Pedigree (40 page)

‘Dear God, Poldine! Good afternoon, Franz.'

It was one of Élise's brothers who was an inspector at the national armaments factory and lived right at the end of Coronmeuse.

‘Don't you think, Franz, that Poldine has grown thinner?'

She added deliberately:

‘I came here yesterday to tidy up Mother's grave a bit.'

She had borrowed a spade from the keeper. Her brothers and sisters never thought of doing this but just brought flowers and candles along on All Souls' Day; and if it had not been for Élise, their mother's grave would have been a tangle of weeds and dead leaves.

‘Just imagine, some people …'

She did not say the neighbours, but she pointed to the nearby tombs.

‘Just imagine, some people had thrown all their rubbish behind Mother's tombstone. I painted the little railing too, Louisa. It needed it.'

She still had some enamel paint on her fingers which pumice stone had failed to remove.

‘Good afternoon, Madame Smet. Good afternoon, Valérie.'

Everybody kissed. Roger's cheeks retained the smell of all these foreign kisses; he waited in one place after another, for there were a great many graves to be visited if nobody was to be offended. Désiré followed along too, a foreigner in a world of which he did not even know the language.

‘You haven't seen Marthe and Hubert Schroefs, have you?'

‘They must be visiting the grave of Hubert's brother, at the far end of the cemetery, towards the colliery.'

‘To think that Louis of Tongres hasn't been to see his mother's grave since the funeral! He wouldn't be able to find it again.'

At Robermont, they had stayed only a few minutes. At Sainte-Walburge, dusk started falling when they were still there, forming groups which broke up only to come together again in front of another vault.

‘How is Félicie?'

‘I haven't seen her for over a month. The poor girl! She's so delicate, and she has to pick a fellow like Coucou!'

They had finally met the Schroefs, and Hubert walked along behind the women with Désiré.

It was dark by the time they reached the Rue Sainte-Walburge where a few shop-windows were lighted. They turned round every now and then to make sure that the others were following.

‘Why, Franz and Poldine have gone off without saying goodbye!'

‘You know what Poldine's like.'

Just before they reached the brightest shop-window, Élise protested:

‘No, Marthe, let's not stop. It looks as if we've come for the tart. Besides, we are going to the evening service at Saint-Denis. There's such a good preacher.'

But Hubert Schroefs had stopped with Désiré in front of his sister's cake-shop. Marie Beckers had caught sight of them through the window and was already waving to them. It was too late to cross over to the other pavement.

‘Good evening, Marie. Don't bother about us. We didn't want to go past without dropping in to give you a kiss, but you've got so much to do on a day like this …'

The door kept on opening and shutting, ringing the bell every time. Marie Beckers, helped by her eldest daughter, was shaking the sugar canister over some tarts, wrapping these up in glossy paper, and banging the keys of the cash-register whose drawer opened automatically.

‘Go into the kitchen. I'll be with you in a minute.'

It was dark in there. There were tarts everywhere, even on the chairs. The windows looked out, not on a yard, but on the bakehouse with the glass roof where Beckers, bare armed, his vest white with flour, grey hairs in his armpits and powder all over his head, was working with his two apprentices.

‘No, Marie, we aren't hungry. We didn't come for that. And we're in a hurry, aren't we, Désiré? Françoise is expecting us for the evening service at Saint-Denis.'

It was no use. The cups were filled with coffee, the chairs were cleared, and big slices of rice tart were cut while Marie Beckers, a thin little woman with feverish eyes, bustled to and fro between the kitchen and the shop.

As Élise used to say, it was hard to believe that she was clumsy Hubert Schroefs' sister, she was so sensitive and sad. Élise followed her into the shop to ask her in an undertone:

‘And your husband?'

‘He's always the same. You've seen him.'

How could she have married that vulgar man who spoke Walloon more often than French and who had the biggest nose Roger had ever seen? If he opened the bakehouse door, it was to make a coarse joke. He had no respect for anything, not even his own daughters.

‘Just imagine, Élise, the other evening, when I asked him if he'd seen Germaine …'

Germaine was the eldest of the three Beckers girls. She was seventeen. She was fresh and sprightly, but unfortunately she had her father's coarse features. Without appearing to do so, she pricked up her ears to listen to her mother's whispering, and Marie lowered her voice even further and started talking in Flemish.

‘ “Your daughter,” he told me, “must be coupling in a corner with her young man.” It made me cry, Élise. That wasn't the way we were brought up. He makes no bones about talking crudely in front of her about certain things. “What's a girl for,” he says, “if it isn't to go with a boy?”'

Nobody took any notice of Roger who was stuffing himself with sugared tart in the noisy kitchen.

‘You must come and see us one Thursday afternoon with the little boy, Élise. I'm so lonely, you know. If I hadn't got the business to keep me busy, I don't know what would become of me.'

Élise promised, but it was a long way, a steep climb.

‘One Thursday when it's fine.'

They went down into the town by way of the Rue Pierreuse, with the soldiers from the Citadel clattering past them with a great din of hobnailed boots. They reached the cheese square late, the stained-glass windows of Saint-Denis were covered with black hangings, and when Désiré pushed open the padded door, they heard the preacher's loud, booming voice.

‘Pick your feet up, Roger … Thank you, Monsieur, don't put yourself out …'

They remained standing behind the chairs which had been turned to face the pulpit. An unobtrusive sign to Françoise who was sitting near the reredos. The Dominican's voice bounced off the walls of the huge nave and the faces turned up towards him looked as if they were carved in ivory.

A cough now and then, stern looks, the legs of a chair grating on the flagstones.

‘… In the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Ghost, Amen!'

The Dominican blew out the candle burning on the edge of the pulpit and vanished down the winding staircase, all the chairs were moved at once, the organ thundered, a thousand signs of the cross were made, and the fingers of the faithful groped about on the sticky stone of the basin, searching for the cold touch of the holy water.

They waited for Françoise by the fountain and kissed Loulou, who had a cameo profile and had played the part of the Virgin in the last procession.

‘You will come and have supper with us, won't you?'

‘No, Françoise. We don't want to bother you. Besides, the lodgers are waiting for us.'

That was true. For fifty centimes a day, Mademoiselle Pauline and Monsieur Chechelowski now had their supper in the Rue de la Loi kitchen. Élise stopped at Tonglet's to buy some ham, then in the Rue Puits-en-Sock where she had left her chip-dish on the way to the cemetery. They rediscovered the atmosphere of Outremeuse and brought to it from Sainte-Walburge something of a Peters flavour, still hearing the echo of laments in Flemish, the accents of Aunt Louisa and Schroefs, still seeing Aunt Poldine's Lenten silhouette and the grin of Franz who had the same mannerism as his brother Louis and kept shutting his eyes. How many women in mourning, nearly all belonging to the family, they had met! Élise often used to say that it was the fate of big families to be always in mourning.

‘If I reckoned it up carefully, I do believe I'd find that I've been in mourning for three-quarters of my life.'

She lit the fire again, and spread the tablecloth with the red squares over one half of the table, the half reserved for the lodgers, for the Mamelins had their meals on an oilcloth which was rolled up on a stick afterwards.

In obedience to the daily ritual, Élise opened the glazed door a little way and called out into the darkness of the hall:

‘Mademoiselle Pauline! Monsieur Chechelowski!'

There was a noise on the first floor, then in the ground-floor room. The chips were keeping hot in the oven.

Élise divided up the ham. It was a small kitchen. They were all on top of one another. The Mamelins, for their part, had some bread and butter with a little piece of cheese or some ham. Désiré waited until supper was over before burying himself in his paper, where there was talk about William II and the inevitable war.

‘Hurry up, Mademoiselle Pauline, your chips are going to dry up.'

For the Polish girl always waited several minutes before coming down, wasting her time putting on powder and scent.

‘What's the use?' Élise had asked her once. ‘Whom are you trying to please?'

Monsieur Chechelowski, who was a real Russian, and Mademoiselle Feinstein, who was a Polish Jewess, never spoke to each other, confining themselves to a stiff greeting, even though they had supper every evening at the same table.

‘Do you know what she answered, Valérie, when I asked her whom she was trying to please?

‘ “Myself!” '

She was fat and red-haired. If she wore scent, it was because she smelled bad by nature. She had a big nose and thick lips, there were folds of flesh on the back of her neck, and her ankles were so swollen that she could not lace up her boots to the full extent.

‘And you, Mademoiselle Pauline, if you had the power to change yourself to suit your taste, how would you like to be?'

Élise told this story to everybody. The lodger in the pink room had answered in her calm way:

‘
Just as I am now!
'

Mademoiselle Frida waited in her room until the others had finished. Only then did she come downstairs, take her tin from the kitchen shelf, and pour some boiling water into her little blue enamel coffee-pot.

‘You understand, Mademoiselle Frida, it's a question of tidiness and cleanliness. If everybody had his meals in his room, the house would look like heaven knows what. I'll give you a tin in which you can keep your bread, your butter, your coffee, anything you like.'

Gazing vacantly into the distance, while Élise started her washing-up on a corner of the stove and Désiré read the newspaper, Mademoiselle Frida slowly ate the bread on which she had scraped her butter and made sure that there were no grounds left in her coffee-pot.

The days had grown even shorter. As early as three o'clock, Brother Mansuy had lit the two gas-jets, creating that murky, almost stifling, atmosphere which invaded the classroom on winter afternoons. The two blackboards above the platform looked red rather than black. The bottles on the polished shelf took on a strange life, and in the next classroom Monsieur Penders' pupils could be heard chanting in unison:

‘The Belgium of old was bordered to the north and east by marshes, to the west by the sea, to the south …'

In the passage-ways between the light-coloured desks, Brother Mansuy moved noiselessly, without displacing any air; his cassock glided gently through space and his touch made you jump like the touch of a bat you don't hear coming.

It was always from an unexpected corner of the room that his calm, soft voice spoke out.

‘What is God? Van Hamme, answer.'

The catechism lesson was for the second-year pupils who occupied the left-hand part of the classroom. The first-year pupils, of whom Roger was one, covered their slates with pot-hooks which they rubbed out with a little wet sponge.

‘God is a pure spirit, infinitely perfect, eternal, and the Creator of heaven and earth.'

‘Good. Ledoux. How many persons are there in God?'

One pupil sat down while another stood up.

‘There are three persons in God: the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost.'

‘Is each person God? Your turn, Gallet! Van Hamme, I forbid you to prompt. Is each person God?'

Roger applied himself to his pot-hooks, holding his breath, the waves of heat sent out by the nearby stove reddening his cheeks. Brother Mansuy was not far away and perhaps, on his way past, he would take a pink sweet out of his pocket, or, better still, a violet gobstopper of a sort which you could not find at Gruyelle-Marquant's and which he kept for his favourite pupils.

For that, you had to take care not to look at him or to raise your head. It was a game which had its unwritten rules. He went past, and it was only when he reached another corner of the classroom that you knew whether he had put a pink sweet or a violet gobstopper on a corner of the desk.

Brother Mansuy was young, rosy-faced and fair-headed, and if you looked at him just then, he turned his head away to hide a smile.

It was raining. Bright pearls slid down the black window-panes and in the yard you could hear the discreet rustle of the rain. You could also hear Brother Médard, two classrooms further on, thundering at some poor pupil and pounding the platform with his wooden leg.

The three classrooms were separated by glazed partitions. The lower part of the partitions was made of solid wood. Brother Mansuy was tall enough to see over it, but the boys could see nothing of the other classrooms but the platform.

Roger went on waiting, but the friar did not come as far as him. He had suddenly turned round, leaving Gallet to hunt for his answer on the ceiling. Somebody had knocked timidly on the door. The boys could feel the draught of damp air, but did not dare to turn round. They heard a woman's voice, and Roger gave a start, for he thought that he could recognize it.

‘Mamelin! Get your things. Somebody has come for you.'