508
PARTISAN REVIEW
The spacious house, surrounded by clipped trees, was situated in
the foothills of the Ardennes which at this point descend into the
valley of the Aisne. It boasted
.a
glasshouse with warm-water heating,
where the absent owner had cultivated grapevines.
The kindly innkeeper had walked among the neglected shoots,
trying to fathom the secrets of cross-breeding, and then among the
tables of the officers. From the shattered balustrade where sad nymphs
lifted only the stumps of arms to their lovely breasts, he carried the
cooled wine to the nightly orgies of the military, averting
his
eyes
from the female body lying naked and patient on the officers' knees,
a living card table; with a white handkerchief lightly thrown over its
head, the body might have been the torso of a goddess.
When he went home on furlough he found his property quietly
and peacefully administered, his little boy faithfully cared for and
a daughter, born during his absence, so wonderfully like himself
that after the war's end he no longer hesitated to consummate his
hitherto only natural union with the child's mother before the law
and the high altar of the church. He thought of the past as a dream,
or rather with the faint recollection a girl might have of an embrace
in the dark.
The innkeeper's image of war as he had seen it was not much
altered by the subsequent French occupation, except that victor and
vanquished had exchanged roles. With the fatalism of a man who
is always ahead no matter how the dice fall, he watched the soldiers
come and go, he bought and sold and went about his daily tasks un–
touched by history. He was like the Roman sutlers who, in the wake
of the legions, settled in the Rhine valley without ever experiencing
the scourge, the blood sacrifice, and the delusion of the war-god.
Only when one army unit had departed and the next had not
yet marched in, only during such quiet intervals when the waves were
calm and when day after day lay open, like an empty boat under
the night sky, was he seized by an inexplicable shudder: he would
suddenly start, push the blanket off, and think he had uttered the
long-forgotten name of a French village; but his wife would ask him
why he had called her. At once, however, both names again slid
away, and the next morning he would remember neither the village
where the dream had taken him nor the sleep-drenched face of his
wife as she leaned over him.
