Birth of Our Power (32 page)

“Comment ça va? Wiegeht's? Nié loutché?”

The patriarch's bloodshot eyes would move slowly and direct an unswerving glance, like an invisible ray, toward a form stretched out
nearby; his lips, at the same time gray and violet-tinged stirred, pronouncing only one word:

“Croaked?”

Sonnenschein lacked the courage to lie—a lie would doubtless have exasperated this solid old man, as would cheating on a bargain, or a precaution unworthy of him in danger. But in order to comply with a desire for dignity in death which he believed he sensed in him, Sonnenschein would go over to the designated remains, close the dead man's eyelids with his fingertips, and join his hands across his stomach. The patriarch followed all these movements with a serious attention in which Sonnenschein discerned approbation. He alone out of eight was alive on the third day. They didn't know what to do with him. The doctor did not appear.

Before falling into a coma, the patriarch painfully stirred his great arms, which made one think of the rugged branches of a felled tree. Sonnenschein thought he understood his wish, went over, and gently, but not without difficulty, raised his hands with their shapeless nails like the worn claws of an old tiger—hands which had firmly held the swing-plow, the ax, the knife, the woman's shoulder, the child's frail body, the friend's hand … The Jew thought obscurely of those things as he joined them over the huge tortured chest in which the heart made a dull sound as of shovels of earth filling into a faraway grave.

“Good,” said the old man.

It was still night. The twinkling stars emitted an extraordinary calm. All at once to himself, Sonnenschein said that life is marvelous. He took a few steps in the darkness, stumbling over some sharp stones, and pronounced aloud: “Marvelous.” He looked at the stars, and, between them, making his eyes blink, the tiny luminous points that were still more stars. And he thought wordlessly of those countless worlds, of those great fires gravitating through space, following necessary courses, of the continents, of the races, of the cities, of the flowers, of the machines, of the animals in the warm grass, the teeming water, the jungle, the cold steppe, of the children who were laughing, at that moment, on beaches in the sun, on the other side of the earth; a mother giving suck to her greedy child, somewhere, perhaps in California, perhaps in Malaysia, bronzed or copper-colored madonna … madonna with half-closed eyes, with pointed breasts … white madonna … “But they exist, they exist,” thought Sonnenschein with astonished joy. “There is no death,” he said, surprised by his own words, without the presence
of cold corpses, behind him in the nauseating room, seeming to contradict the inexpressible affirmation with which he was brimming.

“Sonnenschein!”

Faustin II joined him. “Sonnenschein,” he asked, “do you know how to row?”—“No.”—“It's good to row,” said the Negro. He leaned over, his neck bent, working imaginary oars with his Herculean arms. “Like this. The night so. There are reeds, the river is terrible, you know, calm and terrible, treacherous like a sleeping serpent …”—“What river,” thought Sonnenschein, but without asking. He murmured:

“Yes, it's good to row, Faustin. You'll take up the oars again, Faustin, on the peaceful and treacherous river.”

UPON WAKING, PEOPLE WOULD WONDER WHO HAD DIED DURING THE NIGHT
We used to call the infirmary
the Morgue.
A sick man even said, feeling very low: “All right, I'm cooked. Take me off to the Morgue.” They took him. He was an Alsatian or a Belgian, worker or peasant, one lad among many others about whom nothing in particular was known. The disease, obliterating his youth, depersonalized him even more. His greatest preoccupation during his last day was to prevent anyone from stealing his nickel-plated watch, attached to his wrist by a copper band. Consumed by fever, he would raise his arms: trying to join them behind his neck in order to hide the watch. We went to see him, Sonnenschein and I: he came out of his bewildered despair in order to wave good-by to us with his hand over his head: Farewell, farewell … The pain of death could be read clearly on that damp and dried-out face, as if ossified, streaked with purple, livid at the temples where the eyes, drowned in a haze, had an atrocious fixity. He was only one dead man among many others.

Almost all of us had been infected, but our group held out victoriously against the epidemic. From the beginning we had noticed that the disease only killed off the most miserable, the famished, the lice-infested. The Greeks, reduced for the most part to living off the administrative pittance, and whose hygiene was poor, had been the first to be touched. The Belgians and the Alsatians had been decimated. We Russians held out thanks to our solidarity. Our emergency fund provided just about enough extra provisions for even the least fortunate among us to keep the flame of life glowing, if only as an ember. We allowed no one to be carried off to the Morgue, while the others cleared their rooms of the feverish at the first opportunity. We went to bed, one after the other, teeth chattering, while the convalescents and those who had been spared watched over the sick. We continued to struggle, to
think. To a comrade rolled up in his covers, his burning head buried in a pillow covered by an old dishrag, we had to bring the news of the day—dispatches from the front: the Château-Thierry “pocket,” the last big push of the Central Powers against Paris; dispatches from Russia: terror, exploits of the Czechoslovaks, “barbarism of the Chinese and Lett praetorians forming the People's Commissars' guard,” denial of the rumor of Trotsky's assassination, Lenin's recovery, nationalization of heavy industry—and the sick man would chuckle, think things over, want to argue: and this signaled the victory of life within him …

I'll never forget the joy of a young lad who had really thought he was a goner for a while; he kept silent, but his eyes cried out his anguish. Every time we approached him, he would follow our movements with a sort of dread and a terrible cough would wrack his body. We finally understood that he was afraid we had come to tell him that it was necessary to move him to the infirmary. “As for me,” said Sonnenschein in an offhand way, standing in front of his bed, “I don't let anybody go down there.” A morning came when the sick man felt saved. I could see it in his eyes as soon as I had crossed the threshold of Room II. He was lying in the back, only his head emerging from under the covers; but he greeted me from afar with such a spring like smile that I myself was refreshed, like a thirsty man who has just tossed off a big glass of spring water. What life-giving spring water flowed from him to me, from him to everyone! For several days he was radiant with his joy of living, too great to be expressed, and which he held in, besides, out of a kind of modesty; and this gave him the confused air of young lovers whose secret is discovered, who blush, betray themselves, smile, recover themselves … He had taken up but little place among us until then, but he became dear and close to us because of his happiness and the good that his happiness did us. The group was no longer complete without him. A new ardor made his limbs more supple. I don't know what quality of nimbleness and frolicsomeness in the movements of this young man whom I had known and ignored as taciturn made me think of the delightful spontaneity, of young kittens … He would laugh gladly, and even when he wasn't laughing, his eyes still laughed.

People continued to die around us, a little more slowly since the more helpless were now sleeping in the little Trécy cemetery behind a low church with a pointed spire; some of them with white wooden crosses, like those which were planted in such numbers at the Front, the others, more numerous, under a common mound. The life of the
camp continued unchanged above the Morgue and those graves. Is it not as simple to die as to live?

Men had been killed during those days, somewhere, in commonplace trenches over which hope passed, like a putrefying breeze. They were the last dead of the war; and we thought about them, I don't know why, with an even more indignant sadness. The Armistice exploded above us like a dazzling rocket, tracing a meteoric curve through the sky of our gray life. In the yard, radiant soldiers carrying newspapers mingled together with groups which would suddenly come together and then fly apart in an explosion of shouts: men began to run up and down the stairways, pursuing each other, pursued by their joy. Armistice, peace, the end of the nightmare, the end of captivity? We shared in that great joy, we too were carried away. The minutes which passed were henceforth no longer those of immense fratricide. But we were full of second thoughts:

“It's a crushing victory,” said Krafft.

“Therefore: no revolution. Order, triumph, trophies, parades, the survivors' pride guaranteeing that the sufferings and the deaths would be forgotten, apotheosis of the generals.”

“Here, yes,” resumed Fomine … “And for the moment. But over there it's already the revolution, the true victory of the vanquished, born in defeat.”

Yes. Over there and here. Wherever it may be, this victory of the vanquished, lighting its torches now in Kiel, in Berlin, in Vienna, in Budapest, in the flames of red flags; proclaimed by Liebknecht, come out of prison to harangue the crowds from the Emperor's balcony (“… he took to his heels, the Kaiser, like a rabbit”)—this victory is ours! What leaps it is making, from the Neva, from the Volga, to the Vistula, to the Rhine, to the Escaut! Will the old armies, heavy with their old, deadly victories, be able to stop it? We concluded, in turn, that it was impossible and that it was probable.

The Morgue had its contingent of half-dead men. They heard the Armistice being acclaimed. An excited group burst through the door of their cold and nauseating room. They were able to glimpse the upturned faces, the open arms calling to them; they could hear the vigorous voices calling to them:

“The grip can't hold us any more! This time it's peace! Get up!”

“Get up!” shouted another enthusiast before they dragged him off and the door was closed again over the tumultuous apparition, reflected without astonishment in the glassy eyes of the dying men.

One of them, benumbed by a feverish somnolence, would question me every time I went to see him. The effort he had to make in order to speak and understand dilated his pupils. “What's happening?” he finally articulated. I leaned over to his ear and I said forcefully, but too loud not to trouble the silence of the room, “The Armistice!” But he couldn't understand and would ask, an hour later, with the same effort: “What's happening?” And I answered him, as best as I could, like a man trying to make himself understood through walls—but already there was nothing left for him.

The Baron was dying in a deserted room, on the second floor, along with another moribund. They had not been sent to the Morgue on account of their lucidity. The room was illuminated by bay windows full of a milky sky. These two men had dysentery or intestinal typhus. A horrible stench thickened the air around them. They were in the throes of death amid defecation, light, and calm.

We had seen the Baron go down slowly among us, step by step, on the invisible stairway to that level which was even more piteous than the grave in which his remains would soon be laid out. We had known him elegant, dressed in a gray hunting costume, his calves molded by leather leggings. He smoked a handsome meerschaum pipe: and his eyes, gray like his mustache, leveled a distant but good-natured glance at people. Months passed without letters, without hope, without money. Somewhere in Flanders a patriotic notary was looking after his estate and cheating him. He borrowed from Maerts in order to amble in the Bonne Fortune cabaret. We saw him wash his own linen, swap his hunting jacket for an old soldier's tunic, and take his seat, his mustache drooping and his eye humiliated, next to Lamblin who would say to him, familiarly: “Willya 'ave a coffee, Baron.” He would borrow thirty centimes from people without returning them. “A moocher,” they said. His badly patched shoes became broken-down clodhoppers. He was a poor wretch. The Flemish used to call him
Barontje.
He had a yellow complexion, cheeks covered with an ashy brush, a lifeless gaze. He sold his bread to buy cigarettes. Now his tall body, thin and hairy, is being slowly drained of its blood, its strength, of everything. A pile
of shapeless old clothes rests on a stool at his bedside. Faustin II, who had been taking care of him, has fallen sick as well. “There's nothing left to do,” says Jean, the male nurse. “Let him be.” His cot, caked with defecations, is like a dung heap. He moans feebly, falls asleep, is delirious at moments, falls back into a torpor full of dreams … It is then he calls Charlie, his handsome intelligent setter, stuffs his pipe, and sets off on the Campine road, walking stick in hand, greeted by the people he passes; the road turns, lined with alder trees; cows watch this peaceful man go by; the animals belong to Jef van Daele, a sly chap who knows everything about breeds and prices, really a character out of Brueghel, that fat Jef, and a joker, but what a shot with a bow and arrow … He enters the Cabaret du Coq, but that's not old Mother Mietje bringing him his gin at his usual seat near the window through which he can see the gray waters of the Nethe—it's Maerts, a huge Maerts, whose bearded head, covered by a little dented hat, grows larger, puffs up, blocks the window, is about to crash through the ceiling and knock down the poster-covered walls. “You didn't expect to find me here, eh Monsieur le Baron?” mocks that formidable disembodied head. “Ah! Bastard!” cries the Baron, and he strikes with all his strength, strikes that monstrous, fantastic head which bounces back flabbily under his blows without ceasing its mocking laughter …