September 1917
The leave comes through on the 3rd.
Henri reads it in the communication trench, between two sentry posts, standing in the mud, the paper in one hand, his rifle in the other. Four days. From 8 September. Grounds: imminent birth. The battalion commander has written in the margin, in his own hand: 'Granted. Good luck, Castayrol.'
Henri puts the paper away and carries on with his round. He says nothing. Not yet. He finishes his watch, goes back to the dugout, sits down, and only then does he say: 'I've got the leave.'
The shepherd looks at him. 'The child?'
'The child.'
Fayolle says: 'Hop it.' As if Henri could leave on the spot, as if the war were an office you walk out of by putting down your pen. But the meaning is there - hop it, go, run to the place where life is beginning, and leave us here with death, we'll manage, we always have.
Henri gets ready to leave. He hands the platoon over to Sergeant Lavigne, a solid NCO who came in with the spring reinforcements, who is not worth the shepherd but will do. He hands the shepherd over to the shepherd - Lacombe needs nobody to look after him. He hands the cat over to the shepherd too, which is an act of faith as much as an order. And he hands Marcel's cigar box over to Fayolle, because Fayolle is the only one he trusts enough to handle the lead type without losing any.
On the evening of the 7th, the eve of his departure, Pélissié comes to find Henri in the dugout. He has something in his hand - a sheet of paper folded in four, covered in his slow, careful handwriting. Henri unfolds the paper. It is a letter. Not a letter for his wife - a letter for Henri's child.
'Dear little one. You don't know me. I'm a soldier who can't write very well. It was your father taught me. Your father, he's a good man. Be like him. Signed: Pélissié, Jean-Pierre, private, 7th Infantry Regiment.'
Henri looks at Pélissié. Pélissié looks at him with his peasant's eyes, without expression, without expectation. He has written what he had to write. He has handed it over. That is all.
Henri puts the letter in his breast pocket. He says: 'Thank you, Pélissié.' It is not enough and it is all he can say, because what has just happened goes beyond words - a man who could not write eighteen months ago has written a letter to a child not yet born, and that letter is the proof that the world can be saved, one word at a time.
On the morning of 8 September, Henri leaves.
The train, the roads, the south. France in September, golden, harvested, the vines bowed under the grapes and the orchards heavy with apples. Henri crosses this land of plenty with the eyes of a man who comes from a land of mud, and the beauty is a pain and a promise, as it always is.
He reaches Figeac late on the evening of the 9th. The station is almost empty. Louise is not on the platform.
It is Émile who is there. Émile, Louise's brother, the schoolmaster from Capdenac, the one who started it all with a letter and a book. Émile with his limp and his smile, a smile a little too broad to be merely a smile of welcome.
Henri stops. His pack slides off his shoulder.
'Louise?' he says.
Émile says: 'She's well. Everyone's well.'
'The child?'
Émile's smile grows broader still, and Henri understands, all at once, like a silent detonation, like a shell that makes no noise.
'It's a girl,' says Émile. 'Born this morning. Three kilos two hundred grams. All's well.'
Henri does not remember the way from the station to the haberdashery. He must have walked, he must have gone up the street, pushed open the door, climbed the stairs. He does not remember. What he remembers is the door of Louise's room, open, and the light of the oil lamp, yellow, soft, and Louise in bed, her hair loose on the pillow, her face pale and luminous, her eyes shadowed and her eyes alive, and in her arms a bundle of linen with a face showing.
Henri stops on the threshold. He cannot move. His legs, which climbed the slope of the Chemin des Dames under the machine guns, which ran through the mud of the Somme, which held at Verdun for eight days - his legs refuse to go forward.
Louise sees him. She smiles. 'Come here,' she says.
Henri goes forward. Three steps. He sits down on the edge of the bed. He looks at the bundle. The face. A tiny face, crumpled, red, with closed eyes and a mouth making fish movements. Eyelashes. Eyebrows. Dark down on the scalp. Fingers - fingers so small they seem impossible, fingers clutching at nothing.
'Jeanne,' says Louise.
Jeanne. The girl is called Jeanne. Like the sister. Like the aunt who works at the Berliet works and fights for crèches and stools and the dignity of women. Like Rose's little girl with her nine months and her round cheeks. Jeanne.
Henri holds out his hands. Louise lays the child in them. The weight is inconceivable - three kilos, nothing, a feather, a breath, and at the same time the heaviest weight Henri has ever carried, heavier than the thirty-kilo pack, heavier than the rifle, heavier than the war.
The child opens her eyes. Blue eyes, blurred, that see nothing yet, that do not see the face of this thin man in horizon blue holding her in his calloused hands, but that sense him, perhaps, that sense the warmth and the smell and the trembling.
Henri is trembling. His hands are trembling. Hands that have not trembled since the Marne, hands that threw grenades without trembling, hands that held the pencil to write letters and correct exercises and trace letters on a slate. His hands are trembling because they are holding their reason for being, and a reason for being is a weight nothing prepares you to carry.
Louise's mother stands in the doorway, behind Henri. She says nothing. She watches her son-in-law hold her granddaughter, and on her spare, abandoned woman's face something changes - not a smile, not tears, something older, deeper. The satisfaction of seeing that the thread goes on. That the line holds. That a man is holding a child and the child is alive and the world has not stopped.
Three days in Figeac. Three days with Jeanne - little Jeanne, who must now be told apart from big Jeanne, the one in Lyon, the one with the stamp and the stools. Henri spends those three days in a state he has never known - a mixture of terror and happiness that will not come apart, that forms a new alloy, a metal he did not know existed.
He learns the movements. Holding the head. Changing the napkin. Rocking - that movement of the body which is not learnt but found again, as if the body knew how to rock before the mind learnt it. At night, when the little one cries, Henri gets up, picks her up, settles her against his shoulder, and walks up and down the room, three steps one way, three steps the other, humming something that is not a song but a sound, a low drone, and the child calms down, and Louise sleeps, and Henri walks in the dark with his daughter on his shoulder and the world has shrunk to this room, these three steps, this sound.
On the second day he sits in the yard behind the haberdashery, the little one in his arms, and talks to her. Not in baby talk - as a schoolmaster. He shows her the fig tree. 'That's a fig tree. Ficus carica. It makes figs. Figs are purple when they're ripe, and sweet. You'll eat them when you've got teeth.' The child sleeps against his chest, indifferent to the fig tree and to botany, and Henri goes on talking because talking to children is what he knows how to do, and this child is the first he has talked to not as a master but as a father.
Louise watches him from the window, leaning against the frame, still weak, still pale. She watches her husband telling their daughter about a fig tree, and she thinks of the Francis Jammes letter she sent three years ago to the schoolmaster she did not know, Émile's schoolfellow who was said to be a good sort. She regrets nothing. It is the rarest feeling of 1917 - to regret nothing.
On the third day, Henri takes out Pélissié's letter. He gives it to Louise. Louise reads it. 'Your father, he's a good man. Be like him.' Louise looks up, the letter in her hand. 'Is it the shepherd?'
'No. Pélissié. A farmer from Saint-Céré. He couldn't write a year and a half ago.'
Louise looks at the letter. The slow, careful handwriting, the letters a little too big, the spelling almost perfect. She puts the letter in the drawer of the bedside table, with the Francis Jammes and Henri's letters, and she says: 'We'll keep it for her. For when she's grown up.'
Henri nods. For when she's grown up. It is a sentence that takes a future for granted, and the future is the bravest thing anyone can take for granted in September 1917.
On 12 September, Henri leaves again.
It is the hardest departure. Harder than the others, harder than all the others. Because this time he is not leaving only Louise - he is leaving Jeanne. Little Jeanne, three days old, who does not yet know the world exists and will not know her father has gone, and whose ignorance is at once a grace and a cruelty.
Henri bends over the cradle. The child is asleep, fists clenched, mouth half open. He looks at her and engraves. Every feature, every fold, every eyelash. He engraves like a man taking a photograph with his eyes, because photographs are dear and eyes are free.
He kisses Louise. He shakes the mother's hand. He goes down the stairs. He goes out into the street. He walks towards the station.
He does not look back. Not because he does not want to - because he cannot. Looking back means seeing the bedroom window, and behind the window the cradle, and in the cradle the child, and the child is everything, and everything is too much for a man walking towards the war.
At the station, he gets on the train. The train pulls out. Figeac disappears. The causse slides past. And Henri sits in the compartment with his pack, his haversack, the cigar box, the Montaigne, the Goethe, the wooden dog, the ring on his finger, and in his breast pocket something new - a photograph. Louise had the Figeac photographer come that very morning, and the photograph is there, in his pocket, against his heart. Louise sitting, the little one in her arms, in front of the haberdashery. The fig tree showing at one side. The mother in the shadow, standing behind, straight as a post.
Henri touches the photograph. He touches the ring. He touches the wooden dog. His breast pocket is a country.
On 14 September, Henri is back. The trench, the mud, the noise - the same noise, always the same noise, which never stops. The shepherd greets him with the cat and a single word: 'Well?'
Henri takes out the photograph. He shows it. The shepherd looks. The men of the section look, one by one, as the photograph passes from hand to hand in the dugout. Louise, the little one, the fig tree, the haberdashery. Life.
The shepherd says: 'She's beautiful.' He does not say which - the woman or the child. It is the same thing.
Fayolle says: 'She's got your nose, Lieutenant.' Henri does not know whether it is a compliment or a condolence, and the laugh that follows is the laugh of the whole section, the laugh of men who have just seen the proof that the world goes on.
Pélissié says nothing. But in the evening he asks Henri whether the letter arrived. Henri says yes. Pélissié nods and goes back to his slate.
Henri pins the photograph up in the dugout, next to Lucienne Marty's drawing and the children's drawings from 1914. Louise, little Jeanne, the fig tree. A child's sun beside a woman's face. Before and after. The beginning and the beginning.
The shepherd looks at the photograph and says: 'Lieutenant.'
'Yes.'
'M. I know it.'
Henri looks at him. The shepherd's eyes are clear, clearer than usual, and in those eyes there is something that has not been there for months - direction. A purpose.
'I want to write to Madelou. Not just her name. A letter. Before Christmas.'
Henri calculates. Three months. Lacombe has got to M, to simple syllables. Three months to go from M-A-D-E-L-O-U to a whole letter. It is tight. It is possible. For a man who has learnt to survive Verdun, the Somme, the Chemin des Dames, learning to write a letter in three months is a reasonable aim.
'We'll get there,' says Henri.
The shepherd nods. The cat purrs. The candle burns. And in Henri's pocket, against the ring and Pélissié's letter, the photograph of his daughter, three days old, three kilos two hundred grams, blue eyes that see nothing yet but will see everything.