Jealousy and in the Labyrinth (23 page)

The man is standing outside, in full sunlight, because there is not enough light inside the apartment; he has simply stepped outside his door and decided to stand near the lamppost. In order to be facing the source of light, he has turned in the direction of the street, having behind him on the right (that is, on his left) the stone corner of the building; the street light on his other side is brushed by the bottom of his overcoat. The soldier glances at his feet and for the first time notices the spray of ivy embossed on the cast iron. The five-lobed, pointed palmate leaves with their five projecting veins are growing on a rather long stem; at the point where each of them joins it, this stem changes direction, but the alternating curves it thus describes are scarely evident on one side, and on the other are quite pronounced, which gives the entire stem a generally concave movement, preventing the spray from reaching very high and allowing it to curl around the cone; then it divides in two, and the upper branch, which is shorter and has only three leaves growing on it (of which the one at the tip is extremely small), rises in a blunted sine-curve; the other branch disappears toward the opposite side of the cone and the edge of the sidewalk. Once the roll of film is used up the soldier returns to the apartment house.

The hallway is dark, as usual. The apartment door has remained ajar; he pushes it open, crosses the unlighted vestibule, and sits down at the table where his wife pours him some wine. He drinks without saying anything, taking small mouthfuls, each time setting down the glass on the checkered oilcloth. After many repetitions of this action, the area in front of him is entirely covered with circular stains, though almost all of them are incomplete, showing a series of more or less closed arcs, occasionally overlapping, almost dry in some places, in others still shiny with the last drops of liquid. Between mouthfuls of wine, the soldier keeps his eyes fixed on this confused network which becomes increasingly complicated from moment to moment. He does not know what to say. He should be going now. But when he has finished his glass, the woman pours him another; and he drinks it too, in small mouthfuls, while slowly eating the rest of the bread. The child's silhouette he had noticed in the half-open door to the next room has disappeared in the darkness.

When the soldier decides to look up at the young woman, she is sitting opposite him: not at the table, but on a chair placed (has she just put it there?) in front of the chest, under the black frame of the portrait fastened to the wall. She is examining her visitor's faded uniform; her gray eyes move up as far as his neck where the two pieces of red felt marked with his serial number are sewn.

"What regiment is that?" she asks finally with an upward movement of her chin to indicate the two bright-red diamonds.

"I don't know," the soldier says.

This time the woman shows a certain amount of surprise. "You've forgotten the name of your regiment too?"

"No, that's not it . . . But this overcoat isn't mine." The young woman remains where she is for a moment without speaking. Yet she seems to have a question on her mind which she doesn't know how to formulate or which she hesitates to ask directly. Then, after a whole minute's silence, or even more, she asks: "Whose was it?"

"I don't know," the soldier says.

Besides, if he had known he could probably also have said what regiment the bright-red diamonds represented. Again he looks at the photographic enlargement hanging on the wall above the woman's black hair. The picture is oval-shaped, blurred around the edges; the mat around it has remained creamy-white all the way to the rectangular frame of dark wood. At this distance, the distinguishing insignia are not visible on the overcoat collar. In any case the uniform is that of the infantry. The man must have been billeted in the city or in its immediate environs while waiting to be sent to the front; otherwise he could not have come to say goodbye to his wife before leaving. But where are the barracks in this city? Are there a lot of them? What units are billeted there in peacetime?

The soldier decides he ought to show an interest in these matters: they would provide a normal and harmless subject of conversation. But he has scarcely opened his mouth when he notices a change in the woman's attitude. She is squinting slightly as she looks at him, seeming to wait for the rest of his words with exaggeratedly strained attention, considering the importance he himself attaches to them. He pulls up short in the middle of a vague sentence hurriedly concluded in a direction its inception did not suggest; its interrogative character is so faint that the woman has every opportunity to refrain from answering. And in fact this is the solution she adopts. But her features remain tense. Such questions are obviously the very ones a clumsy spy would ask, and suspicion is natural under such circumstances . . . although it is rather late, now, to conceal the location of military objectives from the enemy.

The soldier has finished his bread and his wine. He has no further reason to linger in this apartment, in spite of his desire to enjoy a few moments more of this relative warmth, this uncomfortable chair, and this guarded presence facing him. He should think up some way of leaving gracefully which would reduce the impression left by the recent misunderstanding. In any case, trying to justify himself would be the worst mistake of all; and how explain convincingly his ignorance about . . . The soldier now tries to remember the exact words he has just used. There was the word "barracks," but he cannot recall the strange sentence he has spoken; he is not even certain he has actually referred to the location of the buildings and still less whether he has definitely indicated that he was not familiar with it.

Without realizing it, he may have passed in front of a barracks during his peregrinations. However he has not noticed any structure in the usual barracks style: a low building (only two floors, with identical windows framed in red brick) about a hundred yards long with a low-pitched slate roof surmounted by high rectangular chimneys also made of brick. The structure rises at the far end of a large, bare, gravel courtyard separated from the boulevard and its luxuriant trees by a high iron fence supported by abutments and bristling with pickets on the inside as well as toward the street. Sentry boxes, placed at intervals, shelter armed guards; these sentry boxes are made of wood, with zinc roofs, and each side is painted with large black and red chevrons.

The soldier has seen nothing of the kind. He has passed along no fence; he has not noticed any large gravel courtyard; he has encountered neither luxuriant foliage nor sentry boxes, nor of course any armed guards. He has not even walked down any tree-lined boulevards. He has always followed only the same straight streets between two high rows of flat housefronts; but a barracks might also look like these. The sentry boxes have been removed, of course, as well as anything that might distinguish the building from those on either side; there remain only the iron bars protecting the first-floor windows for most of their height. These are square vertical bars a hand's breadth apart, connected by two horizontal bars placed not far from each end. The upper ends of these vertical bars are free, terminating in points about eight inches from the top of the window recess; the bases of the bars must be set in the stone sill, but this detail is not visible because of the snow which has drifted there, forming an irregular layer across the entire horizontal surface, particularly thick on the right side.

But this might just as well be a fire house, or a convent, or a school, or an office building, or merely an apartment house whose first-floor windows are protected by iron bars. Having reached the next crossroad, the soldier turns at right angles into the adjoining street.

And the snow continues falling—slow, vertical, uniform—and the white layer thickens imperceptibly on the windowsills, on the doorsteps, on the projecting parts of the black lampposts, on the street without traffic, on the deserted sidewalks where the paths made by pedestrians during the course of the day have already disappeared. And it is night once again.

The regular flakes, all the same size, equally spaced, fall at the same rate of speed, maintaining the same distance between themselves and the same arrangements, as if they belonged to the same rigid system which shifts position from top to bottom with a continuous, vertical, uniform, and slow movement.

The footprints of the straggling pedestrian walking head down in front of the houses, from one end of the straight street to the other, appear one by one in the smooth, fresh snow into which they already sink at least a half an inch. And behind him, the snow immediately begins covering up the prints of his hobnail boots, gradually reconstituting the original whiteness of the trampled area, soon restoring its granular, velvety, fragile appearance, blurring the sharp crests of its edges, making its outlines more and more fluid, and at last entirely filling the depression, so that the difference in level becomes indistinguishable from that of the adjoining areas, continuity then being re-established so that the entire surface is again smooth, intact, untouched.

Hence the soldier cannot know if someone else has passed along here, in front of the houses with their un- lighted windows, some time before him. And when he reaches the next crossroad, no tracks appear along the sidewalks of the cross street, and this means nothing either.

However the boy's footprints take longer to disappear. In fact he leaves humps behind him as he runs: his sole, shifting sharply, accumulates a tiny heap of snow which then remains in the middle of the footprint (at the place where its outline is narrowest) whose more or less accentuated protuberance must take longer to efface than the rest; and the holes made on each side of the shoe's toe and heel are all the deeper since the boy does not follow the old paths made during the day, but prefers to walk near the edge of the sidewalk in the deeper snow (though no difference in depth is apparent to the eye), where he sinks in farther. Since, in addition, he proceeds very rapidly, from the point where he is to the last irregularity still discernible under the new layer of snow, the length of his course is much greater than that the soldier leaves behind him, particularly if the loops which punctuate the child's progress around each lamppost are included.

These loops, it is true, are not indicated with absolute clarity, for the child scarcely sets foot on the ground during the revolution he makes as he catches hold of the cast-iron shaft. As for the pattern of his rubber-soled shoes, it is already blurred: neither the chevrons nor the cross in the center of its circle are identifiable, even before the falling snow has begun to blur the image. The distortions produced by running, added to the uncertainty concerning the latter's characteristics, make it impossible, all in all, to differentiate these footprints from those left by another child of the same age—who would also be wearing, moreover, shoes with identical soles (the same shoes, perhaps, coming from the same store) and who would be making similar loops around the lampposts.

In any case, there are no tracks at all in the snow, no footprints, and the snow continues falling over the empty street, uniform, vertical, and slow. It must be entirely dark now, and the flakes are no longer visible except when they fall through the zone of light around a street light. Hence the street is punctuated at regular intervals (though these seem to grow increasingly shorter in proportion to their distance to the right or the left), punctuated with lighter zones where the darkness is stippled with innumerable tiny white particles animated with a common falling movement. Since the window is located on the top floor, all these circles of light must look pale and distant at the bottom of the long trench formed by the two parallel planes of the housefronts; so distant, in fact, so quivering, that it is naturally impossible to tell the flakes apart: seen from so high up they form at intervals only a vague whitish halo, itself dim because the light from the street lamps is extremely weak and made still more uncertain by the diffused reflection which all these pale surfaces spread around them —the earth, the sky, the curtain of close flakes falling slowly but without interruption in front of the windows, so thick that it now completely conceals the building opposite, the cast-iron street lights, the last straggling pedestrian, the entire street.

Perhaps even the street lights have not been turned on this evening, tonight, that night. As for the sound of possible footsteps, muffled by the fresh snow, it could not reach such an altitude, penetrate the iron shutters, the windowpanes, the thick velvet curtains.

The shadow of the fly on the ceiling has stopped near the place where the circle cast by the lampshade meets the top of the red curtain. Once it is motionless, the shape becomes more complex. It is indeed the enlarged reproduction of the bent filament of the electric bulb, but the primary image is repeated nearby by two other paler, vaguer images framing the first. Perhaps, too, still other less distinct images are further multiplied on each side of the latter; they are not perceptible, for the whole of the tiny figure the fly projects is not situated in the most brightly illuminated area of the ceiling, but in a fringe of half-light about a quarter of an inch wide bordering the entire periphery of the circle, at the edge of the shadow.

All the rest of the room, lighted by only this one lamp on the corner of the table, seems to be in relative darkness compared to the brilliant circle of light cast on the white ceiling. Eyes which have stared too long at the latter no longer make out, when they turn away, any detail on the room's other walls. The picture hanging on the rear wall is nothing more than a gray rectangle framed in black; the chest beneath it is nothing more than a dark square as flat as the picture, pasted there like a piece of wallpaper; and the same is true for the fireplace in the center of the perpendicular wall. As for the wallpaper itself, the innumerable tiny spots which constitute its pattern look no more like a torch than a flower, a human figure, a dagger, a street light, or anything. The wallpaper merely looks as if silent feathers were falling in regular lines at a uniform rate, so slowly that their movement is scarcely noticeable, and it is difficult to decide whether their direction is up or down, like particles suspended in motionless water, tiny bubbles in a gaseous liquid, snowflakes, dust. And on the floor, which is also in semi-darkness, the gleaming paths have disappeared.