Pedigree (49 page)

Fear gripped her when she went past the Rue Grande-Bêche, as if she were passing an abyss which was capable of sucking her down, and she had been unable to refrain from explaining to Roger:

‘Look over there! You must work hard at school. Otherwise, later on, you'll be poor and live in that street.'

She did not want to be poor. The very sight of poverty made her sick with fear and disgust. She hated the rich, but she did not like the poor.

‘The best thing, you know,' Désiré had said to her once, ‘is to keep to the happy mean, like us.'

The happy mean was the Rue de la Loi. She knew that. Often she managed to be happy there. But she could not help it if, from time to time, she felt ill-at-ease there and longed to do almost anything to get away from it, as she had got away from Cession's and later from the Rue Pasteur.

‘You know, Léopold, it's rather as if we were strangers everywhere, all the members of our family.'

She talked about the Peters, the men and the women.

‘Marthe is unhappy with Hubert Schroefs, in spite of all his money, because he's got no delicacy of feeling. Louisa hates serving drinks at the bar, and you'll never convince me of the contrary. Louis is ill-at-ease in his wife's noble family, and she probably makes him feel that he doesn't come out of the top drawer. My best friend, Valérie, hurts me all the time without knowing, and I can never speak freely to her.'

Franz and Poldine … Félicie who had died as a result …

And Léopold who drank, who had to drink, from the moment he woke up in the morning, otherwise he was like a sick man waiting for his medicine.

‘It isn't because we're from the frontier, and practically foreigners. Mademoiselle Pauline, for instance, is happy wherever she goes. On the corner of the Boulevard de la Constitution, there are some Jews who go to the synagogue and who are quite at home in the district.'

She could not get rid of the idea that it was something personal, that there was a sort of curse, a stain perhaps on the family.

‘What did father die of exactly?'

‘A cancer of the tongue.'

Léopold was in a sombre mood that morning. He stared in front of him, forgetting to relight his pipe. He never said what he was thinking about, and you had to guess; sometimes Élise, who was used to him, had the impression that she could hear him thinking and she answered him quite naturally.

In the Rue Puits-en-Sock, all those little shopkeepers who had been born side by side and would die side by side, next door to one another, lived together like a big family, without any worries, and that was why she had an involuntary feeling of irritation every time she saw Désiré setting off with Roger for his father's hat-shop.

Scattered all over the place, and strangers in their own district, the Peters instinctively drew towards one another, because only one of their own family could understand them; but, once they were together, they kept quiet as if they were frightened of their daemon.

Sometimes it seemed to Élise that there was more in common between herself and Mademoiselle Frida, for instance, or between herself and Monsieur Saft's mother, who worked as a servant to pay for her son's education, than between herself and her own husband.

Was there a race of human beings more sensitive than the rest, who suffered more and whom nothing could satisfy?

The other day, she had been going up the Rue Haute-Sauvenière. Some miners had been coming down the same street, in groups, their eyes white in their black faces and their hobnailed boots clattering on the paving-stones; and she had started trembling nervously, drawing Roger to her in an instinctive movement.

She had never admitted this to Madame Laude, but at Embourg she had been frightened every night when Frédéric had come home from work, and she had felt reassured only when, emerging from his tub, he had once more become a quiet man with a long fair moustache and a cloth cap, who played at skittles or dug his garden.

She always had the impression that something was going to happen, that it was impossible for the world to remain suspended in space, prolonging the present moment into infinity, and she anxiously questioned the others who noticed nothing, convinced that a catastrophe was approaching of which she was the only one to be afraid.

Léopold rose clumsily to his feet, emptied his pipe by knocking it against the coal-scuttle, and drank the last drops of cold coffee left in his cup.

‘Good-bye, my girl.'

‘You've nothing to say to me, Léopold?'

What could he have to say to her? Far more eloquent than any words were his heavy, uncertain footsteps, which stopped a few yards along the pavement: he had gone into the pub next door.

That was why Élise had come with her son to the chapel in the Rue Neuvice; that was why she stood up with a sniff and pressed the button which would ring a bell somewhere in the confessor's cell.

He was a very old man who had said to her the last time:

‘Pray, my daughter. Carry out your duties as a wife, a mother and a Christian, and you will see that the peace of God will come back to you.'

She was impatient to see that happen; for the coming spring, she would have liked everything in her to be as pure and light as in her house, which had been cleaned from top to bottom and where cool draughts played from morning till night in even the smallest corners.

‘Wait for me quietly, Roger.'

She knelt down behind the green cloth which concealed only half her body, and for a long time the child heard her monotonous murmur and glimpsed, behind the wooden grating, the face of Father Meeus, who looked like a character in a missal.

A little later, when they were back in the noisy street, Élise made an effort to smile at the sun and suddenly decided in front of a confectioner's shop:

‘Come and eat one of those cream cornets you like so much.'

Soon it would be Easter, he would put his straw hat on for the first time, they would change into their summer clothes, and they would go on a pilgrimage to Chèvremont, stumbling along in the thick white dust of the calvary edged with hawthorn. They would recite one Our Father and three Hail Mary's at every flower-decked altar, and up there by the dairy, they would eat on the grass beside the swings, among the communicants, the girls all in white like young brides.

Then they would come home by way of Fléron, even though it was longer, so as to stay up on the heights as long as possible.

I
T WAS
1911. The life which filled the little house in the Rue de la Loi had burst the walls and spread out on the pavement. In the kitchen, where the lids trembled on the saucepans, Élise spoke of the time of Mademoiselle Pauline and Monsieur Saft as Chrétien Mamelin and his friend Kreutz spoke of a period they had known when there were no trams and motor-cars, or as Désiré spoke of his youth, when there were twelve children round the table in the Rue Puits-en-Sock, and when a glance from his father at his riding-crop was enough to impose silence.

Old Papa was dead. He had not been ill. There had been no reason to expect him to die that evening rather than another, and yet, in his sleep, Roger had seen a ball of fire cross his room, from the floor to the ceiling, at the time when the old miner's soul had furtively stolen away, as if not to disturb anybody, leaving on the bed a huge carcase of no importance.

They had had no news of Monsieur Saft who, once he had finished his studies, had gone back to his country. Yet he had promised Roger that he would send him some of those Polish picture-postcards which were so beautiful. On the other hand, Mademoiselle Pauline wrote now and then from Berlin, where she had become a pupil of Professor Einstein. It seemed that the savant regarded her as one of his best disciples and that she had an extraordinary brain. Élise could not get over it.

‘She may have the bump of mathematics, but all the rest was hollow. You remember, don't you, Mademoiselle Frida? She never knew what to do with her hands, and she had such a lack of tact!'

Certain remarks made by La Feinstein, certain anecdotes, her hands which she cared for as if they were precious valuables, her fits of anger when Désiré teased her, her swollen ankles for which she had to buy special boots—she had a whole wardrobe full of them!—all that now formed part of the traditions of the house, and new lodgers learned them as soon as they arrived.

Of the old lodgers, only Mademoiselle Frida remained. She had always refused to change her room, even when Élise had offered to give her the green room for the same price as her gloomy entresol.

The green room, for the past few weeks, had been occupied by Monsieur Bernard, a Belgian whose parents ran a grocery shop at Verviers. He was studying medicine. He was a young man, thin and fair-haired, always joking and teasing like Désiré, and when the two of them set about Mademoiselle Lola there was such a din in the house that Élise wondered how the poor girl could stand it.

It was true that nothing ever flustered that rather childish Caucasian.

‘You've only got to see her smile, Valérie. She smiles as blissfully as a child.'

She occupied Mademoiselle Pauline's pink room, which had become more feminine—indeed almost too feminine, for Mademoiselle Lola, who was very beautiful, with the tranquil beauty of an odalisk, tended and adorned her body with loving care, spent hours at her dressing-table, and went about the house half naked, with her breasts showing in the opening of her dressing-gown, and leaving a trail of perfume behind her.

She sang and laughed and had never been seen studying. Her parents were rich, and she admitted that she had entered the University only to escape from the monotony of life at home and to see something of the world.

‘She'll stay a child all her life. I tell myself sometimes that she's lucky.'

She spoke French so quaintly that she gave rise to roars of laughter in and out of season, especially when a doubtful meaning could be read into her innocent words. For since Monsieur Bernard's arrival the jokes in the Rue de la Loi had become spicier. Désiré had followed his example, and often Élise had to motion to the two men that Roger was listening to them without appearing to do so.

There had been grey periods during which lodgers had followed one after another so quickly that there had been no time to get to know them. There had even been one lodger who, nobody had ever known why, had gone off without a word the day after he had arrived, leaving in his room an old pair of socks and a fountain-pen. The fountain-pen was still in the kitchen drawer.

Curiously enough, Monsieur Chechelowski, the only lodger Élise had ever thrown out, had sent her news of himself. Married now, and the father of a child who was nearly three, he was an engineer in an electrical works in Antwerp and did not intend to return to his own country.

His knife too was still in the table drawer.

The back room on the ground floor was let to another Russian, Monsieur Bogdanowski, of a type which they had not seen before in the house, a sort of Oriental—he came from Astrakhan—who was fat and spruce like Mademoiselle Lola, with eyes as beautiful as hers and curly hair with bluish glints in it.

Like the Caucasian girl again, he lacked the most elementary sense of decency and wandered around in his pyjamas, going dressed like that to buy his butter at the little dairy shop in the Rue Jean-d'Outremeuse. Once, when he was striding up and down the hall between the kitchen and his room, Élise had called out to him:

‘Please stay still, Monsieur Bogdanowski. You're making me feel giddy!'

‘The enema, Madame!'

Sure enough, a few moments later, clutching his stomach, he had rushed like a madman in the direction of the little place at the back of the yard.

He was fond of talking about his intestines, and about the enema he took every week. At ten o'clock every morning, he ate a jar of yoghourt.

‘For the bowels!' he explained in his comic accent.

He was as curly haired as a negro and wore a scent calculated to turn your stomach.

That day was one of the longest in the year. All the doors and windows were open, for it was necessary, when every room was occupied, for the house to extend into the street. Roger, who had had his supper at six o'clock, alone at a corner of the table, in order to make room, was sitting on the doorstep surrounded by his tubes of paint, saucers full of iridescent water, paint-brushes, rags, pencils and rubbers. Heedless of the two existences, inside the house and outside, which came together over his head, he was carefully copying a picture postcard showing a mill beside a stream.

Monsieur Bernard had been so insistent on having full board that Désiré had given in. Two Belgians, both medical students, who had a room nearby, also came every day for their midday meal.

‘Eat up quickly, Roger. The lodgers will be here soon.'

The stove was covered from morning till night with saucepans with trembling lids; the table had scarcely been laid for some before it had to be cleared to make room for others; and at two o'clock it was the turn of the sugared dishes which Élise cooked for Désiré.

Mademoiselle Frida, faithful to her tin box, stole imperturbably into the room, poured boiling water into her little blue enamel coffee-pot, and spread out her bread, her butter, her egg or her cheese.

As for Mademoiselle Lola, she was disorder personified. Sometimes she ate in town, nobody knew where; sometimes she demanded the same meal as the other lodgers; sometimes she decided to cook herself one of her national dishes, asked for unknown condiments, and mixed together the most unexpected ingredients, only to discover in the end that she had forgotten the exact recipe.

There was laughter. There was shouting. You could not make yourself heard. Now and then there was the sound of a chase on the stairs, doors banged and the Caucasian girl called for help: it was Monsieur Bernard running after her, seizing her by the waist, and stopping, panting, in face of her heaving flesh, her head thrown back with her hot breath setting her dark-red lips quivering.