Balcony in the Forest

by Julien Gracq

  But as soon as these signs had faded with the darkness from the sky, the Roof returned to its rude activities. Before the sun was up, Grange heard outside his window the crackling of a great fire of brambles Olivon lit beneath the washtub to melt the morning ice; the men soon gathered around its sudden heat; sometimes a woodcutter stopped on his way to work from Les Falizes to warm his hands before the blaze. Grange liked hearing this murmur beneath his window, when his house began to hum for the whole day: ever since the snow, his relations with Moriarmé had become more and more those of a vassal who has chosen to raise his drawbridge and keep his distance. The blockhouse no longer lived on the valley: the cans of food and the biscuits Gourcuff brought up from Moriarmé had accumulated in the concrete block below, constituting a kind of private siege stock whose arrangement Grange and Olivon went down to inspect from time to time.

  “We’re pretty well fixed,” Olivon said, nodding at the heaped larder: and his tone was that of a steward checking the storeroom of a ship caught in an ice floe. There was a suggestion in it of the magical wish that they might be forgotten here for a long time—forever.

  Grange had arrived at Moriarmé with quite a lot of money in his wallet which the blockhouse life and his accumulated pay had increased month by month: Les Falizes replaced the Commissariat, though it had neither bakery nor grocery; the farms, provisioned for the long plateau winter and still baking their own bread, furnished all the food they needed, and there was no lack of wine either. The money slipped happily between his fingers. “The hell with saving,” he decided with a shrug of the shoulders. “We’ll see later on. In the spring . . .” and against the back of his neck—half-apprehension, half-excitement—he felt a faint prickle, like the roller-coaster rider who sees, not far ahead, the curve of the big plunge approaching.

  Never before had he felt his life so open and warm as it seemed this winter on the Roof, free of ties, isolated from past and future alike by crevasses as deep as those that separate the pages of a book. However lightly he might have felt himself committed to his life, the war had severed the few links he recognized: in 1914 for the last time, perhaps, men had left home with the idea of returning for the harvest; in 1939 they had exchanged their country dances for the movies, but it was without looking back that they left, knowing in their heart of hearts they would see only a land the fire had passed over. No sooner had they abandoned it than the life which still enveloped them in all its warmth seemed tainted with a swift, an irremediable aging—withered in the stalk, already too white for harvest. Before him stretched this curtain—lowered still but stirred now by mysterious currents, pierced by sudden beams, and he sensed the footlights were about to come up. Until then, between the old life and whatever was behind the curtain, the time to come was comforting. The earth had grown buoyant again; once winter had come, the sick and the old, in the wake of the evacuated rest home, had one after the other decamped from the forest villages, disappearing behind the lines in the smoke of the wheezing little Meuse trains: the Roof was rejuvenated, like a city after a siege during which it has abandoned its useless mouths. However little martial spirit he thought he possessed, Grange nevertheless sensed—obscurely, powerfully—the war’s bitter, rousing spring in this brutal sweep of the broom that cleared the earth of its offal: the air that bathed these outposts now was livelier than a forecastle breeze.

  The snow, cutting off the blockhouse from the Meuse, brought it closer to Les Falizes. Now that the ancients of the tribe had left the plateau, which the war had already emptied of its able-bodied men, only the freest, shrillest feminine laughter sounded on the snowy slopes from morning to night, and matters were arranged simply. The tastes of the blockhouse occupants tended on the whole toward consistency and stability, and the Christmas landscape, the long nights, the uncertainty of the time to come, as well as a certain peasant seriousness of character apparent in both Olivon and Hervouët, gave the men a kind of nostalgia for a woman by the fireside.

  Olivon could generally be found at Les Platanes, where Gourcuff occasionally helped him with the bottling, actually quite infrequent now that Grange had become almost the only customer. When he came in for his afternoon coffee, he often surprised Olivon sitting under the Byrrh calendar and wearing a jute apron (the apron of the deceased, Grange reflected: the café-owner was a rather heavy-set though still agreeably cheerful widow), explaining the morning paper to Madame Tranet—an occupation of considerable significance, since it was Olivon who decoded the second page of the Communiqués de la Prefecture, which set subtle traps for winesellers in these difficult times.

  Hervouët replaced chasseur alpin in the house of a farm woman so pale and so thin, so overwhelmed by her large family and hard times, that the public opinion of Les Falizes had not taken the family’s new provider in bad part, and Hervouët’s appearance at Les Mazures was regarded as the mission of a heaven-sent paladin who consecrated himself to the protection of widows and orphans.

  Grange, whom this exemplary interim sometimes perplexed a little, grew calm again at the thought that his orders—beyond the service itself—prescribed after all the most generous use of the garrison for agricultural work. Seen early in the morning chopping the day’s wood, breaking the ice in the well and shoveling the snow away from the door long before the rest of the household was up, his functions—rather serious and dignified ones on the whole, marked with the character of necessity—so far outstripped more playful suggestions that order was somehow re-established and readjusted of its own accord: it might be said that Hervouët was justified by his works. In thinking about the avatars of his little world, Grange, vaguely touched, was not far from feeling that he was on the whole well settled. It was only Gourcuff who gave him any concern now, crippled by Hervouët’s secession and flaunting a strangely arrogant alcoholic chastity around the blockhouse. During his hours of liberty, he would disappear down some snow-clogged path, always alone, always sweating, and always very red, furiously punching his helmet down on his head and muttering Breton oaths into the raised collar of his overcoat.

  “He’s hunting,” Olivon said, winking mysteriously and assuming the complacent tone of a retired family man.

  What astonished Grange was that these haphazard couples created an image that was quite the contrary of licentiousness; surprisingly, the domestic routine of the blockhouse, the sort of liberal discipline which had been established there, did not suffer from it in any way. The blockhouse, in fact, filled a place left empty; it restored, in the village—surrendered entirely to the vagaries of women—a male order that involved an unaccustomed severity of behavior, for if it included the bed, it did not extend to the evening paper and slippers. As soon as the abrupt winter twilight set in, the members of the little crew buckled their belts, shook the dust out of their overcoats onto their women’s doorsteps, and returned for the night, their own masters, to the men’s house, as in the Carib villages, where everything belonged to another order: language, mood, topics, jokes. It was a fragile world, hanging over the void on all sides, but somehow its machinery managed to function nevertheless. Occasionally Grange was reminded of a stopped clock set running again by an earthquake, though sounding only on the quarter-hour: he had always delighted in such mechanisms, costing a penny or lasting a day, delicate and absurd, where chance momentarily made necessity flourish once again. When he was entirely honest with himself, he reflected that these almost creaturely romances of their billetings, winter-hatched and blooming quite apart in the warm comfort of the houses, reassured him: they made his feeling for Mona turn toward a peaceable order, gave it a certain solidity, even a kind of hope.

  He got up early now to finish off the few tasks the curbed life of the blockhouse still required, well before a light the color of dirty water, grayer than the ground, began to filter through the woods ahead of the sun: an image of Mona’s house taking its dust-bath in the still-dark morning sharpened his appetite. He left Olivon in charge and started down the road, almost the whole day ahead
of him. The white earth crackled again beneath its frozen crust; night withdrew from the forest without a breath of wind, as if swallowed by the snow; before he reached the path to Les Falizes, a great red sun rose in front of him down the road’s long vista. This moment always seemed fresh and marvelous to Grange: the air was even more alive and tingling than his own coursing blood; it was as if the day had never dawned so young before. He rapped his iron-tipped stick against Mona’s door, feeling as good-humored as if he had swallowed a flask of brandy before setting off on his expedition. With her short sheepskin-lined jacket, her heavy rubber boots, her yellow hair that looked as tangled as if she had been sleeping on the ground and still seemed to have bits of straw in its meshes, as fresh as the scrubbed red tiles of the house itself, Mona gave off a rough, wholesome smell, reminding him of the grass broom and the currycomb, or washing in the horse trough. Outside, nothing could be heard but the thaw’s great drops drumming from the eaves and the cocks crowing in the already sun-drenched morning. Mona was always on time; each morning she emerged from the darkness as fresh and pale as a beach when the tide recedes.

  “How old are you?” he would ask her sometimes, stroking her eyebrows with his finger, staggered by her beauty, blinking as if into too bright a light while she laughed her throaty laugh and lightly ruffled his hair—but he realized that his question had no meaning, that youth, here, had nothing to do with age; she belonged to a fabulous species, like unicorns. “I found her in the woods,” he mused, and a certain wonder touched his heart; there was a sign upon her: the sea had floated her to him on a stone slab; he felt how precariously she was granted; the waves that had brought her would take her back again.

  They turned into a path behind the naked gardens and frozen cabbage patches leading to Les Fraitures. As soon as they had left Les Falizes behind, the landscape revealed itself; the path followed the lip of the great slope of woods that dipped toward Belgium. At the end of the forest, black against the snow, that reached the horizon without one house, without one column of smoke, they could see a town clinging to a peak over a gorge, its white houses sparkling in the sun above the mauve fog. The light reflected from the snow gave it the phosphorescence of a forbidden city and a promised land. The sun mounted higher, sending a rain of drops from every branch, but for a long time, as they walked toward Les Fraitures, the town on the brink of its gorge sparkled gloriously between the white and the blue. Mona was sure it was Spa: ever since she had read the name, which enchanted her, on the waiting-room posters, she could not believe there were any other towns in the Belgian Ardennes.

  “Why don’t you take me?” she asked, shaking his arm with that insistence of desire that seemed to turn the world new again each time. And nodding with a knowing housewifely precocity, added: “Julia could come with us. In Belgium, you know, it’s not very expensive.”

  Beyond the gorge of Les Fraitures, they shoveled the night’s accumulated snow away from the door of an abandoned charcoal burner’s cottage and pulled out the luge, a kind of heavy sleigh or schlitte used to haul logs through the forest. The Bihoreau boy, whose proficiencies ranged from electrical repairs to pottery mending, had fitted it with cane-bottomed seats; though it was clumsy and quite heavy, they pulled the sleigh through the pines as far as the Fraitures Light, a pylon made of unbarked tree trunks standing in a clearing at the top of the hill. The ten o’clock sun spangled the frozen snow, and Grange and Mona laughed at the two great clouds of breath they puffed before them as they walked. When they reached the pylon, they ate some of the food Julia had prepared and which Mona was carrying in a knapsack. Mona always tied the sleigh to the pylon, like a horse: it was one of her eccentricities—like unlocked doors and sudden signs of the cross made with her thumb—which Grange dared not question; in his moments of enthusiasm, he was not far from believing she possessed the secret of certain half-magical practices of primitive life. Admitted to her intimacy, he was far from knowing everything about her: there were still moments when she frightened him.

  On the steep flank of the hill, a clearing in the woods opened ahead of them, wide and rectangular. The sleigh started gradually over the fresh snow, then, with the acceleration of an avalanche, plunged straight down, scraping its bottom on the black roots of the roughly cleared hillside: the sun, the powdery snow, the treacherous snags, the nearby cliff of black pines, everything in Grange’s vision was swallowed up in the wake of a violent wind that tore at his ears and seemed to purge the earth of all weight; he felt Mona’s breasts—she was lying upon him—lightly crushed against his back, then released at every jolt of the sleigh; she clung to his shoulders, light and warm as the troll children you carry across the ford and whose weight suddenly buckles your legs. Sometimes the sport became stranger still: he felt Mona’s cold teeth close on the nape of his neck and her hands slide along his arms to his wrists, which were steering. The sleigh tumbled them gently into a snowbank which the stream at the bottom of the ravine was undermining; rolled into the drift, weak with laughter, they struggled, arms and knees pressed together, and suddenly he felt Mona’s teeth against his nape a second time: a sudden weakness ran through his body, like that of a cat lifted off the ground by the skin of its neck—the snow, which slipped into the hollow of his shoulders and down his arms, became a soft burning. When they shook themselves and sat down a moment on the sleigh to catch their breath, he glanced at her, her waist so slender in her close-fitting blouse, with a shadow of anxiety; he thought of those wasps which instinctively know where to sting in order to paralyze their prey. As soon as they had stopped talking, their eyes closed, they heard only the faint gurgle of the thaw, and sometimes, far away, a lonely cock shrilled to the noonday sun: his head against Mona’s shoulder, Grange felt the world come to him crammed with a tender profusion.

  By the time they returned to the hut and ate what remained of their food sitting side by side on the sleigh, the afternoon was already getting on; the forest horizon darkened, surmounted by a band of mauve. The cold increased, and a touch of mournfulness appeared in the slanting light. Mona shivered beneath her short furred jacket: she clouded over as suddenly as any mountain sky, immediately exposed to the warnings of the hour and the season.

  “I don’t like this time of day,” she said, shaking her head when he questioned her. And when he asked what she was thinking about: “I don’t know. About death. . . .” Then she would lean her head on his shoulder, and momentarily give herself up to strange, hurried sobs, as sudden as an April shower. He felt the cold seize him roughly now. He did not like the words that rose to this child-sibyl’s mouth, suddenly so full of darkness.

  When they reached Les Falizes, a cold blue shadow lay across the walls; threads of ice, already frozen again at the gutter rims, silenced the alleys between houses. Even before the sun had set, the snow turned gray. The earth around them suddenly seemed so dim, so frozen, that Mona’s forebodings spread to Grange: he felt the day collapse at the bottom of a black pit, and a gray, cold liquid rose within him, its taste stale in his mouth. As soon as Julia had served tea, they undressed with anxious haste; in the great darkened room, weighted with the evening’s sadness, they embraced without speaking a word. Sometimes Grange half sat up between the cold sheets, and letting go Mona’s fingers, stared, his eyes wide open, toward the thick clumps of shadow that invaded the room. “What’s the matter with me?” he wondered, his heart heavy. “Who knows? It’s twilight nerves,” but he was surprised never to have had them before. When he came back to the blockhouse at nightfall, his solitude depressed him; often he would call for Hervouët at Les Mazures before returning. They set out along the wet snow path that sponged up all sounds. As soon as they turned into the road, the glow from the other side of the Meuse, which outshone the twilight now, released across the sheets of snow a sickly phosphorescence, a kind of false dawn. It seemed to Grange that the earth itself was yellowing with disease, that time was working there, underneath, with a slow fever: they walked upon it as on a corpse that was beginning
to smell.

  OFTEN, back in his room, he found on his desk the mail which Gourcuff or the occasional supply truck had brought up from battalion headquarters, and this prospect darkened his returns: he did not enjoy the news any more: he was like those solitary creatures who have left a mother or an older sister somewhere and who slyly avoid the postman every day. If Grange came in late, the silence from the crew room, a silence not that of sleep, told him even before going into his room that the newspapers had come up from Moriarmé, and scarcely more than a minute passed before Olivon knocked at his door, supposedly to report (according to the evidence of an unaccustomed and hypocritical heel-clicking that Grange found cheering) but in fact only to return to the crew room with the pacifying news that “the lieutenant seemed in a good mood.”

  But there seemed, in fact, to be no cause for alarm. Apparently nothing in the official communications indicated that a change in the Roof sector was imminent. With a little optimism, one could occasionally pick up hints that were frankly reassuring; for example that communication from the engineers—already promising a long spring lull—which ordered the anti-tank mines to be removed after the thaw for checking and stocking. Yet something filtered through this grayish logorrhea—more abundant each week—which spoiled his calm a little: as if a mind given over to sleep were still obsessed with its heavy thoughts, occasionally rousing the nerve ends with tiny twinges. Now that the winter was advancing, it was the cavalry maneuvers that seemed to worry him, for everyone knew (the cavalrymen themselves made no secret of it) that in case of a German attack the cavalry was to deploy its units far ahead of the lines in Belgium. But when he tried to decipher the extremely fragmentary orders that reached Les Falizes, Grange was astonished by the perspective that appeared: obviously the cavalry’s advance ahead of the lines mattered less than its manner of retreat behind them. Week after week a hail of detailed orders on this point alerted the Meuse unit-commanders in their snowbound posts, specifying retreat itineraries, the order of flow of the columns, and the units authorized to set off the detonations. The transfer of the blockhouses to the command of the retreating cavalry crossing the frontier was spelled out with special precision. Grange received diagrams indicating in red pencil on the master plans the fire zone of the advanced artillery provided to cover the cavalry retreat behind the Meuse. “The Meuse?” Grange reflected—and it was as if a long, sly brush had touched the blockhouse in the obscurity of its forest, making it gleam with a dangerous phosphorescence—“the Meuse?” This had something to do with them.