Balcony in the Forest

by Julien Gracq

  As they came out of the tunnel, there still seemed to be light in the undergrowth. They used Grange’s compass and plunged through the forest toward the west. The sound of motors had started on the road again—behind them, toward the blockhouse, loud voices shouted to each other through the woods, calm and relaxed, like hunters when the shoot is over. They walked on, bent double, through the dense tangle of May branches, leaving a noisy wake of broken boughs. But they paid no attention: the voices behind them gradually faded out; the sense of strange, almost intoxicating immunity that fills prisoners and wounded men persisted. Occasionally they stopped for breath and drank a mouthful out of Gourcuff’s canteen. All their thoughts now began to flow of their own accord down another slope. The war was continuing, but was already moving far away, with the diminishing sound of the last drops of a squall that dry up on the windowpanes.

  “What are you going to do, after the war?” Grange asked, almost without thinking.

  They talked as men talk on a railroad platform in wartime, their minds elsewhere, when a change of trains will break off indifferent farewells.

  The terrain ahead of them began to slope gently: they were approaching the ravines of Braye, which ran out not far from the blockhouse after gashing into the plateau above. The forest in this area was a thick tangle of chestnut saplings; walking here, brushing aside the rubbery stems, became exhausting; Gourcuff’s rifle continually caught on the branches; he swore; their coats hooked on brambles; the bayonet sheath clanked against the canteens with the muffled ring of a herd coming down from the upland pastures.

  “We’ll never get there,” Grange thought, almost casually. “Besides . . .”

  His leg was beginning to swell and grow heavy. He stopped to change the bandage and threw the bloody rag into the bushes. When he put his weight on his heel, a sharp spear of pain leaped up to his hips; he drew a long breath, his eyes closed, and wiped the tickling sweat off his icy brow; two or three stars were already twinkling in the treetops. The sounds of voices and motors had stopped. The blood he had lost left him floating, lightheaded, in the calm night. They were walking toward the Meuse. But it didn’t matter now whether they reached the Meuse. It didn’t matter where they were. Against the harsh cloth that bound his skin, he felt the faint velvety shudder of fever, still almost voluptuous.

  “Stop,” he murmured to Gourcuff, tugging at his bayonet sheath. The clanking gave him gooseflesh. “I’m thirsty.”

  There was nothing but red wine in their canteens: scarcely had he tasted the sharp stuff this time when a fit of nausea twisted his stomach, as though he had swallowed sawdust. He tried to stand up but his leg gave beneath him, suddenly filled with needles. He lifted his trouser leg above his hard, swollen knee that was mottled with pale bluish spots. “Probably a splinter I didn’t even feel,” he thought. He leaned against a chestnut sapling, his leg straight out before him on the moss. Another stream of icy sweat trickled down his forehead. Putting his hand under his belt to unbuckle it, he pulled it away sticky with blood: he had been hit in the hip as well.

  “It’s bad,” he said sharply. “Leave me here.”

  He looked at Gourcuff planted before him, his legs wide apart as he corked his canteen, his mouth wide in a perplexity so comical than Grange felt a ghost of laughter slip across his face without moving it, as if at a distance. The clumsiness of a man dealing with wounds suddenly struck him, yet at this moment he would not have wanted a woman with him. “Go on,” he continued, angry now. “It’ll be night soon.” He held out the compass. Gourcuff stood motionless before him, his head down; with the toe of his shoe he kicked at twigs on the moss, his expression undecided. The darkness was falling fast now, their faces were already indistinct.

  “I’d just as soon stay here,” Gourcuff said at last, with a grimace that looked as if he wanted to cry. He was holding the compass at arm’s length, clumsily, like the saucer under a cup of coffee.

  “Don’t be stupid. Get out of here. You’ll get caught here without doing any good at all. That’s an order,” Grange added, and felt that in spite of himself his tone was vaguely burlesqued. Again he had the sense that this war, in its least detail, was imitating something without being able to decide what it was.

  After a few seconds, Gourcuff shook his head, filled a canteen with wine, and left it on the moss next to Grange; he poured several handfuls of biscuits out of his knapsack onto a piece of newspaper. Then he leaned Grange comfortably against the chestnut tree and spread his blanket over his legs. Grange guessed that he was delaying on purpose. When he found nothing else to do, he sat down beside the chestnut tree, his legs crossed. They lit their cigarettes with Gourcuff’s lighter. The darkness was upon them; for precaution’s sake, they held their helmets over the tiny red points that glowed already in the darkness.

  “All right, mon lieutenant, if that’s the way you want it,” Gourcuff said, after they had wished each other good luck. “If I find any of the guys over there, we’ll come back for you,” he added modestly.

  He began moving off behind the trees—a floundering, noisy mass gradually vanishing into the dimness of the thicket. From time to time he stopped and turned around, and Grange guessed that he was glancing back with the panic look of a dog that is frightened at no longer being called back.

  He listened for a long time to the crackling of the underbrush that grew fainter now, swallowed up by the forest like a stone in a well. As long as he kept completely still, his leg hurt him very little. The coolness that followed the twilight was not yet unpleasant. Mechanically, he chewed a piece of biscuit, then spat it out: the pasty flour stuck to his tongue: he was thirsty again. Above him a trace of greenish light still lingered between the branches: over the forest fell the stupefied calm of the first moment of darkness, before the night birds wakened. At this moment, the animals were not yet aroused—only the woods: occasionally a branch moved after the heat of the day, drawing after it a languid feathery rustling, the sound of gardens after rain.

  “How empty it is!” he thought. Memories turned in his mind, images of a strange earth without men—winter wanderings in the forest, afternoons in the blockhouse when all he could see from his window were the warm drops of the thaw swelling one by one at the tips of the branches. The earth slipped away beneath him, alien and incongruous, like a night train whose clatter suddenly rises, rushes toward the horizon, and fades into the landscape. Lying at almost full length on the ground, the cold began to take him, but at the same time an inexpressible calm filled his mind.

  “I’m really here,” he told himself. It occurred to him that the war was lost, but the thought came calmly, listlessly. “I’m demobilized,” he mused again. Suddenly he realized that Les Falizes was close by. The image of a lair, a hiding place, became an obsessive one; he remembered that all wounded men drag themselves toward a house. There was a well of fresh water, a deep well, near Mona’s house. The anticipation of that black water moistened his throat; he felt the cold, delicious touch on his mouth. “I’ll try in a little while,” he decided. “But not now, not right away. I have to get back my strength.”

  He nodded once or twice in the darkness, pleased with having reasoned so well. The path to Les Falizes must pass nearby, somewhere to the east. But where was the east? He remembered that he had given his compass to Gourcuff: a sudden, wild, stubborn anger made him tremble against his tree: two or three great tears of rage ran down his cheeks. But his mind drifted despite himself, slipped its moorings: he supposed Olivon and Hervouët would be decorated: no one could say—no one—that they hadn’t defended the blockhouse.

  Posthumously, he reflected. The formula mechanically turned round and round in his mind: it seemed somewhat abstruse, but important, imposing, like those seals on old official documents that fastened down a bow of silk ribbon. His fever seized him again; he realized that if he waited any longer he wouldn’t be able to stand up any more. He drank a little wine out of Gourcuff’s canteen and stuffed some biscuits in his pocket; then he c
ut a branch overhead with his pocketknife and made it into a cane. After a few moments’ effort, he managed to stand up: so long as he did not bend his knee, he could use his wounded leg, as if it were a wooden leg. A dog bayed to his right; he moved toward the sound through the thicket, and, a hundred steps farther, came out into the path to Les Falizes.

  A haste, a childish anxiety, drew him onward now, forcing one step after another, his stiff leg stumbling in the holes of the dark path. He was making for the house as if he were expected there. When he stopped, his forehead throbbing with fever, dripping with sweat, he cocked his ears again in the silence of the forest, surprised at this world that would let a man escape like water through a pile of sand. When his neck began to feel weak, he threw away his helmet: the fresh air did him good.

  “No one here!” he repeated to himself. “No one!” Once again he felt like crying; his heart contracted. “Maybe I’m going to die,” he thought. His mind wandered despite himself, burdened by an increasing heaviness: now he remembered that gangrene began in infected wounds; the maddening certainty seized him that his leg was turning black: he stopped, lay down on the ground, and began to roll back his trouser leg. “I’ve forgotten my flashlight,” he suddenly realized, and again a furious, impotent rage shook him with sobs: leaning forward in the darkness with oxlike stubbornness, he tried to bring his eye closer to his leg, straining his aching hips. He felt he was about to faint—the cold sweat trickled down his forehead—and lying on one side he vomited tiny mouthfuls of the red wine and biscuit he had swallowed. Yet as soon as he was prone and motionless again, he felt only a little pain, his strength returned—a sense of tranquility, of stupid happiness, filled him, as though he were floating. “Or as if I were convalescent,” he mused. “But from what?”

  He remained lying on the ground for at least an hour. There was no hurry to start off again; he looked at the branches above him that stretched over the path against the paler sky: it was as if the night that lay ahead of him down this corridor was inconceivably long and peaceful—he felt lost, really lost, far from all paths: no one was expecting him any more—ever—anywhere. This moment seemed delicious to him. When the cold began to be unbearable, he stood up almost easily. The path grew harder beneath his feet now, wakening the deep muffled echo of an empty room; he was in the village before he noticed it: here the long, blind walls of the barns fused with the forest. Turning into the little alley where Mona’s house was, he stopped to listen a last time. The stiff rooftrees of the houses silhouetted against the night seemed to make it clearer, emptier. The silence was absolute, but it was no longer the silence of the forest. It was a widowed silence, full of the sad, sealed nuance which the overhang of stone walls gives the night. Only to the right, where the clearing opened a little between the hamlet and the forest, the gardens roused by the froth of May seethed against the dark houses in a slow, breathing tide that stirred the dark air and seemed to swell beneath the starry sky; at intervals, from the other end of the village, the dog began baying again—the sense of gentle, magical tranquility that had filled him on the path seized him once more.

  In the alley, he suddenly felt at the end of his strength—he had thrown away his cane and was clinging with one hand to the fence posts, with the other he was already holding the key wrapped in his handkerchief; the odor of the gardens made him dizzy. “I’m coming,” he thought, “I’m coming back!” His teeth were chattering, the key trembled in his hand less from fever than his wild haste; from time to time he seized his wrist with his left hand, trying to suppress the continuing jerks. “I couldn’t open it,” he thought, and supported his heavy head with one hand. “I couldn’t.” Yet he had strength enough to close and lock the door behind him, and then, in the thick darkness, he moved into the room, hands held out before him, struck his knee against the side of the bed and fell backwards upon it, his legs wide.

  He lay motionless for a long time waiting for his breath to come back; his heartbeats grew calmer. A faint gray light filtered into the room now, through the transom over the door and the hearts cut in the shutters. The counterpane yielded softly under his weight; he felt he could snuggle here as if inside a womb; the silence seemed marvelous to him, varnished with a faint odor of wax, purified by the salubrious, bitter perfume of lavender. His body gradually revived in this black silence—his strength was restored.

  “What a business!” he thought. He still felt a little dazed, but he tried to pull his thoughts together; he realized that once he had closed this door a line was drawn, an epilogue had been pronounced: his brief wartime adventure had come to an end. What surprised him was the void created around him: a ghostly, yawning, stale void that drew him in. He had sent Mona away. Olivon and Hervouët were dead. Gourcuff had gone. The war was shifting far away, very insignificant now, already devoured by these dim, heavy shadows that came back to crouch around him. He looked about him, still stunned by the shock of his wound, watching the heavy waters of the closed room floating beneath the moon, crushed by the silence of the countryside. “What a move!” he thought. He tried to remember, wrinkling his forehead, what it was he had watched for from his window, waited for all winter long down the distances of the road so feverishly, with such morbid curiosity. “I was afraid, and yet I wanted it,” he decided. “I was expecting something to happen. I had made room for something. . . .” He knew something had happened, but he felt it had not been real: the war continued to hide behind its ghosts, the world around him went on draining away in silence. Now he remembered the night patrols along the silent frontier, from which he had returned so many times to this bed, to Mona. Nothing had taken shape. The world remained evasive, kept the cottony, limp feel of hotel rooms under the dim blue night light. Lying on the bed in the darkness, in the hollow of the empty house, he became again the blind prowler he had been all winter, gliding still over a vague twilight border, the way you walked along a beach at night. “Only now I’m touching bottom,” he reminded himself with a sense of security. “There’s nothing else to wait for. Nothing else. I’m back.”

  “I mustn’t strike a light,” he remembered. He stood up, groped for the table, found the pitcher in the bowl and took a long drink; he felt the fine, stale film of dust slipping over his tongue and remembered that it was less than a week ago that he had left Mona. Then he stretched out on the carpet and washed his wound. The water flowed onto the floor without a sound, vanishing into the thick pile. The cold liquid burned, but once he had bathed the wound it seemed as if the pain had dulled a little: he stood up again and drank some more. A faint gray shadow seemed to come toward him from across the room and make him a sign; he raised his hand: the shadow in the mirror repeated the gesture with a drawn-out slowness, as if it were floating in layers of water; he leaned over until his nose was almost pressing against the mirror—but the shadow remained vague, eaten away by the darkness: life did not connect with itself: there was nothing but this approximate confrontation with a dim shadow he could not really make out. Yet thoughts occasionally drifted through his mind which now seemed infinitely remote: he wondered if Gourcuff had reached the Meuse. “Varin was right about the funnels,” he decided impartially. But all that didn’t matter to him. Nothing was happening. There was no one. Only this stubborn, dim, intimidating shadow that gloated toward him without meeting his own limbo—this ear-splitting silence.

  Fatigue throbbed through his skull; his mind reeled with heavy somnolence. He stretched out again on the counterpane without undressing, one leg bare: the silence closed over him like a pool of water. He remembered how he used to listen, sometimes, lying next to Mona while she slept: he thought about her for a moment more; saw again the rainy road where he had met her, where they had laughed so when she said “I’m a widow.” But even this image faded: it was as if it were rising despite himself, into more buoyant waters. “Lower,” he told himself, “much lower. . . .” He heard the dog bay two or three times, then the cry of the screech owl at the nearby edge of the forest, then nothing more
: the earth around him was as dead as a plain of snow. Life fell back to this sweetish silence, the peace of a field of asphodels, only the faint rustle of blood within the ear, like the sound of the unattainable sea in a shell. As he turned over heavily, Grange heard the identity tags clink in his pockets; he wondered what Olivon and Hervouët had bought with such mortuary coin. “Nothing, probably,” he decided. He lay for a moment more with his eyes wide open in the darkness, staring toward the ceiling, perfectly still, listening to the buzzing of the blue fly that butted heavily against the walls and the windows. Then he pulled the blanket up over his head and went to sleep.