1914

14

AFTER ANTHIME CAME HOME, he’d been closely watched during his convalescence: they’d nursed, bandaged, washed, and nourished him; even his sleep was monitored. “They” meaning Blanche in particular, who at first had chided him gently for having grown thinner during his five hundred days at the front, without even thinking to make any allowance for the almost eight pounds a lost arm would represent. Then once he seemed nicely recovered, enough even to hazard an occasional brief smile—although only with the left corner of his lips, as if the other one were linked to the missing limb—and when he was able to live an independent life again at home, Blanche and her parents wondered whatever they would do with him.

Of course the army would pay him a pension but they couldn’t let him lie fallow, he needed an activity. Assuming that his infirmity would prevent him from carrying out his duties as an accountant with the same dexterity, Eugène Borne had an idea. While waiting to step into Eugène’s position, Charles had been the deputy plant manager, but his sudden death had left open the question of the succession. Putting off this decision for the moment, Eugène had assembled a kind of governing body for the concern, a board of directors with himself as president, which allowed him to avoid having to take all initiatives on his own and therefore sole responsibility for everything. To these weekly collegial meetings already attended by Monteil, Blanche, and Mme. Prochasson, Eugène decided to add Anthime in homage to his heroic brother and for services rendered to the firm, sweetening the deal with some director’s fees. Giving structure to Anthime’s life without constraining it, this directorship did not entail much but it was something: he was expected to attend, give an opinion—without being any more obliged to have one than the others were to listen to it—vote, and sign papers without necessarily having read them, a task he swiftly learned to carry out with his left hand. In this regard it did seem that others worried more about his handicap than he seemed to himself, for he never mentioned his missing arm.

If he didn’t, it was mostly because he had managed almost too quickly to dismiss it from his mind, except when he awakened each morning and looked for it— but only for a second. Forced to become a lefty, he did so without any fuss: having successfully taught himself to write with his remaining hand—and while he was at it to draw, too, more and more, which he’d never done with his right one—he abandoned without regret certain now impractical habits, like peeling a banana or tying his shoelaces. As regards bananas, never having particularly cared for this fruit (a recent addition, incidentally, at the market), Anthime switched easily to fruits with edible skins. Regarding shoelaces, he did not find it difficult to design and commission from the factory a prototype for shoes intended for his exclusive use, a single pair, at first, until the return of peace brought home men interested once again in lighter footwear, and Anthime’s Pertinax moccasin became a great commercial success.

Anthime had also to renounce, whenever he wanted to reflect, wait patiently, seem relaxed, or appear preoccupied, those classic postures taken by crossing the arms or clasping the hands behind the back. At first he instinctively kept trying to adopt them, remembering only at the last moment that he could not follow through. Once he’d finally assumed the role of a one-armed man, however, Anthime did not capitulate so easily, using his empty right sleeve as an imaginary arm, wrapping it around his left one across his chest or grabbing the cuff firmly behind his back. However assumed this role was, though, when he automatically stretched out his arms upon awakening, he also mentally stretched the missing limb, with a tiny twitch in his right shoulder. Once fully alert, and once he’d decided that the day offered few things to do, it wasn’t unusual for him to return to sleep after eventually masturbating, which, with his left hand, had not really posed a problem.

So: frequent idleness, to reduce which as much as possible Anthime trained himself to read his paper with a single hand and even to shuffle a deck of cards before tackling a game of solitaire. Managing at last to hold his trump cards under his chin, it took him a little more time before he risked playing silent games of manille at the Cercle Républicain with other cripples back from the front as well, all tacitly agreeing never to mention what they’d seen. Of course Anthime played slower than the veterans who’d lost one or both legs, but also faster than the gas victims who didn’t have cards in Braille. But when players kept offering to help him and then peeked at his cards, he finally got fed up and stopped going to the Cercle.

The boredom of those weeks, the solitude, and then—Anthime had the sudden impression one day, in front of the cathedral, that things might be looking up: as his gaze drifted over the pedestrians and pavement, he distractedly ran that gaze up the length of a cane tapping along the sidewalk across the street and wound up staring at a pair of glasses. Such canes were not yet white, as they would be painted only after the war, nor were the glasses completely black, and they weren’t dark enough to prevent Anthime from recognizing behind them the face of Padioleau. Sent home from the front at almost the same time as Anthime, guided by his mother holding on to his arm, blinded by a gas that had smelled like geraniums, Padioleau immediately recognized his voice.

The joy of their reunion did not last long, though. Anthime swiftly realized that without his sight, Padioleau as well no longer had the heart for much of anything. Deprived of his livelihood, never having imagined an alternative to the art, science, and style of carving up meat, Padioleau was reduced to zero, in despair over the absence of any possible vocational rehabilitation, unable to envisage a future or comfort himself with the idea that some people can overcome their handicaps and do so in many fields, even in the most sophisticated professions, where they may even reach the heights of genius—although it is true that among the blind, one runs into more pianists than butchers.

Once these two men had found each other again, they were obliged to try passing the time together. Cards being out of the question for Padioleau, reading aloud from the newspaper having finally lost its charm for Anthime, they once more found themselves seriously at loose ends. Attempting to dispel this ennui, they would often evoke the boredom they’d felt at the front and which, edged with terror, had been frankly worse, after all. They distracted themselves by recalling how they’d come up with distractions, and talked about the pastimes they’d invented in the past. D’you remember? D’you remember?

Arcenel used to busy himself sculpting bas-reliefs from the veins of white stone that surfaced in places from the clay of the trenches. Bossis had taken an interest in creating rings, watch charms, eggcups out of scavenged metals: aluminum from spent enemy shells, copper and brass from the shell casings, cast iron from the lemon and egg grenades. Drawing on his civilian background in shoes, Anthime had begun by cutting laces from abandoned leather straps. Then he’d had an idea and turned those same straps, knotted and furnished with a clasp, into wristbands to which he could attach pocket watches via small loops soldered on at six and twelve o’clock. Believing he’d invented the wrist-watch, Anthime had cherished the magnificent dream of copyrighting this invention when he got home—only to learn that ten years earlier, Louis Cartier had come up with the same idea to help out his friend Santos-Dumont, a pilot who’d complained how hard it was to consult his pocket watch while flying.

Yes, they’d had some good times in spite of everything. Even though delousing wasn’t heaps of fun, still, between alerts it was always a distraction for the men— albeit a vain and temporary one—to hunt down lice, to pry them loose from their skin and clothing, but that arthropod always leaves behind innumerable and constantly renewed eggs, which in clothes could only be killed by a firm pressing with a nice hot iron, an accessory not provided in the trenches. In addition to learning how to use conventional weapons, they’d acquired practical experience with slingshots, and one of their funniest memories, for example, was of winging tin cans full of urine over the barbed wire to the guys across the way. The concerts given by the regimental musicians had been entertaining in a different sense, and then there’d been the accordion the captain sent someone to buy in Amiens: he’d made sure it was played every evening, and the orderlies and liaison officers had danced to the music. And the days when mail was distributed, whenever possible—they had been fun, because the men had sent off a lot of mail and received a lot, too, tremendous numbers of postcards but also letters, among which had been the short note informing Anthime of Charles’s death. And now it was too late for Charles to take advantage of an advertisement that appeared two years into the conflict: “Le Miroir will pay any price for photographic documents of particular interest relating to the war.”