Lieutenant Schreiber's Country by Andrei Makine

Author:Andrei Makine
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Arcade Publishing
Published: 2018-04-16T04:00:00+00:00

During the first postwar days in Paris, Jean-Claude tries to explain away his feeling of isolation with that ancestral distrust that his name and birth—his “different” blood—usually provoke in other people. He remembers situations where an attitude of rejection or scorn made him suffer, conflicts that were often petty and all the more hurtful for it.

Yet he knows that this is not what makes him such a foreigner in the eyes of Parisians celebrating their victory in this month of May 1945.

It is his very life that distances him from his compatriots. He is becoming a bothersome witness. For certain people, the return of this soldier awakens a guilty awareness of their well-behaved inaction during the Occupation. As for those even younger than he is, they are irritated to have Lieutenant Schreiber and his combatant’s shadow hanging over their sparkling and untroubled youth. Their eyes reflect the trees in bloom on the boulevards; his, the snowy plains blackened by explosions and tagged with bodies. Their ears are cradled by the lascivious undulations of saxophones. His hearing echoes with the shouts of the wounded, the banging of shots on armored plating. They theorize about existence with pretty phrases while he carries, in his memory and in his bruised body, the density of an existence that refutes, by virtue of its truth, every one of those charming commentaries.

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