My grandmother had not travelled alone to K. She had taken with her a young girl who, according to the printer’s letter, was slightly feeble-minded: the kitchen-maid at the inn where the old lady took her meals every second day.
From now on this ‘half-wit’ played quite a part.
My grandmother apparently doted on her. She took her to the cinema and to the cobbler – who, incidentally, turned out to be a Social Democrat – and it was rumoured that the two women played cards in the kitchen over a glass of wine.
‘Now she’s bought the half-wit a hat with roses on it,’ wrote the printer in despair. ‘And our Anna has no Communion dress!’
My uncle’s letters became quite hysterical, dealt only with the ‘unseemly behaviour of our dear mother’ and otherwise said nothing. The rest I know from my father.
The innkeeper had whispered to him with a wink: ‘Mrs. B’s enjoying herself nowadays, so they say.’
As a matter of fact, even in these last years my grandmother did not live extravagantly in any way. When she did not eat at the inn, she usually took no more than a little egg dish, some coffee and, above all, her beloved biscuits. She did, however, allow herself a cheap red wine, of which she drank a small glass at every meal. She kept the house very clean, and not just the bedroom and kitchen which she used. All the same, without her children’s knowledge, she mortgaged it. What she did with the money never came out. She seems to have given it to the cobbler. After her death he moved to another town and was said to have started a fair-sized business in hand-made shoes.
When you come to think of it, she lived two lives in succession. The first one as daughter, wife and mother; the second simply as Mrs. B, an unattached person without responsibilities and with modest but sufficient means. The first life lasted some sixty years; the second no more than two.
My father learnt that in the last six months she had permitted herself certain liberties unknown to normal people. Thus she might rise in summer at three in the morning and take walks in the deserted streets of the little town, which she had entirely to herself. And, it was generally alleged, when the priest called on her to keep the old woman company in her loneliness, she invited him to the cinema.
She was not at all lonely. A crowd of jolly people forgathered at the cobbler’s, it appears, and there was much gossip. She always kept a bottle of her red wine there and drank her little glassful whilst the others gossiped and inveighed against the town officials. This wine was reserved for her, though sometimes she provided stronger drink for the company.
She died quite suddenly on an autumn afternoon, in her bedroom, though not in bed but on an upright chair by the window. She had invited the ‘half-wit’ to the cinema that evening, so the girl was with her when she died. She was seventy-four years old.
I have seen a photograph of her which was taken for the children and shows her laid out.
What you see is a tiny little face, very wrinkled, and a thin-lipped, wide mouth. Much that is small, but no smallness. She had savoured to the full the long years of servitude and the short years of freedom and consumed the bread of life to the last crumb.
A Question of Taste
We were sitting on straw-plaited chairs in the dining-room in one of those delightful old country houses near Paris. A long narrow window reached down to the stone floor, through which we could hear every now and again the clatter of a passing train or the blast of a motor-car horn; the reflection of the logs in the open fireplace flickered gently on the greenish wallpaper; our host the painter, known as Mountain on account of his girth, was roasting a massive piece of beef on an iron spit set upon a tripod. Standing at a small polished table, his wife was making the salad in a huge bowl with those attractive movements which delighted her audience on the Boul’ Miche every evening when she served them one of her saucy songs. From his chair the small lean art dealer kept his eye on her, and each time she reached for one of the carafes of oil or vinegar she first waited for his nod of approval. The responsibility was too great for so small a person.
What with the large joint of beef and the dripping fat, the conversation revolved around materialism in German philosophy. Mountain was not at all pleased with it.
‘They really did a proper job, those Germans,’ he said indignantly, ‘they spiritualised it to such an extent that only the ghost of anything material inhabits their systems. Of course it was to be expected that once they had got hold of it materialism wouldn’t survive as a way of life, they just don’t know how to live, the whole point of their philosophy is to teach people the best way of not living. From the start they excluded base materialism from their meditations and turned towards higher things which have nothing to do with the delights of eating because they have nothing to do with anything at all.’
I lodged a half-hearted protest but Mountain was in full swing.
‘Materialism and six days without meat! Take Love, for example. For the Germans it’s a movement of the soul. There’s hardly any other movement involved. Couples just want to feel cosy. Love has got to be armless.’
I was somewhat astonished until I realised he meant harmless. We were speaking German. In French you simply can’t say ‘feel cosy’.
This put the art dealer on his guard.
‘For God’s sake, Jean, don’t get so excited,’ he exclaimed, ‘you’re turning the spit too quickly. You’ll put paid to German materialism all right, but you’re also destroying our own matter, the beef. Of course there’s something in what you say. I love the Germans. You can’t say they have no taste. Just think of their music. They can even afford somebody like that ghastly Wagner. Not that he affects the issue. It’s just that their culture is perhaps a little too spiritual, wouldn’t you say? You’ve got to have spirit, but you need the body too. What good would the spirit be without it? And really, after they’ve put something through the refiner, there isn’t much left. Once they’ve refined it, their love is rather sexless, as you can see from their literature. They can’t enjoy nature without premonitions of death. They have beautiful feelings, but rather deep down inside, so it seems. The sixth sense is there all right, but where are the other five? Bread, wine, the chair, your arms, Yvette – all the basic materials evaporate so easily for them. They pay no attention to fundamentals. For a start, they probably exaggerate the difference between man and animals. They only cultivate man, not the animal in him as well, they leave out too much. For them, spirit has too little to do with roast beef. Their taste for art is too remote from their taste for food: when it comes to the more bodily functions their sense of beauty lets them down.’
‘Every sentence an insult,’ I said laughing.
‘Ah,’ he said contentedly, ‘we are a race of gluttons. Once food is involved you have to take us seriously.’
The salad was ready. With his longhandled scoop Mountain ladled the fat in the pan over the joint of beef, which quickly turned brown.
‘I like the Germans too,’ Yvette said dreamily, ‘they take you seriously.’
‘That’s the worst thing that’s been said about us so far,’ I protested. ‘Be thankful my reaction is purely spiritual and that I’m not throwing this stool at anybody. Nice table manners you have here. The joint is roasted, the salad’s delicious, the guest is warned. He’s going to be tested to see if he’s capable of enjoying them. Woe betide him if he doesn’t smack his lips!’
Yvette seemed dismayed.
‘Oh, now you’ve intimidated him. It’s all going to stick in his throat.’
Mountain manoeuvred the beef skilfully on to the table and seized the carving-knife.
‘I’ll tell him what I think about us and that will even things up. About our politics, for example, hein, mon ami?’
‘I’ll say something about that,’ said I, and I did.
The joint was excellent, a work of art. I was on the brink of saying so but feared they would ask me straightaway if I could name one single German work of art that deserved to be called a joint of roast beef. Better sti
ck to politics . . .
The art dealer had plenty of nasty things to say, particularly about colonial policy.
Yvette turned to me.
‘Did you know Jean was an officer in the colonial army. He must tell you the story about the Kabyles and the cook in the Tangier fortifications – as a punishment.’
‘I’ve been punished already,’ I said. ‘Even if I get something to eat now. My last meal – but I won’t be getting until after my execution.’
‘As a punishment for him,’ said Yvette, ‘for being a chauvinist.’
Mountain smiled. He broke some white bread, threw the pieces on to his plate and mopped up the fat as he began obediently to tell his story.
‘It was in the Riff war. A ghastly business. We attacked a foreign people and then treated them like rebels. As you know, it’s all right to treat barbarians barbarically. It’s the desire to be barbaric that makes governments call their enemies barbarians. I didn’t always see it that way, Yvette is right to insist that I tell the story once again to punish myself, because in the old days I used to tell it differently. I used to tell it to illustrate the chauvinism of our enemies. Well, history since then has taught me better. As you know, I was an officer. I won’t talk about the war itself. That’s better forgotten. We burnt things down and shot things up, and the newspapers spoke of strategy. Naturally our weapons were the better, so the generals were able to praise our heroism. I had been wounded slightly and was having lunch with our commander in the officers’ mess in the fortifications. That’s how I came to be present when they investigated the murder of one of the cooks by some Riff Kabyle prisoners. Let me tell you right away that they found out absolutely nothing.
‘Very early on it became clear that the cook died of his own good nature. The Kabyles had been brought into the fortress in the afternoon, about seventy of them in all. Of course they weren’t in particularly good condition, they’d been on the road for two days and those were some roads. On top of that they were starving. But in the fortress that day’s rations had already been issued, so they couldn’t be given anything until the next morning. They were crammed into one of the stone caves, and there they lay or stood screaming for food. The stronger ones dragged themselves to the iron grating and pleaded with the guards or cursed them.
‘The cook, in civilian life a small fishmonger in Marseilles, took pity on them and wondered how he could get round the regulations. Hats off to him, he alone stood for the France of the Convention.
‘In the evening he took along a basket with loaves of bread which he had saved up somehow or other and a handful of cigarettes for bribing the guards with. He bought the cigarettes in the canteen out of his wages. As I said, may the earth lie gently upon him.
‘It worked. The guards weren’t monsters, they were smokers, and the prisoners got their loaves of bread.
‘Later that evening the cook went down to them once again because he had forgotten his basket and didn’t want it to be discovered at the morning inspection. You understand, the whole affair was illegal.
‘Next morning his body was found in the cave.
‘When the guard changed the first thing that happened was another great rumpus. The prisoners complained, yelling that they’d been given stale bread. True enough, only one of them had been able to eat his loaf.
‘But the cook lay in the corner with his head bashed in.
‘That’s all there is to the story really. The inquiry got nowhere. The cook had brought the prisoners bread, they had killed him just the same. Nobody could discover how. The most careful search of the cell produced no weapon. It was a complete mystery. Since the mystery was never solved, the story has no point either. It’s really not much good as an example of chauvinism, that would be plain silly. Perhaps these Kabyles were chauvinists but we were worse ones. From childhood on, we had been brainwashed, it’s my only excuse for the way I used to misinterpret this affair. All it proves is that you can’t be kind-hearted in wartime. One can’t say: we want to shoot the women and children to smithereens but that’s as far as we’ll go. We won’t go any further. We’re going to be beasts, but only up to a point. Nor could the cook have said: I’m neither a Frenchman now nor a soldier, I’m just a cook. The stack of loaves didn’t fool the Kabyles.’
Mountain had long since stopped eating and was now playing with the crumbs of white bread.
After a short pause the art dealer said:
‘But we can drink to the man from Marseilles. He made a mistake, but some mistakes are terrible.’
We emptied our glasses. Then I couldn’t help remarking: ‘Yet another race that doesn’t appreciate bread properly.’
We laughed.
Yvette passed round the cheese. The little art dealer was just raising his knife when something occurred to him.
‘There’s a solution to that mystery,’ he said slowly. ‘I can tell you why the cook was killed.’
Mountain simply asked: ‘Why?’
‘It wasn’t despite his bringing those loaves of bread but because of it. They were too stale, just as you said. Inedible. Hard.’
‘With one exception,’ muttered Mountain. ‘Yes, perhaps that’s a way of looking at it too. But that doesn’t solve the mystery. It only supplies the motive.’
‘There’s still the little matter of the weapon,’ said the art dealer. ‘And we can solve that too. I suggest the weapon was a loaf of bread. An old loaf of bread, too hard for the Kabyles to chew. And too hard for the cook’s skull.’
Mountain opened his big blue eyes in astonishment.
‘That’s really good,’ he said admiringly. ‘Perhaps you know who the murderer was as well?’
‘Of course,’ said the art dealer without further ado. ‘The murderer was the Kabyle who had eaten his loaf although it was so hard. He had to eat it, otherwise they’d have found blood on it.’
‘Oh,’ said Yvette.
‘Yes,’ said the little art dealer seriously. ‘They knew a thing or two about bread. They had good taste.’
The Augsburg Chalk Circle
In the days of the Thirty Years War a Swiss Protestant by the name of Zingli owned a large tannery and leather business in the free imperial city of Augsburg on the Lech. He was married to an Augsburg woman and had a child by her. As the Catholics marched on the city his friends strongly advised him to flee, but, whether it was that his small family held him back or that he did not want to abandon his tannery, he simply could not make up his mind to leave while there was yet time.
Thus he was still there when the imperial troops stormed the city and, while they plundered it that evening, he hid in a pit in the courtyard where the dyes were stored. His wife was to have moved with the child to her relatives on the outskirts, but she spent too much time packing her belongings – dresses, jewellery and bedding – and so it came about that suddenly she saw from a window on the first storey a squad of imperial soldiers forcing their way into the courtyard. Beside herself with fear, she dropped everything and fled from the place through a back door.
So the child was left behind in the house. It lay in its cradle in the large hall and played with a wooden ball that hung on a string from the ceiling.
Only a young servant-girl was still in the house. She was busy with the copper pots and pans in the kitchen when she heard a noise from the street. Darting to the window she saw soldiers throwing all kinds of loot into the street from the first storey of the house opposite. She ran to the hall and was just about to take the child out of the cradle when she heard the sound of heavy blows on the oaken front door. She was seized with panic and flew up the stairs.
The hall was filled with drunken soldiers, who smashed everything to pieces. They knew they were in a Protestant’s house. As though by a miracle Anna, the servant-girl, remained undiscovered throughout the searching and plundering. The soldiers made off and, scrambling out of the cupboard in which she had been standing, Anna found the child in the hall, also unharmed. She snatched it up hastily and stole with
it into the courtyard. In the meantime night had fallen, but the red glow from a burning house near by lit up the courtyard, and with horror she saw the battered corpse of her master. The soldiers had dragged him from his pit and butchered him.
Only now did the girl realise the danger she ran should she be caught in the street with the Protestant’s child. With a heavy heart she laid it back in the cradle, gave it a little milk to drink, rocked it to sleep and made her way towards that part of the city where her married sister lived. At about 10 o’clock at night, accompanied by her sister’s husband, she elbowed her way through the throng of soldiers celebrating their victory to go to the outskirts and find Frau Zingli, the mother of the child. They knocked on the door of an imposing house, which, after quite a long while, did open slightly. A little old man, Frau Zingli’s uncle, stuck his head out. Anna announced breathlessly that Herr Zingli was dead but the child unharmed in the house. The old man looked at her coldly with fish-like eyes and said his niece was no longer there and he himself washed his hands of the Protestant bastard. With that he shut the door again. As they left, Anna’s brother-in-law noticed a curtain move at one of the windows and was convinced that Frau Zingli was there. Apparently she felt no shame in repudiating her child.
Anna and her brother-in-law walked on side by side in silence for a while. Then she declared that she wanted to go back to the tannery and fetch the child. Her brother-in-law, a quiet respectable man, listened to her aghast and tried to talk her out of this dangerous notion. What were these people to her? She had not even been decently treated.
Anna heard him out and promised to do nothing rash. Nevertheless, she must just look in quickly at the tannery to see whether the child needed anything. And she wanted to go alone.
And go she did. In the midst of the devastated hall the child lay peacefully in its cradle and slept. Wearily Anna sat down by its side and gazed at it. She had not dared to kindle a light, but the nearby house was still burning and by its light she could see the child quite well. It had a tiny mole on its little neck.