Not a word. A cackle of sneering laughter. A hand falling heavily on his shoulder.
It was Doms. Marette, without knowing what he was doing, had followed him, and they had spent two hours drinking beer in a café he would have been incapable of finding again.
Since then, the winter had gone by. Doms, one fine day, had vanished without a word.
Night had fallen. At one end of the Rue Montmartre, the arc-lamps had been lit between the buildings in the Central Market and, at the other end, the noisy life of the Grands Boulevards was flowing by.
Marette waited, tense and expectant, his nerves on edge. Some light filtered at last between the shutters of the Vétu shop. A silhouette brushed against the walls. After the first turning, he walked faster, passing his arm round a waist which showed no surprise.
‘Well, my love?’
His eyes looked at her in a pathetic inquiry, Isabelle’s eyes smiled, and their lips met, heedless of the passers-by who were merely shadows.
‘Have you had a reply?’
They were walking along, crossing the Central Market as they had done nearly every evening for three months now, and soon they would come to the deserted embankment, to the Seine surging noisily past the stone walls.
‘No. It must come, mustn’t it? It just has to.’
‘Calm yourself, my dear.’
‘And your mother?’
‘No. You can’t see anything yet.’
He felt an urge to take some violent action, to gesticulate frantically, but then he suddenly repented and calmed down, putting his arms protectively around Isabelle as if she had become fragile.
‘And to think that all we need is to find five hundred francs; to think that that horrible woman refuses to accept my word and give us credit! You know, Isabelle, there are times when … there are times …’
All that energy, all that despair, all that need, all that determination to be happy, meeting the tranquil emptiness of a fine night!
‘Calm yourself, my dear. You know very well that when you’re like that you frighten me. It doesn’t do any good.’
And they walked on in silence, pressed against one another, gazing at the grey paving-stones in front of them.
CHAPTER THREE
‘WHERE are you going, Roger?’
‘To play with Albert, Mother.’
‘You’ve put your pinafore on?’
‘Yes.’
‘Mind the tram.’
She leant over the banisters while Roger took his straw hat from the hallstand, snapped the elastic round his neck, and stood motionless in the hall for a moment, like a grown-up wondering if he hasn’t forgotten something. Finally he opened the letter-box and took out his marbles.
‘Make sure that I can see you all the time.’
He did not reply, but went out, leaving the door ajar. The Rue de la Loi was hot and empty. A solemn silence hung over the school yard, for the holidays had started the day before, and the friars could be seen going out at unusual times, in threes, with the edges of their hats turned up like wings, their black cloaks floating behind them, and one of their white bands always sticking up in the air. Brother Médard himself had come out of the green gate a little earlier, not to plant himself in the middle of the pavement as he did the other mornings to watch the boys coming in and out, but to go off towards the town. Was he taking a holiday too? In any case, he had looked to see if he could catch sight of that neat, hard-working young mother who took in lodgers.
For a long time now, Élise and Brother Médard had known each other without having exchanged a single word, separated as they had always been by the width of the street. Brother Médard looked like nobody else and defied all classification. He was extremely fat. His shiny cassock was stretched over a belly as round as a barrel. A huge head, with close-cropped hair and plump, shiny cheeks, was stuck solidly on top of this cylindrical mass; the whole massive ensemble rolled from left to right at every step, on account of the wooden leg which had to be lifted off the ground; Brother Médard sweated profusely, mopping his face with a red handkerchief like Léopold’s, and you could hear his stick on the pavement long before he appeared in the frame of the green gate; yet in spite of all that, he imposed respect and confidence, and it was to him that, if Élise needed advice, she would go to ask.
She was flattered by the glance which he granted her every morning, by that vague, modest greeting which you addressed to somebody you did not know but wanted to know; several times she had noticed that he hung around after the boys had gone if he had not seen her at one of her windows.
In the autumn, Roger, who was five-and-a-half, would be going to the Friars’ school.
The latter, who looked rather like crows, were greeted with shouts of: ‘Caw! Caw!’ by the street-urchins, those dirty, cheeky children whom Élise called filthy brats.
There were plenty of filthy brats in the district. Between Saint-Nicolas and the Rue Puits-en-Sock, in the back-streets where you went only when you were in a hurry, as a short cut, you met nothing else: dirty little girls, without knickers, sitting on the kerb with their legs apart, babies with their noses running and egg-stains round their mouths, and boys who bumped into passers-by and threw stones at you with deafening yells.
A hundred yards away, in the Rue de l’Enseignement, the children who went to the state school were filthy brats too.
‘Behave yourself, Roger! Don’t put your finger in your nose. You don’t want to look like a brat from the state school!’
Now and then a gang of children from somewhere or other, Bressoux or the parish of Saint-Pholien, descended on the Place du Congrès; rough, common and noisy, they stood on the benches, dirtying them, climbed the trees, pulled off the leaves, swung on the lower branches and frightened the mothers, until the figure of a policeman loomed up or they thought of a prank to play somewhere else.
Even at the Friars’ school, in the Rue de la Loi, there were some children from the back-streets, in other words more filthy brats, some of whom clattered about in clogs. For the school was divided into two parts. Opposite the Mamelins’ house, the green gate which Brother Médard guarded led into a spacious yard and the pink building of the Institut Saint-André.
You never said the Friars’ school, for people might misunderstand. The pupils of the Institut Saint-André came out in a row under the supervision of their masters, unless their mothers were waiting for them in the glass parlour on the right of the porch.
A little further on, on the other hand, the pupils of the free school could be seen every afternoon rushing out of a sort of dirty barracks in a noisy, unruly horde. A friar followed them with some difficulty to the door, a big, fat, common-looking man, a sort of peasant in a cassock with his nose smeared with snuff, who, without bothering to arrange the children in two rows, seemed to drive them out of the peaceful middle-class street.
This invasion lasted only a few moments, but if Roger happened to be outside just then, his mother was sure to appear at the door or at one of the windows of the house:
‘Come in quickly, Roger!’
Spick and span in his black pinafore with its wide folds, his Jean-Bart hat on his head, and his calves bulging out over his navy-blue socks, he wandered along, as dreamy or as thoughtful as a man, in a setting whose details were more familiar to him than to anybody else. Two houses further on, behind the panes of a window with impeccable curtains, he knew that he would catch sight of Raymonde. Raymonde, who never played in the street, not even on her own doorstep, was a girl of his age, as pink as any expensive doll, a quiet little thing with lovely golden curls. She looked at him too, but those window-panes always separated them. Raymonde lived in a quilted box into which neither the air nor the noises from outside ever penetrated, and gliding behind her you could sometimes see a governess in black with a narrow lace collar. Raymonde’s father and mother, Monsieur and Madame Rousseau, were both in the teaching profession; they went off in the morning and came home in the evening, grave and dignified.
Wasn’t he too in a sort of box, a bigger box than Raymonde’s, a box whose lid was a patch of blue sky with roofs and chimneys standing out against it, and whose edge was the gentle curve described by the No. 4 tram which you saw passing along the Rue Jean-d’Outremeuse and which reappeared in the Place du Congrès, at the end of the Rue Pasteur? In this box, he knew the colour of every house, the shape of the windows, and even certain hollows between the paving-stones which served as holes for his game of marbles.
He knew that it was Saturday because this morning his mother had not put on her cotton check apron but the apron in coarse blue cloth which was reserved for the weekly cleaning, and, looking round again before turning the corner of the Rue Pasteur, he recognized the soapy water flowing along the front of the house. In the afternoon, the streets looked like a draught-board, with big black squares in front of certain houses and white squares in front of others. The shining black squares were the wet patches, where the women had washed their stretch of pavement and roadway with bucketfuls of water and where each woman had left her little pile of dust and dung in the middle of the street.
It was scarcely a week since the policeman had rung every door-bell along the street and ordered the occupants to pull up the grass between the paving-stones; Roger had spent hours squatting on his heels with a potato peeler in his hand, digging up the narrow strips of grass or moss and trying to keep long pieces intact, his teeth set on edge by the grating of the blade on the stones. The whole district was outside, people nobody ever set eyes on; some looked embarrassed while the policeman Leroy, who lived in the Rue de l’Enseignement, strolled up and down with a satisfied smile.
Armand Pain was alone outside his house. Roger did not say hullo to him. If his mother had been there, she would have scolded him.
‘Say hullo to Armand.’
‘I don’t want to.’
‘He’s your friend.’
‘I don’t want him to be my friend any more.’
He went past looking the other way, on purpose. His friend nowadays was Albert.
‘Albert who?’
‘Albert.’
‘Why hasn’t he got another name?’
‘Don’t try to understand. Go and play.’
Roger stopped in front of a house in white brick, the only light-coloured house in the street, right opposite the Pains’. He banged the letter-box, and a gentle, fair-haired young woman opened the door.
‘Oh, it’s you, Roger. Have you come to see Albert?’
It was not a house like other houses. Everything in it was gayer and more delicate, there were flowers in the vases and scent in the air, and Albert’s mother was always dressed in pale silk.
‘Albert! Do you want to go to play with Roger? Don’t stay too long. Remember we have to pack your things.’
Albert was not an ordinary boy either. With his hair as fine and fair as his mother’s, and his white skin with a few freckles under the eyes, he looked like a girl, and he wore velvet suits with big white collars.
From the opposite pavement, Armand enviously watched them walking off towards the corner of the street, for Roger and Albert were supposed to play at the junction of the Rue Pasteur and the Rue de la Loi, so that their mothers could see them. On the way, they showed each other their marbles, not forgetting to turn round to look scornfully at Armand, who pretended to be enjoying himself on his own.
‘I’ll never play with him again,’ Roger promised with a certain solemnity, as if Albert had reproached him with their former friendship.
He was afraid of displeasing Albert. He admired his suit, his easy manner, even those little golden spots which gave a special glow to his face.
‘What shall we play at?’
The corner of the street was formed by a tall yellow house and, at pavement level, there were the windows of a basement kitchen. They were wide open, showing a maidservant at work, tiled walls, and copper saucepans on a white enamel cooker. The maid was grating carrots and this made a noise like an insect. A bulldog bitch, the only one in the district, was lying on the doorstep, on its back, and now and then Roger glanced furtively between its paws, as he did with the dirty little girls in the Rue des Récollets. In this connection, there was a question he would have liked to ask Albert, but he did not dare.
They could hear the shrill voice of fat Madame Morel who, from the pavement where she was standing, was talking to a neighbour at a first-floor window.
‘Can you do that?’ asked Albert, interlocking the fingers of both hands and suddenly twisting his thin wrists.
‘It’s easy!’
However, Roger did not manage it at the first attempt.
‘Wait a minute! You can do it because you’ve tried it before.’
Trams went by every ten minutes along the Rue Jean-d’Outremeuse. Friars came back in groups of three and rang the bell outside the green gate. Roger, who watched everything, knew that there was a wire across the yard and that it was by pulling a handle attached to it that the cook worked the mechanism of the door from his kitchen.
Only a month ago, he and Albert had been hoarding cherry-stones, which they managed to make white and shiny by cleaning them and by turning them over and over in their pockets, but the cherry season was over. The asparagus season too. Asparagus was what Roger liked best of all.
Albert announced:
‘Tonight we’re leaving for the seaside.’
‘Have you seen the sea already?’
‘Yes. We go there every year. You too?’
‘No. Is it very big?’
Élise Mamelin was washing her part of the street, to get ahead with her work. Wearing clogs, she flung bucketfuls of water over the pavement, scrubbed away with her brush, straightened her crumbling bun. Mademoiselle Frida came home and crossed the wet patch with stork-like precautions, wearing a white blouse over her flared skirt and a flat boater on her raven hair.
‘But yes, Mademoiselle Frida, you really must come with us. You’ll see how good the air is on the heights. She must come and spend the day at Embourg, mustn’t she, Désiré?’
Monsieur Saft had gone back to Poland. He had been so afraid of failing his examination and having to stay to prepare for the one in October! He would be coming back in the autumn. His room was being kept for him, even though he did not pay for it during the holidays, for he was not rich.
In the morning, he always came downstairs first, went into the yard, wearing a white vest showing the shape of his torso, and, for half an hour, while Élise was making the coffee and the house was gradually awakening, he did his exercises, very difficult exercises, then ran back upstairs to his room with a wet towel tied round his neck.
Mademoiselle Pauline, who had another oral examination to come, was leaving at the beginning of the next week. Her mother, a fat lady who walked with difficulty because of her bad feet, had come to see her at Christmas and had brought a smoked goose.
‘I bet you’ve never eaten any smoked goose!’ Roger said to Albert.
‘It doesn’t exist.’
‘It does, in Poland. I know, because we’ve got some Poles in our house. And what about cherry soup, have you ever had that?’
‘You can’t make soup out of cherries.’
‘You ask my mother! She made some once for Monsieur Saft and I had some. Mother! Mother! Albert doesn’t believe …’
‘Careful, children. Don’t go where it’s wet. Go and play somewhere else.’
There was only one shop in this part of the street—the other part, on the far side of the Rue Pasteur, didn’t count, people never went there, it was another country—and even then it was not a real shop. It was a private house in which the Venetian window had been converted into a shop-window. It was too high up. The children had to perch on tip-toe, or cling
with the ends of their shoes to the freestone basement jutting out …
‘You’re spoiling your shoes, Roger!’
Behind the half-lowered blind, they gazed at the boxes of cigars whose gold bands fascinated them. There were some ordinary ones, but there were others with broad coats-of-arms bearing complicated emblems, sometimes the profile of an eminent person, Léopold II’s white beard.
‘When I’m bigger, I shall collect cigar bands.’
They went to and fro, serious and thoughtful, in search of a new game, the basement kitchen on the corner sent out whiffs of stew, and the bitch, rolling in a pile of steaming dung, exhibited its pink belly with the two rows of pimples and the little slit with the hair along the edges which intrigued Roger so much.
Albert’s mother came towards them, sheltering her fair hair under a mauve parasol, and bent forward like a flower on its stem.
‘Are you coming for your dinner, Albert?’
She never shouted from her doorstep, like the other mothers of the district.
‘Good-bye, Roger. See you in a couple of months. Have a good holiday.’
Élise had taken in her bucket and brushes and Roger hopped towards the square patch of wet pavement, building another lock of mud in the gutter before going into the hall which was being invaded by blue steam from the kitchen.
It was after two o’clock. Désiré, who had just come home, was at table and Roger could hear the sound of his fork, his voice and then Élise’s, for all the doors were open this Saturday, even that of Mademoiselle Frida’s room, and draughts were blowing all over the house.
‘Roger!’
He was expecting it. He already knew what his mother was going to say.
‘If you’re going to stay on the doorstep, take your cushion.’
A pity. He liked the feel of the cold stone which was a grey colour bordering on blue, and the contrast of this chilliness with the heat of the sun beating down on his face. He went to the hall-stand to get the red cushion his mother had made for him with a piece of carpet.
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