Repetition

by Alain Robbe-Grillet

  “Dance hostess.”

  “At your age? In that dress?”

  “There’s no particular age for work like that, as you ought to know, Monsieur Frenchman. As far as the dress goes, it’s compulsory in the cabaret where I’m a waitress, among other things.… It reminds the German officers of their absent families!”

  HR has turned toward the promising nymph, who takes advantage of this movement to emphasize the irony of her observation by a naughty wink, behind a lock of hair that has fallen over one eyelid and her cheek. Her indecent gesture seems all the more suggestive in that the young lady has tucked up to her waist her full skirt, with its carefully pressed pleats, in order to adjust in front of the mirror her rather too loose panties, being careful not to let the appropriate gaps disappear. Her bare legs are smooth and suntanned all the way to the top of her thighs, as if this were still high summer at the beach. He asks: “Who’s this W whose pajamas I’m wearing?”

  “Walther, of course!”

  “And who’s Walther?”

  “Walther von Brücke, my half-brother. You saw him yesterday in the vacation photograph, the one at the seashore in the salon downstairs.”

  “Does he live here?”

  “Of course not! Thank God! The house had been empty and closed for a long time when Io moved in, at the end of ’46. That donkey Walther had to get himself killed as a hero on the Russian front during the German retreat.10 Or else he’s rotting in a camp somewhere in the wilds of Siberia.”

  * * *

  Note 10 – Unpleasant to her colleagues whenever she has the chance, our budding trollop employs her customary effrontery here. And merely for the gratuitous pleasure of lying, for no Service directive provided this absurd detail, all too easy to refute.

  * * *

  Gigi, who has meanwhile reopened the creaking door of the big armoire, only half of which is fitted out as a closet, now searches frantically among the clothes, lingerie, and trinkets heaped up in great confusion on the shelves, apparently looking for some little object she fails to find. A belt? A handkerchief? A piece of costume jewelry? In her exasperation she drops on the floor a delicate high-heeled black slipper whose triangular vamp is entirely covered with blue sequins. HR asks if she has lost something, but she doesn’t bother to reply. Yet she must have laid her hand on what she was looking for, some very discreet accessory of an unimaginable nature, for when she closes the armoire again and turns back toward him it is with, quite suddenly, her first smile. He asks: “If I’m not mistaken, I’m using your room?”

  “No, not really. You saw the size of the beds! But it’s the only mirror in the house where you can see yourself from head to toe.… Besides, it used to be my room, in the old days … practically from birth, until 1940. … I was five. I used to play I was two people, because of the two beds and the two bowls. Some days I was W, and others I was M. Though they were twins, they must have been quite different from each other. I made up special habits for each of them, and very marked characters, personal peculiarities, notions, and ways of behaving that were totally opposed to each other. …I was careful to respect the imaginary identity of each one.”

  “What’s become of M?”

  “Nothing. Markus von Brücke died when he was very young.… Would you like me to open the curtains?”

  “Why bother. Didn’t you say it was a dark night?”

  “It doesn’t matter. You’ll see! There’s no window anyway.…”

  Having regained her juvenile exuberance for no obvious reason, the girl takes three elastic leaps over the blue-striped mattress, crossing the space separating the mirrored armoire from the closely drawn curtains, which she slides with both hands in opposite directions across their gilded metal rod, the wooden rings dividing the curtains right and left with a loud clicking noise, as though to make room, in their median separation, for the expected stage of a theater. But behind the heavy curtains there is nothing but the wall.

  This wall, as a matter of fact, contains no sort of bay or window in the old style, nor the slightest opening of any kind, except in trompe l’oeil: a painted window frame looking out on an imaginary exterior, both painted on the plaster with an amazing effect of tangible presence, accentuated by tiny spotlights ingeniously arranged so that the gesture of opening the curtains must have turned them on. Framed by a classic French window, the wood of which was rep resented with hypertrophic realism, the molding showing every last scratch or defect in the grain, its iron bolt rusted in places, and beyond the twelve rectangular panes (two rows of three in each “door”) appears a ruined landscape of war. Dead or dying men lie here and there among the rubble, wearing the greenish, easily identifiable uniforms of the Wehrmacht. Most have lost their helmets. A column of disarmed prisoners, in the same more or less ragged and filthy uniforms, vanishes into the distance to the right, guarded by Russian soldiers covering them with the short barrels of their automatic assault rifles.

  In the foreground, life-size and so close that he seems two steps away from the house, staggers a wounded noncommissioned officer, also a German, blinded by a hastily improvised bandage around his head from ear to ear, stained red over his eyes. Moreover, some blood has trickled under this bandage and around his nostrils down to his mustache. His right hand, held out in front of his face, fingers spread wide, seems to beat the air ahead of him for fear of some possible obstacle. And yet a blond girl of thirteen or fourteen, dressed like a little Ukrainian or Bulgarian peasant, is holding his left hand to guide him, or more precisely to pull him toward that improbable and providential window which she has been struggling to reach since the beginning of time, her free (left) hand extended toward the miraculously intact panes, where she is about to knock in the hope of finding some help, some refuge in any case, not so much for herself as for this blind man she has taken charge of, God knows with what obscure intentions.… Upon closer consideration, it appears that this charitable child distinctly resembles Gigi. In her exertions, she has lost the bright-colored cloth which in normal circumstances would cover her head. The golden locks flutter around her head, her features excited by this bold course through unknown perils.… After a long silence, she murmurs in an incredulous tone of voice, as if she can scarcely admit the existence of the picture:

  “It must have been Walther who painted that crazy thing, to take his mind off … everything.”

  “And there was no real window in the children’s room?”

  “Yes, of course there was! … Overlooking the back garden, there were even some big trees … and goats. It must have been walled up later, for unknown reasons, probably at the very beginning of the siege of Berlin. Io says the mural was painted during the final battle by my half-brother, who was caught here on his last leave.”11

  In the distance, to the left, appear several ruined monuments recalling ancient Greece, with a series of columns broken at various heights, a gaping portico, fragments of architraves and fallen capitals. A strayed black kid-goat has climbed up on one of these heaps, as if to contemplate the historical situation. If the artist has sought to represent a specific episode (a personal recollection or a story told by a comrade) of World War II, it might concern the Soviet offensive in Macedonia during December 1944. Dark clouds spread in long parallel strips above the hills. The carcass of a destroyed tank aims its huge useless cannon at the sky. A grove of pine trees apparently keeps the Russian troops from seeing our two fugitives, with whom of course I identify myself on account of my present tribulations, actually discovering in the man’s features and physique a certain resemblance to my own.

  * * *

  Note 11 – The unpredictable Guégué, for once in her life, is not making something up but accurately reporting some correct information furnished by her mother. Except for one detail: I had not reached the banks of the Spree on leave, which would scarcely have been conceivable in the spring of ’45, but on the contrary on a highly dangerous “special contact mission,” which the Russo-Polish offensive, launched on April 22, imm
ediately rendered null and void. Unfortunately or fortunately, who can ever say? Note as well—and it is anything but surprising—that the girl doesn’t seem at all concerned about a certain incoherence in her remarks: if I am in Berlin during the final assault, I can hardly be dead a few months earlier, during rearguard skirmishes in the Ukraine, Byelorussia, or Poland, as she appeared to believe likely a few moments earlier.

  As for the presence of Greek ruins on the distant hills remarked by the narrator, this was merely—if I remember correctly—a sort of mirror image of those already appearing in the big allegorical scene which, from my earliest childhood, hung on the opposite wall of this children’s room. It might also be a reference, though, or an unconscious homage to the painter Lovis Corinth, whose work once had a strong influence on my own, almost as much, I suspect, as that of Caspar David Friedrich, who struggled all his life on the island of Rügen to express what David d’Angers calls “the tragedy of landscape.” But the style adopted for the mural in question doesn’t have much to do with either one, except maybe for the latter’s dramatic skies; what mattered for me was to portray in the minutest detail an authentic and personal image of war, directly from the front.

  Reference to my beloved Friedrich leads me to correct an incomprehensible error (unless, once again, this was an intentional falsification for an obscure motive) committed by the so-called Henri Robin concerning the geological nature of the soil on the German coast of the Baltic. Caspar David Friedrich, as a matter of fact, has produced countless canvases representing the sparkling marble, or more prosaically the luminous white chalk cliffs which have made Rügen so famous. That our scrupulous chronicler should have retained the memory of enormous blocks of granite, resembling the Armorican boulders of his childhood, quite bewilders me, the more so since his solid agronomist’s training, which he deliberately mentions (or even parades, some say), should have kept him from falling into this unlikely confusion; in this northern region, the old Hercynian shelf never extends beyond the overwhelming Harz massif, where moreover so many Celtic and Germanic legends are to be met with: the magical forest of the Perthes, which is another Brocéliande, and the young witches of the Walpurgisnacht.

  Among these, the one who concerns us now, and whom we designate in our messages by the code name GG (or else 2G), might be the worst kind, one of the unreal legion of barely nubile flower maidens in the power of the Arthuro-Wagnerian wizard Klingsor. While attempting to keep her under control, I must for the sake of the cause pretend to submit to her almost daily extravagances and indulge her in whims of which I might gradually become the accomplice, without being entirely conscious of a spell which would inexorably lead me to a perhaps imminent death … or worse still, to loss of willpower and madness.…

  Already I wonder if it is really an accident that she happened to be on my path. I was prowling that day around Father’s house, where I had not set foot since the surrender. I knew that Dany had returned to Berlin but was staying somewhere else, probably in the Russian zone, more or less clandestinely, and that Jo, his second wife, whom he had to repudiate in 1940, had just taken up residence on the premises with the blessing of the American Secret Service. Rigged out with a false mustache and big dark glasses, which on principle I wear on days that are too bright (to protect my eyes, still delicate ever since my wound of October ’44 in Transylvania), with a broad-brimmed hat pulled down over my forehead, I ran no risk of being recognized by my young mother-in-law (she’s fifteen years younger than I), if she had taken it into her head to come outside at that very moment. Standing in front of the open door, I pretended to be interested in the varnished wood panel of recent manufacture, decorated with elegant hand-painted scrollwork meant to reproduce the 1900-type hardware that constituted the old fence, as if I just happened to be looking for dolls, or else had some to sell, a supposition which would not, in a sense, have been entirely mistaken.

  Then, looking up toward the still-appealing family villa, I was astonished to discover (how could I have failed to notice it when I arrived?) that just above the door, with its high rectangular spy hole, its glass protected by massive cast-iron arabesques, the central window upstairs was wide open, which was hardly unusual in this warm autumn day. In the open space was standing a feminine figure which at first I took for a shop-window mannequin, so perfect did her immobility seem, at that distance, the hypothesis of such a display, boldly facing the street, seeming moreover quite likely, given the commercial nature of the premises advertised on the wooden panel serving as a signboard. As for the type of life-size doll selected to lure the customer (a slender adolescent girl with blond curls in suggestive disarray, presented in an outrageously transparent outfit, permitting, no, insisting on the attraction of her promising girlish charms), it could only reinforce the equivocal—not to say prostitutional—character of the handwritten sign, the traffic in minors for sexual purposes likely to be, in today’s ruined Berlin, much more widespread than that of children’s toys or wax figures for fashionable shops.

  After carefully verifying one lexical detail referring to the sign’s possible implications, I looked up toward the second floor.… The image had changed. It was no longer an erotic effigy from some wax museum whose budding attractions were exhibited at the window, but indeed a very young girl, very much alive, wriggling there in a fashion as excessive as it was incomprehensible, leaning forward over the railing with her transparent slip clinging now to just one shoulder, the already- loosened straps gradually coming undone. Yet even her most extreme gestures and attitudes retained a strange grace which suggested some delirious Cambodian Apsaras undulating her six arms in all directions, her slender waist rippling as delicately as her swanlike neck. Her reddish gold head of hair, illuminated by the afternoon sun, flamed around an angelic countenance of sensual curves, giving off sparks like a young dragon hatching from her chrysalis.

  The scene which follows this first apparition remains, even today, tender and affecting in my memory. It was two days later, at nightfall. Since I was not troubled by legalistic issues in those actually not so remote days, nor even with saving appearances, the organization of anti-Nazi pseudo-resistants I belonged to at the time being nothing more, it must be admitted, than a criminal mafia (pimping, selling bad drugs, forging documents, ransoming former dignitaries of the fallen regime, etc.) that flourished in the shadow of the NKVD, which we supplied with all sorts of precious information, not counting our substantial assistance for particularly dangerous violent actions in the Western sectors, I quite simply had the interesting nymph kidnapped, in order to examine her in greater comfort, by three Yugoslav thugs, former deported workers left to their own devices since the collapse of the regime and the closing of the war factories.

  So she finds herself transported to our Treptow headquarters, near the park but in an odd zone of abandoned warehouses and ruined offices, between a railroad freight yard and the river. Despite the blockade, crossing the demarcation lines was no problem for us, even when our luggage included a cumbersome trunk (containing an adolescent girl half-unconscious as a result of the obligatory injection, struggling faintly, as if dreaming … or at least pretending to do so). For from that moment on, I found it strange that she should react to her abduction with such insouciance or such sangfroid.

  Doctor Juan (Juan Ramirez, whom we always call by what is in fact his given name, but pronounced in the French way), who possessed a huge and convenient, though fake, Red Cross ambulance, was on the mission, as usual, to oversee the psychological or medical aspects of the operation. At the checkpoint (the bridge over the Spree that becomes the Warschauerstrasse), he presented with great assurance an internment order to a psychiatric hospital in Lichtenberg which was part of the Narodnyû komissariat. The man on duty, impressed by Doctor Juan’s Lenin goatee and his steel-rimmed glasses, as well as by the many official stamps on the document, gave a quick routine glance at our young captive, whom two Serbs, dressed up as interns, were holding in their manly grip, with no great diffic
ulty, I might add. All these men showed Soviet passes in good order. The girl had decided to smile, with a lost expression that fit the scenario perfectly. But here too there was some occasion for surprise—that she took no advantage of the police check in order to call for help, especially since, as I learned subsequently, she speaks German very well and manages quite handsomely in Russian. Moreover Doctor Juan had made it clear to us that a little syringe of some harmless sedative could not have reduced her consciousness of the external world and of the imminent dangers threatening her to that degree.

  Once past the military post, our intrepid captive emerged from her momentary lethargy, again struggling to see something through the filthy windows, doubtless hoping to recognize, in the almost nonexistent municipal lighting, which streets the vehicle was taking. In short, she was sabotaging my plan of operations. What I wanted above all was to scare her to death. And she, on the contrary, seemed to be having fun, becoming, thanks to us, the heroine of a grown-up comic strip. And whenever she made efforts to escape or suddenly yielded to panic, this always occurred in the absence of outside witnesses and gave rise to the stereotypical audacities of a theatrical tomboy enjoying her theatrical situation.

  Once she was in our lair—a series of workshops still full of archaic machines which might have served for work on fresh pelts: stretching, depilating, and branding with hot irons, but also for the flaying of precious furs, or more simply for their meticulous laceration, or anything else of the same kind—the girl became quite curious about these installations and their problematic use, raising or lowering her eyes toward the stirrups, winches, and pulleys, the big steel chains dangling terrifying hooks, a carpet of raised needles, a long table of polished metal with its cylinder of compressed air, giant circular saws with huge sharp-edged teeth.… Continuing, during this inspection, to ask preposterous questions which invariably received no answer, she occasionally uttered tiny shrieks of horror, as if we were taking her on a tour of some museum of tortures, and then, suddenly, she would put a hand over her mouth as if bursting into peals of laughter, for no discernible reason, like a schoolgirl on a class trip.