Pedigree (42 page)

It was because Monsieur Pain was a murderer that he had such a white face, grey hair and stony features; it was on account of his crime that he was always alone, that Julie, his wife, was sickly and that Armand was slit-eyed. Wasn't it extraordinary that a man who had killed somebody and who had been in prison should live in the Rue Pasteur, practically opposite the magistrate's house, and that Roger should play with his son on the pavement?

Monsieur Reculé, who worked for North Belgian Railways, travelled first class, as Élise was always saying, and would have a pension when he retired. Roger tried to picture this pension, to give it a form and consistency, and he turned a gaze heavy with questions on the thin face of the head clerk whom he saw, in slippers and straw hat, ending his life in the garden of a country house.

In the days when the world had been simpler, Roger had questioned his mother unceasingly.

Nowadays, he kept quiet. When he was found with his thoughts far away, he pretended to be playing. He listened to what the grown-ups said among themselves; certain phrases, certain words haunted him for weeks, while others translated themselves as pictures which imposed themselves on him willy-nilly and which he later tried in vain to dispel.

If he heard his mother undressing in the next room or washing in the morning, the word
organs
came to his mind, the ugliest and most frightening of all words.

‘It's my organs, you see, Valérie. Doctor Matray wanted me to have them removed. I refused, for Roger's sake, because you can never tell what may happen after an operation.'

And he saw some bleeding objects like the things which hung in butchers' shops, coming out of a pale body that had been slit open from the neck to the legs.

Anxious and ashamed, he was conscious of moving towards discoveries which ought not to be mentioned to anybody, and he promised himself not to join Ledoux again in a corner of the yard, next to the tap, during playtime.

Monsieur Pain's crime was linked with this discovery he was in the process of making, and generally speaking everything grown-ups talked about in whispers, including Aunt Félicie's death.

How had Ledoux managed to find out? Roger turned away from the card-players to try to imitate his gesture, even though it was certainly a mortal sin.

Talking about his Aunt Cécile, Roger had said to Ledoux:

‘She's going to buy me a new little cousin.'

Ledoux, who was in the second year, had a long, pasty, clownlike face, a mouth which he stretched and twisted as if it were made of indiarubber, and stiff hair which came forward as if it had been brushed the wrong way.

‘You still think people buy babies or find them in cabbages?'

It was then that he had made the gesture. He had made a ring with the thumb and forefinger of his left hand and then, with a peculiar gleam in his eyes, he had pushed his right forefinger into this opening.

‘What does that mean?'

‘If you don't know, I can't explain it to you.'

A dozen times Roger had returned to the attack, following Ledoux around at playtime and turning round in class to address mute appeals to him. The other hedged, promised, took back his promise.

‘I bet you don't even know who St. Nicholas is!'

‘He's the patron saint of schoolchildren.'

‘He's your father and mother!'

Now, on that point Ledoux had been right. Roger had thought about it for a long time, and he had recalled St. Nicholas's Day in previous years. A few weeks before the great day, St. Nicholas looked into houses when the children were doing their homework to make sure that they were being good, and, if he was satisfied, he threw a handful of almonds or walnuts through a fanlight or a half-open door.

Roger had watched his parents. He had noticed that every time St. Nicholas had manifested his presence in that way, his father had been in the yard and had come in afterwards making a show of surprise.

St. Nicholas was Father and Mother. But he mustn't say so. Roger pretended not to know and, as in previous years, he would write the traditional letter listing the presents he would like to be given. He turned round and looked at Ledoux when, in class, Brother Mansuy made them sing:

‘
Oh, great St. Nicholas,

Please come down to us,

Fill our baskets
…'

Seeing that Ledoux had told the truth about St. Nicholas, he must know about babies too.

‘Tell me and I'll give you my top.'

‘I can't. You're too little.'

‘I'm as big as you.'

‘You know you aren't, because you're in the first year and I'm in the second. If you want to know, look at a couple of dogs. It's practically the same thing.'

Roger blushed as he recalled the dogs he had met on summer days, joined to one another and looking so unhappy. No! It couldn't be true that Aunt Félicie and Coucou … It would be too awful. He would not think about it any more. He would not talk about it any more to Ledoux, who lived at Bressoux and whose mother was a charwoman. He was practically a slum child.

Élise was right:

‘The friars ought not to admit certain children to the Institut Saint-André. The state school is there for them. In Roger's class, there's a boy whose mother sells vegetables from a barrow in the street. Those people think that provided they pay, they can go where they like.'

It was Thioux she was referring to, a big, rugged, red-haired boy with innocent blue eyes, whose clothes were impregnated with the smell peculiar to the back-streets. His pockets were always full of food, and he chewed away from morning till night, giving a start whenever Brother Mansuy called out his name and looking around for help, for he never knew his lessons.

Roger gave a start too as he met his father's gaze, and he looked to make sure that his fingers were no longer making the gesture.

‘What is it, son?'

‘Nothing, Father.'

‘You aren't bored?'

‘No.'

The men too, like Élise when she was with her sisters or with Valérie, sometimes spoke in an undertone, making sure that Roger was not listening. But they did not speak in the same tone of complaint or anxiety. They smiled. They were merry. Every year, the whist-players at Velden's went on a trip for three or four days with the kitty. This summer they had been to Paris. In a night-club in Montmartre, when big Désiré had gone in flanked by the tiny Grisard brothers, the singer had shouted:

‘A round of applause for the giant and his two clowns!'

Désiré had also told how they had spent the evening in
Paradise
and
Hell,
explaining that in the first night-club the waiters who served the beers and cherry brandies were dressed as angels while in
Hell
they were dressed as devils.

Why did his father wink at certain allusions?

‘You remember that little brunette who wanted to sit on Émile's knees and swore she had a
béguin
for him?'

Although he had promised himself not to ask any more questions, Roger had none the less asked his mother:

‘What is a
béguin
?'

‘You know what it is, Roger. It's a bonnet that babies wear, like the one you wore yourself when you were little.'

Brother Mansuy made them sing:

‘
When I was a little boy,

I slept in a little bed,

And my mother sang to me:

Darling, rest your little head
…'

And every time this song made him feel like crying. His mother. The organs. The carriage which was always going to come for her and take her to hospital. Tears came to his eyes when they got to the line:

‘
When your hair is white
…'

His eyelids started prickling, and he stopped his ears so as not to hear:

‘…
I will earn some money,

Money so that you may lead

A life of milk and honey
.'

‘Off we go to dinner, son!'

The game was over. Désiré swallowed the creamy dregs of his beer, wiped his moustache and shook hands all round.

‘See you on Friday!'

They met the crowd coming out of the half-past-eleven Mass at Saint-Denis. Désiré greeted people. He was happy. Footsteps were louder, because it was winter, and outlines, especially those of the freestone buildings, clearer.

They stopped at the Spaniards', whose shop with the exotic smells was painted canary-yellow. Among the piles of Brazil nuts, figs, oranges, lemons and pomegranates, they picked their Sunday dessert, a bitter orange which Roger would suck after putting a lump of sugar inside, or a pomegranate with the pips embedded in pink jelly.

The planks of the Passerelle went up and down under their feet. Désiré stopped again to buy a packet of Louxor cigarettes. What had he said to the shop girl when his son had not been paying attention? She had turned away murmuring:

‘You are a one, Monsieur Mamelin!'

Everybody was walking faster, for it was time for them to go home if they did not want to arrive late at the Wintergarten. Mayol was singing there for the first time in Liége. Élise had decided not to go, although she wanted to, because of the child.

‘There'll be such a crush!'

As usual, there was roast beef, chips and stewed apples for dinner.

On the almond-green wall of the classroom, opposite the shelf holding the measuring-cups, there was a picture which had been stuck on canvas and varnished, a picture the colour of old ivory which represented the winter fair, probably in a Rhineland town, for all the school pictures came from Leipzig. The Gothic houses had indented gables, steep roofs and latticed windows. The town was covered in snow. The men were wearing bottle-green or rust-coloured greatcoats and fur caps; a girl in the foreground was sitting on a sledge being driven by a coachman dressed in a bearskin. In the square there were stalls loaded with food and toys; you could see a performing monkey and a flute-player with laced breeches. It was a lively scene, for Christmas was near, and the town was in a fever of excitement.

Brother Médard, in the big boys' classroom, pressed an electric bell. Straight away, in the three classrooms with their glass partitions, the boys stood up in a single movement, made the sign of the cross, and jabbered out the evening prayer before rushing for their coats and berets.

While the others filed out in the half-light, led by Monsieur Penders, Roger only had the street to cross; on the first floor of his house he could see two windows of a soft, warm pink. The windows had no shutters or Venetian blinds, and through the lace curtains which were draped across one another, he could make out the pink globe of the shade with the pearl drops and Mademoiselle Pauline's curly red hair bent over her books.

Through the keyhole, which was just the right height for a child, he could see, before knocking, the kitchen door and his mother's silhouette. He had come out of one warm, familiar atmosphere only to enter another; the water was singing in the white enamel kettle, and the oven door was half open, revealing the firebricks which would be put in the beds in the evening; but this evening he would not be sitting down at the table covered with the old oilcloth to do his homework.

‘We're going into town, Roger. Don't take your coat off. Let's see if your hands are clean.'

She put some more coal on the fire. Outside, in the dark yard, there was a glow of light from another window, Mademoiselle Frida's, just above the kitchen. In Monsieur Saft's room too the light was on, for every cell in the honeycomb was occupied; only Monsieur Chechelowski would not be back until supper-time. Everywhere there was a stove purring away, flanked by its coal-bucket, poker and shovel; each person lived in the centre of a zone of silence and, when one or other of them got up to put some coal on his fire, Élise automatically looked up.

Had she remembered everything? Her bag, her purse, her key. They hurriedly crossed the wilderness of the Rue Jean-d'Outremeuse where there was not a single real shop and where you could feel snow in the wind; and they plunged, as if into a warm room, into the swarming crowds in the Rue Puits-en-Sock.

‘Hold my hand, Roger.'

The town's breath was heavy with smells peculiar to the period before St. Nicholas's Day. Although it was not snowing yet, invisible particles of ice were floating in space and gathering together in the luminous halo of the shop-windows.

Everybody was outside. All the women were running along, dragging behind them children who would have liked to linger outside the shops.

‘Come along, Roger. Pick up your feet.'

Thousands of mothers were uttering the same words.

‘Mind the tram.'

The sweet-shops, the confectioners' and the grocers' shops were as full as the stalls in the picture at school. Two smells predominated over the others, so characteristic that no child could have mistaken them: the sweet aroma of gingerbread and the smell of chocolate figures, which was not the same as that of chocolate bars. The shop-windows were stacked from top to bottom with honey-cakes, some of them stuffed with coloured comfits. Life-size St. Nicholases in gingerbread, frosted with sugar and adorned with cotton-wool beards, stood surrounded by sheep, asses and farmyard animals, all a brownish or wholemeal colour, sugared, scented and eatable. It was enough to make your head reel.

‘Look, Mother.'

‘Come along now.'

They went to buy some butter at Salmon's, in a little street running down from the Pont des Arches, on the other side of the river. Not for anything in the world would Élise have gone anywhere else to buy the oblong blocks wrapped in cool cabbage leaves. It was in a tin next to the soup-tureen that she kept the tickets which, at the end of the year, entitled the customer to a three-per-cent refund.

They went into the Vierge Noire, in the Rue Neuvice, to buy some coffee. In the window-displays in the confectioners', which were gaudier than the rest, there were rows of marzipan cakes imitating fruit, cheese, even a cutlet with chips and green peas.