The Foundling's War. Yasmina Khadra

a bishop! Not ruddy likely. I don’t like tricky situations. As you’re my witness, I shall be a priest and stay a priest …’

      ‘You lack ambition.’

      ‘Ambition is a sin.’

      ‘Picallon, you’re an imbecile.’

      ‘Yes, maybe I am, but you’re too clever, you know too many things. Doesn’t he, Jean?’

      ‘No. Palfy doesn’t know anything. He guesses it all. And because he doesn’t know anything, he dreams up fabulous schemes that make him a multimillionaire one day and a conman the next.’

      ‘Conman is harsh,’ Palfy said without irritation.

      Picallon, his mind opened to life’s great adventures by the plum brandy, wondered whether the things he had been taught at the seminary still meant something. The invader was trampling France – the Church’s elder daughter – underfoot, and of his only two friends one was disenchanted and the other a conman. His mind a little fogged by alcohol, he tried to work out whether it was all a very good joke, or a dream inspired by the Great Tempter.

      ‘You’re mocking me, both of you,’ he said. ‘You’re incapable of being serious …’

      And he went to bed, in a bedroom that smelt of wax and straw dust, which was a reassuring atmosphere for a country lad from the Jura.

      We shall not elaborate now (or later for that matter) on the conversation that took place between Jean and Palfy after Picallon had gone to bed. More serious than usual, it went on until around two in the morning, after a last glass of plum brandy. The bottle was empty. To find another they would have had to break down the cellar door and they were neither vandals nor looters, just soldiers abandoned by a republic in flight. A minimum of careful thought was vital. Where had the French army gone? Even in the absence of official news, it was plain to see it had evaporated. The worst part was that there did not seem to be a German army either.

      Standing on the doorstep, admiring the warm starry night that enveloped the farm and the countryside, Palfy sighed.

      ‘If we were genuine optimists,’ he said, ‘we’d be imagining that both armies have put the wind up each other. The Germans have turned round and nipped back across their beloved Rhine to stroke their Gretchens with their blond plaits, and the French have laid down their rifles and put in for their paid holidays, a month’s leave on the Côte d’Azur …’

      ‘I wouldn’t mind going down to Saint-Tropez myself …’

      He thought of Toinette and the sweet letter she had written him when he enlisted. But dreaming was forbidden! Palfy reminded him of it every time he weakened, and did not fail to do so this time as well.

      ‘My dear boy, one doesn’t sleep with one’s aunt. It’s no more unhealthy than sleeping with anyone else, but it may bring misfortune on your head. Now is the time to be superstitious again, believe me. I would not have messed up my last two projects in London and Cannes so stupidly if I’d paid attention to certain signs …’

      ‘You’ll never fail to make me laugh,’ Jean said. ‘Let’s go to bed. Tomorrow—’

       ‘Mañana será otro día.’

      ‘Don’t get clever with me. I know those are the only four words of Spanish you know.’

      ‘Mm, they’re all I need. In them lie all the hopes of the world.’

      *

      Tomorrow was indeed another day. The tankettes had to turn out onto a short stretch of departmental road that might be used by the Germans. As soon as they were under way they glimpsed a motorcyclist in the distance, bent over his handlebars and riding flat out in their direction, like a fat cockchafer. The insect swelled disproportionately and they made out a green jacket, black boots, a sort of large, gleaming kettle crowned with insignia and, beneath it, a face grey with dust. The rider did not slow down, acknowledging them with a friendly wave as he flashed past and immediately disappeared behind a hill. Palfy, driving in front, stuck out his right arm, indicating that they should turn onto a dirt track between two large fields. The track led to a barn and a ruined farm. Picallon jumped down, opened the gate, and the two tankettes concealed themselves behind the barn’s stack of hay.

      ‘That was a German!’ Picallon yelled, as soon as the two engines cut out.

      ‘Thanks for telling me!’ Palfy sighed. ‘I came to the same conclusion. I must say, strong emotions make me hungry and thirsty.’

      They found some shade and sat down to some saucisson and the two bottles of light red wine they had liberated unrepentantly from the farm that morning.

      ‘It should be drunk cooler than this!’ Picallon observed, the taste of the light wine reminding him of haymaking time on his father’s farm.

      ‘I say, young priest, you do know how to live!’

      ‘Don’t make fun of me, Palfy. I went straight from my farm to the seminary and from the seminary to the army. You’ve seen the world; I haven’t. So perhaps you know why that German didn’t stop and didn’t shoot at us.’

      ‘It’s probably perfectly simple: a humble soldier on the winning side finds it impossible to imagine that behind his army’s lines are three chaps in French uniforms out sightseeing on a couple of tankettes.’

      ‘Are you saying he took us for Germans?’

      ‘Precisely, my dear young priest. In which case, it also occurred to me that a semblance of thought might run through his fat head and perhaps cause him to turn round and come back. Which is why we are sitting eating saucisson in the hay in the shelter of a barn while there’s a war on somewhere.’

      ‘All right,’ Picallon said, ‘I get it. We’re in the hands of divine Providence again …’

      Providence was no slouch. From the haystack they watched the road for more than an hour. It remained empty. They set off again in the summer heat. Their tracks chewed the soft tarmac. Picallon sat cooking on Jean’s bonnet while the tankette advanced at a stately pace and Jean alternately dozed and watched anxiously as the fuel gauge neared zero. They had been on the move for two hours when they glimpsed a village whose church pointed a tentative spire into a sky empty of aircraft. Palfy held up his arm and they halted outside the mairie. The tricolour hung despondently from its pole. There was not a soul on the street, not even a stray dog. A grocer’s had been looted and the Café des Amis had barricaded itself behind wooden shutters. It was an ordinary French village, pleasant, neither ugly nor handsome, lacking all arrogance as it lacked all pretension. Windows closed, it slumbered quietly in the warm afternoon. On nameplates they read: Jean Lafleur, solicitor; Pierre Robinson, doctor: surgery hours from 2 p.m. to 4 p.m. and by appointment; Auguste Larivière, contractor … Where had they all gone, these peace-loving citizens, exiled one morning in panic from their village, from their memories, their family portraits, the little gardens you could picture behind their houses, tidy and neat, with an apple tree, a few rose bushes and some geraniums? Crammed into wheezing cars, they had fled the war without thinking that the war would travel faster than they could on the congested roads. The single petrol pump was, predictably, padlocked, and hung with an unequivocal sign: ‘No more petrol, so don’t ask.’ The situation seemed perfectly simple: they would have to continue on foot.

      Palfy said bad-temperedly, ‘God, what fools you French are!’

      Picallon’s hackles rose. ‘You’re French as well.’

      ‘I do apologise, young priest, I haven’t regaled you with my life story yet. My mother was English, my father Serb. I’m wearing the same uniform as you are merely because I happened to be born at Nice while my father was trying out an infallible system at the Casino on the Jetée-Promenade.’

      ‘An infallible system?’

      Palfy raised his arms heavenwards and called Jean as his witness.

      ‘Must I explain