The Foundling's War. Yasmina Khadra

her once during her period of greatest misery and still requested, in a tone that brooked no refusal, minor services from her which she provided in his office after the door had been locked behind her. For the first few days Jean could not get a word out of her. He tried to reassure her that he had not been taken on so that La Garenne could get rid of her, but because only a man could deal with customers interested in canvases of nudes. She half believed him and for a long time continued to look as gloomy as the rural landscapes that she sold with barely disguised apathy. Business boomed. Soldiers on leave in field-grey uniforms crowded outside the gallery windows, shoving each other with their elbows, smothering their guffaws, embarrassment and curiosity pressing them together. Their NCOs walked past, ramrod straight, eyes front, outraged in the name of the Reich at the sight of these bottoms, nipples and pussies, the very symbols of the moral and physical corruption that had led France to its destruction. The officers, on the other hand, strode in, leafed through the gallery’s catalogue and asked to see what Louis-Edmond proudly called his ‘hell’, a collection of pornographic prints, licentious drawings and Jesús’s most daring canvases. It was understandable that Blanche de Rocroy should feel uncomfortable displaying such horrors to male customers who were in the habit of screwing monocles into their eyes so as not to miss the smallest detail. Jean’s days were therefore mostly spent in ‘hell’, with Louis-Edmond only appearing when a customer started haggling too much. Moving from honeyed charm to outright disdain, and from disdain to perfectly pitched indifference, he would close the sale with his ineffably glib tongue. The examples of extreme erotica sold fast. Jesús began to be unable to satisfy the demand, and La Garenne started to look for new artists. He found a few, but their work did not sell: talentless and sleazy, they failed to meet La Garenne’s customers’ exacting requirements. From Jean Jesús learnt what was happening and slammed the door on his dealer. Jean laughed. Louis-Edmond, frantic at the idea of running out of merchandise, sent him back as his ambassador, bearing a very large cheque.

      ‘Tell ’im to come ’ere hisself,’ Jesús answered. ‘I wan’ to see this shit climb my stairs on ’is ’ands an’ knees.’

      The dealer came, and climbed. Jesús let him off the hands and knees, though La Garenne was ready to submit. Puce-faced, perspiring, so breathless he could not speak, he listened without protesting as he was called every name under the sun, his head bent, twisting his plump hands with their filthy nails. When Jesús ran out of insults La Garenne sobbed, ‘I am a wretch.’

      ‘A wretch stuff’ with cash!’

      ‘I’m not talking about that. I’m talking about my name, which I’ve allowed to be dragged through the mud. Me! The descendant of a crusader!’

      ‘An’ fuck your crusades!’

      But La Garenne had got his breath back, and with it his snooping instinct, and was glancing around the studio. Ignoring the daubs he usually bought, he went up to an easel on which stood one of Jesús’s new canvases, a black and luminous landscape, a violent confrontation between a lava-covered land and the sea, under a blazing sky.

      ‘This is brilliant!’ he said. ‘I’ll buy it.’

      ‘Eh?’ Jesús said, dumbstruck.

      La Garenne took out his cheque book.

      ‘How much? You tell me.’

      ‘I don’ feed the jam to the pig.’

      ‘Jesús, I’m not asking for compensation for your insults. Where genius is concerned, everything is allowed. How much?’

      ‘No.’

      La Garenne signed his cheque, dated it, left the amount blank and handed it to Jesús.

      ‘You put down whatever you like.’

      ‘Go fuck yourself!’

      As we may imagine, La Garenne walked away with the picture, leaving behind a cheque for twenty thousand francs and the promise that Jesús would deliver within the next week a series of six etchings for ‘hell’.

      ‘Edition of fifty, not one more!’ the dealer promised, his arm extended as if for a fascist salute.

      Jean had reason to believe that, with the help of subtle manipulation, the fifty would turn into two hundred, plus several dozen artist’s proofs. La Garenne fiddled the documentary evidence and had already for a long time been forging the pseudonymous signature Jesús used for his bread-and-butter work. To buy Jesús’s landscape as he had, almost with his eyes closed and with an impressively faked passion and a cheque to match, had been a stroke of genius. Jesús wavered. For a time he even stopped heaping insults on Louis-Edmond, making an effort, without great conviction, to acknowledge a flair beneath his crudity, a sort of instinct for painting that only the treacherous circumstances and frightful materialism of the French prevented from showing itself. Jean refrained from pouring cold water on his friend’s enthusiasm and opening his eyes to the Machiavellianism of La Garenne who, almost as soon as they were back at the gallery, had handed Jesús’s canvas to Blanche, curling his lip contemptuously.

      ‘Put that in the toilet or the cellar. Yes, in the cellar. If I had that in front of me I couldn’t deal with two shits at once.’

      Perhaps the important thing was that Jesús had found a buyer for a painting that he had begun to think was unsaleable.

      What about Claude? I hear you say. We have not forgotten her. She explains everything. Without her Jean would not stay a single day longer in this new Paris, slowly beginning to fill with people again and to face the autumn with a kind of fearful, courageous expectancy. He puts up with the ignominy of working for La Garenne, with Blanche’s relentless gloom, with the disheartening experience of spending his days in the gallery’s hell, because when he finishes work Claude’s smile and the cool welcome of her cheek is waiting for him on the fourth floor of Quai Saint-Michel.

      Cyrille would open the door: a pale little boy with curly blond hair and blue eyes sparkling with pleasure.

      ‘Maman, it’s Jean!’ he would shout.

      ‘Who else did you think it would be?’ she would answer from the next room.

      She would appear, her face half turned to his, offering her cheek and the beginning of her smile. Cyrille would go back to his toys, and when the weather was fine they would lean on the balcony and look out over the city slowly disappearing in the twilight, the Seine velvet and immobile, its banks empty but for pedestrians hastening home.

      The first evening Claude said, ‘It’s terrible!’

      ‘What’s terrible?’

      ‘Everything. Not knowing anything about the people you love, or even the people you don’t love. Not being sure of anything. What will happen to us? We’re using up the best years of our lives wanting to know, wanting to have an answer.’

      ‘I close my eyes. You should do the same.’

      ‘You don’t have anyone else.’

      ‘I’m the same as you. I have you.’

      ‘You don’t have me. You have to remember that.’

      ‘Well, I think I have you, whether you like it or not, and deep down it doesn’t matter if you do or you don’t.’

      Yes, let us dispel the ambiguity. Nothing has happened between them since their meeting at Clermont-Ferrand, and it is Claude’s wish that nothing should happen. To all appearances that is not how things are: they are together, they see each other every day. When the gallery closes, Jean walks down from Montmartre to Saint-Michel. He likes crossing Paris like this, among crowds of Frenchmen and -women hurrying about their business, paying no attention to the signs in Gothic script that they encounter en route. The occupiers are still tourists. There were others like them before the war, and no one is surprised that this new wave of curious visitors responds to the same siren songs as their predecessors, making straight for the Opéra or the Folies-Bergère. Jean loves Paris for other reasons; for him the city is intimate and full of secret places. Turning a corner, catching sight of a theatre or a cinema,