Last Times, page 14
“And you?”
A personage with the face of a jockey boiled in vinegar announced gravely, “I wish to make a complaint. My bicycle has been stolen.”
“In writing. You can bring me your complaint out of turn. If you know the name and address of the thief, the exact spelling. Who’s left?”
M. Carpe was sick to his stomach and had a bitter taste in his mouth. Behind his eyeglasses full of chaotic reflections he was in fact in tears. An idea, one single idea, beat in his brain like the clapper of a broken bell: “We’re done for, done for, poor Paris, poor Paris.”
The victim of adultery stood in the half light and stared at the filthy stone floor; his hands moved slowly around the brim of his hat. Mme Nelly Thorah turned around, took a step toward the door, then two steps back, removed a bottle of salts from her handbag and took a long whiff. “It’s unbelievable.”
Officer Landois’s neck had turned purple. He was listening to two timid old people neatly dressed in black, sexagenarian orphans. The woman repeated the story after her husband and Landois tried to understand, but the landscapes of the Oise were in his mind and all three of them seemed like suppliants with invisible ropes around their necks.
“We are from Rouen, officer, we had a hardware store for thirty years in the Rue des Bonnetiers. They came in along Rue Grand-Pont and the river. Our house was destroyed, even the cellar. We have nothing left. We are on our way to Niort, where our son-in-law’s house is, he’s in the Army. We lost our younger daughter at Argenteuil, there were explosions, a panic. We thought we’d find her at Montparnasse station, but she wasn’t there, the train was three hours late, you can imagine. She’s a good girl, but she’s backward, she doesn’t always understand what you tell her, you have to repeat it softly.”
They opened a locket containing the picture of a young girl.
“Give me her description. I will communicate with the missing persons bureau. Leave the picture. We will find her.”
“Do you need the picture? We have no other—and what if you don’t find her?”
“No, I don’t need it. We will find her.”
It seemed to him that the whole police station and the millennial foundations of Paris were beginning to sway gently with a mad motion which made his heart beat fast and filled his very limbs with a sensation of savage energy. He looked down on the old man and the old woman in black.
“Blond, seventeen, beige topcoat, operation scar on her neck, must be spoken to softly—I can see her. We’ll find her, I guarantee it.”
The two old orphans went out, jostling one another as though they were going to fall together. The woman murmured, “Did you hear that, Guillaume? He said, ‘I guarantee we’ll find her.’”
Officer Landois walked like a sailor on a pitching vessel. M. Carpe took his arm. “It seems M. Tartre has been murdered, next door to the Hôtel Marquise. Go have a look. But you know it doesn’t matter anymore.”
“First I want to call the missing persons bureau. I tell you we’ll find that girl. People have to speak softly to her.”
“Yes, softly,” echoed M. Carpe.
Landois spent forty minutes on the phone. Twice he shouted the description of a blond, stammering young girl in a beige topcoat, scar under her chin, lost in the tumult of the defeat between Argenteuil and Montparnasse. The ground of the city continued to sway distinctly, but somewhere amid the shifting crowds there was this child, intact and calm, who couldn’t understand the world in which people spoke too loudly—and to say what? He had no doubt that he would save her. In the end a furious voice answered him. “Will you stop pestering us? This is the second time you’ve given us that description. Get it into your head that it’s the three-thousandth and then some in two days. We’re snowed under.”
The ground stopped swaying. M. Carpe came in.
“Landois, it seems we’re about to capitulate. The Boches may be here in a few hours. Some idiot just said on the radio that Paris is not France. I say there is no more France.”
“You’re wrong, Monsieur Carpe.”
“Yes, I’m wrong—”
That aged him, made him seem thinner, took away his deputy-captain’s dignity. He looked like the wino with glasses who had been locked up a few days before for pessimistic remarks.
“Do you remember that tramp, Monsieur Carpe? He said that Europe was doomed, that we’d all end up by being shot, and that there’d be a great plague.”
“Maybe he was right.”
They were immersed, as they spoke, in a strangely banal fear. By chance Patrolman Blin entered the public waiting room, followed by several screaming pushcart women. Carpe automatically recovered his old self. “Silence! I told you, Blin, not to bring action against them, it’s not the moment for it.” Then more softly, “My poor Blin, we are about to capitulate. You can set up your carts wherever you like, ladies. Tomorrow we shall see. —Ah, what shall we see tomorrow?”
And the swaying of the earth began again. Landois, to escape it, went out into the stupefying street radiant with sunlight and headed for 16 Rue du Roi-de-Naples. He stopped at the Marquise and asked Anselme Flotte to accompany him to the site of the crime. Mme Prugnier remained on the landing, her arms crossed beneath her black shawl.
“I think I saw a tall soldier pass last night, I heard him climbing up there like a cat. It gave me gooseflesh. But you’d better look in on the foreigners on the sixth floor, officer.”
The door was unlocked, Landois and Flotte needed only to give it a shove. The stench of the corpse caught in their throats and made them cough. They turned on the desk lamp. M. Tartre had crumpled in his swivel chair and the safe stood open behind him. The murdered man’s large face was turning green, his open eyes were also turning green. In his left hand he held the metal inkstand, in his right hand a rag. Both hands had fallen on the desk. Flotte and Landois tiptoed round the desk, examined the dark head wound and the blackened blood on the carpet.
“I can guess how it was,” said Flotte. “He fell there, see, then he got up again and sat down—” And Landois concluded, “He didn’t know what he was doing anymore. He began to wipe the fingerprints off the inkwell . . . He must have been mighty scared of fingerprints— In view of his own deals.”
Landois burst out laughing so loudly that M. Anselme Flotte took fright and Mme Jérôme Prugnier crossed herself on the landing. Flotte pointed a finger at the safe: “That’s a lot of dough in there!”
“You see where it gets you to have too much dough,” said Landois joyfully. “Well, now we are informed, M. Flotte. I am not one of those who believe in the resurrection. Will you treat me to an aperitif? Don’t touch anything before the coroner arrives, if the coroner hasn’t taken the express for Bordeaux.”
The building was swaying on its foundation. “To hell with the foreigners on the sixth floor,” thought Landois. “I’ll say that their papers are in order and that I’ve seen nothing suspicious.”
Passing in front of Mme Prugnier, he said very gravely, “Everything is in order, Madame. Be careful to lock the door.”
Mme Prugnier followed him to the bar where he drank three little glassfuls, one after another. Mme Prugnier asked, “Aren’t you afraid there will be looting?”
Landois meditated a moment, but that was to permit the tonic warmth of the alcohol to expand in his brain. “Looting, Madame? It’s quite possible, quite possible. But there’s nothing much we can do about it with our reduced personnel.” His slightly mad eyes gleamed with malice as he thought, “A little looting will shake up your fleas.”
9. THE EXODUS
Leaving Paris by the Porte d’Italie, desolate as the gateway to a dead capital overgrown with weeds, the little yellow truck traveled over roads almost devoid of traffic. The main wave of fugitives had already passed. The suburbs were lethargic. Mobile Guards, few and far between, were interested only in hearing the latest bad news. Near the last houses of Villejuif a Mobile Guard stopped the car. Silber and Ardatov leaned out.
“What’s the problem?”
“Is it true that the Boches have entered by the Porte de la Chapelle and the East Station is burning?”
“Probably not true.”
The soldier in his black helmet chewed on his cigarette. “All you hear now is rumors. You have room. I wonder if I shouldn’t get the hell out of here with you?”
“And your mission?” Ardatov asked him softly. “Our mission was to defend the country I think,” replied the man in the helmet. “Very well. You may pass.”
“It’s the deluge if they’re not checking papers anymore,” Silber observed.
Ardatov remembered the debacle of a White army fleeing toward Novorossiysk and the Black Sea in 1920, with a whole population of ex-bourgeoisie mixed in among its wagons, its cars, its lice-ridden ambulances; he thought of the people of Viipuri just last winter fleeing like this under the gray snow toward the lakes and forests of Finland. Ortiga remembered the golden roads of Catalonia only last year, covered with routed armies moving toward the Pyrenees, prosperous France, the hope of living after all.
Experts in defeat, Ortiga and Ardatov judged it best to avoid the main roads, crowded, perhaps clogged and perhaps bombed, in any case drained of gasoline. They headed for Limours, then through plains and thickets for Dourdan and Étampes. Unaware of the disaster, the villages seemed unchanged: scattered among the green fields, sparse woods and orchards, drowsing around their belfries. A dreary, parsimonious aspect: shutters closed on streets where no one passed, solidly closed portals, jagged zigzagging walls topped with broken glass, cafés half-open, but so drowsy that the only tremor of life was the buzzing of flies. Ancient old women by the roadside showed signs of surprise at the sight of a commercial vehicle from Paris—if anything in the world could surprise them after seventy years of petty toil, of God-willed sorrows, of penny-pinching, of distrust and perseverance. In a sunlit courtyard some men were shoveling manure with pitchforks.
Silber questioned them as to the shortest road to . . . Then: “Are you aware of what is happening?” The peasant spat into the palm of his hand the better to take hold of his pitchfork.
“What else could you expect? The way things are now, the sooner it’s over the better.”
Silber reflected that you couldn’t carry your fields with you as a peddler carries his stock. The people of the earth thought they owned the land—in reality they belonged to it. As Silber took the wheel he realized that the massive, meditative presence of Ardatov beside him modified the course of his own thoughts.
“Is there such a thing as mental communication, doctor?”
“Often,” said Ardatov. “We say only a part, the least important part, no doubt, of what we want to communicate. Anyone who hears only the words without forming a further contact with the man is performing only a superficial and useless function.”
Hilda and Angèle, inside the truck, were watching the oncoming landscape over the shoulders of the two men in front and at the same time listening to their conversation.
“Then you think our conversations consist of two parts,” said Silber. “One spoken and one understood.”
“The essential part is not spoken but understood.”
“Otherwise there would be no love,” said Angèle, and if her cheeks were red it was from windburn and not from blushing at her boldness.
Among these strangers, so different from the men and women she had known up to now, she felt simpler, prepared for a kind of battle that she could not yet define.
“All falsehood,” said Hilda resolutely, “resides in words. I hate words.”
Ortiga, leaning on the tailgate, saw all in one piece the flowers, thickets, wheat fields racing by, and outlined on the glass partition, the profiles and windblown hair of the two young women. His contentment expressed itself in a mocking, almost cruel look and by the absence of any precise feeling; he felt like a body of water warmed by the sun, stirred by long waves, traversed by slow-moving fishes. The fishes were thoughts. This tranquility and this lovely land. But he was not duped. He was lying in the sierra, listening to the buzzing of insects, seeing only a sumptuous landscape in miniature, plants which seen from so close up looked like a tropical jungle and within it a beetle with wings of dull gold; and he desired nothing so much as to have lying beside him a girl whose eyes had the metallic sheen of those wings; his manhood rose within him . . . But just raise your head two inches, at the risk of having your forehead plugged by a Moorish sharpshooter, and you will perceive the carcass of a friend, the bones of his hand—the flesh eaten away by ants—still holding a thermos full of fresh wine. The wine attracted him. It was near Huesca.
“Where are we, Doctor?”
“We’re heading for the Loire. We’re going to get on the highway, José.”
The highway: the immense, mad, calm disorder of a sudden, hurried migration. Sometimes the dull roar of cannon fire seemed to draw nearer, and then again died away. Beneath tall comforting poplars the mass extended, molten humanity imprisoned between ditches and embankments, peril and safety. The stream was halted because of a bottleneck somewhere miles ahead. Silber hesitated to join the blocked traffic, but some army trucks coming on behind him on the narrow side road cut off his retreat.
The little truck advanced slowly, laboriously, through a crowd of people covered with white dust, each bent beneath his wretched burden. These were fugitives from a village on the Somme where the houses, the vegetable gardens, the farmyards, the post office, the cemetery had vanished from the face of the earth in fantastic eruptions of earth and fire. Evacuated in quartermaster trucks, they had been piled into luxurious first-class railway coaches in a last train that a stoical or stupid station master had dispatched on schedule, though the heavens at the end of the line were incandescent metal—and now they were again heading for some station in hope that another train would pass. Pathetic and commonplace. Some carried children in their arms, while others followed them. Fearful of being separated, they refused seats on the buses. Silber found a gap in the line behind a brewery truck from the North, drawn by two statuesque Flemish horses, their flanks caving in with weariness. A red froth caused by thirst had formed around the nostrils of the beasts. Their master, a teamster from Armentières, cursed highways without water, though he knew that he himself was to blame because he was afraid of separating himself from the current, in the midst of which his panic dissolved. Some soldiers suggested unharnessing his horses and leading them across the fields to “that farm you see over there.” The man from Armentières repelled their suggestion with alarm. What if the stream began to move again, what if he should fall behind? Above all, he feared that he would not find his wife and daughter who had gone ahead in the Ford with all their family possessions, and were supposed to wait for him at the crossroads under the belfry surrounded by red tiles and roofs of violet slate rising over the gently sloping fields. He climbed breathlessly up the embankment from which he could see his destination. “That’s where they are, Caroline and Marinette, they still have some cold chicken and a case of good old bottles, we haven’t lost everything.”
The plain rose like a woman’s belly; to the right, between two clumps of round trees, tanks could be seen crawling along the other road toward the crossroads.
“Couldn’t they fight?”
“They’re going to bring the bombs down on us.”
The eyes of the horses were vitreous globes, reflecting nothing.
At the top of the embankment the magazine-cover silhouettes of two graceful Parisian girls could be seen against the sky. They were smoking nonchalantly; bright silk scarves hung over their shoulders. A young soldier was joking with them. “You don’t believe in love at first sight? Well, missies, you’re a little behind the times.” His words were cut off by the breeze. Two old people were pushing an antique baby carriage in which an aged woman lay on her back with her mouth open, apparently sleeping and not at all disturbed by the flies crawling over her ashen lips. Her feet in coarse black socks hung grotesquely on either side of the carriage. With her mummified hands she held a hen and a rooster in the hollow between her legs and her belly. The birds were tied together, their little eyes had circles of coral. “We’re from the Eure,” the people said. “This is our grandmother.”
“What filial love,” Hilda muttered.
Ortiga nodded his head. “Unless there’s a question of inheritance.”
“In either case,” Ardatov interrupted, “we’re taking them aboard.”
He addressed the head of the family, an old man with a handlebar mustache: “How many of you are there? We’ll give you a lift. Climb in.”
An energetic woman of about fifty and a tall flat-chested girl with a chin like a horse disengaged themselves from the crowd.
“We thank you,” said the man. “I’ll pay you for your gas.”
Some Moroccans helped them to hoist up the baby carriage, the infirm old woman, the poultry, the bundles.
“We do a small business in the markets of Normandy,” explained the man with the mustache. “We are taking our stock with us, what would become of us if we didn’t?”
•
Marketers’ carts, drawn by horses of that discouraged breed seen at run-down country fairs, bore the most unlikely assortment of people and objects. Cyclists pushed along their bikes step by step. Autos caparisoned with bedding, deformed by heaps of trunks, scarred by collisions, remained enviable and strong, superior machines, the possession of which ennobles and saves. The men at their wheels had an expression of irritated energy, as though the pedestrians, the cycles, the carts, the trucks that had gone into the ditch had no right to the same road, the same flight. Ordinarily the possession of an obedient, efficient motor of a good make enhanced their dignity, but now that this privilege no longer had the power to abstract them from the common misfortune, it became a mockery. One car had been stopped by engine trouble. A peasant, leading the horses of his cart by the halter, was proposing the most fantastic arrangement to an impressive, decorated gentleman with watery eyes and an apoplectic expression.
