Blast

If he ever did find Ariane, Vincent wouldn’t dare caress her skin. His hands had reached proportions he no longer recognized. Hard, the fingers swollen, their outer surface thick, rough, and dry; they’d undergone a metamorphosis. The callused skin over them was so arid that, even when he washed them carefully and at length, they didn’t soften. There was still a constellation of black fissures burrowing deep into the bark-like covering on his palms and fingers. The soil had tattooed them with its indelible imprint by infiltrating the cracks and crevasses carved out by two winters in Germany.
Before the war, his hands used to dance when he talked. Ariane had laughed about it and imitated him. He could see her now, here, on this Riviera beach in front of him. The first time they’d come here to swim, the sun was barely up. They were still giddy from spending their first night together, and Ariane needed to get home early so no one would notice her absence. They’d walked past the beach and had been gripped by an irresistible impulse to extend their night together in the sea. Across the water, the sun bounced off the Îles d’Or, the “Golden Islands.”
He remembered the swimsuit she’d improvised by knotting a scarf around her breasts with the grace of a fearless dancer.
Her squeals as she went into the sea, the way she arched her body against his, electrified by the chill water and the rising sun . . . That salty body, desire sharpened by the sea air, the wet silk clinging to her skin. He would give anything to return to that carefree existence and dive back into the love they’d shared.
He pulled the scarf, the one he’d stolen from her, more tightly around his neck.
He’d escaped so that he could track down Ariane. She’d vanished and no one had had word of her for two years, but he was looking everywhere for her. He couldn’t believe she was dead. Impossible; she’d never do that to him. And while he’d been a prisoner, he’d received those enigmatic letters . . .
Now that the south had been liberated from the Germans, everything would be easier. They hadn’t surrendered yet, but everyone was saying they were screwed.
He had an idea about how to find Ariane. And he played up this tenuous idea to bolster his hopes. But truth be told he was just clutching at a vague intuition to save himself from going under. He was alone, and helpless, and no, the revolver he hid in his clothes like a talisman wouldn’t change anything.
While the rest of town was preparing for its first big celebration since the beginning of the war, the beach he looked down over was ravaged. Trenches and barbed-wire coils blocked access to the sea. Signs forbade entry, warned of danger. Danger of death: All along the French Riviera the beaches were mined.
Vincent could hear an amateur band rehearsing in the distance, attempting a few incursions into breezy jazz numbers. It was a beautiful day. People around him were smiling, their heads full of the promise of summer. It was almost the end of the war, and for him, most likely, the beginning of a solitary hell.

Beyond the balustrade where Vincent stood, a dozen men were spread out across the beach, advancing in a line, slowly, silently. Armed with just a bayonet, they inspected the sand with the tips of their metal pikes to detect mines buried by the Germans. Fabien took careful, focused steps, and all the men walking in the line alongside him matched their stride to his.
Fabien was not yet thirty but had naturally emerged as the group’s leader. His brotherly brand of authority, his engineering training, his commitment, from the maquis to the Resistance . . . Having blown up so many trains, he was considered the uncontested explosives specialist. The officer at the mine-clearing unit had immediately singled out this recruit to his supervisor, the Resistance fighter Raymond Aubrac.
Mine clearing was the unavoidable prerequisite to rebuilding France, but her soldiers—on the Ardennes front and then in Germany—had been relieved of this task by the interim government. Who could do the work? Demining wasn’t a profession. It was an unprecedented challenge. No one had the experience. There were so few volunteers . . . Fabien could just as easily have set off three fireworks on the deck of a ship, he would still have been elevated to the ranks of a godsend.
Rumor had it the deminers were all lost souls, godless and lawless men who’d emerged from the bowels of prisons to redeem themselves or secure an early release. Worse still, it was whispered that collaborators were trying to whitewash their dark past by melting into their ranks. Whenever Raymond Aubrac felt that anyone—at the ministry or elsewhere—was being contemptuous or patronizing about his men, he would cite Fabien as a fine example: He was the incarnation of excellence.
So much so in fact that no one could understand why he’d signed up to clear minefields. Fabien knew what people were saying about him: Having sabotaged trains, he was now sabotaging himself. The authorities put it down to some form of despair, his team thought he was hiding something, but everyone admired his courage. And you did need courage, as well as self-sacrifice, to keep risking your life rather than making the most of it.
The Ministry of Reconstruction offered assignments in blocks of three months. It looked set to take a long time: The army estimated that there was a minimum of thirteen million mines over the whole country. Thirteen million . . . So, despite war-weariness and exhaustion, men were encouraged to start a new assignment as soon as the previous one ended.
Since 1942, the Mediterranean Wall had been constantly reinforced by the occupiers. German mines had been intended to stop Allied landings and Allied mines to slow the German retreat. Net result: The French were trapped. First and foremost, their children.
The beaches at Hyères, Saint-Tropez, and Ramatuelle, at Pampelonne and Cavalaire: They were all mined. No dolce vita along the Riviera now. No one could venture onto the sand anymore. The port at Saint-Tropez had been dynamited along with all the buildings on the seafront, the transporter bridge in Marseille’s Old Port, and the Saint-Jean neighborhood, razed to the ground. Inland, roads and railway tracks, factories and administrative buildings were all booby-trapped with the murderous devices. With every footstep you could be blown up. Scorched-earth policy honed to savage perfection.
To avoid succumbing to the dizzying numbers and despondency, Fabien stayed focused on his objective. Acting calmly and not cursing the lack of volunteers and training, the inadequacy of their equipment and, crucially, the cruel absence of land-mine maps; they were advancing blindfolded.
All at once, Manu, a wiry and ferally beautiful young man working just a few meters from Fabien, stopped and raised his arm: Mine! His bayonet had just come into contact with a suspect solid surface. All the men instinctively backed away, teeth clenched. They would never get used to it. With a jerk of his head, Fabien gave them permission to retreat beyond the regulation twenty-five meters. He glanced at Manu, encouraging him to continue: He had to lie on his stomach and gently probe the ground, freeing the object that had resisted the metal spike. Stroking away sand with his hands, Manu revealed a large black metal cylinder: an LPZ mine. Thirty centimeters in diameter. Twelve centimeters high. Two and a half kilos of TNT. An all-out instrument of death, capable of pulverizing a several-ton tank and any living creature unwise enough to weigh more than seven kilos.
A more seasoned deminer needed to take over and disarm the device or blow it up. Other mines were buried nearby; safer to neutralize it even though that was more difficult because mines were designed to explode, not to be tamed. You had to tackle them with your bare hands. Fabien took responsibility for it. He knew how to—although nothing was ever guaranteed, there were so many different models—and it helped him keep his team’s respect. If he was absolutely honest, if he agreed to sound out his very depths, there was another reason he put himself in danger every day despite the fact that he loved life passionately and knew his sacrifice would be forgotten as quickly as all the men he’d seen fall around him. But he wasn’t ready to delve that deep, at least not today; he needed to concentrate on the mine. One slip, even a tiny one, and you ended up blasted to pieces.
Breathe. Don’t shake. No parasitic thoughts. Or sudden movements. Don’t concede anything to fear. The mine. Think about nothing else How many times had he reiterated all this to his men, even though it was completely illusory?
To neutralize an LPZ you first had to deal with its percussion ignition system: Remove the cap on the pressure plate by freeing it with a bayonet, then put the stopper in the safe position. Next, take the mine out of the ground, keeping it horizontal, and sit it on its side, definitely not lying flat. Unscrew the five nuts and five detonator shafts and remove them. Without shaking.
How to stay calm? Every part of his body strained to turn and run. How to breathe, whether to breathe at all? And concentrate despite the endless assault of questions, feelings of remorse, regrets?
Impossible: Reverberating in the distance were the chords of the last song he’d danced to with Odette, his wife, and those chords were breaking his heart.
Fabien stopped what he was doing to listen properly. Maybe he’d misheard? No, that was it. “Mademoiselle Swing.” The song he’d once poked fun at. Odette used to say it brought good luck. And it was so light and playful, surely it had defied all that Nazi ponderousness? Since Odette had gone, he’d stopped poking fun: The simple melody felt devastatingly intense.
It’s said that before dying you see your whole life flash by. All he saw was Odette, Odette dancing, happy, free, smiling, Odette and her brown curls, her lithe big-cat body and her feline, couldn’t-care-less individuality. Odette before she was arrested by the Germans.
He was hypnotized, motionless. And his team had noticed. Fabien could feel their eyes on him. He pulled himself together: If he wasn’t seeing his whole life flash past but just Odette dancing, that meant he wasn’t about to die.
After the neutralizing came the deactivation. Lying the mine down flat, but the wrong way up. Unscrewing all the nuts from the casing on the underside. Unwinding the duct tape that held the two covers together, sliding them apart. Taking the main charge out of the upper casing. Unscrewing the collar around the detonator. Removing the detonator.
“Mademoiselle Swing” was spilling out its final notes and Fabien had managed to master the mine. Odette was right: The song had brought him good luck. Or perhaps it was Odette herself, from beyond the grave, wherever she was. Looking out to sea, to the Golden Islands, from this beach he so loved, he acknowledged that he’d already had the best of his life. A woman loved in an atmosphere of danger can’t be replaced. Odette would be forever irreplaceable.