many years I’ve tried to understand, though I don’t think of myself as any smarter than the next guy. I grope along, I get lost, I go round in circles. At the beginning, before the Case, Destinat was a name to me, an official position, a house, a fortune, a figure I came across at least two or three times a week and to whom I tipped my hat. But what lay behind all that I had no way of knowing. Since then, by living with his ghost, it’s a little as if he were an old acquaintance, a relative in misfortune, a part of myself, so to speak, and I do my best to make him talk and come alive again, so I might ask him a question. Only one. Now and then I tell myself that I’m wasting my time: The man is as impenetrable as morning fog, and a thousand evenings wouldn’t be time enough for me to see my way through. But now I have time to spare. It’s as if I’m outside the world. All the hurly-burly seems so far off. I live in the movements of a history no longer mine. Little by little, I steal away.
V
1914. There was, in our town, on the eve of the great slaughter, a sudden scarcity of engineers. The factory kept running as ever, but something compelled the Belgians to stay home in their little kingdom, under the spindly shadow of their operetta monarch. The prosecutor was informed, with many bows and courteous words: There would be no more tenants.
The summer had announced itself as a hot one, under the arbors and inside the skulls of the many patriots who in their fervor had been wound up tight as fine clockwork. Everywhere they raised their fists and bared their painful memories. Around here as all over, wounds have a hard time closing, especially where they never dry and are left to fester in evenings of brooding and rancor. Out of pride and stupidity, a whole country was ready to duke it out with another country. The fathers drove their sons. The sons drove their fathers. Hardly anyone but the women—mothers, wives, sisters—could see all this with even an inkling of coming misery, a foresight that projected them well beyond those afternoons of joyous shouts, of glasses tossed back, of rounds of songs that pounded against the canopy of the chestnut trees until your ears rang.
Actually, our little town could hear the war but didn’t wage it. You could even say without giving offense that we lived off it: Our men kept the factory going, and the factory kept them. An order was handed down from on high—a good one for once. By dispensation of I forget which far-off government bureaucrat, all workers were reserved for essential civilian service. And so at least eight hundred strapping local lads would escape the raging guns and the perils of the wild blue yonder. Eight hundred men who in the eyes of some were never men at all, who rose each morning from a warm bed and a drowsy embrace—not from a muddy trench—to go haul useful things rather than cadavers. The incessant blast of shells; the dread of meeting the fate of so many others; the buddies caught in barbed wire just twenty yards away, left to groan until they died, when the rats set upon their remains—all that stayed far away. Instead, there was life pure and simple: real life. It unfolded each morning, not as a dream somewhere beyond the fumes but as a warm certainty that smells of sleep and women.
Lucky bastards! Deadbeats! That’s what all the convalescent soldiers thought—one-eyed, legless, amputated, crushed, gassed, mangled, faces smashed—as they passed the workers on our streets, in the pink of health, about to open their lunch boxes. Some, with an arm in a sling or dragging a wooden leg, would turn around and spit on the ground when those men went by. You could understand it. A person can hate you for less than that.
Not everybody was a civilian worker. The few farmers who were not too young or too old traded their pitchforks for rifles. Leaving as proud conscripts, they couldn’t have known that soon enough they would have their names engraved
Laurice Elehwany Molinari