He did not trouble to reply. There was no way of knowing why he had come, what had impelled the vagabond to sit down in this kitchen, next to this little sister of his whom he did not know and whom he gazed at with surprise in his eyes.
Once again, without realizing that she had already asked the same question, she said:
‘Is Eugénie keeping well?’
She had seen Eugénie only once, an astonishing woman who must have been very beautiful at one time, a brunette with a Parisian accent who called everybody ‘dearie’ and used the familiar tu with people.
‘Have you seen Louisa lately?’
She talked about her sisters, about Louisa who lived on the Quai de Coronmeuse, about Marthe, Schroefs’ wife, about Félicie who was extremely unhappy with her husband.
‘She’s married a madman. He hides in the dark at night to frighten her. He beats her too. She’s shown me the marks.’
Léopold heaved a sigh and she felt more and more uneasy, yet drawn to him by a mysterious force. There were so many questions which she would have liked to ask him, so many questions which, like an augur, only he could answer!
Why was it that she felt guilty? If Désiré had come home unexpectedly, she would not have known what to say, what attitude to adopt, and she would have begged his pardon.
‘You knew Father well, Léopold …’
He drank his coffee, with drops running down the black hairs of his beard. His eyes sought automatically for another drink which he would have preferred, and he heaved a sigh.
‘Is it true that at the end of his life? …’
‘That what?’ he asked gruffly. ‘That he drank?’
Désiré’s armchair creaked under Léopold. The latter knew everything. He had been to see his father’s birthplace, at Herzogenrath, on the other side of the frontier, the vast, comfortable house of a big landowner.
The place itself remained incomprehensible to Élise, those three frontiers close to the Meuse, those low-lying meadows, that house situated in Germany whose windows overlooked Holland while from the bottom of the garden you could see Belgium.
‘Mother lived in the biggest farm in Dutch Limbourg. She was a Liévens.’
The daughter of a rich farming family, a family which was still one of the richest in Limbourg.
The young couple had decided not to go far: they had crossed the Meuse and settled in Belgian Limbourg, at Neeroeteren. Peters was a dike keeper. It was he who controlled the movement of the water in the polders. From Neeroeteren, you had to walk for an hour before you saw another house.
‘It’s there that you were born?’
‘The others too, Hubert, Louis, Marthe, Louisa, all of us except Félicie and you. And I’m not so sure about Félicie. Wait a moment…’
He started counting and she tried to picture that expanse of pale, spongy grass, those endless meadows divided by curtains of poplars and by irrigation canals.
‘In winter, we used to go to school on skates, along the canal.’
‘You aren’t too hot like that, Léopold?’
It was strange that she should have met him again just now. She scarcely ever went to the Rue Puits-en-Sock. She never saw her sisters, except Félicie, when the latter was able to escape for a few minutes, or when Élise went to the market and caught sight of her through the windows of the café. The day before, when they had found no note on Françoise’s door, Élise had experienced a feeling of emptiness.
She circled round Léopold, not daring to look him in the eyes. She wanted to ask him so many more questions.
‘How did we come to lose all our money?’
‘First of all we moved to Herstal. On account of the poplars.’
She did not grasp the connection between the poplars at Neeroeteren and the move to Herstal. Yet it was quite simple. By means of the poplars on his estate, her father had been initiated in the timber trade. He had decided that this business would be more profitable than farming, that they should go and live near the town.
Élise remembered vaguely that they had lived in what had once been the castle of Pépin d’Herstal. There were some underground passages left and an old tower which had since been destroyed, where a mysterious light could be seen every night.
‘We had four barges on the water and ten horses in the stable.’
All that Élise could remember was the ewe which they used to feed on sweets and chocolate and which nobody had had the heart to kill. That was her only recollection, together with the smell of the timber and the story of the light in the tower.
‘Then Father started drinking.’
‘What for?’
He just looked at her.
‘You know, my girl …’
He called her my girl. He would always call her that.
‘He started drinking. At the café he made the acquaintance of a certain Brooks.’
The man who still held the contract for the emptying of the town’s dustbins. So those heavy dustcarts which went through the streets in the morning had a distant connection with Élise!
‘Brooks asked him to sign some bills of exchange. He wasn’t able to pay on the day. People turned against Father and he was forced to sell everything.’
She felt like asking him:
‘And you, Léopold, where were you at the time?’
But she was just as timid in front of him, who could talk about the past, as she would have been in front of a witch who could predict the future.
‘Poor Mother!’ she sighed. ‘I remember our flat in the Rue Féronstrée. She never went out without her gloves. She used to tell me time and again: “You see, daughter, it’s better to arouse envy than pity. People won’t give us anything anyway.” ’
Léopold had not been at his mother’s funeral. There had been whispers, at the time, that he had gone to England with a countess older than himself, while Eugénie had taken a job as a cook in a middle-class house.
‘Wait a moment while I put some more coal on the fire. Move back a bit. No, don’t go yet.’
She wanted to know more. She was afraid of all that Léopold knew and yet she was also afraid of seeing him go, she needed to question him, to feed on the Peters’ past, on their history, on their life.
How far away was the hat-shop in the Rue Puits-en-Sock, and even big Désiré sitting behind the green windows of the insurance office!
‘The next time you come, I’ll have something for you to drink.’
Yes, she would go and buy some spirits, just for him, seeing that he probably didn’t like coffee. She would hide the bottle.
‘You really think that Félicie drinks? It’s the doctors who told her to start drinking stout, because she was anaemic. I’m anaemic too. At night my back goes numb all over. Perhaps it’s because we were the last to be born?’
He shook his head, a cigarette which had gone out sticking to his lip.
‘Listen, Léopold …’
What was she going to add? She didn’t know. A devil was pushing her on. She felt an urge to go on talking. She circled round him, grating some carrots on a corner of the table, picking up the baby’s celluloid doll, and shutting the window which she had opened for a moment on account of the steam.
‘I saw you, the night of the Grand Bazaar…’
No! She didn’t say it. She had stopped in time, afraid to go on. She did not bear Léopold a grudge. He was what he was, the eldest of the Peters, and he knew everything.
‘What’s the matter, my girl?’
Was it another Peters disease? Félicie was like that too. She would sometimes burst out sobbing, for no apparent reason. It was her nerves, as Élise said. Désiré, who could not understand, was forever saying:
‘What are you complaining about? Are we short of anything? Aren’t we happy?’
‘What’s the matter, my girl?’
Léopold for his part, did not wait for an answer. It was as if he knew. He gazed at the floor like a man whose thoughts are far away.
‘Those poor people whose
son … The father handed in his resignation straight away … He’s lost so much weight you can’t recognize him now … When he walks along the street, he keeps close to the houses, thinking that everybody’s pointing at him.’
She was lying. Léopold knew that she was lying. It was not about old Marette that she was thinking. He looked at her inquisitively. Perhaps he had not recognized her when she had gone into the alley-way to adjust her suspender? He shook his head, hunted for some loose tobacco in the depths of his pocket and rolled himself a shapeless cigarette.
‘How could he have done a thing like that? What good did it do? His parents had given him a good education. He could have become somebody. And now? Heaven knows where he is …’
Heaven and Léopold, who said nothing and heaved a sigh, because all this was pointless, it was words, nothing but words. He wished that she would stop talking and get on with her housework without bothering about him, that she would leave him in peace in his armchair to breathe in the atmosphere of hearth and home.
‘It was just the day Roger was born. I was on my way to get Valérie at L’Innovation, because I was afraid of having the baby before Désiré got home. It seems there were some people killed. I didn’t have the courage to read the papers.’
He could have taken out of his pocket, as well as bits of tobacco and an old pipe with the stem tied together with cotton, some letters written on poor-quality paper. There were not many of them, six or seven, undated, some unstamped, all in pencil.
‘…I am not putting a stamp because I haven’t enough money to buy one…’
As soon as he had arrived in Paris, Félix Marette had plunged into the Rue Montmartre district, where the streets smelled of printing ink and where, in the cafés, you could catch sight of black backs, wide-brimmed hats, loosely tied bows, prominent paunches, political pundits whose names you could see every day in the papers, whose silhouettes you could recognize as they passed, leaders of the lower classes, heralds of proletarian thought.
The thin, starved-looking boy roamed along the slimy pavements, pressing his nose against the windows behind which pipes were being smoked and proofs were being corrected on the marble-topped tables, between the beer-mugs and the sauerkrauts.
With his shoes sucking in water, he had waited with others outside dark passages, to see the bundles of freshly printed newspapers being carried out at a run towards the boulevards.
‘I am not putting a stamp because…’
‘I can feel that I am going to achieve something, I can feel a force within me which…’
He was ambitious to write in his turn, to see the thoughts seething inside him printed on pale sheets of paper. He prowled round the great men who went by, looking calm and busy, haloed by the glory which barely dry ink procures.
‘I have made the acquaintance of a libertarian who recites poetry in a tavern at Montmartre. We argued the whole of one night walking side by side between the Central Market and the Boulevard Montmartre. He too is in favour of direct action and I confessed to him that…’
‘Another cup of coffee, Léopold? Yes, do. I’ll cut you a piece of cheese.’
Léopold-the-Bearded did not stop her, since she insisted on it, but he would not eat the cheese. All he needed was a little bit of courage to drag himself out of the wicker armchair, go down that new-smelling staircase, turn the door-handle, and make straight for the first café he could find. There was one in the Rue de l’Enseignement; he had noticed it on his way here, and at the time he had very nearly gone in.
‘Since the day before yesterday, I have been earning my living, as is shown by the stamp on this letter. I eat at mealtimes…’
He had had a stroke of luck. In that Rue Montmartre where he sought nothing but food for his fever, next to a huge draughty building in which the offices of a score of different newspapers were superposed and intermingled, the boy had noticed, stuck on a stationer’s window, an advertisement written in purple ink.
‘Young man wanted to serve in the shop and run errands.’
He had gone, at high noon, into the semi-darkness of the shop whose window was full of indiarubber stamps, ‘made to order, delivered within twenty-four hours’.
‘Excuse me, Monsieur …’
A man as sad and gloomy as an ant, a woman who could scarcely be seen at the cash-desk, and the smell of ink, paper, indiarubber and glue, especially glue.
‘I read your advertisement and would like to offer my services…’
He was examined through iron-rimmed spectacles.
‘I can only give you sixty francs a month and a little bedroom on the sixth floor. But at least it’s a shelter, a door, a roof, a bed. For your meals, you’ll have to fend for yourself.’
Marette had eaten a sauerkraut with sausages. He reported to Léopold:
‘I went into the Brasserie du Croissant and there, at the next table to Renaudel and Jaurès, I ordered a…’
A sauerkraut! His employer, whose name was Vétu, had not asked him for his papers and had taken him to his attic by way of endless corridors and staircases. He was afraid of waking up with a start during the night, because if he did, his head would bump against the ceiling.
‘…a sauerkraut with two sausages and a huge slice of ham. I was so excited that it would not go down: I had to make an effort and I was afraid my neighbours were going to laugh at me…’
It was Marette’s last letter. He had added:
‘I have started work on the indiarubber stamps. It is not as difficult as you might think. The Vétus have a daughter whom I haven’t seen yet and who spends the whole day practising the piano on the entresol. The floor vibrates…’
‘Are you going already, Léopold?’
Yes, he had got to his feet. He stood a moment longer in front of the stove on which the dinner was simmering. She knew, she felt, that he would return, but she did not dare to ask him when.
‘I’m so happy … If you see Eugénie, give her a kiss from me…’
He heaved a last sigh, shedding bits of tobacco from his heavy verdigrised overcoat.
‘Good-bye, my girl.’
He had not looked at the baby. He had not paid the slightest attention to him. Did he even know his age?
She only hoped Léopold wouldn’t fall down the stairs.
‘I’ll see you to the door.’
She followed him down a few steps, and heard the landlady, down below, opening the door a little way, just like Madame Cession. When she had taken the flat in the Rue Pasteur, she had thought it would be different. Alas, landladies were all the same. There was trouble if you spilt a couple of drops of water on the stairs.
Trouble with the pram too …
‘I shall be glad when your son can walk by himself. Every time I have to go down to the cellar, I bump into that pram…’
It was so much trouble to push a baby’s pram a few inches to one side!
‘Good-bye, Léopold. Don’t forget to come again.’
Without bothering to reply, he found the handle, shut the door behind him less violently than she had feared, dived into the street, and headed for the nearest café.
‘Don’t cry like that. You know very well that your mother’s tired, that her back hurts. If you’re naughty, they’ll have to take her to hospital and operate on her.’
The child, who was one year old, did not understand.
‘You’ve thrown your toys on the floor again. Really, Roger! And Désiré’ll be back at any moment…’
The carrots were nearly burnt. She set to work. She still had to empty the slops, and then … The minutes went by … The ticking of the alarm-clock speeded up …
And when Désiré came in, his stride was even, his face smiling, his lanky figure impregnated with the joy he had experienced at walking through the town, for all that the weather was dull. Cloudy weather had its charms too, and so did rain.
‘I’m hungry.’
‘It’s ready, Désiré. By the way …’
She had to tell him.
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br /> ‘Léopold came. He sat down for a minute and had a cup of coffee.’
‘How was he?’
‘All right.’
That was all. He dropped the subject. But not entirely. A long time afterwards, he asked:
‘Is he working?’
‘I didn’t dare to ask him.’
He ate his sweetened carrots with a well-done steak without noticing that Élise was darting furtive glances at him, as if she were hiding something from him, as if she were afraid of being found out.
‘Monsieur Monnoyeur said to me this morning…’
She raised her eyes to the ceiling. Monsieur Monnoyeur was always saying that: ‘Next year, if all goes well, I’ll give you a rise.’
But today, as if to obtain his forgiveness, she pretended to share Désiré’s pleasure.
‘That would enable us to buy some new curtains, some twilled curtains. I’ve seen some at L’Innovation that weren’t too dear…’
If he had felt things like a Peters, he would have realized that a new element had introduced itself into the house, an element so subtle that even Élise, still trembling with emotion, could not have said what it was.
Léopold had bought a sausage somewhere and was eating it without bread, in the half-light of a low tavern, gazing vaguely in front of him.
CHAPTER SIX
IT WAS the silence that morning which produced in Élise that feeling of an illness one is sickening for, which one can feel inside oneself everywhere and nowhere. The kitchen window was wide open, revealing the backs of a row of houses, the little yards, and a great stretch of bright blue sky indented by the gables; and that extraordinary, frightening silence came flooding into the room in concentric waves, travelling like the sound of a bell. It came from beyond the roofs, from behind the watercolour sky, making her long to shut the window to prevent it from invading the house.
For everybody was bound to have the impression of being the centre of that silence, everybody who, in the midst of that immense, absolute calm, set off little individual noises, with a fork, a glass, opening a door, coughing, breathing.
Outside this sonorous nucleus which each person carried around shamefacedly within him, there was nothing. The pink brick walls of the house which was being built underneath Élise’s windows were deserted, indecently bare; the masons were not working and the first noise she missed was the crunching of the mortar under their trowels. In the centre of the block of houses, the forge at Halkin’s, with its heavy hammer-blows and the echoing sound of sheet-iron, was dead. And at ten o’clock, in the courtyard of the Friars’ school in the Rue de l’Enseignement, the shrill explosion of playtime failed to occur.
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