THE NAMES
Today, I smashed the bottle.
I drove out at dawn (though the sun had never set) to a fold of the mountains near Kiruna, to a spot the Sami traditionally hold sacred, and placed the bottle on a rock and shot it to smithereens with my father’s hunting gun. I was careful to collect the fragments in a plastic bag, for fear the deer might catch them in their hoofs.
I slipped the fragments into a bin by the station. Judging from the hollow crash, the bin was empty. I cut my forefinger, but it is not serious.
We know so little about anything, but no one believes this. If only people would believe this one simple truth, we might begin again, like a proper dawn.
*
When the SS troops came into Valdaron, looking for the Resistance boys in Camp IV, they asked if someone could take them to the farmhouse called Les Pins. More precisely, they booted open the door of the café and pointed their guns into the silence. Then the captain barked out the request in poor French, mispronouncing the name.
They emerged from the café with Hubert Cros, aged nineteen. Hubert worked at the tannery on the river at St Maurice. The reason he was not in Germany as a forced labourer was his right hand: it was withered. He had been born like that. You have no idea how long it took me to discover that fact.
Hubert was a meek young man, who had spent most of his short life putting up with jibes about his deformity. His greatest wish was to wake up one morning with a perfect right hand. He was not a member of the Resistance; many locals viewed the Resistance, in any case, as a band of left-wing troublemakers, disturbers of whatever peace had been left by the occupying forces. He kept his head down, something his nineteen years had already taught him to do.
But he did know the area as well as anyone – he knew its thickest woods, its obscurest paths, its highest peaks. Like most men in Valdaron, he hunted. He had hunted with his father from the age of seven. He also set bird-traps. Despite this activity, one can say that he loved nature. He loved it because it took him away from those who found in him a butt for their jokes and into a world in which he could feel proud to be who he was. He liked to stand in a wood, alone and free, until peace had settled on it again. Then the rustlings and the birdsong would start to return, and he would feel a contentment he felt nowhere else.
Being Swedish, brought up in Varmland, I can understand this feeling for the forest; even to the extent of still sensing the possibility of bears, when the only bears in Varmland are now in the zoo. Maybe what I am sensing is the bears’ collective phantom, as one senses the dead on an old battlefield. I can still hear my father telling visitors: if you see a bear, sing. If it carries on coming towards you, lie down in a foetal position.
Not every danger in life can be so treated, alas. Least of all death itself.
*
The Germans drove with Hubert up the long trackway that runs along the side of a range of hills from the top of which, on a clear day, you can see both the Alps and the Mediterranean. I doubt that any of the soldiers knew this, or were interested: I have no real idea what was passing through the minds of those men as they made their way in half-track troop carriers to the farmhouse. Perhaps fear, perhaps hatred, perhaps something we will never understand but that sits, dark and dreadful, in all of us.
One thing I do know: they had set out from their base in Nîmes at two o’clock in the morning, with the rest of the 9th Panzer Division, Waffen-SS. It was February, the cold made worse by the driving rain. They had penetrated deeply into a confusing labyrinth of dark green hills and mountains, from which at any moment they could expect bullets or explosives from the hundreds or even thousands of concealed terrorists. In reality, of course, there was only a ragtag scattering of unshaven young men, whose main method of keeping warm was to scratch at their fleas.
I also imagine that every bump and bend in the rough, unmetalled roads was an irritation to these troops, driving vehicles that were superior to the terrain, that crushed everything in their path with their caterpillar tracks and huge front tyres, that were made to be driven with a certain amount of willed aggression so that a tight curve was almost an insult to them, perched high above the ordinary world of muddle and compromise. I believe these vehicles altered those in them for the worse, as cars and most especially the four-by-four type do, of which we have so many in Sweden, and which are for me the very symbol of an inhuman capitalism.
And given these men were already aggressive, and without the ability to empathise with others (the most important human quality, to my mind), then the picture was already looking very grim for Hubert, and for the Resistance boys in Camp IV.
*
It was a journey of some five kilometres from the village.
Hubert Cros must have been very frightened as the troop-carriers approached the Mas des Pins on its steep mountainside, their engines fuming and roaring, their bulk sending out sheets of water whenever they hit the large puddles. There was very little chance for him to escape, despite his intimate knowledge of the terrain; it is usually more dangerous to try to escape. He had no choice but to obey.
It was not only very cold and wet, but misty with it. The rain, soaking the narrow valleys for days, had turned them into dark, cloud-webbed gorges, almost Amazonian in appearance. Perhaps the others in the vehicle were making jokes that, knowing no German, Hubert couldn’t understand: jokes about his withered hand, or his blood-drained face, or the tannery smell on his clothes, or the look he had about him (in their eyes) of a simple peasant. Trapped under the vehicle’s tarp in a dark fug of wet collars and soaking boots, squeezed between those long grey winter cagouls and their hard-eyed owners, jolted and swayed by the violent movement of the vehicle and with a gun pointed at his belly, Hubert would have been visibly shivering, of that I am in no doubt.
At some point – probably when the winding path up to the mas left the main track – the convoy stopped and men poured out, running and crouching as in all the war films or documentaries you have ever seen, their impermeable hoods up against the rain so that, in the mist, they might have been spectres, or mad monks.
Hubert was forced to run with them, his hair streaming. I know this because I have interviewed one of those present, living comfortably in a village near Düsseldorf until his death in 2001. He barely remembered the incident, I have to say, but was in no doubt that Hubert would not have been treated with much – ‘patience’, was the word he used, as he served me more coffee with an elderly, mottled hand, his wife hovering with the hazelnut buttercream torte.
Well, if our young hostage was showing extreme nervousness, explained the former SS soldier in a simple German I could understand, that would have made things worse: nerves are not only infectious but something to be despised, something that awakens the weakness in oneself (the weakness that was in these men especially, being the hidden shadow of the bully – although my own informant was thin and elderly and nothing like a bully, apart from a certain obstreperousness and a way of cutting the delicious torte to his advantage).
Which is why they could shoot innocent people – even small children and old women – in cold blood. Some of these very men sitting with Hubert had already done so, most likely – if not in France then in Yugoslavia, where this particular SS division had gobbled up shawled peasants and their simple, thatched homes for breakfast, lunch and supper.
So when the vehicles stopped at the beginning of the path and the troops began to fan out up the flank of the wooded mountain, wiping the rain from their faces and wondering when the farmhouse would come into view, Hubert would have been gripped by a firm hand in case he tried to flee. It was always possible, after all, that he had misled them, that he had brought them somewhere harmless, wasting more of their precious time! Where was this farmhouse, anyway?
Then it came into view through the trees: big-stoned, tiny-windowed, added to over unrecorded generations so that it resembled an untidy accumulation of rocks.
It was empty.
It had been empty, purely coincidentally, for two days. The boys were on a mission elsewhere. The only trace of them was beds of bracken in the upper rooms; peelings of vegetables; a lingering smell of roasted chestnuts; a few charred logs in the vast fireplace. (They were to return two days later, to the blackened mess the SS had made of the place.)
Hubert had no idea the farmhouse would be empty. Neither did he know whether it was an active camp (the Resistance kept moving camps, anyway) or an occasional hideout. He had not volunteered for this task, he had been volunteered by someone else present in the café. It is not true, as several in the village have related to me, that he was at first taken away to the commandeered police station and beaten with fists until he agreed to show them. That is a version spun from misunderstanding or forgetfulness, and which breeds even more distorted versions, mostly related by those too young to have been there at all during the war.
What had happened was this: the Germans had burst into the café, the room had fallen silent, the SS officer had demanded a guide to show them the quickest way to the Mas des Pins (there were many obscure farmhouses hidden in the hills, this was only sensible); and after a brief pause, broken only by the officer threatening terrible reprisals, one of the men in the café turned his head towards Hubert at the bar and said, ‘Hubert?’
Just that. Nothing more. It was not premeditated. It was not the product of malice. It was just that everyone else on that particular afternoon in the one café in Valdaron – except for fat-bellied Auguste with his greasy apron, behind the bar, who was to be arrested a quarter of an hour later and released the next day – was well over sixty years of age and drunk.
*
They had been celebrating Aimé’s birthday, which that year fell on a Saturday. Aimé was eighty-eight, the doyen of the village. He was born in 1856. This seems scarcely credible, somehow: that a man who witnessed the Second World War should already have been a lad of thirteen when the Franco-Prussian War broke out. Aimé would recall the return of his father from that war, and his own son’s return from the trenches, minus a lung. Aimé himself was too young for one, and too old for the other. That was good luck. What was bad luck was that he lived long enough to meet the Nazis.
Aimé had fetched a wine bottle from a cupboard in his cellar: it did not contain its original wine, however, but fig brandy – so old it must have quadrupled in strength. He vaguely remembered preparing it one summer before the war – the 14-18 war, that is. The bottle was covered in dust and cobwebs through which its defiant label described an even earlier vintage, and the figs still floated about like laboratory specimens in liquid so dark they were discernible only as shadows. This was a time of want, when most of the wine in the area was being trucked off to Germany. So the men tucked into the long-fermented fig brandy with a certain lack of caution after as good a lunch as they could manage, given the shortages. By the time the SS officer and his troops burst into the café, only Hubert – who had arrived shortly before – was entirely sober. Aimé had been singing and recounting tales, his missing teeth interspersing his words with a whistle for which he was famed. The whistle grated on everyone’s ears, but he himself seemed unaware of this trait.
At first, when this fact about the celebration was revealed to me, I found it interesting that ordinary life pursued its course when the SS were known to be in the vicinity. The village shops were open, the baker’s son was plastering a ceiling in the bakery, dishes were being washed and dried after lunch, patched clothes ironed above the post office.
When I ventured a question on this subject at the beginning of my research over twenty years ago, I was told that up until then, in Valdaron at least, only the Wehrmacht had visited and on just one occasion, and that many of those in that particular group had been Armenian. They took a few chickens and were well-behaved. That was in 1943.
Furthermore, I learned that all those who might have feared arrest had, that morning in February 1944, fled the village, a mere three or four hours after the Waffen SS arrived in the foothills. Thus the village had only a semblance of normality, a mask. This, I think, must have irritated the tired, harrassed soldiers of the SS even more, because I am sure they would have known it was a mask – just as, whenever I ask my young language students back home in Sweden what they would like to change in their life, even the most troubled teenagers merely shrug and say something silly to amuse the others. I tell them quite candidly that what I would like to change in my life is my own cowardice.
Having smashed the bottle, what will I tell them now?
*
The group of about twelve in the café – which included Aimé’s three sons, all in their sixties – were merry. Their laughter must have been audible from Valdaron’s long, narrow street. The noise of the armoured vehicles and most of all the rasping motorcycles would have made the men pause, look at each other in concern, fall silent. The acoustics of the main street of Valdaron are such that a single car makes a kind of subdued booming sound below the engine noise, and this sound carries either way for a considerable distance. Assuming a fleet of some twenty armoured vehicles and ten outriding motorcycles, the noise they made must have been something akin to a roll of thunder turning cacaphonic.
Perhaps the officer had been aware of the laughter, somehow, hanging in the air just long enough for him to note its abrupt disappearance. The armoured convoy did not drive up to the café, which was (and still is) a hundred yards beyond the main square. So it is possible that the officer and a handful of men approached the café on foot while the laughter continued unawares, baiting them with its lack of concern, its insouciance. We Swedes have so little notion of what modern warfare is really like, how it infiltrates the crevices, the details, the very joints of ordinary life.
I imagine the door was kicked open, anyway, but maybe not in the way one sees it in films. There is so little I believe in films, because in real life quite extraordinary contradictions take place that no filmgoer would ever put up with. For instance, I once saw a man shot in the head with a pellet gun in broad daylight. This was in Stockholm, but it might have been anywhere, in any city – it was a drugs-related affair between rival gangs. In a film, the onlookers (the extras, hired for the day) would have been told to look scared, or to run away, or to take cover, or even to scream. In real life, as I watched them, they looked no more than slightly anxious. And then I realised that my own expression was precisely the same as theirs. It was not a dream: the blood was still there in the morning, trapped in the ice like petals, just as the face of Lucille is trapped in my heart.
Destroying the bottle has made no difference to that, at least. Or not for the moment. I live in hope of a thaw.
*
Lucille.
In 1975, I was a student in my third year reading French and Russian at the University of Stockholm, traversing the French countryside on a mobilette bought in Paris. I had reached the mountains of the Cévennes, an area I knew little about except that it was a refuge for many of the student radicals of the sixties protest movement, who sought to put their communitarian, anti-materialist ideas into practice by herding goats or throwing pots. This is not the place to recount my minor adventures on this 50cc odyssey, except to say that as I journeyed down through those wild southerly mountains I fell in love with them.
By the time I reached the area around Valdaron, only a few days from the start of the autumn semester, I was determined to return here, possibly for good. I, too, was something of a radical idealist – like my mother. Unlike my mother, I was not a Communist. I had rebelled against her orthodoxies and gone my own way. She scoffed at my ‘back-to-earth’, hippy tendencies (as did my Estonian-Jewish teacher-father), accusing me of being a spoilt bourgeois, or even quasi-fascist. I believed, for instance, that all cars should be banned. This regressive attitude infuriated my parents. I was not happy in Sweden, for all its political idealism and its peaceful neutrality and its endless forests and its beautiful cities. It was too melancholy and sensible. France offered me an alternative in which my romantic tendencies could find succour (I hardly need to say that this belief would turn out to be something of a deception).
Valdaron struck me as being not only authentically old but rather attractively shabby. That day, the village square had been given over to one of those local jumble sales they call, in France, Vide Grenier, or Attic Emptying; this increased the impression of shabbiness, if anything.
A bottle was standing on one of the many trestle tables, along with a motley assortment of wares that some would find anthropologically interesting, others would call rubbish, and only an artist or an eccentric would actually buy, and which included everything from the old type of electric plug to a hideous badger-trap.
This bottle interested me primarily because I needed a lampstand for my student room. Any qualms about returning to Sweden with an empty bottle (my plan was to sell the mobilette in Marseilles and return to Stockholm by train) were swiftly subdued by the added sense I had that this one object would return me by association to this place, this moment, and to France in general: much more than a souvenir! This feeling was helped, no doubt, not only by the sunlight warm on my cheek after a cold night in my hammock, but by the presence of the wonderfully good-looking girl behind the trestle table.
The bottle was evidently old enough to have been hand-blown, with a thick, uneven base and a rough bulge at the top. The label had been scribbled over on a February day near the end of the war. I handled the bottle with a feigned lack of interest. The girl behind the trestle table was smiling at me. I am a typical Swede – tall, blonde and slightly stern in expression, or perhaps serious would be a kinder term – and in 1975 I was not yet twenty. I was also tanned and a little wild-looking by this stage of my trip, with hay in my hair.
Suffice to say we had a charming discussion, during which I discovered that she was the great-great-niece of the original owner of the bottle, who had lived all his life in the village, but she could not say why the label had a dozen signatures on it, or what the significance of the date was, and she could not ask her grandmother, Aimé’s niece, because her grandmother was dead, and her mother was at work right now and probably wouldn’t know anyway, she didn’t like all these ‘ vieilles tripailles ’. I thought it was strange and amusing, calling this sea of bric-à-brac ‘old innards’, as if pulled from the living instead of barns and houses.
I say ‘signatures’, but at second glance it was clear that the names had been written in full as carefully as one can write anything on a confined, curving space and with a fine-nibbed ink pen.
The form of the letters evoked in me a rush of nostalgia for a world I had never known, but since then I have discovered that French schoolchildren still learn a similar form of old-fashioned handwriting. Perhaps it is for this kind of singularity that I love France so much. I found out a little about Aimé himself, but since the girl – called Lucille – had missed knowing him by some ten years, this was of no real use.
When I put my nose to the top (which amused Lucille greatly) I smelt a scent of such potency (although in reality it was very faint) that I wanted to laugh. I think I did laugh, in my sober Swedish way. I was the first Swede that Lucille had ever met, and she was impressed – most of all by my French. She had dark, shining eyes and long straight brown hair that fell into natural curls like springs over her ears, and a mouth I feel only French women possess, the lips shaped by the language to a permanent, teasing pout that can look either vain or inviting, and which reminds me of a bird in flight. Lucille’s pout was inviting – and beyond it, when it spread into a smile, I saw slightly crooked but very white teeth. She asked me why I didn’t have a bicycle instead of a mobilette, and I told her the truth: a bicycle would be far too healthy.
‘Oh,’ she said, ‘I thought Swedes were very keen on being healthy.’
‘That’s why I am not keen on being healthy,’ I laughed.
She stared at me with a puzzled, uncertain look. I bought the bottle for small change and said goodbye. I was shy and had no notion of seduction. Whatever powers I had were paralysed, anyway, by the way she looked at me straight in the eye – as French girls always do, so fearlessly, even with no intention at all to flirt.
*
It was another thirteen years before I returned to that area. Meanwhile, the bottle standing on a shelf in my various digs in Sweden (I, too, was now a teacher, against all my expectations), had become my talisman. I had not turned it into a lamp, or at least not literally, not outwardly.
We all have a period in our lives in which we seem to achieve the miracle of becoming a different person, something approaching the ideal of ourselves. At least, that is the illusion. It can last days, weeks or months. Rarely more than that. For some it lasts the length of a night, or even the two hours of a great concert or play. The bottle, Lucille’s bottle (as I called it), was the means by which I entered that time I journeyed through France, alone, talking to myself over the whine of the mobilette, choosing the obscurest minor roads, sleeping rough or in youth hostels that were mostly empty, arriving in a town without, in those days, having to pass through the cancerous outer ring of the so-called ‘commercial zone’ established everywhere now, all over Europe, in the garish, big-box American style.
Back then there were only small, brick-built factories or petrol stations, or yards where you could see people in overalls at work – proper manual work. I was happy, I was hopeful, I was a solitary Swede with the answers to all the world’s problems. I assumed humanity – especially the younger strain – was mostly benevolent, courageous and good, and that the villains were easily identifiable. I assumed the future would be ours, my generation’s, and that my generation was not selfish and greedy, driving the world into the wall faster and faster, as we have turned out to have done, or to be doing, in connivance with our parents and our grandparents and even those younger than us.
And gradually, over the years, I became fascinated by the faded names scribbled on the label, and knew them all by heart. I saw into their characters by dint of following the patterns their lines made, and needed to know who they were, and why they were on the bottle, although I guessed it must have been in honour of a special occasion – a birthday or perhaps a marriage. And I felt privileged, in my grey Swedish room, to have this lens of private, sunlit France through which I could see a pair of dark, shining eyes.
Although, by now, I had grown much less enthusiastic about teaching French to sullen and over-comfortable teenagers.
*
When I get into Hubert’s skin as he stumbles along that track amongst the Waffen-SS, I feel loneliness. He is alone amongst all these men. There is no one to help him. I wonder if he ever realised the hopelessness of his situation, the idea that he might not survive what little was left of the day. Why had he been in the café at all?
His movements were simple and regular: he would set off very early for the tannery, which was in St Maurice some seven kilometres away, on his bicycle or (if the latter was needed by his mother) on foot, and work until midday. Then he would eat his meagre lunch with the other workers – all much older than himself. He would be back in Valdaron by seven in the evening, over twelve hours after he had set out. This would be the pattern for five days of the week. On Saturdays, he would return home at midday, which explains why he could be in the café at five o’clock. Meanwhile, every week in Valdaron, the silk factory (now derelict) would flood the village street with its female workers both at lunchtime and at the end of the afternoon – the noise deafening as they sought their homes, the hooter sounding over it all, each woman dressed in the factory’s blue overalls and the crowd resembling the unstoppable rush of water. One of these women was Hubert’s mother.
Hubert had worked at the tannery since he was fourteen, and his clothes and hair and skin carried its pungent smell. He had no brothers or sisters and his father was long dead, from delayed complications following a gas attack in Verdun. The boy remembered him as stern and wheezing, but not so ill that he couldn’t take his son out hunting. On Sundays, Hubert would go to church – not, like most of the village, to the Protestant church at one end, but to the Catholic church on the main square.
The trouble with history is that it proliferates. You take one element and it leads to several others, all equally claiming your attention. How do we know that the men tipsy on Aimé’s fig brandy weren’t all Protestant, and suggested Hubert as a guide because he was Catholic? Believe it or not, this question obsessed me for a while. Perhaps this is because my own maternal family were Swedish Protestants of a particularly severe strain until my mother announced she was an atheist (and a Communist, to boot), while my father was a non-practising Jew who fled to Sweden from Estonia in 1940.
I have spent a lot of time, over the last twenty years, in and out of the archives, establishing the faiths of those I knew were present in the café that afternoon in 1944, but to no great conclusion.
I knew their names, of course, from the label on Aimé’s bottle of fig brandy. And when I discovered, finally, how Hubert’s body, with its shattered face, had lain on the track for three days before it was found by a shepherd, and then rested in a back room of the mairie at St Maurice for a further two days before a fellow tannery worker recognised the victim only by his withered hand, I was not surprised.
He had not been able to make the SS soldiers understand.
They were angry with him because the farmhouse was empty, although he knew nothing about it. They pushed him back down the track and then, two kilometres from the village, they shot him through the back of the head in cold blood.
Similarly, over the next twenty years, until it had grown into a life-crippling obsession, I would not be able to persuade anyone, however much I wheedled and cajoled, to tell me which among the owners of those scrawled names had suggested Hubert as a guide.
But now I have smashed the bottle. None of this matters any more. Now I can begin to live.
*
Before I returned to the area in 1989, I had never even heard of Hubert Cros; his was not one of the scribbled names.
I first saw it on a stone plaque set into a rock on a rough, wide track between the hills; I had walked up the track from the village, looking for a place to sling my hammock for the night. I almost missed the plaque, since it was the same colour as the rocks.
It stated that ‘ Ici ’ –on this very spot! – ‘ le jeune Hubert Cros, agé de dix-neuf ans ’ had been ‘ assassiné par les Nazis ’ on 28th February, 1944. Of course, the date was the same as on the bottle. As I stared, aghast, I felt as if all my life had been a preparation for this meeting-point between three lives: mine, Hubert’s, and Lucille’s. I did not yet know that there was a fourth person involved, and that I was carrying his name in my rucksack.
I had by now moved to the Swedish part of Lapland to teach Russian and French in various schools spread over a considerable area; this was part of my idealism, to live in one of the remotest and most beautiful parts of Europe and submerge myself in the Sami way of life, which I regarded as one of the last ‘native’ cultures on the continent. Save yourself from the crowd, was my mantra. Follow your own drum. Do not be pushed along by the forces of conformism, of greed.
As it turned out, I was soon ground down by the difficulties of the job, by the truly terrible and overlong winters in which daylight is no more than a protracted delusion of the night, by the alcohol problems linked with hardship and loneliness and the sense that modern life was about to sweep the old ways into obliteration. Kiruna, after all, lives mostly by mining. Iron ore.
I spent much of my time driving in my 1940s Soviet Army jeep (which I had lovingly restored) to remote, shabby towns where the few pupils interested in either Russian or French had a certain sense of hopelessness behind their innate pride – their round, reddened faces turned towards me as if I might offer something more than grammatical rules, Molière and Pushkin. I think now that I was never a very good teacher, that it wasn’t the Sami people’s fault if I seemed to be getting nowhere; I began to feel I was part of the damage, as if modern schooling and health care and electricity and television were not the right of everyone, when really the damage was inside myself, because I had lost my way.
And I started to drink, like many of the locals I encountered.
Once the snow had begun properly to melt, I would take the jeep to a point marked on my hiking map and then I would stride out with my long legs, and soon I would lose any other walkers and be alone in the treeless wastes, the low mountains still with their snow on, the black lakes lapping at the pebbles in that very clear, cold light of spring. And, if it was summer, I would pitch a tent on some remote hill and watch the setting sun roll along the horizon, pausing as if to think about it and then rising again, sunset to dawn in three or four minutes, the gnats crowding around my face but rarely biting me because I had something natural in my sweat that they did not like.
Perhaps it was sugar, because sometimes I would drink myself into the ground, always with eau de vie, a very pure alcohol that damages you less than other spirits. I would wake up at some distance from my tent, with blood on my nose, as if something had struck me in the face when really it was the ground itself, and not know whether it was day or the middle of the night.
And once I dreamt, just before I came round with my bloodied nose, that my face had been blown apart from behind by a bullet, a bullet fired at point-blank range into the back of my head and that had travelled on to emerge through my nostrils like a fist so that I was rendered unrecognisable.
A strange dream, marked by its precision of detail, its absolute thrill of gut fear. I took this dream to mean that I lacked an identity, that I did not know where I wanted to go, or what I wanted to be; all I knew was that I was perpetually dissatisfied with what was on offer, that the better world I had imagined was nowhere in sight, that all the minor irritations of life were tormenting me and hiding the great vistas and the golden light like the gnats in a black cloud around my head, and dragging me down. I would look at the lone bottle, back in my flat, and see again the dark, shining eyes of a girl teasing me to follow her into her life, and cry as Swedish men rarely cry – most of all this one.
And this is why I returned, thirteen years and a brief, unsatisfactory marriage later. I went all the way – from far above the Arctic circle to the southern heat – by train, carrying a rucksack in which the most precious item was an empty bottle scrawled over with names.
*
I hired a car, a little white Renault 4, at Nîmes station and I drove into the Cévennes mountains feeling nervous and excited and a disappointment to myself. The car was stiff and underpowered, and I would have preferred my long-ago mobilette because at least that had an eccentricity about it. Swedes are very cautious as well as thoughtful drivers – at least, they were in those days – and I found it hard to adapt to the French way. I was too used to my jeep, the bare wide spaces of Lapland, and by the time I saw the sign to Valdaron, I was feeling as if I had done a foolish thing, returning.
It was the summer, and very hot. The dryness in the air was not the same as the dry winter air of northern Sweden, it seemed to suck the damp from my insides. I loved it. The windows were down and I had already accustomed myself to that sweet, southerly perfume which makes me think of honey on toast or a girl’s sun-warmed limbs.
I made it to Valdaron by six in the evening, on a thin thread of a road that wound tortuously between forest in which the cicadas could be heard warming up for the night chorus, even up here in the mountains. I would try to picture the village, as I lay in my bedroom in lonely Kiruna in the dead of winter, feeling depressed, with the snowlight glimmering on the dark-green glass of the bottle, and attempt to imagine how things might have been if I had said to Lucille, smiling at me and clearly fancying this tall Swede with the sun-burned face and sun-bleached hair: ‘Can I buy you a coffee?’
And why the hell didn’t I say that? Why the hell didn’t I buy her a coffee and then help her pack up the stall at the end of the day and go for an evening walk and hold her hand and stroke her hair and kiss her, then kiss her again and so on? Why the hell not?
To that, I had no answer, even under the influence of eau-de-vie, even after my two years with Ulrike, a mild teaching-colleague who loved books. I was in the moment, back there in 1975, where I was too shy even to offer Lucille one of my unfiltered Gitanes – or maybe it actually never occurred to me to take my life in my own hands and jump. I might have ended up marrying her, living in Paris and coming down to see her family in the village. Or she might have accompanied me to Stockholm, where we would have started something together, not necessarily to do with France. An alternative cultural centre. A trendy bookshop, even. Or just worked in the same school together, teaching, our lives a perpetual love affair with each other, even when the beautiful kids came along. Was this what I saw in the genie’s lamp of the bottle, without even rubbing it? The illusion that my life might not have been something of a shambles, necessarily? That Lucille wouldn’t have found me as hard to live with, in my restlessness, as poor Ulrike did in spite of her books, her solid patience?
And then I would shake my head and realise that I had known Lucille for about ten minutes at the most. It was this very concentrated moment in my life, this white-heat moment, which had cooled and left a trace of glass that the grey snowlight of Lapland was now glimmering upon in my room in Kiruna. It was something more poetic than real. And yet somewhere inside it was a truth I couldn’t grasp.
*
Valdaron hadn’t changed much in thirteen years. It was like an Alpine village, I now realised: seaming a steep and narrow valley, only with red-ochre roofs instead of grey slate, and a rushing stream behind. The houses were still old, gaunt and peeling. There was a labyrinth of alleyways squeezed between the street and the river, but on the other side there was nothing but closed doors. It seemed narrower than I remembered it.
I parked the car and made for the exact spot in the square where Lucille had been with her stall, where I had first seen the bottle, where something had become deflected and led me, eventually, to regard myself as a disappointment. I couldn’t stay long in that spot because they had recently cropped the plane trees and the sun was beating down on my head, but it made me think of how speedily time passes and with so little consideration for objective measurements, so that the bare paving stones where Lucille had sat behind the trestle were, although precisely the same (they have since been replaced with cobbles), only just vacated of her presence and at the same time erased entirely of her memory in some way, like preserved medieval towns that make you feel further from the Middle Ages than if you were sitting at home.
I decided to start with the café. Because it gave onto the street, there were no tables outside. The door stuck and I thought at first it was closed, but then I heard laughter from within. Instead of lifting the door slightly (it dragged on the linoleum), I pushed against the frame with some violence, with the help of my foot – ever the overlarge, clumsy Swede – and made quite a rumpus as I entered, the door’s loose glass clattering.
The laughter had stopped. The silence was deepened by the noise that had preceded it.
My eyes adjusted to the gloom. There were a few old men around the corner table and one young man standing at the bar, all with their heads turned towards me as if I had dropped from Mars. I ordered a beer and a baguette sandwich from the taciturn barman, who had a large belly and heavy, stubbled jowls. It was slightly cooler inside, at least.
I was happy to be back in France: all this gritty reality was part of the experience. I got out my notebook and glanced at the page with the names, wondering whether to start my enquiries here. Perhaps I was a little fearful, but I needed to get going because it was early evening by now and I had no idea where I would be staying, although I had my hammock rolled up in the car so that all I needed was a couple of trees.
Instead – heart pounding, sweat beading on my brow – I asked about Lucille. ‘Lucille Vilot?’ She would be about thirty years old, perhaps early thirties?
The barman frowned, leaning on the zinc, and consulted the old men. There was no Lucille Vilot that they knew of. I said that maybe Vilot was not her name, but it was certainly that of her great-great-uncle, called Aimé. Great-great-uncle? I felt eccentric – an uncomfortable feeling for a Swede, even a Swede like me.
The young man spoke up. He was dressed in a workman’s blue overalls, powdered here and there with sawdust. He looked about nineteen, with a clear, honest look in his eyes. I tried not to notice his hand, holding the cigarette between two scarred stumps. He said that would be Lucille Lacour, who had gone up to Paris with her husband a couple of years ago. He couldn’t remember his name. The man was a lawyer, he added – with the hint of a grimace.
Was he sure of this?
‘ Oui, monsieur. ’
I thanked him calmly, as if I didn’t care very much either way, but one of the old men had come up to the bar and was looking at me with a twinkle in his eye.
‘ Elle était mignonne,’ he declared, as the barman dried the glasses with a strange vigour. The old man’s breath was sweet with spirits.
Yes, she was certainly mignonne, although I didn’t like the term, it reduced her horribly. My face was reddening.
I paid hastily and left, burning with embarrassment. I fancied there was laughter again as I forced the door shut, but it might have been the rush of blood in my ears.
It was then, feeling as if my heart was a basket of eggs and that the bottom had fallen out of it, I decided to look for a place to sling my hammock before it grew too dark. I took all I needed from the car and found a wide track that climbed up from where a little humpback bridge crossed the stream.
Of course she would have married and left! What the hell did I expect? That she’d be waiting for me?
I kept on walking, oblivious to my ostensible purpose, until I saw the plaque some two kilometres along the track, and blinked at the date chiselled upon it, scarcely believing my eyes.
I spent the night there, lying in my hammock in the trees a little way above the plaque and trying to sleep through the endless woodland rustlings and melancholy calls that seemed at one with my thoughts.
*
Today, however, I shot the bottle.
I am past fifty, I am now a school inspector, they are moving my town, and all this is over. Lucille, Hubert, Aimé – it is as if they never happened, swirled away into history. They have nothing to do with me, now. Not even the SS captain has anything to do with me, although I know that his grandson, sweet with expensive after-shave, is the director of a timber company logging illegally in Africa, and that his plump, friendly grandaughter has twins called Lili and Lena.
They are moving my town, lock stock and barrel; if not, Kiruna will sink further into the void left by the mining. It has been decided. One day we will all wake up with a different view, a different lake and forest and mountain.
So I sit in my doomed flat with its unceasing summer light that seems to roar at night behind my aluminium roll-down blinds, and no longer see the dark, shining eyes of the past. I am, in a way, free. It is just a question of making up for lost time, although I am honestly rather tired out, these days. I may even burn the notes I have accumulated, whole bundles of them, all the letters and their replies in coloured folders that have faded to similar shades on my shelves.
If I sleep, however, I may still dream in the same way. That will be interesting; to see if my dreams have stopped, at last. Or at least that particular dream, so vivid in its fear and pain.
I don’t know anything about it, I always shout. I don’t know anything about it, I really don’t!
But it never makes any difference. They always laugh before finishing you off, thinking there is nothing you don’t know.
END
c7500 words
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