Promise at Dawn

  CHAPTER 37

  On the Arundel castle there was a hundred or so English girls of very good family, all of them volunteers in a woman’s driver corps, and the fifteen days of our voyage, with a strict blackout maintained on board, passed very pleasantly indeed. I still wonder how it happened that the ship didn’t catch fire.

  One night I had gone on deck and was looking at the phosphorescent wake when I heard stealthy footsteps, and suddenly a hand seized mine. My eyes, acclimated to seeing in the dark, had barely time to recognize the moonlit beauty of our Provost Sergeant Major before he was raising my hand to his lips and covering it with feverish kisses. Apparently he had arranged a romantic tryst with one of the sweet volunteers at the very spot where I was standing but, having come straight from the brightly-lit saloon into pitch-black obscurity, he had been the victim of a very natural mistake. I let him continue for a little while—it was very interesting to watch a Provost Sergeant Major in action—but, since his lips, step by step, were now reaching my shoulder, I thought it only fair to make sure that he really meant it, and so I said in my deepest bass:

  “Darling, I’m not at all that sort of girl.”

  He bellowed like a wounded beast and began to spit, which I thought was rather ungracious of him. For several days after that, he blushed scarlet and spat every time we passed one another on the deck. We were young in those days and, though most of us are now dead—Maisonneuve shot down with Roque off the coast of Egypt, Castelain killed in Russia, Crouzet in Gabon and Goumenc in Crete, Caneppa downed in Algeria, Maltcharski in Libya, Delaroche crashed at El Fasher with Flury Herard and Coguen, Saint-Péreuse still living but minus a leg, Sandré brought down over Africa and Grasset and Perbost killed over Tobruk, Clariond vanished into the desert with Le Calvez and Davin to die of thirst, their mummified bodies found by a camel caravan nineteen years later—though most of us are now dead, our gaiety remains and I often see them, all alive and laughing, in the eyes of the young men around me. Life is young. As it grows older, it becomes merely duration. It becomes Time, it says good-by. It has taken everything from you and has nothing left to give. I often find myself in places thronged with youth, and there I try to find again what I have lost. Sometimes I recognize the face of a comrade killed at twenty. The gestures, the laughter and the eyes are all the same. Something always remains. Then I almost—almost—believe that something is still left in me of what I was at twenty, that I have not wholly disappeared. I raise my head proudly, I pull my stomach in, I take my foil, with energetic steps I go into the garden, I look up at the sky, I engage, I lunge. At other times, I climb my hill and juggle with three balls, with four, just to show them that I am still there, that I am still to be reckoned with. Them? I know that nobody is watching me, that I am surrounded by indifference, but I feel I have to prove to myself that I am still capable of that sacred naïveté. I have been defeated, but no more than that. The monkey gods did not succeed in teaching me anything, neither wisdom nor prudence, neither resignation nor indifference. The sacred naïveté of the species is still in me. I stretch myself on the sand at Big Sur and I feel all through my body the youth and the courage of those who will come after me, and I wait for them with confidence, listening to the ocean and looking at the seals and the whales who, at that season, pass by the hundreds with their minuscule spouts of white water; I shut my eyes, I smile and I know that no one has ever died, that we are all there again, ready to start once more.

  My mother came almost every evening to keep me company on deck, and we leaned together on the rail, watching the white furrow astern from which the night rose with its harvest of stars. The night had a way of growing from the phosphorescent wake into the sky, where it burst suddenly into bloom, spreading its boughs heavy with golden blossoms, to keep us leaning above the waves until the first light of dawn. As we approached Africa, dawn would sweep the ocean in one triumphant leap from end to end, and there, suddenly, would be the sky in all its brightness while my heart was still beating to the slow, muted rhythms of the night, and my eyes still believed in darkness. But I am an old star eater and it is to the night that I most readily entrust myself. My mother smoked continuously and I saw her by my side with such clarity that, more than once, I was on the point of reminding her that a blackout was in force, and that it was forbidden to smoke on deck because of enemy submarines. And then I smiled faintly at my naïveté, because I should have known that, so long as she was there beside me, submarines or no submarines, nothing could happen to us.

  “You haven’t written anything for months,” she told me reproachfully.

  “There’s a war on.”

  “That’s no excuse. You must write.” She sighed. “I have always wanted to be a great artist.”

  “Don’t worry, Mother,” I promised her. “You shall be an artist, a famous artist. I’ll see to that.”

  I remained silent for a while. I could almost see her silhouette, the lighter shade in the darkness that indicated her white hair, the glowing tip of her Gauloise. I was imagining her there, at my side, with all the love, with all the talent of which I was capable.

  “There is something you ought to know. I have not been altogether truthful with you.”

  “What is it?”

  “I never really was a great actress, a great tragic actress. That is not strictly true. Certainly, I was on the stage, but I never got very far.”

  “I know,” I said gently, “but I promise you that you’ll be a great artist this time. Your works will be translated into all the languages and read all over the world.”

  “But you aren’t writing”—there was sadness in her voice. “How do you expect that to happen if you do nothing?”

  I set to work. It was difficult on a ship’s deck or in a tiny cabin shared by two others, to harness myself to a full-length work; I decided to write four or five short stories, each one a hymn to the courage of men fighting against injustice and tyranny—and by injustice and tyranny I meant far more than the Germans. Once the stories had been written around the same basic theme, I would integrate them into the body of a vast narrative, a sort of fresco of our Resistance, of our refusal to accept and to submit. There would be a central character in the book, more or less patterned after myself, who would tell the stories, according to the centuries-old method of the picaresque novelists. Even if I were killed before the whole work was completed, I could thus leave behind me a few tales, a trace, at least, of my basic creed, of my hope and rebellion and faith in our victory, and my mother would see that, like her, I had never accepted defeat and had done my best. Thus the first story in my novel A European Education 1 was written on the ship which was carrying us to battle. I immediately read it to my mother, on deck, among the early whispers of dawn. “Tolstoy!” she remarked simply. “Gorki!”

  And then, as a courtesy to my country, she added: “Prosper Mérimée!”

  In the course of those nights she spoke to me more freely than she had ever done before, perhaps because she imagined I was no longer a child, or because the sea and the sky were favorable to confidences, since nothing seemed to leave a trace behind it, except the white wake of the ship, itself ephemeral in the silence. Leaning over the waves, my eyes closed so as to see her better, I plunged myself deep into the past, into memories of words, gestures, attitudes, re-creating her in that place with all the intensity of my love, clinging to that essential faith which ran through her life and mine like a thread of light which only her heart could have woven.

  “There is nothing more beautiful in all the world than France,” she said, with her old childlike smile. “That is why I want you to be a free Frenchman.”

  “But I am now, you know.”

  She shook her head.

  “Not yet. You will have to do a great deal of fighting.”

  “I have been wounded in the leg,” I reminded her. “Here, you can feel the place.”

  I stretched out my leg with its tiny piece of lead in the thigh. I had always refused to have it removed
. I was greatly attached to it.

  “Be careful,” she said.

  “I’ll be careful.”

  Often, during the fighting which preceded the Allied landing in Normandy, when the bursts and blasts of the shells sounded like the breakers of some savage sea against the fuselage of my aircraft, I thought of those two words, “Be careful,” and could not help smiling faintly.

  “What have you done with your law degree?”

  “You mean my diploma?”

  “Yes. You haven’t lost it?”

  “No. It’s somewhere in my kit.”

  I knew perfectly well what she had in mind. The sea was fast asleep all around us, and the ship was following its gentle sighs. I frankly admit that I rather dreaded my mother’s entry into the world of diplomacy, the doors of which, she maintained, that famous law degree would open to me. For ten years now she had been carefully polishing our old Imperial silver in readiness for the day when I should have to “entertain.” I knew very little about ambassadors, and still less about their wives, but I thought of them then as the incarnation of tact and breeding, of discretion and good manners. In the light of fifteen years’ experience I have, in that matter among others, come to see things in a more human and tolerant light. But at that time I had formed a very exalted idea of the “Career,” and I was not without a certain amount of apprehension, and could not help wondering whether my mother’s personality might not be a slight source of embarrassment to me in the exercising of my functions. God knows I had never voiced these doubts to her, but she had learned to read my silences.

  “Don’t worry,” she assured me. “I’ll make a perfect hostess. After all, I have been running a hotel for years.”

  “Listen, Mother, it’s not that. . . .”

  “What is it, then? If you’re ashamed of your old mother, say so . . .”

  “Please . . .”

  “But you’ll need a great deal of money. Ilona’s father will have to give her a generous dowry. . . . You’re not just anybody. I will go and talk things over with him. I know very well that you love Ilona, but we mustn’t lose our heads. I’ll say to him: “This is what we have; this is what we are giving: a writer, a diplomat, a hero. . . . And you, what are you prepared to give?’ “

  I clasped my head between my hands. I was smiling, but the tears were running down my cheeks.

  “Yes, Mother, yes. It will be exactly as you say. I’ll do what you wish. I’ll be an Ambassador. I’ll be a great poet. I’ll be a second Guynemer. But give me time. Look after yourself properly. See the doctor regularly.”

  “I’m as tough as an old warhorse. I’ve managed to get this far, I can go a little further.”

  “I have arranged for insulin to be sent to you from Switzerland: the very best insulin. A girl on the ship promised to take care of that”

  It was Mary Boyd who had made that promise, and though I have never set eyes on her since, throughout several years, in fact, up till a year after the war, the insulin continued to reach the Hôtel-Pension Mermonts from Switzerland. All my life I have wanted to thank her, but I was never able to discover her whereabouts. I hope that she is well. I hope that she will read these lines.

  I wiped my face and drew a deep breath. Nothing could have been emptier in the whole world than the deck of the ship beside me. Dawn was here, with its flying fish. Suddenly, with unbelievable clarity and precision I heard the silence murmur in my ear:

  “Hurry, Romouchka. Hurry.”

  I remained a moment longer on the deck, trying to quiet down, or, perhaps, trying to find the enemy. But the enemy never showed himself. There were only the Germans. I could feel the emptiness in my clenched fists, and there, above my head, all that was infinite, eternal, inaccessible ringed the arena with myriad smiles, indifferent to our ancient, to our age-long combat.

  1 Published in the United States in 1960.

  CHAPTER 38

  Her first letters reached me shortly after my arrival in England. They were sent secretly to a friend in Switzerland, and then forwarded to London “Care of General de Gaulle,” short notes, a few lines, usually scribbled in pencil, and none of them dated. Until my return to Nice, three years and six months later, until the very eve of victory, these letters, dateless and timeless, as though coming out of eternity, were to follow me faithfully in all my wanderings. For three and a half years her breath breathed life into me, and I was sustained by a will stronger than my own: the umbilical cord fed my blood with the fighting courage of a heart more gallant than mine. The tone of these brief commanding notes rose from week to week in a sort of lyrical crescendo; she was taking it for granted that, in my demonstration of human invincibility, I was accomplishing prodigies of skill, greater than Rastelli, the juggler, more magnificent than Tilden, the tennis player, more valiant than Guynemer, the flier. Unfortunately, my career as a champion of the world had not yet acquired either form or substance, though I was doing my best to keep myself in shape. Every morning I put in half an hour running, pushing, jumping, weight lifting, and I could still beat the hell out of my squadron buddies at ping-pong. I could still juggle with five balls and had every hope of catching the sixth. I also went on with my novel A European Education, and the stories, which were to run through it like a hymn to the unbreakable human spirit, were already finished. I still believed that in literature, as in life, one could bend the world to one’s inspiration and restore it to what it was meant to be, that is, a masterpiece. I believed in beauty and, therefore, in justice. My mother’s talent and her idealism still drove me on to achieve some miraculous perfection, both in art and in life, and her dream was still stronger than my sense of humor, than all the first insidious whispers of cynicism and maturity. I found it impossible to believe that this just fulfillment could be denied her, if only because it seemed inconceivable to me that life, that destiny, could be so lacking in art and talent. Her simple-mindedness and her imagination, that belief in the marvelous which had enabled her to see, in a mongrel child living obscurely in a remote Lithuanian province, a great French writer and an Ambassador of France continued to live on in me with all the power of beautiful stories well told. I still regarded life as an artistic medium.

  I must confess that I read her descriptions of my heroic, if imaginary, deeds with no little satisfaction. “My glorious and beloved son,” she wrote. “We read in the papers, with feelings of gratitude and admiration, the tales of your exploits. In the sky of Cologne, of Hamburg, of Bremen your outspread wings fill enemy hearts with terror.” I found no difficulty in understanding what was going on in her mind. Whenever the R.A.F. raided a target, I was one of those engaged. In each burst of a bomb she recognized my voice. I was present on every front and made the enemy tremble, and each time a German aircraft was brought down by English fighters it was to me, quite naturally, that she credited the victory. The alleys of the Buffa Market resounded with the echo of my deeds. After all, she knew me: she knew that it was I who had won the ping-pong championship of Nice in 1932.

  “My adored son, all Nice is proud of you. I have been to see your teachers at the lycée, just to let them know. The London radio tells us of the fire and flame you cast on Germany, but they do well not to mention your name. That might make difficulties for me here.” In the mind of the old lady of the Hôtel-Pension Mermonts, my name figured in every communique from every battle front; it was behind each of Hitler’s screams of rage. Seated in her lonely tiny bedroom she listened to the B.B.C., which spoke to her only of me, and I could almost see her smile of wonder.

  The only shadow on this otherwise bright picture was that during all that time I never once managed to cross swords with the enemy. From my very first flights in Africa, it had been made clear to me that I was not to be allowed to keep my promise, and the sky around me became the tennis court of the Parc Impérial, where a young and panic-stricken clown danced a ridiculous jig in pursuit of balls he could never touch, under the eyes of a delighted audience.

  At Kano, in Nigeria, our ai
rcraft was caught in a sandstorm, touched a tree and crashed, making a hole three feet deep in the ground. We emerged from it stunned but unhurt, much to the annoyance of the R.A.F., since aircraft were hard to come by in those days and were much more valuable than the lives of those clumsy Frenchmen.

  Next day, in another plane and with another pilot, I took another tumble when our Blenheim turned over on its back during take-off and burst into flame, and again we escaped with nothing worse than slightly scorched uniforms.

  We had now too many crews and too few machines. Bored to distraction, trying to escape from my thoughts and frustrations in every possible way, horseback included—galloping in clouds of dust through the desert brush—I finally applied for transfer to an RA.F. unit ferrying aircraft along the great sky highway—Gold Coast-Nigeria-Chad-Sudan-Egypt. The machines arrived in crates at Takoradi, where they were assembled and then flown across the whole continent to the Libyan battlefields.

  I made only one such trip, and even so my Blenheim never reached Cairo. It crashed in the bush south of Kumasi. My New Zealand pilot and the navigator were killed. I got off without so much as a scratch, but my morale was low all the same. There is something revolting in the sight of crushed heads, in a smashed and gaping human face and in those extraordinary swarms of flies with which the jungle suddenly surrounds you. And men seem to you more than ordinarily big when you have to dig a last resting place for them with your hands. The speed with which flies congregate and glitter in the sun in all the possible combinations of blue and green with red is truly amazing. After a few hours of this buzzing intimacy, my nerves began to give way. When the rescue planes began to circle above me, I waved my arms wildly to chase them away, confusing their drone with that of the flies trying to settle on my lips and forehead.