Pedigree (75 page)

A little girl in red; a woman feeding her baby while at the same time pressing against the tiller; a man in the distance, in the shadow of the trees, working patiently like a horse.

Then those mattresses, those grey blankets, that barrack-room smell, those four brothers-in-arms living apart from the world and wandering about the Lanaeken farm.

‘You're walking too fast, children. Monique can't keep up with you. It's you, Roger, hurrying along like a madman!'

He slowed down. He would do whatever they asked. It did not matter to him. He had nothing in common with them. He would obediently grind the corn in the coffee-mill and sift it through the sieve.

His life was somewhere else, he did not yet know where. He was looking for it outside and he would go on looking for it.

Élise felt that she had to keep it from him. She imagined that he had not heard. At a certain moment, just as Éléonore Dafnet had been beginning a sentence, she had motioned to her to be quiet, glancing at Roger. The two women had gone on talking in Flemish, and he had understood without wanting to.

Éléonore had asked Élise if she still took in lodgers, because two farmers' daughters of the neighbourhood, who were attending classes at the Pigier Institute, were looking for a room in town.

Now his mother was explaining in an undertone to Anna:

‘You understand, I didn't say no. Farmers' daughters will always bring us something to eat. I haven't spoken to Roger about it yet, because he's getting even more difficult than his father. You'd think he was jealous of everything that came into the house. And then he's never there.'

He showed no reaction. Let her take in as many lodgers as she liked, let her fill the house with them, let her make him sleep in the attic again as in the Rue de la Loi, it was all the same to him. As his mother put it so well, he was never there.

They got to the Quai de Coronmeuse in the dark, went into Aunt Louisa's for a moment, exchanged packets and did some complicated calculations.

Then there were only two of them left to carry their load past the dark houses. Élise was tired. She made an effort to follow her son without complaining. They did not talk to one another any more. They had nothing more to say to each other.

They crossed the Pont Maghin and the Place du Congrès, and automatically glanced down the Rue Pasteur, where there was not a soul to be seen and everything seemed dead.

They had only to cross the Dérivation by the Pont d'Amercoeur and they would be home again; they would go into the kitchen where Désiré, in his shirtsleeves, had laid the table and was waiting for them, reading the paper in his reconquered armchair.

‘Well, Élise? Well, son? Was the expedition a success?'

The two of them took off their harness. Élise chattered away, as she always did when she had something to hide, and Roger stole a glance at his father, feeling sad at heart.

Élise had brought him back a piece of tart which made a sorry sight on the table, with its paper sticking to it and the fruit soaking into the pastry.

I
T WAS
four o'clock. The usher, after opening the double doors, went to station himself in the middle of the Rue Saint-Gilles in order to stem the flood of schoolboys when a tram came by.

It was June 1918. On the heights, the sound of gunfire could be heard coming nearer and nearer. The Germans you met in town were old soldiers of the Landsturm, bearded, bald, too small or too tall or deformed. They no longer emptied the excess contents of their mess-tins into the gutter. You saw little groups of them trailing their short boots along the pavements and stopping to stare with childlike longing at the window-displays.

The other day, when Élise had come out of the American food-centre after spending over three hours waiting in a queue, she had seen one who had aroused her pity and she had been unable to refrain from talking about him at supper-time. He was standing on the kerb, facing the door. In his big porcelain pipe he was smoking something which was not tobacco, and which smelled like the bonfires you lit in the country, hay probably, or oak-leaves. He must have been a grandfather. You could tell that from the way in which he looked at children of a certain age. He had been fat at one time but now his uniform was too big for him, and the buckle of his belt hung down on his shrivelled belly.

‘If you'd seen the look, Désiré, that he shot at the piece of bacon he could see in my shopping-bag! It made his mouth water.'

If they were hungry, the population was hungry too, and for some time now it had been possible to recognize well-to-do people who came rather awkwardly to join the queue at the working-class soup-kitchens.

People were wearing boaters made of rustic straw, ‘rock-straw' as hat-makers called it. The centre of the hat had to be extremely high, the rim as narrow as possible, the ribbon non-existent. It was the latest thing, together with wide trousers and yellow shoes with American toe-caps. Another new fashion was for soft collars in piqué whose points were held in position, on both sides of the tie, by a little bar with a metal ball at each end.

Roger was fashionably dressed, except for his trousers which were of medium width. Coming out of the door, he looked round for somebody, and, when he saw Stievens, fell into step with him.

‘Shall we go and have a game of billiards?'

For he had come to that: to looking out for a Stievens and going down the Rue Saint-Gilles with him, with exaggerated self-assurance in his eyes and walk. He no longer used his oilcloth satchel but instead, like the students at the university, carried his books and exercise books in one hand, tied together with a strap. He cluttered himself up as little as possible. Everybody knew that now, for instance, they were not going home to study, but that a life entirely foreign to school was waiting for them.

Stievens, like Mamelin, was wearing one of those straw hats that you saw most of all on flashy businessmen. It was as if they had both broken with the rest of the class. They still came to school, sat down on their bench, and opened an exercise book as a matter of form, but it was obvious that they were no longer taking any part in the common life. Nor were they getting ready for the approaching examinations.

Neef-the-peasant was nonplussed. His eyes expressed amazement and despair at seeing Roger, who was one of the best pupils in the school, deliberately placing himself, of his own free will, on the same level as Stievens.

The two of them walked along, disdainful of the friends who passed them. In spite of the regulations, and without any attempt at concealment, they went into the porch of the Palace. There was a glass cage on the right where people bought their tickets, but they did not stop; with a familiar, patronizing good-day, they walked past the doorman, who lifted the velvet curtain for them.

The auditorium was full of people sitting around tables drinking beer or grenadine. A serial film was unfolding on the screen and the two youths remained standing for a moment. Then the lights went on for a variety act, the musicians returned to their places in the orchestra pit, a net was stretched over the audience's heads, and some acrobats wearing plaster-coloured tights hoisted themselves up to the ceiling along taut ropes.

‘Shall we go?'

They walked past, apparently indifferent to the amusements of the mob. At the far end of the room, next to the bar where a few prostitutes were hanging about, they lifted a curtain and went up a staircase where they could hear, at the same time as the music from the auditorium, the sound of billiard balls colliding.

Roger was not yet sixteen. Stievens was his senior by some months. Solemn, very conscious of the importance of every gesture, they walked slowly into the over-decorated rooms of the billiards saloon.

‘Is Number 9 free, Albert?'

‘Yes, gentlemen. The usual?'

The light of day did not penetrate into the billiard rooms. You could only just hear the music from the Palace, chiefly when a roll on the drums emphasized an acrobat's somersault.

Here everything was austere and elegant. The lamps lit up nothing but the green billiard-cloths, and the players' heads were like waxwork figures in the half-light. Each person, whether he was playing or waiting his turn, studied his attitudes, looking inquiringly at the wall-mirrors; there was a special degree of nonchalance which was difficult to acquire, a superior smile which was as it were the hallmark of the accomplished player.

The calm was so profound that a loud voice would have arrested every gesture. And yet, moving stiffly to and fro in the depths of this silence, Roger was conscious of an inner force which was carrying him along at breathtaking speed and knew that nothing but a catastrophe could stop him.

He needed Stievens. It humiliated him to be reduced to waiting for him after school, but what else could he do at four o'clock in the afternoon, seeing that he could not go home? He had already seen the films showing at the three cinemas in the town. There were no afternoon performances at the theatres. He had seen the show at the Palace the day before; he had even watched part of it twice over. And when he was alone like that, sitting in the middle of the crowd, he was sometimes seized with an intolerable fear. He was afraid, he did not know why. He needed somebody's presence to reassure him and so he went to Gaston's or to Stievens', for he had sometimes gone to pick up the latter at his home.

If you did not know people, you got the wrong idea about them. The Stievens, for instance, lived in a very simple house, not much smarter than the one in the Rue des Maraîchers. The real difference, apart from a few knick-knacks, was that they had a drawing-room and took their meals in the dining-room. The father, who had died not long before the war, had been a broker. The mother kept his business going.

The two women, the mother and the daughter, who looked so startling when you met them at the Carré, covered in furs and feathers, were utterly nondescript at home, neither of them more desirable than the other. The girl had the same heavy features, the same coarse flesh as her brother. She and her mother loafed around at home in slippers and dressing-gowns. The Stievens, who were very careful with their money, spent it on nothing but clothes.

‘I know perfectly well that I shan't get my diploma,' Stievens said without any regret. ‘I don't care. I'll go into some business or other as a clerk in order to learn the ropes, and then I'll set up on my own.'

‘Will you have enough money to start your own business?'

‘I'll marry a girl who'll bring me some.'

Usually, when he came home, there was nobody there. He ate whatever he could find, opening a tin, if necessary, and went to bed. If he met his mother and sister in town he greeted them from a distance, whether they were by themselves or in company, and each went his own way.

Playing billiards brought back memories to Roger. It was such a short while back and yet it was already so long ago! At the time when he used to comb his hair with his fingers and went out in clogs, he had gone two or three times in the evening to play billiards with his father in a café in Outremeuse.

Everybody recognized Désiré and knew that it was the Mamelins, father and son, who were playing together like equals.

‘Your turn, son.'

‘How would you tackle that one? A follow-through stroke?'

‘Play it off two cushions, putting bottom on the ball.'

The atmosphere was heavy and familiar. Their glasses of beer stood on a little table where they went now and then to drink a mouthful. They wiped their lips with the back of one hand. There too, Roger stole an occasional glance at himself in the mirrors, but this was to make sure of the plebeian joviality of his face.

People came up to watch them playing.

‘So you're teaching your boy to play billiards, Désiré?'

‘Ready for the time when he'll have to give me points.'

Now they scarcely dared to look at one another, he and his father. Roger fled from the house with his mouth still full, and remorse haunted him at the idea that he was leaving Désiré alone with his mother.

Cécile was dead. She had stayed in bed for a whole week. Nobody had ever seen so many flies about as there were then, and the atmosphere had rarely been so stormy. His aunt's voice was so faint that you had to put your ear up against her mouth, and even then you had to guess what she was trying to say. Yet she did not realize the gravity of her condition.

‘If you only knew how thin I am, Roger! Look. There's nothing left. The bones themselves have melted away …'

She lifted the blanket. It was horrible. A smell, which struck Roger as the smell of the death-agony, took him by the throat. He refused to go to see her any more. His aunt kept asking for him. She wanted him to read her the rest of a romantic novel which she had started and could no longer read herself.

‘You're not being very nice, Roger,' Élise told him reproachfully. ‘You were always going to see Cécile, and now you don't set foot there any more just when she needs you so badly.'

Was that his fault? He felt himself going pale just from looking at her, his temples became damp and his head started spinning. When she had squeezed his hand with her sticky fingers, he avoided touching anything until he had soaped his hands two or three times under a tap.

It was only at the very end that she had realized that she was dying. Instead of fighting and rebelling like Félicie, she had been surprisingly calm, almost cheerful. She had said to him:

‘Heavens, Roger, but I shall make an ugly corpse! If you could only see my portrait when I was a girl! You ask Marcel for it if he comes across it. There's only my hair that has stayed beautiful. At school, they used to call me the girl with the beautiful hair.'

They had had to promise to put flowers on her head, once she was dead, as when she had taken part in the procession; and she had gone gently into the final coma, which had lasted twenty-four hours.