August 1916
Henri has leave.
Seven days. It is the first since December, the first since Verdun and the Somme, and when the order comes down he stands still for a moment, the paper in his hand, as if the word 'leave' were written in a language he has forgotten. Seven days. Seven days without noise, without mud, without dead men. Seven days of another world - the one where people sleep in beds, eat at tables, and do not look at the sky to guess where the shell will come from.
He does not go to Cahors. He goes straight to Figeac.
The train crosses summer France - the vineyards of the Bordelais, the hills of the Périgord, the causses of the Quercy. Henri is sitting in a third-class compartment, his forehead against the window, watching the country he is fighting for go by, this country of ripe wheat, slow rivers, villages with slate roofs, and he finds it beautiful with an intensity that hurts. He does not cry. He stopped crying a long time ago. But beauty, when you come back from where he is coming back from, is a form of violence.
Louise is waiting for him at the station. She is wearing the blue dress. Henri gets down from the train, puts his kitbag on the platform, and looks at her. Two seconds. Three. Then Louise steps forward and takes him in her arms, without a word, in the middle of the platform, in front of people, in front of the postmistress watching from her window, in front of the stationmaster who looks away out of tact. She holds him tight. Henri puts his hands on Louise's back and his hands do not shake, and that is the only victory in the whole of this war that counts.
They walk to the haberdashery. Louise's mother is waiting for them in the kitchen, with the soup and the cheese and the walnut wine she makes herself. Henri eats. The mother watches him eat and says nothing, but her eyes say what mothers see - a man worn out, thinner, aged ten years in two, eating the soup as if it were the last meal in the world.
In the evening, Louise takes him to the spare room above the haberdashery. A small room, clean, with a bed, a table, a water jug and a white towel. Henri looks at the bed. A bed. With sheets. Real sheets, smelling of lavender. He sits down on the edge of the bed and takes off his boots and his feet touch the wooden floor and he stays there, sitting, his bare feet on the wood, and he does not move.
Louise is in the doorway. She looks at him. She does not say 'Are you all right?' because he is not all right and they both know it. She says: 'I'm here.'
Henri looks up at her. 'I know.'
She shuts the door. She stays on her side of it. They are not married. It is 1916, it is the Lot, she is the haberdasher's daughter. Some doors do not open yet.
Henri sleeps for fourteen hours.
The seven days in Figeac are the most beautiful of Henri's war. Not because anything extraordinary happens. Because nothing happens. Nothing extraordinary. Ordinary things. Things from before.
In the morning, he goes down to the haberdashery and helps Louise's mother open the shutters. He drinks a coffee in the kitchen while Louise leaves for school - she is giving catch-up lessons in August, for the children who fell behind during the year. Henri stays in the shop. He sorts the reels of thread by colour, he tidies the boxes, he glues back a shelf that leans. The mother watches him with a smile she does not show. A man who sorts reels of thread is a man who wants to stay.
In the afternoon, he walks. Alone, or with Louise when she has finished. They walk along the Célé, the little river that joins the Lot at Bouziès, and they walk the paths of the causse, between the junipers and the dry-stone walls, and Henri finds the landscape of his childhood again with the stupefaction of a shipwrecked man finding dry land. The white stones, the thyme, the butterflies, the silence. The silence above all. Real silence, the kind that is not the absence of noise but the presence of peace.
One afternoon, they climb up onto the causse above Capdenac and sit on a low stone wall. The Lot is below, blue and green, lined with poplars. The sky is immense. Louise sits beside Henri, her hands on her knees, and she does not speak, because she has understood that silence is what Henri needs - not the awkward silence of people who have nothing to say, but the chosen silence of people who have everything to say and know that words are not enough.
Henri talks all the same. Not about the war - not directly. He talks about Pélissié. About the evening school. About Pélissié's first letter to his wife, five shaky lines on a scrap of paper. About Lucien Combes, who read Montaigne and is in hospital with a splinter in his stomach. About the charcoal burner from Souillac, who learned to read with owl's spectacles and will read no more.
He talks about what counts. Not the battles, not the offensives, not the communiqués. What counts is a peasant learning to write his wife's name. It is a sixteen-year-old kid discovering Montaigne. It is a charcoal burner seeing letters for the first time in his life and saying 'bloody hell' with a child's eyes. The war destroys everything, but in the cracks of the destruction, something grows. Something stubborn, irreducible. Henri does not know what to call it. Louise says: 'School.'
Henri looks at her. 'Yes. School. Even out there. Out there most of all.'
On the fourth day, Henri goes to Labastide-Murat.
He takes the slow local train in the morning, two hours of crawling across the causse, and arrives in the village at midday. Nothing has changed. The church, the town hall, the café, the school. The school is shut - it is summer, and the retired man who is standing in for him is at home. Henri looks at the school from outside, the shutters closed, the playground empty, the stone bench where he used to sit in the evenings to mark his papers. He touches the door. The wood is warm under his hand.
He goes to the Delpechs'. Old Delpech is in his yard, sitting on a log, a knife in his hand, whittling a pickaxe handle. He sees Henri coming and gets up, slowly, and the two men shake hands without a word. Young Delpech - the one Henri went to fetch back in March 1914, the one with the leaving certificate - young Delpech is fifteen now. He works the land with his grandfather and his sisters, because his father is at the front, somewhere in Champagne, alive when last heard of.
Henri eats with the Delpechs. Soup, bread, ewe's cheese. Old Madame Delpech does not speak, but she puts in front of Henri a plate so full it would take three men to finish it. That is her way. Old Delpech says: 'The school's all right. The stand-in's not bad. But it's not the same.' Henri nods. It's not the same. Nothing is the same.
On his way back, he passes the Martys' farm. He hesitates. Then he pushes open the gate. Madame Marty is in the yard, feeding the hens. She sees Henri and wipes her hands on her apron. Henri asks for news of Lucienne.
Madame Marty smiles. A real smile, the first Henri has seen on a peasant woman's face for a long time. 'The schoolmistress from Capdenac found her a place. In Cahors. The girl left in April. She draws.'
She draws. Lucienne draws. The seed sown in 1914, watered by Louise in 1916, has come up. Henri thanks Madame Marty, shakes the hand of the father coming in from the fields, and takes the train back to Figeac with something in his chest that is like joy - not the bright joy of before, that joy is dead. A humbler joy. The joy of a schoolmaster who learns that a pupil draws.
On the sixth day, Henri talks to Louise about the future.
They are in the kitchen, in the evening, the mother in bed, the house silent. Henri has a glass of wine in front of him, and the words come, one by one, like stones laid to build a wall.
He wants to ask for a transfer to Figeac after the war. He wants to marry Louise. He wants a school, a house, a garden. He wants children. He says it all in order, like a report, because he no longer knows how to talk except in lists and facts, and Louise listens, her hands round her cup, and she does not laugh at the list and the report, because she knows it is his way of saying immense things.
'And you?' says Henri. 'What do you want?'
Louise thinks. Not for long. 'I want the school. I want children. I want to go on teaching. And I want a garden big enough for tomatoes and beans.'
Henri smiles. It is the slowest smile of his life, a smile that starts deep down and rises, and Louise sees it and she smiles too, and for ten seconds, in a kitchen in Figeac, in August 1916, two schoolteachers smile as they talk about beans, and the war does not exist.
The seventh day. The departure.
Henri packs his kitbag. The Montaigne, the Goethe, the letters, the notebook. Louise has knitted him a muffler - not blue this time, grey, from the wool of the causse ewes, rough and warm. He puts it in the bag and feels the wool under his fingers and thinks of the blue muffler from the war godmother, the one from 1914, worn down to the weft, left behind somewhere in a trench on the Aisne.
At the station, Louise does not cry. She kisses him - on the lips, this time, not on the forehead, not on the cheek. A brief kiss, firm, precise. Then she steps back and watches him get into the train.
Henri is at the window. The train whistles. Louise says: 'You're coming back.'
It is not a question. It is the same sentence as last time, in December. An order. A pact. Henri says: 'I'm coming back.'
The train leaves. Figeac disappears. The causse goes by, white under the August sun, with the junipers and the stone walls and Lacombe's ewes grazing somewhere down there, looked after by a woman and an old man and a dog called Flòc.
In Lyon, Jeanne is living through an August of work and heat and something else.
Paul has written. Not a card - a letter. Three pages. It is the longest letter Paul has ever written, and Jeanne reads it standing in the kitchen, in the evening, back from the factory, her hands still black.
Paul talks. For the first time, he talks about the war. Not about battles, not about shells - about men. About the chap from Saint-Étienne, his friend, his anchor. About a Breton stretcher-bearer who sings hymns as he carries the wounded. About a lieutenant of twenty-two he respects. About a stray dog that followed the regiment for three weeks and disappeared one morning. And he says something Jeanne was not expecting: 'I've understood why the union matters. Not for the politics. For dignity. Here, men don't have any dignity left. We're treated like materiel. They wear us out, they replace us, they throw us away. When I come home, I'll fight so that nobody gets treated like that. Nobody. Not the workers, not the women, not anybody.'
Jeanne reads 'not the women' and puts the letter down. Then she picks it up again and rereads. 'Not the women.' Paul has written 'not the women'. It is not a concession - it is a recognition. Paul, the worker, the trade unionist, the man who said nothing when his wife went charring for the bourgeois, Paul has seen something in the trench that has opened his eyes to what women have always lived through - the wearing out, the replacing, the invisibility.
Jeanne puts the letter away in the biscuit tin. The tin has not shut for a long time. She will need a second tin. Or a chest.
On 31 August, Henri is back at the front. The Somme, still. The battle has been going on for two months and shows no sign of ending. The gains are tiny, the losses immense, and the war of attrition grinds both armies with the impartiality of a millstone.
The shepherd greets him with the cat on his shoulder and one word: 'Leave?' Henri says: 'Good.' The shepherd nods. He does not ask for details. He looks at Henri's face and sees what he needs to see - a man who has come back from the rear with something in his eyes that was not there before. Something alive.
Marcel says: 'You look well, Sergeant.'
Fayolle says: 'Did you bring any saucisson?'
Henri has brought saucisson. Confit too, in a jar Louise's mother slipped into his bag, wrapped in a tea towel. And ewe's cheese from the Delpechs. And a drawing by Lucienne Marty, sent by the school in Cahors, which Louise put in an envelope - a portrait, in pencil, of a woman bent over a haberdasher's counter. Louise's mother. Lucienne has drawn someone she has never seen, from Louise's description, and the result is striking.
Henri pins the drawing up in the dugout, beside the children's drawings from 1914, the ones from the school at Labastide. The two drawings look at each other - one by a kid of seven who drew a yellow sun, and one by a girl of fourteen who draws like an adult. Two years between them. Two years of war, of mud, and of pencils that have not let go.
The shepherd looks at Lucienne's drawing and says: 'She's good.' It is the longest artistic compliment of Antoine Lacombe's career.