“Good, good,” said Uncle Ernest, beaming, “he got courage.”
Jacques, rooted to the spot, looked at his mother, who was sitting a bit apart from the others, darning socks stretched over a wooden egg. His mother gazed at him. “Yes,” she said, “that’s good, you’re brave.” And she turned back to the street, and Jacques, seeing nothing but her, felt unhappiness swelling once more in his heavy heart.
“Go to bed,” said the grandmother. Jacques, without lighting the small kerosene lamp, undressed in the bedroom by the light from the dining room. He lay down on the side of the double bed, to avoid having to touch his brother, or disturb him. He went right to sleep, worn out with fatigue and emotion, awakened at times by his brother, who climbed over him to sleep by the wall because he got up later than Jacques, or by his mother, who sometimes bumped into the wardrobe while undressing in the dark, and who climbed softly into her bed and slept so lightly you could think she was lying awake, and Jacques did sometimes think so; he felt like calling her but he told himself she would not hear him anyway, then forced himself to stay awake as long as she did, just as quietly, motionless, and making no sound, until sleep overcame him as it had already overcome his mother after a hard day of laundry or housework.
- Jacques’s brother is sometimes called Henri, sometimes Louis.
a. distorted.
b. The next day, the smell of raw chicken on the fire.
Thursdays and Vacations
Only on Thursdays and Sundays could Jacques and Pierre get back to their own world. (Except on some Thursdays when Jacques was in detention—as stated in a note from the chief monitor’s office, which Jacques would ask his mother to sign after summarizing its contents with the word “punishment”—and had to spend two hours, from eight to ten o’clock, sometimes four in serious cases, at the lycée, in a special room with other offenders, under the supervision of a monitor who usually was furious at being drafted on that day, doing some particularly unrewarding task.)a Pierre, in eight years of lycée, never suffered detention. But Jacques was too rambunctious, and also too vain, and he played the fool for the sake of showing off, and so he collected detentions. Try as he might to explain to the grandmother that these punishments were for conduct, she could not see the difference between stupidity and bad behavior. To her, a good student would of necessity be virtuous and well behaved; accordingly, virtue led straight to knowledge. So Thursday’s punishment was made worse, at least in the first years, by Wednesday’s beating.
On Thursdays when there was no punishment, and on Sundays, mornings were devoted to errands and work around the home. And in the afternoon Pierre and Jean1 could go out together. During the summer there was the Sablettes beach, and the parade grounds, a big vacant lot that included a roughly laid out soccer field and several areas for boules players. Usually they played soccer with a ball made of rags, and teams of Arab and French boys that were put together on the spot.
But during the rest of the year the two children went to the Home for Disabled Veterans at Kouba,b where Pierre’s mother, who had left the post office, was chief laundress. Kouba was the name of a hill to the east of Algiers, at the end of a trolley line.c In fact, the city ended there, and the gentle countryside of the Sahel began, with its symmetrical knolls, its relatively abundant waters, meadows that seemed practically opulent, and fields of savory red soil, separated here and there by hedges of tall cypress or reeds. Grapevines, fruit trees, corn grew in abundance and without too much effort. Also, for those who came from the city and its damp and hot lower districts, the air was bracing and believed to be good for the health.
For those people from Algiers who, once they had some wealth or income, would flee the Algiers summer for a more temperate France, it was enough if the air they breathed someplace was just slightly cool, for them to dub it “French air.” So in Kouba they breathed the air of France. The old soldiers’ home, started for crippled veterans soon after the war, was five minutes from the end of the trolley line. It was a former convent, vast, complex in its architecture, and spread out over several wings, with very thick whitewashed walls, covered arcades, and big cool halls with arched ceilings where the dining rooms and the various services had been set up. The laundry, headed by Mme. Marlon, Pierre’s mother, was in one of these big halls. That was where she first greeted the children, amidst the smell of hot irons and damp linen, with the two employees, one Arab the other French, who were under her orders. She would give them each a piece of bread and chocolate; then, rolling up the sleeves on her lovely arms, so strong and youthful: “Put that in your pocket for four o’clock and go out in the garden, I have work to do.”
First the children would wander through the arcades and the inside courtyards, and most often they ate their snack right away to be rid of the cumbersome bread and the chocolate that melted between their fingers. They would encounter the disabled veterans, some missing an arm or a leg, others installed in little carts with bicycle wheels. There were no disfigured or blind men, only cripples; they were neatly dressed, often wearing a medal, the sleeve of the shirt or jacket, or the pantsleg, carefully taken up and fastened with a safety pin around the invisible stump, and it was not gruesome, there were so many of them.
Once past the surprise of the first day, the children looked on them as they did on everything new they discovered and immediately incorporated into their view of the world. Mme. Marlon had explained to them that these men had lost an arm or a leg in the war, and as it happened that the war was part of their universe and they heard about it all the time, it had influenced so many things around them that they had no difficulty understanding that you could lose an arm or a leg to it, and even that it could be defined as a time of life when legs and arms were lost. That was why this world of cripples was in no way sad for the children. Some of the men were closemouthed and somber, it is true, but most were young, smiling, and even joked about their disability.
“I only have one leg,” one of them would say—he was blond, with a strong square face, and radiantly healthy; they often saw him prowling around the laundry—“but I can still give you a kick in the ass,” he would tell the children. And, leaning on the cane in his right hand with his left hand on the parapet of the arcade, he would pull himself erect and swing his one foot in their direction. The children laughed with him, then fled as fast as they could. It seemed normal to them that they were the only ones who could run or use both arms. On just one occasion the thought occurred to Jacques, who had sprained his ankle playing soccer and was limping for a few days, that the Thursday cripples would for all their lives be unable, as he was now, to run and catch a moving trolley, or kick a ball. Suddenly he was struck by the miraculous nature of the body’s mechanics, along with an unreasoning fear at the idea that he too might be mutilated, and then he forgot about it.
They* would wander alongside the dining halls with their shutters half closed, the big tables entirely surfaced with zinc glowing faintly in the shade, then the kitchens with their huge containers, caldrons, and casseroles, from which a persistent smell of meat scraps drifted. In the last wing they saw bedrooms with two or three beds covered with gray blankets, and blond-wood closets. Then they went down an outside stairs to the garden.
The soldiers’ home was surrounded by a big park that was almost entirely neglected. A few residents had taken on the task of caring for some clumps of rosebushes and flower beds around the building, not to mention a small vegetable garden enclosed by big hedges of dry reeds. But beyond that the park, which had once been superb, had gone back to nature. Huge eucalyptuses, royal palms, coconut palms, rubber treesd with great trunks and low branches that took root farther off, thus making a labyrinth of vegetation full of shade and secrets, thick solid cypresses, vigorous orange trees, clumps of extraordinarily tall pink and white laurels—all these overshadowed the secluded paths where clay had swallowed the gravel; nibbling at the paths’ edges were odorous tangles of syringas, jasmines, clematis, passionflowers, bushes of honeysuckles, and they in turn were invaded at ground level by an energetic carpet of clover, oxalis, and wild grasses. To wander in this fragrant jungle, to crawl in it, to snuggle your face in the grass, to cut a passage through grown-over paths with a knife and come out with mud streaked legs and water all over your face—this was rapture.
But the manufacture of frightful poisons also took up a large part of the afternoon.
