[Work in progress - II]

To woo a footsoldier had never been her ambition. It had always been the pilot who had captivated her, the great myths of flying aces. She was in Paris in 1919, when Charles Godefroy flew under the Arc de Triomphe. She would never forget the sight; his face became a constant object of her conjecture. The face she had never seen, that of the buoyant audacity that came, perhaps, with the knowledge that it was all over. But that was long ago, even longer in fact than the chance meeting with the boy’s father in Marseille many years later. He was a footsoldier; in the strangest sense of the word – he saved her feet. It was socks. When she was dying of cold and hunger. He fed her a yellow soup and had red woollen socks made for her naked feet. She wore wooden soles in the days that followed, everyone did. Leather would have been considered a luxury. They were all over the place, feeding on the moneys that belonged to everyone but them. It had become a War of hunger and bare feet, of German soldiers and French food previously unpalatable to them. The audacity of her faceless pilot had been misplaced, as had been the confidence that it was all over. The War became a term reused, in all its morbid appropriateness, for a second War of heinous proportions, more even than the previous.

Who was she? She had herself lost track, all her identities confused in the drawing, redrawing of boundaries everyday. She was anyone, she was no one. He had never asked where she was from, she had never said. In all the silences was conceived a child, a boy, who never asked who or where his father was. But she told him anyway that he was killed in the War. Thus subsumed by the great universal persona of the War Hero, the identity of his father perhaps ceased to matter to him. Or perhaps he too, a child of war, was trained to look at the larger picture and be a stoic rather than dwell on personal effects.

She wore the shoes he had got her, wooden like everyone else’s; weren’t those his personal effects as well? The child itself was, in a way, a personal effect of his. But the child, the boy, never wore out. He kept growing, and growing more and more (according to his mother) astute. He began, early in his life, to see the poetry in her gestures. The worn out soles of her shoes became an emblem to him of her longstanding suffering at the hands of some mysterious Fate that seemed to have struck all the men and women in Les Pennes-Mirabeau some years ago.
Or so she thought. Who knew what was really in the mind of this boy, fatherless in a war ravaged land, with a mother who seemed not ordinary, less or more than the norm, he couldn’t decide.
When she looked at the ruins whenever they travelled a little further inland – and there were still plenty in those days when he was growing up, a provincial boy as yet unaware of his mother’s urban and even international exploits in her day – he would catch an odd expression in her eyes, not wistful like some of the other mothers, not sad like some of the older crowd, not angry like some of the menfolk. One day he asked her, Why do you like ruins so much?
Never thought about it, I don’t know, she said.
As he looked at her, as she only half answered his question, as if the ruins meant something to her that he would never understand, it came to him like poetry can come only to a ten year old: Because the walls are crumbling.
The boy knew nothing of her shoes or her socks, other than that the sole was worn. Yet, prophet-like, he seemed to know that the ruins and the shoes on her feet were siblings of a sort, born of the same parents: the un-knowledge of a future, the uncertainty of the present which made her wear her shoes as if they were her most prized possession. The boy would grow out of his provincial upbringing, joining history less dangerous than that of his parents but as exciting to him nevertheless. In 1968 his mother thought the world had forgotten what War was, Every generation needs a War. They never know the value of a loaf of bread, a pair of woollen socks.

For the next generation, 1968 was a war. Having collectively lost from their collective memories the experience of death, hunger, squalor and fear, they became a generation of l’academie. Death was no longer real. It was the death of the author now, more than anything else that the youth of France, yet another mythic body, would worry about in the evenings, over coffee or a glass of wine in the Quartier Latin, a single glass of wine no longer manna out of heaven, no longer a luxury paid for with the family jewels or a painting or two.