Pedigree

by Georges Simenon

  The spire of Saint-Nicolas stood motionless against a sky of menacing stillness. The air was heavy. While the others were lingering at table, Élise had begun her washing-up on a corner of the stove.

  ‘Hurry up, Monsieur Bernard. You’re always the last to finish eating.’

  He was a child and she treated him as such.

  She was impatient to be left alone with her work, which would take her until midnight. While they were amusing themselves in the street, she would be able to drop that forced smile which she kept from morning till night on a face which was becoming increasingly pointed and mobile.

  Where were they all going? Where was she going? And what of the house, which she had launched at a venture, like a boat, and of which she sometimes felt that she had lost control?

  In the street they were playing innocent games, even big Désiré, running after each other, pushing one another, joking, getting excited. You could hear the tinkling laugh of Mademoiselle Lola, whom somebody had taken by the waist again and who was struggling with an ardent look in her eyes and the embarrassing laugh of a girl in search of love.

  Suddenly she pricked up her ears at the sound of a more distant voice and footsteps running along the Rue Jean-d’Outremeuse.

  ‘Ask for the Meuse! … Special edition! …’

  The newspaper-man came along, bent forward, barely stopping at each group to detach a sheet of paper still wet with ink from the pile he was carrying under his left arm, and then running on.

  ‘Ask for the Meuse! … The Agadir incident … Insolent provocation by the Kaiser … War…’

  Had she heard aright? Had he uttered the word war? What had he shouted after that? She rushed out of the kitchen and leant across her son’s tubes and saucers which were blocking her way.

  The others had frozen. They were still in the postures in which the word had caught them and there was a pause before they automatically completed the gestures they had begun, there in the street where silence had suddenly fallen like a veil.

  The laughs had petered out, except for that of Mademoiselle Lola who had not understood, a tinkling laugh which itself died away slowly while the fat girl looked around her with a surprise tinged with fear.

  Désiré was the first to move, going towards the corner of the Rue Jean-d’Outremeuse and feeling in his pocket for a sou. They could see him waiting there, facing the Rue Puits-en-Sock. The doors of the nearby houses opened one after the other, and people looked out, calling to one another.

  ‘What was he shouting?’

  The newspaper-man finally appeared, and Désiré stood there on the kerb, looking at the sheet of printed paper. Everybody wanted to know what it was all about, and wondered why he did not come back straight away. Finally he turned round and gave a reassuring wave.

  ‘Well?’

  Here he was at last. The neighbours crowded round him. He was very calm.

  ‘No, no! There’s nothing to be alarmed about. It isn’t war yet. Everything can still be settled peacefully, and you’ll see, it will be settled peacefully.’

  He read out the news, pointing to the question-mark which corrected the threat of a headline in huge letters:

  War in Europe?

  Kaiser William lands at Agadir.

  Monsieur Fallières calls Cabinet meeting.

  Will Mobilization be ordered?

  At Nevers, in the gathering dusk, Félicien Miette was bent double outside the newspaper offices, trying to start the car he had just bought. Isabelle, dressed in kid with a veil holding her hat in place, was waiting impatiently for the engine, which kept coughing intermittently, to decide to go.

  Miette mopped his forehead and took hold of the starting-handle again. The engine started running. At the same moment a window opened.

  ‘Monsieur Miette! Monsieur Miette!’

  And just as Isabelle had finally installed herself in the bucket-seat, the telephonist on duty in the office, waving his arms in the air, shouted in a shrill voice which could be heard above the din from the engine:

  ‘War!’

  Élise was still holding her dishcloth in her hand. Monsieur Bernard, pitifully pale in the face, suddenly looked like a sick little boy. For a moment Monsieur Schascher had stuck a colourless face crowned with red hair against the window of his room, and then he had gone back to his table as if war were nothing to do with him.

  With a naïvety which made nobody laugh, Mademoiselle Lola asked:

  ‘Do you think they’ll do anything to women?’

  The day refused to come to an end. The rising moon was so bright that you did not notice the transition from day to night, the groups of people becoming just a little more indistinct and the voices a little louder in a world which seemed artificial.

  ‘We’ll see tomorrow whether it’s war or not,’ declared the eldest of the Delcours as he went off to bed.

  His sister Hélène accompanied her fiancé, hand in hand, as far as the Place du Congrès. They could not find a word to say but pressed close to one another, and when he left her, she felt like calling him back.

  ‘Désiré,’ Élise whispered in bed, ‘do you think the civic guards will be given marching orders?’

  When everybody had fallen asleep, trying to push away the hideous nightmare of war, a scream rang through the house, a piercing shriek which recalled the cry of an animal mad with terror.

  ‘Désiré … Désiré …’

  Sitting up in bed, Élise shook him. A strangely calm voice came from the next room, whose door was always left ajar:

  ‘What’s the matter, Mother?’

  Élise slipped on the first clothes which came to hand, automatically put her hair up, and opened the door at the same time as other doors were opening in the house. Mademoiselle Lola, who had given the shriek, was on the first-floor landing, in a pale nightdress; she was babbling in Russian and darting mad glances around her.

  ‘For heaven’s sake, shut her up, Monsieur Bernard. What’s the matter with her? What is she saying? What has happened?’

  Everybody was up and moving round the house. All that they noticed was that it was as bright as day without a single lamp being alight. Somebody said:

  ‘A fire!’

  ‘Quick, Désiré! … The child … There’s a fire! …’

  She did not wait for Désiré, but picked Roger up and carried him out of his room, all warm in his white nightshirt.

  War … Fire …

  Her arms dropped, her legs gave way beneath her, and she was just sitting down on the stairs when she realized that the fire was not in her house, even though Mademoiselle Lola’s room was lit up by a fiery glow.

  ‘The Institut Saint-André …’

  It was behind the school’s slate roofs that the flames could be seen, crossed every now and then by black objects being hurled into the air.

  Désiré was close to her; he calmed her down, saying:

  ‘It’s Déom’s workshop … Don’t move … I’ll go and have a look…’

  People were running along the street; windows were thrown open; the mournful bell of the fire-engine could be heard, together with the murmur of a crowd in the Rue Jean-d’Outremeuse.

  It was not only Monsieur Déom’s furniture workshop which was on fire, but the whole house. Although the firemen had already brought their hoses into play, the neighbours were shouting:

  ‘A chain! … Everybody form a chain!’

  Others had come along with jugs and buckets. Two policemen were trying in vain to keep the spectators back. On the opposite pavement, Désiré, who was not wearing a jacket but just his nightshirt with the red designs on the collar, ran into Albert Velden, and the two of them watched in silence, each lighting a cigarette.

  ‘Go to bed, Roger. It’s nothing.’

  The child stayed in Mademoiselle Lola’s room, which was pinker than ever. The women were leaning out of the windows, while the men were outside.

  ‘And all that wood piled up in the workshop! He used to make such lovely furniture!’<
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  Monsieur Déom, a tall, thin man with a straggling moustache, was wandering around as if he no longer knew where he was or what he was doing. Looking at him with awed respect, some people were murmuring that he had gone out of his mind. Dazed and bewildered, he roamed about among the strangers who kept running into his house holding handkerchiefs to their noses and coming out with anything that had come to hand.

  ‘Look! … There’s somebody there!’

  A human form, two arms, were moving in a second-floor window from which smoke was pouring. It was an old, bed-ridden lodger who had been forgotten. The firemen extended their ladder.

  And all the time men, women and children were arriving from the Rue de la Loi, the Rue Pasteur and the Rue Puits-en-Sock, in an unending procession. There were people from the back-streets, and you could recognize them straight away. Among the most active rescuers, constantly going into the house and coming out with all sorts of objects, was Monsieur Bogdanowski, his face black with smoke, his eyes white underneath his curly hair.

  The pink room smelled of the eau-de-Cologne which had been sprinkled over Mademoiselle Lola. Now and then, a column of flame forced its way through the burning sky and you could hear a sound like the roar of a gigantic stove on the point of exploding.

  ‘Dear God … If we ever have a war,’ sighed Élise, looking at the firemen who were cautiously hoisting themselves on to the steep roofs of the Friars’ school. ‘The poor people! What’s going to be left of their home?’

  She confused in her mind the threat of war and the disaster which had overtaken the Déom house. Her blood pounded faster in her arteries, and she rushed around to no purpose. It seemed to her that what was happening had been bound to come, that what she had feared and expected was beginning: that awful final catastrophe of which she had always had a terrible presentiment.

  She prayed automatically:

  ‘Dear God, spare us, spare our house, spare Roger and Désiré. Take me if need be, but spare them.’

  She gave a start at the sight of Mademoiselle Frida, pale and erect in the dancing light, like an avenging angel.

  ‘Will you start fires too, when you have a revolution?’

  And the other woman, digging her teeth into the pulp of her lips, answered:

  ‘It will be terrible!’

  She rolled the r’s of terrible in a long-drawn, dramatic manner. Mattresses, chairs, saucepans, nameless objects were piling up on the flooded pavement, as pitiful as the lots in a forced sale. Madame Déom, who was expecting a baby, had been taken into a nearby house where she automatically swallowed the rum which was poured between her lips.

  ‘My house …’ she kept saying.

  Street-urchins were running in between the legs of the grown-ups, and, quite naturally, Velden and Désiré had started talking about the Agadir incident.

  ‘Germany wouldn’t dare. Nobody would take the risk of starting a war at the present moment, with the means of destruction available to every army.’

  People started going off to bed. It was three o’clock when the sky darkened and the moon disappeared while black ash was still falling into the streets.

  Monsieur Schascher had locked himself in his room as soon as he had seen that it was not the Rue de la Loi house that was on fire. To revive Mademoiselle Lola, Élise had gone to find the bottle of Madeira which she used for sauces and she had poured out several glasses.

  ‘Is it all over, Désiré? Did they manage to save anything? The poor people! They must be ruined!’

  ‘Why? The insurance will pay.’

  ‘Will the insurance give them back the things they treasured most, the souvenirs you can’t replace? But it’s time to think of going to sleep. Come along, Roger.’

  Roger was asleep on Mademoiselle Lola’s sofa, his cheek on one of her petticoats. He did not wake up when his father carried him back to his bed and tucked him up.

  An hour later, Élise, who had not yet fallen asleep, heard a soft tapping on the letter-box. She went downstairs in her bare feet, and asked:

  ‘Who’s there?’

  ‘It’s me.’

  It was Monsieur Bogdanowski, whom everybody had forgotten, with his shirt torn and one ear stained with blood.

  ‘Where have you been? What have you been doing?’

  ‘Over there …’

  Without saying a word, he had worked with the firemen until the very end, and he had finished up in a house he did not know, in the company of strangers who had all been given something to drink.

  The alarm-clock, which knew nothing of the fire or the rumours of war, went off as it did on other mornings, at half past five, in Roger’s room. He put out his arm in a mechanical gesture, stopped the bell, and remained for a moment hesitating in the pleasant warmth under the red blanket. He had an excuse for not getting up this morning, and he would have had no reason to be ashamed of himself for staying in bed, but precisely because it was exceptional, he got up and put on his clothes in that pale, almost unobtrusive light of dawn which he knew so well.

  As he was crossing his parents’ bedroom in his stockinged feet, his mother asked him from her bed, in which only her long hair was showing:

  ‘Are you up, Roger?’

  ‘Yes, Mother.’

  ‘You’d have done better to have a rest.’

  ‘I’m not tired.’

  Silently closing the street door behind him, he walked down the street past the blackened house with the gaping windows and the sagging roof. A fire-engine was still standing at the edge of the pavement, and he had to step over some thick rubber pipes.

  It was a quarter to six—he could see the time by the Saint-Nicolas clock—when he stopped at the corner of the Rue Jean-d’Outremeuse and the Rue Puits-en-Sock, next to the dark green postal sign. From that vantage point he could see four streets at once. He heard footsteps in the distance, and recognized the tread of Monsieur Pelcat who, in the Rue Entre-deux-Ponts, had just opened and shut the door of his shop.

  He was a huge man, who weighed over fifteen stone and whose behind recalled the hindquarters of an elephant at the circus. He ran a haberdasher’s shop and trailed its rancid smell behind him, but this particular morning, the smell which predominated in the whole district was the smell of burning, the special scent of ashes drenched in water.

  ‘Did you see the fire, sonny?’

  Another door opened, in the Rue Puits-en-Sock. Grandfather Mamelin came along, with his walk which was similar to Désiré’s, and accepted the furtive kiss which Roger bestowed on his cheek. Then, at the end of the Rue Méan, there appeared the slight, tripping figure of Monsieur Repasse, the shoemaker in the Rue de la Cathédrale.

  The men did not start talking about the war straight away but set off automatically, as they did every morning; for every day they met at the same time, coming from different points of the compass, as if they attracted each other like magnets, and their little band grew bigger as a band of schoolboys grows bigger as it approaches the school.

  In the Place du Congrès, as soon as they turned the corner, Monsieur Effantin, the police superintendent, came out of his house, and the strange thing was that they scarcely greeted one another; they were happy like that, although Monsieur Repasse, who had a wrinkled face and a purple nose, always looked grumpy.

  They were all between sixty and seventy years old. They had reached the top of their careers. They no longer expected any surprises from life, and, every day, they walked along with measured tread, in the cool morning air, past the shuttered houses in which people were still asleep.

  Roger circled round them like a young puppy, like the puppy belonging to Monsieur Fourneau, who was waiting by the river, making the animal jump over his stick.

  It was the time of day when a scented mist rose from the glistening river, the barges coated with shining pitch slowly moved away from the banks, and the tugs hooted and shuddered with impatience outside the Coronmeuse lock. It was also the time when the nearby slaughterhouse was full of the sound of bellowing
and the animals being driven along the embankment bumped into one another in the roadway.

  Roger did not listen to the old men’s conversation. They talked very little, relaxing in long, heavy silences. You could feel that they had a language of their own, like little children, a language which only they could understand, after the forty years or so they had known each other.

  They had become friends long ago, when they were thin, ambitious young men, when Monsieur Repasse, who was now the shoemaker to high society, was still employed in a little workshop, and Monsieur Pelcat, who had not yet acquired his bulky paunch, used to tour the country fairs as a pedlar.

  True, they had lost sight of one another for a time, while they were working hard and starting families. But then they had come together again on the other slope of existence, and they may well have believed that they were still the same.

  Did they talk about the threat of war? Roger did not hear. He was playing with Rita, Monsieur Fourneau’s Malines dog, which had won its owner several prizes, throwing a stick into the water for it to fetch.

  ‘Fetch it, Rita … Fetch it! …’

  Monsieur Fallières? … The Kaiser William? …

  They were getting nearer to the baths, whose diving-stages emerged from the Meuse, right at the end of the embankment, surrounded by piles and cables. The strong smell of the water was more noticeable. Just opposite, if the trees had not been there, they could have seen Aunt Louisa’s house on the Quai de Coronmeuse, on the canal bank.

  Roger’s eyelids were rather heavy, and he had an empty feeling in his chest from not having had enough sleep. He kept picturing Mademoiselle Lola on her bed when they were dabbing her face with eau-de-Cologne, and he thought about her more than the fire.

  His father had said that there would not be a war.

  They went through a gate, walked along a path paved with red bricks, turned left, and arrived in front of the bathing-huts. The boy rushed towards the biggest hut, the only one which could hold a dozen people.

  Then the old men undressed, all together, their thin legs, freckled or blue-veined, appearing underneath their shirts; they made jokes and indulged in boisterous horse-play, throwing towels and soap at each other, while Roger pulled on the blue-striped bathing trunks which he had brought along under his arm, rolled up in a Turkish towel with his comb and his cake of pink soap.