He pawed her with his big hands, and insisted on his cousin’s feeling her too. Roger had to follow his example. The woman smelled of beer, rice-powder, and hot armpits.
The two of them thought that he had gone back to sleep, but that wasn’t true. His eyelashes fluttered every now and then. He looked all round him, bit by bit. He saw everything. The café was dimly lit. The tables were made of polished wood and spotlessly clean, and the sawdust formed patterns on the floor.
By the window, which was hung with an embroidered curtain, two Germans were sitting at a table with a woman who was the exact opposite of Gaston’s, dark and thin, with a serious face. Sitting with her chin in one hand, she was gravely and patiently listening to what a massive Feldwebel was trying to tell her, a red-haired man who must have been in his forties and was wearing that peculiar grey cap without a peak, with a bottle-green ribbon and a cockade of black, white and red enamel.
The other German, who was even older, was puny and almost hunchbacked, unless it was his outsize greatcoat which was deforming him. His head was bowed, and he was sunk in gloom.
The red-haired giant had taken from his wallet a whole batch of photographs which he spread out on the table, among the glasses of beer standing side by side with glasses of gin. Perhaps he was drunk too? He tried to explain something, searched for words which would not come, persisted, frowning, and smiled broadly when at last the woman made a show of understanding and spoke to him in her turn in pidgin German. Without taking his eyes off the photographs of his wife and children, he happily thrust his hand under her skirt, humming a sentimental song and rocking from side to side.
It was all very far away and at the same time very close. Between Roger and the rest of the world, there floated a yellow fog which deadened the sounds and gave a soft, mysterious quality to the pictures; he closed his eyes, still hearing the song, which was soon accompanied by the noise of a horse’s muffled hooves on the hardened snow.
It was probably on account of Gaston’s voice, the Flemish words which he could hear being whispered, the waves of heat reaching him from the stove. He was in a sleigh, with Cécile, the second of the Van de Waele daughters, and Alice, the youngest, the one who looked like a grasshopper or some other insect. The sleigh was not a big one. Jef had taken his place on the seat and was driving. All you could see of him was his bearlike back. On Roger’s right, Alice kept fidgeting all the time, but on the left Cécile, who was roughly of the same age as he was, snuggled up against him.
He had put one arm round her waist. His right hand was in hers, in her lap; a thick blanket, which had a good stable smell about it, covered them up to their chins.
Although the moon had disappeared, you could make out the black pot-hooks of the poplars on the sparkling snow. The wind buffeted their blue faces, but their hands were burning, an intimate warmth prevailed under the blanket, and from the centre of Cécile’s body, whose forms Roger could feel through her dress, there came a more penetrating warmth.
He did not move. He wanted this to last a long time, and wished they would never get to the village church where they were going to hear Midnight Mass.
He had spent only about ten days at Neeroeteren. First of all Mia, Gaston’s sister, the eldest of the girls, had come to Liége to obtain treatment for the sores which she had all over her body and which festered instead of healing. When the doctors had spoken of the need for regular and delicate attention, Élise, as was only to be expected, had offered her help, and Mia had come to stay in the house in the Rue de la Loi where they were still living. If Désiré complained about the smell of the ointments and the unpleasant dressings which were left about even in the kitchen, Élise retorted:
‘You forget that they send us food!’
Roger had been invited to spend the Christmas holidays at Neeroeteren. He recalled the big kitchen in which Gaston, at the head of the table, solemnly played the part of the paterfamilias, saying grace and filling his plate first of all, while his mother fussed around him like a servant-girl and his sisters maintained a respectful silence.
Nowhere else had he ever been filled with such reassuring warmth as in that room where hams and sides of bacon hung from the ceiling and where you scratched away the frost on the window-panes to see the cattle moving slowly across the farmyard.
Jef, Gaston’s brother, was a monster with a huge head and a giant’s hands. He had taken Roger into the pine woods to hunt squirrels, killing two with stones and cutting them up while they were still warm. Under a roof where the pig-food was cooked, he had lit a log-fire and grilled the carcasses on the end of a stick, with the blood dripping into the flames.
‘Don’t you want any? It’s good.’
He also killed and ate cats, field-mice, all kinds of animals. He ate anything and everything, all day long. Roger, for his part, took along some potatoes in his pockets and baked them under the ashes.
Mother Van de Waele, whose skirts hung round a body like a broomstick, had, just like Élise, the timid face of a slave. Only men counted in her house, or rather only one man, the master, and, in his father’s absence, Gaston was that master. The girls huddled in a corner when he came in, and silence fell straight away; he sat down, and they rushed forward to take his boots off and put his slippers on; then they brought him his pipe already filled and a brand picked out of the fire with a pair of tongs.
Perhaps Roger had felt tempted to live like that in the immensity of those fields intersected by the frozen canals and the curtains of poplars leaning towards the east. He would have married Cécile with her smooth, rather soft skin, who looked at him with submissive eyes.
He stirred restlessly in his corner. A fit of anger took hold of him. He was going to grow excited again. What had he said to Gaston earlier on? The truth! That they were all syphilitic. It was the father who had started it all, early in his married life. His wife had had to have treatment almost straight away, and now her hair was falling out and she had scarcely any teeth left. Jef, their second son, was a mental defective who could have been put on show in a fair as a wild man of the woods. He sometimes started circling round children skating on the canals as he circled round cats and squirrels, and who could tell whether one day he might not strangle one?
‘Rotters!’ shouted Roger, jumping to his feet.
‘What’s the matter with your pal?’ the blonde asked in surprise. ‘Does he often get like that?’
‘Sit down, Roger. You ought to have a cup of coffee, you know.’
‘I don’t want any coffee. I want some spirits.’
For fear that he would not be given any, he drained the two glasses on the table, one after the other, and then went and planted himself in front of the German, glaring at him fiercely.
‘Why haven’t I got a woman?’
‘Ssh! Don’t shout like that. Why don’t you come and sit with us?’
‘And what if I want to make love?’
‘Not so loud, young fellow my lad,’ said the manageress, whom he had not seen before, hidden as she was by her bar, behind which she had been having a little doze. ‘I don’t mind you having fun, but you mustn’t shout silly things like that. Look how your friend’s enjoying himself nice and quietly.’
‘He’s a rotter.’
‘Now, now.’
‘And I’m a rotter, too. And that fellow there’s another.’
The German, who did not understand, raised his glass as if he were clinking it against another, and said:
‘Prosit.’
‘Give me a drink!’ yelled Roger, wondering what he could do to feel better. ‘Give me a drink right away, or I’ll smash everything. And first of all, I want to piss. Where do you piss here?’
The old woman led him through the kitchen to a little backyard oozing with damp. When he came back to the café, he found the two groups together: Gaston, the German soldiers and the two women at the same table.
For a moment he was on the point of sobering up, and his eyes narrowed angrily, but putting a glass i
nto his hand was enough to make him sit down quietly.
‘You see, Gaston, what makes me mad is that it could be so stunning …’
What could be stunning? That was what he was incapable of putting into words. He just felt it. It seemed to him that all that was needed was an effort made once for all, and then there would be no rotters any more, life would be beautiful and clean, as harmonious as certain memories, and you would no longer have the impression of constantly floundering about in filth.
‘Listen! Here’s an example. One example and you’ll understand. The money I’ve got here,’—and he slapped his breast-pocket where his wallet was—‘well, it’s more than we make in a couple of months with Mademoiselle Rinquet. And what am I going to do with it, eh? Try to guess what I’m going to do with it. For a start, there …’
He took a note at random and thrust it into the dark woman’s hand.
‘Go on, take it! Don’t be frightened! I may be drunk, but I know what I’m doing, and I shan’t come along tomorrow to ask for it back. As for going to bed with you, no thank you.’
‘Ssh …’
It was not a brothel, but a café such as you could find in the quiet streets around the Town Hall. True, you were entitled to sit in a corner with a waitress and to play about with her. In the daytime there was a convenient chiaroscuro, and at night the lighting was as discreet as could be.
‘Why are you all looking at me like that? Have I got a smut on my nose? Well? Don’t you dare answer me?’
The Feldwebel stood up and spoke to him in his language, coming up to him and making as if to embrace him.
‘Keep calm, Roger. Mind how you behave. He isn’t dangerous. He says you remind him of his young brother who was killed in August 1914.’
‘Prosit.’
The old woman had filled the glasses. She appeared only when she was needed and disappeared straight away. The hunchback, who had an unexpected bass voice, stood up in his turn, climbed on to his chair, and started bellowing a mournful song at the top of his voice.
‘Come and sit here. Come, now. Don’t be a fool. You aren’t going to cry now, are you?’
‘Why should I cry?’
He obeyed the fat woman who enveloped him in a maternal caress.
Later on, he must have sung too. He had got on to the bench, gesticulating wildly. In a corner, Gaston, blue in the face, was begging the old woman to let him go up to one of the bedrooms with his woman—for half an hour, ten minutes, just five minutes, not even that!
‘I’d like nothing better, young man. You must realize that I’d be only too happy to please a nice young fellow like you. But the police are very strict. And then there are the patrols that go past nearly every night. They’d close my café. I’d be out on the streets. Be a good boy, now. Take your friend home and go to bed. You can come back tomorrow.’
What else had happened? They had forced Roger to drink some boiling coffee, which he had spilt over his new suit. They had washed the stains with warm water, with the corner of a napkin. He despised them all, while they were fussing over him.
They didn’t understand! A month earlier, for instance, hadn’t he wanted Raoul to crop his hair short? He had gone around in wooden clogs, smoking an old man’s pipe and ambling over to the Crypt at Le Bouhay to attend Benediction.
And what if his father saw him now, sitting at the same table as the German soldiers? However much Roger might try to explain, Désiré would not understand either. He was not a rotter. He went through the streets without seeing the filth around him. He had never been tempted, like his son, to explore the shady side of the town. He believed what he was told to believe, and during High Mass he stood erect in his pew, as calm as a saint in a stained-glass window, while Chrétien Mamelin went from pew to pew, collecting for St Roch.
Did St Roch need money too?
Roger had had a rendezvous with the little dancer at the Renaissance. In the street, she was an ordinary-looking girl, timid, very poor. When he had given her the gilt powder-compact which he had just bought for thirty-two francs, she had looked at him with more alarm than gratitude, the present struck her as so magnificent.
‘It’s far too much,’ she had stammered, in the same tone of voice as Élise when her sister Marthe slipped some chocolate or some tins of sardines into her shopping-bag.
He had tried to kiss her. She had let him do so, while staring over his shoulder.
‘You mustn’t send me any more flowers like you did the other day. The other girls wonder why. They think I’m putting on side.’
‘What do the other girls say about me?’
‘That you look nice and you’re well dressed.’
‘And the actors?’
‘I don’t know. They don’t talk to us.’
Father Renchon pretended to take no notice of him and avoided asking him questions, for he remembered nothing of his lessons and scamped his homework anyhow, sometimes while he was walking along the street. At home, he just came and went.
‘Supper ready?’
He sat down at table and went off when the meal was scarcely finished, going out or shutting himself up in his room, above all taking care not to find himself alone with his father. Sometimes he had the impression that the latter was holding him as it were at the end of a line, that he knew everything, that he was afraid of intervening and was waiting anxiously.
He was dead drunk. The proof of that was that he did not know how he left the snug little café. Hadn’t they walked for some time in the company of the two Germans with whom Gaston had kept up an interminable conversation?
Yet he noticed that he was crossing the Passerelle, for he recognized its springy and always rather slimy planks under his feet. He had even wanted to lean on the parapet and weep as he gazed at the reflection of the moon on the water. His cousin had pulled him away. He was holding him by one arm and forcing him to keep walking.
‘Don’t be so rough, Gaston.’
‘Then hurry up. The tart promised to come round to my room as soon as the old woman had gone to sleep.’
‘And what if you catch syphilis? I say, Gaston … Look … We’re in the Rue Puits-en-Sock … I may be drunk, but I can recognize it, because it’s the Mamelins’ street and over there, where there’s a big red crush-hat over the door, that’s my grandfather’s … Next door, that’s Gruyelle-Marquant’s … You think you know a lot, but you don’t know anything at all … Do you want me to tell you something?’
He had nearly spoken, but his face had suddenly frozen as if he had become aware of the gulf separating him from a Gaston Van de Waele.
‘It’s none of your business. Go to bed with that fat girl. She smells of beer and whey.’
Why whey? He didn’t know. It went with her flesh, which was as white and soft as a cow’s udder.
‘Listen, Roger, there’s no need to tell your parents you’ve been out with me. If I know your mother, she’d tell the whole family.’
It was true that at Neeroeteren Gaston said grace before every meal!
‘Have no fear! You can leave me now. I’m nearly there.’
And he zigzagged away from his cousin, who went on watching him, turned the corner of the Rue des Maraîchers, and noticed straight away a little light filtering underneath the shutters. He did not need to take his key out of his pocket, or to tap on the letter-box, for the light had already gone on in the hall. The door opened. It wasn’t his father. It was Élise.
‘Where have you been at this time of night, Roger? Aren’t you ashamed of yourself?’
The first thing which struck him was the familiar disc of the alarm-clock on the black marble mantelpiece. It gave the time as ten to two. At this revelation, panic seized him, but immediately afterwards he noticed Mademoiselle Rinquet lying in wait as it were in his father’s armchair.
Then anger swept over him again, like blood going to his head. Red in the face a moment before, he turned deathly pale, his nostrils twitched, his eyes narrowed, and it was obvious that nothing was g
oing to stop him now.
‘What’s the old cat waiting for?’
‘Roger, be quiet, will you? Why, you’ve been drinking! Mademoiselle Rinquet has been kind enough to wait up with me. We’ve been up to the Pont d’Amercoeur a score of times and I even asked at the police-station, thinking that you might have had an accident.’
‘She’d have been delighted!’
‘Roger! Go straight to bed. Tomorrow you’ll beg her pardon.’
‘Me? Not likely! I hate her. I despise her. She’s a spiteful woman who doesn’t deserve to live, and you know it. If there were any justice in this world, it’s rubbish like her they’d send on to the battlefields instead of killing poor soldiers.’
Élise grew hysterical, trying in vain to silence him and finding no better way than shouting louder than him.
‘You’re mad! You’re absolutely mad! Mademoiselle Rinquet, my son has gone mad! It’s a scandal! What have I done to deserve this? And all this time, his father’s been so sick with anxiety that he’s had to go to bed …’
At the word father, Roger had rushed out of the kitchen. He went up the stairs four at a time and stopped for a moment on the landing to calm down a little. While he was standing there, motionless, with one hand on his pounding heart, a voice said softly:
‘Is that you, son?’
The door was ajar, and the night-light which he had had when he was a little boy was burning. It was all so unusual that Roger shivered, seized by a mortal fear.
‘Is it true that you’re ill?’
The worst of it was that drunkenness was still clogging his mouth and he stumbled over the syllables.
‘Your mother always exaggerates. You’ve come home, that’s the main thing. Hurry off to bed now.’
On a sudden impulse, Roger threw himself on the bed with his head on his father’s chest. Sobbing, he tried to stammer out an apology, but he had a lump in his throat. A hand stroked his wet hair—he didn’t know why his hair was wet—and then he heard Élise’s voice, and the kitchen door opening.
Pedigree Page 55
