And There Was Light Page 12

  Jean thought that after a defeat like ours, there must be terrible years ahead. Terrible for us, that was sure. Hard choices would have to be made, and dangers met. No one could say that death might not be part of it.

  “You have more imagination than I have,” he said. “I love life but you love it more. I shall need your strength. With you there I shall never be at a loss.” We were very romantic, weren’t we? Yes and no. For we kept our promises to the bitter end: the promise about the war and the one about love. We seemed to be laughing at ourselves just a bit. Our enthusiasm was so great that it could stand a little humor.

  Aliette was all changed since the armistice. Had she guessed our decision — secret though it was — to love her without letting her know? You might say that she had suddenly begun to respect us. Women in wartime need men so badly. She was getting ready for the bachot too, just as we were, and since we didn’t know when the examination would be, we had agreed to work very hard to hold on to our patience.

  Working very hard was a thing Aliette didn’t care for very much. She admitted she could not do it alone. She asked us, as a service, to make her work. Knights in the days of chivalry were never more exalted by their lady’s demands.

  We took Aliette out into the woods and sat her down at the foot of a tree in a clearing and made her go over her courses as well as we could.

  Jean was the specialist in science. To lure Aliette he was trying to draw from algebra, solid geometry and electricity everything that these subjects, so unsympathetic to girls, can of fantasy or beauty.

  My job, I admit, was simpler. The advantage I had almost embarrassed me. I was supposed to teach German, history, and literature, that divine subject, in which everything was somehow related to love.

  I hardly dare to admit that Aliette failed her exams three weeks later, and that Jean and I passed. For us it was a personal defeat. Fortunately, Aliette, drying a few tears as she read the list that was posted, looked prettier than ever. And she knew very well that we were men, and that men were supposed to be first in this kind of competition. That was only natural.

  So the bachot was behind us as I knew very well. The morning we took the French composition I was so happy about a kiss Aliette had given me, like a little sister, on the cheek, to bring me luck (she had given one just like it to Jean) that when I came out I had no idea what I had written. For this composition I got the best mark I had ever gotten for one in my six years of lycée attendance.

  When July came, a silence like mourning had fallen over France. The Germans had forced us to cut our country in two, north and south. They took over the Northern Zone themselves. And there was no one around us who had the courage to think what that meant.

  As for the Southern Zone, they were already calling it “the free zone.” But that seemed to us a mockery. On July 10, a French government had been set up at Vichy under Marshal Pétain. It was a government, but not the government of France.

  Military defeat had opened a breach into which all the enemies of the Third Republic and of France could rush. Within a few days words had changed their meaning. People no longer talked about liberty but about honor, for honor was more reassuring. No more talk of parliament or institutions! Now it was the fatherland. No more talk about the French people or its wishes. Now it was the family. The family was smaller and more manageable.

  My father, who was sincerely devoted to democratic principles, said that France was going through one of those onslaughts of the spirit of reaction which have been so common in her history but which seemed this time to be more formidable than ever before.

  At the end of August trains were set up in convoys to repatriate all the refugees and all those who needed to go back to their homes in the north. My parents had no choice. We were headed for Paris. Jean’s family decided on the same course. Our hours of love were numbered.

  [ 9 ]

  THE FACELESS DISASTER

  A GIGANTIC CONVENT with its parlors deserted, that was Paris at the end of September 1940. The year before you never heard the church bells except on Sunday morning when traffic was moving slowly. Now you heard nothing but the bells.

  In our apartment on the Boulevard Port-Royal, at the far edge of the Latin Quarter, all day long I heard the bells of Val-de-Grâce, St-Jacques-du-Haut-Pas and, whenever the wind was in the west, those of Notre-Dame-des-Champs. If it was from the north, there were the bells of St-Etienne-du-Mont, farther away on the square in front of the Panthéon. The bells reached my room in all their force, for to reach it they had only to cross those vast soundless stretches.

  Paris under the Occupation looked to me as if she were praying. She seemed to be calling on someone, but hers was a voiceless cry. Still, I had better wake up. These were nothing but dreams. Since I had returned I had really seen nothing. We had come into the Austerlitz Station in the evening on our way back from Toulouse. My heart had stayed behind with Aliette. We had not been able to find a taxi. There were no more taxis, and we had had to carry our suitcases and walk the two miles to our house. Along the whole length of the Boulevards de l’Hôpital, St-Marcel and Port-Royal, we never met a single car. The few pedestrians we saw were walking in the middle of the street, moving straight forward and very fast. Paris seemed much bigger and much quieter than I remembered it. Except for that I was not aware of anything unusual.

  But where was the disaster? No one seemed to know. There were hardly any cars left and no buses, only trucks. Rich people or poor, they all had to take the Métro. The price of cigarettes was a bit higher. So were the prices of bread and meat, but not much. All this was really nothing, it was surely not calamity. And the Germans, where were they? They kept out of sight, hiding in barracks or in hotels. To keep from seeing them, all you had to do was stay away from the Place de la Concorde, the Champs-Elysées and the Etoile. There you could smell them, smell their cigarettes, sweeter than ours because of the blend of Oriental tobacco they liked.

  In other parts of Paris you hardly ever saw them. If you did, they were riding in cars and making the tires scream at the corners of the deserted streets. If they happened to get out, you heard their shoes scraping, their step stiff, always stiff, and loud. They had the grave and satisfied look of people who knew where they are going. But did they really know?

  From day to day we were waiting for them to land in England. But the date kept on being postponed. I was watching for the agony in the street but not finding it. It may be that the calamities of history, when they are as real as the one we were living, don’t proclaim themselves all at once. No doubt it takes time. The next day I would surely hear cries, learn that people were suffering. Paris as prisoner would pound on the door to be released. But the next day came and was filled with the same silence as the night before.

  The silence caught you by the throat, made sadness press into your thoughts. The houses had grown too tall, the streets too wide. People were separated from each other by spaces that were too big. Even the air which flowed down the empty streets was furtive and kept its secrets.

  No one knew what to think about. One thought about oneself. Perhaps everybody was thinking only of himself and of nothing else. I used to say to Jean: “This is a queer war. We are never going to see our enemy, and it won’t be easy to have courage.”

  But courage to do what? There was not a single direction marked for us to follow. There was nothing to do but stay at home, think of Aliette, each from his own corner, think of her for hours on end with every ounce of our strength, and get only a battered picture in return, a little face as sad as our own, almost without eyes and without voice, a photograph that hadn’t turned out. Here was grief that grated on your nerves, made you jump up, wanting to fight, longing all at once for the one thing that was not there — Aliette, Aliette so far off, Aliette who had gone away — but no, it was I who had left her — Aliette whom I longed to take in my arms and hold tight.

  How strange! In Toulouse that was not what I had wanted. I would not have wanted to touch Aliette. For
, at my touch, she would only have vanished into thin air. But ever since her body had been separated from mine, it existed as a body. What I was embracing was only shadow.

  We no longer had our beloved and we had not met our enemy. We were heavy and empty at the same time, and our fever rose. Besides, we should never again know what was happening to Aliette. Letters exchanged between the two zones were forbidden. The occupying authorities allowed only the cards called “interzones” — a piece of pasteboard with forms printed on them to be filled out. “I am…” ran the formula, and you wrote “well,” “very well,” or “fairly well.” “I received your card from…” and you looked at another card just like it to find the date on which the people you loved had written these meaningless phrases the last time.

  The French are resourceful, they always find a way of making rules serve their own ends. We managed to slip in words loaded with meaning, loaded with meaning at least for us, for what could the others understand from their side of the wall? People were not talking much anymore about the war, for they were not learning anything. The only newspapers that were appearing were German or had sold out to the German side. Radio Paris too was German and it was forbidden to listen to the BBC. Of that there was no doubt, for it was the only precise order that had been issued by the German military government up to this time.

  Naturally, hundreds of thousands of people were listening in all the same. This is how it went: “London calling, Frenchmen speaking to Frenchmen.” Here were General de Gaulle, Jean Oberlé, Pierre Bourdan, Jean Marin, Maurice Schumann. They were the ones giving the news. Confidence rang out in their voices. But after hearing them we never spoke of it. We were afraid of our neighbors. A country in disaster is swarming with traitors.

  We should never again know what people were thinking. There would be no way of asking them, and in any case they would not have replied. There it was — the real anguish of Paris — five million human beings on guard, ready to defend themselves or to hide, determined not to talk whatever happened, to do good and evil alike. We should no longer be able to tell cowardice from courage, for everywhere there would be silence.

  The lycées were reopening. We began our philosophy classes on the first of October at Louis-le-Grand. We were preparing for our second bachot. On the first day we had a new history professor. He walked rapidly and seemed to know exactly what he wanted. All of us stood up. With a small gesture of annoyance he told us to sit down. “Gentlemen,” he said, “I ask you to listen to me, not to obey me. This land will surely perish if everyone obeys.” He was young, wore thick glasses and was short. He never stayed still, but kept moving around between the benches. He put his hand on one boy’s head, or on the shoulder of another. He questioned us by word of mouth and face to face, about our age and our plans, the June defeat and the reasons for it, about the correct behavior of the army of occupation, about de Gaulle, Hitler and Pétain. He asked us if we knew what Russia was, and America and Japan, or if we knew what parts of the world have coal, steel, oil or manganese.

  He talked fast. I had to pay the closest attention to understand him. In an hour he said more than I had ever heard before in two weeks. Paris was still occupied, but the occupation had a new meaning, and so had the future. His voice was flexible, warm, like the voice of a creature full of life. Each word held a gesture. Ideas were germinating in my head at such speed that I no longer had time to stop them so I could really see what they were. Never mind. I would recapture them at night when I was alone. But what was he actually saying, this teacher of ours? That our class held at least one traitor and that he knew it? A boy ready to inform the occupation authorities about things that might be said in school? Impossible. I must have heard wrong. But no, there was no mistake, and the teacher repeated it. Along my spine ran a hot wave. I felt as though I were coming to life. So, after all, there was an evil to reject. And there would be something good to be done.

  BEING BLIND SEEMED TO GIVE ME nothing but advantages. For instance, after two or three weeks of hard adjustment, I could see Aliette again. Jean, for his part, couldn’t see her yet and said to me, “I never manage to close my eyes tight enough to see her.”

  I was spared that particular pain, there was no doubt about that. I was not only closer to the inner world than Jean, but for nearly eight years I had identified myself completely with this world within. I had had no choice. The investment had surely been good, and here I was drawing the interest.

  Only the visible Aliette had been taken away from me, her outside shell. I was rebuilding her presence inside myself, and without even thinking about it. I had no idea how the operation was performed, but I had noticed that the less I worked at it the more successful I was. Memories and emotions are fragile things. You should never bear down on them, or draw on them by main force. You should barely touch them with the tips of your fingers, the tips of your dreams.

  The best way to bring love back to life, and happiness with it, was to catch hold of a reminder of love, catch it lightly as it passed by — no matter whether it was the hem of Aliette’s dress or the sound of her laughter — and then let memory do the rest. For it was memory and not I as a person who was happy and in love. My will did not count and was nothing but an obstacle in the way. I tried to hold it captive, but from time to time it got away from me, wanting to see Aliette and see her more clearly. But the will has a horror of half-measures, and as soon as it took over, I had to start again from the beginning.

  But when I held my will in leash, not letting it move, my beloved girl filled the whole room with her presence. Aliette was no longer on my right or my left, as she had been in Toulouse, divided from me now more, now less by holding my arm or letting it go. She was above me, behind and within. I no longer had to pay any attention to silly limitations of distance or space.

  She still had a face and it was her prettiest, and she still had a voice. But now the face and the voice embraced and accepted me. When they had been with me in the real world, the divided world, I had not always been sure of joy in the same measure.

  My parents had turned the back of their apartment over to me — two small rooms next to each other, opening on a courtyard and completely isolated from the rest of the house down a long corridor with a bend. This was my own domain where I had free rein. I changed the furniture around and planned order and disorder to suit my whims.

  I was not always alone there. People came to see me, and I was the one who received them. After dinner, when I had said good night to the rest of the family, I had a place of retreat. The two little rooms became a shrine.

  I sat up late at night. I had thrown myself furiously into the study of philosophy. I wanted to understand it all, and felt it was urgent. I don’t know exactly why, but it seemed to me that such a chance would not come again, that I was going to be snatched away to more worldly responsibilities.

  All the ideas of men who had dedicated themselves to thought found their way into my head for the first time, from Pythagoras to Bergson, from Plato to Freud. I examined them as closely as I could. Truly, the human spirit — or whatever there was of it in me — was not a good glass to look through, for it did not hold steady. This lapse in attention often worried me, but not overly, since the philosophers themselves did not always appear to have seen clearly.

  As a rule they had chosen a direction which the best of them had been able to follow through an entire volume, in some cases for a lifetime. This was true of Plato and Spinoza. But the choice in itself and their obstinacy in pursuing it were limiting, and prevented them from looking about them. I saw their thinking as to the surface of a sphere, but only at one point, thus losing touch with the reality of the universe which could be nothing less than the sphere as a whole. In this way, the more deductive and systematic a philosopher was, the greater his defeats as I saw them. Poets and most artists said and did many foolish things, but at least they reached out in all directions, multiplying risks and opportunities at the same time. There was something good in their turmo
il.

  I tormented myself that autumn of 1940. I thought a lot, or at any rate gave exercise to my thoughts. I tried all the avenues, one after another, the realist and the idealist, the materialist and the spiritualist, the empirical and the rational. All the way from Heraclitus to William James, no one of them seemed to me without function, but none satisfied me completely.

  As for psychology — they were making us study its foundations and its doctrines for nine hours a week — I had a grudge against it. For me, it was way off the track. Either psychology was analyzing the properties of mind and spirit without taking into account that their very existence was open to question; or else, in a trice, it turned its back on mind and spirit alike. Outward manifestations were the only concern.

  Manifestations and reflexes! But these were nothing but effects. How could they be taken for the sum total of human life? Perhaps they were signs, but their interpretation could not help being insecure since it was made by individuals who did not know themselves any better than those they were judging.

  When I came upon the myth of objectivity in certain modern thinkers, it made me angry. So there was only one world for these people, the same for everyone. And all the other worlds were to be counted as illusions left over from the past. Or why not call them by their name — hallucinations? I had learned to my cost how wrong they were.

  From my own experience I knew very well that it was enough to take from a man a memory here, an association there, to deprive him of hearing or sight, for the world to undergo immediate transformation, and for another world, entirely different but entirely coherent, to be born. Another world? Not really. The same world rather, but seen from another angle, and counted in entirely new measures. When this happened, all the hierarchies they called objective were turned upside down, scattered to the four winds, not even like theories but like whims.

  The psychologists more than all the rest — there were a few exceptions, Bergson among them — seemed to me not to come within miles of the heart of the matter, the inner life. They took it as their subject but did not talk about it. They were as embarrassed in its presence as a hen finding out that she has hatched a duckling. Of course, I was more uneasy than they were when it came to talking about it, but not when it came to living it. I was only sixteen years old, and I felt it was up to them to tell me. Yet they told me nothing.