clever dick. She’s mad about us.’
‘It makes me feel sick.’
‘We’ll pay her back a hundred times over.’
The time for hesitating was over. Palfy turned and walked away. Inside the café the young woman was sitting at a table on her own. She smiled when she saw him walk in.
‘So it is you,’ she said.
Jean had never read On Love.3 Had he ever opened it, he would probably have shut it again immediately. Theories left him cold, and the philosophy of love had not yet revealed itself to him. Jostled and pre-empted by reality, as spoilt as a little prince and punished as only the innocent are, he had never thought love could be expressed in cut-and-dried formulas. The cold-eyed clarity of Stendahl’s Julien Sorel, punctuated by outbursts of frenzy, left him annoyed and disbelieving. In truth, being incapable of calculation, he found it natural that fortune should smile on him more than other young men of his age. Life had granted him, very young, two capital experiences and he felt they would never be repeated, at least not in the same way. A shred of reason restrained him – reason that was swept away by the words ‘So it is you’ and by the amused look the speaker directed at him. He felt suddenly awkward and ridiculous, and so inferior to the lovely woman staring at him that it was all he could do not to take to his heels. Sitting facing her, he was unaware that the crystallisation around her fleeting outline had turned into a real love that was almost comfortable in its reciprocity, however undeclared it was, and that he was preparing for this young woman with her nose dotted with pale freckles, her unmade-up mouth that scorned lipstick, and short hair that exposed her lovely, gazelle-like neck, to be the love of his life – even long after everything was finished between them – and that his only distress, as it is with every happy love, would be not to know how to love her enough. In short, as she sat in front of him with her chin resting on the palm of a hand ornamented at the wrist by a green malachite bracelet, she was the natural intermediary a boy of twenty needed in order to embark upon manhood.
It would be so much kinder not to smile. Jean’s feeling for Claude and hers for him have coalesced within a drama containing plenty of burlesque elements. We ought to overlook the participation of Madame Michette and the girls at the Sirène. Let us just lament, by way of excuse, that the ways of love are impenetrable. Fortunately that’s all too true. The situation and timing are ill-chosen: the country is split down the middle by a defeat that has left it stunned. People are nursing their bruises and wounds, counting their dead, their missing, their prisoners. Without the saving grace of a cowardly relief that the adventure had been no worse, there would be little place left for the love that is blossoming, masked by a discreet ruefulness, between a young man of twenty and a young woman of twenty-five.
There is no mistaking some raising of eyebrows at the mention of their ages. Is Jean destined for ever to love women who are older than him? Let us remember that in those distant times women did not start making love as soon as they reached puberty. It was thus inevitable that a fine figure of a boy, as the novelists have it, should experience his first amorous awakenings with women who are a little more, or even much more, experienced than he is. With of course one exception: Chantal de Malemort, who by her conduct at Jean’s age had wrecked the idea of a pure love blossoming in a sylvan paradise, dawning in a provincial mansion and rudely sundered from its ideals in a cramped bohemian bedroom in Paris, in Rue Lepic. So here they are, these two, Jean and Claude, each subtly attracted to the other, and I am very tempted to talk of magic. In fact magic it certainly is if we enumerate the combination of circumstances necessary to bring this encounter about. If a single detail were out of place, the whole thing would be impossible. If, for instance – as Jean imagined, thinking about his Italian journey of 1936 – a thief had not stolen his bicycle, if the consular official had not shown him the door instead of offering him his help, if he had not met the truck driver, Stefano, the lover of Mireille Cece, if Mireille had not squeezed him dry with her insatiable appetite, if, as he fled from her, he had not met Palfy disguised as a priest in his elderly Mathis, and so on … he would never have found himself, one July afternoon, at a café table on Place de Jaude facing a young woman who, in any other circumstances, he would have had no reason to be meeting. We might ask ourselves some questions about the impressive intelligence of chance, which has been preparing for a long time for this inevitable event, and preparing for it with such minute attention to detail that no electronic brain could match it. It is an observation that leaves us with few illusions about our freedom of choice, but what does it matter if the result is the one we have been preparing for from birth? Out of the air we plucked the theft of Jean’s bicycle at Ostia, but there are a thousand other events whose sequence is equally necessary. And so must we also, in the same context, thank chance for having thrown Chantal into the arms of Gontran Longuet and Sergeant Tuberge for abandoning his men in their foxholes. The backstage scene is one of an immense watchmaker’s mechanism of cogs and wheels of such complexity that they pass all human understanding. Only the result counts, and for now Claude and Jean are face to face.
We shall compress the account of the first meeting of these two beings, already in love and still swimming in that atmosphere of happy awkwardness and sweet felicity that precedes the moment of fateful pronouncements. So as not to keep the reader in suspense any longer, we shall provide some details about Claude, at least the ones we know, unconnected with her character, whose slow discovery is Jean’s business. She is French on her father’s side, Russian on her mother’s. We shall refrain from mentioning Slavic charm, out of consideration for those who witnessed the arrival of the first Soviet troops in Poland, Silesia, Pomerania and East Germany, and, later, the triumphal entry of the liberators into Hungary and Czechoslovakia. That so-called quality may well be one of those ghastly clichés you still hear bandied about in nightclubs. Claude’s aura expresses itself in a different way, more like a poem whose lines are arranged in the form of drawings, in words that write themselves around her when she speaks and smiles.
I am conscious of having mentioned her smile a great deal already. That is because each time it appears in her natural, unmade-up features it is an extraordinary summons, an instant temptation, an expression one would give one’s soul to see appear. So why is she not surrounded by a swarm of admirers battling to get closer to her, elbowing each other aside, loathing their rivals and planning their victorious offensive? For the simple reason that charm and grace are not apparent to everyone and this exquisite young woman lacks one crucial quality that excites and fans men’s passions: she is incapable of being a bitch.
So far only one man had disregarded this shortcoming. His name was Georges Chaminadze, and Caucasian blood ran in his veins. He was the father of the small boy with blue-green eyes who we shall encounter a few days after the first meeting with Claude, in a third-class railway carriage steaming slowly up to Paris. In the same compartment are six other people, all with set faces, who clearly dislike the presence of this boisterous child with the strange name of Cyrille. Jean is trying to get him interested in some drawings of monsters that he is sketching in an exercise book, while Claude stares out of the window at the countryside rolling past on the other side of the demarcation line.4 France is in the fields. Between Paris and the Loire the war has left few serious scars on the land. There is no sign of crops flattened by tanks, and only occasionally an abandoned truck at the side of the road or an aerodrome where planes were burnt where they stood on the morning of 10 May, at the sacrosanct coffee hour. A horse drags a wagon with a cot balanced on its roof. The crossing keeper chases his children, playing on the level crossing. The sun is shining. The summer of 1940 is superb, soft and golden. Three fighter planes – Messerschmitt 109s – fly over the train, showing their camouflaged undersides decorated with the black cross of the Luftwaffe. On a river bank there are even some fishermen sitting with their rods, two wearing straw hats, one in a beret. Paris is approaching: suburban burrstone houses and sad-looking apartment blocks, their shutters closed above shops still locked and dark. The train slows. Cyrille is at the window. Scrambling onto Claude’s knees, his feet have made her skirt ride up. Jean sees her knee for the first time. He places his hand on it, and she gives him a glance of reproof. The other passengers pull down their suitcases and parcels. Impatience and clumsiness make their natural rudeness worse. They would trample you underfoot rather than