The kindly rain even makes it possible for him to walk more quickly without his haste appearing suspicious: after all, he is merely a simple pedestrian who refuses to submit to the dictates of the heavens. He is getting farther away from the danger zone, but he still doesn’t allow himself to look over his shoulder, or give way to the delirium of joy overwhelming his final reservations. His sturdy shoes make a mockery of the puddles and seem like seven-league boots; his suitcase no longer weighs down his arm. He will have plenty of time to read, now, and he no longer regrets having filled it so full. At last he looks behind him. No one is following him. And, under the protection of the mighty ramparts of the ducal castle, he allows himself to take his first deep breath as a free man.
His friends would probably not be expecting him so soon. He was already savoring the moment when he would knock at their door, they would open it, and, with a mischievous grin, casually adjusting his glasses behind his ears, he would simply say to his astonished hosts, “I missed the train.” He had planned his escape down to the last detail. All he had to do now was cut across to the harbor, walk along the Quai de la Fosse of ill repute, where sailors’ bars were now operating in the basements of the charming but dilapidated old mansions, and climb to the Butte Sainte-Anne, where one of his old schoolfriends lived over his father’s carpentry workshop. In the not so distant past, when he was a boarder at the Catholic school in Chantenay, one of the poor suburbs of Nantes, just a few steps away, he had many times benefited from the generous hospitality of the Chris-tophes, who already had so many people to cater to that one extra didn’t make the slightest difference. There were three generations under one roof, and his schoolfriend Michel was the eldest of twelve children. He suffered from being an only son, and when they put up a cot for him in the workshop he loved to feel part of this turbulent throng who seemed completely indifferent to material difficulties. The recipe was simple, even though it lacked variety. Madame Christophe, whose figure had become somewhat problematic after her repeated pregnancies, had no rival in praising in every possible way the virtues of the potato, which the family cultivated on a vast scale in their land allotment on the outskirts of the town. It was with her in mind that he had refused to return his ration card (as well as his tobacco card, but in this case he was thinking more of himself), although his call-up papers had demanded that he hand it in to the appropriate authority. He would give his hostess his weekly sheet of J3 food coupons, the special ones for young men over thirteen that entitled them to more liberal rations. She would start by exclaiming, “But Joseph, you’ll need them yourself, you’re only here for a few days,” but he would have plenty of arguments to persuade her, and in the end she would accept them and confess that they would help to butter a few parsnips, although for a long time no one had been able to find either the one or the other. “Save bread,” the wall posters adjured the populace, “cut it in thin slices and use all the crusts for soup” — as if the workers’ families were in the habit of throwing away the leftovers.
During the day, he would join Michel and his father in the workshop, as he had always done when he visited them before. His talents as a cabinetmaker had become apparent very early. When he was only twelve he had turned his cradle into a small table, although he’d made a pretty good hash of it. Next he had made an armchair; it had massive curves, but its seat was too narrow because he had forgotten to include the thickness of its arms in his calculations. At sixteen he had taken some friends on board a long canoe he had made and christened the Pourquoi-Pasf in memory of Captain Charcot, which didn’t evince any great optimism when you remember how its illustrious eponym had ended up, crushed to bits by the ice floe. This marked preference for working in wood was no doubt inherited from his wooden-clog-making ancestors, who had been established for centuries in the heart of the Foret du Gavre, from where the last of the line — his grandfather, whom he hadn’t known — had emigrated to open a little shop in Random, which had developed into a wholesale business after he cut off one of his fingers, and it was to this fatal, unfinished, rough-hewn wooden clog, emerging from a chunk of wood like a kind of sacrificial chopping block, that our family owed its conversion to the porcelain business. But the tools of our mutilated ancestor’s trade still hung in our workshop: the knives, chisels, and gouges with which Father had carved out the arms and back of his armchair.
Under the guidance of his hosts, the young autodidact had become a skilled worker. He had even developed his own speciality: staircases. These demand a combination of dexterity, knowledge, and improvisation: in some cases, no two steps are alike. He may even have dreamed for a moment of making them his career. On one of the false identity cards dating from his underground period, made out in the name of Joseph Vauclair, born in Lorient, Morbihan (the town had been demolished in the bombings so its records had disappeared), on February 22,1925 (by making himself three years younger, he was no longer eligible for forced labor in Germany), his Profession was given as Carpenter. This was a tribute to his adopted family and an insurance against being caught red-handed as a manifest incompetent if some foxy investigator asked him out of the blue: What’s a trying plane, a marking gauge, a molding plane? And if any such catechist, mistrustful of the tall young man’s appearance, were to suspect him of having gained his knowledge purely from books, he would only have to show his hands, which had already been hardened by farm work. Since at the end of his two weeks with the Christophes, it had been arranged that he would go and lie low in the countryside, where people of all sorts ultimately came together: volunteers, recalcitrants, outcasts, members of the Maquis, black marketeers. In this way they partially agreed with the marshal, who wanted people to go back to the land, even if the nation in peril was in the event primarily interested in the peasants’ larders and their conveniently isolated villages.
But in the meantime, between the carpenter’s shop and the farm, he had planned a detour to Random to make an unexpected appearance and perform his own kind of impromptu, in comparison with which the famous “Indian trunk” disappearing act would be no more than a feeble illusion. While everyone believed he was a forced laborer in Germany, he would reappear on stage as Planchet and brandish his fishing rods under the very nose of the occupier, only to vanish again like a latter-day Judex, leaving the astonished spectators momentarily converted to the Resistance. Momentarily, because immediately after the war was over, those very same people lost no time in refusing to consider any of the candidates who had belonged to the Resistance, preferring to reelect the existing municipal councilmen who had written such charming letters to the marshal congratulating him on his action and exhorting him not to forget Random.