The Praetorians by Jean Lartéguy Page A

war,” she had mused, “but, like all females, I have a weakness for men who fight and who bear the marks of fighting.”
    Â * * * * 
    Irène rolled over on to her back:
    â€œWhat you say is fascinating, but you must leave aside general considerations and describe in detail what it was like that morning in Algiers when anything was possible.”
    She stretched and heaved a sigh of well-being.
    â€œIt’s so wonderful, Philippe. We hardly know each other, and yet we’re already close friends. I could strip naked in front of you to go bathing, I shouldn’t feel the slightest shame or embarrassment. Let’s go for a swim in the river. The water is icy at this time of year; it still is even in summer. We shall go blue with cold, then red. We’ll be ravenous and simply gulp down my father’s carefully prepared dishes.”
    Irène could not resist any longer and rubbed her cheek against the major’s leg.
    Â * * * * 
    Paris was behind her: the convulsions, desires and agitations of the capital suddenly seemed derisory. That morning she had found it was more important to be woken by bird-song than by the telephone ringing, even if it disclosed a bedroom or household secret.
    In three days she had not written a word or opened the black leather book in which she jotted down her notes. She had not even abided by the convention which demanded, when an
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journalist was away from Paris, that he should ring up the editorial department two or three times daily, to show that no matter where he was, no matter what the circumstances, all his thoughts were centred on the paper and its interests.
    In a pair of faded jeans she went ambling along the river bank, through the pine-woods or under the olive-trees, following the stony paths where the sunshine was scented with thyme, lavender and fennel, accompanying a sort of disenchanted officer on half-pay, whom she regarded more or less as a brother or cousin.
    She helped him to put the house straight, imposing her taste as though she were going to live in it. To see to his laundry and cooking she had found him a housekeeper, but she herself was the one who had unpacked for him, counted his underclothes, his socks and shirts.
    Irène knew that Philippe was keeping back one of those secrets that do not always overthrow a régime but at least make a journalist’s career. She could see those secrets buzzing round him like flies which, in the summer, heavy and clumsy, knockagainst lamps and window-panes. It would be easy to catch them.
    Yet sometimes, to her embarrassment, she found herself interrupting the paratrooper’s disclosures.
    The major held out his hand to help her up. Did she want to put him on his guard? She could not prevent herself from saying:
    â€œI also took part in what you call the masquerade at the République, and I haven’t changed my views.”
    But at that moment she would have liked to seize him by the shoulders, shake him and shout in his face:
    â€œYou silly fool, I work for the weekly paper
Influences.
I’ve been given the job of worming everything out of you. The day I leave, when I ask you for that photograph showing you wounded, naked to the waist, half sitting up on your stretcher, it will not be to keep it and hang it up in my room, but to publish it!”
    They were scrambling down towards the torrent, dislodging the pebbles under their feet. A blackbird, a thrush, then a squirrel fled out of the thickets.
    â€œI could start a new life,” Philippe was saying to himself, “if I had a girl like Irène with me. She has the sort of adolescent beauty, the immature body, that has always attracted me. But she’s healthy, her teeth are dazzling. I feel she is open-minded, but without a single idea in her head; violent, but without passion. Politics, the army, Algeria, de Gaulle, Communism: a game everyone in her set plays and of which she knows the