Jealousy and in the Labyrinth (27 page)

Now the tracks stop suddenly in front of a door just like the others, but not completely closed. The stoop is very narrow and can be crossed in one stride without setting foot on it. The light at the other end of the hallway is on; the ticking sounds like an alarm clock. At the far end of the hallway is a rather narrow staircase rising in short flights, separated by small square landings, turning at right angles. The floor landings, despite the many doors which open off them, are scarcely any larger. At the top is the closed room where the gray film of dust gradually settles on the table and on the small objects on top of it, on the mantelpiece, on the marble top of the chest, on the day bed, on the waxed floor where the felt slippers . . .

The tracks continue, regular and straight, across the fresh snow. They continue for hours, a right foot, a left foot, a right foot, for hours. And the soldier is still walking, mechanically, numb with cold and fatigue, mechanically setting one foot in front of the other without even being sure he is making any progress, for the same regular footprints are always there in the same places under his own feet. Since the spacing of the chevroned soles corresponds to his own stride (that of a man at the end of his strength), he has naturally begun putting his feet in the footprints already made. His boot is a little larger, but this is scarcely noticeable in the snow. Suddenly he has the feeling he has already been here, ahead of himself.

But the snow was still falling, at this moment, in close flakes, and no sooner were the guide's footprints made than they immediately began to lose their clarity and quickly filled up, becoming more and more unrecognizable as the distance increased between him and the soldier, their mere presence soon becoming a matter of doubt, a scarcely noticeable depression in the uniformity of the snow's surface, finally disappearing altogether for several yards . . .

The soldier thinks he has definitely lost the track when he sees the boy waiting for him a few feet away, under a street light, huddled in his black cape already white with snow.

"Here it is," he says, pointing to a door just like the others.

Then there is the electric bulb swaying at the end of its long wire and the man's shadow swaying across the closed door like a slow metronome.

During the night the soldier awakens with a start. The blue bulbs are still on, hanging from the ceiling, a row of three down the center of the room. In a single movement the soldier has thrown back his covers and sat up on the edge of his bed, his feet on the floor. He was dreaming that the alarm signal had sounded. He was in a winding trench whose top reached as high as his forehead; in his hand he was holding some kind of grenade, elongated in shape, with a delayed-action explosion device which he had just set going. Without a second to lose he had to throw it out of the trench. He heard it ticking steadily like an alarm clock. But he stood there with the grenade in his hand, his arm extended as if to throw it, inexplicably paralyzed, increasingly rigid, less and less able to move even a finger as the moment of the explosion approached. He must have shouted in his sleep to escape the nightmare.

Yet the other sleepers seem perfectly calm. Probably he has not really cried out. Looking more carefully, he discovers that his neighbor's eyes are wide open: both hands under his neck, he continues to stare straight ahead into the darkness.

Half intending to find some water to drink, half to look as if he knew what he were doing, the soldier stands up and, without putting on his shoes in order to avoid making noise, leaves the row of beds and heads for the door through which he first came. He is thirsty. Not only his throat feels dry, but his whole body is burning despite the cold. He reaches the door and tries to turn the handle, but the lock resists. He dare not shake it too hard for fear of waking everyone. Besides, the door seems to be locked.

Having turned around, panic-stricken, he realizes that the windows, the imitation windows drawn in black on the wall, are now on his left although they were on his right when he came into this room the first time. He then notices a second, identical door at the other end of the long passage between the two rows of beds. Realizing that he must have turned the wrong way, he crosses the entire length of the room between the two rows of prone bodies. All the eyes are wide open and watch him pass, in complete silence.

As a matter of fact, the other door opens easily. The latrines are located at the other end of the hall. The soldier noticed this as he came upstairs, before lying down. Intending to shift the package wrapped in brown paper under his arm, he suddenly remembers having left it unguarded beneath the bolster. He immediately closes the door again and quickly returns to his bed. At first glance he sees that the bolster is now lying flat against the vertical iron bars; he approaches and discovers that the box is no longer there; he turns the bolster over as if it were necessary to convince himself further of the fact, turns the bolster over twice more; finally he straightens up, no longer knowing what to do, but there are no longer blankets on the mattress either. And three beds farther along the soldier recognizes some blankets bundled into a ball on an empty mattress. He has simply gone to the wrong bed.

On his bed, everything is where it was: blankets, bolster, and package. And, under the bed, the boots and the coiled- up leggings are also there. The soldier lies down again without having had anything to drink. Despite his burning throat, he no longer has the strength to make another attempt to walk through the labyrinth of unlighted hallways until he reaches this infinitely distant and problematical water. His passages through the dormitory have occurred very quickly, in the last restlessness of a feverish awakening. He now feels incapable of taking another step. Moreover, he could not go out carrying his big box without awakening or reinforcing futile suspicions; his recent behavior has made him only too noticeable already. He scarcely takes the time to wrap his feet and legs in one of the blankets before stretching out again, spreading the second blanket over his whole body as well as he can. And once more he is walking in the snow through the empty streets along the high, fiat housefronts which succeed each other indefinitely, without variation. His route is punctuated by black lampposts with stylized ornaments of old- fashioned elegance, their electric bulbs shining with a yellow luster in the leaden daylight.

The soldier walks as fast as he can without running, as though he feared someone might be pursuing him and that all the same too evident a flight might arouse the suspicion of passers-by. But no figure appears as far as the eye can see toward the gray end of the straight street, and each time the soldier turns around to look back, continuing straight ahead without slowing down, he can see that no pursuer threatens to catch up with him: the white sidewalk stretches behind him as empty as in the other direction, with only the line of footprints made by his hobnail boots, slightly distorted each time the soldier has turned around.

He was waiting on a street corner near a lamppost. He was looking at the corner of the house opposite him on the other side of the street. He had already been looking at it for some time when he noticed that there were some people in a room on the third floor. This was a rather large room with no visible furniture and two windows; the figures came and went from one window to the other, but without coming near the panes, which had no curtains. The soldier particularly noticed their pale faces in the room's half-darkness. The room must have had dark walls to make these faces stand out so clearly. The people seemed to be talking to each other, consulting each other; they made gestures, as the relative whiteness of their hands indicated. They were looking at something in the street, and the subject of their discussion seemed of some importance. Suddenly the soldier realized that this could only be himself. There was nothing else outside those windows on the sidewalk or in the street. To disguise his intentions the soldier began examining his surroundings, staring at the horizon first in one direction, then the other. Not exactly to disguise his intentions, but to show that he was expecting someone and was not concerned with the house in front of which he merely happened to be standing.

When he again glanced furtively toward the third floor windows, the pale faces had come noticeably closer to the bare panes. One of the figures was obviously pointing at him, hand outstretched; the other faces were grouped around the first at various levels, as if some of their possessors were standing, some crouching, others on tiptoe or even on chairs; the other window was empty.

"They think I'm a spy," the soldier decided. Preferring not to have to refute this accusation, which risked being formulated in a more immediate way, he pretended to consult a non-existent watch on his wrist and walked off without further thought down the next cross street.

After about ten steps he decided his behavior was foolish: it merely confirmed the suspicions of his observers, who would lose no time following him. Instinctively he began to walk faster. Imagining he heard behind him the sound of a window being flung open, he even had difficulty keeping himself from running.

The soldier turns around once more to look behind him: there is still no one. But as he turns back in the direction he is walking, he now sees the boy who seems to be waiting for him as he passes, half hidden behind the corner of a house at the next crossroad.

This time the soldier stops short. The door of the apartment house on his left is half-open, revealing a dark hallway. Farther on, at the crossroads, the child has stepped back a little so that he is entirely concealed by the stone corner of the building. The soldier suddenly turns into the door and finds himself in the hallway. At the far end, without losing a minute, he begins climbing the short flights of the narrow staircase which turns at right angles, each flight separated from the next by a small square landing.

On the top floor, there is the room sealed behind its thick curtains. The shoe box wrapped in brown paper is lying on the chest, the dagger-bayonet on the marble mantlepiece. The dust has already covered the heavy double-edged blade with a thin layer which dims the metal's luster under the shaded light from the lamp on the table. The shadow of the fly on the ceiling continues its circuit.

To the right of the large luminous circle whose circumference it regularly follows, there is, at the corner of the ceiling, a slender black line about an inch long and scarcely noticeable; a crack in the plaster, or a spider web covered with dust, or some trace of a bump or scratch. This imperfection in the white surface, moreover, is not equally visible from every point in the room. It is particularly apparent to an observer near the base of the wall to the right, at the other end of the room, looking up along what is virtually the diagonal of this wall, as is normal for someone lying on the bed, his head resting on the bolster.

The soldier is lying on his bed. It is probably the cold which has awakened him. He is on his back, in the same position he was in when he first opened his eyes; he has not moved since. In front of him the windows are wide open. On the other side of the street there are other windows identical to these. In the room all the men are still lying down. Most of them look as if they are sleeping. Nor does he know what time it is now. His immediate neighbors, to the right and left, are wrapped as closely as possible in their blankets; one of them, who has turned toward him, has even covered part of his face, leaving only his nose sticking out, while a flap of material pulled over his head covers his eyes as well. Although it is difficult to tell what kind of clothes the sleepers are wearing, it appears that none of them has undressed for the night, for there are no clothes to be seen hanging somewhere or folded up or thrown down at random. Moreover, there are no closets or shelves or cupboards of any kind, and only the bed ends could be used to hang coats, jackets, and trousers on; but these bed ends, made of metal rods painted white, are all as unencumbered at the foot as at the head. Without moving his body, the soldier pats his bolster behind him in order to make sure his box is still there.

He must get up now. If he does not succeed in giving this package to its intended recipient, he at least has the chance of getting rid of it while there is still time. Tomorrow, tonight, or even in a few hours, it will be too late. In any case, he has no reason to stay here doing nothing; a prolonged stay in this pseudo-barracks, or infirmary, or hospitalization center, can only make new complications for him, and he may thereby be compromising his last chances of success.

The soldier tries to raise himself on his elbows. His entire body is paralyzed. Having slipped only a few inches on his back toward the head of the bed, he lets himself fall back, his shoulders leaning against the vertical iron rods supporting the upper, thicker bar against which his head rests. The box, luckily, is in no danger of being crushed. The soldier turns his face to the right, where there is a door through which he should be leaving.

Next to the man whose face is hooded in a flap of the coarse brown blanket, the sleeper beyond has one arm outside his blankets, an arm wearing the khaki sleeve of a military jacket. The reddish hand hangs over the edge of the mattress. Farther along, other bodies are lying stretched out or curled up. Several have kept their field caps on.

At the end of the room, the door has opened noiselessly and two men have come in, one behind the other. The first is a civilian, wearing hunting clothes: heavy leather boots, narrow riding breeches, a thick duffle-coat, and a long muffler around his neck. He has kept on a faded felt hat, shapeless with age and wear; his entire outfit is worn, tattered, and even rather dirty. The second man is the one from the evening before, wearing his jacket and corporal's cap with its unsewn stripes. Without stopping at the first beds, without even glancing at them in passing, they have advanced down the central space to one of the sleepers in the opposite row under the second window. Stopping at the foot of the bed, the two men speak together in low voices. Then the civilian in the felt hat approaches the pillow and touches the body near the shoulder. At once the body, wrapped in blankets, sits up and a pale face appears, the eyes deep in their sockets, the hollow cheeks blackened by several days' growth of beard. Startled out of his sleep, the man takes some time to get his bearings, while the two others stand motionless beside him. He passes one hand over his eyes, across his forehead, and through his short, grayish hair. Then he begins to lean back and suddenly collapses on his mattress.