‘Well?'

‘It's essential to any rule that it applies to everyone regardless of who they are, and particularly to those who think they're smarter than everyone else.'

‘But it's an undeniable fact that some people
are
smarter than others,' Léon cautiously objected.

‘In the first place, that's irrelevant,' said his father. ‘Secondly, you haven't so far – to the best of my knowledge – aroused suspicions of any outstanding intellectual capacity in class. You'll go back to school tomorrow.'

‘No, I won't,' said Léon.

‘You'll go back to school tomorrow!' yelled his father.

‘I'm never going back to school!' Léon yelled back.

‘As long as you're living under my roof, you'll do as I say!'

‘You can't give me orders!'

After this positively classic altercation, the dispute developed into a scuffle in which the two of them rolled around on the kitchen floor like schoolboys and bloodshed was avoided only because my great-grandmother swiftly and courageously intervened.

‘Enough of this,' she said, hauling the pair to their feet by the ears, one of them in tears and the other on the verge of asphyxia. ‘You,
chéri,
will now take your
laudanum
and go to bed – I'll be up in two minutes. And you, Léon, since the national war economy means so much to you, will go to the mayor's office first thing tomorrow and report for labour service.'

It emerged next morning that the national war economy really could find a use for Léon Le Gall, the Cherbourg schoolboy – but not on the beach as he had hoped. On the contrary, the mayor threatened him with three months' imprisonment if he ever again acquired jetsam contrary to the law. He also questioned him closely about any other knowledge and talents he had that might be relevant to the war economy.

It turned out that, although well-built, Léon was disinclined to expend any muscular energy. He didn't want to be a farmhand or an assembly-line worker, nor did he care to be a blacksmith's or carpenter's dogsbody. The same went for his intellectual energies. He wasn't actually dim, but he'd displayed no preference for any particular subject at school and hadn't distinguished himself in any, so he had no firm plans or wishes regarding his future occupation. He would gladly, of course, have taken his sailing dinghy out into the Channel on voyages of espionage and destabilized the enemy's currency by circulating forged reichsmarks on the German coast. This being no realistic professional prospect, however, he merely shrugged when the mayor questioned him about his plans.

His interest in the national war economy had completely evaporated by now. To make matters worse, the mayor had a neck like a turkey and a blue-veined nose. Being endowed with a strong aesthetic sense like most young people, Léon failed to understand how anyone could take a person with such a neck and nose seriously. Glumly, the mayor went through the list of situations vacant sent him by the Ministry of War.

‘Let's see. Ah, here. Can you drive a tractor?'

‘No, monsieur.'

‘And here. Arc welder required. Can you weld?'

‘No, monsieur.'

‘I see. I assume you can't grind lenses either?'

‘No, monsieur.'

‘Or wind armatures for electric motors? Drive a tram? Turn gun barrels on a lathe?' The mayor chuckled. This business was beginning to amuse him.

‘No, monsieur.'

‘Are you by any chance a specialist in internal medicine? An expert on mercantile law? An electrical engineer? An architectural draughtsman? A saddler or cartwright?'

‘No, monsieur.'

‘I thought as much. You don't know anything about tanning leather or double-entry bookkeeping either, eh? And Swahili – do you speak Swahili? Can you tap-dance? Do Morse? Calculate the tensile strength of suspension bridge cables?'

‘Yes, monsieur.'

‘What? Swahili? Suspension bridge cables?'

‘No, Morse, monsieur. I can do Morse.'

Le Petit Inventeur,
a young people's magazine to which Léon subscribed, had in fact reproduced the Morse alphabet a few weeks earlier. On a whim, he had spent a rainy afternoon learning it by heart.

‘Is that true, youngster? You aren't pulling my leg?'

‘No, monsieur.'

‘Then this would be something in your line! The station at Saint-Luc-sur-Marne is looking for an assistant Morse telegraphist to replace the regular employee. Making out waybills, reporting arrivals and departures, helping to sell tickets if necessary. Think you could do that?'

‘Yes, monsieur.'

‘Male, minimum age sixteen. Homosexuals, persons suffering from venereal diseases and Communists need not apply. You aren't, I suppose, a Communist?'

‘No, monsieur.'

‘Then Morse me something. Morse me – let's see – ah yes: “Out of the deep have I called unto Thee, O Lord.” Well, go on. Do it on the desk top!'

Léon drew a deep breath, glanced up at the ceiling and proceeded to drum on the desk with the middle finger of his right hand. Dash, dash, dash, dot-dot-dash, dash...

‘That'll do,' said the mayor, who didn't know the Morse code and was incapable of assessing Léon's digital dexterity.