December 1916
Henri leaves on the morning of the 22nd.
The cold is dry, the sky white, the mud of the Somme frozen into grotesque shapes that crack underfoot. Henri goes back through the communication trenches towards the rear with his pack and his haversack, and in the haversack the wooden dog, the Montaigne, the Goethe, and a clean uniform he has had brushed and darned by a tailor at the depot - horizon-blue trousers without a stain, a greatcoat that is almost new, the second lieutenant's rank braid sewn back on straight. He has polished his boots. It is the first time he has polished his boots since 1914.
The shepherd watched him leave from the entrance of the dugout, the cat against his chest. Fayolle said: 'Bring back some cake, Lieutenant.' Marcel said: 'Kiss the bride for us.' Pélissié gave Henri a piece of ewe's-milk cheese his wife had sent in a parcel - cheese from the Causse de Gramat, hard as a stone, that smelt of wool-grease and thyme. 'For the meal,' said Pélissié. It is the wedding present of a man who has nothing to give but the cheese from his ewes, and it is the finest present Henri has ever received.
The journey takes thirty-six hours. The troop train to Amiens, the civilian train to Paris, the change at Austerlitz, the night train south. Henri sleeps in fits and starts, his head against the window, rocked by the rhythm of the train and by a tiredness that never entirely leaves him now. He crosses France by night. The stations go by, lit by yellow lamps - Limoges, Brive, and suddenly the Lot, the valley, the cliffs in the dark, and the train slowing down and stopping.
Figeac. 23 December, six in the morning. It is still dark. The platform is empty, cold, wet. Henri gets down, puts down his pack, and waits for his eyes to get used to the darkness. A figure at the end of the platform. Louise. A coat, a hat, a scarf. She walks towards him, and Henri walks towards her, and they meet in the middle of the platform, in the halo of a lamp, and Henri puts his hands on Louise's shoulders and looks at her.
'You're here,' he says.
'You're here,' she says.
They are the same words. They are the only words.
The eve of the wedding is a day of meticulous preparations that keep everyone busy and stop everyone thinking about what might not happen - an alert, a recall, an order, a telegram. The war can take Henri back at any moment. But the war, for once, does not take him back.
Louise's mother has cleaned the haberdashery from top to bottom. The windows shine, the counter is polished, the reels of thread are lined up by colour with a military precision that would do Verdier credit. Upstairs, the kitchen is ready - a white tablecloth borrowed from the neighbour, plates that do not match but are clean, crystal glasses that have come from heaven knows where and that the mother is bringing out for the first time in ten years.
Émile Soulié arrives at midday, on the train from Capdenac. He limps, he laughs, he embraces Henri with an effusiveness quite unlike him - Émile is ordinarily a reserved man, a calm schoolmaster, but the occasion is beyond reserve. It was he who wrote to Henri, two and a half years ago, to tell him about his sister. It was he who set all this off, with a letter and a book by Francis Jammes, and he knows it, and he is proud of it, and he says so: 'It's all my doing. I claim the credit.'
And Jeanne arrives.
The Lyon train sets her down at three in the afternoon on 23 December. Henri is waiting for her on the platform - the same platform, the same lamp, a different face. Jeanne steps down from the carriage and Henri does not recognise her. Not at once. The woman getting off the train is not the Jeanne he left in August 1914 - the one who went charring for the Bernardins, who kept letters in a biscuit tin, who never raised her voice. The woman getting off the train is a factory hand, a head inspector, a union woman, a woman who walks with her shoulders straight and a gaze that no longer needs permission to settle where it likes.
They look at each other. Two and a half years. Henri is a thin second lieutenant with mended spectacles and a star on his sleeve. Jeanne is a woman in a grey coat with calloused hands and eyes that have watched the world change.
'Jeanne.'
'Henri.'
They hold each other on the platform, hard, for a long time, and Henri feels his sister's body against him, thinner than before, harder, and he understands that Jeanne has fought her own war, and that her war has no medal, though it deserves one.
24 December 1916. Christmas Eve. The wedding.
The town hall in Figeac is a building of white stone, plain, republican. The mayor is an old Radical, Dr Labrousse, who has married three hundred couples in his career and has never made a speech of less than twenty minutes. But that morning, facing a second lieutenant in uniform, a schoolmistress in a blue dress, a brother with a limp, a sister who has come from Lyon and a mother who does not cry, Dr Labrousse does something unusual. He cuts it short. Not out of indifference - out of respect. He sees the star on the sleeve, he sees Henri's eyes, and he understands that this man has no need of a speech on the duties of marriage. He needs a signature.
The words of the Republic. The articles of the Civil Code. 'Do you declare that you take as your wife...' 'Do you declare that you take as your husband...' Henri says yes for the third time in this war - the first yes to the mobilisation, the second to the rank, the third to Louise. The third is the only one he has chosen.
Louise says yes in a clear voice, without a tremor, her eyes on Henri, and Henri hears that yes and thinks of the yes on the postcard, the one from the bridge at Capdenac, a single syllable that held the world. This yes is the same, but spoken aloud, in front of people, in front of the law, in front of the future, and it is heavier and lighter at the same time.
Émile signs as witness. Jeanne signs. Her hand does not shake. Her signature is clear - 'J. Vauterin' - the same one she puts every day on the dispatch notes at the Berliet works, and as she signs she thinks that this is the first time her stamp is not needed and her hand is enough.
Louise's mother sits in the front row, upright, spare, motionless. She does not cry. She will not cry. But when Henri and Louise come out of the town hall, married, the mother makes a gesture nobody expected - she takes Henri's hand, grips it, for a second, hard, and lets it go. It is the gesture of an abandoned woman entrusting her daughter to a man and telling him, through the pressure of her fingers, what her lips will never say: don't do what the other one did.
The wedding meal is in the haberdashery kitchen. There are seven of them - the bride and groom, the mother, Émile, Jeanne, the postmistress from Capdenac, who invited herself because she has followed the whole story through the envelopes, and the old curé of Figeac, who has come to bless the marriage even though the couple are secular, because in the Lot in 1916 the curé always comes, and nobody tells him no, and nobody regrets it.
The mother has cooked. Confit of duck, potatoes sarladaise, a walnut salad, a prune cake. Pélissié's cheese is on the table, next to the confit, and Henri says: 'This cheese was given to me by a farmer from Saint-Céré. His name is Pélissié.' Nobody asks any questions. The cheese is eaten with the respect owed to the gifts of silent men.
The wine is Cahors, black, thick, a wine that stains the teeth and warms the belly. Émile gives a toast - 'To the bride and groom, and to peace' - and the word 'peace' drops into the kitchen like a stone into water, and the ripples spread, and everyone drinks in silence, because peace is the word one now only dares to say as a wish.
Jeanne watches her brother. Henri is smiling. It is a smile she has never seen on him - not the smile of the student who read Jaurès, not the smile of the schoolmaster talking about his pupils, but a man's smile, slow, deep, a smile that knows what it has been through and what lies ahead and smiles anyway.
After the meal, Henri and Louise are alone.
The mother is in bed. Émile has gone to stay with a friend. Jeanne is sleeping in the spare room. The haberdashery is closed, the shutters drawn, the fire dying in the stove. Henri and Louise are in Louise's room, under the eaves, a small room with a narrow bed and a window that looks out over the rooftops of Figeac.
What happens in that room will not be written. Not because it is unspeakable - because it is private. It is the only private thing Henri has had left for two years, the only thing the war cannot take from him, and he keeps it, as he keeps the letters in his breast pocket, as he keeps the wooden dog, as he keeps the names of the dead in his notebook. Sacred things are not told. They are lived, and they remain.
On 25 December, Christmas Day, Henri and Louise wake up married.
It is a grey, cold morning, with frost on the windowpanes and the sound of the church bell ringing. Henri opens his eyes and sees Louise's face on the pillow, her hair loose, her eyes closed, her lips parted. He watches her sleep and does not move, because this moment is the most perfect of his life and he does not want to lose a second of it.
Louise opens her eyes. She sees Henri. She smiles. 'Good morning, Monsieur Castayrol.'
'Good morning, Madame Castayrol.'
It is the first time Louise has borne that name. It is a soldier's name and a schoolmaster's name, a name that comes from Cahors and will go to Figeac, and Louise wears it the way one wears a wedding ring - aware of what it binds her to.
Jeanne leaves on the 25th, by the evening train. Henri walks her to the station. On the platform they are alone, brother and sister, on Christmas night, and Henri says something he never says, because he does not know how to say such things, because the Castayrols do not say such things, because words of love between a brother and a sister are harder than words of love between a man and a woman.
'Jeanne, what you're doing - the factory, the union, the women - it matters as much as what I'm doing. More, perhaps. Because when it's all over, what'll be left won't be the trenches. It'll be what you lot built while we were destroying.'
Jeanne looks at him. She does not cry. The Castayrols do not cry. But her eyes shine in the light of the lamp, and she says: 'Take care of yourself. And take care of your wife. She's a good one.'
The train comes in. Jeanne gets on. Henri stays on the platform. The train pulls out. The red lights fade into the night. Henri stays a moment, alone, in the cold, then he walks back up to the haberdashery, to Louise, to the two days that are left.
On 27 December, Henri leaves again.
The platform. The train. The ritual. Louise is there, upright, in her coat, her face closed by the discipline she imposes on herself and which is her form of courage. Henri looks at her, and this time it is different from all the other times, because this time the woman on the platform is his wife, and the thread that ties them is no longer a thread of letters and promises - it is a thread of law, of wedlock, of a shared name.
'You're coming back,' says Louise.
It is not a question.
'I'm coming back,' says Henri.
The train pulls out. Figeac disappears. The causse slides past. And Henri sits in the compartment, with his pack, his haversack, the wooden dog, the Montaigne, the Goethe, and in his breast pocket something new - a gold wedding ring, thin, plain, which Louise bought at the jeweller's on the place Vival with her schoolmistress's savings, and which weighs three grams and the whole weight of the world.
On 29 December, Henri is back in the trench. The mud has thawed. The noise has started again. The shepherd is waiting for him with the cat and a look that asks the question without asking it.
Henri raises his left hand. The ring gleams in the grey light of the dugout. The shepherd looks at the ring, nods, and says: 'That's good.'
Marcel says: 'The cake?'
Henri takes out of his haversack a parcel wrapped in a tea towel. Louise's mother's prune cake, a little squashed by the journey, a little dry, but whole. He puts it down on the crate that serves as a table, and the men gather round - the shepherd, Fayolle, Marcel, Pélissié, the others, twenty-six men round a wedding cake in a dugout on the Somme, on 29 December 1916.
Henri cuts the cake with his knife. He hands it out. Each man takes his share and eats in silence. It is a prune cake, an ordinary cake, and it is the most extraordinary cake of the war, because it comes from a place where people get married, where mothers cook, where the fire burns in the stove, where the sheets smell of lavender.
The shepherd eats his share, gives a piece to the cat, and says: 'She cooks well, your mother-in-law.'
It is Antoine Lacombe's longest sentence since the puppy. Henri smiles. The ring turns on his finger, a little loose - his hands are thinner than they were, the hands of the war. But the ring is there. And it holds.
31 December 1916. The third New Year of the war.
Henri is in the dugout. The candle is burning. The notebook is open. He writes:
'31 December. Married. Alive. The year to come will be what it will be. I no longer promise fate anything, because fate does not keep its promises. But I promise Louise that I will come back. It is the only promise that counts, and I shall keep it or die keeping it.
The men are here. The shepherd. Fayolle. Marcel. Pélissié. The cat. We ate wedding cake in a hole and it was a feast.
1917 tomorrow. God keep us, if God exists. And if He does not, we shall keep ourselves. We know how.'
He closes the notebook. He blows out the candle. The cat lies down on the shepherd's bunk. The shepherd lies down. Fayolle lies down. Marcel lies down. Pélissié is already asleep.
Henri touches the ring in the dark. Three grams of gold. The weight of the world. And the world holds.