Léon and Louise (30 page)

Under their mute gaze we cross the street to the administrative building of the Chemins de Fer du Soudan Français, which rises above the dusty plain like some fairy-tale Mauretanian castle. Stored in its cellars – I can tell you this now because it really doesn't matter any more – are 180 tonnes of gold. We've deposited another 200 tonnes in the customs building down by the river, 120 tonnes in the district commander's cellars, and 80 tonnes in the magazine at the barracks. We check all the seals, inspect the sentries, and satisfy ourselves that none of our useless precious metal has been stolen. It takes two hours to complete the circuit, then we catch the midday train back to Medina.

We make an inventory every two months during the dry six months of the year. That takes us a full day for each location. When the seals have been removed and the doors opened, soldiers carry all the boxes outside and lay them down in rows of ten. Then my boss climbs on top of the first box and strides to the next, and the next, and the one after that, and so on, counting out loud: ‘Two hundredweight!' – stride – ‘Four hundredweight!' – stride – ‘Six hundredweight!' – stride – ‘Eight hundredweight!' Meanwhile, the office girl sits at her folding table ticking the boxes off, and when it's all over she types out a formal report. Finally, when all the boxes have been counted (they're still stencilled ‘Explosives' for security reasons), they're replaced in the cellar and the doors are sealed, and we return to the officers' mess to recover from our day's exertions.

Now and then a plane lands on the airstrip and the pilot produces some bumf authorizing him to pick up two or three boxes. We don't ask questions, just unlock one of the cellars. At first these couriers came from Vichy, but for some time now they've been coming from London. We had to hand over the Belgians' gold a while back, to satisfy the Germans, also the gold belonging to the Poles. It'll be interesting to see if anyone gives it back to them when the war's over.

This is the third rainy season I've spent here. Time goes so quickly. Another three months and the world will dry up again. Then I'll be able to get out the decrepit man's bike I bought in the market at Kayes the year before last, which gives me an illusory feeling of freedom during the dry season. I visit the surrounding villages or pedal a few kilometres downstream to the power station at Félou and go to the rapids to watch wildlife with the Bonvin brothers, who perform their electrical engineering duties in monastic seclusion. They realized a long time ago that the local fauna are infinitely more interesting than their power station's tunnels, sluices and turbines. Once you've grasped the way that installation works, it's a very simple affair. The last time I visited them, I learned that the hyena's famous laugh is a submission ritual performed by low-ranking individuals begging for a share of the prey or for admission to the pack. You see? Laughter is the weapon of the powerless. The powerful don't laugh.

I've gone quite grey, by the way. When I arrived here three years ago I had a few white hairs; now I've only a few dark hairs left. I think I've lost a bit of weight as well, because I've got the legs and breasts of a twelve-year-old. But I can also run and cycle like a twelve-year-old, and – yes, thanks for asking – I've still got all my own teeth.

How often have you written to me since I've been here, Léon – ten times, a hundred times? No letter from you has ever reached me – I did warn you, didn't I? Nothing ever reaches us here. No pay, no instructions, no supplies or ammunition, no newspapers or clothing. From time to time, as I say, an airman drops in and tells us stuff we find hard to believe, and a few months ago the commandant ordered the arrest of three young men who appeared from nowhere, spoke very poor French, took a suspicious interest in our watchtower, and eventually turned out to be German. Apart from that, we're on our own – the world has forgotten us.

Conversely, we're starting to forget the world. After a while you get used to the heat and don't miss the winter any longer. You eat couscous as if it were pommes dauphinoises, and one night not long ago I had my first dream in Bambara, not French.

We don't get any first-hand news of the war out here. Baobabs are baobabs and cockroaches are cockroaches, rifles rust because they're never fired, and our soldiers die of typhus and malaria, not in combat. We might have lost all idea of why we're here at all if Galiani, our radio operator, hadn't concocted a short wave radio out of the cadavers of various electronic odds and ends. It enables us to pick up BBC London quite well.

Have I forgotten you? Well, yes, a bit – there's no point in being eaten up with longing day after day. But you're always with me, nothing changes that. It's strange: I've only vague memories of my father and mother and can hardly remember the names of my childhood companions, but you I can still see quite vividly.

When the wind blows through the trees I hear your voice whispering nice things in my ear, and when the hippos in the Senegal River yawn I see the corners of your mouth, which always turn upwards even when you don't mean to smile at all. The sky has the blue of your eyes and the parched yellow grass is the colour of your hair. Now I'm getting lyrical again!

Love is an imposition, isn't it? Especially when it lasts a quarter of a century. I'd dearly like to know what it really is. A hormonal dysfunction for reproductive purposes, as biologists claim? Consolation for little girls who aren't allowed to marry their daddies? A raison d'être for non-believers? All of those things at once, perhaps. But more than that as well, I know.

While we're on the subject, I should tell you that, for well over a year now, Galiani the radio operator has been – for want of a better word – my lover. Does that make you laugh? Me too. It's like in the theatre, isn't it? If an Italian with a moustache appears in the first act, he has to kiss the young heroine in the third. Mind you, it's quite a while since I was a young heroine and Galiani isn't perfectly cast as a romantic heartbreaker, what with his eternal spitting, his bad language, his stubby limbs, and the curly black hair that escapes from under his uniform.

But he does have one outstanding feature: he's quite unlike you. Because he's childishly uncouth and leers at every skirt in sight, and because he pays women grotesque compliments and is forever swearing on his mother's grave although he has no idea where it is – that's precisely why he's right for me. He has to be different from you, understand?

It all began one night in the officers' mess smoking room, well over a year ago. I was suffering from a fit of the blues, as everyone does from time to time, and trying to conceal it from the others by cracking jokes and laughing uproariously. At some stage Giuliano Galiani got up and went over to the sideboard behind my chair to pour himself another glass of our home-brewed millet beer. In passing, he casually – half unconsciously and with no ulterior motive, so it seemed – put his hand on my shoulder in an instinctively sympathetic way. I was grateful to him for that.

After midnight, when everyone was asleep, I went to his room and got in beside him without a word. He said nothing and asked no questions, just made room for me as if it were something he'd long been expecting – as if he'd been used for years to my getting into bed with him. And then he took me as a man should, saying little but pleasurably and confidently, with gentle determination.

Galiani firmly and unerringly guides us to our destination every time. He makes no vows or proposals afterwards, but releases me and lets me sneak back to my room, and the next day he betrays no sign of what has happened. He never winks at me or waylays me, takes no liberties and doesn't pester me to pay him another visit. On the contrary, when we're with other people his manner towards me is markedly offhand, sometimes even distant. But, when I slip beneath his bedclothes a few days or weeks later, he welcomes me as if I'd never been away.

He's a gentleman in the outer skin of a roughneck, and I like that. There are enough of the opposite kind. It'll be over between us as soon as the war ends, of course, because I can't be doing with him in daylight. At night he's a wordly-wise, warm-hearted man, by day an orally fixated infant. Whenever he opens his mouth he brags about his wife's breasts – she's waiting for him somewhere near Nice – and blathers about Milan and Juventus, Bugattis, Ferraris and Maseratis, and betweentimes he complains that the government damned well owes him the Legion of Honour and a pension for life, and that he'll spend the money on a boat and go fishing off the Riviera every day.

It won't be too long before the war is over. Even out here in the bush we've heard of Stalingrad, and ever since the Allies landed in Morocco and Algeria, every sergeant, customs officer and petty criminal who comes our way claims to have been a hero of the Resistance. Before another few weeks or months are up, says our commandant, we'll be loading our boxes into the train and going home to Paris via Dakar and Marseille.

I know exactly what I'll do when I get out of the train at the Gare de Lyon: I'll take a taxi to the Rue des Écoles and ring your doorbell. And if you're still there – if you and your wife and children have all survived – I'll kiss each of you in turn. We'll rejoice that we're still alive, and then we'll go for a walk together – or have some cabbage soup, whichever. Nothing else will matter then, will it?

Be alive, Léon. Be happy and healthy and tenderly kissed. See you very soon!

Yours, Louise

L
éon now spent every lunch break on his boat in the Arsenal harbour – and sometimes the couple of hours between the end of work and suppertime as well. At lunchtime he would eat a ham sandwich in his cabin, then lie down on one of the bunks for half an hour. He would never have done that in the old days. As a boy he had found it faintly horrific when his father subsided on to the sofa like a dead man after lunch and instantly fell asleep with his mouth open and his eyes tight shut. Now he himself had reached the stage where a little siesta was indispensable. It gave him the energy to return to the laboratory and patiently endure the recurrent humiliations, rituals and spells of inactivity that life demanded of him.

Fleur de Miel
remained his secret. He never spoke of it to anyone. No one at home missed him. Yvonne was too busy with the fight for survival and had neither the time nor energy nor desire to concern herself with the meaning of existence, affairs of the heart, or similar minutiae. She had long known about the boat, of course, because it was essential for safety's sake that she knew whether her husband was doing things on the side that might endanger the family. Because he wasn't, the boat didn't bother her. All she expected of Léon was that he help to feed and protect his family, neither more nor less. In return she granted him absolute freedom, demanded no emotional input from him, and refrained from troubling him with any of her own.

Léon appreciated this. A few years ago he had been saddened by Yvonne's sour, prematurely aged manner and missed the light-footed girl she used to be. He had occasionally longed for the return of the capricious diva, and sometimes even of the housewife tormented by doubts about herself and the meaning of existence; but now he felt only gratitude and respect for the selflessly pugnacious lioness Yvonne had become during the war years. To expect her, in addition, to sing coquettish songs and toy with the top button of her blouse would have been unfair in the extreme.

Yvonne and Léon had demonstrated long ago that they were a good, strong couple who had already weathered many a storm and would jointly confront any future threats as well. Their mutual trust and affection were so profound and strong, they could allow each other to go their own way in peace.

The children were equally uninterested in where Léon spent so many hours on his own. Apart from young Philippe, they were now of an age to be preoccupied with their own battles. All they expected of their father was that he hold the fort and supply the family with affection and money. They were also grateful to him for being a mild-mannered, amiable paterfamilias who seldom asked questions or demanded anything of them.

It should in fairness be said that Léon was able to afford his mildly paternal manner only because Yvonne's supervision of the four children was all the more rigorous. Not a minute of the day went by without her being apprised of their whereabouts, and she demanded to be fully informed about their doings, state of health and circle of friends.

Far from relaxing when another day fraught with peril had been successfully survived and the children were safely asleep in their beds, Yvonne kept Léon up until late at night. Obsessed with every conceivable form of potential threat, she spoke of fascistic schoolmasters and drunken SS men, of paedophiles on the loose, of car drivers running amuck and highly infectious microbes, of heat, rain and frost, of inflated food prices and the imponderables of the black market. She never tired of discussing possible escape routes through the forests, overland or by water. She even suggested retreating into the catacombs of Paris in the event that the Germans did, after all, unleash an apocalypse.

Yvonne was so taken up with her mission as a guardian angel, there was no room left inside her for anything else. She cultivated no friendships and kept no dream diary, wore no pink sunglasses and sang no more songs. Although still Léon's faithful companion, she had long ceased to be a wife, and she was so solicitous of her children that she showed them no affection.

The years of exertion and tension were written on her face. Her eyes were lashless and her cheeks gaunt, and the long neck that had once been so graceful was tensed up and threaded with veins and sinews. She had broad shoulders but no breasts, and the stomach below her ribs was hollow.

She offended the neighbours by passing them on the stairs without a word. She no longer wore make-up and was becoming steadily thinner because she forgot to eat. She kept two suitcases lying ready beside the front door at all times. These contained the bare essentials for an escape by the whole family, and she couldn't help checking, several times a day, to ensure that she really hadn't forgotten anything. It wasn't until she refused to take off her shoes so as to be ready to leave at a moment's notice, even in bed at night, that Léon gently called her to order and insisted that a minimum of the proprieties be observed for the children's sake.