Balcony in the Forest

by Julien Gracq

  “There’s something missing, mon yeutenant, don’t you think?” Olivon asked, when the job was through. He had stepped back a few yards to get a better look, squinting at the shabby structure with a curious expression. “We ought to hang up a sign: beware of the dog.”

  Toward evening, Moriarmé called to confirm the barbwire emplacement, and ordered them to check whether munitions stocks, rockets, and reserve supplies were at full strength.

  “I’m sending up the truck with a replacement rocket-gun,” Varin added. “Rocket-guns never work. Nev-er.”

  In spite of himself Grange imagined the inimitable flaring of the nostrils at the other end of the wire. But the captain must have been interrupted, for Sergeant Prinet took the receiver.

  “Did you get bombed?” Grange inquired politely.

  “Not much damage, mon lieutenant. Some horses. And a few houses. Les Verreries . . .”

  “Any news?” Grange’s voice was somewhat less detached than he would have liked.

  “Nothing definite,” Prinet said, after a second’s hesitation. “The radio says the Germans have crossed the Albert Canal.”

  It was strange to discover how much or how little names could mean now. The Albert Canal was far away, in the north. The lower reaches of the Scheldt. The others. . . .

  “And toward our lines?”

  “No one knows,” Prinet answered. “The cavalry is in Belgium.”

  “All by itself?”

  “Well . . . yes, I think so, mon lieutenant.” Prinet seemed surprised. “No one’s ready to move down here. They’re all waiting.”

  Behind Prinet’s voice, he could just hear a radio in the office playing La Brabançonne. Suddenly, mysteriously, the planet’s spasm was exploding here: the sound of the sea when you hold a shell to your ear. Outside, the feathery shadow of a little cloud crossed the road, climbed the wall of trees like a squirrel—and through the open window Grange could hear birds chirping peacefully.

  At nightfall, after dinner, the crew sat outside, smoking on the grass near the road: in the blockhouse these days they felt like fish stranded on a beach. Grange remembered how on August 2, 1914, his whole town had gathered on the quay with their dinners on their laps, for a gigantic picnic. Everyone brought chairs outdoors—to be within reach of signs. Some one saw a flag in the moon, someone else mentioned a tidal wave that was moving up the river: it was some experiment with a mysterious explosive: Turpin powder. The memory was one of the delights of his childhood. They had forgotten to send him to bed that night; the world was in its second childhood.

  The conversation turned to the bombings. During the afternoon Hervouët had met a man from Les Buttés who had come back up from the Meuse. There was more damage than they had supposed. Blockhouses along the river had been attacked. The man from Les Buttés said that the planes dived straight toward their target with some kind of terrible siren sounding at the same time. Grange could tell from their faces that the men were particularly affected by the siren. They were scandalized. That hoax, a dirty, nasty trick at such a moment conflicted with some innate, obscure code of honor. It was the symbol of a depraved character, the quintessence of cunning, the one hold not allowed.

  “They must be rotten clear through to the bone,” Gourcuff said, nodding.

  Now, with the darkness, the planes returned over the Meuse, not bombing this time, but on a lingering prowl, probably photographing the afternoon’s fires. Lying on their elbows in the dim, already dewy grass, they lit cigarettes and silently watched the battle for a moment. It was like the last lights of a fair going out on the far horizon beneath the cold stars. From the valley rose a chain of tracer bullets—great, slow bubbles of light that mounted one after another into the night’s darkness. Then the short burst of anti-aircraft guns, like the clicking of a roulette wheel.

  AS THEY were going back inside, the truck from Moriarmé stopped and switched off its lights. The driver cursed the road, which had been cut up by the cavalry. He was still shaken by the afternoon’s bombing, but from the snatches of news he dropped they could guess that the atmosphere in Moriarmé had grown heavier. The engineers had pulled all the boats to the left bank of the Meuse; the barges for blowing up the bridge had been put in position; the refugees were camped in front of the station and in the streets, waiting for a train that didn’t come, already hungry.

  “When the civilians clear out . . .” the driver said, with a grimace. “And even so, in a way, it isn’t the refugees so much. Up here, mon lieutenant, you don’t have any idea. You haven’t seen the cavalry wounded go through.”

  The truck drove off down the road, its headlights on now as it jolted noisily along the service path to Les Buttés. They could follow it far into the calm night from all the clatter it made. The darkness of the forest where its little lights bounced along seemed suddenly greater, vaguer, as bewildering as the sea itself.

  Just as Grange was about to get into bed, Moriarmé telephoned, reminding them that all blockhouse garrisons were now under cavalry orders.

  “I know,” Grange said, a little surprised. “Of course.”

  “You still haven’t received orders?”

  “No.”

  There was a dumfounded silence at the other end of the wire. “All right,” the voice said at last, crossly and with great precision. “Call tomorrow morning early if nothing comes through. Call without fail.”

  Grange stretched out on his bed, bewildered. Something in the unknown voice warned him not to take off his clothes. “What’s going on?” he wondered, his head throbbing—“and why does everyone in Moriarmé have insomnia?” At the same time a phrase ran through his mind, a bitter little phrase with a hint of poison in it: “the cavalry wounded.” Neither the planes nor the bombs had stirred his imagination—even the Roof suddenly blooming with its columns of smoke still looked a little like a natural phenomenon to him. But with “the cavalry wounded” he was suddenly touched; the words opened a valve somewhere, unlocked a door that led to a new country. “Will that be coming through here?” he wondered, dazed and slightly scandalized at the same time. He glanced toward the forest and shrugged his shoulders. “The Ardennes?” he repeated to himself, incredulous, as if the word could have reassured him, warded off danger—“The Ardennes! . . .” They would have to be crazy to try. . . .

  Toward two in the morning he awakened, shivering in a draft; he got up to close the window. The night was perfectly calm, and yet not quite asleep: looking hard at the slightly darker line of the forest horizon, he could see the sky above waken at long intervals with a sudden, unidentifiable blink of light. It was a quick, isolated flash, with nothing of the soft palpitation of heat lightning; instead it was as if a heavy hammer behind the horizon were pounding out red-hot iron on an enormous anvil with regular strokes. Grange strained his ears for a few minutes to hear the noises of the night: a gentle wind stirred the high branches; from the Meuse came the faint rolling sound of a distant train. Now another blink was alternating with the first, veering toward the right; his heart stirred with vague apprehension, Grange stared at the strange sky that reddened slightly as its lights sparkled over the forest. He turned on his lamp; then, using the outside ladder, he climbed into the half-attic and raised the trap door to the roof.

  His eyes swept across the treetops, and the source of the reddish glow suddenly became perceptible: a tiny, very distinct point of light which appeared at long intervals at the limit of the horizon. The languid rhythm, the air’s motionlessness, and the silence made him think of a slow drop falling at intervals from the night’s vaults in exactly the same place, with that tiny explosion spattering against the tip of a stalagmite—when he looked very carefully, he could see a faint pinkish foam stirring for a moment around the point of the flame. The night was soft and calm; Grange no longer felt the cold; leaning on the edge of the wide-open trap door, his chin in both hands, he watched, spellbound, as slow flame mysteriously oozed up out of the earth.

  “It’s very far away,” he
mused, “toward Bouillon, maybe Florenville. But what is it?” From time to time he pulled his blanket closer around his shoulders. Toward two-thirty, the flashes grew rarer, then the strange meteor stopped altogether: the night seemed suddenly close, stifling with the exhalations of its growth. Grange suddenly felt the cold; he climbed down to bed, his mind in a daze. Passing the open door of the crew room, he listened to the men’s breathing for a moment. It seemed to make the overly calm night where the sinister lights prowled easier to bear. He felt comforted that they were sleeping so well.

  THERE are hours when it seems as if a heavy palm were pressing hard upon the earth, full of darkness, like the butcher’s hand as he quickly, gently, strokes the calf’s frontal bone before bringing down the felling-ax; and at its touch, the earth itself senses the blow and shrinks: as though the very light had turned sour, the morning winds blowing hot and heavy. No interpretable sign has come, but the anxiety is there, in the suddenly thickened sickroom air: all at once a man feels neither hunger nor thirst, but only his courage draining away, and he begins to breathe heavily, as if the world were weighing on his heart.

  “It’s Sunday,” Grange realized with a joyless yawn, seeing the dawn pale at his window. He had slept badly. The blockhouse steeped in a silence that was a little oppressive, a silence of stagnant water. Mechanically Grange glanced down the empty road. He felt ill at ease. This emptiness, these sleeping roads unoccupied even by behind-the-lines preparation—it was strange, improbable, somehow magical: a road to the Sleeping Beauty’s castle. As he came down the iron staircase he lit a cigarette. The morning seemed mild and aqueous, but on the grass the dew was already very cold; the thought of Olivon’s hot coffee almost made him turn back, but he had decided to walk as far as the bend of the road where the engineers had installed a mine field. He thought he would find a sappers’ guard post there: perhaps there would be news.

  There was no one at all. The road had sagged a little above the mine field, banked with dirt that was too soft; in the caterpillar ruts little puddles had accumulated, darkened now by the overhanging foliage. The two bare ends of the detonating wire, sticking out of the ground, led a little farther and came to an end on a heap of gravel.

  “That’s funny,” Grange thought, puzzled. He sat down on the gravel, distinctly out of sorts. It was as if there were no sounds in the forest for a mile around; he strained his ears toward the birdless treetops, vaguely troubled by this suspect disappearance of man and animal, this site suggestive of desertion. Suddenly, as he was lighting his cigarette again, there was a rent in the motionless air, high above his head: a long, shrill clatter, as if a celestial express train were rushing along its tracks, rattling at top speed around curves: the heavy artillery of the Meuse was opening fire on Belgium.

  Then it seemed to Grange that things happened very quickly. He was scarcely halfway back to the blockhouse when a powerful whine of motors began to burrow and thunder through the forest on all sides at once, with the unceremoniousness of a troop of beaters going into a thicket, and suddenly the whole Roof shivered with the tremendous racket of bombs and machine guns. Grange stood for a moment amazed: the forest was vibrating like a street shaken by the uproar of a pneumatic drill; he felt himself shaken by the vehement, incomprehensible tremors that ran through him, from the soles of his feet and from his ears as well. He rushed off the road down a path where the arches of thick-leaved branches showed only a tiny streak of white sky. As soon as he felt himself out of sight, the racket seemed less overpowering: he realized that it was caused by motors rather than by explosions: there were long quiet spells. Reassured, Grange immediately set out for the blockhouse again beneath the roaring sky, but some ten yards ahead the worn asphalt that paved the road here began to fry strangely: it took him a second or two to realize that he was being machine-gunned: he ran back to where the service path turned off. He lit another cigarette, much more comfortable: the noise relieved him. From time to time the sky overhead, in a roar of motors, was crossed by a sudden flight of black shapes; there was nothing else to be discovered—when Grange went as far as the road to peer out, he saw flattened against the sky, which was lighter overhead, clusters of thinly scattered planes flying high and quite slowly, as if they were swimming against a current. What he noticed was their peaceful, easy movement of fish in water, the way they had of spreading out so comfortably high in the air, ignoring one another, like schools of fish that cross without noticing it, each going about its business at different levels in the transparency of the deeps. It suggested a serene, nonchalant occupation of the elements, except that from time to time the brutal racket suddenly broke out again and rose toward its high point, tearing through the shoals of air where these soft constellations were floating.

  The planes disappeared as they had come, carried away by a shift of wind. A stale smell of dust wafted over the forest. Out of the road, scarred now with a tiny whiplash, Grange picked a great round bullet. The idea that he had been under fire was disconcerting, a little preposterous. The blockhouse had not been attacked: he found his men, a little pale, sitting on boxes, glasses in hand.

  “Well now, well now!” Gourcuff was saying, shaking his head. Olivon filled Grange’s glass without a word; the bullet passed from hand to hand, weighed in their palms, shiny and heavy. Grange picked up the telephone. Moriarmé did not answer. He shook the lifeless receiver for a moment against his ear, incredulous, and quickly hung up, for the men were staring at him. The line had been cut.

  “All right. Clean-up time!” he said, his voice suddenly harsh. “We’re moving downstairs.”

  There was little combustible material in the fireproof upper story. They moved two straw mattresses and some blankets to the blockhouse below, then began carrying down a few pieces of furniture by the iron stairway, but this took too long: tables, chairs, even a little chest, flew out of the windows over the barbed wire. The sound of splintering wood gave them heart to finish the job.

  “It’s good and empty now,” Olivon remarked officiously. “And it looks more natural—for the camouflage, I mean. As though we’d cleared out.”

  When they had moved into the concrete block, they opened some tin cans and ate a little, but with small appetite. From time to time they looked up, feeling out of place, and sniffed the stale air, dank with the odor of roots and earth that rose from the open hatchway. The black cat Grange had brought back from Les Falizes tentatively rested its paws on the cold concrete before disdainfully taking refuge on a crate. They quickly reopened the armored door and went back out into the air. As they were sitting down on the grass, a sidecar appeared, leading a cyclone of tanks rolling at top speed along the road from Belgium, followed by infantry trucks, mounted guns, half-tracks, and machine-gun tanks, the paint chipped where bullets had hit; hanging on to bumpers, fenders, wherever there was a place to catch hold, rode a swarm of furiously peddling cyclists apparently standing on the dust of the road, while clusters of refugees crowded the running boards and hoods—even an old butcher’s van had been caught up in this wild cavalcade, its rack of swaying carcasses covered by a filthy mustard gray. The procession was heading for the Meuse—an avalanche in a tunnel of dust, the muddy, rumbling stream roaring like a herd of water buffalo running from a jungle fire toward a ford in the river.

  “Hey, cavalry—you pulling out?” Hervouët shouted, but his voice was not even meant to carry. The men sat there on the tanks, not turning their heads, not speaking, only twisting the corners of their mouths in the slow, tired grin of a boxer hanging from the ropes.

  Suddenly the stream dried up, and then, before the dust had settled, a single machine-gun tank, not moving so fast, its barrel pointing to the rear, lurched by the blockhouse. As it was about to pass, the tank stopped with a squeal of brakes and out of the tower appeared a helmet with a leather strap, then a face with hands cupped around the mouth, shouting in stupefaction toward the blockhouse, “It’s no time to show off in there! The Germans are ten minutes behind us.”

&nb
sp; The tank started up again. Grange turned toward his men: it seemed to him their faces had turned quite gray—suddenly he felt a heavy blow land on his nape—and he mechanically raised his wrist at the man’s words; “what time is it?” he wondered quite stupidly—“eleven?” For the first time that day he looked at his watch.

  It was four in the afternoon. Behind the forest, with the dry click of a circuit being cut, the bridges over the Meuse were exploding, one after another.

  THEY dashed into the blockhouse and slammed the armored door behind them. There was a moment of panic: their fingers trembled, fumbling, as they opened the ammunition boxes. When the clatter of greased steel stopped for a moment, the only sound was a deep breathing that hissed like soup in a caldron. Grange felt a little faint, his eyes were burning; at the same time, a hard little laugh as dry as it was annoying rose under his ribs, and Grange felt his spirits rise with it.

  “This is real army slapstick,” he muttered to himself, “and we’re all part of it”—unconsciously a scowl of grim hilarity wrinkled his cheeks. “With the meat van! Now what do they think I’m going to do here?” He felt like putting his hands on his hips. “With my three anabaptists! . . . And the mines didn’t even go off!” Somehow this scandalized him more than anything else: vengefully he kicked the instruction folders removed from his files. “Asses!” he thought again, with disgusted impartiality. “Stupid asses!” He would have been unable to say just what he meant: the words were a kind of doting absolution that dismissed the world from all appeal, consigned it once and for all to its old chaos.