Balcony in the Forest

by Julien Gracq

  “Look at this for a minute, Grange. The Second Office is spoiling us.”

  The document, to which was clipped a red card reading “To be communicated only to the officers’ units,” was a complete series of photographs showing the different kinds of casemates in the Siegfried line. Most were in forest emplacements, like Les Falizes—the angle of the excellent shots revealed the dark embrasures with their paler circular flanges. The whole thing, consisting of loose-leaf sheets of glossy paper in a ringed notebook, with measurements of the structures and reference numbers, reminded him of the careful presentation of spring collections at a tailor’s shop.

  “Which does Monsieur prefer—this one, or perhaps this?” The captain grimaced slightly; it was evident that the glossy paper in particular aroused his sovereign antipathy; he was probably thinking that the general-staff puppies were putting on airs. . . . “Pretty, aren’t they?”

  He winked, rubbing his finger over the shiny paper, indicating a heavy model that had three embrasures and looked rather unwieldy beneath the overhanging pines.

  “Pretty or not, in any case, I advise you to get them into your head, lieutenant.”

  “Because . . . we’re going to attack?”

  “Because neither you nor I will ever see these music boxes any closer than this. You know what this means?” The captain began walking up and down, spurred by a cunning daemon. “It’s an old trick. GHQ sends us its travel souvenirs with postmarks attached. There are bridegrooms like that—they invent a honeymoon for the audience. It makes you more important with your friends, or the boys at the office. I suppose the Poles found this reassuring.”

  “The Germans aren’t moving either,” hazarded Grange, always exhilarated by this pessimistic strategy: he liked encouraging people to follow their inclinations. “Perhaps they’ll never attack.”

  The captain fixed him with his leaden look. His nostrils quivered. “It’s strange,” Grange thought. “He doesn’t even see me. He’s shooting down an objection. He may not be an intellectual, but at least he can keep an idea in his head with a certain amount of irony.”

  “Then what are you waiting for here, young fellow—post cards?”

  “Here?”

  “ ‘Here’? . . .” The captain gave a worn, rather sinister laugh. “ ‘Here’? What do you mean ‘here’? Here just the same as anywhere else. And it’ll be a kind of lark, won’t it . . . a stroll with a cane in your hand!”

  After these sudden outbursts, the captain dismissed him rather dryly and plunged back into his papers: there was no use trying to strike fire again for another week. Grange emerged from these consultations half diverted, half disturbed. It was like a bloodletting: it relieved you, he told himself; however strange he found it—for he himself followed the war’s progress with great indifference—Grange understood that the captain was suffering. When he was outside in the street again, it seemed as if the light had faded; a great dark crescent cast by the cliff was already gnawing at the other bank of the Meuse. He decided he had nothing else to do in these blank, empty streets where bicycles were piled in front of the cafes and a few soldiers, already drunk, were staggering toward the railway station: he was eager to get back to the shelter of his woods. The captain’s remarks were spoiling his day; not that he believed them, but they landed in the silent, muffled life Grange had created for himself like a stone thrown into a pond that had seemed so inviting beneath its watery lens: in a second you saw how black the water was, and your nostrils filled with an obstinate rotten odor you couldn’t forget again. “The war? he wondered, shrugging his shoulders peevishly, “who knows if there even is a war? If there were, we’d hear about it.”

  But his nerves bothered him nevertheless; he thought about this army dozing around him like a man napping on the grass who even in his sleep turns and brushes away the wasp buzzing about his head. Walking along the river bank, the lieutenant glanced—already suspiciously—at the little blockhouses whose embrasures surveyed the Meuse at long intervals: he found them paltry, shabby, their concrete substructure and brick tops looking as if they had begun as casemates and ended up as provincial bus stations. Of course, this isn’t the Maginot Line, Grange thought, raising his eyes unconsciously towards the bushy eagles’ nests that bristled high over the river—in fact this indolent fortification was somehow reassuring: obviously nothing serious was expected here. Behind these forests . . .

  And then the winter was coming: in a few weeks there would be snow. There would be days when the truck wouldn’t come up any more: with a thrill of pleasure Grange contemplated the prospect of being imprisoned at Les Falizes, cloistered in his mountain retreat around the red-hot stove, snowbound for long days in the fairy-tale forest. In April, the Ardennes slope was still white with snow while the valley apple trees were in bloom. . . .

  “Varin’s angry because they’ve stuck him here on this make-believe front: everyone in the regular army wants promotion.” As soon as the road’s zigzags penetrated the forest, he felt himself breathing more easily; at each turn he saw Moriarmé shrinking back into the valley. Grange walked on in the moist silence that closed over him: he felt light, young again: merely vanishing into this forest that surrounded him as far as the eye could reach revived a sense of well-being that swelled his lungs. The air smelled as it does after a shower: before nightfall, it would rain on the Roof; at Les Falizes, the world was different. Then suddenly, at a turn in the road, the sting returned, the pinprick that made him frown.

  “Then what are you waiting for here, young fellow—post cards?”

  •

  One day when he was climbing up to the blockhouse this way—it was one of the last Sundays in November—the rain surprised Grange at the first turn, and he had scarcely reached the plateau when it became a regular downpour. The light was already fading from the sky, and the clouds rolled along the edge of the Roof, clinging occasionally to the rises of the plateau which then vanished, wrapped in the lingering mist: this was the herald of one of those long rains that wrung out the soft clouds for whole days over the Roof. Whenever the rain settled in like this, Grange felt alert and good-humored; the sharper sense that he was on his way home flowed through his limbs like a warm draught: already he saw his men sitting around the stove in the common-room where the wet overcoats were steaming on their hooks. He walked on through the downpour at a steady pace, conscious only of a slight fatigue, his left hand holding his sopping coat collar away from his chin and the cold drops sliding down his neck one by one. Glancing down a service path, he saw that a cottony fog walled him in twenty feet away; he advanced in a clearing of the fog which moved as he moved—only the road before him, where the branches held the fog off the ground, showed paler in the gloom. This stretch through the fogbound forest gradually lulled Grange into his favorite daydream; in it he saw an image of his life: all that he had, he carried with him; twenty feet away, the world grew dark, perspectives blurred, and there was nothing near him but this close halo of warm consciousness, this nest perched high above the vague earth.

  On the plateau, where the roadbed drained badly, puddles stretched across the pebbly surface, puckered by the raindrops’ bouncing gray bubbles. When he raised his eyes to the horizon, he noticed a figure some distance ahead of him splashing from puddle to puddle, still nebulous in the curtain of rain. In silhouette it looked like a little girl wearing a long, hooded cloak much too big for her and knee-high rubber boots; watching her pick her way along the uneven road, her back a little bent, as if she were lugging a leather satchel over her shoulder, he first thought it was a schoolgirl on her way home, though he knew there were no houses for at least two miles, and suddenly he remembered that it was Sunday; he began observing the diminutive figure more attentively. There was something that intrigued him in her way of walking; beneath the continuous patter of the downpour, to which she seemed quite oblivious, she certainly looked like a child playing truant. Sometimes she would jump over a puddle, feet together, sometimes she would stop bes
ide the road and break off a branch—once she half turned round and seemed to glance behind her, as if to measure how much nearer Grange had come, then started hopping on one foot, kicking a pebble in front of her, ran a few steps, making the puddles dance—and once or twice, in spite of the distance, Grange even thought he could hear her whistling. The road grew lonelier still, the enveloping downpour making the forest rustle from one end to the other.

  “She must be a rain-sprite,” Grange thought, smiling unconsciously behind his streaming collar, “a naiad—a little forest witch.” He began to slow down despite the rain; he didn’t want to catch up with her too quickly—he was afraid the sound of his steps might alarm the girl, keep her from her graceful, solitary wild-creature’s games. Now that he had come a little nearer, she was no longer quite a little girl: when she ran a few steps, her hips were almost a woman’s; her childlike, playful neck movements were those of a runaway colt, but every now and then appeared a provocative curve that suddenly suggested something quite different, as if her head remembered of its own accord having rested on a man’s shoulder. Grange wondered, a trifle annoyed, if she had really noticed he was walking behind her: sometimes she stopped beside the road and gave a happy laugh, as you might address a friend roped behind you on a mountain-climbing expedition; then, for minutes at a time, she seemed to have forgotten him, resuming her romping, tomboy gait—and suddenly she seemed utterly alone, about her own business, like a kitten that ignores you for a ball of string. They went on this way for a moment. Despite the noise of the rain, the road’s pale trough seemed to Grange to run through a clearing: he was merely a man walking behind a woman, all pounding blood and violent curiosity. “A little girl!” he told himself uneasily—but unconsciously his heart beat faster each time the silhouette stopped at the roadside and a hand half opened the long cape’s hood for a moment. Suddenly the figure planted itself in the middle of the road and, standing in a puddle that reached to her ankles, the girl began washing the sides of her rubber boots in the water; when he reached her, Grange discovered under the hood tilted in his direction two bright blue eyes as sharp and warm as a spring thaw—and, deep inside, as if in a crib, the soft straw of her yellow hair.

  “You keep your woods p-pretty wet, don’t you?” asked a fresh, abrupt little voice, while the person in the cloak shook herself with puppyish unconcern, showering Grange—then all at once the chin rose gently, tenderly holding up the face to the rain as if for a kiss, the eyes dancing.

  “Let’s walk together,” she continued, in a voice that admitted no contradiction. “It’s more fun.”

  She began laughing again—her fresh, rainy laugh. Now that he had caught up with her, she walked beside him at a good speed. From time to time Grange glanced at her surreptitiously; around the edge of the hood he could see only her glistening nose and mouth and the short chin set against the rain, but he was stirred to feel her near him, young and vital, supple as a fawn in the warm scent of wet wool. She had fallen in step with him of her own accord: it was as if she had taken his arm. Sometimes she turned her head slightly and the dark hood’s edge revealed eyes the color of a brightening sky; whenever their eyes met they laughed a little without speaking, a laugh of pure delight. She had thrust her hands deep into the pockets of her cloak with the simple gesture of a farm girl afraid of frostbite. “But she’s not a country girl,” Grange decided, his heart leaping, “and she’s not really a girl at all. How old is she? Where is she going?” Merely walking beside her was so delightful he dared not question her: he was afraid of breaking the spell.

  “I was waiting for you back there on the hill. You didn’t walk fast then!” she said suddenly, tossing her offended head and at the same time glancing at him obliquely. There was a kind of conscious mockery in her voice that exposed Grange’s stratagem. The tone of voice indicated that she hadn’t been deceived about such things for a long time. She was quite aware how attractive she was.

  “I wanted an escort,” she added quickly, apparently repeating a lesson not quite understood. “Sunday nights, there are often soldiers on the road. They say they misbehave themselves,” she added, gravely nodding her head again—but he felt that she wasn’t very frightened.

  “And you weren’t afraid of me?”

  “Oh, I know you!”

  She skipped ahead down the road: life seemed released in this graceful body like a colt in a meadow.

  “. . . I’ve seen you from my house. Every day you come to Les Platanes for coffee. . . . It’s ostentatious!” she added, emphasizing the word with a meaningful look, as if she had just learned it—but again the chin held up her mouth to him and her eyes danced, while her neck curved in a way Grange found disturbing. At each word, at each movement of her head and shoulders, his notion of her changed decisively.

  They walked on again in silence for a moment. The rain was not so heavy now, but fell straight down, good for several hours. The wind had dropped and the light was beginning to fade: the mist-choked woods around them dripped heavily.

  “And you’re—you’re vacationing here?” Grange asked suddenly, quite Machiavellian. Yes, that was it—she must be a schoolgirl. And he remembered she had said “your woods.”

  “Oh no! . . . I’m a widow!” she said after a moment, in a reasonable little voice that was quite sure of itself. “I have a family ration book!” she continued with childish glee; rummaging in the inside pocket of her cape, she pulled out a yellowish booklet with an official seal and dog-eared pages. Grange, startled, blinked for a moment: every second he felt a new gust of wind take his breath away.

  “It’s very sad!” she concluded, nodding with comic gravity, like a little girl playing “visits.” And then, standing in the rain in the middle of the road, they both burst into helpless laughter.

  Through her disconnected sentences, Grange began to see her situation a little less fancifully. Early in the year she had married a young doctor who, probably dazzled by her beauty, had carried her off from her classrooms without a moment’s hesitation: two months later he had left her a widow. At least that must be what her sudden confidences meant him to infer, for in her account the doctor appeared only as “Jacquot,” which seemed to be a sufficient identification for him. After his death, her father—who passed in her remarks for a remote and rather absent-minded providence—had rented a house for her at Les Falizes. “Jacquot,” before abandoning her so suddenly, had been worried about her because of a shadow on one lung, which seemed to have assumed for her afterwards the purely poetic significance of a deathbed wish rather than a disease. She had come up here to cure herself, or rather to obey his last request, in the forest, where the war had found her like a bird on a branch. She had stayed on.

  “It’s good for you!” she declared, energetically shaking her head, which looked quite tiny inside the hood.

  Grange listened to her, but such details remained peculiarly vague for him. The words “father” and “husband” had no hold over her; they rested on her for a moment like a garment put on and taken off, but did not involve her. Wherever she was, you felt, she was complete. How dense, how concrete the present became, in her shadow. With what force of conviction, with what energy she was here! She had taken his arm to cross a puddle and kept it now; he felt the grip of her light fingers through his coat; her skin glistening in the rain, her step firm, she was anything but unsubstantial; suddenly she leaned against him, as round and perfect as a pebble on the road.

  “You must take me home,” she said, when they reached the path. “It’s gallant. Julia will make us tea (more riddles, Grange thought, vexed by the appearance of another character on the scene). I’m always so frightened in the big oaks!”

  When they took the narrow path to Les Falizes, night suddenly seemed to fall with the shadow of the great trees. The rain had stopped for a moment: turning to look down the road toward the Meuse where the sky was clearing, they saw a streak of dull red disappearing on the horizon, the same western glow that fades on snowy nights. Here the
path entered a grove of high trees; the night’s chill fell on their shoulders from a thick dome of wet branches. Grange noticed she was shivering and pressed his arm around her without speaking: suddenly his gaiety vanished and he was overcome by a grave, tender pity: it was dark now, and here was this defenseless girl beside him, lost in the war’s forest: he wanted to speak her name.

  “My name is Mona,” she said, her voice a little hoarse. He saw her head bending and suddenly felt her lips on the back of his hand. “I like you,” she added suddenly, with a rather ambiguous gentleness, and once again Grange felt disturbed, uncertain. She was spontaneous, but she was not clear: like spring freshets full of earth and leaves. Her words were a child’s, but their boldness was not at all naïve; there, suddenly, on his hand, was a fleshy mouth with lips that already knew how to find what they wanted.

  When they came out of the woods, night had already extinguished the village in the clearing; only one square of light shone from the open door of Les Platanes onto the little terrace, disengaging the low branches of the chestnut tree from the darkness; then, faintly at first, the cluster of low cottages appeared around them in the grass, their roofs barely showing above the garden fences. Grange had never come to Les Falizes at night: here, they were suddenly very far away; lying at full length upon the ground, a forgotten life paused in the clearing and drew its quiet breath, immersed up to its nostrils in the odor of plants, the creeping emanations of wet earth. Mona released his arm, and, running ahead on the path, began to shout toward one of the dark houses at the top of her lungs, using her hands as a megaphone.