Jealousy and in the Labyrinth (32 page)

"They were ordered to! Keep it straight."

"Everyone stopped fighting on orders," the soldier says.

The cavalry corporal shrugs his shoulders. He looks at the infantry corporal as though he had expected support from him. Then he turns toward the large window looking out on the street. He murmurs: "Rotten officers!"

And again, after a few seconds: "Rotten officers, that's what it was."

"I'm with you there," the infantry corporal agrees.

The soldier tries to see, to his right or farther back, if the young waitress has not started to come over to their table, but even though he half rises from his chair to see over the heads of the drinkers surrounding it, he cannot catch sight of her anywhere.

"Don't worry," the infantry corporal says, "you'll see him soon enough when he comes back." He smiles rather pleasantly and adds, still supposing that the soldier is looking for the absent friend: "He must be over there, in the poolroom. He must have found someone he knew."

"You can ask him," the cavalry corporal continues with a thrust of his chin. "He was in the fighting. You can ask him."

"All right," the soldier says, "but he's here all the same, now. He had to come here just like everyone else."

"He was ordered to, I tell you," and after a moment of silent reflection he concludes, as though to himself, "Rotten officers, that's what it was!"

"I'm with you there," the infantry corporal agrees.

The soldier asks: "Were you at Reichenfels?"

"Oh, no," the infantry corporal answers, "we were both farther west. We fell back to keep from being taken when they broke through from the rear."

"We were ordered to. Remember that. Keep it straight," the cavalry corporal corrects.

"And we moved fast," the infantry corporal says. "It was no use hanging around: the Twenty-eighth, on our left flank, waited too long and got picked off like flies."

"Anyway," the soldier says, "it all comes down to the same thing now. Sooner or later they'll get us."

The cavalry corporal glances at him, but prefers to address his remarks to an imaginary interlocutor sitting on the opposite side: "Nobody's proved that. We're not through yet."

Now the soldier shrugs his shoulders. This time he stands up completely to try to attract the waitress' attention and get something to drink. As he does so, he overhears a random sentence from the conversation at the next table: "I tell you there are spies everywhere!" A relative silence follows this declaration. Then, from the other end of the same table, comes a longer commentary in which only the words "firing squad" can be heard. The rest is lost in the general confusion. And another phrase stands out just as the soldier sits down again: "Some fought, others didn't."

The cavalry corporal immediately begins examining the green diamonds on the soldier's overcoat collar. He repeats: "We're not through yet." Then, leaning toward the infantry corporal, he says as though in confidence: "They say there are enemy agents paid to sabotage morale."

The other man shows no reaction. The cavalry corporal, who has vainly expected a reply, leaning forward across the red-and-white checked oilcloth, finally straightens up in his chair. A little later he says again: "Should take a look," but without explaining himself further, and in so low a tone that he can scarcely be heard. Both men are now silent, motionless, each one staring straight ahead into space.

The soldier has left them, intending to find the young woman with the heavy dark hair. Yet once he is on his feet among the crowded tables, he has decided he was not so thirsty after all.

On the point of leaving, already not far from the bar and the group of middle-class drinkers, he has just remembered the soldier who was also at Reichenfels and who, for one, had fought so gloriously. The important thing was to find him, to talk to him, make him tell his story. The soldier immediately turns around and crosses the room in the opposite direction between the benches, the chairs, and the backs of the seated drinkers. The two men are still alone in the same positions in which he left them. Instead of proceeding to their table, he turns directly toward the back of the room to reach an area where everyone is standing: a crowd of men gesturing and shouldering each other toward the left, but advancing very slowly because of the narrowness of the passage, which they nevertheless gradually approach, between a projecting angle of the wall and three large, loaded, circular coat racks standing at the end of the bar. While the soldier too is moving forward along with the crowd—even more slowly since he is on the edge—he wonders why it suddenly seemed so urgent to talk to this man who could only tell him what he already knows. Before reaching the next room where there are probably more drinkers, a pool table concealed under its tarpaulin cover, the black-haired waitress, and the hero of Reichenfels, he has given up his project.

It is probably here that the scene occurs: the silent gathering which steps back in every direction around him, the soldier finally remaining alone in the center of a huge circle of pale faces . . . But this scene leads to nothing. Besides, the soldier is no longer in the center of a crowd, neither silent nor noisy; he has left the café and is walking in the street. It is an ordinary kind of street; long, straight, lined with identical houses with flat façades and uniform doors and windows. It is snowing, as usual, in close, small, slow flakes. The sidewalks are white, as are the street, the window sills, the stoops.

When a door is not closed tight, the snow which the wind drove into the doorway during the night has been wedged into the narrow vertical slit for several inches, remaining caked against the jamb when the soldier opens the door wide. A little snow has even accumulated inside, forming on the ground a long, tapering streak which has partially melted, leaving a moist black border on the dusty wood of the floor. Other black marks occur along the hallway at intervals of about two feet, growing fainter as they continue toward the staircase, whose first steps appear at the end of the hallway. Although the shape of these puddles is uncertain, changeable, and occasionally fringed with intermediary zones, it is likely that they are footprints left by small shoes.

On the right of the hallway as on the left are lateral doors at equal and alternating intervals, one to the right, one to the left, one to the right, etc.... The series continues as far as the eye can see, or almost, for the first steps of the staircase are still visible at the end of the hallway, lit by a brighter gleam. A small silhouette, a woman or a child greatly reduced by the considerable distance, rests one hand on the large white sphere where the banister ends.

The more the soldier advances, the more he has the impression that this figure is retreating. But one of the doors has been opened on the right. Here, moreover, the footprints stop. Click. Darkness. Click. Yellow light revealing a narrow vestibule. Click. Darkness. Click. The soldier is once more in the square room furnished with a chest, a table, and a day bed. The table is covered with a checkered oilcloth. Above the chest the photograph of a soldier in battle dress is fastened to the wall. Instead of sitting at the table drinking wine and slowly chewing his bread, the soldier is lying on the bed; his eyes are closed, he seems to be sleeping. Around him are standing three motionless people, who are looking at him without speaking: a man, a woman, and a child.

Right next to his face, at the head of the bed, the woman is bending forward slightly, examining the sleeper's drawn features, listening to his laborious breathing. Behind her, near the table, stands the boy, still wearing his black cape and beret. At the foot of the bed, the third person is not the lame man with the wooden crutch, but the older man whose head is bald in front, wearing a short fur-lined overcoat and well-polished shoes protected by spats. He has kept his fine gray leather gloves on; the one on his left hand is distended, on the third finger, by the stone of his signet ring. The umbrella must have remained in the vestibule leaning against the coat rack, with its ivory handle and its silk sheath.

The soldier is lying on his back, fully dressed, with his leggings and his heavy boots. His arms are at his sides. His overcoat is unbuttoned; underneath it, his uniform jacket is spotted with blood on the left side, near the waist.

No. Actually it is another wounded man who occupies the scene, outside the door of the busy café. The soldier has no sooner closed the door behind him than he sees a young man coming toward him, a soldier drafted the year before whom he has met several times during the retreat and again this morning at the hospital, who is also about to go into the café. For a second, the soldier imagines he has before his eyes the valiant fighter referred to inside, the man whose conduct the cavalry corporal had just been praising. He immediately realizes the impossibility of such a coincidence: the young man happened to be at Reichenfels during the enemy attack, but in his own regiment, as the green diamonds on his uniform attest; yet this unit did not include a single hero, as the cavalry corporal had clearly implied. As the soldier is about to pass his comrade, merely nodding to him, the latter stops to speak to him: "Your friend you went to see this morning in surgery," he says, "is pretty bad. He's been asking for you several times."

"All right," the soldier says. "I'll go back."

"You better hurry. He won't last long."

The young man has already put his hand on the brass doorknob when he turns to add: "He says he's got something to give you." After a moment's thought: "But maybe it's just delirium."

"I'll go see," the soldier says.

He immediately begins walking quickly, taking the shortest route. The setting he passes through is no longer that of the great symmetrical and monotonous city with its straight roads intersecting each other at right angles. And there is no snow yet. The weather is even rather mild, for the season. The houses are low, old-fashioned, vaguely baroque, over-ornamented with volutes, molded cornices, columns with carved capitals framing the doors, balconies with sculptured brackets, complicated cast-iron railings. All of which corresponds to the lampposts on the street corners, former gas lights that have been converted, consisting of a cast-iron column widening at the base and supporting, three yards from the ground, a lyre-shaped structure with twining branches, from which is suspended the globe containing the large electric bulb. The shaft itself is not uniform, but girdled with many rings of varying shapes and sizes, indicating at various heights changes in diameter, swellings, constrictions, circular or spindle-shaped bulges; these rings are particularly numerous toward the top of the cone which constitutes the foot of the structure; around this cone spirals a garland of stylized ivy embossed on the metal and reproduced identically on each lamppost.

But the hospital is only a military building of classic construction, at the rear of a large, bare, gravel courtyard separated from the boulevard and its leafless trees by a high iron fence whose gate is wide open. On each side the sentry boxes are empty. In the center of the huge courtyard one man is standing, a non-commissioned officer with belted tunic and kepi; he is standing perfectly still. He seems to be thinking; his black shadow lies at his feet across the white gravel.

As for the room where the wounded man is, it is an ordinary hall whose metal beds have been painted white— a decor which also leads to nothing, if not to the box wrapped in brown paper lying on the kit shelf.

Hence it is with this box under his arm that the soldier walks through the snowy streets along the high, flat house-fronts when he is looking for the meeting place, hesitating among several similar crossroads, deciding that the description he has been furnished is quite inadequate to determine the exact place with any certainty in this huge city arranged so geometrically. And finally he goes back to an apparently uninhabited apartment house, pushing open a door that has remained ajar. The hallway, painted dark brown halfway up the wall, has the same deserted aspect as the streets themselves: doors with neither door mat nor calling card, absence of the usual household utensils left here or there which usually show that a house is inhabited, and walls completely bare save for the compulsory civil defense bulletin.

And then comes the side door which opens onto a narrow vestibule where the black-sheathed umbrella is leaning against an ordinary coat rack.

But another entrance makes it possible to leave the apartment house without being seen by someone watching for you at the doorway: it opens onto the cross street at the end of the secondary hallway perpendicular to the first, to the left of the staircase ending the latter. Moreover, this street is in every way similar to the preceding one; and the child is here at his post, waiting for the soldier at the foot of the lamppost in order to lead him to the military offices which serve as a kind of barracks and hospital.

In any case they have set out with this intention. However the crossroads and sudden changes in direction increase in number, and the interminable walk through the night continues. Since the boy goes faster and faster, the soldier is soon no longer able to follow him and is alone again, with no other recourse than to seek some shelter in which to sleep. He doesn't have much choice, and must content himself with the first door he finds open. This is once again the apartment of the young woman in the gray apron with the black hair, the pale eyes, the low voice. Yet he had not noticed, at first, that the room where he had been given bread and wine, under the framed photograph of the husband in battle dress fastened to the wall over the chest, contained a day bed as well as the rectangular table covered with a checkered oilcloth.

At the top of the wall opposite this bed, almost at the angle of the ceiling, there is a small, sinuous black line a little over four inches long, which may be a crack in the plaster, perhaps a dusty spider web, perhaps merely a defect in the white paint emphasized by the harsh lighting of the electric light bulb hanging at the end of its wire swaying back and forth in a slow, oscillating movement. In the same rhythm, but in the opposite direction, the shadow of the man with the unsewn chevrons and the civilian trousers (is this the man whom the lame man called the lieutenant?), the shadow on the floor sways left and right against the closed door on either side of the motionless body.