Free Suite Francaise by Irène Némirovsky Page A

to these countless dead, or pitied them. To their descendants they were no more important than chickens who’d had their throats slit. As he walked along, he imagined their plaintive ghosts rising up, leaning towards him, whispering in his ear, “We’ve been through all this already, before you. Why should you be more fortunate than us?”
    “There’s never been anything as horrible as this!” a big woman next to him groaned.
    “On the contrary, Madame, on the contrary,” he replied quietly.
    They had been walking for three days when they saw the first regiments in full flight. Confidence was so ingrained in the heart of the French that when they saw these soldiers, the refugees thought a battle was about to begin, that the High Command had given orders for small groups to head for the front by a circuitous route, that the armed forces were still intact. This hope kept them going. The soldiers wouldn’t say much. Almost all of them were depressed and pensive. Some slept in the backs of trucks. Tanks plodded forward in the dust, camouflaged with thin branches. Between the leaves faded by the burning sun, you could see their pale faces, weary, angry and exhausted.
    Madame Michaud kept thinking she saw her son among them. Not once did she see his regiment’s number, but a kind of hallucination took hold of her. Every unfamiliar young face or voice caused her to tremble so fiercely that she had to stop dead in her tracks, clutching her heart and softly muttering, “Oh, Maurice, isn’t that . . .”
    “What’s wrong?”
    “No, it’s nothing . . .”
    But he was no fool. He shook his head. “You see your son everywhere, my poor Jeanne!”
    All she did was sigh. “He does look like him, doesn’t he?”
    After all, it could happen. He could have cheated death; he could suddenly appear at her side, her son, her Jean-Marie; he would call out to them joyfully, tenderly, in that sweet masculine voice she could still hear, “But what are you two doing here?”
    Oh, just to see him, to hold him close, to feel his cool rough cheek beneath her lips, to see his beautiful eyes shining close to hers, his deep expression, so alive. He had hazel eyes with long eyelashes like a woman, eyes that saw so many things! She had always taught him to see the funny and moving side of people. She liked to laugh and felt sympathy for others. “It’s your Dickensian spirit, Mother,” he would say. How well they knew each other! They would cheerfully, sometimes cruelly, make fun of people who had been unkind to them; then a word, a gesture, a sigh would make them stop. Maurice was different: he was more serene, cooler. She loved and respected Maurice, but Jean-Marie was . . . Oh, my God, he was everything she wanted to be and everything she dreamed of and everything that was the best of her: her joy, her hope . . . “My son, my little love, my Jeannot,” she thought, calling him by the nickname he’d had when he was five, when she would take his head gently in her hands and kiss his ears, tilt his head back and tickle him with her lips while he laughed and laughed.
    Her thoughts became more and more feverish and confused the longer she walked. She was a good walker: when she and Maurice were younger, they had often gone rambling in the countryside during their short holidays. When they didn’t have enough money to stay in a hotel, they would set off like this with food and sleeping bags in their rucksacks. This was why she suffered less fatigue than her companions. But this incessant kaleidoscope, these strange faces passing endlessly before her, then fading and disappearing, was much more painful than physical exhaustion. “A herd of horses,” she thought, “trapped.” In the crowd, cars were tangled up like those reeds you see floating on the river, anchored by invisible knots while floodwater rushes all around them. Jeanne turned away so she couldn’t see the cars. They poisoned the air with their petrol fumes, deafened the