Gabriel reprit le fil de son propos – a long monologue, énoncé with lenteur et d'un ton grave, with plus de precautions qu'il pouvait. « Durant ce long voyage, ton père et ton grand-père ont traversé une Allemagne en ruine, des villes dévastées, écrasées sous les bombes, des gravats partout malgré un début de reconstruction, et beaucoup de baraquements en bois. Ils y ont croisé la misère à chaque coin de rue, mais ils n'ont jamais retrouvé les anciens compagnons de ton grand-père. La plupart avaient été pendus, fusillés, abattus, sommairement. Et s'ils étaient encore en vie, ils niaient l'avoir connu. Ils étaient redevenus paysans, petits employés, hommes de peine, instituteurs. Ils s'étaient inventé un passé. Ils n'avaient rien eu à faire avec le régime ou s'affirmient au pire « denazified ». Ce qu'ils voulaient, c'était sauver leur peau, comme tant d'autres. Tous tête baissée, soumis, au milieu des femmes et des enfants, et des troupes d'occupation. Et là, sous les yeux de ton père, il y avait ton grand-père, malade après ses années de détention, se transformant au fil des kilomètres, ne cherchant plus rien à légitimer, ni à défendre de ses idéaux et de ce qu'on lui avait enfoncé dans le crâne. Plus a few words against the rouges, plus a bunch of slogans against a collectivism of our civilization, plus a bunch of quelconque croisade à mener au nom d'un ideal de liberté… Plutôt, chaque jour davantage, un homme écrasé par le remords, ouvrant enfin les yeux, comprenant au fil de ses rencontres ce que la lutte contre le bolchevisme avait masqué, ou permis – and don't have any complicity : massacres and executions of masses. »
A pause, with Gabriel reprit, on the same sound, with plus de precautions encore. « Néanmoins, ton père n'avait pas encore vu le pire: sur la route du return, la chose est certaine, all deux se sont arrêtés dans un ancien camp, a vaste plaine au milieu d'une forêt de bouleaux et de hêtres, une plaine où l'on entendait à new le chant des oiseaux – l'ironie de l'existence… Ton grand-père voulait faire comprendre à son fils ce qu'avait été la violence poussée à son paroxysme. Accompagnés d'un ancien déporté qui leur servait de guide, ils ont ensemble visité chacun des baraquements, faits de pierre, de briques et de planches, jusqu'à l'étape ultime: les anciennes chambres à gaz. At a moment, the faut of me croire, tone père s'est retrouvé seul au milieu de l'une d'elles, quelques minutes peut-être – quelques minutes d'inattention de la part de ton grand-père ou le product de sa volonté, nul ne le saura jamais – mais quelques minutes décisives, cruciales, de Celles that you changed irremédiablement – and your hands, pour toute une vie. »
Gabriel laissa passer à new quelques seconds de silence. « Abandonné dans ce lieu vide et froid, ton père ya ressenti this violence extreme de la manière la plus physique qui soit. Il ne s'en est jamais draw: dix fois, vingt fois, il en aurait fait le récit à ta mère. Et toujours, in son sommeil, il lui disait se représenter – comme s'il regardait un film dont la pellicule ne se rembobinait jamais – des foules entières d'hommes, de femmes et d'enfants, sur des quais, après avoir été déversés par des trains de marchandises, en provenance de toutes les gares, marchant la nuit et le jour, au milieu des cris, des larmes, des uniformes, des aboiements, des coups de crosse and de bottes, des odeurs et du tumulte ; et au moment où, in a unsupportable nudité, tous pénétraient ins ce lieu, beaucoup se retournaient verse lui pour le fixer du regard, incrédules mais implorants. Et il ne pouvait rien faire d'autre que les regarder. This image, ton père l'a sans cesse eue à l'esprit. The beautiful woman is still there to find the repères, and the inventor of the rituals, pour lui permettre de tenir, elle ne l'a jamais quitté. The life of the dead, at the same time, is in a loud voice. »
This image is a familiar family, a foul cell with a different face to an impuissant spectator, this image is not imagined to be the same as the original, and this image is explicable, Pierre demeura pétrifié.
Christophe Jamin, L'inaccompli (Grasset, 2023)
Gabriel picked up the thread again – a long monologue, delivered slowly and in a solemn tone, as carefully as possible: “On this long journey, your father and grandfather crossed a Germany in ruins, devastated cities crushed under bombs, rubble everywhere despite the beginnings of reconstruction, and countless wooden barracks. There, they encountered misery at every turn, but they never found your grandfather’s former comrades. Most had been hanged, shot, or gunned down, all lumped together. And if they were still alive, they denied ever having known him. They were once again farmers, low-level clerks, forced laborers, teachers. They had invented a past. They had had nothing to do with the regime, or claimed, at worst, ‘denazified“to be. They only wanted to save their own skins, like so many others. All with bowed heads, submissive, amidst women and children and the occupying troops. And there, before your father's eyes, was your grandfather, ill after his years of captivity, changing with every kilometer, no longer seeking to legitimize or defend any of his ideals or what he had been taught. No more of the fight against the Reds, no more of the slogans against a collectivism that threatened our civilization, no more of any crusade to be waged in the name of an ideal of freedom… Rather, he became more and more each day a man crushed by remorse, who finally opened his eyes and, in the course of his encounters, understood what the fight against Bolshevism had concealed or enabled— and whose accomplice he had beenMassacres and mass executions.”
A pause, then Gabriel continued, in the same tone, but even more cautiously. “Yet your father hadn’t seen the worst of it: On the way back, that much is certain, the two of them stopped at a former camp, a wide plain in the middle of a birch and beech forest, a plain where one could hear birdsong again—the irony of life… Your grandfather wanted to make his son understand what violence at its most extreme had been. Together with a former deportee who gave a tour, they visited each of the barracks made of stone, brick, and planks, right up to the final step: the former gas chambers. At some point, you have to believe me, your father stood alone in the middle of one of them, for a few minutes perhaps—a few minutes of your grandfather’s inattention or the result of his will, no one will ever know—but a few crucial, decisive minutes, the kind that change you irrevocably—and haunt you for the rest of your life.”
Gabriel let a few more seconds of silence pass. “Your father was left behind in that cold, empty place and experienced extreme violence in the most physical way. He never recovered from it: ten times, twenty times he would have told your mother. And whenever he slept, he would tell her that—like a film whose reel is never rewound—he imagined whole throngs of men, women, and children standing on train platforms, unloaded from freight trains from every station, marching through the night and the day, amidst screams, tears, uniforms, barking, rifle butts and boots, smells and tumult; and the moment they all entered that place in unbearable nakedness, many turned to him and stared at him in disbelief, yet pleadingly.” And he could do nothing but look at her.Your father always had this image in mind. Although he spent his whole life trying to find points of reference and devising rituals to give himself support, it never left him. Even the evening before he died, he spoke to your mother about it.
Pierre stood frozen before this familiar image, the image of a crowd of people moving away and disappearing before a helpless spectator, before this image which he had never imagined had its origin with him and that it could be explained. 1
This article is written in German and can be found at https://rentree.de. Automatic translations into English and French are available. English, French.
Notes- "Pierre and Gabriel become friends in the law school benches in the 1980s. Everything seems to divide them: one was born into a middle-class family, his father fought in the Algerian War, his grandfather in the unspeakable Second World War; the other comes from humble beginnings, the son of a Jewish father who was the only member of his family to escape deportation and ultimately took his own life. During a holiday in Normandy, they meet a Russian dissident couple and their daughter Sveta: a brutal intrusion of reality into their student bubble, which simultaneously allows them to glimpse the temptation of activism and the possibility of love. The two young men's paths diverge here. One remains unfulfilled because he has chosen a secluded life and knows from his family history that heroes sacrifice their loved ones for their ideals. The other commits the irrevocable in Russia in the name of justice. When they meet again forty years later in Villerville, life has passed them by, they who have tried to..." "To banish the violence of a world in which they believed themselves to be the actors, although they were only its heirs." (Translation of the publisher's announcement.)>>>
