Pedigree

by Georges Simenon

  Colette, who was still rather dry and angular, would become, he had thought, the image of her elder sister, for she had the same long face and pale blue eyes.

  Now, he knew. Colette was like the girls you followed in the shadows of the Carré. She went with boys, let them pull her skirts up, and did dirty things in corners. She was well known in the district. Her other sister, who was not quite fifteen, was even more dissolute than she was. People said:

  ‘… The little Duchêne girls.’

  That was enough. They provoked men, even married men. Respectable girls were forbidden to go out with ‘the doctor’s girls’.

  If Roger told his mother that, she would not believe it. She never believed anything that was ugly, especially if it had some connection with the family.

  ‘Will you be quiet, Roger. I don’t know where you get ideas like that.’

  Simply by keeping his eyes and ears open. Even now, walking beside the canal along the tow-path where the trees cast a diagonal shadow every few yards, he was listening without wanting to. He would have preferred to amble along, day-dreaming as he went, for of all the landscapes of his childhood, this was the one he loved best.

  With a knapsack on his back and a stick in his hand, bare-headed and open-necked, he was walking in front with his two cousins. Élise, Anna and Monique followed, talking in an undertone, and stopping from time to time because Monique got out of breath easily.

  Now and then they passed a barge gliding with a slight rippling of the water along the canal where, for no apparent reason, bubbles kept rising to the surface. They brushed past the tight cable and climbed the bank to avoid the slow-moving horse, which was followed by a carter or sometimes a child brandishing a switch.

  The foliage over their heads formed a fresh, motionless canopy of a dark green colour which was reflected in the water, and less than a hundred yards to the right the Meuse flowed freely, without hindrance, towards the sea, spreading out between low banks and sparkling in the sunshine; there was an angler here and there, motionless under his straw hat, in a flat boat which stakes held in midstream. Everything was so quiet that you could hear the machinery of a lock creaking a mile away; a big bumble-bee went by, or else, far away, at the foot of the hills which were veiled for a moment by a long plume of white smoke, a train whistled frantically.

  ‘She went to the cinema with young Sauveur. Knowing how dumb he is, even worse than his father, you can imagine what fun she had! I said to her: “My dear girl, if you’re going to pick a man …” ’

  They talked without stopping, breaking off only to burst out laughing.

  ‘Since Simone broke it off with Georges, she’s been going with old men. You remember the one who wears white spats and followed us the whole of one Sunday afternoon? It seems that he’s got a bachelor apartment not far from Hazinelle’s school. He’s a nobleman, but he hasn’t got a penny to his name, and his family keeps him on a tight rein. Well, she went along with him. You’ll never guess what he asked her to do …’

  They whispered together, face to face, darting provocative glances at their cousin.

  ‘What would you have done in her place?’

  Why, for heaven’s sake, did Roger descend to asking them, crimson-faced:

  ‘What did he ask her to do?’

  ‘I can’t tell you.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Yolande! He wants to know why not!’

  They burst out laughing, and went on keeping him in suspense.

  ‘Shall I tell him?’

  ‘Are you mad? If you tell him something like that, I won’t stay another minute with you.’

  ‘Tell me, Colette.’

  ‘Guess. If you guess right, I’ll tell you.’

  There he was again with his fever in the blood and his shifty look. There were certain words which he did not dare to utter, even before a schoolmate. He tried to express himself by means of periphrases and vague gestures.

  ‘Was it that?’

  ‘You are a silly! If it had been that, Simone would have been only too pleased. Anybody can see that you don’t know her.’

  ‘Then was it with the mouth?’

  ‘Did you hear that, Yolande? … He wants to know if it was … Say it again, Roger! … If you could see your face now! … Have you tried? … Who with? … Tell us … Where was it?’

  He fixed his attention on the pure sight of the canal, longing to shake off the fever which had taken hold of him. He despised his cousins and all the girls they talked about.

  ‘Tell me what he asked her to do.’

  ‘Who said he asked her to do something?’

  ‘Then he asked her to let him do something to her?’

  ‘He’s getting warm, isn’t he, Yolande? Shall I tell him?’

  ‘If you do, I’ll tell Monique where you went last night.’

  ‘Where did you go, Colette?’

  They kept him on tenterhooks, playing with him and exchanging conspiratorial glances.

  ‘Do I ask you what you do with girls?’

  He heard, closer to them, the voices of the three women following them.

  ‘I know that Évariste will never divorce her. Besides, Louisa would never agree to it. She’s too much of a Catholic. One case in the family is enough. If you only knew how much it hurt my sister to marry a man who’d been divorced! And yet it wasn’t his fault. It was his wife who had gone off with one of his workmen.’

  Roger pricked up his ears, realizing that it was Aunt Louisa’s husband, that quiet old man with a patriarchal beard, who was a divorced man. So from the religious point of view his aunt was not married; for all that she went to church morning and evening, she was living in a permanent state of mortal sin.

  ‘Believe me, poor Monique, as my sister says, everything will work out all right, for there’s a God in heaven.’

  Couldn’t Roger, by means of a superhuman effort, manage to shake off this oppressive atmosphere with a tremendous roar of laughter? Were they mad? Were they monsters? Could they possibly be being sincere with themselves?

  Aunt Louisa prayed to God to ‘work things out’ without a divorce. What could that mean if not that God, in order that Évariste might be happy and marry his cousin, should call to rest the poor little sempstress who had not known how to avoid having a child?

  And Monique prayed to God too, took part in charitable activities, sang at High Mass! They were all perfectly capable of joining together to offer up a novena:

  ‘Jesus and Mary, summon to Heaven that girl who is preventing the world from being happy!’

  He heard Élise murmuring:

  ‘Besides, she’s a sickly little thing. Anna was telling me just now that she knows, from the woman who does their washing, that she started spitting blood not so long ago. She’s got something wrong with her womb too. She wasn’t strong enough for a normal delivery and she had to have a Caesarean operation.’

  It was shameful. It was ignoble. And yet nothing cracked, the sky was a magnificent blue which enveloped you in serenity, thousands of daisies pushed their innocent little heads between velvety blades of grass, and the very fish which an angler was pulling out of the water seemed to be wriggling happily at the end of his line.

  When the poetic Monique had been a girl, had she allowed men to paw her about on dark patches of waste ground or in public lavatories? Had she taken pleasure like her sisters in conjuring up erotic scenes before a boy?

  His skin was baking in the sun. He could hear the staccato laughter of the two Duchêne girls. He turned round and saw the three women in a row; Monique’s innocent parasol, the black parasol of Anna, who was not very particular about her appearance, and the bent head of Élise, who wanted everybody to be happy and who, for that reason, hoped without any malice that Thérèse would die.

  On the canal, a tow-haired woman was using her buttocks to push the tiller of a barge which was moving silently along; a little girl in red, thin and naked under her dress, was playing at her feet on the deck, which was stil
l wet from being washed down. The woman was feeding a baby at her breast, and that breast was the only white patch in the whole scene. In the distance, in the shadow of the trees, the husband was walking along, bent forward, harnessed to a steel hawser; it was he who, by dint of a slow, continuous effort, was making the barge glide along between the canal banks.

  Why had the Duchêne girls suddenly burst out laughing? He had not said anything or done anything. He realized that he was looking at them inquiringly with a stupid expression on his face, and it was some time before he guessed the ignoble truth: they had started laughing because they had thought that he could not take his eyes off the bargee’s milky-white breast!

  They picnicked at Visé, which was known as the Martyred Town because most of its inhabitants had been shot by the Germans in August 1914 and the town itself burnt down.

  Sitting on a grassy mound, they unpacked their provisions while looking vaguely at what remained of the town. Of the houses, churches and public buildings, nothing was left. The few walls which had been left standing had long since been demolished, and now stones and bricks were arranged in regular heaps. The streets and pavements were intact and stood out with astonishing clarity, so that it was still a town, but a town where the blocks of houses had been replaced by piles of stones up to six foot high.

  Facing them, a wooden café had sprung up, flanked by a sort of arbour.

  ‘No need to go and spend our money there. What would they give us to drink? Nothing good, I’ll tell you that. I’ve brought some coffee for everybody.’

  The bridge had been broken in two like a toy. In the distance, on one bank of the Meuse, they could see the frontier post and make out, in spite of the dazzling sunshine, the cable stretched across the river. The flashes they noticed now and then came from the light catching the sentries’ bayonets.

  In the first winter of the war, two hundred youths had piled into the hull of a tug without arousing the Germans’ attention. They had had to wait for several days until the river had risen high enough to allow the boat to pass over the dams; and finally, one night, the tug had pulled away from the bank and forged downstream at full steam, without navigation lights, while rifle shots had crackled from the banks.

  The Germans had already stretched a cable across the river, but the captain, counting on the force of the current, had gone straight ahead; the cable had given way and the tug had spun round slightly in the same place while the youths, free at last, had rushed on deck, shouting for joy.

  Roger had been too young. He still was. His jaw set as he gazed at the frontier. What could he do to make life beautiful and clean, above all clean?

  Head down, he walked along behind the others.

  ‘What’s the matter, Roger?’

  ‘Nothing, Mother.’

  ‘Aren’t you enjoying yourself?’

  His cousins were laughing at him. He did not care. They went along some secluded lanes, and Élise started to explain:

  ‘The most dangerous place will be the level-crossing. You’ve seen the sentry. Luckily he’s a Bavarian. If anything happens, we may be able to come to terms with him. You’ll go first, Monique. Smart and pretty as you are, he’ll just look at you and we’ll take the opportunity to slip across.’

  They finally arrived at Éléonore Dafnet’s farm. She was waiting for them and exclaimed:

  ‘What! You’ve had something to eat already! That’s Élise all over. And I’d got a good dinner ready for you!’

  She was a thin woman, of the same type as Élise, one of those women who look as if they have no stamina at all but are really tougher than men. Why did Roger suddenly think that they seemed to have been born to become widows?

  ‘Is that your son? Dear God! I would never dare to kiss him!’

  She was dressed in black like a woman of the middle classes. The farm was well kept, the kitchen as clean as a new pin. An accordion could be heard somewhere, and Élise, who was easily worried, looked inquiringly at her old friend.

  ‘Don’t take any notice. It’s my lodgers. Because just imagine, Élise, I’ve got some lodgers too. But these came without me having to go and look for them. They are four Germans, three of them old men. I’ve got them well trained, and when they’re not on guard duty they help me to milk the cows.’

  She opened a door a little way.

  ‘Hey, Franz … Come and say hullo to my friends …’

  As he was wearing neither his tunic nor his boots, and had clogs full of straw on his feet, they did not have the impression of being in front of a German soldier.

  ‘You must still be able to talk to them, I suppose, Élise. They’re very nice, you know. I’m looking forward to them going and my husband coming back, but I can’t say that this lot have been a nuisance. Go and get me a bottle from the cellar, Franz … Flasche, ja … Wein … That’s right … You see, he’s understood! … You’ll have a glass too, you fat pig! … Believe it or not, nothing amuses him more than being called a fat pig …’

  ‘You aren’t frightened?’

  ‘What of? … His father is burgomaster of his village … I’ve told him that yours was too … But what are you going to carry the food in?’

  ‘I say, Éléonore, you’re sure they don’t understand everything you say?’

  ‘What if they do? They know what you’ve come for. I give them plenty of butter to send to Germany, where everybody’s starving to death … Where you’ll have to be careful is at the level-crossing … Especially if you see a sergeant-major … He’s a brute of a man who wouldn’t hesitate to have you stripped in the middle of the road to make sure you’re not hiding anything … Last week, he ordered his men to fire at a poor devil who was doing a bit of smuggling …’

  Roger looked hard at Élise, marvelling that his mother could once have been the friend of this woman in front of him. At the time of L’Innovation, had they been like one another, and had life been sufficient to make them different?

  Élise said something in an undertone. The other woman replied in an audible voice.

  ‘Don’t worry, my girl! I take good care not to lose on the deal. If I told you how much I charge them for washing their shirts and socks, you wouldn’t believe me. But you haven’t seen my favourite yet. Wait a minute … Ethel! … Ethel! … Come here, my lad, so we can admire your pretty face … Well, wouldn’t you say he was just like a child? … I don’t know why they’ve put him with the old men, instead of sending him to the front … He’s got the soft skin of a girl and he blushes at the slightest thing … These are friends of mine, Ethel, from the days when I was a girl … Fräulein, yes . . Me, Fräulein … You see! He doesn’t know what to do with himself … His father’s a solicitor at Mainz … He’s got a sister who’s married to a baron … A glass of wine, Ethel? … Ja … Get the glasses out of the cupboard … Try to make yourself useful … You see how I make them work?’

  ‘You still haven’t any news of your husband?’

  ‘No. I haven’t had a single letter for a year now.’

  She heaved a sigh, but went on filling the glasses.

  ‘What are you going to put the corn in?’

  ‘You’ll see. I’ll show you when they’ve gone. I’ve made myself a double petticoat with vertical seams every couple of inches …’

  They had eaten some tart with the Germans. Only Monique had remained somewhat aloof. Then all of a sudden they had noticed that time was passing fast. In the granary, they had had to hunt for a funnel with which to pour corn into the narrow pockets of which Élise’s petticoat was composed. They had weighed the butter and bacon.

  Roger had understood what Colette was up to when, after looking him in the eyes, she had wandered casually into a dimly lit barn. He had followed her. In a rather nervous voice she had asked him:

  ‘What do you want?’

  She must have been frightened, for he really hated her, and it was out of hatred that he had pushed her down on the floor, that his teeth had pressed against hers, that his hands had torn angrily a
t her underclothes. If her sister Yolande had not come in just then, he would probably have gone the whole way, to soil her.

  ‘Well, you two believe in having fun, don’t you?’

  ‘Brute. Filthy brute!’ Colette had muttered, trying to tidy herself up.

  She no longer laughed at him. She respected him. It was she who, the whole of the way home, would go running after him.

  Élise, who was slightly disappointed, did not show it.

  ‘How much has she charged us for the corn?’

  ‘Twenty-five francs a kilo.’

  ‘That’s five francs cheaper than in town. Her butter has a good nutty taste. It isn’t like the butter you get on the ration, which is always rancid and watery.’

  Had she been hoping that Éléonore would let her have all that for nothing, or at the pre-war prices?

  Monique Duchêne was sent ahead to go over the dangerous level-crossing. Roger and his cousins climbed the bank and crossed the railway-line a hundred yards away from the sentries. Élise, in her wheat-filled petticoat which was puffed out like a crinoline, looked as if she were pregnant; she bore a certain resemblance to those Louis Quinze figurines in porcelain, and her face seemed delicate and fine.

  ‘Let me carry something, Aunt.’

  ‘No, Monique, your hands are too delicate.’

  They avoided the tow-path and went along a path between the rushes beside the Meuse. They talked less and less. They ended up by not talking at all, while the sky turned pale green and the breeze covered the river with little white waves.

  Roger envied the young soldier whom he had seen back at the farm and whom Éléonore Dafnet looked at so tenderly. Wasn’t that young man lucky to have escaped from everyday life, from his family, from the never-changing houses which he had seen ever since childhood, standing around him like prison walls?

  In a whitewashed scullery, four mattresses had been laid side by side on the floor. There were helmets and belts lying around on some straw-bottomed chairs, a razor and a shaving-brush on the window-sill, a piece of looking-glass fixed with some nails to the wall. On the other side of the wall you could hear the cows and horses. Sitting on his bed, barefooted, his open shirt revealing a hairy torso, a forty-year-old soldier who was a dentist in civilian life was playing the accordion.