Pedigree (51 page)

Monsieur Schascher had locked himself in his room as soon as he had seen that it was not the Rue de la Loi house that was on fire. To revive Mademoiselle Lola, Élise had gone to find the bottle of Madeira which she used for sauces and she had poured out several glasses.

‘Is it all over, Désiré? Did they manage to save anything? The poor people! They must be ruined!'

‘Why? The insurance will pay.'

‘Will the insurance give them back the things they treasured most, the souvenirs you can't replace? But it's time to think of going to sleep. Come along, Roger.'

Roger was asleep on Mademoiselle Lola's sofa, his cheek on one of her petticoats. He did not wake up when his father carried him back to his bed and tucked him up.

An hour later, Élise, who had not yet fallen asleep, heard a soft tapping on the letter-box. She went downstairs in her bare feet, and asked:

‘Who's there?'

‘It's me.'

It was Monsieur Bogdanowski, whom everybody had forgotten, with his shirt torn and one ear stained with blood.

‘Where have you been? What have you been doing?'

‘Over there …'

Without saying a word, he had worked with the firemen until the very end, and he had finished up in a house he did not know, in the company of strangers who had all been given something to drink.

The alarm-clock, which knew nothing of the fire or the rumours of war, went off as it did on other mornings, at half past five, in Roger's room. He put out his arm in a mechanical gesture, stopped the bell, and remained for a moment hesitating in the pleasant warmth under the red blanket. He had an excuse for not getting up this morning, and he would have had no reason to be ashamed of himself for staying in bed, but precisely because it was exceptional, he got up and put on his clothes in that pale, almost unobtrusive light of dawn which he knew so well.

As he was crossing his parents' bedroom in his stockinged feet, his mother asked him from her bed, in which only her long hair was showing:

‘Are you up, Roger?'

‘Yes, Mother.'

‘You'd have done better to have a rest.'

‘I'm not tired.'

Silently closing the street door behind him, he walked down the street past the blackened house with the gaping windows and the sagging roof. A fire-engine was still standing at the edge of the pavement, and he had to step over some thick rubber pipes.

It was a quarter to six—he could see the time by the Saint-Nicolas clock—when he stopped at the corner of the Rue Jean-d'Outremeuse and the Rue Puits-en-Sock, next to the dark green postal sign. From that vantage point he could see four streets at once. He heard footsteps in the distance, and recognized the tread of Monsieur Pelcat who, in the Rue Entre-deux-Ponts, had just opened and shut the door of his shop.

He was a huge man, who weighed over fifteen stone and whose behind recalled the hindquarters of an elephant at the circus. He ran a haberdasher's shop and trailed its rancid smell behind him, but this particular morning, the smell which predominated in the whole district was the smell of burning, the special scent of ashes drenched in water.

‘Did you see the fire, sonny?'

Another door opened, in the Rue Puits-en-Sock. Grandfather Mamelin came along, with his walk which was similar to Désiré's, and accepted the furtive kiss which Roger bestowed on his cheek. Then, at the end of the Rue Méan, there appeared the slight, tripping figure of Monsieur Repasse, the shoemaker in the Rue de la Cathédrale.

The men did not start talking about the war straight away but set off automatically, as they did every morning; for every day they met at the same time, coming from different points of the compass, as if they attracted each other like magnets, and their little band grew bigger as a band of schoolboys grows bigger as it approaches the school.

In the Place du Congrès, as soon as they turned the corner, Monsieur Effantin, the police superintendent, came out of his house, and the strange thing was that they scarcely greeted one another; they were happy like that, although Monsieur Repasse, who had a wrinkled face and a purple nose, always looked grumpy.

They were all between sixty and seventy years old. They had reached the top of their careers. They no longer expected any surprises from life, and, every day, they walked along with measured tread, in the cool morning air, past the shuttered houses in which people were still asleep.

Roger circled round them like a young puppy, like the puppy belonging to Monsieur Fourneau, who was waiting by the river, making the animal jump over his stick.

It was the time of day when a scented mist rose from the glistening river, the barges coated with shining pitch slowly moved away from the banks, and the tugs hooted and shuddered with impatience outside the Coronmeuse lock. It was also the time when the nearby slaughterhouse was full of the sound of bellowing and the animals being driven along the embankment bumped into one another in the roadway.

Roger did not listen to the old men's conversation. They talked very little, relaxing in long, heavy silences. You could feel that they had a language of their own, like little children, a language which only they could understand, after the forty years or so they had known each other.

They had become friends long ago, when they were thin, ambitious young men, when Monsieur Repasse, who was now the shoemaker to high society, was still employed in a little workshop, and Monsieur Pelcat, who had not yet acquired his bulky paunch, used to tour the country fairs as a pedlar.

True, they had lost sight of one another for a time, while they were working hard and starting families. But then they had come together again on the other slope of existence, and they may well have believed that they were still the same.

Did they talk about the threat of war? Roger did not hear. He was playing with Rita, Monsieur Fourneau's Malines dog, which had won its owner several prizes, throwing a stick into the water for it to fetch.

‘Fetch it, Rita … Fetch it! …'

Monsieur Fallières? … The Kaiser William? …

They were getting nearer to the baths, whose diving-stages emerged from the Meuse, right at the end of the embankment, surrounded by piles and cables. The strong smell of the water was more noticeable. Just opposite, if the trees had not been there, they could have seen Aunt Louisa's house on the Quai de Coronmeuse, on the canal bank.

Roger's eyelids were rather heavy, and he had an empty feeling in his chest from not having had enough sleep. He kept picturing Mademoiselle Lola on her bed when they were dabbing her face with eau-de-Cologne, and he thought about her more than the fire.

His father had said that there would not be a war.

They went through a gate, walked along a path paved with red bricks, turned left, and arrived in front of the bathing-huts. The boy rushed towards the biggest hut, the only one which could hold a dozen people.

Then the old men undressed, all together, their thin legs, freckled or blue-veined, appearing underneath their shirts; they made jokes and indulged in boisterous horse-play, throwing towels and soap at each other, while Roger pulled on the blue-striped bathing trunks which he had brought along under his arm, rolled up in a Turkish towel with his comb and his cake of pink soap.

On the other side of the water they could hear the noise of the first trains. It was the time that Élise came downstairs to light her fire and grind the coffee. The other schoolchildren were still in bed and most of them would wake up grumbling, looking for excuses for putting off the time to get up.

Under their bare feet, the bricks were cold at this time of day, even at the height of summer. The water was cold too, as Roger found when he tested it with one toe before making for the diving-stage of the big pool. Monsieur Effantin, the police-superintendent, had a skin as white as chalk, and Roger always looked away in embarrassment from his big thin body in which you could count the bones.

The old men went on fighting and laughing on the diving boards, and in the water they jostled Monsieur Repasse, who had a sour character. Only Chrétien Mamelin walked slowly to the edge of the pool, slipped gently into the water, on his back, taking care not to get his head wet, and floated downstream like that, scarcely moving his hands at each side of his body. This was because of his heart disease. He was the first to go back to the bathing-hut, walking at an even pace, with drops of water on his skin; and Roger, swimming beyond the ropes, could see him putting on his clothes with the same meticulous gestures with which he ironed the hats on the wooden heads in the back-shop in the Rue Puits-en-Sock.

For hours afterwards, you kept the taste of the baths on your lips, the taste too of the mouthful of coffee laced with rum which Roger was allowed to drink from his grandfather's cup, for he always dropped into the shopkeeper's kitchen for a few minutes.

On your way home, you saw more open windows and more women sweeping their doorsteps, so that you felt that for most people life had scarcely begun and that they were still sticky with the moist warmth of their beds.

‘Late again, Van Hamme!' Monsieur Penders, the school-master, would be saying soon. ‘Ask Mamelin how long he has been up. Ask him what he has been doing before coming to school.'

Thus Roger's day began in an exceptional way. Alone of all the pupils, he was allowed to leave the school at ten o'clock to cross the street, push open the door which had been left ajar, and drink the glass of egg-and-beer which was waiting for him on the stairs.

‘It's me, Mother.'

‘Wipe your feet properly. The hall has been cleaned.'

Alone, because he lived nearby, he had seen the fire. Alone, at half past eleven, he would not join the line of pupils whom Monsieur Penders led as far as the corner of the street, because his house was right opposite, and everybody knew already that he was Brother Médard's white-headed boy.

The proof of this was that his mother joined the latter on the pavement where he was standing.

‘Tell me, Brother Médard, do you think we are going to have a war?'

Wasn't he afraid that, if he reassured her too quickly, he would lose some of his importance?

‘Who knows, Madame Mamelin? It all depends on the French Government's attitude. No doubt we shall know this evening.'

Piles of chips were waiting by the fire, ready to go a second time into the crackling fat.

‘Eat up quickly, Roger. The lodgers will be here in a minute.'

Roger, this particular midday, would have a fresh roll which Monsieur Bernard had left from his breakfast.

A
S USUAL
, Élise had got up at six o'clock in the morning. There was no wardrobe or coat-rack in the little whitewashed room whose two windows looked out on to the road and a horizon of meadows. Désiré was still asleep, and Roger was asleep in the next room, which was on a lower level and fitted with red tiles like a kitchen.

How bare it all was! Clean, of course. Every year, Madame Laude covered the whole house, inside and out, with whitewash. It was a poor house for all that. The walls bulged out here, went in a little further on; a beam crossed the room without supporting anything, and nobody knew why it had been installed; the crucifix was so vulgar that Élise would have been incapable of saying her prayers if she had looked at it; and the glass of one of the two or three colour-prints framed in black, the one showing Napoleon at Austerlitz, had been cracked for several generations.

‘Isn't it queer, Doctor, that I'm even nervier in the country than I am in the town?'

Doctor Matray, whose square face was rather hard by nature, had looked at Élise with a certain tenderness, without answering.

‘I've tried everything, iron, tonics, those pills you prescribed for me …'

Nothing did any good, and it was as if the doctor knew that nothing ever would do any good. Had he discovered that mysterious taint which Élise was more and more convinced that she had inside her and which prevented her from being like other people?

The bed was clean. She had unpicked the mattress. However, stuffed as it was with vegetable horsehair, it impregnated you, especially when you were sweating on a hot summer night, with a smell of mouldy hay. Désiré called that the smell of the country-side, like the vague scent of sour milk which you could smell all over the house even though it was a long way from the nearest dairy.

Like a conjuror, Élise picked up her underwear from the round table and the two straw-bottomed chairs; her chemise, her drawers, her corset, her camisole, and her petticoat. She had a wash and then did her hair in front of the speckled mirror in which your nose looked as if it were askew, and all this time the cows were lowing, facing the Piedboeufs' farm from which some women were coming out to milk them.

However often Élise might tell herself that the country air was good for her, she was never at her ease there, and everything shocked her, even frightened her a little. She went down the few steps leading to the kitchen, whose door was open to the cool morning air from the garden, and found Madame Laude and Frédéric sitting at table facing each other over bowls of coffee and huge slices of grey bread.

She always had the impression that she was in the way; she apologized, and made the coffee in her own coffee-pot, as Mademoiselle Frida did in the Rue de la Loi, although Mademoiselle Frida never thought that she was in the way. Frédéric, with his thick, fair moustache, kept his cap on from morning to night, not even taking it off at mealtimes. He was a workman. All the previous week he had been on strike, and they kept seeing him go off in his black Sunday suit to attend some meeting or other.

‘Come here, Frédéric.'

Madame Laude called him like a child, and, as to a child, she handed him his pocket-money, for he gave her all that he earned.

Désiré got dressed, singing to himself, and awoke his son by tickling his nose. Frédéric went off on his bicycle, his haversack on his back, with the sandwiches and the flask of coffee. After that Madame Laude disappeared in her turn, with two buckets hanging from a sort of pack-saddle fitted with chains which she carried on her shoulders, to go to fetch some water from the pump at the crossroads.