Franck had thirty-one Facebook friends. His interests and hobbies included Nescafé, Burger King, and a Facebook group called I Love My Daughter. Adulthood had sanded him into someone profoundly unremarkable.
But what did I expect? As he had made clear on film—it was all there in the record—Franck’s plan for adulthood had been: go to work, come home, shower, eat your dinner, watch TV, fuck your wife, go to sleep, and the next day, do it all over. Work, eat, fuck, sleep, over and over and over.
Grown-up Franck is driving an Amazon delivery van right now, in his Lamborghini baseball cap.
WE HAD LEFT THE DIRT TRAIL next to the rock shelter above the river and were on an open road that led to the commune.
I heard a car coming from behind. I turned around, relieved to see that it was not a white Citroën panel truck.
It was a beat-up old Renault sedan, coated in country dust, all of its windows down, a woman driving. She pulled up next to us, so that there was little room to walk.
The woman’s brown hair was gathered into a lopsided bun. She had a faded tattoo on her neck, a gecko or some other creature. It looked like it had been moving toward her hairline but got stuck in its tracks. She directed angry looks at Pascal, driving the speed of our walking and struggling with the clutch.
“Here we go,” Pascal said.
“Everything he says is a lie!” she shouted.
Pascal did not turn his head to look at her.
“Where were you, Pascal, when they raided the Chat-teigne, when they tried to burn us out of the Rohanne Forest? Ten thousand were blasted by water cannons! Four hundred farmers on tractors blocked the police from entering Notre-Dame-des-Landes! Where were you, Pascal?”
He kept walking, a slight smile at the corners of his mouth, as if to suggest that the nuts were out of the nuthouse.
Her skills with the clutch were wanting. She revved. Stalled. Started the car again and restarted it by accident after it was already idling, gnashing the teeth of the flywheel.
“I have been fighting cops and holding my ground since you were being pushed in a stroller in the Jardin des Plantes, Pascal. Pushed by your nanny! No doubt an ‘uncouth,’ someone like me! Hired to wipe the ass of someone like you!”
Pascal never once looked at her.
She had clumsy features, a large nose, a broad forehead, a chin that disappeared into her wrinkled neck. Coarse strands of gray escaped her careless bun like live wires. I understood that her unkempt appearance, the sweat pooling on her upper lip, her middle-age fury, these details made it easier for him to keep walking as if she weren’t here.
She over-shifted and lurched away.
We kept on. I said nothing about her. In my silence, Pascal would feel obliged to explain.
“That was Nadia Derain. It’s kind of a long story. She showed up here last fall. And it’s like she said. She came down from Nantes, where they’ve had a very successful movement. They stopped the government from building a massive airport, and they pushed out the police and declared the land an autonomous zone. Nadia was a committed participant with a lot to say. In fact, too much. Her insistence on her activist bona fides began to grind us down. She argues about everything. You have to hear a million stories that feature her. Some of it has to do with origin. She’s from Brittany. It’s a different culture.”
You simply don’t like her, I didn’t say.
“The affective layer of the person,” he went on, “how close to the surface that layer is, this is how we all communicate. You can feel who people are.”
He gestured to the bare skin of his own arms, his own affective layer. (They were rather fleshy arms, and I guessed that Pascal did no farming, no manual labor, just the thinking as his contribution to Le Moulin.)
“We tried to work with her. But her energy was not a good fit. A vote was taken. People wanted her gone. Now she’s off our land, but she won’t leave the area. It’s become this campaign of harassment. I can’t go anywhere without that car showing up. I might have warned you, but I’m always optimistic that she will locate her dignity and move on. Go where people respect her as a veteran of various movements. Why not return to Nantes? The insistence on hanging around, it’s made some at Le Moulin wonder if she’s an informant. Jérôme is convinced she’s a cop. But I don’t think Nadia’s a cop.”
I don’t think she is either, I didn’t say.
“She is alone. And that’s hard. We are social creatures. People don’t have a lot of tools to deal with rejection. And the ones who come here, they tend to be estranged from their families, from the dominant culture; they come to us as if to a family, for acceptance, and so what is next, after rejection? Nadia is mourning her expulsion. And the form her mourning takes is anger. My hope is that her anger will burn itself out and she’ll find something else to channel her energy into.”
“Where did she go, after she moved off the commune?”
He puffed air through his lips and shrugged, a gesture that said, But who cares?
V
THE RED AND THE BLACK
BRUNO’S MOST VIVID MEMORY of the war, he wrote to Pascal and the group, was of picking up an enemy helmet from the forest floor at the age of seven.
The Moulinards had asked a question about the Resistance and the French Communist Party. Bruno answered them, or didn’t, by delving into his wartime childhood.
He had been scavenging the rural landscape of the Corrèze with a ragtag band of boys when he’d come upon the helmet, and the dead soldier next to it.
Bruno told them that this memory could be considered a screen memory, in the Freudian sense—a recollection that functioned to cover his own trauma, to obscure it behind a different incident, one that was less significant. The enemy helmet and the aftermath of its discovery was always with him. In contrast, the more extreme consequences of the war on Bruno’s life, and what, exactly, he had understood of those consequences as a seven-year-old, had remained vague, something he was blocked from recollecting in any detail.
Even as we do not choose a diversion from pain in the form of a screen memory, Bruno said, on account that it chooses us, we might retroactively heighten that memory, in our recognition of what it means.
I regard my childhood encounter with this enemy helmet, he said, as a stutter or shift in the axis of my existence, one that has been critical to who I am, and to what I have come to believe.
But I will start at the beginning, he said, by which I mean, with my earliest memory, which emerges from the gauzed sensations of toddlerhood, when I am three. I am at a medical clinic with my parents because my older brother, Maxime, has just broken his arm. He has fallen from a tree at a playground. His arm is sagging from his shoulder like a length of aged sausage. The shoulder is dislocated, and his elbow is shattered.
They didn’t have modern medicine in 1940, but already that profession was attempting to put people back together with pins, as if our bodies were machines. They inserted a metal plate into Maxime’s elbow, to secure the two moving parts of his arm. In the weeks after the accident, he complained that he could no longer bend the arm. The plate, counter to the doctors’ hope, had fused the two bones into a fixed position. But later, Bruno said, that metal plate did serve a useful purpose: it allowed the authorities to identify Maxime when they found his body at Buchenwald after the war, along with fourteen of my other relatives, including my mother.
Bruno confessed that the extreme difference in fate between him and his older brother was a lifelong vexation that eluded his grasp.
In the summer of 1942, Bruno and Maxime were both sent to the country from Paris by their parents, who each held bureaucratic positions in their municipal chapter of the Communist Party. His mother’s parents, their name was Kouchnir, were Jewish, having come from Odessa, at least that was what Bruno had been told, and there was no way to verify much, Odessa being a kind of black hole for a Jew, a place no Jew could truly be “from,” as the fact of a Jew’s survival in imperial Russia was proof that this same Jew did not linger any place too long. His father’s parents, the Lacombes, were Communist Party militants who ran a little bakery in the Parisian suburb of Malakoff.
Rumors had spread of children rounded up with their parents, for the purpose of keeping families together (uniting them in doom), or so Bruno’s parents had heard, and they felt it was safer to split the brothers up. Maxime was sent to Burgundy. Bruno to the southern Corrèze. Maxime was twelve. Bruno was five, and transported under cover of night, in a truck bed with other children, all of them hidden under a tarp. These children were housed with elderly people on farms to keep them safe from deportation.
