And even their teacher did not devote himself just to what he was paid to teach them; he welcomed them with simplicity into his personal life, he lived that life with them, told them about his childhood and the lives of children he had known, shared with them his philosophy but not his opinions, for though he was for example anti-clerical, like many of his colleagues, he never said a word against religion in class, nor against anything that could be the object of a choice or a belief, but he would condemn with all the more vigor those evils over which there could be no argument—theft, betrayal, rudeness, dirtiness.
But most of all he talked to them about the war that was still recent, which he had fought for four years, and about the suffering of the soldiers, their courage and their endurance, and the joy of the armistice. At the end of each term, before sending them home for vacation, and from time to time when the schedule allowed him to, he would read them long excerpts from Dorgelès’s Les Croix de Bois.d For Jacques these readings again opened the door to the exotic, but this time an exotic world stalked by fear and misfortune, although he never made any but a theoretical connection with the father he never knew.
He just listened with all his heart to a story that his teacher read with all his heart and that spoke to him again of snow and his cherished winter, but also of a special kind of men, dressed in heavy cloth stiff with mud, who spoke a strange language and lived in holes under a ceiling of shells and flares and bullets. Pierre and he awaited each reading with ever-increasing impatience.
That war everyone was still talking about (and Jacques listened silent but with ears wide open when Daniel would tell in his own way about the Battle of the Marne, where he fought and he still did not know how he had come out alive when they, the Zouaves, he said, they were put out in front and then at the charge down a ravine they charged and there was no one ahead of them and they were advancing and all of a sudden the machine gunners when they were halfway down they were dropping one on top of the other and the bed of the ravine was all full of blood and the ones crying for maman it was awful) that the survivors could not forget and that cast its shadow over everything in the children’s world and shaped all the ideas they had for fascinating stories more extraordinary than the fairy tales read in other classes, and that would have disappointed and bored them if M. Bernard had taken it into his head to change his curriculum. But he went on with it, funny scenes alternating with terrifying descriptions, and little by little the African children made the acquaintance … of x y z, who became part of their world; they talked about them among themselves as if they were old friends who were right there and so much alive that Jacques at least could not for a moment imagine that though they were living in the war, there was any chance they could be victims of it.
And on the day at the end of the year when, as they arrived at the end of the book,* M. Bernard read them the death of D. in a subdued voice, when he closed the book in silence, facing his own memories and emotions, then raised his eyes to his silent, overwhelmed class, he saw Jacques in the first row staring at him with his face bathed in tears and shaking with sobs that seemed as if they would never end. “Come come, child,” M. Bernard said in a barely audible voice, and he stood up to return the book to the case, his back to the class.
“Wait a minute, kiddo,” M. Bernard said. Now he stood up with difficulty, ran his index finger over the bars of the cage, so that the canary chirped all the more: “Ah! Casimir, we’re hungry, we’re asking our father,” and [got himself] to his little schoolboy’s desk on the other side of the room, near the fireplace. He rummaged in a drawer, closed it, opened another, pulled out something. “Here,” he said, “this is for you.” Jacques received a book bound in grocery-store paper with no writing on its cover. Before he even opened it, he knew it was Les Croix de Bois, the very copy M. Bernard had read to the class.
“No, no,” he said, “it’s …” He wanted to say: “it’s too beautiful.” He could not find the words.
M. Bernard shook his old head. “You cried that last day, you remember? Since that day the book’s belonged to you.” And he turned away to hide his suddenly reddened eyes. He went back again to his desk, turned to Jacques with his hands behind his back, then, brandishing a short solid red ruler† in his face, he said, laughing, “You remember the ‘sugar cane’?”
“Oh, M. Bernard,” said Jacques, “so you kept it! You know it’s forbidden now.”
“Pooh, it was forbidden then too. But you’re a witness that I used it!”
Jacques was indeed a witness, for M. Bernard was in favor of corporal punishment. True, the everyday punishment only consisted of minus marks that he would deduct at the end of the month from the number of points accumulated by the pupil, thus bringing him down in his overall ranking. But in more serious cases M. Bernard did not bother to send the offender to the principal’s office, as did many of his colleagues. He followed an unalterable ritual. “My poor Robert,” he would say, calmly and still with good humor, “we shall have to resort to the ‘sugar cane.’ ” No one in the class reacted (except to snicker behind his hand, according to the eternal rule of the human heart that the punishment of one is felt by the others as pleasure).e The child would stand, pale but in most cases trying to put a good face on it (some were already swallowing their tears when they left their table and headed toward the desk that M. Bernard was standing beside, in front of the blackboard). Still conforming to the ritual, and here there was a touch of sadism, Robert or Joseph had to go to the desk himself to get the “sugar cane” and present it to the sacrificer.
The “sugar cane” was a red wood ruler, short and thick, spotted with ink, marred with nicks and slashes, that M. Bernard had long ago confiscated from some forgotten pupil; the boy would now hand it to M. Bernard, who usually received it with a mocking air, then held his legs apart. The child had to put his head between the knees of the teacher, who by tightening his thighs would hold him firmly. And on the buttocks thus presented, M. Bernard would inflict some solid blows with the ruler, the number varying according to the offense and equally divided between the two cheeks. Reactions to this punishment differed according to the pupil. Some began sobbing even before being hit, and the unfazed teacher would observe that they were getting ahead of themselves; others would naively try to protect their bottom with their hands, which M. Bernard would slap aside with a casual blow.
Still others, smarting under the blows of the ruler, would buck desperately. There were also those, among them Jacques, who took the blows without a word, shivering, and returned to their places holding back a flood of tears. On the whole, however, this punishment was accepted without bitterness: first, because almost all these children were beaten at home and so physical punishment seemed to them a natural method of upbringing; then too because the teacher was absolutely fair, they all knew in advance which infractions, always the same ones, would result in the ceremony of atonement, and those who went beyond the limit of actions that resulted only in minus points knew the chance they were taking; and finally because the sentence was imposed with hearty impartiality on the best students as well as the worst.
Jacques, whom M. Bernard obviously loved very much, suffered it like the rest, and he even had to undergo it the day after M. Bernard had publicly shown his preference for him. When Jacques at the blackboard had given a good answer and M. Bernard had patted his cheek and a voice in the classroom whispered, “teacher’s pet,” M. Bernard had pulled him close and said with a kind of solemnity: “Yes, I am partial to Connery as I am to all those among you who lost their fathers in the war. I fought the war with their fathers and I survived. I try at least here to take the place of my dead comrades. And now if someone wants to say I have ‘pets,’ let him speak up!” This speech was received in absolute silence. At the end of the day, Jacques asked who had called him “teacher’s pet.” To take such an insult without responding would have meant a loss of honor.
“I did,” said Munoz, a big blond boy, rather flabby and insipid, who though undemonstrative had always shown his antipathy to Jacques.
“All right,” said Jacques. “Then your mother’s a whore.”f That too was a ritual insult that
