And There Was Light Read online

  September passed, so empty. There was hardly any fighting at the front. Poland was conquered already, but who had delivered the final blow? Nobody knew. Suddenly on September 17, Russian troops had invaded her from the east. In Europe nothing was left but enemies.

  A great change (or a change which seemed great to us) happened in our lives. My father, mobilized as an officer in the Engineer Corps in a powder factory, was called to Toulouse. My mother, my brother and I were going to join him. Jean was going too, for, not wanting to leave me, he convinced his mother that she should settle in Toulouse. For the first time we were not going to live in Paris. I remarked to Jean that something impossible was coming about.

  For a while, our premonitions were masked by the life of another city, the South of France, new voices, a different sun. Still, forebodings kept pouncing on us all over again at the most unlikely moments. But was war something we cared about — that we could like?

  To hear people talk they all hated it, but that didn’t keep us from noticing that since the first of September melancholy faces were much less common than they used to be. What was written on these faces was perhaps not gaiety, but interest. At least no one was at the accustomed place at the same hour. At night the men didn’t come home to the same woman and the same children right next to the same neighbors.

  There was a sense of freedom everywhere. People were more willing to say what they thought. Even time had grown precious. You counted it, said it was going too fast or too slow, in short you were concerned about it, and it was exciting.

  The dead were not troubling us, not yet. There were a good many of them at the end of the year, on Finland’s icy lakes: thousands of heroes fighting for a freedom which was unattainable and therefore more beautiful, if that were possible, than our own. But who, in France, cared about Finland? Students of geography like us, who conscientiously followed all the advances and retreats on the big map. No one else, or hardly anyone.

  The war seemed unreal. Some already whispered that it would never happen, that it was a huge political production. I didn’t agree. War would come, in full force. To know it, I only needed to listen to the German radio every night. There it was, the dark prophecy — I could no longer doubt it that winter in 1940. It was there, my war.

  The cloud, the monster, was in the Nazi meetings. The voice of these crowds had gone too far, cutting itself off from the world of man. It would have to be silenced, or I must do something about it. I was upset, caught between passionate anger and the sense of the absurd. A blind boy, fifteen years old, facing Hitler and his people. That was something to laugh about. Still, it was all I could do to keep from spreading the news.

  HAVING TASTED HAPPINESS to the point of intoxication at Toulouse, I can give you this piece of advice: if you are happy when you are a boy or girl of fifteen, don’t tell anyone. Or, if you do, choose your confidant, and take one your own age.

  If you really can’t contain yourself, show the grown-ups that you are happy, but don’t hope for great things. Almost all adults have a short memory, and they always think happiness begins only at eighteen or even at twenty-one. Whatever you do, don’t ever give them your reasons for being happy. The most liberal and loving family would be disturbed right away, and think you were out of your mind. By keeping your secret you will lose nothing, for the secret only makes happiness grow.

  This policy really worked for Jean and me. All year long we concealed ourselves. The more unlikely our hiding places the better they were. Some of our joys were so intense that we couldn’t confide them to each other in any ordinary place like the street. Yet in Toulouse the streets were narrow, winding, badly paved or not really paved at all. The gutters wound down the middle of the road. The smell of cats, of moldy stones, soapy water, food fried in olive oil, garlic and honey assaulted you at every step. Yet even those poetic streets did not serve our purposes. We needed some ugly spot, to give more tang to our happiness. The waiting room of the railroad station was the place we chose.

  Or else we fled to the country for all-day walks, without any destination on principle. To know ahead of time where we were going would have been a mistake. We had the good sense to know that. The important thing was to lose ourselves, in the dry deserted hills south of the city, in the fertile valley of the Ariège, among the ruined houses of deserted villages, on land lying fallow around those little hamlets with high-sounding names, Sayss-en-Gayss, Courtousour, La Crois-Falgarde. No matter where, but somehow losing ourselves! Never thinking of finding the way, nothing in our heads but happiness, walking zigzag or straight ahead till we were tired out — this too another kind of happiness.

  Every day we became friends again as though it were the first time, and this too was essential. Friendship was a fragile state of mind or body, one that vanished as soon as you made a habit of it. To renew it every day was an obligation and hard work. Sometimes we had to set friendship free, making it garrulous and lenient; emptying out all our dreams, without choosing among them and without scruple. Sometimes our censorship held no pity. Jean literally did not have the right to say one foolish thing, nor did I. We examined everything, the articles of agreement one by one: loyalty, faithfulness, tolerance and sharing. Of all the clauses the thorniest was the one about sharing. We did not succeed in stipulating how far it should go. Theoretical at first, this became a practical matter in March. Then there was a crisis.

  Since he had come to Toulouse Jean had lived in a small apartment in a house with dark stairways on a narrow street. But this somber house was lighted by the presence of a young girl. Out of “virtue,” Jean said, he had tried at first not to see her. But as time went on his efforts failed completely.

  Aliette, for that was the girl’s name, was really unavoidable. She was eighteen years old. She was beautiful without giving it a thought. She didn’t touch the ground, she flew. She didn’t walk down stairs, she glided down them like a flower tossed into the wind. She sang from morning to night, so much you wondered how she could manage to learn her lessons. And you were not learning yours, because you were always trying to hear through the partition, because your one idea was to be with her, to drink her song from her eyes and her lips, and then sneak home without being seen. Or if she wasn’t singing, that was surely because she was sad or perhaps sick, and you wanted to run and help her. Consoling Aliette would be such a marvelous thing!

  She said nothing and did nothing the way the rest of the world did it. Jean told me that with a conviction that I was beginning to share. He asked himself what was the difference. She used ordinary words, but as soon as they were out of her month they took on a thousand different meanings. You no longer had time to listen to them. The sun began to play on them as it does on the wings of a butterfly, and your vision became blurred.

  To make everything more complicated, for a week or two Jean had been certain she was interested in him. The proof was she talked to him, even let him talk to her. On the landing they had exchanged tips on problems in mathematics. She said mathematics meant nothing to her. Finally, she invited him to play the piano at her house, and while she was bending over to turn the pages, Aliette’s hair had brushed against his cheek.

  In a word Jean was in love. But love, you understand, is a very feeble word for it. The fact was my poor Jean was no longer living, he was bursting with life. And this is where my story, inevitably, gets confused. For I too was not just living, I too was in love.

  The discovery was terrifying. Everything became unsettled all at once: friendship, its rights and its limits, the future, our studies, the serenity of our lives, and last of all our love itself. To whom did it belong, this love? To Jean or to me?

  If there was nothing between Aliette and Jean but a partition, that, after all, was only luck. And thanks to another piece of luck, I had been the first to meet Aliette and the first to talk to her. From the point of view of history, I had definite rights.

  I can joke a little today when I tell you this story, but we were certainly not joking at th
e time. We made longer excursions into the hills than ever before, and from beginning to end these walks were a single storm. We weren’t fighting, you mustn’t think that. We weren’t angry, we were meditating. The intensity and the size of the problem were so great that almost always at the end of the hour we forgot the problem itself. The rest of the time the two of us were alone with our double girl. We kept on looking at the double image we carried around with us, and after this nothing in the world seemed to us divided.

  I must say, to Jean’s glory and mine and Aliette’s, that no one of the three of us ever went about spoiling the image. On the contrary it grew so gentle and so pure that no one bothered to compare it with its model. Still, the model was there, alive, more and more vibrant, more and more familiar. From now on we were meeting Aliette every day, but always together, never separately.

  We met her on the squares in the town, at the corner of the little streets in the reddish shade of the brick houses. We waited for her after school. We had conversations under the damp arcades. When I went to her house, she and Jean took me back to mine, we went out again to hers, they went back with me, and all the time the summer night spread around us and cradled us.

  I am not very sure what we said all those hours. We counted the stars, I remember that. Each one of us held Aliette by the arm, not with too much pressure, for she was sacred. We let her voice make the rounds of our hearts and our thoughts. We may have made her talk for the joy of it. I think we ended by forgetting her, our Aliette, while she was frisking around between us, laughing and light-hearted, because she was more beautiful than anything, because nothing meant anything anymore. To the devil with reality!

  Was this a girl dreamed about, or lived? Lived, for sure, sometimes to the point of tears, so great was the pleasure she gave. But lived at the one moment in life when things don’t need to have happened to be alive.

  In the distance, to the north, throwing a weird light on our happiness, the war went on. It ended in catastrophe. In five weeks in May and June, France was conquered. The armies of Hitler were rushing southward, heavy with calamity. They alone had the power to separate us.

  ALIETTE, WHEN SHE LEFT US the night before, told us it would be better for us not to see each other again, at least not all three together and not so often. We didn’t know why she said so and she didn’t explain. But suddenly, ten minutes later, the radio announced that German troops had entered Paris and that Paris had yielded without resisting. Paris a prisoner! Aliette going away! Which should we think about first?

  At last in the morning at the main entrance to the lycée, this notice appeared, written by hand in large clumsy letters (they certainly had not had time to have it printed): Because of what has happened, the written tests for the first and second bachots are postponed till a later date. From today on classes are suspended throughout the Toulouse school district until further notice.

  Events! Aliette! And again events! Our heads were about to burst. Jean agreed with me. We must not continue to think of ourselves. Within a week perhaps our country would no longer exist. At such a time the interest of the community is so much more important than the concerns of the individual.

  That is easily said! But emotions were beating in on us from every side at the same moment. Each wave was more violent than the last. We didn’t know where to head in.

  As for France, we were agreed that the war was lost. Our English allies were in flight, climbing into the boats at Dunkerque. You couldn’t blame them. French armies were fleeing too, to the south of the Loire according to the reports.

  In the last two weeks, three hundred thousand refugees had poured into Toulouse: women, old people, children, even men. They came from Holland, Belgium, Luxembourg, from northern and eastern France, from Paris, Normandy and Orléans. They had no idea where they were going. They were heading south, that was all. Toulouse was a big city, so they stopped there.

  They crowded into tents in the athletic fields along the Garonne. Two thousand of them, most of them women and babies, spent the night in the chapel of our lycée. Private houses in the city were taking in all they could hold. Often they were putting up five, even ten, in the same room.

  The city authorities were uneasy. Such a concentration of people was an ideal target for attack from the air. It was rumored that Toulouse was about to be bombed.

  In the middle of the city, it was easy to believe yourself in Paris one day in the Revolution. The crowd was all concentrated in a single mass, immense and purposeless. The fact was that people did not seem either threatening or frightened. They gave the impression of understanding nothing.

  Cars covered with mud, their fenders pierced by machine gun fire, were standing driverless at any angle against the curb. But where was the army and where were the generals? Where was the government? They said it had fled to Bordeaux.

  Terrifying rumors were going the rounds, confirmed by the papers and on the radio. Planes were machine-gunning civilians who were in flight along the roads. On the roads in the north the planes were German, in the south they were Italian. A man passing by said, “There is no time left for crying. This time, it is the end.” What was he saying, this man? We were outraged. A nation does not die like that. Not France…

  But by this time, we were in a side street which was less disturbed, and the memory of the night before came back to us. Aliette didn’t want to see us anymore!

  Could we possibly have offended her? Was she mistaken about our intentions? All of a sudden I said to Jean: “I know. It’s because she is in love with one of us. It can’t be anything else but that.”

  The idea was unbelievably simple. We had loved Aliette for months without even asking ourselves whether she loved us, or even whether she was thinking about loving us, or which one of the two of us she would choose. Because she would have to choose. That too we had completely forgotten. We had lost sight of the fact, deplorable but inescapable, that love is a personal matter. We had been ridiculous, that’s all. And how angry she must be. Jean pulled himself together and said, “Don’t let’s think about her, shall we?” But how could we manage to avoid thinking of everything at the same time when it was all so serious?

  At night we slept well (you sleep whatever happens when you are fifteen), but we had hardly opened our eyes before the double tragedy hit us full in the face: our love and our country.

  You must realize how well informed we were in spite of our youth. Everything that happened meant something to us. We knew about the parties, the governments, political systems and alliances. We were well able to tell the difference between armistice and defeat.

  On June 17 at noon, when Marshal Pétain spoke to the French people and said that the army could no longer keep on fighting, that it was necessary to surrender, that all further resistance would be wrong and that he, the oldest and most famous soldier in France, the victor of Verdun, had agreed to sign an armistice with Hitler and the German generals, thus offering to France “the gift of his own person” — we were there listening and did not believe him. The idea that he could be a traitor never occurred to us. But we were sure that he was wrong. The cause of France was not just the cause of her armies in the field.

  On the evening of June 18, when a young general, almost unknown and bearing a name sounding like that of a legendary hero, Charles de Gaulle, made his first appeal from London for Frenchmen to resist, to keep the war going in all the overseas territories where France was still in a position of command — in North Africa, West Africa, Equatorial Africa, and Indochina — and also in metropolitan France, called on Frenchmen to resist with all the moral and physical arms they had left, we were there too. But this time we believed, and our answer was yes.

  Not a shadow of doubt remained. We were about to become the soldiers of Free France. But when? And how? What arms would Jean have? And — the more difficult question — what arms were there for me? I can say only one thing. We knew nothing, and yet we already knew everything. We were embarking upon the serious things of li
fe just as a well-hammered nail bites into wood and takes hold.

  It was not bravado. It was not even patriotism. For us, France was a rather vague idea, and somehow belied by events. The things in our heads and our hearts we called freedom: the freedom to choose our beliefs, our way of life and let others choose theirs, the freedom to refuse to do harm. But why should freedom need to be explained?

  Aliette too was free. She was calling us again. She had the right to see us or not to see us. She even had the right to tell one of us to go away. If only we had been able to ask her which of the two of us she loved! We almost decided to do it. But, in this affair, what was to become of friendship?

  Jean retreated before my anguish. I drew back before his. If we spoke, one of us would have to withdraw. Whatever the outcome, it was certain to cause suffering. It was at this point that Jean said something entirely confused in its expression but absolutely clear to me.

  I was blind and for once, he said, that had its effects. My chances of talking to Aliette, of being alone with her were not on a par with his. My chances in the material world, I mean. But that was not quite fair, for Jean still felt he had a moral obligation to support me. He promised to do nothing to win Aliette that I, for my part, would not be able to do too. He would go on talking to her (if she still wanted him to), but at times and places where I too could have gone without anyone’s help. He would tell her everything he wanted to, with one exception: he wouldn’t tell her he was in love. I wouldn’t do that either. Like Jean I was going to give my word. Jean kept repeating, “Don’t say thank you. It’s a fair exchange.”