Death on Credit

by Louis-Ferdinand Celine

  Those bastard parents didn’t even answer! Absolutely no conscience!… Only too glad to leave their headaches to us… So then we asked the kids if they wouldn’t like us to deposit them in some charitable institution… at the county seat maybe… Hearing those few words, they came back at us so aggressive, so absolutely furious, for a minute I expected a massacre!… They wanted no part of it… We threw in the sponge right away… We’d given those brats too much freedom and initiative… it was too late to get them back in line!… Hell!… They didn’t mind running around in rags and eating once in a blue moon… but they wouldn’t stand for interference!… They got nasty… they didn’t even try to understand!… They didn’t give a shit about the circumstances!… We tried to explain that life is like that… that we all have our obligations… that law and order screw you in the long run!… That if you go snaffling right and left you always get caught sooner or later!… That one fine day you come to a very bad end!… They told us to shove off with our rotten bullshit… For their money, we were pisspots… miserable drips!… They wouldn’t do anything we said… they wouldn’t listen… Some New Race they turned out to be. Dudule, the youngest of the gang, went out looking for eggs… Raymond was afraid, he was getting too big… Little Dudule was our Raft of the Medusa*… We hoped, we prayed… all the time he was out… that he’d come home safe, sound, and bringing something… He brought back a pigeon, we ate it practically raw with carrots… He knew the country better than any hunting dog!… You couldn’t see him two metres away… He’d lie in wait for hours to nab his bird… Without cord, ball or string! With two little fingers… Crick! Crick!… He showed me how he did it… It was subtle, it was neat… “Betcha I catch her… and you won’t hear nothing!…” It was true. You didn’t hear a thing.

  * * *

  Two of our windows were smashed the same week… Yokels passing like a shot on their bikes… They stoned us more and more… They’d hide, they’d come back again… Christ, were they mean!… And we were on our best behaviour!… We didn’t fight back!… And we should have… they gave us plenty of provocation!… A good volley of buckshot in the arse!… Our pioneers were keeping out of sight… They only went out before dawn, maybe an hour or two in the gloaming… in the first streaks of daylight, to have some idea what they were doing… The farmers had stationed mutts in every yard in the county… wild, vicious, ferocious monsters!…

  In addition we were sadly lacking in shoes for those awful hikes over rocky paths… It was torture!… With all their practice the kids often cut themselves… At daybreak in the rain, especially now it was coming on November, their rags looked like comical patches of bandages!… They were coughing more and more… Sure, they were tough little bandits… but they weren’t immune to bronchitis!… They sank in up to their arse in the deep furrows!… When the dry cold set in, they were finished… They couldn’t make it without shoes!… Their feet would have fallen off… In the winter our plateau came in for plenty of gales… it was swept by the north wind… We warmed up all right at night, but it was stifling in the room, the smoke came back at us from the fireplace… We had nothing but damp wood, there hadn’t been any coal for weeks… We couldn’t stand it… we put the whole business out!… We were afraid it would start up again… we threw water on the coals… There was nothing for the kids to do but go to bed…

  Pretty often around midnight Courtial would get up… He couldn’t sleep… He’d take his muffled lamp and head for the barn, he’d fiddle around with his contraption… he’d start it up for a few minutes… His wife would jump up in her straw and go out too, to see for herself… I could hear them cursing at each other at the far end of the yard…

  She’d come running back… She woke me up… She wanted to show me the spuds… They weren’t pretty!… Those spuds growing in the waves… They were pimply, repulsive!… Hell! She called me to witness!… They weren’t getting very fat… that was plain as day… I didn’t dare to say so, to agree with her too much… but I couldn’t disagree either… They were gnawed, shrivelled, loathsome and putrid… and in addition they were full of maggots!… Courtial’s potatoes!… We couldn’t even eat them ourselves… not even in our own soup… And we weren’t hard to please!… Mme des Pereires was dead sure the experiment had been a failure…

  “And that, Ferdinand, is what he thinks he’s going to send to market! What do you think, eh?… Who’s he expect to sell them to?… It’s too much! It’s a disaster!… What I’d like to know is… where’s the sap that’s going to buy such garbage?… Just tell me where that nitwit is keeping himself so I can send him a basket of flowers!… My oh my, there’s a man I want to see!… That dodo of mine is nuts!… Say, come to think of it, who does he take me for?…”

  It’s true they were disgusting!… Yet those spuds were meticulously cared for!… Choice seeds!… Coddled day and night!… They were completely mouldy… crawling with vermin, with grubs and centipedes… and the smell was really nasty, infinitely sickening in spite of the bitter cold!… That wasn’t normal either… an unusual phenomenon!… It was the smell that stymied me… A stinking potato is something very rarely experienced… This was a very strange variety of hard luck…

  “Sh-sh!” I went… “You’ll wake up the kids!…”

  She went back to the experimental field… She took her lantern and her spade… The temperature was around eight… ten below freezing… She picked out the wormiest, she dug them up one by one… as many as she could, until dawn…

  * * *

  It was really impossible to keep that invasion of vermin a secret very long… The whole field was alive, even on the surface… The rot was spreading… we weeded, uprooted, hoed more and more, it didn’t do a bit of good… In the end the news got around… The hicks came snooping… They dug up our potatoes to see for themselves!… They sent samples of our produce to the Prefect!… With a police report on our strange goings-on!… They even sent whole basketfuls, completely chock-full of grubs, to Paris, to the Museum Director!… It was getting to be big news!… Horrible rumours started up… we were the criminal originators of a brand-new agricultural pestilence!… An unprecedented garden blight!…

  By the effect of intensive waves, of malignant “inductions”, by the diabolical instrumentality of a thousand wire networks, we had corrupted the earth!… Stirred up the genie of the grubs!… In the innocent bosom of nature!… There, in Blême-le-Petit, we had given birth to a special race of absolutely vicious, unbelievably corrosive maggots, which attacked every kind of seed, every conceivable plant and root!… Trees! Harvests! The peasants’ houses! The very structure of the land! Even dairy products! Sparing absolutely nothing!… Corrupting, sucking, dissolving… encrusting the ploughshares!… Absorbing, digesting stone, flint as well as beans! Demolishing everything in their path! On the surface, under the ground!… Corpses and potatoes alike!… Everything without exception!… And thriving, mind you, in midwinter!… Drawing strength from the bitter cold!… Propagating in swarms, in vast myriads!… More and more insatiable!… Crossing mountains! Plains! Valleys!… With the speed of electricity!… Thanks to the waves generated by our machines!… Soon the whole district around Blême would be one enormous field of rot!… A noisome bog!… An immense sewer of maggots!… A seism of swarming grubs!… Then it would be the turn of Persant!… And then of Saligons!… Such was the outlook!… It was still too soon to predict how and when it would all end!… Whether it would ever be possible to circumscribe the disaster!… Only the analyses would show!… It might perfectly well spread to all the roots in France… consume the whole countryside!… Until our national soil in its entirety was nothing but stones!… Our maggots might well make the whole of Europe unfit for cultivation… one big desert of rot!… Well, if that happened, believe you me, they’d talk about the Great Plague of Blême-le-Petit down through the ages… the way we nowadays talk about the ones in the Bible…

  It wasn’t funny any more… Courtial said so t
o the postman when he came… It was perfectly natural that this bikeless Eusèbe should spew a little poison… “It’s damn well fucking possible,” was his answer… He added nothing. Anyway that stinker was getting more and more stinking. We didn’t have a drop of anything left… we had nothing to offer him… He was really pissed off… Fourteen kilometres without a drink!… He was probably putting the evil eye on us… He came out from Persant three times a day! Just for our post!… People were writing to us from all over, it wasn’t our fault!…

  Our post had multiplied by ten!… People who wanted to know all about it… who wanted to come out for an interview!… And rafts of anonymous characters who told us off good for the price of a stamp!… Cartloads of insults!…

  “OK, OK, the spirit’s fermenting!… Look at all those lovely letters! A hundred thousand times more verminous than all the soil in the planet!… And God knows it’s crawling!… It’s lousy with them! You want to know what putrefaction is? You want me to tell you? Eh? I’ll tell you… it’s all the shit we have to put up with!…”

  * * *

  We thought maybe if we cooked them over a very slow fire… putting cheese on them… frying them in fat… if we cajoled them… in some clever way, we’d gradually be able to make them edible after all… We tried all the stratagems of cookery… Absolutely nothing worked… The whole mess turned to jelly at the bottom of the pot… At the end of an hour… maybe an hour and a half… all we had was one enormous grub cake… And still that terrifying smell… Courtial spent a long time sniffing at the result of our cooking…

  “It’s ferrous hydrate of alumina! Make a note of that name, Ferdinand! Remember it well!… You see that meconium-like substance?… Our land is saturated with it! Literally!… I don’t even need an analysis!… Precipitated by sulphides!… That’s our main trouble!… Undeniably… Look at that yellowing crust… I’d always suspected as much!… Those potatoes!… That’s an idea!… They’d make a splendid fertilizer!… Especially with the potash in them… You see the potash?… That’s our salvation! Potash! It’s remarkably adhesive… They’re all supercharged with it!… See how they glisten! You observe the scales?… That coating on every radicle?… All those infinitesimal crystals?… Shimmering green?… And violet?… Do you see them clearly?… Those, Ferdinand, my dear boy, are the transfers!… Yes!… The transfers of hydrolysis!… Yes, yes indeed!… Neither more nor less!… Conveyed by our currents… Yes, my boy!… Absolutely!… The telluric signature!… That’s it all right… Take a good look now! Open your eyes to the maximum! No clearer demonstration is possible!… No need of further proof!… What proof?… There it is… the best!… Exactly as I foresaw!… This is a current that nothing can stop, disseminate or refract!… But it shows… I’ve got to admit that… a slight excess of alumina!… And there’s another little drawback!… But it’s temporary!… Very temporary!… The question of temperature! The optimum for alumina is 12.05 degrees centigrade… Aha! Remember that! Zero! Five!… For our purposes! You follow me?…”

  * * *

  Another two weeks passed… We rationed our bit of fat so strictly that we only made soup once a day… There was no question of going out… It rained enormously… The country was having a rough time too… flattened out by winter… The trees had the shivers… like ghosts rowing in the wind… As soon as we’d emptied our plates, we went back to our straw ticks to keep warm!… We lay sprawled for whole days… all bunched up together… without opening our mouths… without saying a word… Even a wood fire doesn’t help when you’re that cold… We had terrible coughing spells… And we were getting thin… our legs were like matchsticks… and so weak we couldn’t move… or chew… or anything… Starvation is no joke… The postman stopped coming… He must have had orders… We wouldn’t have been so depressed if we’d had some butter… or even a little margarine… It’s indispensable in the winter!… About then Courtial began to have terrible nausea… when the cold got so intense and we were eating less and less… He had some kind of enteritis, really very bad… He had awful bellyaches… He writhed in the straw… It wasn’t from food!… He talked it over with the old girl and they took up the question of enemas… Should he take one?… Or would it be better if he didn’t?…

  “But you haven’t got anything in your bowels!…” she said. “How can you have rumblings?… Colic doesn’t start up all by itself…”

  “I tell you I can feel it going through! Jesus!… It was twisting my bowels all night!… It’s a dry colic… It ties my guts up in knots!… Oh! Oh!…”

  “It’s the cold, you poor dope!…”

  “It’s not the cold!…”

  “Then it’s hunger?…”

  “No, I’m not hungry!… I feel like throwing up!…”

  “Oh, you don’t know what you want!…”

  He didn’t answer… He burrowed into his straw… He didn’t want to be talked to…

  In the agricultural line there was really nothing more he could do… There was no more gas in the shed, not even a single can to start the thing up with!…

  Two more days passed… in waiting and prostration… Our old ladylove, huddled in a corner, muffled in curtains, couldn’t stand it any more, her teeth were chattering fit to crack… She climbed up to the loft and got some more sacks!… She cut herself out a kind of smock like the kids wore and a good stiff kilt. She put them on over her trousers and padded herself out with cotton waste!… It made her look like a Zulu!… She thought it was funny-looking herself!… The cold makes you laugh something awful!… She was still cold, so she started cavorting around!… Clattering her wooden shoes, hey nonny nonny, around the big heavy table! The kids split a gut watching her!… They joined her in a kind of snake dance!… They ran after her… They hung on her shirt-tails… She sang a little song:

  “See the miller’s daughter

  Dancing with the boys –

  The poor thing’s lost her garter,

  Her garter, her garter…”

  These kittenish spells didn’t come over Mother Courtial very often!… It took a special occasion… She had nothing left to chew… Courtial had taken all the tobacco!… She started griping a little about her pipe… The kids tore her apart at the seams… They pushed her down in the straw!…

  “Goddamn it to blazes!” she hollered at them. “Shove off, the whole lot of you!… You swivel-eyed, mangy snot noses! Leeches!… Floozies!…” That made them laugh still harder…

  “Courtial, listen!…” He wouldn’t listen… He burrowed his head in his hole… He sighed… He groaned… it was his belly and the roughhousing!… The kids jumped on him, the four boys and the three girls! He still wouldn’t answer.

  A little later we began wondering what had become of Dudule… He’d been out a good two hours… supposedly relieving himself… We were all good and worried!… It was nightfall by the time he got back!… He was loaded to the gunwales… He’d covered twelve kilometres… to Persant station and back at full speed!… He’d raised a real windfall on the freight platform… What a deal!… A shipment of groceries!… He’d brought us butter, a huge chunk!… Two complete strings of sausages!… Three baskets of eggs… andouilles, jam and foie gras!… He’d even taken their wheelbarrow… He’d snaffled the whole business outside the baggage room while the men were over in the switch house trying to get warm… It hadn’t taken Dudule two minutes to walk off with his whole cargo! The only thing missing was bread… but that didn’t keep us from throwing a banquet!… A real spread!… We built our fire way up high! We threw on pretty near a whole tree!…

  When he heard what was going on, des Pereires woke up completely… He got up to eat… He started guzzling so fast it took his breath away. He was holding his belly in both hands… “Oh my, oh my, oh my!…” he sighed from time to time… The old cutie didn’t need to be asked twice either!… In a few minutes she was so stuffed she had to lie down… She rolled over on the ground… from
her belly to her back… very slowly… “Oh, gracious goodness, goodness gracious, Courtial! It won’t go down! Mm, was I hungry!…” The kids kept going off to vomit in the corners… Then they came back and funnelled in some more… Dudule’s dog was so bloated up he was howling blue murder!… “Ah! My children!” des Pereires kept saying. “Ah, the dear little angels! Ah, my dear darlings! Oh my oh my! It was high time! Ah, there’s nothing like it!” He was in seventh heaven!… “Ah, it was high time! Oh my, oh my!… There’s nothing like it!…” That was all he could say. He couldn’t get over the miracle…

  * * *

  It must have been about five o’clock… there was no sign of daylight… when I heard Courtial stirring in the hay… He was getting up… I figured the time by the fireplace… the fire was almost out… I say to myself: “There he goes, he’s hungry!… He can’t take the cold… He’s going to make himself some coffee… We’ll all have some!… Bueno!…” He actually did make for the kitchen… That was perfectly natural… I hear him fiddling with the coffee pots… I felt like joining him and tossing down a cup… But between my nest and the door the kids were all sleeping… bunched up together, with their heads every which way… I was afraid of stepping on them… So I stayed in my hole… After all I wasn’t too cold… I was sheltered by the wall… I was catching less breeze than the old-timer. I was only frozen stiff. I waited for him to come back with the coffee pot, I’d stop him on the way… But he was taking his time… He was padding around in the distance… For a long time I heard him clattering pots and pans… And then I heard him opening the door onto the road… The thought passed through my mind: “He’s gone out to take a leak…” I didn’t get it… I kept waiting for him to come back… I was worried for a second… I almost got up… And then I fell back asleep… I was in a torpor.

  * * *