Funeral Rites (8 page)

“Now's the time when mushrooms sprout. We might even find some.”

And ten yards farther:

“Won't you have a cigarette?”

Erik's body was pressed against that of the executioner, whose right arm (the ax arm) was squeezing him. As the boy answered merely by pursing his lips and giving an indifferent toss of his head, the man said:

“I'll give you one later.”

Erik thought—but did not say—"the last cigarette, the one the executioner gives you.” They were under the beech. Their clothes were damp and their feet frozen. They sank into a sodden earth. The executioner put out his arms and held Erik by the shoulders against the tree. He was laughing silently. Despite the power of his muscles—and bones—one could feel that his strength was chiefly passive, that he was able to endure rather than to court danger, to lift heavy sacks, saw wood for days on
end, push a truck that had bogged down. It was hard to imagine him fighting. His movements were not swift or dexterous, and his gestures were too mild. He asked again:

“You're not afraid?”

“No. I said I wasn't.”

Erik remained calm. He did not even feel angry. His heart was on his wrist. He heard the watch ticking.

“I'll give him the watch,” he thought, “and that'll do it.” He thought vaguely that by admitting he had the watch he would escape being buggered. Obviously one doesn't send an executioner to execute watch thieves. That's a childish fear.

“If I can get it off. . . .”

He managed to unbuckle the strap. The watch fell to the wet grass. He felt purer. Yet he had no doubt as to the man's intentions. They had walked a few yards farther. Erik leaned against the executioner.

In spite of the cold and dampness and of his anxiety and disgust, Erik was thrilled. He had a hard-on. He shivered, and suddenly, brutally, he pressed against the executioner.

“Ah!”

The man's smile faded, then for three seconds he seemed to hesitate, to wait for an inspiration, and as his eyes met Erik's fleeting gaze, suddenly, at the right corner of his mouth, his smile returned (only to the corner), and became more pronounced, confident, and decisive.

“You're good-looking,” he said, freeing Erik's left shoulder from his grip and stroking his cheek with the back of his hand.

Thus the most spiritualized form of Jean was giving fleecy asylum to the love of a Berlin executioner and a young Nazi. Let's see it through. Erik and the executioner
were locked in an embrace, face to face. Erik's underpants were torn. His khaki breeches were falling down and forming a thick heap of clothes between his legs, and his buttocks were crushed in the fog against the red bark, those soft-skinned, amber buttocks, as rich to the eye as the milky fog whose matter had the luster of a pearl. Erik hung from the executioner's neck with both hands. His feet were no longer touching the wet grass, though his breeches were, having fallen down between his naked calves and his ankles. The executioner, whose prick was still stiff and was now between Erik's pressed thighs, held him up and dug into the rich earth. Then-knees were piercing the mist. The executioner was hugging the boy to him and, at the same time, backing him up and crushing his ass against the tree. Erik was pulling the man's head. The executioner realized that the boy was solidly built and tremendously violent. They stayed in that position for a few seconds without moving, the two heads pressing hard against each other, cheek to cheek. The executioner was the first to break away, for he had discharged between Erik's golden thighs, which were velvety with morning mist. The position had lasted only a brief moment, but long enough to beget in the executioner and the morning's assistant a feeling of simultaneous tenderness: Erik for the executioner, whom he was holding by the neck in such a way that it could mean only tenderness, and the executioner for the youngster, for even though the gesture was necessitated by then-difference in height, it was so winning that it would have made the toughest of men burst into tears. Erik loved the executioner. He wanted to love him, and little by little he felt himself being wrapped in the huge folds of the legendary red cloak inside which he cuddled at the same time as he took a piece of newspaper from his
pocket and politely handed it to the executioner who took it to wipe his prick.

“I love the executioner and I make love with him, at dawn!”

The same surprise, the same wonderment, made Riton say much the same sort of thing when he realized he was in love with Erik, in the small apartment where he had lain down beside the Boche who was sleeping with his mouth open. Each of his thoughts, which sprang from and were suggested by his excitement, tortured Riton. He was amazed at first at having a hard-on, with no other provocation, because of Erik, who was stronger and older than he:

“All the same, I'm not a queer,” he thought. And a moment later:

“All the same, I must be.”

This certainty made him feel a bit ashamed, but it was a shame mingled with joy. A radiant shame. The shame in him merged with the joy into a single feeling just as the same color—pink and sometimes bright red—blends them. With a sigh, he added:

“And for a Fritz in the bargain. I'm a real case!”

In the park, crushed by the executioner, Erik thought thus:

“What a great beginning. A real success. He's not good-looking, he's a bruiser, he's hairy, he's thirty-five, and he's the executioner.”

Erik said this to himself ironically, but actually he was solemn, he recognized the danger of such a situation, especially if it is accepted. He accepted it.

“I accept it all without a word. I deserve a medal.”

When he had pulled up his breeches and buttoned them, the executioner handed him his case and Erik took a cigarette, without saying anything, for he already knew
that his gesture meant thank you by virtue of its elegance.

“Are we friends?”

Erik hesitated a second or two, smiled and said:

“Why not?”

“Are we?”

We are.

The executioner looked at him tenderly.

“You'll be my friend.”

Expressed in this form, the sentimentality of the killer's German soul was addressing the German soul of Erik, which was already replying with a kind of spiritual trembling, a kind of hope.

“I will.”

The brightness of dawn made it possible to see more clearly in the mist.

“Will you come to see me in my home?”

The executioner's tone of voice became almost feminine at the very moment that he flicked a tiny twig or bit of fluff off the lapel of Erik's windbreaker and pulled it slightly to smooth an imperceptible crease. This first and slightly finical act on his friend's behalf did not make Erik smile until later.

Erik, who was now in the Panzer
divisionen,
was at the top of a Paris building, in a lower-middle-class apartment where the men he had called had cautiously installed themselves, one by one. The last of them, Riton, had jumped nimbly to the balcony, alone, despite the soldiers’ offer of help. The straps of three loaded machine guns were wound about his shirt, went around the belt and up across the shoulders, crossed once on the chest and once on the back, and produced a copper tunic from which his arms emerged bare from the elbow almost to the shoulder, where the sleeve of the blue shirt was rolled into a thick wad that made the arm more elegant. It was a carapace,
each scale of which was a bullet. This paraphernalia weighed the child down, gave him a monstrous bearing and posture that intoxicated him to the point of nausea. In short, he was carrying the ammunition supply. His uncombed hair was naked in the darkness. His battered thighs bent beneath the weight of his armor and fatigue. He was barefoot. He had jumped with wonderful suppleness and landed on his bent toes, with the barest help from Erik, who had reached out to him from the balcony. He held on to the machine gun, a lean, dark-colored, completely functional instrument. Erik entered the room through the window, and Riton spun around lightly, despite the mass of metal, and, with his mouth agape, found himself at the edge of a starry night on a rickety, ascetically simple iron bridge and confronted with an abyss of darkness that he felt was quivering with chestnut trees, though their leaves barely stirred. It was the Boulevard de Ménilmontant. Ménilmontant, the kid's neighborhood.

A sentence: “My grief in the presence of Jean's grief reveals the force of my love for him!” The more I grieve, the more intense my feeling seems to be. Now, my suffering is often caused and always increased by remembering Jean's blackened corpse in its coffin, with the nostrils probably stuffed and the body slowly decomposing and mingling its smell with that of the flowers. My grief is heightened by the thought of Jean's suffering when he was shot, by his despair when he felt himself lose his footing and leave life for the realm of shades. My daily life is dominated by the memory of the gruesome sights, of the preparations for burial. My contact with the concrete wounds my sensibility cruelly: the black escutcheon adorned with the silver-embroidered “D” that I saw on the hearse waiting at the gate of the hospital, the coffin
and the poor quality of the wood, the singing in the church, the
Dies Irae,
the blood-red moiré ribbon on which was inscribed in gold letters: “To our leader, the Communist Youth Movement,” the priest's remarks in French, these were all knives that slashed my heart. And all these wounds gave me knowledge of my love. But Jean will live through me. I shall lend him my body. Through me he will act, will think. Through my eyes he will see the stars, the scarves of women and their breasts. I am taking on a very grave role. A soul is in purgatory and I am offering it my body. It is with the same emotion that an actor approaches the character whom he will make visible. My spouse may be less wretched. A sleeping soul hopes for a body; may the one that the actor assumes for an evening be beautiful. This is no small matter. We require the rarest beauty and elegance for that body which is charged with a terrible trust, for those gestures which destroy death, and it is not too much to ask the actors to arm their characters to the point that they inspire fear. The magical operation they perform is the mystery of the Incarnation. The soul, which without them would be a dead letter, will live. Doubtless Jean can have existed momentarily in any form whatever, and I was able, for a span of ten seconds, to contemplate an old beggarwoman bent over her stick, then a garbage can overflowing with refuse, egg shells, rotting flowers, ashes, bones, spotted newspapers; nothing prevented me from seeing in the old woman and the garbage can the momentary and marvelous figure of Jean, and I covered them, in thought, not only with my tenderness but also with a white tulle veil that I would have loved to put on Jean's adorable head, an embroidered veil, and wreaths of flowers. I was officiating simultaneously at a funeral and a wedding; I merged the symbolic encounter of the
two processions into a single movement. And even from here, I was able, by fixing my gaze and remaining motionless, or almost, to delegate my powers to the famous actor in Nuremberg who was playing the role in which I was prompting him from my room or from my place beside the coffin. He was strutting, he was gesticulating and roaring before a crowd of spellbound, raving Storm Troopers who were thrilled to feel that they were the necessary extras in a performance that was taking place in the street.

Actually it's hardly possible for a theatrical service to take place in daily life and make the simplest acts participate in that service, but one can realize the beauty of those performances before a hundred thousand spectator-actors when one knows that the sublime officiant was Hitler playing the role of Hitler. He was representing me.

Curled up inside my grief, I nevertheless paid close attention to the performance, in which there was not the slightest hitch. I dispatched my orders from beside the coffin. The entire German nation was entering a state of trance at the celebration of my own mystery. The real Fuhrer was standing beside a dead boy, but a high priest was performing magnificent rites for me at a kind of gigantic fair.

If my feelings are real only through my consciousness of them, ought I to say that I would have loved Jean less if he had been born in China? And that neither the living Jean nor the charming, handsome Jean of my memory would have been able to reveal to me one of the most painful, most intense feelings I have ever had, whereas Jean
seems
to me to be the sole cause of it? In short, all that grief of mine—hence the consciousness of that beautiful love, hence that love—would not have existed if I had not seen Jean in a state of horror. If I am told he was tortured, if I see him in a newsreel being mutilated
by a German, I shall suffer more and my love will be exalted. In like manner, Christians love more when they suffer more. And the sentence, “My grief at Jean's death revealed to me the force of my love for him,” can be replaced by “My grief at the death of my virtue revealed to me the force of my love for it.” The desire for solitude, which I spoke of briefly a few pages back, is
pride.
I want to say a few words about the admirable solitude that accompanied the militiamen in their relations with Frenchmen and with each other and finally in death. They were considered to be worse than whores, worse than thieves and scavengers, sorcerers, homosexuals, worse than a man who, inadvertently or out of choice, ate human flesh. They were not only hated, but loathed. I love them. No comradeship was possible between them, except in the very rare case when two boys had enough confidence in each other not to fear that the other might inform on him in their marginal world where informing was a matter of course, for, loathed like reptiles, they had assumed the morals of reptiles and made no bones about it. Thus, any friendship between them was uneasy, for each of them wondered: “What does he think of me?” It was impossible for them to pretend that they were acting out of idealism. Who would have believed it? They had to admit: “It's because I was hungry; it's because I'll have a gun and may be able to plunder; it's because I like to squeal, because I like the ways of reptiles; in short, it's in order to find the grimmest solitude.” I love those little fellows whose laughter was never bright. I love the militiamen. I think of their mothers, their families, their friends, all of whom they all lost in joining the Militia. Their deaths are precious to me.