‘A round of applause for the giant and his two clowns!’
Désiré had also told how they had spent the evening in Paradise and Hell, explaining that in the first night-club the waiters who served the beers and cherry brandies were dressed as angels while in Hell they were dressed as devils.
Why did his father wink at certain allusions?
‘You remember that little brunette who wanted to sit on Émile’s knees and swore she had a béguin for him?’
Although he had promised himself not to ask any more questions, Roger had none the less asked his mother:
‘What is a béguin?’
‘You know what it is, Roger. It’s a bonnet that babies wear, like the one you wore yourself when you were little.’
Brother Mansuy made them sing:
‘When I was a little boy,
I slept in a little bed,
And my mother sang to me:
Darling, rest your little head …’
And every time this song made him feel like crying. His mother. The organs. The carriage which was always going to come for her and take her to hospital. Tears came to his eyes when they got to the line:
‘When your hair is white …’
His eyelids started prickling, and he stopped his ears so as not to hear:
‘… I will earn some money,
Money so that you may lead
A life of milk and honey.’
‘Off we go to dinner, son!’
The game was over. Désiré swallowed the creamy dregs of his beer, wiped his moustache and shook hands all round.
‘See you on Friday!’
They met the crowd coming out of the half-past-eleven Mass at Saint-Denis. Désiré greeted people. He was happy. Footsteps were louder, because it was winter, and outlines, especially those of the freestone buildings, clearer.
They stopped at the Spaniards’, whose shop with the exotic smells was painted canary-yellow. Among the piles of Brazil nuts, figs, oranges, lemons and pomegranates, they picked their Sunday dessert, a bitter orange which Roger would suck after putting a lump of sugar inside, or a pomegranate with the pips embedded in pink jelly.
The planks of the Passerelle went up and down under their feet. Désiré stopped again to buy a packet of Louxor cigarettes. What had he said to the shop girl when his son had not been paying attention? She had turned away murmuring:
‘You are a one, Monsieur Mamelin!’
Everybody was walking faster, for it was time for them to go home if they did not want to arrive late at the Wintergarten. Mayol was singing there for the first time in Liége. Élise had decided not to go, although she wanted to, because of the child.
‘There’ll be such a crush!’
As usual, there was roast beef, chips and stewed apples for dinner.
On the almond-green wall of the classroom, opposite the shelf holding the measuring-cups, there was a picture which had been stuck on canvas and varnished, a picture the colour of old ivory which represented the winter fair, probably in a Rhineland town, for all the school pictures came from Leipzig. The Gothic houses had indented gables, steep roofs and latticed windows. The town was covered in snow. The men were wearing bottle-green or rust-coloured greatcoats and fur caps; a girl in the foreground was sitting on a sledge being driven by a coachman dressed in a bearskin. In the square there were stalls loaded with food and toys; you could see a performing monkey and a flute-player with laced breeches. It was a lively scene, for Christmas was near, and the town was in a fever of excitement.
Brother Médard, in the big boys’ classroom, pressed an electric bell. Straight away, in the three classrooms with their glass partitions, the boys stood up in a single movement, made the sign of the cross, and jabbered out the evening prayer before rushing for their coats and berets.
While the others filed out in the half-light, led by Monsieur Penders, Roger only had the street to cross; on the first floor of his house he could see two windows of a soft, warm pink. The windows had no shutters or Venetian blinds, and through the lace curtains which were draped across one another, he could make out the pink globe of the shade with the pearl drops and Mademoiselle Pauline’s curly red hair bent over her books.
Through the keyhole, which was just the right height for a child, he could see, before knocking, the kitchen door and his mother’s silhouette. He had come out of one warm, familiar atmosphere only to enter another; the water was singing in the white enamel kettle, and the oven door was half open, revealing the firebricks which would be put in the beds in the evening; but this evening he would not be sitting down at the table covered with the old oilcloth to do his homework.
‘We’re going into town, Roger. Don’t take your coat off. Let’s see if your hands are clean.’
She put some more coal on the fire. Outside, in the dark yard, there was a glow of light from another window, Mademoiselle Frida’s, just above the kitchen. In Monsieur Saft’s room too the light was on, for every cell in the honeycomb was occupied; only Monsieur Chechelowski would not be back until supper-time. Everywhere there was a stove purring away, flanked by its coal-bucket, poker and shovel; each person lived in the centre of a zone of silence and, when one or other of them got up to put some coal on his fire, Élise automatically looked up.
Had she remembered everything? Her bag, her purse, her key. They hurriedly crossed the wilderness of the Rue Jean-d’Outremeuse where there was not a single real shop and where you could feel snow in the wind; and they plunged, as if into a warm room, into the swarming crowds in the Rue Puits-en-Sock.
‘Hold my hand, Roger.’
The town’s breath was heavy with smells peculiar to the period before St. Nicholas’s Day. Although it was not snowing yet, invisible particles of ice were floating in space and gathering together in the luminous halo of the shop-windows.
Everybody was outside. All the women were running along, dragging behind them children who would have liked to linger outside the shops.
‘Come along, Roger. Pick up your feet.’
Thousands of mothers were uttering the same words.
‘Mind the tram.’
The sweet-shops, the confectioners’ and the grocers’ shops were as full as the stalls in the picture at school. Two smells predominated over the others, so characteristic that no child could have mistaken them: the sweet aroma of gingerbread and the smell of chocolate figures, which was not the same as that of chocolate bars. The shop-windows were stacked from top to bottom with honey-cakes, some of them stuffed with coloured comfits. Life-size St. Nicholases in gingerbread, frosted with sugar and adorned with cotton-wool beards, stood surrounded by sheep, asses and farmyard animals, all a brownish or wholemeal colour, sugared, scented and eatable. It was enough to make your head reel.
‘Look, Mother.’
‘Come along now.’
They went to buy some butter at Salmon’s, in a little street running down from the Pont des Arches, on the other side of the river. Not for anything in the world would Élise have gone anywhere else to buy the oblong blocks wrapped in cool cabbage leaves. It was in a tin next to the soup-tureen that she kept the tickets which, at the end of the year, entitled the customer to a three-per-cent refund.
They went into the Vierge Noire, in the Rue Neuvice, to buy some coffee. In the window-displays in the confectioners’, which were gaudier than the rest, there were rows of marzipan cakes imitating fruit, cheese, even a cutlet with chips and green peas.
‘Look.’
‘Come along.’
Further on, to distract his attention from all these window-displays, she asked:
‘What do you want St. Nicholas to bring you?’
He thought of Ledoux, with his thin face topped with unruly hair.
‘A box of paints, real paints, in tubes, with a palette.’
The pavements were crowded and you had to push your way along the middle of the street; the trams, which could move only at a walking pace, kept ringing their bells all the time; a mysterious f
orce drew you on.
Now and then, to avoid an attack of giddiness, Élise pulled her son into an empty, icy alley-way. They took a short cut. Soon, as at the end of a tunnel, they found themselves back in the light and bustle of the shopping districts.
In every shop Roger was given something. Madame Salmon had given him a thin slice of Dutch cheese on the tip of her knife. At the Vierge Noire, he had been allowed to pick a sweet biscuit out of the box with the glass lid. For fear of losing her, he hung on to his mother’s shopping-bag or her skirt.
‘Aren’t we going to the Bazaar?’
For they were passing it on their way to say hullo to Valérie at L’Innovation. But it was impossible to get into the Grand Bazaar. There were queues outside the brass doors which kept opening and shutting, and you had to fight to get near the windows.
‘Dear God, Valérie! Six o’clock already and Désiré will be home soon.’
His cheeks on fire, trying all the time to look back, and clinging to his mother’s shopping-bag, Roger was dragged along by a series of short cuts, through dark side-streets which did not smell of St. Nicholas’s Day.
For all that he knew that Ledoux was right, he was not in his usual state; December, with St. Nicholas’s Day, Christmas and then the New Year, was a month heavy with mystery, with sweet and rather disturbing impressions which followed one after another at breakneck speed.
The school yard was a livid colour. The big boys in the third and fourth years, in Monsieur Pender’s classroom, were reciting all together a lesson as rhythmic as a song. Who noticed the first flakes? Despite the possibility of a gobstopper from Brother Mansuy, who was walking up and down with an innocent air, every head was soon turned towards the window, and to begin with you had to look hard at the roof opposite to make out the light particles of snow which were beginning to detach themselves from the sky.
The boys were in a fever of excitement. Darkness fell and the flakes became thicker and slower. In the waiting-room where the gas had been lit, the mothers could be seen around the stove, their lips moving soundlessly.
Brother Médard’s electric bell, the prayer which was thrown to the echoes and came rattling back, the lines forming up, the door finally opening: it was settling! The snow was settling!
The children, whether they were in the first year or the sixth, dressed in little hooded coats or blue ratteen overcoats with gilt buttons, were promptly transformed into so many excited gnomes which Monsieur Penders had difficulty in keeping in two lines as far as the corner of the street.
A mysterious signal, and everybody rushed away through the flakes which kept sticking to your eyes and turned the street-lamps into far-away lighthouses on the ocean.
The Place du Congrès, with its huge stretches of darkness, its three ill-lit shops, and a few feebly glowing windows, was too big for the noisy band of schoolboys. A tiny patch of it was enough, the bit nearest the Rue Pasteur. Along the terrace, the water in the gutter had frozen; the bigger boys were already away, their satchels bumping against their backs. Some of them fell and picked themselves up again. Clogs slid best of all, after a preliminary clatter, while hob-nailed boots made white lines. Excitement mounted. Uneven patches of snow were forming on the terrace, and a light covering of snow was hemming the black branches of the elm trees. You had to pick it up in several places, in little heaps which weighed nothing, before you could make a ball out of it to throw at cold cheeks or a blue hood.
A big boy decided:
‘The little boys aren’t allowed to use our slide.’
And the little boys watched them sliding along, their arms outstretched, bending their knees as if they were on springs. They tried to make another slide more their own size, a little further on, but there was not enough ice, and pebbles grating under the soles of their boots stopped them half-way.
Fingers were frozen, nostrils wet, cheeks tight-skinned and burning, breath short and hot, eyes shining.
A woman’s voice called out in the mysterious distance:
‘Jean! … Jean! …’
‘Yes, Mother.’
‘Come home quick.’
‘Yes, Mother.’
Another go on the slide, another two.
‘If you force me to come and fetch you …’
One less! Grown-ups went past unnoticed, men in dark overcoats, women clutching their shawls, their hair powdered with snow. The light from the grocer’s shop-window fell across the slide which was turning a bluish black.
You opened your mouth, put out your tongue and tried to catch a snowflake which left a taste of dust. You declared enthusiastically:
‘It’s wonderful!’
And it was indeed wonderful, this first frost, this first snow, a world which had lost its everyday appearance, roofs dimly outlined against the soft sky, lamps which shed scarcely any light and passers-by who floated through space. Even the tram became a mysterious vessel, with its windows doing service as portholes.
You did not dare to think about tomorrow. Too many hours separated the present moment from the next day, and waiting would hurt.
The Grand Bazaar, this particular evening, would stay open until midnight, perhaps even later, and when the iron shutters finally came rattling down, the shop-assistants, pale and tired, their heads as hollow and noisy as drums, would find themselves standing dazedly in the midst of the ravaged shelves.
‘St. Nicholas, patron saint of schoolboys,
Please bring me nuts, apples and toys,
To have some sweets, I shall be as good as gold,
I shall always do as I am told,
Singing tra la la la,
Singing tra …
Another anxious mother called out in the dark:
‘Vic-tooooor! … Vic-tooooor …’
The group of boys melted away. Those from Bressoux had gone off in a bunch, still picking up snow along the Quai de la Dérivation. Armand was watching the hoods bobbing up and down from his doorstep. Some little street-urchins, who had come from heaven knows where, had invaded the slide, and Roger, walking a little unsteadily, kept close to the walls of the Rue Pasteur and the Rue de la Loi, and looked through the keyhole at the soft light in the kitchen before knocking on the letter-box.
Surprised by the warmth, he felt his eyes smarting; he would have liked to go to sleep straight away, to go to bed without supper so as to be up earlier the next day.
Désiré, on his return from the office, did not put on his old jacket as usual and his slippers had not been put to warm on the door of the stove. Élise was dressed to go out; even Mademoiselle Pauline wore a conspiratorial smile.
In the winter, Roger undressed in the kitchen, by the fire, putting on his long dressing-gown in white flannelette and his slippers, and his mother took his brick upstairs and tucked him up after making sure that the paraffin night-light was not smoking.
‘Be good. Sleep well.’
He listened. He said his prayers.
‘Dear God, please may I have no bad dreams and may we all three die together.’
For he could not bear the idea of following one day the hearse carrying his father and mother.
‘Dear God, please may I have no more evil thoughts. I promise.’
Shouldn’t he give something in return?
‘I promise not to talk to Ledoux any more.’
He would talk to him again, that was practically certain, but what counted was that he should make a resolution not to talk to him any more. If he happened to do so, he would beg pardon and promise all over again.
Further proof that Ledoux really knew: one Thursday, when they came home about five o’clock, Élise had heard voices in Monsieur Chechelowski’s room and had listened hard.
‘Be quiet, Roger. Don’t make any noise.’
She had knocked on the door, pale and determined.
‘Excuse me, Monsieur Chechelowski … Excuse me, Mademoiselle …’
There had been a rather ugly young woman in the room who had looked at Élise calmly while sm
oking a cigarette with a cardboard tip.
‘You know, Valérie, she all but blew the smoke into my face. As for him, I thought he was going to take me by the throat, he was so furious.’
‘This is my room, do you hear, I pay!’
Roger had heard his mother tell the story several times, to Aunt Louisa, to Hubert Schroefs, to Cécile.
‘If you are engaged and your intentions are honourable, then you will understand and agree to move into the dining-room. It’s all the same for you.’
For Monsieur Chechelowski had met a fellow-countrywoman who was studying medicine like Mademoiselle Frida and whom he intended marrying as soon as he had finished his studies.
‘A queer couple they’ll make!’ Élise prophesied.
That was of no importance. What mattered was that they had gone into the dining-room, the door of which Élise had deliberately left ajar. What mattered most of all was that she had said to Valérie, on the Friday, when Désiré had gone out to the Veldens’:
‘You understand, don’t you? Whatever happens, I won’t have them coming to do that in my house.’
Roger repeated to himself:
‘Dear God, please may I have no more evil thoughts.’
No! He would not make that gesture with his fingers again. He did not even want to think, this evening, that St. Nicholas was Father and Mother.
Yet he had heard his parents going out. If he went downstairs, he would find nobody in the kitchen but Mademoiselle Pauline, who had been asked to mind the house and who was copying out some lecture notes by the fire.
It was so rare for Désiré and Élise to find themselves out together, especially in the evening, as in the old days when Désiré used to wait for the young shop-assistant outside L’Innovation!
She held his arm, and, being too short for him, looked as if she were hanging on to it. As soon as they got to the Rue Puits-en-Sock, they could scarcely move, and they in turn were gripped by the general fever of excitement and would have liked to buy everything they saw. Everything looked beautiful to them: there were rocking-horses covered with real skin and hair, electric trains, and dolls which you might have taken to be living babies and which lacked nothing but the power of speech.
Pedigree Page 33
