Repetition

by Alain Robbe-Grillet

  And now, all of a sudden, I find I am three steps away from him. He has sat down on a big boulder which I immediately identify by its welcoming curve, having often sat there myself. Instinctively I have stopped, uncertain, alarmed to pass so close to the intruder. But then he has turned toward me and I dare not fail to continue on my way, with a perhaps slightly more hesitant gait, lowering my head to avoid meeting his gaze. He had a blackish scab on his right knee, doubtless the consequence of a recent fall among these rocks. I had skinned my knee in the same way only the day before yesterday. And in my anxiety, I couldn’t help raising my eyes toward his face. His expression was one of anxious sympathy, vigilant and perhaps faintly incredulous. And there could no longer be any doubt: he was me all right. It was dark now. Without waiting a moment longer, I began running as fast as I could.

  Today, once again, I had resorted to this cowardly measure, flight. But I had immediately got back on the damn train, inhabited by recollections and ghosts, where the passengers for the most part seemed present only to undo me. The mission I was assigned forbade me to leave the train at the first stop, whatever it might be. I had to stay among these six malevolent men who resembled undertaker’s mutes, in this car that reeked of sulfur, until the Berlin-Lichtenberg station, where I would be met by a man who answered to the name of Pierre Garin. A new aspect of my absurd situation becomes evident to me now. If the traveler reaches the station hall before me, Pierre Garin will obviously walk toward him to greet him, with all the more assurance since he does not yet know that the new Henri Robin is wearing a mustache.…

  Two hypotheses are to be entertained: either the usurper is merely someone who resembles me like a twin brother, and Pierre Garin runs the risk of betraying himself, of betraying us, before the misunderstanding is revealed; or else the traveler is actually me—that is, my veritable duplication—and, in that case … Come off it! Such a supposition is hardly realistic. That I, in my Breton childhood, in a country of witches, ghosts, and all kinds of apparitions, had suffered from identity problems regarded as serious by certain doctors is one thing. It would be quite another to imagine myself, thirty years later, the victim of an evil spell. In any case, it is incumbent upon me to be the first one Pierre Garin will see.

  The Lichtenberg station is in ruins, and I feel all the more disoriented here because I’m accustomed to using Zoo-Bahnhof, in the former capital’s western sector. Among the first passengers to disembark from my hapless train, poisoned by the sulfur fumes, and discovering at this very moment that it will be continuing north (to Stralsund and Sassnitz, on the Baltic), I enter the underground tunnel which leads to several subway lines, and in my haste I mistake my direction. Fortunately there is only one exit, so I return to the right platform, where, heaven be thanked, I immediately recognize Pierre Garin at the top of the stairs, still quite phlegmatic-looking despite the fact that we’re considerably later than the time posted on the station schedule.

  Pierre is not, strictly speaking, a friend, but a cordial Service colleague, a little older than I, whose duties have more than once overlapped my own. He has never inspired me with blind faith, nor with any particular mistrust, on the other hand. He is taciturn, and I’ve had reason to admire his effectiveness on all the occasions we’ve worked together. And he, I believe, must have admired mine, for it is because of his specific request that I’ve come to Berlin, as a backup for this highly unorthodox investigation. Without shaking my hand, which is not something we do in the Service, he merely asks: “Good trip? No special problems?”

  At that very moment, as the train was leaving Bitterfeld with its customary slowness, I caught sight of the mistrustful Feldgendarme standing on the platform near the guard post. He had picked up the telephone receiver and in his other hand was holding his little notebook open, consulting it as he spoke. “No,” I answered, “everything was fine. Just a little late.”

  “Thanks for telling me. I managed to figure that out for myself.”

  The irony of his remark was not accompanied by a smile or the slightest relaxation of his features. I therefore abandoned this subject of conversation. “And here?”

  “Here, everything’s all right. Except that I almost missed you. The first traveler up the stairs when the train came in looked exactly like you. I was within an ace of speaking to him. He didn’t seem to know me, though. I was about to follow him out, thinking you wanted to bump into me by chance outside the station, but I remembered your fine new mustache just in time. Yes, Fabien had warned me.”

  Near the supposedly public phone, guarded nevertheless by a Russian policeman, were standing three men in the traditional green overcoats and soft felt hats. They had no luggage, and seemed to be waiting for something, not speaking among themselves. Every now and then one or another of them turned toward us. I’m sure they were keeping an eye on us. I asked Garin: “Exactly like me, you say … without a fake moustache.… Do you think he could have something to do with our business?”

  “You never know. You have to keep all the possibilities in mind,” Pierre Garin answered in a neutral tone of voice, jaunty as well as scrupulous to a fault. Maybe he was surprised, without showing it, by a supposition he regarded as preposterous. From now on, I would have to be more careful about what I said.

  In his cramped secondhand car, painted with filthy military camouflage, we drove in silence, though from time to time my companion pointed out, amid the ruins, what had been here during the Third Reich. It was like a guided tour of some now vanished ancient city, Hieropolis, Thebes, or Corinth. After many detours, caused by streets not yet cleared, or else condemned, and several reconstruction sites, we reached the old center city, where almost all the buildings were more than half destroyed but seemed to rise up as we passed in all their splendor, for a few seconds, at my cicerone’s phantom descriptions, which required no commentary from me.

  Once past the mythic Alexanderplatz, the very existence of which was no longer identifiable, we crossed the two successive arms of the Spree and turned into what had once been Unter der Linden, between Humboldt University and the Opera. The restoration of this neighborhood of monuments, all too laden with recent history, did not constitute, it appeared, a priority for the new regime. We turned left just before the uncertain vestiges of the Fried-richstrasse, made a few more turns this way and that in a labyrinth of ruins where my chauffeur seemed quite at home, finally coming out at the square where Frederick the Great’s cavalry was stabled, which Kierkegaard considered the finest square in Berlin, in the winter twilight under a now limpid sky where the first stars were beginning to appear.

  Just at the corner of the Jägerstrasse, at number 57 of this formerly middle-class street, there is one house still standing, more or less habitable and doubtless partly inhabited. This was where we were heading. Pierre Garin does the honors of the place. We go upstairs. There is no electricity, but on each landing there is an old-fashioned oil lamp spreading a vague reddish glow. Outside, it will soon be quite dark. Someone opens a little door, its central panel marked at the height of a man’s eyes by two brass initials (J.K.), and we’re in the entrance hall. To the left, a glass door leads toward an office. We walk straight ahead; we are in an antechamber off which open two identical rooms, scantily but identically furnished as well, as if you are seeing a room doubled in a big mirror.

  The farther room is lit by an imitation-bronze candlestick with three lit candles in it, set on a rectangular table, in front of which seems to be waiting, at a slight angle, a Louis XV–style armchair in poor condition, upholstered in threadbare red velvet, shiny in spots where it is worn and soiled, and elsewhere gray with dust. Facing old torn curtains which are meant to cover the window, there is also a huge armoire, really no more than a crate made of the same stained maple as the table. On the latter, between the candlestick and the armchair, a sheet of white paper seems to quiver under the vacillating flames of the candles. For the second time today, I experience the violent impression of a fleeting childhood memory. But
, ineffable and elusive, this vanishes immediately.

  The nearer room is not illuminated. There is not even a candle in the lead-alloy sconce. The window recess has no glass or frame, and through it penetrates the cold air from outside as well as the pale glow of the moon, which mingles with the warmer light, much attenuated by distance, that comes from the farther room. Here both doors of the armoire are wide open, revealing the empty shelves. The seat of the armchair is split open, a tuft of black horsehair sticking up through a triangular rip. One heads irresistibly toward the bluish rectangle of the missing window frame.

  Pierre Garin, still quite casual, points to the remarkable structures surrounding the square, or at least which surrounded it in the days of Frederick the Great, and up until the apocalypse of the last world war: the Hoftheater in the center, the French Church to the right, and the New Church to the left, curiously alike despite the antagonism of the confessions, with the same statue at the top of a round steeple above the same quadruple portals with neoclassical columns. All this has collapsed, now no more than huge piles of carved stone in which can still be discerned, under the unreal light of a glacial full moon, the acanthus of a capital, the drapery of a colossal statue, the oval shape of an oeil-de-boeuf.

  In the middle of the square rises the massive pedestal, barely chipped by the bombardments, of some now vanished allegorical bronze group symbolizing the power and the glory of princes by the evocation of a terrible legendary episode, or else representing something altogether different, for nothing is more enigmatic than an allegory. Franz Kafka certainly contemplated this monument, just a quarter of a century ago,1 when he was living in its immediate vicinity with Dora Dymant during the last winter of his brief existence. Wilhelm von Humboldt, Heinrich Heine, and Voltaire also lived on this square.

  * * *

  Note 1 – The narrator, himself unreliable, who calls himself by the fictive name of Henri Robin, here commits a slight error. After spending the summer on a Baltic beach, Franz Kafka moved to Berlin for a final stay, with Dora this time, in September 1923, and returned to Prague in April 1924, already deathly ill. H.R.’s narrative occurs at the beginning of winter “four years after the armistice,” hence toward the end of 1949. Hence it is twenty-six years, and not twenty-five, between his presence on the scene and Kafka’s. The mistake cannot concern the calculation of “four years”: three years after the armistice (which would come to a quarter of a century), that is, at the end of 1948, would actually be impossible, for that would locate H.R.’s trip during the Soviet Union’s blockade of Berlin (from June ’48 to May ’49).

  * * *

  “Here we are,” Pierre Garin said. “Our client—let’s call him X—is supposed to come here, right in front of us, on the stroke of midnight. He would have an appointment at the base of the missing statue, which celebrates the victory of the Prussian king over the Saxons, with the man whom we believe to be his murderer. Your role is limited, for the moment, to observing the entire scene and recording it with your usual exactitude. There’s a pair of night binoculars in the drawer of the table, the one in the other room. But it isn’t calibrated properly. And with this lucky moonlight, you can see almost as well as in broad daylight.”

  “This probable victim you’re calling X—we do of course know his identity?”

  “No. Just a few suppositions, moreover contradictory ones.”

  “What is it that we’re supposing?”

  “It would take too long to explain and would be of no use to you. In a sense, it might even distort your objective scrutiny of the persons and actions involved, which must remain as impartial as possible. I’ll leave you for now. I’m already late, on account of your rotten train. Here’s the key to the little ‘J.K.’ door, the only one which lets you in to the apartment.”

  “Who’s J.K.?”

  “I haven’t a clue. Probably the former owner, or tenant, annihilated one way or another in the final cataclysm. You can imagine anything you like: Johannes Kepler, Joseph Kessel, John Keats, Joris Karl, Jacob Kaplan.… The house is abandoned; only squatters are left, and ghosts.”

  I didn’t insist further. Pierre Garin seemed in a hurry to leave all of a sudden. I accompanied him to the door, which I locked behind him. I went back into the farther room and sat down in the armchair. In the table drawer, indeed, were the Soviet binoculars for night vision, but also a 7.65 automatic pistol,2 a ballpoint pen, and a box of matches. I took the pen, closed the drawer, and moved my armchair closer to the table. On the white sheet of paper, in tiny script without making any mistakes, I began my narrative without a single hesitation:

  During the endless train journey which took me from Eisenach to Berlin across a Thuringia and Saxony in ruins, I noticed, for the first time in I don’t know how long, that man whom I call my double, to simplify matters, or else my twin, or again and less theatrically, the traveler. The train was moving at an uncertain and discontinuous rhythm, etc., etc.

  * * *

  Note 2 – This erroneous indication seems much more serious to us than the preceding one. We shall return to this matter.

  * * *

  At eleven-fifty, after blowing out the three candles, I installed myself in the armchair with the split seat in front of the other room’s gaping window recess. The military binoculars, as Pierre Garin had predicted, were of no use to me. The moon, higher in the sky now, shone with a raw, pitiless, rigorous brilliance. I contemplated the empty pedestal, in the middle of the square, and a hypothetical bronze group gradually appeared to me, with a kind of obviousness, casting a black shadow which was remarkably distinct, considering its delicate chasing, on a thoroughly flattened area of the whitish background. What was apparently there was an antique chariot drawn at a furious gallop by two nervous steeds, their manes flowing in wild locks on the wind, and in the chariot stand several probably emblematic figures whose artificial attitudes seemed alien to the supposed speed of the race. Standing ahead of the others, brandishing a long coachman’s whip with its serpentine lash above the horses’ croups, the figure driving the chariot is an old man of noble stature, crowned with a diadem. This might be a representation of King Frederick himself, but the monarch is clad in a sort of toga (leaving the right shoulder bare), its folds fluttering around him in harmonious undulations.

  Behind this figure stand two young men braced on powerful legs, each drawing the string of a long bow, their arrows pointed ahead, one to the right, one to the left, the angle between them about thirty degrees. The two archers are not exactly side by side, but half a stride apart, in order to allow them room to aim. Their chins are high, as if they are peering at something on the distant horizon. Their modest costume—a sort of stiff loincloth, with nothing to protect the upper body—suggests that they are of a lower, not patrician order.

  Between them and the driver of the chariot, a young bare-breasted woman is seated on cushions, her posture recalling that of the Lorelei or the little Mermaid of Copenhagen. The still-adolescent grace of her features, as of her body, is allied to a proud, almost haughty expression. Is she the living idol of the temple, offered for a single evening to the admiration of the prostrate crowds? Is she a captive princess whom her ravisher carries by force to some unnatural nuptials? Is she a spoilt child whose indulgent papa seeks to divert her by this ride in an open carriage, flashing along through the overwhelming heat of a summer evening?

  But now a man appears in the empty square, as if he had emerged from the dramatic ruins of the Hoftheater. And at once vanishes the nocturnal density of imaginary Orients, the golden palace of the sacrifice, the ecstatic crowds, the flamboyant chariot of the mythological Eros.… The tall outline of the man who must be X is enlarged by a long close-fitting cloak of some very dark color; the lower part (under a belt which indicates the waist) widens as he walks, thanks to great pleats in the heavy material, his polished riding boots then appearing one after the other with each stride. At first he heads toward my observation post, where I remain hidden in the shadows; then
, without breaking his stride, he turns slowly, his bold gaze sweeping the surroundings, but without lingering; and immediately, heading toward his right, he advances boldly toward the again empty pedestal, which seems to be waiting.

  Just before he reaches it, a shot rings out. No aggressor is visible. The gunman must have been concealed behind a patch of wall or in some gaping window recess. X raises his leather-gloved left hand to his chest and then, with a certain deliberation and as if in slow motion, falls to his knees. … A second shot rings out in the silence, loud and clear, followed by a strong echo. The amplification of the noise by the echo prevents localizing its origin or estimating the precise nature of the weapon which has produced it. But the wounded man still manages to turn the upper part of his body and to raise his head in my direction before collapsing on the ground, while a third explosion rings out.

  X no longer moves, lying on his back in the dust, arms and legs outstretched. Two men soon rush into the square. Wearing the heavy canvas overalls associated with construction workers, heads covered by fur caps resembling Polish chapskas, they run quite recklessly toward the victim. It is impossible, considering the distant point from which they entered the square, to suspect them of the murder. But might they be accomplices? Two steps away from the body, they suddenly stop and remain motionless for a moment, staring at the marble face, which the moon turns quite livid. The taller of the two then removes his cap with a respectful gesture and bows in a sort of ceremonious homage. The other man, without removing his cap, makes the sign of the cross over his own chest and shoulders. Three minutes later they cross the square diagonally, walking fast, one behind the other. I don’t believe they have exchanged a single word.