Thursday evening, Upstairs Used Books off Union Street was open for AHA! Night. Among other books, I picked up a copy of The War, a memoir by Marguerite Duras. I love Duras’s writing but find her fiction hard to get through, so I thought I would try some of her non-fiction.

The War is a collection of diary excerpts, memoirs, memoirs thinly disguised as fiction, and fiction; all have to do with people associated with the French Resistance in 1945, before and just after the Allies liberated France from the Nazis.

Duras introduces the story “Albert of the Capitals” thus:

[This text] ought to have come straight after the the diary transcribed in The War, but I decided to leave a space in which the din of the war might die down.

Therese is me. The person who tortures the informer is me…. Me. I give you the torturer along with the rest of the texts. Learn to read them properly: they are sacred.

“Albert of the Capitals” opens this way:

It was two days since the first jeep, since the capture of the Kommandantur in the place de l’Opera. It was Sunday….

Someone says that there’s a man who was a German informer who used to work with the German police. Therese is waiting for news of her husband who was taken away by the Germans to a camp; she doesn’t know if he’s dead or alive. One of the leaders of the Resistance captures the informer, asks Therese to question him, asks two young men to help her. As members of the village watch, muttering “swine, traitor, swine,” the informer is told to strip naked and he is beaten until the blood flows, while Therese conducts an interrogation. They get little information that is of use. Therese wants to leave at first, then she wants him beaten, she wants to see him beaten, then she does not know how to feel.