"There's never been anything as horrible as this!" a big woman next to him groaned.
"On the contrary, Madame, on the contrary," he replied quietly.
They had been walking for three days when they saw the first regiments in full flight. Confidence was so ingrained in the heart of the French that when they saw these soldiers, the refugees thought a battle was about to begin, that the High Command had given orders for small groups to head for the front by a circuitous route, that the armed forces were still intact. This hope kept them going. The soldiers wouldn't say much. Almost all of them were depressed and pensive. Some slept in the backs of trucks. Tanks plodded forward in the dust, camouflaged with thin branches. Between the leaves faded by the burning sun, you could see their pale faces, weary, angry and exhausted.
Madame Michaud kept thinking she saw her son among them. Not once did she see his regiment's number, but a kind of hallucination took hold of her. Every unfamiliar young face or voice caused her to tremble so fiercely that she had to stop dead in her tracks, clutching her heart and softly muttering, "Oh, Maurice, isn't that…"
"What's wrong?"
"No, it's nothing…"
But he was no fool. He shook his head. "You see your son everywhere, my poor Jeanne!"
All she did was sigh. "He does look like him, doesn't he?"
After all, it could happen. He could have cheated death; he could suddenly appear at her side, her son, her Jean-Marie; he would call out to them joyfully, tenderly, in that sweet masculine voice she could still hear, "But what are you two doing here?"
Oh, just to see him, to hold him close, to feel his cool rough cheek beneath her lips, to see his beautiful eyes shining close to hers, his deep expression, so alive. He had hazel eyes with long eyelashes like a woman, eyes that saw so many things! She had always taught him to see the funny and moving side of people. She liked to laugh and felt sympathy for others. "It's your Dickensian spirit, Mother," he would say. How well they knew each other! They would cheerfully, sometimes cruelly, make fun of people who had been unkind to them; then a word, a gesture, a sigh would make them stop. Maurice was different: he was more serene, cooler. She loved and respected Maurice, but Jean-Marie was… Oh, my God, he was everything she wanted to be and everything she dreamed of and everything that was the best of her: her joy, her hope… "My son, my little love, my Jeannot," she thought, calling him by the nickname he'd had when he was five, when she would take his head gently in her hands and kiss his ears, tilt his head back and tickle him with her lips while he laughed and laughed.
Her thoughts became more and more feverish and confused the longer she walked. She was a good walker: when she and Maurice were younger, they had often gone rambling in the countryside during their short holidays. When they didn't have enough money to stay in a hotel, they would set off like this with food and sleeping bags in their rucksacks. This was why she suffered less fatigue than her companions. But this incessant kaleidoscope, these strange faces passing endlessly before her, then fading and disappearing, was much more painful than physical exhaustion. "A herd of horses," she thought, "trapped." In the crowd, cars were tangled up like those reeds you see floating on the river, anchored by invisible knots while floodwater rushes all around them. Jeanne turned away so she couldn't see the cars. They poisoned the air with their petrol fumes, deafened the people on foot with their futile honking as they tried in vain to clear a way through. Seeing the impotent rage or the gloomy resignation on the drivers' faces was a comfort to the refugees. "They're not going any faster than us!" they would say to each other, enjoying the feeling of shared misfortune.
The refugees were walking in small groups. Chance had thrown them together at the edge of Paris and now they stayed together, though they didn't even know one another's names. With the Michauds was a tall, thin woman, wearing a cheap, shabby coat and a great deal of costume jewellery. Jeanne vaguely wondered what would possess someone to flee wearing enormous earrings encrusted with fake pearls and diamonds, large red and green stones on her fingers and a paste brooch with small bits of topaz.
Then there was a concierge and her daughter, the mother small and pale, the child big and heavy. They were both dressed in black and dragged along amid their luggage a portrait of a large man with a long black moustache. "My husband," the woman said. "He's the caretaker at the cemetery." Her sister was with her, pregnant and pushing a sleeping child in a pram. She was very young. As each convoy of soldiers passed by, she too would tremble and search the crowd. "My husband is out there somewhere," she would say; out there somewhere, or perhaps out here… anything was possible.
And Jeanne would say, for the hundredth time no doubt-she really had no idea what she was saying any more-"So is my son, so is my son…
They hadn't yet been shelled. When it happened, they didn't know what was going on at first. They heard the sound of an explosion, then another, then shouting: "Run for it! Get down! Get down on the ground!" They immediately threw themselves face down.
"How grotesque we must look!" Jeanne mused. She wasn't afraid, but she was short of breath and her heart was pounding so violently that she pressed both hands to it and pushed it down against a stone. She could feel a bell-shaped pink flower brushing her lips. Later, she would remember that while they were stretched out on the ground, a small white butterfly was lazily flitting from one flower to another.
Finally she heard a voice whisper, "It's over; they're gone." She stood up and automatically brushed the dust from her skirt. No one, she thought, had been hurt. But after walking for a few minutes, they saw the first fatalities: two men and a woman. Their bodies had been torn to shreds, but by chance their three faces were untouched. Such gloomy, ordinary faces, with a dim, fixed, stunned expression as if they were trying in vain to understand what was happening to them; they weren't made, my God, to die in battle, they weren't made for death. In all her life that woman had probably never said anything but ordinary things, like "The leeks are getting bigger" or "Who's the dirty pig who got my floor all muddy?"
But what do I know? Jeanne asked herself. Perhaps there was a wealth of intelligence and tenderness behind their low brows, beneath their dishevelled, lifeless hair. What are we in people's eyes, Maurice and I, other than two miserable employees? It's true in a way, but in another way, we are precious and unique. I know that too. "What a horrible waste," she thought again. She leaned against Maurice's shoulder, trembling, her cheeks wet with tears.
"Let's go," he said, gently pulling her away.
Both of them were thinking the same thing: "Why?" They would never make it to Tours. Did the bank even exist any more? Was Monsieur Corbin buried beneath the rubble with his files? With his valuables? With his dancer? And his wife's jewellery! But that would be too good to be true, Jeanne thought with sudden ferociousness. Nevertheless, she and Maurice hobbled along, continuing on their way. All they could do was to keep walking and place themselves in the hands of God.
12
The little group made up of the Michauds and their companions was picked up on Friday night. A military truck stopped for them and they travelled through the night, lying among the crates, until they arrived at a town whose name they never discovered. The railway line was intact, they were told. They could go direct to Tours. Jeanne went into the first house she saw on the outskirts of the town and asked permission to wash. The kitchen was already full of refugees rinsing their clothes in the sink, but they took Jeanne to the water pump in the garden. Maurice had brought a little mirror on a small chain; he hung it from the branch of a tree and shaved. Afterwards they felt better, ready to face the long wait by the door of the barracks where soup was being given out, and an even longer wait at the third-class ticket window at the train station. They had eaten and were crossing the square in front of the station when the bombs exploded. Enemy planes had been flying above the town for the past three days and air-raid warnings had been constant. The town had to make do with an old fire siren to sound the alarm; through the din of the cars, the screaming children, the noise of the terrified crowd, you could barely hear its faint, ridiculous sound. The people arriving off trains would ask, "Is it an air raid?" and be told, "No, it's over," only for the faint bell to be heard again five minutes later. There was laughter. Shops were open, little girls played hopscotch on the pavement and dogs ran through the dust near the old cathedral. The Italian and German planes were ignored as they glided calmly overhead. People were used to them.