‘Excuse me, Monsieur. You wouldn’t be interested in buying some brandy, rum or liqueurs, would you?’
Since the beginning of the German occupation, spirits had been strictly prohibited, and they were served only to trusted customers in back-rooms, at the bottom of a Bovril cup.
‘How much?’
He made only one mistake. For fear of bungling the sale, or of being taken for a profiteer, he always quoted a price which was too low and which he promptly regretted.
‘Fifty francs a bottle.’
Most of the café proprietors had been suspicious of this youth who was too well dressed and too polite. Others had haggled, asking for time to think it over. This evening, the two cousins were due to deliver ten bottles to a bar in the arcade near the Pont des Arches, next to the shop where, when he was a child, Roger used to go with his mother every week to buy butter.
What could Gaston have done without him? Why was he giving him only a third of the profits, instead of half?
He thought about that and about various other things which got jumbled up in his mind, and he remained fully aware only of the strange place where he was, hanging as it were above the town whose noises could be heard down below. On the other side of the lowered blind, he could sense a dark expanse of swarming activity, hundreds of little cafés and shops, people walking fast and others sheltering in doorways, their shoulders hunched, looking like wet dogs.
‘You aren’t feeling ill, are you, Roger?’
‘No.’
‘You look pale. Perhaps you ought to be sick.’
‘I don’t want to be sick.’
He knew one thing, and that was that he hated Gaston. He hated Verger too, and Father Van Bambeek. They were cowards. Verger was a coward. Roger remembered his pale face, with a deep crease across the forehead, in the box at the Renaissance. He had not laughed once. He never laughed. Only his lips moved, stretching like india rubber. To think that all the way through the show, and during the intervals when they had gone to have a drink in the bar, he had been turning the same idea over and over in his head! It had had to come out, afterwards, in the darkness of the Carré.
‘I thought you’d been given complimentary tickets.’
‘Well?’
‘I saw the tickets. You got them at the box-office.’
‘What’s that got to do with you?’
‘How did you get hold of the money?’
‘Mind your own business.’
‘I could lay my hands on some money too.’
‘What are you waiting for?’
‘I know where I can find some old accumulator jars for next to nothing. I can get hold of some lead plates and acids too.’
Roger had blurted out:
‘At your father’s!’
‘Never you mind. Just now, accumulators are worth a lot of money, anything up to a hundred and eighty francs. I’ve heard there’s somebody in the Rue de la Madeleine who buys them at that price.’
‘Why don’t you go there?’
‘I don’t dare. I’m afraid of being recognized. If you like, we could come to an arrangement.’
‘What sort of arrangement?’
‘We’d carry them together, and you’d go into the shop.’
‘While you waited outside in the street!’
‘I’d give you twenty-five per cent. I’ve enough material for at least ten batteries. At forty-five francs each, that would give you four hundred and fifty francs.’
That had been three weeks ago and they had sold the ten batteries. They had taken two at a time, because they were heavy. Verger had stayed in the street, paralysed with fear, casting worried glances at Monsieur Gugenheim’s shop.
Roger had not been frightened, not even the first time. Now, on the other hand, possibly on account of the alcohol he had drunk, it all seemed a nightmare to him and he bore a dreadful grudge against Verger. He would not go out with him again; in any case, he had nothing left to sell and Roger did not enjoy his company, for he always looked as if he were being tormented by shameful ideas, took fright easily, and thought he was being followed in the street.
‘Look behind you.’
‘Well?’
‘Don’t you think that fellow looks like a plain-clothes detective? Have you spent all your money already?’
‘What about you?’
‘I’m keeping it to buy a motor-bike for the holidays. I’ll hide it somewhere in the town. My parents won’t know anything about it.’
‘And what if they meet you on it?’
‘I’ll say it belongs to a friend who’s lent it to me.’
Verger was a miser. Before going into a café, he worked out how much it was going to cost him, doing sums in his head, hesitating, torn between contrary desires.
‘You pay for us both. I’ll settle up with you later.’
He was a rotter, and that was a fact! Gaston Van de Waele spent freely, extravagantly, with a sort of frenzy, but he was a rotter too in his way. Roger would tell him so one day. And young Gugenheim was even more of a rotter, with his lopsided face, his Jewish nose, his big, lecherous mouth, and the heavy eyelids which fell half-way over his eyes.
Roger wanted to be sick, but he knew that he would not be able to. His eyes were haggard and worried, his mouth bitter. The room was ugly and he felt as if he were suffocating in it, for the walls were closing in on him like the walls of the room at Embourg when he had had mumps. He wondered if he had not dreamt about the huge Gugenheim shop, if a place like that really existed without anybody knowing it. For he had never heard of it before, and never noticed the narrow door with the frosted-glass window, although it was next to Ramaekers’ where his mother had had a pair of shoes made to measure for him when he had started going to the Collège Saint-Louis.
Inside, though, you might have thought you were in the Grand Bazaar. There were rows of counters and two floors of galleries. In the dirty light falling from the glazed roof there was nobody to be seen, not a single customer or shop-assistant; and you gave a start when there loomed up in the echoing void the disproportionate figure of a boy of fourteen who was the only living creature among all the grotesque merchandise piled up or spread out. Hundreds of carnival masks, for instance, were lined up along one wall, with false noses in cardboard, beards and moustaches. In other parts of the shop you could see heaps of blue, green or pink combs studded with imitation diamonds, bundles of multicoloured shawls, toys, clay pipes, clothes, shirts of a kind nobody ever wore, and improbable household articles. Everything was incredibly ugly and vulgar.
Why did the boy, whose black overall covered his feet like a choirboy’s skirt, press an electric bell? Was he afraid that somebody was going to murder him and steal the masks or the combs, or was he hoping to bring to life the dead world around him? The bell rang far away; a long time afterwards there came the sound of soft footsteps accompanied by the regular tapping of a stick, and an old man with a white beard, a caricature of Father Christmas, appeared from heaven knows where, wearing a ghetto skull-cap on his head.
This was the elder Monsieur Gugenheim, who was hard to understand when he spoke, on account of his accent. Accumulators? Perhaps. He did not say no. They did not interest him personally. He sold nothing but articles for hawkers and pedlars, and his business had enjoyed a high reputation ever since his father had founded it sixty years before. But perhaps one of his friends would be interested. How much did the young man want? One hundred and eighty francs? He would never dare to quote a figure like that to his friend.
Well, well! Another person, who could not have been more than twenty, had suddenly appeared without anybody hearing him coming. Standing beside old Gugenheim, he looked just like a tailor’s dummy, a dummy whose yellow eyes seemed to be trying to say something to Roger.
‘Bring the goods along, anyway, and we’ll see. I mean that my friend will see, eh, Max? At a hundred and fifty francs, who knows if we couldn’t come to an arrangement? You’re starting young, aren’t you? I wouldn’t mind bet
ting that your father’s in business and that he sells accumulators.’
Nobody showed Mamelin out. He opened the wrong door and found himself in a yard which made him think of the bottom of a factory chimney. Then, when he finally got to the street, Max Gugenheim came running after him.
‘Wait a minute. I’ve something to say to you. It’s no use bringing the stuff to the old man, who’s rich enough as it is. I’ll take it off you at a hundred and eighty. Come along, and I’ll show you where you can find me. You see this passage? Don’t be frightened. At the far end, on the right, there’s a staircase. You go up to the third floor. Don’t get it wrong. Not the second, but the third. It’s an attic. You’ve only to tell me when you’re coming and I’ll wait for you there.’
He looked suspiciously at Verger, who had decided to come up to them and was standing there saying nothing.
‘Who’s this?’
‘A friend of mine. We’re partners.’
‘You haven’t anything else to sell, have you?’
Then Verger, who was always full of ideas, spoke up.
‘What do you want to buy?’
‘Anything: butter, tinned food, sugar, flour, bicycle tyres, shoes …’
What was Roger drinking now? Brandy, rum, green Chartreuse?
‘I tell you,’ he shouted, banging on the table with his fist, ‘I tell you they’re rotters.’
‘Yes, of course they are,’ his cousin agreed. ‘Who are you talking about?’
‘About Gugenheim.’
Wasn’t it peculiar that it should have been through Max Gugenheim that the two cousins had met again? One fine day, or rather one evening, in the candle-lit attic which you reached by way of a staircase with no banisters, Mamelin had found himself face to face with Gaston Van de Waele, whom he had not seen for a year.
‘What are you doing here?’
‘Business. And you?’
Now Roger stated categorically, hoping to be contradicted:
‘And we’re rotters too. As rotten as can be! So much the worse for those who haven’t the courage to be rotters!’
Was it still raining? He did not know. His mind kept playing with this idea of rotters. If you weren’t a rotter, so much the worse for you! His father, for instance, wasn’t a rotter. And where was his father now? In an office in the Rue Sohet, under a lamp with a green shade, trembling in front of a Monsieur Monnoyeur who was a hundred times less intelligent than he was. When he went home to the Rue des Maraîchers, that old cat Mademoiselle Rinquet would have taken his armchair. On purpose, even if it made her sick, she would eat most of the dinner, knowing that Désiré had always had a big appetite. She had made some biscuits, using white flour, or rather it was Élise who had done all the work. She had promptly put them in a tin which they had had to lend her and they had never been seen again; the disgusting woman kept them locked up in her wardrobe, with her linen, and always carried the key around with her. Élise had not managed to scrounge a single biscuit.
‘You understand, Gaston? If you aren’t a rotter, you might just as well kick the bucket. You, for instance, you’re a crook. That’s right, a crook.’
‘You ought to try to be sick.’
‘You think I’m drunk, do you? Because I say you’re a crook? And what about your father? Why did he smuggle people across the frontier if it wasn’t to get as much money as he could out of the young men going to enlist? And what’s he doing in Germany now? He’s found another way of making money, even though he’s a deportee, by running a bathing establishment while there are prisoners dying of hunger. Do you want me to tell you what he is, that father of yours? He’s a syphilitic! When Doctor Matray came to see your sister at home, he told my mother so, I heard him, though I pretended not to be listening.’
There was a gap in his memory at this point. All he could remember was stumbling down the stairs and pressing against the wall to let a young woman pass who smelled good and glanced inquisitively at his cousin and himself. He had looked up in an attempt to see under her dress while she was going upstairs.
He had been surprised to find some daylight left outside. The blue-painted gas-lamps were only just being lit. It had stopped raining, and a strong wind was beginning to dry patches of the road.
‘You see, if the fellow insists on tasting the stuff, I’ll say to him: “Excuse me, Monsieur …” Yes, I’ll say to him …’
He waved his arms about. He could not recognize the streets where he was being taken. He went where his cousin pushed him, through an extraordinary town swarming with thousands of rotters, and he turned round to look at all the women with a violent desire to see them naked, disgustingly naked, their flesh pale in the twilight. Later on, he would go to see some. Where were the bottles? Had they forgotten the bottles? No. Gaston was carrying them in a parcel done up with string.
‘You’ve got the Chartreuse, haven’t you, Gaston? You see, if the fellow wants to taste something, I’ll uncork the Chartreuse. On account of the colour, it’s the most striking of the lot.’
‘Listen, Roger…’
‘Yes.’
‘We’ve arrived. Do you feel capable of going in?’
‘Give me the parcel! Give it me, I tell you!’
He had gone down two or three steps. There were some men there, four at least, in one corner of a low-ceilinged room. He had crossed this room without looking at them, had opened the wrong door as he had done at Gugenheim’s, and had nearly fallen into a damp cellar. Finally he had found himself in the middle of a kitchen where there was an enamel coffee-pot with blue flowers on it standing on the stove.
‘Here you are. I promised you ten bottles and I’ve brought the ten bottles along.’
There was an old woman there too, in a wicker armchair like Désiré’s—or rather like Mademoiselle Rinquet’s, seeing that the old cat … What a bitch Mademoiselle Rinquet was! But then, Élise simply had to go and take in people like that. She’d go and look for them in the street if necessary. If she hadn’t somebody to truckle to all day, she’d fall ill!
‘You don’t want to taste them?’
He would have liked to uncork a bottle himself, to drink another glass. The proprietor of the café did not want to. He was small and round, like Monsieur Van Camp, and he looked like a cheese-merchant too. He examined Roger furtively, as if the latter was an impenetrable mystery to him. Did things happen like this in the case of Gouin’s hams? Roger did not count the notes which were handed to him. What was the use? He only hoped that he would not start being sick while he was crossing the café! What would Father Van Bambeek say if he met him coming out? And where was Gaston? There was nobody to be seen in the little street. It was dark. The Meuse was flowing along somewhere.
‘Gaston! Ga-aston!’
‘Ssh! Well? …’
‘Where were you?’
He had been piddling in a corner.
‘Have you got the money?’
‘Yes. I can’t remember which pocket I put it in. Look for it yourself. Search me. Yes, search me, I said!’
He would never know where they had eaten some cheese sandwiches, but it must have been in one of those restaurants for country people where his cousin felt at home.
Was Gaston drunk too?
‘Are you drunk, Gaston? What time is it? I must be off home.’
Another dark street with the wind blowing along it, a patrol with which Roger nearly collided, the heavy, regular footsteps of the three German soldiers who went off smoking their pipes. They were ‘good ones’, Bavarians, with an orange ribbon on their caps.
‘What if we went to a night-club? I say, Gaston, let’s go to the Gai-Moulin.’
He did not know that it was only eight o’clock. The darkness was enough for him. He wanted to hear some music, buy champagne for some dancing-girls, sit on a red plush bench.
‘I say, Gaston …’
What had he been going to say? He could not remember. The whole of this black, slimy town, through which they were wandering as if in a maze
, was … He could not manage to follow his idea through to the end, and this was a pity, for it was an important idea, indeed an idea of capital importance. He felt sad, disgusted. Everything was hideous. It was dirty. That was the word! It was dirty! And he wanted it to be even dirtier, dirty enough to make you cry with pity or disgust, to make you roll on the ground, moaning and groaning!
‘What’s the matter?’
He had stopped in front of a door and was pointing solemnly at the shutter, saying:
‘It’s Gugenheim’s.’
‘What of it?’
‘Nothing. It’s Gugenheim’s. Shall we ring the bell?’
Where had they drunk a glass of beer? It did not matter. In any case, they had gone behind the Town Hall, at the foot of the spiral staircase where you went to watch weddings.
And now everything was getting mixed up again, the various pictures were being superimposed, and he made an effort to wake up, for he could feel that he was asleep. He was wedged in the corner of a bench, not far from a cylindrical stove in front of which a black and white cat was purring on a chair.
‘Feeling better?’ Gaston asked in a thick voice.
The rotter!
Funny! The word had come back to him. Hadn’t his mind toyed for a long time with that idea of the rotter which he had unconsciously rediscovered on awakening? But when? And why? And which rotter?
‘I gave you the money, I hope? You found it all right?’
For he remembered standing on the kerb of a pavement with his hands in the air while Gaston went through his pockets.
Gaston’s face had never been so red before or his skin so tight. You had the unpleasant impression that he needed a bleeding. He was lying back on the leather-covered bench with his tie undone and his shirt open at the neck, and one of his hands was squeezing the breasts of a fat blonde sitting beside him.
She laughed. They both burst out laughing, Roger could not tell why, and then started talking in Flemish, only to burst out laughing even louder.
‘You can help yourself too, you know,’ Gaston said, jerking his head towards the woman. ‘There’s enough for two. Move up. Don’t be frightened, it’s solid stuff.’
Pedigree Page 54
