Odile Blanc

Nella Bielski, to whom Berger dedicated "Once in Europa"

Though born in 1936, we hear nothing of World War II in the story of Odile Blanc, told by John Berger in the titular story of his book Once in Europa [1987]. Instead, we learn of the small farm, garden and orchard her parents tend in the shadow of a giant factory which produces ferromanganese in the Haute-Savoie, a region of France in the Alps, very close to Switzerland.

Achille Blanc hates the factory, the furnaces of which are always kept burning, and which spews fumes and leaves ever-growing mountains of red dust slag. Though the company keeps increasing the price it will pay for his farm, Odile’s father will not sell. He does not want his son working there, but eventually Odile’s older brother does.

Despite the factory, Odile grows up feeding rabbits, helping shovel out the stable and going to school. She is very close to her father. At 14, the schoolmistress comes to tell Odile’s parents that she is doing so well she should be sent to further schooling. She boards in the nearby town of Cluses, lonely, but obedient. Odile’s father dies and the village brass band he had been a member of comes to play “Amazing Grace” at the farm.

One day Odile’s mother asks her to take a loaf to her brother at the factory. Michel, one of her brother’s friends, offers to take her for a ride on his motor-bike. At first she refuses, but then accepts. They pack a picnic and ride over the mountains down into Italy. Odile is thrilled, but only a few weeks later she hears Michel has been badly burned at the factory when a furnace wall broke. He spends a long time in hospital, losing both his legs.

On New Year’s Eve, when Odile is 17, she hears music coming from the barracks where the foreign workers for the factory live. She puts on an old coat and goes to look in the window, watching Russians dancing and many other people she doesn’t know. A man comes up behind her and asks her in. He is Stepan, an orphan Ukranian who grew up in Sweden. He asks Odile to dance: “What’s so surprising about music is that it comes from the outside. It feels as if it comes from the inside. The man who had clicked his heels and announced his name as Stepan Pirogov was dancing with Odile Blanc. Yet inside the music, which was inside me, Odile and Stepan were the same thing.”

Odile’s family is horrified. Her mother won’t speak to her. Odile often walks into the mountains with Stepan and, when they have slept together, quits school and takes a job in town at a components factory. Stepan is patient, thinking they will win over Odile’s family. He builds an amazing bed and a separate room in the barracks which goes by the name ‘In Europa,’ and Odile often stays there. One day, however, as she is preparing for work, her brother calls to say Stepan has been killed at the factory. Asphyxiated, he fell into the furnace and was incinerated.

Devastated, Odile does not know what to do. She is only 18 and pregnant. She stays at the barracks until she can bear to leave and then moves to Cluses where she works in the components factory and raises her son Christian, who looks much like Stepan. As a kid, Christian is deeply interested in flight and, in a framing story, takes his mother hang gliding over the mountains of the Haute-Savoie.

When Christian goes to camp one summer, Odile meets Michel again. He runs a tobacco and newspaper shop in a nearby town and has prosthetic legs. He offers to take Odile to Paris, but as they stop to have a sandwich, someone runs into their car. They put up at a hotel and never get to Paris. Michel, Odile finds, has been to hell and back: “Who says hell has to stay the same? Hell begins with hope. If we didn’t have any hopes we wouldn’t suffer. We’d be like those rocks against the sky.” But he offers himself to Odile. She and her son go to live with him over the shop. Michel and Odile have a daughter together.

Thinking over her life, Odile wants to say to her daughter: “I will tell you which men deserve our respect. Men who give themselves to hard labour so that those close to them can eat. Men who are generous with everything they own. And men who spend their lives looking for God.” She thinks of the men in her rich life with much tenderness.

The stories Berger tells of the people he lived among in Quincy, France, are developed from the talk of his fellow villagers, including perhaps a woman such as Odile. Berger’s biographer Joshua Sperling quotes Berger saying of these neighbors: “’his ideals are located in the past; his obligations are to the future, which he himself will not live to see.’ They were the opposite of opportunists; in many ways they were saints.”