North

by Louis-Ferdinand Celine

  The two of us there with our messkits, hominids or not, we’d picked the tight time … big platters of butterbrot on the bed! … piles of sandwiches and cookies … we looked bright with our two messkits that weren’t even warm! … best thing, give them to Iago … he must be back from his virtue tour, hauling the old man around, showing how thin he was … I whisper in Le Vigan’s ear … damn! … the Gypsy’s heard me … “Allez-y! … allez-y!”

  She yells at us … she throws us out … she knew who we were … those people find dungs out quick … their wagon only got there this morning! … in French she throws us out! … allez-y! go on! … let’s take a look at this brazen hussy’s face … not much light, two candles … the trick is adjusting your eye, like in the X-ray room … now I see her, she’s squatting on the floor, shuffling the cards … right now the cards are a disease … soldiers, civilians, prisoners, everybody … wherever you go … they’ve got it … the lure of the future! … ah, Harras! looking for an “Apocalypse”! a dread epidemic!

  It’s Lili’s turn … but the two of us, Le Vig and me, have to clear out first! … the Gypsy won’t do it in our presence!

  “Gehen sie, doch!”

  The cards look bad … must be something about the police!

  Harras is in Portugal … if I contacted the other fatheads across the way they’d just come over and have their fortunes told, I wouldn’t put it past them … but this Gypsy is impatient! …

  “Los! … los!”

  Hoarse voice … practically like a man … she’s painted, only time for a quick look, blue lashes and eyebrows … that must be a wig, not her hair … a blond wig! … I don’t believe she likes to be scrutinized … oh well, I don’t want to make trouble … we slip out quietly with our messkits … so the ladies can get back to the future! … say, that’s a lot of Fortresses … not in the future, right now! right on top of us! … squadron on squadron, and real, not in the cards! … and they’re not worried, they’re flying in formation below the clouds … maybe a thousand feet … if that! … with all their lights blinking, to show that this is their stamping ground, that the whole German air space belongs to them, not just the capital and environs, and they’re going to smash everything to bits! … craters and phosphorus! turn the whole place upside down, the ruins of the Spree, Adolf and his Chancellery, and his Obersturms and bunkers … even the cemeteries!

  But what about our coupons? … I’m thinking … our Landrat ought to do something about them … he could make confetti out of them! … okay!

  “Hold on to the banister!”

  Down to the cellar now … the corridor … Iago must be there … the old man had come in, I’d seen his bicycle down below, leaning against a pillar … we hoped Iago wouldn’t bite … Le Vig suggests: “you go, he knows you” … I put one messkit down on the floor … I call “Iago!” he’s willing … three slurps … it’s gone! … I give him the other … three more slurps … nice Iago! … we’re pals! it’s easy! … we’ll go back to the “bibels” … they’ve got too much! if you don’t play God yourself … a fair distribution of property … you’re sure to die crazed with indignation, with suppressing too much anger … I know what I’m saying … I’m about to myself … I was telling you about the literary scene, what a racket it is! … and the abominable taste of the public! … I’m used to dissections and very advanced subjects, but my heart quails when I think of the books that come out and the comments … there are no hairier crummier scolopendra in all the Sargasso Sea than enlightened readers … eaters of dialectical excrement, tangled in seaweed, in phrases that twist like octopuses, breathtaking “messages” … sensational muck bubbles … one glimpse at those bottoms of nothing can extinguish your senses of vision, taste, and smell forever …

  Iago was no octopus, but if we’d frightened him he could easily have eaten us … not a false step, we were very careful … he understood us perfectly … he wasn’t a greedy beast … but he was really at the end of his rope … the main thing was getting him used to us … since I was digging into the cupboard, cigarettes to exchange for food … If Harras came back … he’d see … he was getting his three squares in Portugal … why should we suffer all the privations of the Greater Reich … the draconic “Ordinances”? … Iago and us! … and suppose he never came back!

  Now that Iago lets us pass, we can go to Le Vigs place and discuss our plans … and impressions … we hadn’t been able to talk, never alone for a second, always somebody around, gossips and more or less stool pigeons … when you’re a marked man, hunted right and left, the species shoots up all around you … like mushrooms after rain … the human animal is an informer by nature, a born fink, he can’t change … he steps out … don’t ask where he’s going … he’s going to phone the cops, tell them all about you …

  Le Vig’s cell was at the end of a corridor … earth and bricks … between Major von Leiden’s kitchen and his storeroom … the old boy sent his little girls down for logs … he needed them for his stove … a porcelain monument that took up half the drawing room … a very cumbersome source of heat, but useful I’ve got to admit in that majestic mezzanine, considering the Brandenburg climate and all those windows on the plain side … Le Vigan’s windows looked “out oh the same plain, but from below, and through very ugly bars! … Oh, I’ve known worse, but anyway Le Vigan’s pad wasn’t cheerful … the kitchen maids must have slept there in the old days, they’d moved somewhere else … The first thing you saw from this sunken window was a big puddle, a pool of yellow mud with little trickles of water … I give you these details because a few weeks later those trickles of water and those stringy water weeds gave us a lot of trouble, I’ll tell you about it … right then, in his basement, we went through the events of the last two days … you really didn’t understand what was going on? … such a tangle of complications! such a goofy business! Could you really have been in such a tizzy? … it’s not possible! … oh yes, oh yes it is! … a time comes when you don’t dare to even ask yourself what’s what and nobody tries to understand you! readers, spectators … the plain honest truth! … want just one thing, for you to be hanged and quick! they want to see your style, your special way of dangling! don’t write so complicated! the genius of this Civilization is to have found reasons for the worst paranoiac butcheries … the New Look historic trend … bleeding Social Security beneficiaries with granulated livers and shredded brains, lazy sadistic motorized punks! televised! and happy! … beamish! … more! … more! … a drink! … another! … a good belch!

  How I regret

  My shapely thigh!

  My arm so plump

  And the time gone by!

  old stuff, I admit … but what about us? quarantined at the ends of Prussia … on reprieve … but from what? … the people around us solidly hostile, Nazis and antis! … but no more than they’d be in Montmartre, Sartrouville, or Courbevoie … reprieved from where? … the Dental Institute? … Villa Saïd? … the arrangements must have been made … anyway, the whole lot of them here were very shady … and not just the “volunteer workers” … Kretzer … Kracht … Marie-Thérèse the heiress, so friendly with her little cakes … and the von Leidens at the farm … that rage! was it real?… the cripple with his loaded gun … for the hell of it? to scare us? … dunking it over, the details, we decide this scene was acted out … rehearsed … him taking aim … her leaping like a tigress … a suspense act … she’d deflected the barrel all right, but they’d arranged it between them … but what for?… we didn’t get it…

  “I’m telling you, I told you in Grünwald, we shouldn’t have come here … they should have kept us in Berlin! … we’d have waited it out …”

  Preposterous! …

  “We shouldn’t have gone to Baden-Baden either! You probably thought those people at the Brenner were just lovely … Madame von Dopf, die sublime anti-Nazi! … and that oily Schulze … and those Gaullist Ruhr magnates! … you can have them! … and the Fifi waiters!”

  No use tryin
g to reason with Le Vig, the “man from nowhere” … a waste of time … I didn’t think I’d slipped up so bad … but even so, with all the monkeyshines going on in this burg, it would have been a good idea to be somewhere else … anywhere!

  “And say, what about that Gypsy? … did you see the mug on her? … that blond wig? … where’d they dig her up? … did you hear the voice? … a woman? … think so? … a man?… and throwing us out like that! … and now she’ll be raising spirits … they all followed her up there!”

  “Who did?”

  “All those womenl … and Lili’s with them! but in the meantime, listen … what they’re doing to Berlin!”

  A fact … it was worse than usual … cascades of bombs!

  “Is that where you want to be? … at the Steinbock? … or with Faustus … hanging in mid-air! … they’ll turn the whole place inside out … even the shell holes … like a glove … title craters! …”

  No exaggeration, here seventy miles away you could see the walls shaking … Berlin was a Vesuvius! people, ruins, and all! … I admit, they’ve done a lot better since … we’ll see … but even then it was quite a show! plenty of variety! … not just the squadrons of Fortresses … little pursuit planes too … one by one … Marauders … Mosquitoes … the Boche “passive defense”? zero! … not a plane in the air, not a battery! … we’d seen the last pilot! he’d made his own hole … I’m exaggerating … there must have been others, but we hadn’t seen them and they couldn’t have done much better … deeper holes? … What would we do in Berlin supposing they let us go?… it was all rubble when we were there, with this clobbering it’ll be ashes on top of ashes … the man from nowhere was nuts … couldn’t he feel the walls and the flagstones? … and his cell was underground …

  “You think they’ll come here?”

  “We won’t be here any more!”

  “Where will we be?”

  “Let me think!”

  Think?… I was bragging … a glimmer of an idea though … small but practical … “one sees only what one is looking at and one looks only at what one already has in mind …”

  “Didn’t you hear the sergeant?”

  “What sergeant?”

  “The one at the airfield … with the robin …”

  “Didn’t he say something about Heinkel?”

  “Heinkel who?”

  “The factory in Rostock …”

  “Well?”

  “Well, I’ll tell you later … meanwhile well go back upstairs, they must be through with the cards …”

  “Think so?”

  We grope our way out of the cell … light was forbidden … and we had no candle … we call Iago, he comes, he sniffs us … I touch his head, he doesn’t mind … I pat him, he lets us pass … Le Vig picks up the two messkits … we’ll go back to the bibelforschers … Iago understands us … he reminds me of a little tune …

  When you go calling, don’t go empty-handed!

  Not that he was a greedy dog! no! but pulling the old bastard around for hours, he needed, to eat! … I wasn’t worried about the messkits … I’d do it with cigarettes! … why not? … Harras’s cupboard was right there! … as long as I was digging into it for Kracht, what about the others? … What was there to lose? … the cooks at the farm … didn’t they want a smoke too? … and our varmints in the barn? … I’ll say! … and the grocery woman! … and the beadle? … the whole lot! Kretzer and Madame! … I’d make everybody happy! … with discretion, of course, but anyway, Harras would see if he ever came back, the rotten chiseler, gallivanting, around after typhus! he’d understand soon enough … if he’d had those bomb trains over his head, he’d have done exactly the same … the stinker! … he could go looking for his Grünwald and his telefunken girls and his fruit juice! all in flames! … the whole horizon! … green … orange … and yellow flames … and up there in the clouds billows of soot… coming toward us … on top of us … swirling … Harras knew … of course he knew! … that there couldn’t be anything left of his Obergesundt! … even with tweezers he wouldn’t find a single fräulein! or a Finn or a bodyguard! … all sky-high … he’d have something to laugh about … ho-ho-ho! our problem was to go upstairs and find our door … groping … candles strictly prohibited … the only “passive defense” they had … not even a match! … plenty of glims in their rooms though, I could see the light under the doors … they cooked meals too … it smelled of stew … and custards … I could smell the caramel … no wonder they didn’t eat at table … everywhere, in every country at war, it’s the same vice … you never see what they eat and drink … the kids’ rations, especially the milk, are raided for daddy’s coffee … in Bezons, for instance, I prescribed extra milk for children under four, they never saw a drop of it … the mothers looked out for themselves in other ways, with their coupons … they glommed the best ones for themselves … they sent the kids out to play, they brought out the wine … bread … cheese … nobody to see them, no smell … and they stoked! like, ogres! … anywhere, in any country at war, you need sharp eyes and the patience of a cat … to see anybody eating … we never did … it was magic! the only skinny people were Iago and us … we were enough for the whole village … perfect examples of austerity … and the spectators, in the manor, farm and huts … all perfect hypocrites … brands of hypocrisy are like languages, they all have their twists and turns … Boche hypocrisy doesn’t kid when it comes-to mammoth demonstrations, mass parades, barking leaders, frantic enthusiasm über alles! but in the home, at their starvation mahlzeit, they make a big show of living on shadow soup … they shout heil! heil! at the top of their lungs … and up on the wall the portrait of Hitler the idol … thin moustache, thin lips … doesn’t crack a smile … it’s only after the mahlzeit that they go separately to their rooms … and cook up a little something … nobody in this house was thin … certainly our protrectress Marie-Thérèse suffered no privation … she lived on goodies! … I hoped Lili had had a chance to ask for leftovers for Le Vig and me … wherever I’ve seen such gatherings of ladies, table turners, palm readers, fortunetellers, or frantic nymphos, in London, Neuilly, New York, or Dakar, they’re champion nibblers … of cocks? yes, but still more of sandwiches, mountains of petits fouis … plus, so much port, gin, and Scotch that they get up from their table turning bloated and leaking gas … most indecent … from both ends!

  Lili wouldn’t be drunk … I knew her … and she’d surely have thought of us … we go up … we find our door … Lili’s there … all alone … waiting for us …

  “Well?… what did she say?”

  “Who?”

  “The Gypsy …”

  “She made the table talk …”

  “Well?”

  “She saw you and Le Vig in a big gloomy house … very big …”

  “Is that all?”

  “A house with bars …”

  “Why’d she throw us out?”

  “She didn’t want to talk in front of you …”

  “You think she’s a woman?”

  “I’m not sure … we’ll see her tomorrow … they’ve got their wagon in the park … she’s coming for the chairs … they all need repairing at Marie-Thérèse’s and the old man’s … at the farm too …”

  You could count on Lili … she’d thought of us all right … a whole little basket full of sandwiches … and no ersatz like in Berlin, real butter … and foie gras canapés … proving they got everything they wanted … how? … I didn’t know yet … but I suspected … we were beginning to catch on … with one gimmick and another … the synthetic honey, the cigarettes, the soup at the Tanzhalle, the bread at the grocery store … and Harras’s cupboard … we’d want for nothing … the trick in difficult and very difficult conditions is to latch on to addicts, one good turn, get them dependent on you … “give me a fulcrum and I’ll lift the world!” cried Archimedes … get the deprived smoker a pipeful of tobacco and’hell open the doors of the food market … a deprived smoker is capable of anything, he�
�ll find you anything, if he has to steal it …