Jealousy and in the Labyrinth (26 page)

Men are lying on almost all the beds, covered with dark blankets. The man with the unsewn chevrons has led the soldier to the middle of the row on the side of the wall without windows, and has indicated an empty mattress by setting the bedclothes down on it; then he has left again without further explanations, and he has closed the door behind him.

The folded bedclothes form two dark rectangles against the lighter background of the mattress, two rectangles which overlap at one corner. The beds to the right and left are both occupied: two bodies lying on their backs, wrapped in their blankets; the heads are supported by bolsters of the same light shade as the mattresses; the man on the right has also put his hands under his neck, the folded elbows pointing diagonally on each side. The man is not sleeping: his eyes are wide open. The man on the left, whose arms are hidden alongside his body, is also not sleeping. Others farther away, lying on their sides, have their bodies slightly raised on one elbow. One man is even half sitting up: in the dim light he stares at the newcomer who is standing in front of his bed, one hand resting its fingertips on the horizontal iron bar which comprises its foot, the other in the overcoat pocket, a shoe box under the arm. Everyone is perfectly motionless and silent. Doubtless they are not sleepy: it is still too early; and the lack of adequate light prevents them from doing anything but lying here, eyes wide open, staring at the motionless newcomer with his shoe box or at the imitation windows in front of them, or at the bare wall, or the ceiling, or into space.

The soldier finally approaches the head of the bed while he takes in his right hand the package he was holding under his left arm. And again he stands perfectly still. This room, as he now notices, differs in one important detail from the dormitories of a military barracks: there is no kit shelf running along the wall over the beds. The soldier stands with his box in his hands, wondering where he can put it for the night, hesitating to let it out of his sight or to draw more attention to it. After considerable indecision, he pulls the bolster away from the painted iron grill that forms the head of the bed, sets the box down on the end of the mattress, and pushes the bolster back against it in order to secure it firmly. He decides that this way, when his head is on the bolster, any attempt to take the box will awaken him no matter how heavily he is sleeping. Then, sitting on the bed and leaning forward, he slowly begins removing his leggings, coiling up the strip of material as he unwraps it from around his leg.

"You don't even know how to wrap your leggings." At the foot of the lamppost, on the edge of the sidewalk, the boy stares at the soldier's ankles. Then, raising his eyes, he examines his entire outfit from his feet to his head, his gaze finally coming to rest on the hollow cheeks black with their growth of beard: "Where did you sleep last night?"

The soldier replies with a vague gesture. Still bending forward, he unties one shoe lace. The child begins to move away slowly, disappearing toward the rear of the scene but without turning around, without moving, his serious eyes still staring at the soldier beneath the navy blue beret pulled down on each side over his ears, holding the edges of his cape together from the inside, while his whole body seems to glide backwards across the snow-covered sidewalk along the flat housefronts, passing the ground floor windows one after the other: four identical windows followed by a door only slightly larger, then four more windows, a door, a window, a window, a window, a window, a door, a window, a window, faster and faster as he moves farther away, becoming smaller and smaller, vaguer and vaguer, fainter and fainter in the twilight, suddenly swallowed up toward the horizon and then disappearing in the wink of an eye, like a falling stone.

The soldier is lying on his mattress fully dressed, having merely taken off his heavy boots which he has put under the bed beside his leggings. He has wrapped himself up in the two blankets, over the overcoat which he has simply unbuttoned at the collar, too tired to make one more gesture. Besides, the room is not heated save by the bodies of the men lying there. There is no large square porcelain stove near the rear door at the end of the counter with its pipe bent at right angles and joining the wall above the shelves full of bottles. But the main thing is to be sheltered from the falling snow and the wind.

His eyes wide open, the soldier continues to stare into the darkness in front of him, a few yards in front of him, where the child stands, motionless and rigid too, his arms at his sides. But it is as if the soldier did not see the child— neither the child nor anything else.

He has long since emptied his glass. He does not seem to be planning to leave. Yet around him, the room has been emptied of its last customers, and the bartender has gone out through the rear door after having turned out most of the lamps.

"You can't sleep here, you know."

Behind the table and the empty glass, behind the child, behind the large window with its pleated curtain which covers it halfway up, its three spheres arranged in a triangle and its inscription in reverse, the white flakes are still falling just as slowly, their descent vertical and regular. It is doubtless this continuous, uniform, immutable movement that the soldier is staring at, motionless at his table between his two companions. The child sitting on the floor in the foreground is also looking in this direction, although without raising his head he cannot see the bare panes above the pleated curtain. As for the other people, they do not seem to be concerned with what is happening over here: the group of seated drinkers talking heatedly and gesticulating, the crowd at the rear moving toward the left of the picture, where the overloaded coat racks are, the group standing at the right facing the wall, reading the bulletin which has been tacked there, and the bartender behind the bar, leaning forward toward the six men in middle-class clothes forming a small circle with emphatic postures, caught motionless like all the others in the middle of gestures which this arbitrary pause has deprived of any naturalness, like people at a party whom a photographer has tried to catch in candid movement, but whom technical necessities have kept too long in one position: "Don't move now! ..." An arm remains half raised, a mouth gapes, a head is tipped back; but tension has replaced movement, the features are contorted, the limbs stiffened, the smile has become a grimace, the impulse has lost its intention and its meaning. There no longer remains, in their place, anything but excess, and strangeness, and death.

The six men in long frock coats who are standing in front of the bar, under the eye of the bartender whose thickset body, leaning toward them, is supported on his hands that grip the inner edge of the bar, on top of which are set the six glasses, still full, belonging to the customers momentarily distracted from their thirst by a discussion doubtless full of excitement and noise—a fist raised in anger, a head thrown back to shout the swearwords which the mouth shapes with violence, and the other men in the group approving, punctuating the remark with other solemn gestures, all talking or exclaiming at the same time— the six characters grouped in the left foreground are the ones who first catch the eye.

But the most noticeable man of the group is perhaps not the short fat man declaiming in the center, nor the four others around him (two seen full face, one in profile, one from behind) who are echoing his words, but the last man, situated behind them and slightly to one side, almost a head taller than his companions. His dress is apparently similar, as far as can be judged, since his body is almost completely hidden by his neighbors, except for the open collar above a wide white cravat and a well-fitted shoulder, and the opposite arm, which reappears behind one of the heads, stretched out to rest forearm and hand on the rounded edge of the counter in front of a glass shaped like a truncated cone mounted on a circular foot.

This last man seems uninterested in what his friends are saying and doing right in front of him. He is staring over the seated drinkers at the one female figure in the entire scene: a slender waitress standing in the middle of the room, carrying a tray with only one bottle on it among the benches, the tables, the chairs, and the bodies of the workers facing in different directions. She is wearing a simple long-sleeved dress with a full-pleated skirt gathered at the waist. She has thick black hair in a bun and a regular face with sharp but delicate features. Her movements give the impression of a certain grace. It is difficult to know which way she is going because of the pronounced torsion of her waist and her entire body; her profile does not indicate the same direction as her hips, so that she seems to be glancing at all the tables around the room to see if anyone is calling for her, while she raises the tray over her head in both hands. The tray, moreover, is tilting alarmingly, as is the liter bottle balanced on top of it. Instead of keeping her eye on this precarious burden, the woman is looking in the opposite direction, her head turned more than ninety degrees away from the tray toward the right side of the scene and the round table where the three soldiers are sitting.

It is not certain that she is looking only at them: other customers are also within her field of vision beyond this particular table, some civilians at another table, less apparent because drawn in vaguer outline, but still just as noticeable to the waitress herself. And in fact one of the latter seems to be holding up a hand to attract her attention.

But the look which the eye (seen in profile) of the young woman with black hair would direct toward this extended arm in the background would in any case cross the raised face of the soldier who is sitting facing her, a companion on either side (whose faces are not visible in the picture), an impassive face with features lined by fatigue, contrasting by its calm with the contortions and grimaces prevalent everywhere else. His hands, similarly, are lying flat on the table which is covered with a red-and-white checked oilcloth, where glasses, set down several times, have left a number of circular marks, some incomplete, some dry, some quite distinct, others completely obliterated by the sliding of a glass, or by an overcoat sleeve, or by a wipe of a rag.

And now the woman is sitting on a chair facing the soldier on the other side of the table with its red-and-white oilcloth which hangs in stiff folds over the edges. While the soldier is slowly chewing the bread which she has gone to get for him, along with the glass and the bottle, he stares at the half-closed door which reveals a child's figure in its opening. The young woman with black hair and pale eyes has just asked her questions about the regiment to which her visitor belongs—to which at least the latter's uniform and military insignia belong.

In the ensuing silence, when the soldier has raised his eyes to his hostess, the latter's head shifts slightly with a counter-clockwise movement toward the portrait fastened to the wall over the chest. It is a full length photograph of her husband, taken the morning he left for the front during the first days of the offensive, during the period when everyone behind the lines was convinced of an easy and rapid victory. Since then she has had no word from him. All she knows is that the unit he was fighting in was in the Reichenfels area at the time of the enemy breakthrough.

The soldier asks her which unit this was. Although her answer is not very exact, and although she has no idea of army organization, it seems that the position the woman gives is mistaken: the battalion she is talking about was never under fire, it was surrounded and disarmed much farther west. However, the soldier has no desire to begin a discussion on this subject, particularly since the young woman might feel he had insulting intentions concerning her husband's military career. He therefore confines himself to making a general remark: there were many less troops in Reichenfels than was subsequently claimed.

"Then you think he's a prisoner?"

"Yes," he says, "probably," which does not commit him to much, for unless he is dead the husband will soon be a prisoner in any case.

It is at this moment that the lame man has come into the room, through the half-open door to the next room, advancing without any evident awkwardness among the various obstacles, maneuvering his wooden crutch with agility. And the boy has soon reappeared at the other door.

It is this boy who afterwards leads the soldier through the empty streets as night falls, along the housefronts with their unlighted windows. Yet there are still inhabitants in the city; a large part of the civilian population must not have left it when there was still time. Does no one, then, dare turn on a light in rooms overlooking the street? Why do these people still obey the outdated civil defense instructions? Probably out of habit; or else because there is no administration to repeal the old regulations which of course would no longer apply. Besides, the city lighting system is functioning just as in peacetime; there are even street lights that have remained on all day long.

But the windows succeeding each other along the flat housefronts, on the ground floor as on every floor of the high uniform houses, do not reveal the least gleam of light, yet no shutter nor curtain has been drawn in front of or behind the panes, which are as black and bare as if all these apartments were uninhabited, gleaming only occasionally, at certain fleeting angles, with the brief reflection of a street light.

The boy seems to be going faster and faster, and the soldier, too exhausted, no longer manages to follow him.

The slender figure, wrapped in its black cape, beneath which appear the two narrow black trouser legs, gets farther and farther ahead. The soldier is constantly afraid he has lost it. Then he catches a glimpse of it far ahead, much farther than he expected, suddenly illuminated as it passes under a street light, then immediately disappearing in the darkness again, invisible once more.

Hence the child may at any moment turn into a side street without being seen, for the route he has taken from the start is far from being straight. Luckily the fresh snow on the sidewalk shows his footprints, the only ones on the entire smooth surface between the housefronts and the parallel edge of the gutter, clear tracks despite the boy's rapidity, shallowly printed in the thin layer of new snow which has just fallen on the paths trampled hard during the day, footprints of chevroned rubber soles with a cross inscribed in a circle on the heel.