Pedigree (57 page)

It was a newspaper which he had written on his own and reproduced himself with some hectograph jelly. The front page was adorned with a caricature of the director of studies.

The latter, who had picked up the document between two fingers, as if it were something dirty, held it for a moment suspended in the light from the lamp and finally looked up at the guilty schoolboy.

For Roger, this lasted an eternity. Dry-mouthed, and with sweat moistening the palms of his hands, he could not take his eyes off the glossy paper on which the purple ink had printed its dirty marks. Was it out of pity that the Jesuit father finally dropped the document in the waste-paper basket to the left of his foot?

‘I suppose, Monsieur Mamelin, that you are familiar with the school regulations?'

Even if he had wanted to, even if he had angrily decided to keep quiet, with the director's eyes upon him he could not have prevented himself from stammering:

‘Yes, Father.'

‘Then you know that you have rendered yourself liable to expulsion.'

A picture emerged from the chaos of light and shade which surrounded him, or rather a succession of pictures: an embankment in the rain, a bridge which spanned a swollen river and which a tram with a yellow headlamp was crossing, a boulevard lined with low houses, and himself, Mamelin, walking along, approaching the corner of the Rue des Maraîchers, reaching the corner-house which had been his home for some time, and stopping as he saw a chink of warm light behind the kitchen blind and heard or thought he heard the familiar sound of the fire being poked. He had his key in his pocket, but he did not use it; he did not want to go in, and turned round, walking to and fro. A dozen times he reached the Pont d'Amercoeur, and he had to wander in the rain for a long time before he caught sight of the impassive figure of his father coming home from his office.

‘Father, I have been …'

Even in his imagination, the word would not come out.

‘I have been expelled …'

Of all the nightmares which had made him scream with fright, sitting up in his bed, this was the most terrifying, and yet he had not moved. He awoke, astonished to find himself standing motionless in front of a lamp with a green shade while the director of studies gently stroked the crucifix stuck in his black silk belt.

‘Your act of indiscipline, Monsieur Mamelin, is all the more serious, all the more inexplicable in that you are here, are you not, on special terms. I will not dwell on the gratitude which we might expect from you or on the amazement and distress which …'

Oh! How he hated his mother for what he was suffering now! How certain he felt that he would go on hating her for the rest of his life! How he hated Aunt Louisa, as he remembered her in her back-shop in Coronmeuse with its smell of spices and gin, her hands on her stomach, her head bent to one side, lecturing a humble and docile Élise in Flemish!

For it was there, in that lair of hypocritical kindness and bigotry, that the idea had originated.

‘Why don't you make a priest of him? When the ecclesiastical authorities discover a sense of vocation in a child from a poor home, they don't hesitate to pay for his studies, and later on …'

Yes, later on! It was about later on that Élise had thought, about the famous question of her widowhood which was always haunting her and which Louisa had solved as if by magic. There was a line of verse on the subject which buzzed about in Roger's head:

‘…
When you become a priest, I shall be your servant
.'

‘Brother Médard, do you think that Roger would make a good priest?'

Because he served Mass every morning!

‘
Your act of indiscipline, Monsieur Mamelin, is all the more serious, all the more inexplicable in that you are here, are you not, on special terms
…'

Setting his teeth, he bent his head to conceal his hatred. There was a recollection which he would have liked to erase from his memory, just as he would have liked to forget the affair of the catechism, or that of the greengrocer's daughter whom he had begged, on the eve of his first communion, to let him touch her.

‘Just once … With one finger …'

How much uglier it had been, that call he had paid with his mother, who had pulled him along by the hand to the house of the Dean of Saint-Nicolas, in the little courtyard at the end of the cul-de-sac, next to Sister Adonie's nursery school! It had been in the evening, a soft bluish evening in autumn; there were some blood-red geraniums in the window-boxes. The lamps had not been lit. They had waited for a long time in a parlour, on chairs upholstered with black horsehair, and there had been an unpleasant smell in the air, a smell which Roger was now capable of recognizing among a thousand others, the smell of houses in which men live on their own, the smell which had turned his stomach in the Institut Saint-André whenever he had been sent on an errand to the kitchens, and which he met again, only slightly attenuated, in the Jesuit fathers' private quarters.

‘Now behave yourself, Roger. Above all, say what I say. Don't start contradicting me again, like you usually do!'

And when the fat little dean without a neck, as common as a tobacco-jar, his face a purplish red, had finally received them, she had talked. She had talked as she knew how to when she wanted something passionately, humble and proud at the same time. The ‘bare necessities' had been brought into it, and her backache at night, and her organs, and Désiré who was the best of men but who, like all the Mamelins, had no initiative or ambition.

The dean looked at her with his big protruding eyes, doubtless thinking that it was time for his dinner, but the whole family had to be mentioned, a Peters cousin who was the parish priest of a Limbourg village, another cousin, on the Mamelin side, who was a professor at the grand seminary of Louvain, Désiré's sister in the Ursuline convent at Ans …

‘He never thinks of anything but studying. I've all the trouble in the world taking his notebooks away so as to make him play a bit. Monsieur Jacques, one of my former lodgers who's only got his final examination to pass to be a doctor, says he's never seen a child so advanced for his age …'

She had won. She had obtained her letter, which the dean had written with the same dazed expression on his face.

And Roger had been admitted to the Jesuit college at half the usual fee.

Now he was being expelled, but first of all they were taking care to make him pay his debts.

‘…
The most elementary gratitude
…'

‘Well, Monsieur Mamelin, do you realize the gravity of your offence?'

‘Yes, Father.'

No, no, and no! It wasn't true. He felt like shouting this out at the top of his voice. He was not ashamed of himself. And if his name had been Neef, Neef-of-the-Château of course and not Neef-the-peasant who was just an embarrassment to the school, he would probably be strolling up and down the gallery with Father Van Bambeek, chatting about the last charity bazaar.

‘Think carefully about the question I am going to put to you. Have you the sincere intention, the firm resolve to mend your ways, by which I mean to abandon once for all a certain attitude of mind which is out of place in this house?'

‘Yes, Father!'

What a tremendous
no
would have echoed round the study if his inner voice could have been heard!

‘Your case has been discussed at some length. I must tell you straight away that I explained your parents' situation. It is out of consideration for them, Monsieur Mamelin, and particularly out of consideration for your mother, whose courage and self-abnegation are well known to us, that the school has decided to exercise clemency in your case.'

Not expelled!

Roger, all of a sudden, was not so much relieved as disappointed. The priest stood up and pressed an electric bell, and the usher's face appeared behind the glazed door.

Another brief sentence, which came out so dryly and said so much:

‘I hope that we shan't have to bring this up again.'

That was all. It was over. He would go on coming to the college. But he hated the director of studies for his menacing indulgence, as icy as the draught which met him in the gallery. When he went back into the classroom the lamps were on and he was suddenly afraid of the harsh light, of the eyes fixed on him, for he felt that his face was expressing, not contrition and gratitude, but ill-will.

Father Renchon must have known, for he did not even look at the boy while he was sitting down again on his bench. Perhaps he had been consulted? Would Roger have to hate him too?

A note was slipped on to his desk which had been passed from hand to hand, and Neef-the-peasant gave him to understand, with much twisting and turning, that it was he who had sent it, begging him with his eyes to answer.

The big fool with the voice which was breaking had written in his childish handwriting:

‘
What did he say?
'

And Roger angrily scrawled a single word across the paper:

‘
Merde
.'

The note went back the way it had come, but this time Father Renchon, without interrupting what he was saying, followed its progress with his malicious little eyes. Just as the recipient was unfolding it he said:

‘Monsieur Neef.'

Both of them stood up at the same time, both the Neefs, as usual.

‘For once, it is not you who is concerned,' the master said with exquisite politeness to Neef-of-the-Château.

Then, turning to the other Neef:

‘Monsieur Neef, would you be so kind as to bring me that paper which you seem to find so passionately interesting.'

The poor booby crossed the classroom, dragging his hobnailed boots along the cement floor where they struck sparks here and there. Blushing, he put the note on a corner of the rostrum and stood there in despair, begging Roger's forgiveness with his eyes.

‘Thank you. You may return to your place.'

Father Renchon's thin lips had stretched slightly. Only Roger had noticed this. Neef, from his seat, was still begging his forgiveness.

‘Monsieur Neef, you will do me the favour of writing five hundred lines for Thursday.'

Neef-of-the-Château had the misguided idea of playing once too often on the ambiguity.

‘Me?' he asked, standing up.

‘You too, of course, since you insist.'

Had he looked at Roger? His glance had passed very quickly. But the boy was convinced that in all this there had been something deliberate, a subtle, gentle contact, a sort of benevolent message.

‘Let us continue, gentlemen.'

And taking his watch from his broad belt:

‘Monsieur Mamelin, it is half past three.'

I
T WAS
towards the end of August 1915, on one of those mornings when the air buzzes and things are so to speak haloed with a quivering smoke. Roger was at Embourg all by himself, in the new house which Madame Laude had rented on the main road and in which she was at last fulfilling her dream of running a café.

In the Rue de la Loi, Élise was doing the rooms, with all the windows open and all the bedding outside, leaning out as soon as she heard a tradesman's trumpet, as she used to do in the good old days, for although she no longer had any lodgers and the bedrooms had remained empty for several months, they had just been requisitioned by the German Army.

The rooms had a name and a smell again. Désiré was alone in treating his guests coldly, while Élise bustled around from morning till night, chattering away in a peculiar German which had come back to her from her childhood.

Once again she could scrub the floors, turn the mattresses, polish the furniture, clean the brasses; packets of foreign cigarettes lay about on the tables with letters and bars of bitter-tasting chocolate, In one of the drawers of Major Schorr, a handsome, red-faced man who always smelled of eau-de-Cologne, she had found a box of chemical phials which she had mentioned to Doctor Matray.

‘Just imagine, Désiré, he's got a dirty disease.'

‘So much the better.'

‘Such a handsome man! When you remember that he takes his pick of the Offenstadt girls, you know, the girls whose parents own the big riding-school …'

Mademoiselle Pauline's room—for Mademoiselle Lola had passed through without leaving her mark—was occupied by another major, one of those who wore a floating cape and trailed their sword along the pavement, an aristocratic figure, buttoned up tight in a uniform under which he was obviously wearing a corset, and with a monocle always in one eye. It appeared that in civilian life he was a banker.

As for Mademoiselle Frida's room, it was good enough for a lieutenant in the Landsturm, Monsieur Kramp, a tubby little Bavarian, all pink and fat, a champagne dealer before the war, who had already had his wife to see him twice on the sly. Needless to say, the latter had spent hours in the kitchen with Élise.

‘I assure you, Désiré, they are ordinary people like anybody else. It's because you don't understand them.'

But Désiré would not even allow the subject to be brought up. His face assumed such a furious expression that you felt that it would be better to keep quiet. One day, scarcely a month after the Germans had entered the town, Élise had actually thought that he was going to beat her, and, for the first time in their married life, she had been really frightened of him.

Coming home from his office at two o'clock, he had halted in his tracks in front of a notice stuck behind a window in his own house, a notice which could be seen all over the district, with its crude lettering carelessly done with a paint-brush:

Instead of going straight into the kitchen, he had gone to take the notice down, and when he had finally approached Élise, he had been so pale and wooden-faced that she had recoiled.

‘Listen, Désiré, it isn't my fault … Everybody's selling it … Schroefs advised me to, and it was him who did the notice … His cellar is full of wine and he's afraid it might be confiscated one of these days … He lets me have it for a mark …'