The War by Marguerite Duras

I couldn't stop my self--I started to run downstairs, to escape into the street. Beauchamp and D. were supporting him under the arms. They'd stopped on the first-floor landing. He was looking up.

I can't remember exactly what happened. He must have looked at me and recognized me and smiled. I shrieked no, that I didn't want to see. I started to run again, up the stairs this time. I was shrieking, I remember that. The war emerged in my shrieks. Six years without uttering a cry. I found myself in some neighbors' apartment. They forced me to drink some rum, they poured it into my mouth. Into the shrieks.

The first section of The War, Marguerite Duras' collection of memoir pieces about her World War II experiences, depicts the author in the war's waning days, waiting to hear news of her husband, who had been captured by the Nazis and taken to Bergen-Belsen. News is difficult to come by; it's all private whispers and hearsay. In her mind, he is already dead; and the death follows her around like another husband, always with her, even as it is not yet known. Miraculously, he's discovered alive by her friends in the Resistance, but in a deeply weakened state. By the time he makes it back to Paris, he's too weak to even eat--many returnees die, we're told, because their shriveled stomachs burst as soon as something solid is put into them. It's no happy homecoming, but something out of a horror movie: "The war emerged in my shrieks." What follows is a long and arduous process of getting him back to strength. At the end of it, when he's well enough, Duras tells him--and us--that she is, as she has always intended, divorcing him to marry her fellow Resistance fighter D. (presumably, "Duras").

What's funny about The War, which seems to have been cobbled together from several disparate pieces, is that it really isn't interested in the war's progression, but by its end. The war only becomes real, and most horrible, for Duras, when its most ravaged victims, like her husband, begin to return. The other two pieces deal more directly with Duras' experiences in the resistance, but they, too, take place toward the war's end, when Germany is already losing its hold on its possessions in Europe, and this gives the pieces a kind of bitter irrelevancy. One tells about an agent of the Gestapo with romantic designs on Duras; she goes out with him for months as a prelude to identifying him to the Resistance to be killed. The third is about literal torture: the bloody beating of a man expected of collaboration with the Nazis. There's a black humor to the single question he keeps refusing to answer: What is the color of the ID that let you into the Nazi administrative building? Finally, after beating him so badly he's likely to die, he admits that it was green--Gestapo green. Both of these figures, marked for death by the Resistance, have a kind of innocence and naivete that makes them strangely sympathetic, and the fact that the war is in both cases practically over makes their token stubbornness seem mean, vain, and sad.

Boy, Duras could write. The first section, about her husband's return, is some of the most effective and chilling writing I've ever read about World War II--which is maybe the most written-about event in all of world history, you know? I enjoyed all three parts, which I sense were never really intended to be grouped together when they were written, but it's that first section--the war emerging with the shrieks, the rum being poured into the shrieks--that I think will stay with me.