Balcony in the Forest Read online

  In good weather, he often went down to the hamlet of Les Falizes for the afternoon. Half a mile from the blockhouse, the tiny white road came to an end in a fresh upland meadow where a dozen cottages basked in the solitude of high stubble and the encircling firs. Grange turned left at the Bihoreau farm, a rest home whose shutters were closed now, and sat down at the Cafe des Platanes, which lodged whatever improbable guests might appear out of this wilderness. In front of the one-story house, on a tidy little paved terrace overlooking the road, were a table, two red-and-white-striped iron chairs, and even—a surprising touch of modernity—an orange parasol folded around its pole; not long past noon, the shadow of a huge chestnut tree fell across the terrace. After exchanging a few compliments with Madame Tranet, who appeared, smiling, behind her curtain of glass beads like a figurine on a barometer (“here’s my lieutenant back with the good weather”), and commiserating with her on the war’s uncertainties and the demands of rationing, Grange installed himself in his garden chair, sipped his coffee, and plunged into a kind of dreamy beatitude. At this time of the afternoon, the village was usually quite empty; the houses scattered across the meadow, the black-and-white cows grazing here and there in the clearing, the yellower sun of the last autumn days, the rest home with its closed shutters—everything reminded him of the sweetness of high mountain meadows, of the season when the herds gather and the little summer hotels, the last tourist gone, close well ahead of the first snow. Behind this timid and still golden beauty, this snug, late-season peace, he could feel the cold rising, reaching across the land, a cutting chill that was not winter’s: the clearing was like an island in the vague intimidation that seemed to rise from these black woods. “That’s it. I’m the season’s last summer visitor: it’s over,” Grange thought, with a shrinking feeling around his heart, looking at the freshly painted table, the parasol, the chestnut tree, the sunny meadow. “Ten years of childhood in vacationland: the years of fat cows. Now it’s done with.” When he closed his eyes, he could hear only two faint sounds: the cracked bells of the little black cows harnessed in pairs to make it easy finding them when they wandered off into the woods, and another sound that seemed to rise out of the depths of his past: the recitation of some ten children in the tiny school-house down the road that must have been a blacksmith shop once. He felt something like a tide rising in him at that, something inert and despairing which was close to the brink of tears.

  As soon as the sun started sinking, the villagers emerged one by one from the edge of the woods and came home along the road with their carts and bundles of firewood: chopping down trees and raising piebald cows seemed to be their only occupation. As they passed beneath the chestnut tree they greeted Grange with weather-wise observations—there was never any mention of the war—and sometimes the Bihoreau boy would have a drink with him, though it was up to Grange to make conversation. His melancholy soon passed, and he began to feel almost important here: it was as if he were some good-natured vidame coming down from his castle keep to enjoy the evening’s cool with the peasants of his manor.

  When he returned before nightfall, he rarely failed to climb down into the concrete block for a brief inspection; this was what he called “keeping an eye on the blockhouse.” As a matter of fact, there was no need for an eye there—the concrete cell remained locked up all day long—but Grange had developed a strange compulsion: he liked to stay inside it for a few minutes at sundown. In good moods, he mocked himself about it: wasn’t he like those ship’s engineers too long in the service who preferred smoking down in the hold? When he had closed the vault’s heavy door behind him, he stood on the threshold for a moment, glanced around the walls and up at the low ceiling, never without apprehension: he was assailed by a sudden sense of being out of his element, at a loss. It was the room’s diminunitiveness that first affected him: it was hard to co-ordinate what he saw with the structure’s over-all dimensions; the feeling of confinement became oppressive: his body moved here like the dry kernel inside a nutshell. Then came the vivid sensation—Grange marveled how expressive the word was—of the hermetic block sealed around him—a sensation produced by the musty coolness that fell on his shoulders, the stale, aseptic dryness of the air, the tiny drops of concrete spattering the framework that articulated the redoubt in delicate ribs, sealing the floor to the walls, the walls to the ceiling. “A concrete dice-block,” Grange mused, tapping the wall unconsciously—“a crate that might topple over: someone ought to paste on labels reading top and bottom—let’s hope fragile will be unnecessary.”

  The room was bare, crude, with something violently uninhabitable about it. In a far corner, the hatchway that opened into the escape tunnel was half covered by a mattress hung against the wall. To the left were piled munitions boxes and machine-gun belts—oilcans, jars of grease, and filthy rags made greenish blurs which looked like the smears on garage floors. To the right a red fire extinguisher and a white-enameled first-aid box with a red cross on it were attached to the wall. The middle of the room was empty; there was no place to stand in preference to any other; mechanically, Grange took a few steps toward the brutal shaft of light that cut through the gloom and stretched out for a second or two in the gun-layer’s position beside the anti-tank gun. Through the narrow embrasure he saw only the road rising gently toward the horizon—constricted by the forest walls—the harsh color of broken slag, with a line of sugar-white, crystalline gravel on each side. Five hundred yards away, the road sank down behind a rise in the terrain; its flat bed and the double palisade of trees formed a battlement so sharply etched that its edges seemed silvered against the empty sky. Putting an eye to the sight, Grange could readily distinguish each twig along the battlement’s edge, each sharp pebble in the road, and even the thin, shallow tracks the wheels had made. Unthinkingly he turned the aiming screw: slowly the sight-wires’ slender black cross came to rest on the center of the battlement, a little above the road’s surface at the horizon. In the curve of the crescent that brought together the vague white sky and the empty road, the least twig’s motionlessness became fascinating: the great round eye with its two crossed hairs seemed to open on another world, silent, intimidating, and bathed in a white light, a soundless evidence. Grange realized he had been holding his breath for a moment and quickly stood up, shrugging his shoulders.

  “Stupid!” he mumbled—but he noticed his hand was trembling.

  At Les Falizes dinner was served early: for Grange this was always an agreeable moment. They sat down, all four together, around the little deal table Grange worked at during the day and which they dragged into the common room for dinner. Gourcuff usually fell asleep before the meal’s end, but Hervouët, Olivon, and Grange often sat talking long afterwards near the stove, where a pot of harsh yet tasteless coffee was always steaming, as on the stoves of Flemish farms: “this is where the penates of Les Falizes are,” Grange thought, when Olivon set down the cups and uncovered the pot with a ritual gesture; he was surprised at having found a hearth and home for himself so effortlessly.

  The conversation flowed easily: Olivon, who had been a foreman in the shipyards of Penhoët, had friends in common with Hervouët, since half the men of La Brière worked in Saint-Nazaire. Both men were leftists and political discussions ran high: the strikes of ’36, the Popular Front, rolled through the little room with the sound of the Grande Armée in the memories of soldiers on half pay; it was as if the war were only a technical incident, as they said on the radio, a curtain accidentally dropped by a remote stagehand at the play’s most exciting moment. Then Hervouët would tell stories of his hunting adventures, of nights spent lying in wait while an image of the old singing, lascivious, poaching Briéron flickered before them, a kind of legendary hero who amused Grange because of his resemblance to Father Ierochka in The Cossacks. Sometimes, when the talk had lasted late, they listened to the broadcasts of the Stuttgart Traitor, who had once mentioned their regiment. After a long sputtering, all the war’s unreality melted through the static into this
thin, piercing voice, which lingered over its words, hissing like the villain of a melodrama. In the silences, they heard the branches dripping around the blockhouse, and sometimes, quite near, the sound of some large animal digging in the woods, which sent Hervouët running to look outside. Through the open window came a long, sumptuous rustle that seemed to dissolve into the breathing forest and the cry of the screech owls perched on the barbed wire, lured by the rodents that came to eat the rotten bread. The men were at ease together, good-humored and relaxed in the comforting warmth, only a little disquieted by this murmur from the wild, this window open to the troublesome darkness. It was the moment Gourcuff always chose to wake up: the jokes that greeted his childish yawns were the signal for going to bed.

  “A hell of a war!” Olivon remarked, stretching as he filled the empty pot. The men said good night and went back to their quarters, which over-looked the barbwire emplacement; Grange called it the crew room. Leaning out, he noticed the sudden glow of Hervouët’s cigarette at the next window—before leaving to set his traps, the soldier was sniffing the wet woods like a hound.

  Back in his own room, Grange read for a few moments by the weak light of a lantern, but too many cups of coffee after dinner set his nerves on edge, and if the weather was dry and there was a moon, he took a short walk before going to bed. The forest night was never completely dark. In the direction of the distant Meuse, the opposite slope, in the gaps between the trees, whitened vaguely with a sort of momentary false dawn, a silky palpitation of soft, sluggish flashes, like the great bubbles of light that regularly burst over valleys of blast furnaces: these gleams were the concrete casemates being constructed on accelerated schedules, poured at night under arc lights. Toward the frontier, where the plateau rose to meet the horizon, he could see tiny beads of light forming one by one and sliding for a few seconds down the night, noiselessly broadening and sweeping the treetops with a sudden beam: the Belgian automobiles driving toward the peace of another world, flashing across the wider clearings where the Ardennes gradually petered out.

  Between these two fringes which suddenly disturbed the night in this vague fashion, the Roof (this was Grange’s name for the high forest plateau hung above the valley) remained plunged in profound darkness. The road stretched out as far as the eye could reach like a phantom path, its powdering of white gravel half-phosphorescent between the trees. The air was soft and warm, heavy with the smell of plants; it was good to walk on this loud, crunching path, hidden by the shadow of the branches, with over his head this streak of paler sky that was somehow alive, occasionally wakening to the reflection of distant lights. Grange walked on, his sense of physical well-being marred by troubled thoughts: the night protected him, gave him this easy breathing and this prowler’s freedom of movement, but it was the night that brought the war closer: as if a fiery sword were writing great pure characters above the world that cowered in primordial fear; roused, the sky over the woods watched dark France, dark Germany, and between the two the strange, calm scintillation of Belgium, whose lights died away at the horizon’s edge. The night was not sleeping; he felt as if the vigilant earth had assumed the darkness like a camouflage; his eyes automatically followed the searchlights’ distant pencils that intersected now and then, seeming to grope their way through the air, cautious as insect antennae behind the vast and disquieting horizon.

  Grange left the road, turning off on a service path toward Hill 457, a sharp rise of ground recently cleared, from which a view extended far across the plateau; he sat down on a stump, lit a cigarette, and stared for a long time into the night torn by sudden flashes and gleams. From here the glowworms suddenly became more numerous, forming against the horizon almost a half-circle of sudden winks that seemed to warn, to wonder; they were like a populous coast seen from the open sea on a clear night: he felt as if a question it had become urgent to understand were being asked—but Grange did not understand: he merely felt a certain feverishness rising within him after a little while, and around his eyes the faint constrictions of insomnia; he wanted to walk in this overwakeful night until exhaustion came, until morning.

  By the time he returned to the road, everything was calm again: the night breathed gently in the shadow of the trees; noiselessly he climbed the stairs to the house. Before going to bed he stood for a moment in front of the crew-room door which the men left open at night to catch the stove’s last warmth; out of the darkness came the sound of heavy, healthy breathing that made him smile in spite of himself: the world around him was troubled and uncertain, but there was this sleep as well. “All four,” he thought as he closed the door, and felt something like a desire to whistle. He was amazed to realize that two weeks before he hadn’t even known their names.

  OFTEN, on Sundays, Captain Varin, who was in command of the company, invited Grange to lunch at Moriarmé. Sometimes the lieutenant rode down in the provisions truck; but on clear days, rather than borrow a bicycle from Les Falizes and be jolted for seven miles down the torrential bed of rough gravel, he preferred to walk; besides, he was grateful for this bad road which left him a free hand and virtually cut off the Roof from the inhabited world.

  He started out early; as he approached l’Eclaterie, he listened for the sound of Moriarmé’s bells rising from the valley after High Mass: their high-pitched chime fading into the great circle of the woods pleased him like a half-forgotten sign of welcome: it was a sound that never reached the silent Roof.

  He found the officers of both companies—the 1st and 3rd took their mess together—already started on their apéritifs; from one window he could see the Meuse, a deep oily color at the foot of its overhanging forests, and from the other the church square where civilians in Sunday clothes were already lining up in front of the pastryshop. Around the table reigned a noisy and virtually continuous cordiality: it was evident that Captain Varin’s Sundays, which now and then collected the rangers scattered in the wilderness blockhouses, had something to do with the maintenance of esprit de corps.

  Grange soon saw what kind of man was in command of the 3rd Company: Captain Magnard was a petulant blond—perhaps too consciously handsome—with the tender blue eyes of a womanizer, as carefully groomed as if he were wearing a corset, like officers during the Dreyfus Affair, and with the capricious condescension of a chasseur transferred to a camp behind the lines; he published occasional patriotic verses in l’Echo du Front, the corps paper circulated by the Army, and if asked once or twice, he would start reciting over the dessert. Grange supposed that the day war was declared the man had assumed his old-campaigner’s tone the way he might put a flower in his buttonhole the morning of the happiest day of his life—the marriage had not been consummated, and the flower looked dead to all eyes but his own. “A ribbon clerk who’s just left his whore’s bed,” Grange decided, supremely irritated when the man minutely described some village conquest in his crude terms.

  Captain Varin was distant and rather unconcerned, but occasionally his eyes unhooded themselves behind his wineglass and glowed for a second like the bulb in a target when some particular oafishness roused him; evidently he was having to bear with the luncheon, and with Magnard more than all the rest. “As for us, he doesn’t miss a thing, he keeps track,” Grange told himself, a little stung, but deciding that the restraint Varin imposed on the meal was not unpleasant: it was like the curé’s presence at a wedding breakfast, it warded off the worst. The conversation was of a pitiful simplicity; the humor that of a compartment full of traveling salesmen; after glasses had been clinked and a few choruses brayed, there were several moments of silence when the high spirits evaporated. Captain Magnard patronized the reservists and the young officers with a comic broadness; it was by slaps on the shoulder and clay pipes pushed familiarly under their noses that he “gave them confidence.”

  “At the colonel’s? You’ll get a queer name for yourself, if you don’t watch out, fellow,” his nasal drawl suddenly cut through the other voices, with a familiarity all too recently assumed. There w
as a lot of drinking. “Every man here is worth more than he looks, Grange thought, exasperated: “the paterfamilias at the brothel.” Outside the window, the Meuse slowly darkened, dimmed by the cliff shadow; the vacant boredom of a provincial Sunday leaked through the casements despite the war; the air smelled of pernod, stale cigar smoke, and heavy food. Obviously something was being simulated here, but what? In the moments of silence, the guests looked out the window at the catechism class lining up in the square for vespers.

  “That’s enough about the service!” drawled Captain Magnard’s affected, slightly drunk voice. “Had any ass lately?”

  Sometimes, after lunch, Grange accompanied a fellow officer through the dozing Sunday streets to the Charleville train, then stopped at the Company office to settle some service details. Captain Varin was always there, smoking his cigarette behind stacks of papers. His face was heavy and somewhat carnivorous-looking, the hard mustache still black, the raked nostril flaring, the jaw massive; at first glance, he seemed only a rather heavily turned-out old trooper, but a trooper who never drank, never joked, never even laughed, and, since the division had been in the sector, never once set foot in the Charleville whorehouse the other officers took turns visiting on Sundays. He commanded his company with icy competence, holding men and officers alike on short rein, announced his decisions briefly, his voice harsh, listened attentively, and never argued. He was born to the “I give orders or I keep still” manner—he must have chosen the wrong war or else the wrong army, Grange thought (the captain intrigued him)—always astonished by this bare office where everything breathed regulations, as harshly scrubbed as a convent parlor, with no chair for a visitor, not even a bottle of apéritif. Yet on Sundays there was something else. Alone with the captain, Grange occasionally, for a few seconds, felt him come closer, almost to the point of openness—not that he relaxed: he worked all day long; not that he became more human: his confidence was impersonal to the point of coldness—Varin’s attitude had nothing to do with putting Grange at ease. The captain spoke of the war. Grange decided that Varin talked about it with him because he, too, had never asked leave for Charleville, which caused talk—and perhaps because he was still young: the captain’s secret vice was to scandalize his colleagues.