Pedigree (59 page)

He could not have said why the school, just then, reminded him so vividly of the Linière, why a whiff of his early childhood came back to him, why his head felt heavy, his limbs numb, his mind half-way between dream and reality, as when, on Thursday afternoons, he used to come home with his mother from Aunt Louisa's.

It was a winter memory for, just as they were leaving the shop with its warm, almost syrupy light, Roger always felt a certain anguish on the threshold of the dark embankment, where a fine, icy rain hung in the air like a fog.

They turned round to say a last good-bye to Aunt Louisa, who stood framed in the doorway, and perhaps also to have a last look at the reddish rectangle of the shop-window, for afterwards there was nothing but a huge, wet, mysterious world in which gas lamps surrounded by a misty halo flickered here and there. As for what there was on their left, on the far side of the terrace with the four rows of bare trees, where you could hear the waves of the swollen Meuse, that was absolute darkness, chaos, the end of the world.

They walked fast, for Élise too was in a hurry to reach the Pont Maghin and the rows of reassuring shops. Half-way home, they came to those walls of blackened brick, soaring to dizzy heights, and perforated with high, narrow windows like cathedral windows. They were not real windows with curtains and the kindly appearance of houses that are lived in; they were grey-green holes, the window-panes were made of dirty frosted glass, some of them were missing, and behind you could sense an emptiness as vast as in a church.

In that inhuman emptiness, where the light of arc-lamps swung from side to side, you could hear the noise of machines, of metals making contact, of steam hissing; Roger knew, from having seen them come out on the stroke of six, when the siren sounded, that there were thousands of girls inside, dirty, common, hatless girls from the back-streets, who bustled about endlessly, tiny creatures at the bottom of the abyss, crushed by the space above them and surrounded by mechanical monsters.

He had almost the same hard, hostile impression of the world from which he was emerging now, from which he seemed to be escaping by himself, and which a few minutes earlier, in the director of studies' office, he had thought he was leaving for good.

Wearing his wet overcoat and holding his satchel, he walked along the endless gallery in which identical windows revealed to him the same sight of bare walls, of dark coats hanging in a row, of black benches, of pupils sitting uncomfortably but motionless in the harsh light.

Beyond the iron balustrade there was the darkness of a courtyard so huge, so bare that you hesitated to venture out into it, and to reach it you had to go down a steep iron staircase which had a factory sound.

From the staircase, and from the yard which he walked across diagonally, you could see nothing of the ordinary world. On one side there were the blank walls of the festival hall which was only rarely opened. At the far end, there was a wall as implacable as that of any prison, and on the left, the gigantic building which he had just left and which reminded him of the Linière, with its three storeys of classrooms connected by iron staircases and galleries.

How many windows could you see at once, all as bare as one another, all emitting the same cold light? Perhaps a score on each floor; he had never counted them. There was nothing to distinguish one classroom from the next, and occasionally he still made a mistake, as all the pupils did.

There were too many of the latter, over a thousand. You could not get to know all the faces, indeed you could scarcely know all the masters by sight; the pupils formed a vast crowd in which little boys in sailor suits darted in and out of the legs of young men with moustaches.

At playtime, every class, every group was obliged to find a corner somewhere for itself, so that in that strictly geometric yard, without a single tree in it or a single handful of earth, enclosed by thousands of identical bricks all carefully cemented together, there were places where Roger had never set foot, zones surrounded by an invisible frontier which were so to speak forbidden territory for him.

While he was walking along, hypnotized by the disheartening sight of the windows, he bumped into somebody, no, he just avoided him, a man standing all by himself in the middle of the wilderness. Roger froze, filled with an instinctive fear, but at last the usher's voice reassured him.

‘Good evening, Monsieur Mamelin.'

‘Good evening, Monsieur Sacré.'

There were bicycles lined up on the right, under a shed, hundreds of bicycles at rest; but Roger did not possess one and never would, for a bicycle cost far too much. He plunged into a sort of passage which grew narrower with every step. The yard finished in the form of a funnel, with two walls coming closer together, an icy archway, and finally a door, the one to which he had taken a dislike on his very first day.

Out in the street, his step became lighter; a tram was going downhill, another was coming up, and they stopped for each other at the crossroads; the shop windows were dimly lit, for fear of air-raids; in the very centre of the town, you might have thought you were in a dreary suburban street, and from a distance the big stores all looked like those poor little shops in working-class districts in which you see a few withered vegetables next to some candles, sweets and cakes of soap.

It was raining, the pavement was wet, and his shoes started taking in water; there were no shoes to be bought in the shops any more; most boys wore shoes with wooden soles, but you could not go to the Collège Saint-Servais like that, whatever Élise might say.

‘At least your feet would be dry, and you needn't take any notice of what the other boys say.'

The war had been going on for three years now and for three years the glass panes of the street-lamps had been painted blue, so that they shed scarcely any light; and when, at six o'clock, the shops closed their shutters, you wandered along the streets like a ghost, pointing the dancing ray of a torch in front of you. Now and then there would be a burst of laughter, girlish laughter particularly. You would come across a couple pressed against a door or in a corner, and try your best to light up a patch of bare thigh.

Roger's face was still burning with the warmth which had invaded it in the director of studies' room. He turned right into an alley-way, to take a short cut. It was an alley-way which was out of bounds to the schoolboys, but he had never taken any notice of the ban. They were forbidden to smoke too, and it was on purpose that he filled his pipe as soon as he was out of the door.

This particular evening he was full of a vague feeling of rancour, and now and then he kicked the kerb of the pavement like a street-urchin.

He hated school. He had been almost relieved that afternoon at the prospect, frightening though it was, of being expelled, of never having to go back there; and yet now, coming out of the alley-way and crossing the Boulevard d'Avroy, he envied the pupils in his class whom he had left sitting on their benches, waiting for four o'clock and listening to Father Renchon's monotonous voice.

Above all he envied the way they went off in groups, for they nearly all lived in the same districts, the rich districts of the town; their parents knew each other, had their names on brass plates, were doctors, barristers, solicitors, magistrates, industrialists; the boys talked about their maids and the seaside resorts where they went every year; they had sisters who were already young women.

In summer especially they gave an impression of radiant life when, riding nickel-plated bicycles and casually holding the handlebars with only one hand, they went off in a group, waiting for one another as they sneaked in and out of the crowds in the Rue Saint-Gilles before regrouping on the shady boulevard.

No other pupil went Mamelin's way, and if by chance he heard hurried footsteps behind him, if somebody caught up with him, panting for breath, it was Neef, Neef-the-peasant of course, who accompanied him as far as the Pont d'Amercoeur where he had to catch the tram to Chênée. Roger avoided him, shook him off. However humbly poor Neef might offer him his friendship and devotion, he spurned them; he felt guilty about it sometimes, but he could not help it, he preferred his solitude to the company of the yokel in his corduroy velvet clothes.

He went along the Rue Hazinelle. Already, in the shadow of the pavements, on both sides of the Girls' High School, youths and men were waiting for the girls to come out. There was a little square there with two alley-ways leading into it, and because of those figures lying in wait, because of the stories which went the rounds, because of certain scandals which the papers had reported, you felt a special sort of fever there; the walls, the doors, the few bare trees, and above all the patches of shadow did not look the same and did not smell the same as they did elsewhere.

It was rumoured that a certain number of girls from Hazinelle—some said three, others more—had been found by the police in a furnished room in the Rue de la Casquette in the company of some German officers.

Every time he passed the school, Roger visualized the same picture which he had built up out of nothing, or rather which had formed itself in his mind almost without his knowing and which he always rediscovered unchanged, with some indistinct parts, patches of shadow, and, on the other hand, excessively sharp details, as in certain photographs which schoolmates had shown him and which always produced the same feeling of uneasiness in him.

The bedroom in the Rue de la Casquette looked like Mademoiselle Lola's room, but the light was green as it was in Monsieur Saft's room, and what is more the leather armchair from the drawing-room was there. One of the officers looked like Major Schorr who had a shameful disease, while the other looked like the caricatures of the Kronprinz which were circulated secretly. Of the girls, all he could see was thin, pale faces, tired eyes, pinched nostrils, and milky patches of flesh under hitched-up skirts.

He quickened his pace, crossing the busier streets as if they were rivers with fords, and constantly taking short cuts like Élise, not so much in order to save time as out of a liking for those narrow alley-ways with their lop-sided houses where tilting stones flanked the doorways and dark passages led off heaven knows where.

Now and then the sound of footsteps made him start. He was frightened, but his fear was a pleasurable fear, as when he went to serve Mass at the Bavière hospital at six o'clock in the morning. Invariably, in the winter-morning darkness, there would be somebody walking along a hundred yards behind him, and after keeping his nerves under control for a while, Roger could not restrain himself from running as fast as he could, until he finally came to a stop in the pale light of the doorway, panting for breath and clinging to the knocker.

Nearly all his memories were blurred, with ambiguous lights and mysterious glows in settings plunged in shadow. The war itself was something dark, heavy and oppressive: the cellar where they had cowered with unknown neighbours during the bombardment; the charred paper floating in the air like an infernal snow, which they had seen through the ventilators gradually covering the pavements when the municipal library in the Rue des Pitteurs had gone up in flames; then the Uhlans, the first to enter the town—it was said that they had come to parley—whom they had anxiously watched going by, seeing nothing of them but their boots; and the lamps or candles which they had had to keep alight in all the windows of every house while the troops had marched past night after night…

The Rue Puits-en-Sock and the Rue Jean-d'Outremeuse had changed colour, and the house in the Rue de la Loi which the Mamelins had left six months before and which he scarcely recognized, struck him as narrow and dirty, without any life or personality. He was rather ashamed of it, and felt a certain malaise at the idea that it was there that he had spent the greater part of his childhood. Indeed, he blushed over his childhood itself, and it was with a feeling of repugnance that once again—he had just decided it would be the last time—he went through the green door, heedless of the brass plate on which, from his doorstep, half-shutting his sunbaked eyelids, he had once spelt out the words ‘Institut Saint-André'.

The waiting-room on the right of the porch was no longer lit, to save on gas; as he went past, Roger could only just make out the mothers sitting in the damp darkness, clutching their shawls round their shoulders.

He could have sworn that there was less light in the classroom. He crossed the courtyard. He was no longer a pupil. For those sitting on the polished wooden benches, he was a big boy, almost a man. He went straight to the kitchens; the big vat of gruel had just arrived from the food-kitchens, yellow, sugary, and with a basis of maize sent by the American Red Cross.

Roger felt sick at the sight of it, and decided that he would not even eat any today. This evening, for the last time, he had not a single word or smile for the cook with the big, pear-shaped belly, common face and soiled cassock. He knew that his mother would insist that he should go on leaving school at half past three and coming to serve their extra meal to the pupils of the Institut Saint-André.

This was another idea of hers. She was obsessed by her desire to keep his strength up. Food had become so short that it had become necessary to provide supplementary rations in the schools.

In the higher classes and in the colleges, all that the pupils were given was a tiny white roll, but the little children in the primary schools were also entitled to a bowl of that gruel which Roger, with the cook's help, was carrying across to Brother Mansuy's classroom.

On the platform, it was he who filled the bowls which the queue of children held out to him one after another; he too who kept an eye on the rolls which they took afterwards from a basket.

In return for this service, when he had finished doling out the rations in every classroom, he was entitled to as much gruel as he could eat and to three or four rolls, for there were always a few children absent and ill.