The Death Instinct

'In that case, why not give the boy snake oil?'

'I would if it made him better. I would do anything to make him better.'

Younger opened his door. 'There's nothing wrong with your brother's mind,' he said. 'He just needs this – this bloody war to end.'

On July 13, Younger was kept busy overnight at the front, working on some badly wounded men; he wasn't able to return to base until late the next evening. Despite the hour, he commandeered a transport wagon and drove it to the French position where Colette could usually be found. When he got there, she was laundering clothes in the glare of her truck's headlamps.

She ran to him: they stood face-to-face, but didn't touch. 'Where were you?' she asked. 'At the front?'

At a certain point, men in wartime either stop thinking about death or become paralyzed by it. Younger had stopped thinking about it. 'At the moment I'm absent without leave,' he replied. 'Court-martialable offense.'

'Not really?'

'It's all right. My orderly knows where I am. Couldn't let Bastille Day go uncelebrated.' From the rear of his wagon, he pulled out a bottle of dessert wine, two glasses, a tin of foie gras, a blue cheese, a jar of strawberry preserves, fresh butter, and an assortment of English biscuits. 'Not exactly revolutionary,' he observed, 'but the best I could do.'

'Where did you get all this?' she said in wonder.

'Will you allow me, Mademoiselle?'

'With pleasure.'

She laid a blanket on the grass and arranged the articles he had brought. The night was warm. He threw his leather jacket to the ground, put his cap and pistol belt on top of it, and began corkscrewing the wine – but stopped when blood drizzled down his fingers onto the bottle. 'Do you sew by any chance?' he asked.

She lifted his sleeve and gasped at the deep laceration in his forearm. 'Wait here,' she said. When she came back a moment later with suturing thread and a disinfectant alcohol, she added, 'I don't have any anaesthetic.'

'For this?' he replied.

She poured the clear alcohol onto his wound, where it hissed and effervesced, ran a needle through one piece of his bubbling, bleeding skin and then through another, pulling the thread tight thereafter. 'How can you bear it?' she asked.

'I don't feel it,' he said.

'Of course you do,' she replied, continuing to suture.

'I'm indifferent to it.' 'A man who doesn't feel pain can feel no pleasure.'

'I'm indifferent to pleasure too.'

'That's not what the nurses say.'

'I beg your pardon?'

'How long since you've slept?' she asked.

'There's something about you I don't follow, Miss Rousseau. Specifically, your leaving Paris to live in a truck. And don't tell me it was your duty to France.'

'Why not?' she asked, piercing the last lip of open skin. 'Hold still.'

'Because women don't act out of duty to country. There's always a man in it somewhere.'

'You're unforgivable.' She cut the thread, tied it off. 'Done.'

He flexed his hand, nodded, opened the wine, poured her a glass, and offered a toast to womankind. She returned it with a toast to France. They settled down to their meal; she served him. 'You were following a boy, obviously,' Younger resumed. 'He was called to the front, and this was the only way you could go with him. The only question is whether you lost him or he lost you.'

'I wasn't following a boy.'

'My apologies – a man.'

'Not a man either.'

'A girl?'

She threw a cracker at him.

'Sorry, but it doesn't add up,' he said. 'You left the Sorbonne, which must have been the most important thing in your life. You know they won't reenroll you after the war. There will be too many men whose education was interrupted.'

'Yes.' She swept crumbs from the blanket, barely betraying her deep disappointment: 'Even Madame warned me she wouldn't be able to get me back in.'

'Then why did you leave?' asked Younger.

'I couldn't stand the charity any longer.'

He was unable to read the expression in her eyes.

'There are people,' she went on, 'willing to house those of us who have lost our families, willing to feed us. But charity comes at a price. Out here we have a roof over our heads, and I don't have to ask: anyone for bread.'

'What was the price?' asked Younger.

'Dependence.'

'We're all dependent when young. On family, if no one else.'

'To be dependent on your family is a joy,' she said. 'To be dependent on someone else is – different.'

Again she wore her indecipherable expression, but this time Younger deciphered it.

'So,' he said. 'You weren't lying, but I was still right.'

'What do you mean?'

'You weren't following a man when you left Paris. You were escaping one. A man who wanted a return on his charitable investments.'

She looked at him over the rim of her glass.

'You had a – an intimate relationship with him,' said Younger. 'No one can blame you.'

'You are very curious about my relationships.'

'Any girl would have done the same in your place.'

'Maybe an American girl would have. I didn't. You will believe me when I tell you who it was: Monsieur Langevin.'

Paul Langevin was the great French physicist notoriously coupled with Marie Curie in newspaper reports all over the world several years earlier.

'I should have known,' declared Younger. 'You said his name to once before, with more venom than any word I've heard you speak except "German." What did the rascal do?'

'He tried to undress me in the laboratory.'

'Scoundrel. Where should he have done it?'

'You think it's funny? This is the man Madame loved. The man she lost everything for. And he makes love to me almost under her nose.'

'At least he has good taste.'

'I think you are trying to provoke me,' she said. 'It was dreadful. He had put Luc and me up in his house. I thought he was being kind. But then came the laboratory, and then there was more, at night, in his house.'

'By force?'

'No – when I resisted, he would let me go. But he would make me push him away. It was unbearable. If I had left his home without leaving Paris, Madame would have understood everything immediately, no matter what I told her. It would have been agony for her. And she would have hated me.'

'So you learned to drive this truck,' said Younger. 'I couldn't think of any other way. I had to leave the university. He was always finding ways to be near me. Madame would have seen how it was, sooner or later.'

Younger paused to take it in. 'You gave up the Sorbonne to spare her.'

There was a longer silence. 'There are three things I'm going to do in my life,' she said. 'The first is to make Luc better. The second is to graduate from the Sorbonne, for my father. If they don't take me back right after the war, I'll apply and apply again until they do.'

'And the third?'

She smoothed her skirt. Then she studied him. 'Of course it's different for you. You're a man – you've had many girls, and you are applauded for it.'

'Me? I'm as celibate as a Capuchin.'

She laughed mockingly.

'If you're listening to the nurses again,' said Younger, 'they're just jealous because I spend all my time with you.'

'You never married?' she asked.

'I don't believe in marriage.'

'Let me guess why not,' she said. 'Because you think it's against man's nature to be monogamous.

'Marriage looks to the future. Not practical, when you're at war.'

'I have another explanation.' She put her glass down and picked up Younger's leather jacket and military cap. 'It's because you're American.'

'Well?'

'Well, if you were a Frenchman and you got married, you could have as many affairs as you liked. You would consider it your right. But as an American, you would have to be faithful.'

'Would I?'

'American married men are much more faithful. That's what Monsieur de Tocqueville says.' She stood up, trying on the jacket and cap. 'How do I look?'

He didn't answer.