The Foundling's War. Yasmina Khadra

a friend of ours.’

      *

      This time Madame Michette herself opened the door and asked them, disdainfully, what they wanted. The house was closed. The ladies were having lunch.

      ‘We won’t disturb them. We merely wanted to have a word with Monsieur Michette and deliver a letter to him from a mutual friend.’

      ‘And who might that be?’ she asked, with the suspicion of someone accustomed to the kind of subterfuge her business inspired.

      ‘It’s a matter between Monsieur Michette and ourselves.’

      ‘Monsieur Michette is still serving in the army.’

      ‘In that case we shall come back later.’

      It was a risky move. It depended entirely on the curiosity and high regard in which Madame Michette held herself, after having taken over the reins of the establishment. The two workmen rightly inspired very little confidence, although the older one talked very correctly and the younger one had a handsome, open face. These were tumultuous times. Clothes no longer made the man.

      ‘Come in!’ she said, in a more accommodating tone.

      We shall not linger over a description of a brothel interior at Clermont-Ferrand in 1940. It would be tedious. There is a whole literature full of such images of the good old days, when lonely men could take themselves to a so-called ‘house of ill repute’ and find a family to welcome them, to provide tenderness and a sympathetic ear to their preoccupations large and small. Let us merely say that at the Michettes’ (another fateful name, but the author cannot help that)2 a very strict code of discipline and morals was applied. Monsieur Petitlouis was not exaggerating. Madame Michette was convent-educated and Monsieur Michette had had an exceptionally distinguished war in 1914–18, coming out of it as an infantry sergeant-major. The sum of physical and spiritual human misery that found respite and forgiveness in their establishment was incalculable. One might, without irony, describe the Michettes as belonging to that category of society’s benefactors that provincial life shunned, stifling it in the straitjacket of moralistic disapproval. Lastly – a supreme luxury in a town whose relative enlightenment as the capital of the Auvergne did not stop gossip being rife – the Michettes had made discretion the watchword of their profession. No large number over the door, and obviously no red light. A stranger could walk past the house a dozen times without suspecting anything, unless his gaze should rest for a second upon the little mermaid whose fish’s tail curled to form the knocker and gave its name to the establishment.

      The diocese valued this self-effacement and the punctuality with which its rent was paid. Seminarians were offered concessionary prices and popular opinion had it that senior clerics paid by handing out absolutions. Numerous were the Clermontois who remembered with feeling having lost their virginity there before their marriage. In the arms of Nénette, Verushka or Victoire they had learnt many imaginative alternatives to the missionary position, alternatives that they would later teach their wives. Those violated, humiliated, ashamed and overwhelmed brides, at first taken horribly by surprise at what marriage involved, would later be secretly grateful to the girls of Michette’s. Not for them the harrowing labours of Mesdames de Rênal and Bovary, pursuing experience with clumsy youths. I am being perfectly serious. France’s brothels – the serious ones, in any case – contributed to both the moral welfare and mental stability of her people. They were her universities of sex. Anatomy was taught there and love acted out with far greater talent than was to be found in a marriage arranged by a notary. They were, in fact, where men passed their exams in licentiousness before setting out on the business of life. Suppressed after the war by a prudish republic, they were so sorely missed by the French that a generation later the state was forced to take measures to introduce the theory and practice of sexual matters into schools. We then witnessed the spectacle of a generation of benighted adolescents receiving the cobbled-together guidance of schoolteachers and demonstrating just how far the civilisation of love had regressed.

      There is no need to remind ourselves that our two heroes had different conceptions of love. Palfy, as a gentleman, kept his preferences to himself, and Jean, thanks to his physique, had not had to go to the same school as everyone else. As a result, coming across such a place for the first time, he found Madame Michette’s establishment gloomy, especially its large sitting room with its walls decorated in a design of pale-skinned mermaids with crimson lips and golden tresses, where Madame received them standing up, not inviting them to sit as she would have done for the humblest customer before the girls processed past him. A scent of cheap face powder hung in the air, along, perhaps, with other odours less pleasing to fastidious nostrils. Tall, solidly large, with the physique of a grenadier, with workman’s hands, and hairs sprouting from her animated chin, Madame Michette banished from their minds any further thought of playing practical jokes.

      ‘Do you have the letter you mentioned?’ she asked Palfy.

      ‘I have it with me, but its sender, Monsieur Salah, was very insistent that we deliver it personally. It’s a shame Monsieur Michette isn’t yet back from the war.’

      Jean patted his back pocket. The famous letter he had been given by the prince, in case he ever found himself in difficulty, was not there. His friend’s latest deceit infuriated him. He would happily have strangled Palfy, who intercepted his glare and gave a forced half-smile, half-grimace. Madame Michette, whose eyes had opened wide at Salah’s name, took the smile as a shared understanding. She was dying to know the letter’s contents.

      ‘I have the same authority as my husband to receive Monsieur Salah’s orders. His friends are our friends.’

      ‘It’s a delicate matter,’ Palfy murmured in a reticent undertone.

      Jean decided that if Palfy showed the letter to Madame Michette, he would grab it and make a run for the nearest exit, but a diversion saved him from such an extreme step. A face framed by red curls appeared in the half-open doorway.

      ‘Madame, the lamb’s done. Shall I pour the sauce over the flageolets?’

      ‘Wait for me, Zizi, I’m coming. Serve the asparagus first and leave the lamb in the oven.’

      Zizi’s head disappeared.

      ‘We shall leave you,’ Palfy said.

      Madame hesitated. Despite her position and her responsibilities, she was still a woman. Suspicious but curious. She would have that letter.

      ‘Come and join us for lunch. We had a gift of a shoulder of lamb, and it’s sitting waiting for us.’

      Jean felt his resistance weaken. Palfy was already accepting, begging Madame Michette to forgive his and his friend’s state of dress.

      ‘We trust you, Madame, but I must ask you not to enquire as to the reasons for what we’re wearing. We are on our way back from an ultra-secret mission and haven’t yet been able to change …’

      The reader will find his excuse less than subtle, but I ask him or her to remember the period. Over the next four years numerous people would live in disguise and under borrowed identities. The world would lose count of the colonels and generals who popped up like jack-in-the-boxes, only to disappear again immediately; of the bogus priests and phoney nuns concealing sub-machine guns or explosives underneath their skirts, and the inflated numbers of commercial travellers, an easy profession to assume for those who carried false papers. A great intrigue was on the wing, undertaken by amateurs who would dazzle the readers of adventure and espionage fiction. Madame Michette, ordinarily exceptionally sceptical and trained by years of experience at sniffing out men’s lies, felt so flattered by Palfy’s half-confidence that she instantly adopted an expression of complicity.

      ‘I promise you we shall say nothing.’

      So they went through to the dining room, where the residents had already sat down. They stood up again as Madame entered, and for a moment Jean wondered if she was going to say grace. He and Palfy were introduced as ‘friends’ to Nénette, Claudette and one or two others. Indicating the young black woman, Madame added, ‘– and our black pearl,