Jealousy and in the Labyrinth (22 page)

Before the man has had time to speak to her, a door on the left side of the hallway suddenly opens, and another woman in an apron, heavier-set than the first and perhaps older too, steps out. Looking up, she stops short, opens her mouth wide—too wide—and as she steps back into her doorway begins to scream, the shrill sound rising until it comes to an end with the violent slamming of her door. At the same moment comes the sound of hurried footsteps going up the staircase; it is the other woman running away, vanishing at once, the pounding of her clogs continuing without slowing down, but fading from floor to floor as she climbs, her full skirt, billowing around her legs, perhaps held down with one hand, not even stopping on the landings to catch her breath, the only clue as to her position being suggested by a different resonance at the beginning and the end of each flight: one floor, two floors, three or four floors, or even more.

Afterwards there is complete silence again. But, on the right side of the hallway this time, another door has opened. Or was it already open before? It is more likely that the sudden uproar has just attracted this new figure, which resembles the preceding two, or at least the first: a woman, also young, apparently, and wearing a long dark-gray apron tied around her waist and hanging full around her hips. Her eyes having met the soldier's, she asks:

"What's going on?"

Her voice is low, deep, but without any intonation; there is a premeditated quality about it, as if she wanted to sound as impersonal as possible. This might also be the voice heard in the street a moment ago.

"They got scared," the soldier says.

"Yes," the woman says, "it's from seeing you standing there like that.. . with the light behind you ... they can't see ... they thought you were a ..."

She does not finish her sentence. She stands still, staring at him. She opens her door no wider, probably feeling safer inside, one hand resting on the jamb, the other holding the door, ready to close it again. She asks:

"What do you want?"

"I'm looking for a street..." the soldier says, "A street I have to go to."

"What street?"

"That's just it. I can't remember the name. It was something like Galavier, or Matadier. But I'm not sure. Could it be Montoret?"

The woman seems to be thinking.

"This is a big city, you know," she says at last.

"But it's around here somewhere, that's what they told me."

The young woman turns her head toward the interior of the apartment and in a louder voice questions someone who remains invisible: "Did you ever hear of a Rue Montoret? Somewhere near here? Or something that sounds like that?"

She waits for the answer, revealing her regular profile as she turns toward the open door. Everything behind her is dark: there must be a hallway without any windows. The heavy-set woman also came out of complete darkness. After a moment a faint voice answers a few indistinct words, and the young woman turns back toward the soldier:

"Wait here a minute. I'll go see."

She begins to close the door, then changes her mind: "Close the street door," she says, "the whole house is getting cold."

The soldier walks back to the door and pushes it shut, the latch making a faint click as it falls back into place. He is in the dark again. The woman's door must be closed too. It is not even possible to walk toward it, for there is no means of recognizing anything, not even a gleam of light. Complete darkness. Nor can the slightest sound be heard: neither steps nor murmurs nor the clatter of kitchen utensils. The whole house seems uninhabited. The soldier closes his eyes and again sees the white flakes falling slowly, the row of street lights at regular intervals from one end of the snow-covered sidewalk to the other, and the boy running away as fast as he can, appearing and disappearing, visible each time for a few seconds in the successive circles of light at equal intervals of time, though the space is increasingly foreshortened by the distance, so that the boy seems to be running slower and slower as he grows smaller and smaller.

It is six steps from the chest to the table: three steps to the fireplace and three more after that. It is five steps from the table to the corner of the bed; four steps from the bed to the chest. The path from the chest to the table is not quite straight: it swerves slightly in order to pass closer to the fireplace. Above the fireplace is a mirror, a large rectangular mirror fastened to the wall. The foot of the bed is directly opposite.

Suddenly the light reappears in the hallway. It is not the same light, and it does not directly illuminate the place where the soldier is standing, which remains in darkness. At the other end of the hallway, a pale yellow artificial light comes from the right side of the transverse hallway. A luminous rectangle thus appears against the far right wall just in front of the staircase, and the illuminated area begins to widen from there, tracing two oblique lines across the floor: one of which crosses the blackened flooring of the hallway, the other rising diagonally up the first three steps; beyond the latter, as on this side of the former, the darkness remains, though slightly reduced.

Also on the right, in the area which cannot be seen, where the light is coming from, a door closes gently and a key turns in a lock. Then the lights go out and it is dark again. But footsteps, probably guided by long familiarity with the premises, are advancing down the transverse hallway. They are regular, distinct footsteps which do not hesitate. They advance down the hallway in front of the staircase opposite the soldier who, in order to avoid the collision of two bodies in the darkness, gropes blindly around him, looking for a wall against which he can flatten himself. But the footsteps are not heading toward him: instead of turning into the hallway at the end of which he is standing, they have continued straight ahead, into the left branch of the transverse hallway. A bolt is drawn and a harsher light, from outside, appears in this left section of the hallway, its intensity increasing until it becomes a kind of dim gray twilight. There must be another outside door here, opening onto the other street. It is through this door that the boy would have gone out again. Soon the light disappears as it had come, gradually, and the door closes at the same time that complete darkness is re-established.

Darkness. Click. Yellow light. Click. Darkness. Click. Gray light. Click. Darkness. And the footsteps echoing across the hallway floor. And the footsteps echoing across the pavement, in the snow-covered street. And the snow beginning to fall. And the boy's intermittent figure growing smaller and smaller in the distance, from street light to street light.

If the last person had not left by the same door as the boy, but from this side of the building, he would have let daylight into this part of the hallway as he opened the door, and discovered the soldier pressed against the wall, suddenly appearing in broad daylight a few inches away. As in the case of a collision in the darkness, new screams might then have aroused the whole house a second time, sending shadows scampering toward the staircase and bringing terrified faces to half-open doors, necks craning, eyes anxious, mouths already opening to shout. . .

"There is no Rue Montalet around here, nothing like that," the low voice announces; and immediately afterwards: "You're standing in the dark! You should have turned on the light." At these words the light comes on in the hallway, yellow light from a naked bulb on a wire from the ceiling, illuminating the young woman in a gray apron whose arm is still extended outside her doorway; her hand resting on the white porcelain switch moves downward while her pale eyes are fixed on the man, shifting from his hollow cheeks where the beard is almost a quarter of an inch long to the box wrapped in brown paper and the clumsily wrapped leggings, then moving back to the drawn features of his face. "You're tired," she says.

It is not a question. The voice has again become neutral, low, without intonation, cautious perhaps. The soldier makes a vague gesture with his free hand; a half-smile twists one corner of his mouth.

"You're not wounded, are you?"

His free hand rises a little higher: "No, no," the man says. "I'm not wounded." And his hand falls back slowly. Then they stand there for a while looking at each other without speaking.

"What are you going to do," the woman finally asks, "since you can't find the name of that street?"

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

"Was it for something important?"

"Yes . . . No . . . Probably."

After another silence, the young woman asks again: "What was it?"

"I don't know," the soldier says. He is tired, he wants to sit down, anywhere, here, against the wall. Mechanically he repeats: "I don't know."

"You don't know what you were going to do there?"

"I have to go there to find out."

"Oh!.."

"I was supposed to meet someone. Now it's too late."

During this dialogue, the woman has opened her door wide and stepped forward in the opening. She is wearing a long black dress with a full skirt, the latter three-quarters hidden by a gray pleated apron tied around her waist. The bottom of the apron is extremely full, like the skirt, while the top is merely a simple square of material protecting the front of her dress. Her face has regular, strongly marked features. Her hair is black. But her eyes are pale, a color between blue-green and gray-blue. She does not avoid the soldier's eyes, but instead stares at him for a long time, though without permitting the soldier to determine what her attitude toward him is.

"You haven't eaten," she says. And a fleeting nuance, as though of pity or fear or surprise, can be detected in her words this time.

But as soon as she has spoken her sentence and silence has fallen again, it becomes impossible to recapture the intonation which seemed just now to have a meaning—fear, boredom, doubt, solicitude, some sort of interest—and all that remains is the declaration: "You haven't eaten," pronounced in a neutral tone of voice. The man repeats his evasive gesture.

"Come in for a minute," she says, perhaps reluctantly— or perhaps not.

Click. Darkness. Click. Yellow light, now illuminating a tiny vestibule where there is a coat rack covered with hats and coats. Click. Darkness.

Now a door opens into a square room furnished with a day bed, a rectangular table, and a marble-topped chest. The table is covered with a red-and-white checked oilcloth. A fireplace with cold ashes in an open grate but without andirons on the hearth occupies the center of one wall. To the right of this fireplace is another door, ajar, opening into a dark room or closet.

"Here," the young woman says, pointing to a wicker chair beside the table, "sit down." The soldier shifts the chair slightly, grasping it at the top of its back, and sits down. He rests his right forearm and hand on the oilcloth. His left hand has remained in his overcoat pocket, the left arm still holding the box wrapped in brown paper at his side.

In the opening of the door, but one or two feet away, the figure of a child stands motionless, turned toward the man in uniform whom his mother (is it his mother?) has just brought into the apartment and who is sitting obliquely at the table, half-leaning on the red oilcloth, his shoulders hunched, his head bent forward.

The woman returns through the door to the vestibule. In one hand she is holding at her waist a piece of bread and a glass. Her other arm hangs at her side and in that hand she is holding a bottle by the neck. She sets everything down on the table in front of the soldier.

Without speaking she fills the glass to the brim. Then she leaves the room again. The bottle is an ordinary liter of colorless glass, half full of dark-red wine; the glass, which is in front of it, near the man's hand, is of coarse manufacture, the shape of a cylindrical goblet, fluted for half its height. The bread is to the left: the heel of a large black loaf whose cross-section is a half-circle with rounded corners; the loaf has a close texture with extremely small, evenly spaced holes. The man's hand is red, injured by rough work and the cold; the outer surface of the fingers, which are folded toward the palm, reveals many tiny crevices at the joints; they are, moreover, stained black, as though by grease, which might have adhered to the chapped areas of the skin so that a perfunctory washing would not have made them clean. Hence the bony protuberance at the base of the forefinger is crisscrossed with short black lines, mostly parallel or only slightly divergent, the others variously oriented, surrounding the first lines or cutting across them.

Above the fireplace a large rectangular mirror is fastened to the wall; the wall reflected in it is the one with the large chest against the base of it. In the middle of this wall is the full-length photograph of a soldier in battle dress—perhaps the husband of the young woman with the low voice and the pale eyes, and perhaps the father of the child. Overcoat with front flaps folded back, leggings, heavy boots: the uniform is that of the infantry, as is the chin-strapped helmet and the full equipment of knapsack, canteen, belt, cartridge belt, etc. The man's hands are closed, one a little above his belt, over the two leather straps that cross each other over his chest; he has a carefully trimmed moustache; the figure as a whole, moreover, has a neat, almost lacquered quality, doubtless due to the skillful retouching of the specialist who has made this enlargement; the face itself, wearing the usual smile, has been so smoothed, scratched out, and rearranged that it no longer has any character at all, resembling all those faces of soldiers or sailors about to go into battle displayed in photographers' windows. Yet the original snapshot seems to have been taken by an amateur—probably the young woman or some friend in the regiment—for the setting is not that of a fake middle-class living room nor of a false terrace lined with potted palms in front of a park painted in
trompe-l'oeil
on canvas, but the street itself in front of the apartment house door near the street light with the conical shaft around which curls a spray of stylized ivy.

The man's equipment is brand new. The photograph must date from the beginning of the war, the period of general mobilization, or from the first draft of reservists, perhaps even from a date previous to this: during military service or a brief training period. Yet the full paraphernalia of the soldier in battle dress seems rather to indicate that the photograph dates from the beginning of the war itself, for the infantryman on leave in peacetime does not come home in such uncomfortable garb. Hence the most likely occasion would be an exceptional leave of a few hours, granted to the draftee to say goodbye to his family before starting for the front. No friend in the regiment came with him, for the young woman would then be in the photograph beside the soldier; she must have taken the photograph with her own camera; she has even probably devoted a whole roll of film to the occasion, and she has later had the best picture enlarged.