Pedigree (50 page)

The week before, he had laid in Mademoiselle Lola's bed the skeleton he had bought for his studies. Uttering piercing shrieks, she had come downstairs in her nightdress, and, as he had burst out laughing, she had scratched him across the face; he still bore the marks.

‘You're a dirty Belgian! A dirty Belgian! You hear?'

‘Do you want me to beg your forgiveness on my knees, Mademoiselle Lola?'

He had done this. Désiré had laughed too. Élise had given the nervous smile which scarcely ever left her now and in whose thin creases a thousand worries lay in wait.

For she had probably never been as worried as she was in the midst of all this noisy bustle, which she had started off and of which she alone could follow the thread. In the evening, Désiré, instead of going to read his newspaper on the doorstep, had taken to lingering in the kitchen. She got impatient with him, although she was not jealous of Mademoiselle Lola.

‘The Delcours are already in the street,' she observed.

This had become a nightly rendezvous, unless there happened to be a summer shower. The young people from the house next door were waiting on the pavement where the chairs had been arranged in a semicircle. The group had been joined by the fiancé of the girl Hélène, who was now a schoolmistress.

Thus, across the hall, at the end of which Roger, sitting on the blue stone, was painting his mill, the laughs and shouts in the street joined those in the kitchen, pending the fusion of the two groups.

Roger could not even settle down somewhere else. At four o'clock he had to hurry up to finish his homework. The front room, his only remaining refuge, was now let; a bed and a washstand had been put in with the dining-room furniture and the room had become Monsieur Schascher's domain.

The latter took no part in either jokes or meals. He was a little red-haired Jew, so ugly that he frightened children, so poor that he wore neither socks inside his old shoes nor linen under his clothes. In the evening, through the window and the sharp leaves of an evergreen, he could be seen studying with his fingers dug into his ears, taking advantage of the last gleams of the setting sun to save on the gas.

Although he sometimes went all day without a meal, he never complained. It was through Mademoiselle Frida that they had learnt that a Jewish bank in his country was lending him the money he needed for his studies. Afterwards, it would keep his diplomas until he had paid all the money back. This would probably take him ten years.

‘Isn't it wonderful, Louisa, people helping each other like that! Why must the Jews be the only ones to do it? What a difference from a Monsieur Bernard who thinks of nothing but having fun, so that I have to lock him in his room to force him to work! It's his poor mother who gave me permission to do that. He doesn't deserve to have parents like that.'

The spire of Saint-Nicolas stood motionless against a sky of menacing stillness. The air was heavy. While the others were lingering at table, Élise had begun her washing-up on a corner of the stove.

‘Hurry up, Monsieur Bernard. You're always the last to finish eating.'

He was a child and she treated him as such.

She was impatient to be left alone with her work, which would take her until midnight. While they were amusing themselves in the street, she would be able to drop that forced smile which she kept from morning till night on a face which was becoming increasingly pointed and mobile.

Where were they all going? Where was she going? And what of the house, which she had launched at a venture, like a boat, and of which she sometimes felt that she had lost control?

In the street they were playing innocent games, even big Désiré, running after each other, pushing one another, joking, getting excited. You could hear the tinkling laugh of Mademoiselle Lola, whom somebody had taken by the waist again and who was struggling with an ardent look in her eyes and the embarrassing laugh of a girl in search of love.

Suddenly she pricked up her ears at the sound of a more distant voice and footsteps running along the Rue Jean-d'Outremeuse.

‘Ask for the
Meuse
! … Special edition! …'

The newspaper-man came along, bent forward, barely stopping at each group to detach a sheet of paper still wet with ink from the pile he was carrying under his left arm, and then running on.

‘Ask for the
Meuse
! … The Agadir incident … Insolent provocation by the Kaiser … War…'

Had she heard aright? Had he uttered the word
war
? What had he shouted after that? She rushed out of the kitchen and leant across her son's tubes and saucers which were blocking her way.

The others had frozen. They were still in the postures in which the word had caught them and there was a pause before they automatically completed the gestures they had begun, there in the street where silence had suddenly fallen like a veil.

The laughs had petered out, except for that of Mademoiselle Lola who had not understood, a tinkling laugh which itself died away slowly while the fat girl looked around her with a surprise tinged with fear.

Désiré was the first to move, going towards the corner of the Rue Jean-d'Outremeuse and feeling in his pocket for a sou. They could see him waiting there, facing the Rue Puits-en-Sock. The doors of the nearby houses opened one after the other, and people looked out, calling to one another.

‘What was he shouting?'

The newspaper-man finally appeared, and Désiré stood there on the kerb, looking at the sheet of printed paper. Everybody wanted to know what it was all about, and wondered why he did not come back straight away. Finally he turned round and gave a reassuring wave.

‘Well?'

Here he was at last. The neighbours crowded round him. He was very calm.

‘No, no! There's nothing to be alarmed about. It isn't war yet. Everything can still be settled peacefully, and you'll see, it will be settled peacefully.'

He read out the news, pointing to the question-mark which corrected the threat of a headline in huge letters:

War in Europe?

Kaiser William lands at Agadir.

Monsieur Fallières calls Cabinet meeting.

Will Mobilization be ordered?

At Nevers, in the gathering dusk, Félicien Miette was bent double outside the newspaper offices, trying to start the car he had just bought. Isabelle, dressed in kid with a veil holding her hat in place, was waiting impatiently for the engine, which kept coughing intermittently, to decide to go.

Miette mopped his forehead and took hold of the starting-handle again. The engine started running. At the same moment a window opened.

‘Monsieur Miette! Monsieur Miette!'

And just as Isabelle had finally installed herself in the bucket-seat, the telephonist on duty in the office, waving his arms in the air, shouted in a shrill voice which could be heard above the din from the engine:

‘War!'

Élise was still holding her dishcloth in her hand. Monsieur Bernard, pitifully pale in the face, suddenly looked like a sick little boy. For a moment Monsieur Schascher had stuck a colourless face crowned with red hair against the window of his room, and then he had gone back to his table as if war were nothing to do with him.

With a naïvety which made nobody laugh, Mademoiselle Lola asked:

‘Do you think they'll do anything to women?'

The day refused to come to an end. The rising moon was so bright that you did not notice the transition from day to night, the groups of people becoming just a little more indistinct and the voices a little louder in a world which seemed artificial.

‘We'll see tomorrow whether it's war or not,' declared the eldest of the Delcours as he went off to bed.

His sister Hélène accompanied her fiancé, hand in hand, as far as the Place du Congrès. They could not find a word to say but pressed close to one another, and when he left her, she felt like calling him back.

‘Désiré,' Élise whispered in bed, ‘do you think the civic guards will be given marching orders?'

When everybody had fallen asleep, trying to push away the hideous nightmare of war, a scream rang through the house, a piercing shriek which recalled the cry of an animal mad with terror.

‘Désiré … Désiré …'

Sitting up in bed, Élise shook him. A strangely calm voice came from the next room, whose door was always left ajar:

‘What's the matter, Mother?'

Élise slipped on the first clothes which came to hand, automatically put her hair up, and opened the door at the same time as other doors were opening in the house. Mademoiselle Lola, who had given the shriek, was on the first-floor landing, in a pale nightdress; she was babbling in Russian and darting mad glances around her.

‘For heaven's sake, shut her up, Monsieur Bernard. What's the matter with her? What is she saying? What has happened?'

Everybody was up and moving round the house. All that they noticed was that it was as bright as day without a single lamp being alight. Somebody said:

‘A fire!'

‘Quick, Désiré! … The child … There's a fire! …'

She did not wait for Désiré, but picked Roger up and carried him out of his room, all warm in his white nightshirt.

War … Fire …

Her arms dropped, her legs gave way beneath her, and she was just sitting down on the stairs when she realized that the fire was not in her house, even though Mademoiselle Lola's room was lit up by a fiery glow.

‘The Institut Saint-André …'

It was behind the school's slate roofs that the flames could be seen, crossed every now and then by black objects being hurled into the air.

Désiré was close to her; he calmed her down, saying:

‘It's Déom's workshop … Don't move … I'll go and have a look…'

People were running along the street; windows were thrown open; the mournful bell of the fire-engine could be heard, together with the murmur of a crowd in the Rue Jean-d'Outremeuse.

It was not only Monsieur Déom's furniture workshop which was on fire, but the whole house. Although the firemen had already brought their hoses into play, the neighbours were shouting:

‘A chain! … Everybody form a chain!'

Others had come along with jugs and buckets. Two policemen were trying in vain to keep the spectators back. On the opposite pavement, Désiré, who was not wearing a jacket but just his nightshirt with the red designs on the collar, ran into Albert Velden, and the two of them watched in silence, each lighting a cigarette.

‘Go to bed, Roger. It's nothing.'

The child stayed in Mademoiselle Lola's room, which was pinker than ever. The women were leaning out of the windows, while the men were outside.

‘And all that wood piled up in the workshop! He used to make such lovely furniture!'

Monsieur Déom, a tall, thin man with a straggling moustache, was wandering around as if he no longer knew where he was or what he was doing. Looking at him with awed respect, some people were murmuring that he had gone out of his mind. Dazed and bewildered, he roamed about among the strangers who kept running into his house holding handkerchiefs to their noses and coming out with anything that had come to hand.

‘Look! … There's somebody there!'

A human form, two arms, were moving in a second-floor window from which smoke was pouring. It was an old, bed-ridden lodger who had been forgotten. The firemen extended their ladder.

And all the time men, women and children were arriving from the Rue de la Loi, the Rue Pasteur and the Rue Puits-en-Sock, in an unending procession. There were people from the back-streets, and you could recognize them straight away. Among the most active rescuers, constantly going into the house and coming out with all sorts of objects, was Monsieur Bogdanowski, his face black with smoke, his eyes white underneath his curly hair.

The pink room smelled of the eau-de-Cologne which had been sprinkled over Mademoiselle Lola. Now and then, a column of flame forced its way through the burning sky and you could hear a sound like the roar of a gigantic stove on the point of exploding.

‘Dear God … If we ever have a war,' sighed Élise, looking at the firemen who were cautiously hoisting themselves on to the steep roofs of the Friars' school. ‘The poor people! What's going to be left of their home?'

She confused in her mind the threat of war and the disaster which had overtaken the Déom house. Her blood pounded faster in her arteries, and she rushed around to no purpose. It seemed to her that what was happening had been bound to come, that what she had feared and expected was beginning: that awful final catastrophe of which she had always had a terrible presentiment.

She prayed automatically:

‘Dear God, spare us, spare our house, spare Roger and Désiré. Take me if need be, but spare them.'

She gave a start at the sight of Mademoiselle Frida, pale and erect in the dancing light, like an avenging angel.

‘Will you start fires too, when you have a revolution?'

And the other woman, digging her teeth into the pulp of her lips, answered:

‘It will be
terrible
!'

She rolled the
r
's of
terrible
in a long-drawn, dramatic manner. Mattresses, chairs, saucepans, nameless objects were piling up on the flooded pavement, as pitiful as the lots in a forced sale. Madame Déom, who was expecting a baby, had been taken into a nearby house where she automatically swallowed the rum which was poured between her lips.

‘My house …' she kept saying.

Street-urchins were running in between the legs of the grown-ups, and, quite naturally, Velden and Désiré had started talking about the Agadir incident.

‘Germany wouldn't dare. Nobody would take the risk of starting a war at the present moment, with the means of destruction available to every army.'

People started going off to bed. It was three o'clock when the sky darkened and the moon disappeared while black ash was still falling into the streets.