The Foundling's War. Yasmina Khadra

      Picallon helped himself to a glass of pastis and stared around the sitting room, finally exclaiming, ‘It’s really nice in here!’

      ‘Personally, I think it’s revolting,’ Palfy said. ‘I wouldn’t live in a room like this if you paid me. The worst of French bad taste …’

      Picallon was quiet, suddenly anxious. The black furniture polished to a dusky red, the dresser and its shelves of travel trinkets, the reproduction Corot that was so dull it made you want to throw up, the bone china on the mantelpiece had astounded him, but Palfy’s confident and violent antipathy cast doubt on all of it. He turned to Jean, who saw his discomfiture.

      ‘Listen, I grew up in a kitchen. My father’s a gardener, my mother was a washerwoman and a nanny. A house like this would have been the height of luxury to them. My father would say the same as you. He’s an honest, good man and I’ll never be ashamed of him. You stick to what you think, Picallon.’

      ‘But what about you, what do you say?’

      ‘I say the same as Palfy, but I’ve been lucky, I’ve learnt how to live.’

      They heard footsteps. Palfy put a finger to his lips.

      ‘You got the message, Picallon? Keep mum. You don’t speak a word of French.’

      Their host entered, smiling and happy. He grasped Picallon’s hand and shook it vigorously.

      ‘I hear you don’t speak French. Your comrades will translate. You are welcome in my house. I am a friend of Germany.’

      ‘Don’t waste your breath, Monsieur Graindorge,’ Jean said, ‘our comrade is an excellent soldier but a complete dimwit. The only thing he’s interested in is eating.’

      ‘In that case just give me half an hour, and forgive me for receiving you like this, with whatever’s in the larder …’

      The surveyor was wearing a blue pleated apron much too big for his narrow waist and he had turned up his cuffs, revealing pale, skinny wrists.

      ‘What do you think of my pastis?’

      ‘Drinkable!’ Palfy said without enthusiasm.

      ‘For German throats it must be a novelty.’

      ‘Don’t you believe it, Monsieur Graindavoine. Before entering France like a knife through butter, we had an intensive course in French language and customs. We were taught to appreciate garlic, red wine, accordions and women who wear little silk knickers … Don’t laugh, Monsieur, I’m not making it up. Our Führer is very far-sighted. Helmut here is quite different from my friend Hans and me. He may be a giant and rather crude-looking, and he may not have followed the course we did, which was somewhat beyond his intellectual capacity, but instead he was taught how to kill and he now belongs to a commando unit that specialises in terminating suspects with extreme prejudice. I’ve never seen anyone kill as cleanly as Helmut does. You can trust him, he eliminates without fuss, and if you like, if you have an enemy, I don’t know, anyone, just let me know, don’t be shy, all I have to do is lift my little finger and Helmut will get rid of him for you …’

      Picallon, furious, was about to explode with indignation. Jean gripped his arm and urged him to drink. The so-called Helmut’s sullen expression fully convinced Monsieur Graindorge, who quivered with excitement and fear at having such a redoubtable fighting machine as a guest in his house.

      ‘As you see, the village is deserted,’ he said. ‘So I have no enemies here any more. In peacetime it was a different matter … The mayor was a leftist and a warmonger. No one would mind seeing the back of him … but as I say he’s not here … We’ll talk some more. I need to see to my saucepans.’

      Jean thought of his father. Albert Arnaud would definitely not have left Grangeville. At the beginning of the phoney war his pacifism had made him several enemies. Now his leftist ideas would make him a sitting duck for the Graindorges of the world.

      ‘I’ll have you for this,’ Picallon said to Palfy. ‘If you take the piss out of me once more—’

      ‘Drink your pastis, young priest, and belt up. You are about to eat like a prince and we’re about to empty this ass’s cellar.’

      ‘Then what?’

      ‘Then we’ll see.’

      ‘It will end badly.’

      ‘Everything always ends badly. So if it’s a bit sooner or a bit later than expected, who cares?’

      Monsieur Graindorge was a competent chef, though it was hard to judge on the basis of a hastily prepared chicken fricassee in which he had had to use tinned mushrooms. His sauce lacked body.

      ‘Forgive me—’

      Palfy interrupted him.

      ‘Monsieur Graindemaïs, let me say that we are listening to you with the closest attention. The truth is that you are our first real contact with the French population. But on Adolf Hitler’s instructions – very strict instructions – we were ordered categorically never to say “Forgive me” but “I beg you to forgive me”. I can’t believe our Führer would have made a mistake on such a point …’

      The surveyor blushed deeply. He was not an ugly man, having an average nose, mouth and eyes, but the rush of blood to his cheeks and forehead and around his neck, in large splotches, coloured his face so violently and artificially that it looked like a mask tortured by fear and anxiety. Have I mentioned that this was a man who had only just turned forty and was therefore in what is commonly referred to as his prime, and what is more a bachelor, which in general keeps you young; that he enjoyed a level of material comfort as a result of his technical abilities, which were sought after in the region; that he was a gourmet, a trumpeter in the village band, always jockeying for position on official occasions, but unhappily secretly undermined in his pleasure by a deficiency that, at another time and place, would have earned him highly trusted status in a harem? I’ll admit that that is a lot to reveal about the character of a man whom the author will feel obliged to leave behind fairly swiftly. Jacques Graindorge, then, was ignorant of the subtleties of the French language that Palfy was disclosing to him with a calculated ingenuousness. Querulous, he started to stammer, then, feeling his self-importance rapidly slipping away, made a superhuman effort to get a grip on himself and hide his petulance.

      ‘Your Führer is right … I have made a mistake in French and what you have been taught is absolutely right … but look, you must excuse me. So as not to seem like a pedant in this village, inhabited by honest but unrefined citizens, I tend to adjust my speech to stay in tune with them. Stupidly, in your company, I forgot myself …’

      ‘I’m not annoyed,’ Palfy said, ‘because our Führer is right on this point. I’m not aware that he has made a single mistake in his life.’

      Picallon was shovelling down his lunch, apparently devoting himself to the pleasures of his plate. He served himself a second helping without a word or gesture to his host. Monsieur Graindorge ventured a timid smile.

      ‘Your killer has a healthy appetite, anyway. It’s a real pleasure to see him eat. What a face! A real animal. I expect he was born in some remote province in Germany …’

      Under the table Palfy applied sudden sharp pressure to Picallon’s foot, sensing he was about to explode, and to calm him served him a third full plate of fricassee. Monsieur Graindorge noticed nothing. Crouched at his sideboard, he was looking for a box of cigars that was so well hidden that for a moment he suspected his housekeeper of having made off with it in her pram. He eventually discovered it under a pile of napkins. Palfy sniffed one with suspicion.

      ‘Hm,’ he said. ‘Rather dry … Well, there’s a war on.’

      The surveyor offered him the flame of a petrol lighter. Palfy drew back in surprise.

      ‘Well, well … that is remarkable … We were taught that the French were as painstaking about their cigars as they were about their wine, and they only lit them