Léon and Louise (9 page)

Permeated by sun, wind and rain showers, fresh sea air and a night without much sleep, Léon and Louise set out for home. Their route took them back along the same roads, across the same hills and through the same villages as they had seen the day before. They drank water from the same village fountain and bought bread from the same bakery. Their bicycles hummed along dependably, and before long the sun reappeared. All was as it had been the previous day, yet all was imbued with magic. The sky was wider, the air fresher and the future brighter. Léon felt he was truly awake for the first time ever – as if he had come into the world tired and the whole of his life hitherto had wearily traipsed along until this weekend, when he'd woken up at last. There was a life before Le Tréport and a life after Le Tréport.

At midday they had some soup at an inn, then snoozed in a barn beside the road. And although all that had so far happened is pure legend, what began that midday, while they were asleep in the barn, is the account my grandfather often liked to give many decades later of how, at the end of May 1918, he became embroiled in the Great War for the first and only time. He always told his story with charming restraint. It was believable and accurate in every detail, even after countless repetitions, save for one little fib which every member of the family saw through. This was that, for reasons of propriety, Louise wasn't a girl but a workmate named Louis.

When Léon and Louise – or Louis – woke up after an hour's nap in the barn, they heard, through its tiled roof, a distant rumble which they mistook for a thunderstorm. Hastily climbing down from the hay loft, they pushed their bicycles outside and rode off, their hair and clothes full of straw, in the hope of putting as much distance as possible between themselves and the approaching storm and getting to Saint-Luc before it descended on them.

As it turned out, the thunder was not an atmospheric phenomenon but German artillery fire. The rumble developed into a series of crisp detonations. Then the air was rent by hisses, whirrs and howls, and the first columns of debris erupted beyond a small wood. Panic-stricken, they pedalled madly along the highroad while more columns of debris went up behind, ahead and beside them. They rode past a fresh, smoking shell-hole with the roots of a fallen apple tree jutting skywards from its lip. The air was filled with acrid smoke. They were completely disoriented. Since danger seemed to threaten them on all sides, any thought of turning round and going back was out of the question.

Faster and faster they rode through the exploding countryside, Louise in the lead and Léon in her wake, and when the distance between them increased and she looked back enquiringly, he waved her on. ‘Keep going, keep going!' he shouted. When she hesitated and seemed to be waiting for him, he lost his temper and yelled, ‘Keep going, damn it!' So she resolutely stood up in the saddle and pedalled off.

Louise had just disappeared over a rise in the ground when a cloud of smoke and debris spurted into the air at that very spot. Léon uttered a yell and pedalled madly uphill. He had almost reached the brow of the hill when the road exploded a stone's-throw ahead of him. Debris flew tree-high into the air and a pall of brown smoke billowed outwards. At that moment an aeroplane appeared. It sprayed the road with machine-gun fire, then banked away just as Léon, travelling at full speed with two bullets in his stomach, rode blindly into the crater, where he lost a molar, consciousness, and, in the next few hours, a great deal of blood.

A
t half-past five on 17 September 1928, when Léon Le Gall hung up his laboratory apron in the locker, took out his hat and coat, and set off for home as usual, he never guessed that his life would take a decisive turn in the next few minutes. As he had a thousand times before, he walked along the Seine by way of the Quai des Orfèvres, conducting his usual survey of the second-hand booksellers' stalls as he passed them, then crossed the bridge to the Left Bank and the Place Saint-Michel.

This time, however, he did not for once walk on up the boulevard into the Quartier Latin and turn down the Rue des Écoles, where he lived with his wife Yvonne and their four-year-old son Michel on the third floor of No. 14, immediately opposite the Collège de France and the École Polytechnique, a new, airy, three-bedroom flat with parquet floors and moulded ceilings. This time he deviated from his usual route home by going down into the Place Saint-Michel Métro station and travelling two stops in the Porte d'Orléans direction so as to get some
tartes aux fraises
from Yvonne's favourite pâtisserie. It was the end of the working day in all the French capital's banks, offices and department stores, and the streets and the Métro were populated by thousands of men who looked indistinguishable in their dark or grey suits, white shirts and discreet ties. Many wore hats and most of them sported moustaches, some carried canes and many wore spats, and each was on his way from his very own desk to his very own kitchen table, whence, after his very own supper, he would retire to his very own wing chair and thereafter to his very own bed, where, if he was lucky, his very own wife would keep him warm throughout the night until, after shaving, he would drink coffee from his very own cup and set off once more for his very own desk.

Léon had long ceased to marvel at the banal absurdity of this daily mass migration. For the first few years after he succumbed to the city's gravitational pull, he had continued to suffer from nostalgia and found it hard to stomach the Parisians' barking voices and aggressive self-infatuation, the roar of the traffic and the stench of the coal-fired central heating systems. He had constantly felt surprised to have become one of the hordes who trod the pavements day after day and flaunted their new suits, either sticking out their elbows or hugging the walls, many for a few months only but others for as long as thirty or forty years, some in the belief that the world had been waiting for them alone, others in the hope that the world would notice them yet, and still others bitterly aware that the world has never waited for anyone in the course of its existence.

To Léon, who had then felt cut off from the world and imprisoned in his own thoughts, it had been a mystery how all the other fellows could slurp soup with gusto and aspire to succeed in absurd professions, tell silly jokes and flirt with peroxide blondes, without feeling in the least bit hemmed in or cut off from the world. But then his first son Michel saw the light and loudly brought it to his notice that of course a man has to slurp soup, so a desire to succeed in absurd professions is not unreasonable in itself, and that this exertion is easier to endure if you occasionally tell a silly joke or flirt with a peroxide blonde. Besides, Léon simply hadn't the time to feel cut off from the world and imprisoned in his own thoughts, which meant that a substantial number of philosophical questions pretty soon underwent a dramatic loss of urgency.

Instead, he learned to appreciate the tenderness of an unaffected smile and the unaccustomed delights of an undisturbed night's sleep, and after his first walk with wife and child and pram in the gossamer sunlight of the Jardin des Plantes he was so reconciled to life in the metropolis that he only rarely felt homesick for Cherbourg beach and longed only at quiet moments to relaunch the old sailing dinghy with his friends Patrice and Joël and take it out into the Channel.

But Léon still thought of Louise every day. He was now twenty-eight years old. It was ten years since he had ridden into a shell-hole halfway between Le Tréport and Saint-Luc-sur-Marne. He had never managed to discover how long he lay there in debris and mud and his own blood, sodden by hours of rain, sometimes unconscious from the pain and sometimes roused by its intensity, before a khaki lorry adorned with a red cross came lumbering up at dusk and stopped on the edge of the crater. Two medical orderlies, who spoke a peculiar French and turned out to be Canadians, hoisted him out of the mud with practised hands, applied a pressure dressing to his stomach, and bedded him down in the back of the lorry with twelve wounded soldiers.

‘Wait,' cried Léon, grabbing one of the orderlies by the sleeve. There's someone else lying out there.'

‘Where?' asked the man.

‘On the road. Over that hill.'

‘That's the way we came. There's no one there.'

‘A girl,' gasped Léon, who was finding it hard to speak.

‘You don't say? Blonde or brunette? I like redheads, myself. Is she a redhead?'

‘With a bicycle.'

‘Nice legs? And her tits – what are her tits like, pal? I like redheads' milky white tits, especially when they both squint outwards.'

‘Her name is Louise.'

‘What did you say her name was? Louder, pal, I can't understand you.'

‘Louise.'

‘Listen, there's no Louise lying back there, I'd have noticed. I'd definitely have noticed a Louise, you can bet your life on that, especially if she's got such great tits.'

‘No bicycle either?'

‘What bicycle, yours? Yours has had it, pal.'

‘The girl was riding a bicycle.'

‘Louise, the redhead with the squinting tits?'

Léon shut his eyes and nodded feebly.

‘On the other side of the hill? Sorry, there's nothing there. No tits, no bike.'

‘Please,' Léon gasped.

‘I already told you,' said the orderly.

‘I beg you.'

‘Fucking hell. All right, I'll take another look.'

The orderly gave the driver a sign and walked back over the brow of the hill. He returned five minutes later.

‘I told you there was no one there,' he said.

‘Really not?'

‘Just a smashed-up bicycle.' Laughing, the man opened the passenger door. ‘No tits or pussy, worse luck.'

Then the lorry, which appeared to have neither springs nor gears, set off on its interminable journey to the Canadian military hospital at Le Tréport, of all places. The two medical orderlies stretchered their thirteen items of human freight to the emergency ward, and soon afterwards, in the tented operating theatre, Léon was anaesthetized with laughing gas by a tightlipped, bloodstained surgeon who extracted two machine-gun bullets from his body with swift, ample strokes of the scalpel and then sewed him up with swift, ample stitches. He learned later that one of the bullets had lodged in his right lung; the other had punched two holes in his gastric wall and come to rest against his left hip bone.

Because he had lost a lot of blood and his post-operative scar was thirty centimetres long, he had to remain in the hospital for several weeks. The first thing he saw on emerging from the anaesthetic was the plump, friendly, freckled face of a nurse who was looking at her watch with her fingertips applied to his wrist, lips moving silently.

‘Excuse me, mademoiselle, but has a girl been brought in recently?'

‘A girl?'

‘Louise? Green eyes, short dark hair?'

The nurse laughed, shook her head and called a doctor. Since he, too, shook his head, Léon spent the rest of the day questioning all the nurses, orderlies, doctors and patients who passed his bed. That evening, because they merely laughed and could give him no information, he wrote three letters to Saint-Luc-sur-Marne: one to the mayor, one to Stationmaster Barthélemy, and one to the landlord of the
Café du Commerce.
And although he knew that the army postal service was slow and he couldn't expect to receive an answer for weeks or even months, he asked if any mail had come for him the very next morning.

He stood up unaided for the first time three weeks after the operation; it was another three weeks before he took his first short-winded walk to the cliffs. He made his way along the edge of the hundred-metre drop, sat down on the grass at the western end of the beach, and looked down at the black mussel banks, the remains of the campfire, and the sandy spot among the rocks where he and Louise had spent the night.

Forty-two days had gone by since then. The sea was the same blue-grey paste as before, the wind was propelling the same rain clouds across the Channel, the gulls were frolicking in the updraughts in the same way, and the world seemed undaunted by the horrors that had occurred on land in the interval. The gulls would frolic in the updraughts tomorrow and the day after, and they would continue to do so even if not only a few hundred thousand men but all the nations on earth assembled behind these cliffs in northern France, there to slaughter each other by the billion in a last great paroxysm of bloodlust. The gulls would continue to lay their eggs and hatch them if a final stream of human blood trickled over the cliffs and into the sea; they would frolic in the updraughts to all eternity, because they were seagulls and had no reason, in their seagull existence, to concern themselves with the stupidities of human beings, hump-backed whales or harvest mice.

Three days later, because Léon, being a civilian, was not permitted to use the hospital's official phone under any circumstances, he defied the medical superintendent's explicit prohibition and struggled down the flight of steps – 400 of them – that led to the little town, where he went to the post office and put through a call to the town hall of Saint-Luc-sur-Marne. When no one answered, he called the station.

It was Madame Josianne who picked up the receiver after much hissing and crackling and the mediation of two telephonists in succession, and Léon had to repeat his name several times before she grasped who was calling. Then she burst into a tearful sing-song of jubilation, called him her dearest angel and demanded to know where in heaven's name he'd been hiding himself all this time. She didn't give him a chance to speak, but commanded him to come home this minute. Everyone was very worried about him, although to be honest they weren't at all worried any more because – he must surely understand this – it was six weeks since he'd disappeared without trace and made no sign of life since, so they'd confidently assumed that he and little Louise, with whom he'd been seen riding out of town – that he and poor little Louise had got mixed up in the last German offensive at the end of May, the very last German offensive after four years of war – incredibly hard luck on them, because it was now clear that the Boches had been driven back across the Rhine in revenge for 1870–71 and the war was practically over already, now that the Americans, with their tanks and their negro soldiers...