Balcony in the Forest

by Julien Gracq

  “I’m assigning you to the blockhouse at Hautes Falizes,” the colonel said a few seconds later, still speaking in the neutral tone of the service—yet he communicated a secret intention to his words, for his eyes momentarily contracted to hard points. “You will go up there tomorrow morning with Captain Vignaud. As for today, you’ll mess with the quartermaster corps.”

  Grange regarded a dinner with the corps as less than promising; launched into this war that had started so quietly, at the zero point, he did not dream of flinching before whatever task might be asked of him, but he did not participate—instinctively, whenever possible, he kept his reserve and a certain distance. When he had left his gear in the truck that was to take him up to Les Falizes, he ordered some ham and eggs in a worker’s cafe whose shutters were drawn early, and then, crossing streets already immured and echoing to the march of patrols, he reached his quarters for the night.

  The room was a rather narrow attic whose windows overlooked the Meuse; in the corner opposite the iron bed some fruit was drying on an old newspaper spread over a rickety commode: the insistent, sweetish odor of the crab-apples were so strong that he suddenly felt sick. He opened the windows wide and sat down on a trunk, completely disenchanted. The sheets, the blankets smelled of rotten apples, like an old cider press; he pulled the bed in front of the open window. The candle flame trembled in the slow draft of air from the river; between the eaves, he could see the heavy slabs of the Meuse floor, the schist a strange wine-lees color. He undressed, his mood extremely somber: this foundry town, these sooty back-streets, the colonel, the apples, everything in this initiation to a billeted life, was distasteful to him.

  “A blockhouse,” he wondered, “what does that mean?” He ransacked his already remote memory of the regulations concerning campaign fortifications: no, he could recall nothing at all. It must be under the code of military justice instead; the word itself offered him little reassurance, reminding him of both a house of detention and a prison block. When he had blown out the candle, everything changed. Lying on his side, his gaze plunged down over the Meuse; the moon had risen above the cliff; the only sound was the calm murmur of water slipping over a submerged weir and the cries of the screech owls perched quite near him, in the trees on the opposite bank. The little town had vanished with its smoke; the odor of the great forests glided off the cliffs with the fog and drowned it to the depths of its factory alleys; nothing was left save the starry night and around him these miles and miles of forest. The afternoon’s enchantment returned. Grange realized that half his life was going to be restored to him: in wartime, the night is inhabited. “Under the stars . . .” he mused, and thought vaguely of narrow white roads beneath the moon, the round apple trees in black pools of shadow, tents pitched in woods full of wild animals and surprises. He fell asleep, one hand hanging out of his bed over the Meuse as if across the gunwale of a boat: tomorrow was already very far away.

  AS SOON as they had passed the last houses of Moriarmé, the tar pavement stopped and they began taking the first zigzag turns. It was as if the stony roadbed had been plowed up for its whole width, becoming a kind of Saharan reg, a river of pebbles with neither gutter nor shoulder between the two walls of trees. Grange consulted his map between jolts: they were getting into the forest part of the route. At each hairpin turn, the valley grew deeper, a wisp of fog appeared above the river which drained faster toward the delta now, quickened by eddies like water emptying from a bath. The morning was gay with sunlight, fresh and transparent, but Grange was amazed by the silence of these woods where no birds sang. Leaning out of the window, he half turned his back to the captain and raised himself on his arms to look down to the valley floor: no matter where he was, perspectives had always fascinated him to the point of rudeness. In the back of the truck there were two sacks of biscuits, a side of beef wrapped in a piece of jute sacking, a machine-gun tripod, and a few rolls of barbed wire.

  “Let’s stop a minute at l’Eclaterie, since this is your first time up,” Captain Vignaud said, smiling. “The view is worth the trouble.”

  Almost at the top of the slope, a small roadside platform furnished with two benches had been built out over the valley. From here you could see the summit of the somewhat lower opposite slope and the woods stretching to the horizon, thick and matted like a wolfskin, enormous as a stormy sky. At his feet there was the slow, slender Meuse, fettered by the distance to its floor, and Moriarmé burrowed into the hollow of the huge forest shell like an ant lion at the bottom of its pit. The town consisted of three convex streets that followed the meander’s curve, and ran in terraces above the Meuse like contour lines; between the lowest street and the river a block of houses had disappeared, leaving an empty oblong barred in the slanting light by a sundial’s neat gnomon: the church square. The whole landscape, its ample masses of shadow, its thread of open meadows perfectly legible, had a dry and military precision, an almost geodetic beauty: these eastern sectors were made for war, Grange thought. He had been on maneuvers only in the jumbled west, where even the trees were never quite round, never quite vertical.

  “That certainly looks like a good, clean cut,” he said politely: the captain was wearing a staff-college ribbon.

  The captain shook out his pipe with a look of disgust. “The front is thirty kilometers long, the river’s sixty,” he said abruptly. “A line like that eats up everything.”

  Grange felt like a novice: he must have violated some taboo of the general-staff mess. They got back into the truck in silence.

  The truck climbed quite slowly up the bumpy path. As soon as the zigzags stopped and they had lumbered onto the plateau, the truck turned into a straight road that seemed to run on through the underbrush as far as the eye could reach. The forest was stunted—the trees were mostly birches, dwarf beech, ash, and pin oaks, all gnarled like pear trees—but seemed extraordinarily dense, without a rent or clearing anywhere; on each side of the ribbon of river it was as if this earth had been shaggy with trees for all eternity, had exhausted ax and saber alike by the resurgence of its greedy fleece. Occasionally, a service path ran through the trees, as narrow as an animal trail. The solitude was complete, and yet the possibility of a meeting did not seem altogether unlikely; sometimes, in the distance, there seemed to be a man standing by the roadside in a long pilgrim’s cape: at close range, this turned out to be a small fir, its shoulders black and square against the curtain of bright leaves. The road they were on must have followed the plateau’s watershed, for there was never the sound of a stream, though two or three times Grange noticed a stone trough, half-buried in a recess of trees, from which a thread of clear water ran: it added to the silence of the fairy-tale forest.

  Where am I being taken, he wondered. He calculated that they must have gone a good twelve kilometers since leaving the Meuse: Belgium couldn’t be far away. But his mind floated in a comfortable obscurity: he asked for nothing better than to go on driving through the calm morning, between these moist thickets that smelled of squirrels’ nests and fresh mushrooms. As they were about to take a turn, the truck slowed down, then, all its springs protesting, plunged left beneath the branches across a grass-grown breach. Among the trees, Grange made out a house with a peculiar-looking silhouette as if a kind of Savoyard chalet were caught in the branches, fallen like a meteorite among these forgotten thickets.

  “This is where you live,” Captain Vignaud said.

  THE Hautes Falizes blockhouse was one of a series constructed in the heart of the forest to prevent enemy armored units from penetrating into the Belgian Ardennes toward the Meuse line. The structure consisted of a squat concrete cube with an armored door opening at the rear onto a zigzag path across a small barbwire emplacement that surrounded the blockhouse like a cabbage patch. The concrete had been perfunctorily daubed with faded olive-green paint that smelled of mold: fungus growths encouraged by the suffocating heat of the undergrowth caused damp patches to suppurate on the sides, as if wet sheets had been hung there every day. Two
embrasures pierced the front of the blockhouse: one, narrow, for a machine gun; the other, a little larger, for an anti-tank gun. On top of this squat cube, as if on a pedestal too small for it, rested the projecting story of a little house, entered from one side by a perforated iron staircase, like an American tenement fire escape: this was the quarters of the tiny garrison. Its ugliness was that of the poorest mining cabin or frontier hut; the dripping forest winters had pitted the exposed surfaces, torn off patches of plaster, and blackened the windows under the staircase with long streaks of rust that ran over onto the concrete. On cords hung under the eaves from the windows to the nearby branches, underwear and towels were drying. Against the blockhouse leaned the brand-new, galvanized-wire netting of a henroost and a crude plank rabbit hutch; tin cans that must have been thrown out of the windows and half-loaves of rotting bread were scattered all over the barbwire emplacement. The bizarre coupling of this prehistoric mastaba with a ramshackle suburban cottage, surrounded by such hobo’s bric-a-brac in the heart of the forest, had something perfectly improbable about it. Through the open windows, a cast-iron throat was making the woods ring with a barroom song which broke off at the sound of the truck.

  On va guincher dans tous les caboulots

  Sur le plancher des va-ches. . . .

  There was no doubt about it, Grange thought, this war wasn’t beginning the way he had thought it would. There were all kinds of surprises. The men came down the staircase one by one, their boots clattering, buckling their belts—clumsy, circumspect, and squinting like suspicious Berber tribesmen at their new commanding officer.

  FOR a long while Grange clung to the half-sleep that kept him tossing on his camp bed, though the dawn was already pale at every window; since childhood, no sensation had been so purely delicious: he was free, in sole command of this Little Red Riding Hood hut, lost in the heart of the wilderness. On the other side of his door, the placid bustle of a waking farm added to his happiness: he connected it with long-familiar sounds; for the first time, Grange realized with a shock of incredulous delight that he was going to live here—that perhaps the war had its desert islands. The forest branches brushed against his windowpanes. A heavy clatter shook the staircase; Grange jumped off his bed and looked out the window: two soldiers, Hervouët and Gourcuff, were already disappearing between the trees, straightening their rifles with a shrug of the shoulder, their overcoat collars raised against the piercing chill. Behind the partition, someone was stirring up the stove; the sound of tinware promised hot coffee.

  He stretched out on his bed a minute, wrapped in his coat. The day was gray and overcast; an atmosphere of foggy mornings, the idleness of Sundays in the country, filled the blockhouse; and a silence, so rare in military life, falling at intervals between the sounds on the other side of the wall, settled down in the middle of the room like a contented cat. The cold itself was not uncomfortable; and even in their absence, he felt that the air here was stirred only by young and well-fed bodies. For a moment Grange stared vacantly at the pale fume his breath left on the air, then turned over and gave a perplexed chuckle: the notion that this was an outpost completely bewildered him. The orders Captain Vignaud had passed on to him were simple. In case of attack, the engineers would fall back to a position in front of Les Falizes and blow up the road. The mission of the blockhouse was to destroy the tanks trapped by this demolition and to provide information as to the enemy’s movements. The enemy was to be halted “with no thought of retreat.” An underground tunnel into the woods was supposed to permit the garrison to leave the blockhouse without being seen and, in the last extremity, to withdraw toward the Meuse through the forest.

  On the general-staff map, hanging down over the edge of his table, he could see from his bed the route of orderly withdrawal which Captain Vignaud had drawn in red pencil, and which he was to start reconnoitering today. But his imagination found little stimulus in these improbable events. In front of him he had the woods reaching to the horizon, and then beyond that came the sheltering corner of Belgium that dropped down like a fold of curtain. The war was little by little falling asleep, the army yawning like a class that has handed in its papers, waiting for the bell and the end of maneuvers. Nothing would happen. Perhaps nothing would happen. Grange leafed absent-mindedly through the file of official communications, the combat orders, the munitions accounts: a fine rain of learned paragraphs engendered by an ingenious and polemical madness, which seemed to take account of earthquakes in advance; then he put them in an envelope and locked them away in his drawer with a gesture that was an exorcism. Such things belonged to the order of events which, too minutely foreseen, did not happen. These were the notarized archives of the war; they slept here waiting for confirmation; reading these pages that tracked down the unpredictable from comma to comma, Grange felt inexpressibly reassured: it was as though the war were already over. A finger scratched at the door with a timidity surprising after the powerful racket of boots that had preceded it.

  “Coffee, mon yeutenant.”

  Grange jumped off his bed and pulled on his boots: all the same, it wasn’t an ordinary house. The iron-soled boots made a dull sound against the bare concrete, with no vibration or resonance, as if he were walking on a new road or a bridge abutment. Grange felt he was welded to that cool dark cavern underneath, which his ear unconsciously questioned—a snail en promenade outside its shell. And suddenly the fairy-tale house didn’t quite reassure him any more. They slept here like sailors in the lull of hot nights, making for gray seas and trying to forget that the wind would be rising one of these days.

  IT SEEMED as if the rhythm of the blockhouse regime had been determined once and for all. It was something of a peasant life they led, slowly vegetating at one of the least sensitive nerve endings within the war’s great body: the season, the wind, the rain, the moment’s inclination, and the round of household tasks created much more of a stir than the general-staff bulletins, whose echoes died away on these somnolent frontiers as sluggishly as ripples on a beach. From this perspective it was easy to understand that the war depended on violent movements, like a man pulling himself out of a quicksand limb by limb: paralyzed as they were, the earth reclaimed them for its own, they sent down roots, the garrison returned to peasantry.

  The blockhouse at Les Falizes sheltered a marginal clan like men living in isolated moorland shanties: as seldom seen in towns as highlanders in the valleys, living off the land by individual craft, half charcoal burners, half poachers. Four times a week, Hervouët and Gourcuff left for their lumberyard, a little clearing the division’s engineers had made in the Braye forest two kilometers from Les Falizes; here stakes were cut for the barbwire emplacements being completed along the front. There was reason to believe the men cut few enough, for the Braye forest gullies were full of game, and allowances for the trip there and back were generously calculated during these shortening days. Often Grange, awake before daylight and musing in his bed, surprised a wary footstep on the dripping stairs: he knew it was Hervouët, a knapsack on his back, leaving with Gourcuff to make the rounds of his traps. Grange found he liked both men: their passion for outdoor living left him all the more time to himself, and he was pleased by their discretion and reserve, the silent manners of woodsmen and scouts accustomed to keeping their mouths closed and their ears open and not inclined to discuss private matters. Hervouët was tall and spare, a duckhunter from La Brière whom nights of lying in wait had made as day-blind as a cat. Gourcuff, an almost illiterate day laborer from Questembert, was stocky and redfaced: he was not a gifted man and his only natural aptitudes seemed to be those of a remarkable drinker. As in most such cases, the sedentary man had become the nomad’s serf: Hervouët had pressed his seal on this soft wax—where everything he uttered was engraved as if it were scripture—and Gourcuff had become his sword-bearer, his beater, his hunt servant. When they slipped into the overgrown service paths, Hervouët, who liked having his arms free, would hang his rifle on Gourcuff’s shoulder as if on a hat peg
. They disappeared early in the morning between the trees, taciturn and long-striding, like the Amazon seringueiros.

  “Where have Hervouët and Gourcuff gone this time?”

  “They’re at their yard, mon yeutenant. There’s no more meat.”

  They emerged from the thickets at the afternoon’s end, smelling of game and breathing hard, like wet dogs, their knapsacks full of dead animals, empty bottles, and Belgian cigarettes. They brought news as well, for these desolate forests, wakened by the war and full of hideouts and refuges, hummed louder than telegraph wires.

  Once Hervouët and Gourcuff had gone, Corporal Olivon retired to the common room, engrossed in mysterious domestic tasks, and Grange had the whole day empty before him. Mornings, he usually read and wrote at the deal table in front of the foggy little window facing the forest, until the moment, every other day, when he heard the truck blowing its horn on the road up to Les Falizes, bringing supplies, mail, newspapers, various clandestine substances Olivon ordered from Moriarmé to “stuff” his chickens on, and occasionally materiel for the upkeep of the blockhouse and its nearby defenses: cans of paint, pruning tools, cartridges for signals, or rolls of barbed wire. When Grange had signed the receipts, the curtain fell for two days more on the inhabited world: in this forest wilderness perched high above the Meuse, it was as if they were on a roof and the ladder taken away.

  With two men requisitioned almost daily for woodcutting, the blockhouse service, except for keeping the materiel in repair, was reduced to almost nothing more than maintaining a permanent watch. Grange played the role of a janitor, his empty concrete block visited every now and then by some official commission that scowled because the embrasures were not yet fitted with their regulation funnels, unceremoniously replaced for the moment by sandbags (when he took them into the block, keys in his hand, Grange acted almost contrite: he felt the reproving, somewhat disgusted stare of the Engineers’ officers upon him, eying him as if he were a hobo filling his broken windowframes with newspaper; he always felt obliged to lead them out with a vaguely apologetic gesture toward the vaulting, as if to say something like: “The walls are good!”).