January to March 1919
Jeanne's child is born on 14 January, at three in the morning, in the flat at Vaise.
Not in hospital - at home. Because Jeanne said she would give birth at home, in her own bed, in her own house, in the place she has kept standing for four years, and nobody argues with a decision Jeanne makes, not any more. The midwife is there, a small, spare woman from the district who has brought half of Vaise into the world and is moved by nothing. Rose is there, in the kitchen, with the three children asleep on blankets on the floor. And Paul is there.
Paul is sitting in the passage, on a chair, his right hand on his knee, his left hand motionless in a sling he no longer wears but whose posture he keeps - the arm bent, the elbow against his side, the wounded man's reflex. He hears Jeanne. He hears the cries, the breathing, the silences between the cries. He does not move. There is nothing he can do. A man who has survived Verdun and the Somme and the Argonne can do nothing when his wife is giving birth, except sit on a chair in a passage and wait.
At three in the morning, a different cry. Smaller. Shriller. The cry of a being who did not exist a minute ago and exists now, who takes up space and sound and air, and who tells the world he is here.
The midwife opens the door. 'A boy.'
Paul gets up. He goes in. Jeanne is in the bed, soaked, emptied, alive. And in her arms, the boy. Red, crumpled, furious, fists clenched like his mother's, mouth open like his father's when he shouted in the trench. A boy of the peace, conceived in the war, born into the silence.
Paul sits on the edge of the bed. He looks at the boy. The boy is howling. Paul reaches out his right hand and touches the baby's forehead, a light brush of his fingers, and the boy falls silent. One second. Two. Then he starts crying again, because day-old babies do not stay quiet for long, even for their fathers.
Jeanne says: 'He's called Henri.'
Paul looks at her. They had not talked about it. Not about the name. Paul had assumed a family name - his father's, perhaps, or Jeanne's father's. But Jeanne has chosen, and Jeanne has chosen her brother's name, the schoolmaster, the soldier, the man who taught her that figures are a weapon and that women will not go back.
Paul nods. 'Henri.' He tries the word, tastes it, weighs it. 'Henri Vauterin.' His brother-in-law's name on his son. It is an honour and it is a debt, and Paul accepts both, because debts between men who have come through the war are not repaid - they are carried.
Rose comes into the bedroom with coffee. She sees the baby, she sees Jeanne, she sees Paul, and she says: 'Another one.' Then she smiles, and her smile says what her words do not - another child, another living soul, another thumb of the nose at death.
Henri learns of his nephew's birth from a letter of Jeanne's dated 16 January. He is still in Belgium, still waiting to be demobilised. The cat is on his knees, Pélissié is beside him, and Henri reads the letter aloud, because good news is for sharing.
'My dear Henri. You're an uncle. A boy, born on the 14th at three in the morning, three kilos four hundred grams, all's well. He's called Henri.'
Henri stops. He reads the name again. He looks at Pélissié. Pélissié looks at him. 'She's named him after you,' says Pélissié, with the factual precision that is his mark. Henri says nothing. He reads the letter again. 'He's called Henri.' His sister has given her son his name. The schoolmaster's name, not the soldier's. The name of the man who kept school in the mud.
He writes to Jeanne that same evening. Not a long letter - he does not need long letters with Jeanne. The Castayrols do not write each other long letters.
'Dear Jeanne. Thank you for the name. It's a lot. It's too much. It's right. Give little Henri a kiss from me, and tell him his uncle will teach him to read, and his aunt in Figeac will teach him beans, and that the world he's been born into is a better world than the one we lived in, because we wanted it better, and wanting is already half the way there.'
February. Demobilisation goes on, slowly, by classes, by length of service. Henri waits. He waits with the patience he does not have - Henri is not patient, Henri is methodical, which is different. He organises the waiting as he organised the trench - the evening school, the fatigues, the cleaning, the discipline. The discipline of peace is harder than the discipline of war, because war provides its own reason for obeying - survival - and peace provides none.
Pélissié leaves on 5 February. Class of 1910 like Henri, but longer in service, and demobilisation takes length of service into account. Pélissié gets his order one morning, reads it slowly - he always reads slowly, but he reads - and comes to find Henri.
'It's my turn, Lieutenant.'
Henri looks at Pélissié. Jean-Pierre Pélissié, a peasant from Saint-Céré, who spoke nothing but patois, who could neither read nor write, who came through the whole war without saying more than ten words a day and who now writes thirty every evening. The man who killed without hesitating and reads Montaigne without flagging. The man who wrote a letter to a child that was not his own and gave ewe's-milk cheese for a wedding.
Henri does not know what to say. He said goodbye to the shepherd in December, and that was already beyond words. Saying goodbye to Pélissié is beyond beyond.
Pélissié solves the problem. He takes the slate out of his haversack. The slate. The one from the beginning, from the first lesson, cracked, worn, grey with chalk, bearing the ghosts of a thousand words wiped away and written again. He puts it on the table, in front of Henri.
'For the little one,' he says. 'When she learns.'
Henri picks up the slate. It weighs nothing. It weighs everything. It is the heaviest object of the war, heavier than the rifle, heavier than the shells, because this object transformed a man, and transforming a man is the heaviest thing one man can do for another.
'Thank you, Pélissié.'
Pélissié nods. He picks up his pack, his rifle - for the last time - and goes out. He does not shake Henri's hand. It is not in his nature. He goes out, and as he goes he touches the door frame, a peasant's gesture, the gesture you make on leaving a house you have lived in - you touch the wood of the door to tell the wood you are leaving.
Henri stays standing with the slate in his hands. The cat jumps onto the table and sniffs the slate, and the slate smells of chalk and sweat and the trench and patience, and the cat loses interest because cats are not sentimental.
March 1919. The order comes.
'Second Lieutenant Castayrol, Henri, class of 1910, is demobilised with effect from 15 March 1919. Discharge depot: Cahors.'
Henri reads the order in the mess hall of the Belgian billet, standing, alone. No shepherd, no Pélissié, no Fayolle, no Marcel. Alone. With the cat and the cigar box and the Montaigne and the Goethe and the slate and the blue exercise book and the wooden dog and the ring and the photograph.
He packs his kit. The last packing. Everything that is left of four and a half years of war - the objects, the memories, the weight. The pack is light. A few kilos of cloth, paper, wood, lead. A few kilos that weigh a life.
The cat poses a logistical problem. You cannot demobilise a cat. There is no form for cats, no movement order, no travel warrant. Henri puts the cat in the shepherd's haversack - the haversack Lacombe left behind, worn, holed, smelling of wool-grease and cheese - and the cat accepts it, because the cat has always accepted the haversack, and the haversack is its world as Henri's pocket is his.
On the morning of 15 March, Henri climbs into the lorry. The last lorry. The drive to the station, the train, France sliding past. But this time in the other direction. Not north, not towards the front. South. Towards the Lot. Towards Figeac.
The journey takes two days. Troop train to Paris, the Gare du Nord, the Métro, the Gare d'Austerlitz, the civilian train south. Henri crosses Paris in uniform, the haversack on his shoulder, the cat inside it, and the Parisians look at him without seeing him, because soldiers in uniform are everywhere and Parisians stopped looking at them months ago. The war is over, the soldiers are coming home, it is normal, and what is normal is invisible.
On the train south, Henri sits by a window. The landscape slides past - the Beauce, the Berry, the Limousin, the Quercy. The fields are ploughed, the farms are standing, the rivers are flowing. The south of France has not been touched by the war - not a shell, not a trench, not a village destroyed. It is an intact country, a country at peace, and Henri looks at it with the eyes of a man coming back from a destroyed country, and the beauty is a violence, as on every leave, but this time the violence is final, because this time it is the last.
The train slows down. The cliffs of the Lot appear, white, sheer, with holm oaks clinging to the slopes. The Lot, below, green and slow. The poplars still bare - it is March, the spring is hesitating. And the station. Figeac station. The platform. The lamp.
Henri gets down from the train. The cat stirs in the haversack. The air is cold, damp, it smells of river and stone. Henri puts his pack down on the platform and looks.
Louise is there.
She is at the end of the platform, standing, in her coat, and beside her a little girl holding her hand, a little girl of eighteen months, with dark curls and blue eyes, Henri's eyes, looking at the train with the gravity of children who do not yet understand but can feel.
Henri walks towards them. His steps ring on the empty platform. Louise does not move. Little Jeanne does not move. The cat does not move. The world does not move. And Henri walks, and every step is one step less between war and peace, between absence and presence, between the man he was and the man he will be.
He stops in front of Louise. He looks at her. She looks at him. Eighteen months since the last time. Eighteen months in which the little one has learnt to walk, to talk, to live, and Henri has seen none of it, and that none is a hole in time he will never fill.
Louise says: 'You're here.'
Henri says: 'I'm here.'
Then he crouches down. Little Jeanne looks at him. She does not recognise him - how could she, she has seen him only once, at three days old, and babies of three days remember nothing. She looks at him with the careful wariness of children faced with strangers, and Henri is a stranger to his own daughter, and it is the last wound of the war, and it is the first wound of the peace.
'Jeanne,' says Henri. 'It's Papa.'
The little girl looks at him. She looks at her mother. She looks at the man crouching in front of her, this thin man in a blue uniform with mended spectacles and wet eyes. And she does something no book on teaching foresees and no schoolmaster can teach - she reaches out her hand and touches Henri's face, with her fingertips, as the old Belgian woman touched his sleeve in August, to make sure it is real.
Henri takes his daughter's hand in his. The hand is tiny. The hand is warm. The hand is alive.
The cat comes out of the haversack and jumps down onto the platform, and little Jeanne lets go of Henri's hand and says her first word to her father: 'Cat!'
Henri laughs. Louise laughs. And the cat of the war meets the daughter of the peace on a station platform in the Lot, in March 1919, and the world begins again.