Pedigree (81 page)

After that everything was chaos. Everybody was crying, laughing, embracing, pushing. There were some who rushed outside to shout the news to the passers-by, but the latter knew it already, the whole town had heard it within a few moments. The shopkeepers were on their doorsteps, women were leaning out of the windows, and some people, seeing the growing crowds, wondered whether it would not be advisable to lower the iron shutters.

The war was over! In spite of the rain, the streets were filling with an increasingly excited mob, singing could be heard, and then suddenly, like a signal, the sound of a window shivering into pieces.

It was a pork-butcher's shop whose owner had worked with the Germans. Men disappeared into the shop and started throwing out hams and black puddings. The furniture followed, hurled out of the first-floor and second-floor windows: wardrobes, beds, a bedside table, a piano. The police did not know what to do and looters ran off down the street with their booty.

‘Destroy if you like, but don't take anything!' a police sergeant shouted.

Ten, twenty, fifty butchers' shops suffered the same fate and the crowd continued to become increasingly varied. In the Rue de la Cathédrale itself you could see whole groups of people from the poorer districts, certain cafés had begun serving free drinks and the others were forced to follow suit, for soon the mob insisted on it.

In a patch of shadow, a human figure was struggling with half a dozen determined men and Roger looked on uncomprehendingly. They were stripping a woman, tearing off every piece of clothing she was wearing. She was naked now, on her knees on the slimy pavement, and one of the men slashed her hair off with a pair of scissors.

‘She can go now. We're going to do the same to all the women who've slept with the Huns. Like that, when their husbands come back from the front, they'll know what's what.'

She ran off to an accompaniment of hisses and jeers, pale and frozen in the windy night air. Some street-urchins followed her and the same scene was repeated all over the town, so that you gave a sudden start, in the darkness, on catching sight of a white, naked body keeping close to the houses.

Roger had lost his two Russians. He had been caught up in a procession and accompanied it from one café to the next, singing with the rest, without recognizing the districts which they filled with their noisy, aggressive joy.

He drank like everybody else. When the beer ran out, it was gin which was served in full glasses, and one group would break up to join another. On his left he had a lovely working-girl who had found time to put on a dress of pale green satin.

For the first time in his life, he had gone right down the most secret alley-ways in Outremeuse and walked in single file through taverns whose existence he had never suspected. At one point a woman who looked like a costermonger had come up to his companion and, darting a suspicious glance at Roger, had taken her rings off her fingers.

He also remembered standing for a moment with his elbows on the bar of the café where he used to play billiards with his father.

A dozen times, perhaps, he had come close to his home, and every time a surge of the crowd had pushed him back. He had had nothing to eat. He could not remember having anything to eat. What stood out in his memory was hundreds and thousands of strange faces which he had never seen before at such close quarters, cheeks which you kissed, mouths which opened wide to howl a song or a shout of triumph, eyes in which you could see a dangerous frenzy. Then more cafés, dark, shining pavements, pieces of broken glass, drops of rain.

If he had been drunk, he was perfectly sober when, just as dawn was turning the sky pale and chilling the air, he crossed the Pont d'Amercoeur. He knew that his parents would not say anything, that they had probably not been worried about him. It was the armistice. His sodden clothes were clinging to his body. His shoes had taken in water. He was cold all over and he had a raging headache.

Yet it struck him that he had never been as calm or clear-headed in his life as he was this morning.

Had he really shouted with the rest? Perhaps he had tried. Yes, now he came to think about it, he had behaved that night as he had behaved during the two months he had spent at Germain's Bookshop. He had taken pains to do what was expected of him, to avoid drawing attention to himself, to behave like everybody else.

He had failed. As far as he was concerned, he succeeded by dint of trying. But the others were not taken in. It was they who looked at him as if he were a foreigner and drew away. Witness that working-class woman who had taken away her daughter's rings!

For the rest of his life, he would remember the comic singer with his sickening mask of imbecility. If it had not been for the armistice, Roger would have been returning in exactly two days—that had been agreed—to see the confectioner at the Pont de Longdoz. The latter would probably have taken him on. Roger would have become a confectioner, although he was not born to be a confectioner any more than he was born to be a bookseller's assistant.

He was not sad. It was a different feeling which made him bow his head as he walked along. Armistice night was over, the war was over, and with it a whole period of his life which he would like to forget completely.

The day which was dawning was a greyish day. It was still raining. The houses were black.

There was not the smallest spark of excitement left in him. He opened the door with his key and went straight upstairs to see his parents, who were still in bed.

‘Is that you, Roger?'

‘Yes … it's me. I hope you didn't get worried about me. I'd have liked to let you know I was all right and come home earlier, but I kept getting swept away by the crowds.'

He had the impression that his mother was looking at him in astonishment. It was probably his calm manner which surprised her.

‘You didn't drink too much?'

‘Not too much, no. I haven't been sick.'

He spoke in level tones, not like a man who had spent the night singing and drinking, but like a man who had been thinking deeply and carefully.

‘Anybody'd think you weren't pleased.'

‘But I am pleased, Mother, very pleased. I haven't kissed you yet. Forgive me.'

He kissed her and then his father, breathing in the smell of their bed with some embarrassment.

‘There now. I'm off to bed. Wake me when you like.'

The two girls, Alice and Marie, were not back yet. One of the Russians had come back by himself early in the evening, already sick from over-drinking. Roger had stepped over his vomit in the hall.

Now that he came to think of it, they would have to leave the house soon, seeing that they had taken it only for the duration of the war.

‘Good night.'

He was alone in his room, and on the boulevard he saw files of defeated troops beginning to go by, their heads bent, following the guns and the field-kitchens in the monotonous rain.

When he closed his eyes he could still hear them. He had the impression that he could see them too, marching endlessly along, and he suddenly remembered a Polish picture-postcard which Mademoiselle Feinstein had once received. He probably still had it in his album, for she had given it to him. It showed an old man sitting on a pavement kerb, his arms dangling, next to a child in rags who was snuggling up against him. He was gazing into space with eyes full of a pathetic inquiry.

Mademoiselle Feinstein had translated for him the caption printed in Polish underneath the picture: ‘
Where are we to go?
'

The line of men filed past beneath his window and would go on filing past at the same dreary pace for day after day. Roger tossed about in his sleep in the cold dawn of the unshuttered room.

He slept so soundly that when he awoke, with his eyes still shut, his first feeling was a feeling of weariness. Then he sat up with a start and rubbed his eyes, puzzled by the unaccustomed light.

The war was over, he remembered that. The gas-lamp across the street was lit and its glass panes had been stripped of their coat of blue paint. The clear rays, of a brightness which nobody had known for a long time, were piercing the lace curtains and drawing strange patterns on the walls.

Downstairs, he could hear a buzz of voices and the rattle of crockery. His mother poked the fire. Everybody was probably at table.

He was hungry. And yet he remained standing barefoot at the window, until the kitchen door opened and Élise's voice came up the staircase well.

‘Are you awake, Roger? Aren't you coming down?'

‘I'm coming, Mother.'

The time it took to get dressed without lighting the lamp, and down he went.

THE END

THIS IS A NEW YORK REVIEW BOOK

PUBLISHED BY THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS

435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014

www.nyrb.com

Copyright © 1948 by Georges Simenon Ltd (a Chorion Company)

Introduction copyright © 2010 by Luc Sante

All rights reserved.

This translation first published in Great Britain by Hamish Hamilton, Ltd, 1962

Cover image: Montagne de Bueren, Liège, Belgium, c. 1910; collection of Luc Sante

The Library of Congress has cataloged the earlier printing as follows:

Simenon, Georges, 1903–1989.

[Pedigree. English]

Pedigree / by Georges Simenon ; translated by Robert Baldick ; introduction

by Luc Sante.

  p. cm.—(New York Review Books classics) ISBN 978-1-59017-351-0 (alk. paper)

1. Boys—Belgium—Fiction. 2. Liège (Belgium)—Fiction. 3. City and town life—Belgium—History—20th century—Fiction. 4. Belgium—Social conditions—20th century—Fiction. 5. Bildungsromans. I. Baldick, Robert. II. Title.

PQ2637.I53P3913 2010

843'.912—dc22

2009052634

eISBN 978-1-59017-555-2
v1.0

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