“Hamlet jumped into Ophelia’s grave. But then he jumped out.”
“And so do I, figuratively, each time. But let me go on. It hardly ended there. Louis Mignon and his wife, Marie, saved us, for a time. I stayed with them in Reims until I was seven. Then I went to live with cousins in Paris. At the station, Louis and Marie embraced me. They cried. I cried. And Louis tried to press a coin into my hand, ‘Pour chocolat,’ he said. But I refused to take it. I was a little kid, a very confused little kid, and I thought that by refusing the gift I was expressing my gratitude. He was deeply hurt, and two weeks later he died. I know I didn’t kill him, but you see?
“The next was a dog, my dog, Jeudi. After I was sent to Paris I was bullied a lot in school – no parents, a Jew who stuttered in the accent of Reims, a child whose unhappiness brought forth a thousand blows and a lot of blood, literally. One day when I was coming home after taking a beating, she ran to greet me. She loved me, and I loved her. Because I had no parents, she was everything to me. But that day, for no reason, I hit her. I’ll never forget the sound when she cried out. Sometimes I dream it. Why did I hit her? I know now but so what? Normally I would have taken her in my arms. Her tail was wagging, she was just excited to see me, but I hit her, hard. She’s long dead. At times, when I think of that, I come to tears.
“It doesn’t end there. I had a cousin, twenty years older than I was, a hero who had served with the Free French. He was tall, he had a beautiful girlfriend, and they would take me to amusements and on long walks. Young people in love sometimes have a kind of practice child. That was important to me, because I wanted to be exactly like him. I was always unhappy when he left, because, frankly, the relatives who took me in Paris didn’t want to have anything to do with me. I don’t blame them. I was a difficult child. But he saw through that. They had a little garden in which there was a hose for watering the plants and the grass. I played there, or brooded. One day in late September he had to leave, and a taxi was waiting to take him to the station. He came downstairs and into the garden to say goodbye to me. He was wearing a beautifully tailored suit. What did I do? Because I didn’t want him to go, I sprayed him with the hose. He got soaking wet and cold, but he had no time to change because he had to catch the train. I was scolded like a murderer, but he intervened and said it was all right. The way he looked at me told me that he understood and still loved me. Two months later he was dead from melanoma. What did I know? I thought he had become sick because of the chill. I thought for years that I had killed him. I know of course that I didn’t. It doesn’t matter.
“There were so many other occasions of that nature – pets that I had to put down, animals that I accidentally ran over, even a dove that I stepped on as I was coming out of my barracks before dawn. But there are two that loom very large. The time is passing, so I’ll tell you those quickly.”
“Don’t worry about the time. You can come back.”
“I don’t think I will.”
“If it’s a matter of economy …” Dunaif began. For him, the ability of a patient to pay was not paramount.
“It’s not that.” Jules paused for a moment before he went on. “I said two more, but it’s possibly three. That’s the problem.
“The first was in Algeria in fifty-eight, on the northern sector of the Morice Line. I was a draftee of eighteen. I had good luck, because I served in the mountains, far from the cities. Our job was to prevent infiltration from Tunisia, of which there was a great deal. That was more straightforward and less morally difficult than most everything else in the war. We were soldiers fighting soldiers who came from abroad to participate in the civil war for which we had come from abroad as well. So, in a sense, we were even.
“I had hoped to be a musician in the army, playing at the élysée or in parades, but there was no place open for the cello, in marching bands the piano translates to the glockenspiel, and the glockenspiel positions were filled as well. So I ended up on Djebel Chélia, in a pine forest at two thousand meters. It was beautiful there in the middle of nowhere, with snow in the winter; views, from high outcroppings, of hundreds of kilometers; wild horses on the plains below; and heavy, steeply sloped forests.
“Our base was surrounded by mines and wire, and we would patrol the few roads in armored vehicles, which, though rarely, were sometimes attacked. It was a quiet sector, because infiltrators preferred to travel away from the mountain itself, and other units would come into contact with them before they got to us – mostly.
“I loved being in such a place – or would have had it not been for the war – which made me long for home in the same way that one can long for a woman: the deep desire that can be felt, physically, throughout every part of the body. Evidently a lot of people don’t experience that, which is too bad.
“Though I had determined to die before I killed an innocent, it was not from idealism. I hate idealism. It was because I couldn’t possibly do to anyone what had been done to my mother and father, as simple as that. But there were no civilians anywhere near us in those mountains, where the green of the pines was as deep as the blue of the sky, and I thought I’d escaped that kind of test, which is more common in war than most people imagine.
“I was much stronger than I am now ….”
“You seem fit for your age,” Dunaif said.
“Maybe, but when I was young I had volcanic energy in surplus and overflowing. So I volunteered. For what? I was already there. But we were vulnerable. During the day, you could hear our vehicles from a kilometer away, and at night you could not only hear them but see their arc-light on top, probably from a hundred kilometers distant. Their ineffectiveness wasn’t a danger just because the enemy might have hidden and subsequently passed through, but because he might have massed to wipe out our small post. Not for any strategic reason, really, but just to kill us, take our weapons, enjoy a small victory.
“I went to my commander and laid this out for him. He was one of those people who at the expense of everything else will take any route to his own success. At the end of my strategic essay – I was a young private – he said, ‘What do you recommend, patrolling without armor?’
“‘Yes,’ I answered. ‘Two or three men at a time, going out lightly armed, silently, waiting in ambush.’
“‘Good,’ he said. ‘Do exactly that, according to your design. Arm yourself as you wish, go when and where you want, hunt in the forest.’
“‘But I thought you would put me under a sergeant,’ I told him.
“‘Oh no no no!’ he said. ‘You’re in command.’
“‘Me?’
“‘You.’
“‘Of how many men?’
“‘One. You.’