Promise at Dawn Page 31

  I was seeing my mother. Her head was leaning to one side, her eyes were half closed. She had one hand pressed to her heart I had seen her looking exactly like that, several years earlier, when she had her first attack of hypoglycemic coma. Her face was gray. She had done what she could but she had not strength enough to save all the sons in the world, only her own.

  “Mother,” I said, raising my eyes. “Mother.”

  She looked at me. “You promised to be careful,” she said.

  “I wasn’t flying the kite.”

  There was some fight still left in me. There was a sack of green African oranges among our provisions on board. I can still see myself standing beside the tangled wreckage, facing the sky and juggling with five of those oranges, swallowing my tears. Each time panic caught me by the throat, I grabbed the oranges and began to juggle. It wasn’t merely a matter of getting a grip on myself: it was a question of style and a gesture of defiance. It was the best I could do to proclaim my dignity, the superiority of a man over all that befalls him. I simply could not see any other way of spitting in the face of the monkey gods.

  I remained there for thirty-eight hours. I was found inside the fuselage with the roof shut. The heat was infernal. I was unconscious and half parched, but without a single fly on me.

  And so it went throughout my tour of duty in Africa. Each time I took off the sky flung me back to earth with a tumultuous, hollow din, in which I recognized the familiar sound of stupid, mocking laughter. I kept going down for the count with astonishing regularity. Sitting on my bottom beside my fallen mount, in my pocket my mother’s last letter dwelling on my heroic deeds in a tone of absolute confidence, I stared somberly at the ground, sighed, picked myself up and once more tried to do my best.

  I don’t think that in five years of war spent with the Lorraine Squadron I can look back on more than four or five combat missions in which I can claim to have behaved in the least like a good son. The months passed in the tedium of routine flights. I was posted with three Blenheims to Bangui, in French Equatorial Africa, to provide air cover for a territory where mosquitoes were the only serious threat from the sky. Our exasperation and frustration rapidly reached the boiling point and, merely to express our feelings and at least do something, we dive-bombed the Governor’s Residence with light exercise bombs, thereby discreetly indicating our mood to the authorities. We were not even punished. This sort of behavior was exactly what was expected of us. Then we tried to make ourselves as undesirable as possible and organized in the streets of the little town a procession of its illiterate and unsuspecting black citizens carrying banners inscribed: THE CIVILIANS OF BANGUI SAY SEND THE AIRMEN TO THE FRONT. Our nervous tension also tried to find release in games which, more than once, had tragic consequences. Mad acrobatics in worn-out planes and a deliberate courting of danger brought death to many a good pilot. On one such occasion, diving almost to ground level on a herd of elephants, our machine touched one of the animals and crashed, killing both elephant and pilot. Climbing out rather sheepishly, and as usual without a scratch, from the wreckage of the Luciole, I was greeted by a blow from the rifle butt of a Belgian game warden, whose indignant words “No one’s got the right to treat life like that!” have long remained in my memory. I was honored with fifteen days’ close arrest, during which I kept myself busy clearing the garden of my bungalow, where the grass grew each morning a good deal thicker and faster than the stubble on my cheeks. Another stretch of boredom and the friendly hand of Colonel Astier de Villatte finally extricated me from my gloomy hole, and I rejoined my squadron, which was then operating on the Abyssinian front.

  I wish, here and now, to make one thing perfectly clear: I did nothing, nothing at all. When one bears in mind the hope and trust in me, not only of my mother, but of practically the whole Buffa Market, I have no excuse.

  Certain incidents have completely escaped my memory. One of my friends, Perrier, whose word I would never dream of doubting, told me long after the war that once, when he returned to the bungalow we shared at Fort-Lamy, he found me under the mosquito net with a revolver pressed against my temple, and that he flung himself on me just in time to deflect the bullet. According to him, this bit of self-hatred was caused by despair and remorse and the fact that I could not reconcile myself to having abandoned in France, without resources of any kind, an aged and sick mother, only to find myself rotting, helpless and useless, far from the fighting line in some black hole under the Equator. I have no recollection of this disgraceful episode. It was not in the least like me; in my fits of despair, which are as transient as they are violent, it is against my enemies that I strike out and not against myself, and, far from cutting off my own ear like Van Gogh, it is to the ears of others that I give wistful thought. I must add, however, that the months immediately preceding September, 1941, have remained confused and vague in my memory as the result of a bad attack of typhoid in Damascus: six weeks of high fever and delirium resulted in a temporary amnesia which, even after it had gone, still left certain blank spots in my mind. So extreme had been my mental confusion under the impact of fever that the doctors expressed the view that, should I survive, my reason would be seriously impaired. I survived.

  I rejoined the squadron in the Sudan but, by that time, the Ethiopian campaign was already drawing to a close. Taking off from the Gordon’s Tree airfield at Khartoum, we no longer met any Italian fighters, and the few puffs of smoke from anti-aircraft guns which still greeted us resembled the last breaths of the dying. We usually returned at sunset, just in time for a visit to one or the other of the night clubs in which the English had “interned” the companies of Hungarian dancers who found themselves stranded in Egypt when their country entered the war against the Allies. After a pleasant night, we took off at dawn for another bombing of some wretched Italian garrison. It is easy to imagine with what feelings I read the letters in which my mother poured out her song of praise for my heroic deeds. Far from attaining the level of her expectations, I was reduced to seeking solace in the company of a lot of poor girls whose pretty faces grew thinner and thinner, almost while one watched, under the pitiless bite of the Sudanese sun in the month of May. We were obsessed by the feeling of manhood draining away, of stagnation and impotence while violent fighting was going on in Libya, and we did what we could do to reassure ourselves and to assert our virility.

  CHAPTER 39

  My despondency was the more acute because it followed in the wake of a brief moment of happiness experienced and now gone forever, leaving only a sad and bitter memory behind it. If I have not yet spoken of it it is from lack of talent. Each time I lift my head and take up my notebook again, the inadequacy of my voice and the poverty of the means at my command seem an insult to all I am trying to say, to everything I have loved. Someday, perhaps, a greater writer will discover in what I lived an inspiration worthy of his talent and then I will not have written these lines in vain.

  At Bangui I dwelt alone in a small bungalow hidden in a grove of banana trees, at the foot of a hill on which the moon perched each night like a luminous owl. After sunset, I would sit alone upon the terrace of the colonial club high above the river, overlooking the black tangle of equatorial forest on the opposite bank, where the Belgian Congo began, and listen to the only record they had left there, “Remember Our Forgotten Men.”

  One morning I saw her walking along the road by my bungalow, her breasts uncovered, on her head a basket of fruit: all the splendor of the female body in its tender youth, all the beauty of life, of hope, of laughter, a walk, a poise, so sovereign in its ease that it was as if nothing had ever died. Louison was sixteen, and when her body against mine gave me two hearts, I knew that I had kept all my promises and accomplished everything. I went to see her parents and we celebrated our union according to the rites of her tribe. The Austrian Prince Stahremberg, whom the hazards of a chequered life had led to Equatorial Africa as a pilot in my squadron, acted as my witness. Louison came to live with me. Never in my life have I fo
und greater joy merely in listening and watching. She did not speak a word of French, and yet talked constantly, and I understood nothing, except that life was lovely, happy and immaculate. Her voice had made me forever indifferent to any other music. My eyes never left her. The delicacy of her features, the incredible fragility of her wrists and ankles, the gaiety in her face, the softness of her hair—but what can I say here that would do justice to my memories and to the perfection I have known? And then, after a while, I began to notice that she suffered from a slight cough and, dreading tuberculosis in a body too beautiful to be safe from the enemy, I sent her to be examined by Dr. Vignes, our squadron M.O. The cough, he said, was nothing, but Louison had a curious mark on her arm which attracted his attention. He came to see me that same evening. He seemed worried. Everybody knew how happy I was—the sight of my happiness must have hurt the eyes of the monkey gods. He told me that Louison had leprosy and that we would have to part, but he said so without much conviction, guiltily lowering his eyes. I denied it. I simply denied it. I knew it was impossible: I could not believe in such a crime. I spent a terrible night with Louison, looking at her while she slept peacefully in my arms, and even in her sleep a smile of gaiety shone upon her face. Even today, I cannot say whether I loved her, or whether it was only that I could not stop looking at her. I held her in my arms as long as possible. Vignes never said a word, never insisted, never blamed me, and when I swore, blasphemed and threatened, he merely shrugged. She began treatments, but came back each night to sleep with me. Never have I clung to anything in my life with greater tenderness, with deeper pain. I refused to hear of our separating until it was explained to me, on the strength of an article in some medical publication which I did not altogether trust, that a new remedy against Hansen’s bacillus had recently been tried out at Leopoldville and that the results indicated that the disease could now be stabilized and perhaps even cured. I put Louison on board the famous “flying wing” which Warrant Officer Soubabère piloted twice a month between Brazzaville and Bangui. She left me and I stood there, on the airfield, utterly lost, my fists clenched, feeling as though not France alone but the whole world had now been occupied by the enemy.

  Every fortnight a Blenheim, piloted by Hirlemann, maintained military liaison with Brazza. It was arranged that I should go with him on his next trip. My whole body felt hollow. I felt the absence of Louison in every grain of my skin. My arms had become useless things.

  Hirlemann’s plane lost an airscrew over the Congo and crashed in the flooded forest. Hirlemann, Bequart and Crouzet were killed on the spot. Courtiaud, the mechanic, had a leg broken; for three nights and four days he fought off the red ants trying to get into the wound, and very nearly went mad. They had been my friends. Very fortunately an attack of malaria blacked me out completely for one whole week.

  My trip to Brazzaville had to be postponed until the return of Soubabère the following month. But he too vanished in the forests of the Congo with that strange “flying wing” which only he and Jim Mollison knew how to handle. I was ordered to rejoin my squadron on the Abyssinian front. I obeyed the order. I never saw Louison again. Three or four times I received news of her through friends in Brazza. She was being well looked after and there were hopes of a cure. She asked when I was coming back. She was gay. Then a curtain of silence fell. I wrote letters, I made inquiries through official channels, I sent sharply worded, insolent, raging telegrams. Nothing. The military authorities were icily noncooperative. I raged and protested. The sweetest voice in all the world was calling to me from some wretched African lazaret. I was sent to Libya. I was also told to undergo an examination to determine whether I had any symptoms of leprosy. I had none, but that was poor comfort. I had never imagined that one could be so haunted by a voice, by a neck, by shoulders, by hands. What I want to say is that she had eyes in which it was so good to live that I have never since known where to go.

  CHAPTER 40

  My mother’s letters were becoming shorter, mere pencil scribbles written in a hurry. They reached me four or five at a time. She was well. She was receiving the insulin regularly. “My glorious son, I am proud of you . . . Vive la France!” I found a table on the roof of the Royal, looking out on the steaming waters of the Nile, while mirages made the city look as though it were floating on a thousand lakes of melted lead, and I sat there, the letters in my hand, among the Hungarian dancers, and the Canadian, South African and Australian officers who crowded the dance floor and the bar, doing their best to persuade the girls to grant them their favors. They all had to pay. Only the French paid nothing, which proves that even after the defeat France had lost none of its prestige. I read and reread the loving, confident words while little Ariana, the sweetheart of one of our most popular pilot officers, came to sit with me from time to time between dances and studied me with curiosity.

  “Does she really love you?”

  Without the slightest hesitation or false modesty, I said that yes, she did.

  “And you?”

  As usual I played it tough. “Oh, women,” I replied, “you know how it is. They come and they go—we say in France: one lost, a thousand found.”

  “Aren’t you afraid she might be unfaithful to you while you’re away?”

  “No. Not that one. I’ve got a good grip on her.”

  “Not even if the war lasts for years and years?”

  “Not even.”

  “But you can’t really think that a normal woman can spend years alone, without a man, just for the sake of your bright blue eyes?”

  “But I do,” I answered. “I once knew a woman who remained without a man for years and years, just for the sake of someone’s bright blue eyes.”

  Off we went to Libya for the second offensive against Rommel, and in the very first days six of my French comrades and nine English fliers perished in the most tragic accident we had yet had. The kamsin was blowing hard that morning and, just as they were taking off upwind under the command of Saint Péreuse, the three pilots of our three Blenheims saw three English Blenheims suddenly come at them head-on out of a cloud of sand. In the kamsin, they had started in the wrong direction and they had the wind behind them. There were three thousand kilos of bombs on those planes and both formations had already built up to take-off speed. They were in that hundred-octane boost position—still on earth but condemned to go straight ahead—when it is impossible to maneuver. The formations crashed into one another and only Saint-Péreuse and his observer Bimont managed to avoid the collision. All the others were pulverized. For hours after, one could see dogs running about the sand with lumps of flesh in their jaws.

  By good luck I wasn’t flying that day. When the explosion took place I lay dying in the military hospital at Damascus. I had contracted typhoid with internal hemorrhages and the doctors who were looking after me, Captain Guyon and Major Vignes, weren’t giving me more than one chance in a thousand to pull through. I had had five transfusions but the hemorrhages continued. My friends came to my bedside, one after the other, to offer me their blood. I was nursed with true Christian devotion by a young Armenian nun, Sister Félicienne of the Order of Saint Joseph of the Lesser Apparition, who now lives in her convent close to Bethlehem. My delirium lasted for a whole fortnight but it took more than six weeks for my reason to return more or less completely. For a long while after the war I kept a complaint, sent through official channels to General de Gaulle, in which I protested against the administrative error as a result of which, I said, my name had been removed from the list of the living, which meant, as I pointed out, that neither privates nor N.C.O.’s saluted me, but behaved as though I did not exist. A few weeks before I fell ill I had been promoted to second lieutenant and, after what had happened at Avord, I attached a perhaps excessive value to the insignia of my rank and the external marks of respect which were due me.

  When it at last seemed obvious to the doctors that I had but a few hours to live, the Damascus air base was asked to provide the guard of honor to watch over my m
ortal remains in the hospital chapel. In the meantime, the Senegalese orderly had put my coffin in my room. During a momentary return to consciousness—these lucid periods usually followed a hemorrhage, which reduced my fever by draining off my blood—I caught sight of the coffin at the foot of my bed. Thinking quite rightly that it was some sort of lousy trap, I at once took flight. My legs were as thin as matchsticks, but I managed to drag myself into the garden, where a young convalescent was sunning himself. Seeing a specter tottering toward him, stark naked except for an officer’s cap, the wretched man uttered a piercing shriek and rushed to the guardroom. That same evening he had a relapse. In my delirium I had put on my second lieutenant’s cap with its brand new and recently acquired golden thread of rank, and I refused to be separated from it which seems to prove that the shock I had suffered three years before at Avord had been more severe than I knew. My death rattle was, it seems, exactly like the sound made by a soda-water syphon at its last gasp. My dear Bimont, who had made a dash from Libya in order to be present at my funeral, told me later that he had found the way I was hanging on to dear life slightly shocking and even indecent. I was insisting too much. There was a certain lack of style and elegance in my attitude toward the inevitable. It was rather disgusting, he said, almost like a miser hanging on to his pennies. And with that rather mocking smile that suited him so well—I hope he has kept it after all those years in Equatorial Africa, where he now lives—he said to me: “You really seemed to want to stay alive, old cock.”