As soon as he had sat down, he shut his eyes, to gain time, for he was playing a private game; he let a numbness come over him which you could not obtain every day or even every hour of the day; he savoured the prickling of his cheeks, of his eyelids which the golden rays were piercing; he studied the thickening of his blood in his veins, deliberately confused the sounds reaching him through the crystalline air, mixed up the pictures, created whirlpools of bright colours.
With a hand over one eye, to create a dark contrast, he spelt out from the brass plate of the school, in the limpid shade of the opposite pavement which was turning a greenish colour: ‘Ins-ti-tut … Saint …’—for Sister Adonie had taught him to read on the sly: he had to keep it a secret, since he was not old enough.
‘Ins-ti-tut Saint …’ The Friars’ green door was shut. The little door, which was cut out of the big one and was always left open, was shut too.
‘I’m sure that Mathilde Coomans…’
It was his mother’s voice in the vibrant coolness of the kitchen. In the Rue Pasteur, Armand was sure to be sitting on his doorstep, without a cushion, with only his feet protruding beyond the shadow which, at this time of day, formed a narrow ribbon running along the fronts of the houses. Had Albert already gone? Would a motor-car come to fetch him, Monsieur Méline’s motorcar which stopped every week in front of the white house and which the neighbours watched out for?
‘You’ll see that Mathilde won’t refuse us that.’
Roger blew on the back of his hand, then breathed in the sharper smell of his skin. He gave a start as he heard the trumpet of the ice-cream vendor who had just stopped in the burning wilderness of the Place du Congrès, picturing to himself his little lemon-coloured cart with the brass lids and the painted panels, one of which showed the Bay of Naples, a turquoise-blue colour, and the other a dramatic eruption of Vesuvius.
‘Git orf ze cart!’
The funny little Italian with the waxed moustache flew into a rage when the street-urchins climbed on to the wheels of his carefully painted cart. They deliberately hung on to it as soon as he had his back turned.
‘Git orf ze cart!’
They ran off, not very far, coming back soon, and Di Coco, with a wealth of gesture, shrieked at them in phrases in which he mixed up the Walloon dialect and that of his own country.
‘You couldn’t mention it to Victor, could you, Désiré? Tell him that Mathilde would only have to come for a quarter of an hour every morning to make Mademoiselle Frida’s bed and empty her slops.’
A fly went by. A tram. Roger, when he was drunk with sunshine like this, could, if he wished, hear the fly as clearly as the tram. He could mix everything together, behind his lowered eyelashes, the spire of Saint-Nicolas, motionless against a violet background, the brass plate of the Friars’ school, and the humps of the cobble-stones surrounded by a trickle of water which bore witness to the morning’s cleaning.
He could experience things which had already happened and other things which were still to come; Désiré was going to get up with a sigh of satisfaction and stop in front of the hallstand to put on his boater and take his stick. Then Élise would hang up a curtain—not a real curtain but an old sheet—behind the glazed door of the kitchen. He could already hear the water boiling in the washtub.
‘Roger!’
No! Not again, not before his father had left, before his mother had gone up to the second floor to get the clean linen, the glycerine soap, the glove-sponge which became soft and slimy in the soapy water, and the nail-scissors.
Roger, without needing to listen to what his parents were saying, guessed what they were talking about, and there was an element of mystery in their plans which alarmed and excited him.
For three Sundays now they had not been to Ans, to the Ursuline convent, to see Mother Marie-Madeleine, who was an aunt of his and whose coif used to bump against him when he kissed her. They had not been to Coronmeuse either, where the grown-ups sat on straw-bottomed chairs outside Aunt Louisa’s shop while Anna played the piano in the sitting-room with the windows open and Roger, armed with a wicker wand from the workshop, strolled along the shady embankment and looked at the boats on the canal.
He did not know why, but one Sunday, all of a sudden, they had gone into the country with some people he had never met before.
‘Say good day to Aunt Mathilde and Uncle Victor.’
He had gathered later that they were not a real uncle or a real aunt. They were cousins of Uncle Charles, the sacristan at Saint Denis. If he turned his head, Roger could see their shop, on the corner of the Rue de la Loi and the Rue de la Commune, in the part he did not like, on the far side of the invisible frontier.
He did not like the Coomans either, or their son who was six months younger than he was and a cheeky little boy.
They had taken sandwiches, hard-boiled eggs, and coffee in the civic guard’s flask. Taking the tram, they had passed through a world of factories and dark little houses which all looked the same; then, on foot, they had climbed a long slope bordered with bushes. Désiré had covered the back of his neck with his handkerchief, keeping it in position with his boater, and he had taken his jacket off.
They had picnicked on the grass, by the side of a dusty white road, and in the evening their clothes had been covered with a layer of powder.
Roger opened one eye and shut it again quickly; another smell came back to him, the smell of the prize-giving, the garden of the nursery school where they had been placed in three rows in front of the conservatory, among some evergreens, the children in the front row sitting cross-legged, to have their photograph taken. Where had his mother put the crown of gilded laurel-leaves which he had tearfully refused to keep on in the street?
Uncle Victor was a printer; he talked politics through his nose, a long narrow nose; his thin moustache which dropped over his lips looked as if it were coming out of his nostrils. Aunt Mathilde had taken it into her head to open a grocer’s shop on the corner of the Rue de la Commune. It was a huge room, too bright and painted beige, a room which smelled of paraffin and where nobody ever set foot.
‘She hasn’t got a head for business, you know, Désiré. Now if I were running that shop!’
Désiré’s footsteps came nearer. He bent down slightly, brushed his lips against Roger’s forehead.
‘See you tonight, son.’
‘Good-bye, Father.’
Élise was going to call him. She had gone upstairs to get the linen.
What were they going to ask Aunt Mathilde for?
‘Do you think they’d let us have a cup of milk, Désiré? We’d pay for it, of course.’
They were on the dusty road. Beyond meadows where sluggish cows were grazing, you could see, far away, in the blue and green of the horizon, the red and white patches of some villages, a slender spire on the top of a hill.
Standing a few yards away from the three little whitewashed houses, they had discussed the point for a moment, then Élise had bravely made for the nearest open door, which was at the top of a flight of five or six steps.
‘Excuse me, Madame. Forgive me for bothering you. It’s because of the children, you see.’
That was how they had made the acquaintance of Madame Laude, a big, powerful woman built like a man, with a loud voice and an upper lip covered with dark brown, who had promptly picked Roger up in her strong hands.
Madame Laude had taken them underneath the Virginia creeper in the garden and a wasp had fallen into the boy’s milk.
‘How good the air is here!’ Élise, who had semicircles of sweat under her arms, had kept remarking.
‘Why don’t you leave the little boy with me during the holidays? That would put some colour into his cheeks.’
Nobody had thought that Roger was listening, but he had declared:
‘I don’t want to stay with her.’
They had sent him to play with the Coomans boy who was as ill-mannered as the children at the state school. The green shutters on the first floor had
been opened, and Roger had seen that his parents were going over the house, arguing, nodding their heads; he had caught sight of Élise making signs to Désiré behind Madame Laude’s back.
On the way home, the grown-ups had gone on talking in an undertone all the time.
‘You see, Mathilde, there’ll be nobody left in the house but Mademoiselle Frida. Monsieur Saft is going, Mademoiselle Pauline, too. As for Monsieur Chechelowski, the engineer I told you about, who’s on a course at Ougrée-Marihaye, he’s waiting to hear from a fellow countryman of his whom he’s supposed to be joining at Charleroi during August.’
The proof that this was what his father and mother had been talking about just now was that on Thursday Élise had bought some cream material at L’Innovation to make into smocks for Roger. They had already been cut out. In her draughty room, where both the door and the window were open, Mademoiselle Frida, probably for the first time in her life, was busy sewing.
‘Roger! It’s time. Roger! What are you doing?’
Nothing. He was in something of a daze. He was dawdling. In the kitchen, his mother undressed him, but not without his saying:
‘Lock the door.’
For he lived in dread of being caught in his bath.
‘Wash your ears well, Roger.’
His hair was brushed and combed, his toe-nails were cut, steam collected on the window-panes and, when he was ready at last, dressed in clean clothes from head to foot, a new feeling on his skin succeeded the caress of the sun: he felt at once very heavy and very light, rather empty too, and his ears stayed crimson until the evening.
‘Go out for a walk. Don’t get dirty.’
She gave him five centimes to buy an ice-cream and he sucked this for a long time, very seriously, in the Place du Congrès, where he was all alone with the Italian.
The blue of the sky became tinged with pink, then red, puddles of water glistened on the newly washed pavement, and, on the shady side, the freestone which had been scrubbed with iron brushes was an implacable white.
Désiré came home half an hour later than usual, for he had gone to the Rue des Pitteurs to have a bath. Élise had had time to tidy the kitchen, to pack the food they would need the next day, and even to iron some linen, for a vague smell of ironing hung about the kitchen.
‘What did Victor say?’
‘That Mathilde would be only too pleased.’
‘Tomorrow we’ll tell Madame Laude, and we could leave next Sunday. Listen, Roger: we are going to spend a month in the country, at Embourg, at Madame Laude’s, where father will join us every evening.’
The street door had been left open to the soft summer evening, and Désiré, in his shirtsleeves, installed his chair on the pavement, tilting it backwards, a couple of yards from the Delcours, the people next door, who were sitting like him outside their door. There was a girl of sixteen who was at the teachers’ training college, a big fellow of twenty-two who was already a schoolmaster, another brother who was a draughtsman in a factory, and the eldest of the family, a thirty-five-year-old painting contractor who was always joking like Arthur and was familiar with everybody.
Further on, other people were taking the air. Mademoiselle Pauline, all pink from the glow of the setting sun in the pink of her room, was idly looking out of her window with her elbows on the sill, and, over the wall of the Institut Saint-André, she could see some of the friars strolling round the yard.
Désiré started talking. A circle formed round him, the chairs were drawn nearer to one another, the painter who looked like Arthur answered him and everybody laughed, the girl made a show of indignation, and they all looked up now and then at Mademoiselle Pauline. Élise, who had put on a clean pinafore with little flounces, came out, smiling too, to have a look before returning to the thousand-and-one tasks waiting for her in the cool interior of the house.
The bells rang for the evening service, but there must have been only a few old bigots in the empty church. The whole parish was living its Saturday life, the shopkeepers of the Rue Puits-en-Sock taking the air on their doorsteps, Chrétien Mamelin smoking his pipe in silence beside old Kreutz, and the two dolls—as people always called the tow-haired Kreutz sisters—knitting away as if their lives depended on it.
Two or three shop-windows, which the owners had obstinately left alight, threw out an artificial glow. The shops exhaled their smells, sugared sweets and gingerbread at Gruyelle-Marquant’s, cardboard and paste at the Dolls’ Hospital, butter and cheese, and then the tarts at Bonmersonne’s which would be piled up on the shelves the following day. A woman without a hat trailed behind her, as far as the nearby cul-de-sac into which she disappeared, the greasy smell of the chips she was carrying in a dish covered with a red-edged napkin.
In the Rue de la Loi, Désiré was making them laugh, on the two thresholds which had become one, and even Mademoiselle Frida, who had come to lean quietly against the door-jamb, stretched her lips in a condescending smile.
‘Go and play, Roger. It’s for grown-ups. Besides, it’s time to go to bed.’
‘Another five minutes, Father! Just another five minutes!’
‘You know perfectly well that you’ll have to get up early tomorrow.’
Roger was more afraid of the twilight than he was of the dark. That cold light, which struck him as the reflection of the dead sun, frightened him, and he did not like the yellow, oily colour of the flame of his night-light, or the glow which he could still make out through the blinds.
‘Are you in bed, Roger?’
His mother came upstairs and tucked him up in bed.
‘Sleep well. Tomorrow, we are off to Embourg. Are you pleased to be going to Embourg for your holidays?’
He did not reply. The whole day, in a single moment, palpitated within him and puffed him up, his ears started buzzing, his body which smelled of Saturday evening and the bath curled up, he pulled the sheet over his head to see nothing more, and yet he could still make out, far away and at the same time very close, shrill laughter in the street, the sound of voices, his father’s voice dominating the others, and a snatch of song which was promptly drowned by the noise of the tram.
‘Well, Élise?’
‘Just a minute …’
She came out smiling, a little tired, at first refusing the chair which was offered to her in the circle, then sitting on the edge of it, her hands motionless in her lap, and heaving a sigh.
The gas-lamps had been alight for a long time when, one after another, the doors shut, and suddenly it was Sunday, the seven o’clock Mass, the smell of eggs and bacon in the kitchen, Mademoiselle Frida astonished by the prospect of the day before her, Mademoiselle Pauline to whom the house was being entrusted, the coming and going, the voices, and the excitement which would die down when the door had finally shut again and they were out in the empty street.
‘You haven’t forgotten anything? You’ve put the ham in the bag?’
The tram. Roger managed to stay on the platform with his father, next to two anglers who were cluttered up with their equipment.
It was not yet ten o’clock and there they were, slowly climbing the long slope between two green hedges, with cow smells hanging in the air, Mademoiselle Frida, dressed in black and white with her boater flat on her head, holding herself as erect as in town and poking the dust with the tip of her parasol, and Désiré carrying not only their provisions, but also his jacket which he had just taken off.
‘Don’t dawdle, Roger, keep walking.’
And they smiled as they looked back at the town behind them, and their breath burned their throats; for want of practice, they were rather out of breath.
CHAPTER FOUR
IT WAS on 15 August 1908 that Désiré spent half the morning trying to send a kite up from the Piedboeufs’ meadow, but if a gust of wind lifted the light contraption of red and green cotton, if hope finally relaxed the features of Roger who had to stand several yards away from his father, the air promptly closed up again and you could see nothing in the atmosp
here which was humming with invisible insects except the hot circular waves which the sun was sending out like rings.
The day before, in the bluish twilight, Roger and his mother had been waiting, as they did every day, at the top of the Thiers des Grillons; and they had seen that Désiré, who was reading his paper as he climbed the hill, was carrying an oblong parcel. It was the dismantled kite: four fragile sticks, some cross-pieces, a piece of green cloth and one of red. What Roger had not known at the time was that his father had another surprise in store.
After supper, in Madame Laude’s garden, nobody had thought of putting the boy to bed, in the room where he used to go to sleep with his window open to the stars and to the croaking of the frogs in the brickworks, and where the pale light of dawn brought the lowing of the cows on Halleux’s farm.
A Désiré whose moustache was quivering with impatience bustled mysteriously to and fro. He could not wait until darkness had fallen completely: a firework exploded in the road, and a rocket soared into the sky to fall slowly to the ground in a fine shower of sparks.
Roger would never forget the three houses with their white walls growing indistinct in the dusk; the mound opposite and the hedge with the red berries; a solitary, twisted tree, at the foot of which he had recently dug his canary’s grave; some silent groups of faceless figures, children who had come quietly from the pump crossroads; Désiré himself, as self-important as a stage-hand in a pantomime who can only just be glimpsed in the wings; the flame sputtering at the end of a rocket; and finally the real stars lighting up in the sky. A smell he had never known before invaded this corner of the countryside as it was transformed by the Bengal lights, and, when a rocket misfired, when the green stars went out too soon in the sky, Roger held his breath, so moved that he could not answer his mother.
‘Are you happy?’
He did not move, not daring to go forward or to turn round.
‘You’re enjoying yourself? You aren’t frightened?’
He wasn’t frightened. And yet the creatures moving about and whispering in the shadows struck him as unfamiliar. He did not recognize either Madame Laude or the children in clogs from the other houses. A triple windmill gave Désiré a lot of trouble. One of the windmills went out too soon and he struggled to start it up again, bending double so as not to block the light. When he finally came back towards his son, Roger looked at him differently from before, rather as if he were not his father.
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