‘…one of our pupils, Roger Mamelin, whom an injury has prevented from taking his place among his fellow pupils, but whom I am delighted to see, loaded with prizes, in the front row of the audience …’
The headmaster read out the report which Brother Médard had written.
‘One morning at the beginning of this month, when the stifling heat forced us to close our schools …’
That was true. All the schools in the town had been closed for three days, and it was on the third day that Roger had gone to play on the drill-ground with some friends from the Place du Congrès. In the blazing sunshine, next to the shining torrent of the Meuse and the thundering weir whose foam was scattered into bright specks of spray, the soldiers were drilling, and guns and artillery wagons drawn by four horses were bumping up and down among the ruts and hillocks of the plain.
‘…Frightened by a rearing horse,’ the headmaster went on.
That wasn’t true. The truth was simpler, so simple that it was impossible to tell it on a day like this, when the children were wearing golden crowns on their heads. There had been four of them, their cheeks flushed with excitement, throwing stones into the river like filthy little brats, when one of the boys had shouted:
‘Étienne! … There! … There! …’
And they saw a straw hat sailing by, floating further away from the bank, swept along by the swift current from which an arm emerged now and then.
Roger had jumped into the Meuse, almost without realizing. He had swum after the other boy. Twice he had nearly given up, because Étienne had clutched hold of him and he had been frightened.
Finally he had saved him, heaven knows how, and he had pushed the dripping, twitching body on to the stones on the bank. After-wards, they had walked over to the only house nearby, a peculiar pink building standing by itself on the drill-ground, a café for the troops, and there they had been made to drink some rum. Roger had gone home by himself, talking in a whisper, a pitiful sight in the clothes which the people in the café had lent him and which were far too big for him.
It was the first time in his life that he had worn men’s trousers, which were so long that huge turn-ups had had to be made in the legs and kept in place with safety-pins.
The headmaster avoided giving these details.
‘As a consequence of his bravery, Roger Mamelin is confined to his chair today, when he had been looking forward so much to playing the part of the Month of May in The Round of the Months which we have just presented to you….’
How could a friar of the Christian Schools, and a headmaster too, lie like that?
The real and the false were so confused in the stifling heat that soon Roger would end up by thinking that he had sprained his knee while rescuing his friend.
In fact, it had been the next day that he had fallen, over a line of bricks bordering a flowerbed in the friars’ garden. He had been running along with one foot on each side of the bricks, like a little street-urchin; he had had a premonition of the accident but he had continued all the same.
He had been alone in the kitchen-garden. Brother Médard, during the rehearsal of The Round of the Months, had sent his pet to fetch something from the classroom, giving him the key.
What did it matter? It was much prettier the way the headmaster told it and it was best not to admit that pupils of the Institut Saint-André amused themselves throwing stones into the water.
Everybody was nice to him. He had been solemnly presented with a Bayard in gilded zinc. Most of the pupils’ mothers came and kissed him.
At home, there were three medical students to look after him, to bring dressings and plaster bandages which they had scrounged from the Bavière hospital where they worked as assistants.
Was Roger still in pain? Was his knee still swollen?
He was so comfortable like this, on a chaise-longue in Mademoiselle Lola’s pink room, his legs stretched out, his arms on padded elbow-rests, and on a chair within easy reach, his egg-and-beer, some coloured sweets, and a collection of illustrated papers which smelled pleasantly of printer’s ink.
He read a little, looked at the pictures, lazily followed the progress of a fly or the patterns of light and shade on the weird floral wallpaper, and listened to his mother’s comings and goings, the trumpet of the greengrocer turning the corner of the Rue Pasteur, the hammers at Halkin’s, the silence of the school which had closed for two long months.
Wasn’t it extraordinary that he should already have covered this first stage of his school life, which had seemed so long to him when he had set foot for the first time in Brother Mansuy’s classroom? That classroom had been gloomy on that far-away autumn morning, and yet his memories of school were nearly all sunny memories, except for one perhaps, or rather two which cast a grey shadow over the bright light of his reverie: first his perverse whisperings in corners with the clownlike Ledoux about the difference between boys and girls; then the business of the new catechism.
Ever since that business he had hated Brother Mansuy, or at least avoided him, because Brother Mansuy knew. His mother had bought Roger a second-hand catechism and its cardboard cover was a faded blue, the corners were broken, and you could see the threads of the binding and reddish stains on certain pages. Roger wanted a new catechism with a shining cover so badly that one day he had gone to see Brother Mansuy.
‘My mother says you are to give me a new catechism.’
How little he must have been at that time! He could not get over having been so bold. He had had his catechism. He had enjoyed it in secret, for he did not dare to show it at home, and every night, in his bed, he was tormented by the thought of the inevitable catastrophe. Before the Easter holidays, his parents would be sent, together with his marks, a list of books and stationery supplied during the term. It was a matter of urgency for him to speak to his mother. A dozen times he nearly did so, but in the end he did not dare. He had gone into the classroom at playtime, his catechism in his hand, and it was to the friar that he had spoken, heaven knows how, so nervous that his eyes had seen nothing.
‘My mother has told me to give it back to you. She has found the old one.’
Brother Mansuy had not looked surprised. It was as if he had guessed the truth. He had kept his gentle smile and perhaps he had even given the child a sweet.
Even now Roger still bore him a grudge, precisely because, having guessed the truth, he had been generous enough to keep quiet, to avoid humiliating a child.
That did not matter any more, since it was all over and Roger would never go through the big green gate as a pupil again. Except for Mademoiselle Lola, who did not take her studies seriously and had gone home, the lodgers still had one or two examinations to sit for. After that they too would go home for the holidays and the Mamelins would go to Embourg.
Roger sucked a sweet, and read the story of Onésime Pourceau, sportsman, which every week occupied the two centre pages of the Petit Illustré. He breathed in the smell of the tomato soup, looking forward to going downstairs for dinner, with one leg in the air, hopping from one step to the next and holding on to the banisters. Every minute of life was good, and yet he wondered if his knee would go on hurting much longer or if he would go to play in the street for a while.
It was already eleven o’clock. A tram went along the Rue Jean-d’Outremeuse, Élise started laying the table, you could hear the clatter of the plates, and a draught slammed the kitchen door shut. Mademoiselle Frida was studying in her room, with the window and the door open, facing the white wall of the yard where for some days a column of ants had been crawling around whose nest had been deluged in vain with boiling water.
Could anybody suspect that, from one second to the next, this peaceful state of affairs would be shattered? Did Élise herself guess that the anxious frenzy driving her forward was suddenly going to reach its fermata?
The street door opened. She looked through the glass pane. Why, it was Monsieur Bernard coming home early! What was the matter with him? He seemed to be in a h
urry, rushed upstairs, leant over the banisters and shouted:
‘War, Madame Mamelin! It’s war! The Germans have invaded Belgium. There’s fighting going on around Visé.’
Visé, where they sometimes went on a Sunday to eat waffles with Aunt Louisa’s family? Élise smiled incredulously.
‘Impossible, Monsieur Bernard!’
Under a sky so vast and blue that, from the spire of Saint-Nicolas, you could almost see the green plain round Visé where the Meuse broadened out!
Mademoiselle Frida, stiff and erect, was standing at the door of her room.
‘Do you know if the trains are still running?’
After that, everything became confused; there was no telling who was coming and who was going, what had happened before and what happened after. Élise had not taken time off to cry. She had just knocked on the door of the next house, and old Madame Delcour had appeared, bent double, the face under her black bonnet wearing a surprised expression.
‘It’s war, Madame Delcour! Monsieur Bernard has just come home from the hospital. He’s already putting on his uniform.’
A skeletal figure half lying on a couple of chairs, the man with the sleeping-sickness looked at Élise with his empty eyes, and nothing in him moved but his fingertips.
‘What are you going to do, Mademoiselle Frida?’
‘I’m leaving.’
‘You’re going back to your country? But you won’t be able to go through Germany.’
‘I’ll go through France and Switzerland.’
She packed her bags. Monsieur Bogdanowski arrived in his turn, in a state of feverish excitement. More cautious in his ways, he had already been to the station to reserve a seat in a train.
‘You have to fight to get a ticket. If you could see the crowd …’
Monsieur Bernard came downstairs, in the bottle-green uniform of a rifleman.
‘Are we having dinner all the same?’ he joked without much gaiety.
‘What I’m wondering, Monsieur Bernard, is why my husband hasn’t come home. I don’t suppose they’re going to keep the office open. Dear God, Roger! Why have you come downstairs? Mind your leg. What do you want?’
‘I want the plaster taken off.’
‘What ought we to do, Monsieur Bernard?’
Here came Monsieur Jacques Dollent with his fine black beard, looking rather awkward in uniform, for he had already been to the Bavière hospital, where he was an intern, to change his clothes.
‘You couldn’t sew a button on for me, could you, Madame Mamelin?’
She thought, automatically, for it was Monsieur Dollent’s favourite phrase, which he used to say half in jest, half in earnest:
‘My gratitude will die only with my last breath…’
She did not say it. She would think of it later on; she would think of it often.
‘Are you going to fight?’
‘I don’t know. I’ve got to join my regiment at the Fort of Boncelles. I’m trying to get hold of a bike so that I can travel faster.’
‘Listen …’
They listened. They could not hear anything.
‘Gunfire … A dull noise … Don’t move your feet about, Roger …’
They listened again and this time they made out a distant rumble. Monsieur Bernard ate his dinner. Monsieur Jacques, as calm as ever, with astonishingly delicate gestures for a man, loosened the contraption imprisoning Roger’s knee.
‘My gratitude will die only with my last breath …’
Alas, it would not be long in coming! That very evening, Monsieur Dollent, who had red hair, Monsieur Dollent, who was trying to get hold of a bike so that he could travel faster, would be killed in that forest of Sart-Tilmant, near Boncelles, where they had so often gone picnicking and where two regiments of riflemen would wipe each other out, each mistaking the other for the enemy.
They did not even know how the Germans were dressed. They were not made for war. It was all a ghastly mistake.
Élise served dinner, anywhere, anyhow, all the time keeping an eye on the bright rectangle of the street door which had been left open. Everybody was still joking, especially young Bernard who, finding his medical studies too long and too arduous, had decided to make do with a diploma in dentistry.
‘Have a good trip, Mademoiselle Frida. Perhaps we’ll meet again in Berlin, seeing that the Russians are on our side.’
They came and went, not listening to one another, not thinking. They knew that it was war, because everybody said so and those who had come from the centre of the town had seen the posters, but an optimistic fever was buoying them all up, and it was as if they had been expecting it, expecting to be freed at last from the everyday routine, from the pile of accumulated worries which everybody trailed behind him.
Little by little the house emptied, the doors left open as after a house-moving, and things lying about on the bedroom floors: a broken comb, an empty tube of toothpaste, some cardboard boxes, a few balls of crumpled paper. When at last Désiré’s footsteps could be heard, he came walking in as usual and bent down automatically to kiss his son on the forehead.
‘Well, Désiré?’
Gravely, simply, he said:
‘It’s war.’
‘Have they called out the civic guard?’
He nodded, then smiled quickly.
‘We’ve got to guard the public monuments. They’re probably afraid that the Town Hall or the Law Courts are going to run away. Don’t worry. They aren’t entitled to send us to the front.’
He changed into uniform, put on the strange hat with the reddish-brown plumes which he had worn so many times at reviews, or to go to the communal shooting-gallery where the best shot of the year won a silver place-set. Désiré had already won two sets. They had decided not to use them until they had one for each member of the family.
Élise accompanied him to the door, made an effort to smile.
‘Come back quickly, won’t you?’
He would not go very far. With a few others from his company, including little Grisard, he would be sent to guard the slaughter-house, which the people from the back-streets had started looting. It was there, at the end of the Quai des Pêcheurs, that Roger used to go every morning with his grandfather, Monsieur Pelcat, Monsieur Repasse and Monsieur Fourneau, when they went to swim in the Meuse at half past six.
Now Roger was playing marbles, all by himself, in front of the door; twice he went to the end of the street, but his friend Albert did not put in an appearance.
Élise finally sat down in her kitchen and her whole body relaxed. There no was fever left in her and no thoughts. With one elbow on the table and a hand on her forehead, she ate some cold food which she took from any plate which was to hand—it didn’t matter any more—and when she stood up, she looked around without knowing what to do next. She tidied up out of habit, even though it no longer served any purpose, and she felt as tired as if she had just done a fortnight’s washing.
PART THREE
CHAPTER ONE
THE voice of Father Renchon, who was giving his history lesson, was flowing along, as monotonous and fluid as the rain which had been falling for days and days from a twilight sky. Everything in the classroom was damp and grey—the whitewashed walls, the black desks which had been wiped with wet sleeves, the concrete floor which showed every footprint—and when Roger, in his corner by the window, moved his head, it touched the coats hanging on the hooks, with cold drops clinging to the woollen hairs.
Sitting on a bench without a back, with his shoulders hunched, he was pretending to be writing in a notebook spread out in front of him, but it was further down that his gaze was directed, at the book with the cloth covers lying open on his knees, hidden by the desk.
The book smelled of the lending library, the coats hanging from the hooks smelled of wet wool, the classroom smelled of foul ink and stale chalk; everything was dull, everything seemed old and dirty, with excessively bold forms, excessively harsh outlines against a vague background, like the glis
tening roofs which could be seen beyond the huge courtyard of the college, or like that distant window, already lit up, behind which somebody came and went without your being able to tell whether it was a man or a woman, or what mysterious task it was performing.
Roger Mamelin drank in this atmosphere every time that he turned a page and raised his eyes for a moment, before looking down again at La Dame de Monsoreau, for which he had imagined a setting in black and grey, with patches of dull white, like nineteenth-century engravings.
Everything tied up, connected, harmonized; everything, including Father Renchon’s voice, melted into his little world, to such an extent that he started when the tone of that voice altered. Then, hurriedly shutting his book, he lost no time in coming to the surface.
With a gentle courtesy which underlined every word, the voice said:
‘Monsieur Neef, if what I am saying has not the good fortune to interest you, may I ask you at least to make a pretence of listening politely?’
Roger, like the rest, turned to look at first one Neef, then the other, for there were two in the class, two Neefs with no family connection, Neef-the-aristocrat, who lived in a château and came to school every morning on horseback, followed by a flunkey, and Neef-the-peasant, the son of a country brewer, who started and blushed every time a master spoke to his namesake.
Curiously enough, despite their dissimilarities, the two Neefs had one thing in common: they were both far too old to be in the third year, among boys of fifteen. They were already men, the brewer’s son with his upper lip darkened by brown hairs and his deep bass voice, and the other with his lop-sided, thoroughbred face and his mincing, foppish manners.
‘Didn’t you hear me, Monsieur Neef? Yes, you. It’s to you that I’m talking.’
Father Renchon imperceptibly quickened his delivery, this being the only outward sign he ever gave of being angry.
‘Seeing that your presence is no more agreeable to me than my lesson seems to be to you, I gladly give you permission to go for a walk until the latter comes to an end.’
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