A French Novel. Frédéric Beigbeder

      11

      END OF AN ERA

      The last time I saw Pierre de Chasteigner, that majestic shrimp-fisher with his mane of white hair, was at the Curie Institute, in the 5th arrondissement, in 2004. My grandfather was laid out on a hospital bed, bald, gaunt, unshaven and delirious from the effects of the morphine. The public-alert sirens which go off at noon on the first Wednesday of every month began to wail. He talked to me about his time during the Second World War: ‘Whenever you heard a siren, a bomb exploding, the roar of an aeroplane, it was good news: it meant you were still alive.’

      An officer in the French army, Pierre de Chasteigner was wounded in the arm by shrapnel and captured near Amiens in 1940 during the phoney war. Narrowly avoiding the firing squad, he managed to escape using false papers.

      ‘I should have joined the Resistance, but I was afraid; I thought it was better to go home.’

      It was the first time he had raised the subject with me. I suppose he saw his life flashing past; it was a pity he had to wait until he was dying to finally recover his memory. I didn’t know what to say to him. He had lost as much weight as he had hair; his breathing was laboured. Tubes snaked in and out of his body, making alarming gurgling sounds.

      ‘You have to understand, Frédéric, your uncle and your mother were already born. I had lost my father when I was two months old. It’s hard, growing up without your papa.’

      He knew that we had this weakness in common. I avoided the subject. Granny, too, had been an orphan – it’s crazy when you think about it, my paternal grandmother and my maternal grandfather had both lost their soldier fathers. I come from a world with no fathers. My fisher of shrimp with his hollow cheeks went on: ‘I didn’t want to risk inflicting the same fate on my children, so I was a coward …’

      The son of the man martyred on the battlefield at Champagne felt guilty that he had not been another martyr. I shook my head. ‘Don’t say things like that. You joined the Resistance, Bon Papa, you joined the O.R.A. in Limousin in 1943.’

      ‘Yes, but I joined late, like Mitterrand.’ (He pronounced it ‘mitrand’.) ‘Frédéric, how could you ever have supported the communists? Guingouin’s men almost had me shot, you know. We were a competing organisation. They were very dangerous …’

      I did not want to tell him I had supported the communists as an act of rebellion against my class, and therefore against him. I didn’t dare say that I also saw communism as an extension of Christian charity by other means. Conversations between generations are rare; there is no time for digressions; lose the thread and you may never find it again (which is, in fact, what happened). The important thing was that my grandfather had never known his own father, because he was dead. My case was almost worse: I was deprived of a father who was still very much alive. My daughter probably suffers the same strange absence; the silence of the living is harder to understand than the silence of the dead. I should have taken my grandfather’s hand, but we do not do physical affection in my family.

      ‘Bon Papa, you were heroic to stay with your children; tough luck for France.’

      As I said this, I knew I was asking for a slap in the face, but my grandfather was tired; he simply sighed. Afterwards he asked whether I prayed for him, and I lied. I said I did. He pressed the morphine pump; he was completely spaced out now: it’s quite funny to think that our health system peddles class-A drugs to cancer patients quite legally, while those of us who get off our face in the street wind up in the nick (are we really any less ill?). By the time I left the clinic it was dark, as though someone had switched off the lights.

      On his deathbed, my grandfather had more or less told me, ‘Make love, not war.’ At the last moment, the old commandant awarded the Military Cross ’39–’45 became, ideologically, a soixante-huitard. It took me years before I understood what he was actually trying to tell me in that fatal moment: you don’t remember the war, Frédéric, you weren’t even born then, but your parents and grandparents still remember, even if subconsciously, and all your problems, and theirs, are directly linked to their suffering, their fear, to the bitterness and the hatred of that period in the history of France. Your great-grandfather was a hero of the First World War, your grandfather a veteran of the Second; do you really imagine such violence could not have consequences for successive generations? It is thanks to our sacrifice that you grew up in a country at peace, my dear grandson. Never forget what we went through, never forget your country. Never forget where you come from. Never forget me.

      We buried him the following week, in the graveyard by the sea, in front of the Guéthary church, amid the stooping crosses, under the stone where my grandmother already waited, with a view of the ocean behind the hills; the green dingles married to the deep blue of the sea. During the ceremony, my cousin Margot Crespon, a hypersensitive young actress, read a quatrain or two by Toulet (an opium-eating poet who lies in the same graveyard as my morphine-swigging grandfather):

       Sleep, friend; tomorrow, higher

       Wings your soul and steep.

       Sleep as the gyrfalcon sleeps,

       Or the covered fire.

       While beneath the russet sun

       The mayflies flitter,

       Sleep beneath leaves so bitter.

       My youth, too, is run.

      I chose this poem because it sounds like a prayer. Leaving the graveyard, I watched the sun dissolve among the branches of a cypress like a nugget of gold in a giant’s hand.