The Foundling's War. Yasmina Khadra

between you and me now!’,5 yet the future lies here: he must live to deserve the beautiful being at his side, whom the war has left defenceless. Georges Chaminadze is in England. He has managed to get a message through via the Red Cross. Claude is going back to her apartment and an uncertain livelihood. The train draws into the platform at Gare de Lyon with a long screech of brakes. German railway workers mingle with French. There are no longer any porters and no taxis.

      The mêlée of passengers jostles and pushes its way to the Métro, which greets them with its smell of burnt electricity and disinfectant. Claude holds Cyrille’s hand. Jean carries the two cases. He escorts Claude to her apartment on Quai Saint-Michel. Apart from the occasional German car, the streets are empty. Paris smells good. The chestnuts are in leaf. The booksellers have reopened their stalls and there are soldiers flicking through pornography or buying engravings showing little urchins peeing in the gutter while a girl with an upturned nose watches spellbound. The lift is out of order. Four floors.

      Claude pushes open the shutters and there is Notre-Dame, to which France’s government of freemasons and secularists filed on 19 May to pray to the Holy Virgin to save the nation. A Te Deum that fell on deaf ears. France has vanished but the witnesses to her past have remained: the Conciergerie, the spire of the Sainte-Chapelle, and in the distance the Sacré-Cœur, as ugly as ever, the work of a pretentious pastry chef. Cyrille tugs off his socks and lies down on his bed among his favourite animals. Claude closes his bedroom door and walks back to the hall with Jean. She raises herself on tiptoe and kisses him quickly on the cheek.

      ‘Thank you,’ she says. ‘Tomorrow?’

      ‘Tomorrow.’

      As he goes back downstairs he reflects that so far he has not even held her hand. But his palm has kept the memory of her knee that he stroked for a second on the train. Where to now? He knows no one and has only a few francs in his pocket. He feels a strong urge to turn round and retrace his footsteps. He reaches the Opéra. On the terrace of the Café de la Paix there are green uniforms and women sitting at the small tables. Rue de Clichy is deserted and the Casino de Paris is closed. Paris looks like a city drowsing in the sun, unwilling to wake up because it feels too early and there is no sign of the familiar morning noises – the buses and their grinding gearboxes, the milkmen and newspaper sellers – yet different noises are audible, as if in a bad dream – the two-stroke engines of German cars, the distant rumble and squeak of armoured units driving through the city back to the north, and the whistle of dispatch riders’ heavy BMW motorcycles. Drawn by a Percheron, a charabanc passes, transporting cases of beer. And on the giant billboard above the entrance to the Gaumont a poster for a German film.

      Jean had thought he would never see Rue Lepic again, but here it is, and as he walks up it he recognises the Italian fruit-seller, the pork butcher from Limousin and the café-tabac run by the Auvergnat, though it is no longer Marcel behind the counter but his wife whose breasts are as large as ever. And finally the filthy, poetic building from which Chantal de Malemort escaped one morning, carried off in a Delahaye driven by that dandified thug, Gontran Longuet. Nearly all the shutters are closed, but two are open on the fourth floor. Jean climbs the stairs. Nothing has changed. He rings the bell. A sound of footsteps. The door opens wide. Jesús Infante stands with his mouth open.

      ‘Jean!’

      He throws his arms wide, seizes Jean and crushes him, knocking all the air out of his body and thumping him on the back, Spanish-style.

      ‘Jean!’ he repeats. ‘You are ’live!’

      On a bed behind him, draped with black satin, lies a girl with dyed blond hair.

      ‘Com’ in!’ Jesús shouts in a booming voice. ‘Make yourself at ’ome!’

      The girl gets to her feet to look for a dressing gown and finds a piece of cloth that she knots above her breasts.

      ‘Coffee, Zorzette! A real one!’

      Jesús is the same as ever, shirt unbuttoned on his hairy chest, five o’clock shadow, gold-filled smile. On his easel is a canvas of depressingly anatomical realism. He intercepts Jean’s gaze.

      ‘Yes, it’s revolting, I know. But i’ sells, i’ sells. You ’ave no ide’. I make one a day. So – tell me everything!’

      Jean tells his story quickly. Jesús’s reaction is decisive. Jean has nothing, so he must live with him. He has a camp bed he can put up in the studio. The Germans buy his nudes by the dozen. The gangster from Place du Tertre who sells them visits three times a day and has doubled his price. Anyhow, Jean’s not here for that. They’ll talk about it later. Jesús jerks his chin in the direction of Georgette, pouring boiling water into the coffee pot. She is not in on the secret. Jean studies her as she bends forward to fill his cup: she has a tired and listless face with smudges around her eyes. She bleaches her hair carelessly and smells of the same cheap scent as the girls from the Sirène. Jesús taps her on the bottom.

      ‘Go an’ get dress’. ’E’s finish’ for today.’

      She goes to change behind a screen.

      ‘What time tomorrow?’ she asks.

      ‘Today, tomorr’, we celebrate Jean. I le’ you know. An’ fuck the painting!’

      She shrugs and holds out her hand. He puts money in her palm and she vanishes. Jesús tells Jean about his ‘war’, which has been as simple as can be: he has stayed exactly where he is. The only one left in the building, he went to the Étoile to watch the Germans march past, their band leading the way, in front of General von Briesen. Life has slowly returned to something like normal. Jean, remembering his friend’s strange eating habits, asks if he can still find peanuts and red wine. No, there are no more peanuts.

      ‘The peanut supply line ’as been cut!’ Jesús says, imitating Paul Reynaud, former president of the Council and much given to vainglorious announcements.

      ‘So?’

      ‘I eat wha’ I find! War is war. You ’ave to survive.’

      His face takes on a sorrowful expression. There is a question on the tip of his tongue, but he is hesitating. Finally he speaks.

      ‘An’ ’ow is Santal de Malemort?’

      ‘I don’t know,’ Jean says.

      ‘You forgive ’er.’

      ‘I haven’t thought about it.’

      ‘You ’ave to forgive.’

      ‘That’s rich, coming from you!’

      Jesús puts his hands together. He would like to swear but there is no God, so Jean will have to believe him. This is the truth: he, Jesús, never slept with Chantal, although it is true that she came to see him when Jean was working nights and offered to pose for him. Jesús would not have dreamt of touching her. He hadn’t known how to say it to Jean, and then afterwards he realised the misunderstanding.

      ‘I don’t care,’ Jean said. ‘And you’re a chump not to have screwed her.’

      ‘You is telling me that I’m chump?’

      ‘A very big chump.’

      ‘Okay, I’m chump. She was a girl who like’ to show ’er tits …’

      Jesús wants to know everything. Why did she go back to Malemort when Gontran Longuet was offering her the high life, sports cars, hotels, travel? Women were incomprehensible; in fact they were completely mad. An Andalusian philosopher, a man from Jaén, Joaquín Petillo, declared in the eighteenth century that female seed came from another planet. An unknown object, smaller than a whale and bigger than a sardine – but in the shape of a fish – had several thousand years ago deposited an unknown seed on the surface of the earth. Until that moment our fathers (and mothers), all hermaphrodites, had lived happily and immortally together.

      ‘So how did they reproduce?’ Jean asks.

      ‘By the masturbación,