Bombs and Le Bon Dieu

WHEN THE SKY is very clear over Ambleteuse, you can see Dover's cliffs over the Channel. But when the fog rolls in off the ocean every night, there is one hour of limbo when no one can see anything. The fog comes in with the high tide, which is often with the dusk.

When the fog comes in, the men in the bistro at the foot of the hill open the door wide so that any evening stragglers can see the wide swathe of light cast onto the fog. The men already there order another Pernod and wait. Their wives will not close the shutters or put out dinner until the fog breaks. The priest in the chapel rings the angelus against the swing of the tide, a tinny sound amid the din. He waits for the fog to lift so the people in the town, carrying their flashlights through the streets, can come to evening mass.

Out somewhere in the channel, far away from the milky light of the town's houses, a foghorn drives the fishing boats off the rocky shore. The foggy air magnifies the sound of the waves, but deadens all other noise. When I stood on the edge of the rock seawall and called Francois's name, my voice was swallowed up in the damp.

Francois had been mad all day. We were walking on the beach that morning and someone laughed at him. Just a little, of course, and quickly stifled. Someone coming on him suddenly couldn't help it, I suppose. Francois was furious. He waddled down the beach faster almost than I could run to catch him. When I got to him, we trotted side by side for a while. His face was livid and he was muttering obscenities.

"God will put them in a volcano," he said. "And then, German airplanes will come and drop bombs on them and there will be fire all around them."

FRANCOIS LEVEQUE was very young during the Occupation. His father was killed then, they say, although no one really knows. His memories of that time are as twisted as his back. He has no family to sort out these garbled visions for him. He lived with us in the big old house in Ambleteuse and we all loved him as best we could and tried to understand when his anger brought back phantoms.

"The tanks!" he screamed, and began searching through the pockets of his overcoat. He pulled out a flashcard with a picture of a large tank. "I will make the French tanks kill them." Francois wears his overcoat in any kind of weather. It is a size 52, even though Francois is only five feet tall. Part of the extra cloth covers his hump. Another part gets pulled into a sagging pouch on all sides of him by his pockets, filled with symbols of the war somewhere in his past.

He has dozens of flashcards of planes and tanks, and he knows all the numbers and countries they belong to. In a back pocket, he has dozens of coat hangers twisted into spears. In his front pocket, when he is not brandishing it, is a large bunch of squashed tooth brushes, bundled up in hundreds of rubber bands into one big bomb.

Francois would not hurt anyone. He cried one whole afternoon when Aida, our dog, was killed. His tears ran in zig zags down his crooked little face. But fear and anger mean war, for him, and war means airplanes and bombs and tanks and a volcano of fire.

THAT MORNING we returned to the house, picking up stones and shells from the beach on the way. He mumbled a little, but he seemed quieter and his anger subsided away from the roar of the waves and the people on the beach. At sunset, though, I heard the tide turn, and I thought of the fog. I looked around and he was gone.

He was nowhere in the house, or out in the garden or in the tiny woods alongside us. I climbed to the top of the house and out onto the widows' walk. The house is built into a cliff and it dominates the town: We can see for miles around us, into the town and onto the beach. The fog was creeping in. Already the ocean, the beach and the seawall were covered in fog. He has gone to find those people from the beach, I thought, and panicked. The tide comes in in the evening with an incredible speed and Francois can barely walk along the slippery rocks down to the now-covered sand bars.

The deux chevaux coughed and stalled, coughed and stalled all the way down the hill. I stopped at the bistro. Maybe he had seen the light and gone in to see his friends from the town. I hoped he was there where it was bright and warm. Jean-Luc answered first when I called into the smoky room for Francois. "He's not here, but I saw him head for the seawall about half an hour ago. Give me the keys, I'll help you look."

When Jean-Luc took the car, the headlamps blinked out in the fog about ten feet from where I stood. Jean-Luc would drive out onto the beach and perhaps the light would do him some little good there. I thought of all the places Francois could be.

I HEADED for the seawall, now totally black and foggy. A dark black shape moved in the darkness against the wall. "Francois?" But it was an old man, perhaps from the next town, on his way home by the shortest route. "Pardonnez-moi, monsieur, avez-vous vu un petit homme bossu qui courait... have you seen a little hunchback running along the wall?" The man stumbled back into the dark, changing his path a little--"Non, non, non..." --and vanished.

The fort, Francois might have gone to the fort. He was drawn to the fort in his blackest moods. It was in ruins now, a remnant of the almost-glories of Napoleon III. We often found Francois there leaning against the rocks, making his own comfort out of fantasies of destruction. I circled the slimy stones. He was not there.

I ran the length of the seawall, almost a mile, and out into the reeds on the high ground past the town. Francois could not have heard my call even if he had been there. The sea was beaten right up to the foot of the wall. Its noise was deafening. I started back to the house, knowing that Jean-Luc would be there with the car: There was no longer any beach for him to drive along.

The deux chevaux was there, and Jean-Luc, but Francois was not. When Jean-Luc saw me returning alone, his face tightened. He remembered, I suppose, someone he had once pulled out from the next morning's ebb. I remembered, too. "Call the police," I said. He went for the phone. I went down the crooked steps to the chapel behind the house for a moment's rest before they came.

A storm was churning overhead. The fog would not lift tonight. I heard a noise in the brush by the stone staircase and there was Francois. His pants were wet to the knees and there was a crusty line of sand up the front of his jacket. He looked frightened, but his eyes shone. He pulled from his pocket a handful of round, smooth stones from the beach. "Bombs!" he said. "I went to the beach and got bombs Le Bon Dieu will hurl these at them and kill them, and then put them in a volcano."

Jean-Luc and I got him washed and into bed. When the thunder broke he began to shake with terror and glee. The war, his father, the people on the beach, bombs, planes and lightning were all the same to him for that moment. When the storm finally subsided he went to sleep. He cried out once or twice in the night, but did not awaken.