Funeral Rites (27 page)

“Who are my pals now, my com-rades? It's them, it ain't my Paris pals. I'm washed up, and that's no shit, I'm washed up, Riton my boy.”

The soldiers were snoring. A subterranean soul animated that exceptional tomb which had been raised to the top of a giant building from which Riton, his heart overflowing with peace, could watch the naive joy of the inhabitants of the earth. He stood stock-still, his face still ravaged. His grief lasted five to six minutes, long enough to prepare him for what follows. He squatted with his back to the window and looked at the loose-leaf calendar on the wall, the block calendar that showed August 15, Assumption Day, and he loosened his belt a bit. The sergeant was rereading his letters. Erik was gazing sadly at his harmonica, he was waiting for a
screaming of sirens to be able to play a little, if only in a muted tone. Three shots shook the apartment. The soldier in the bedroom had fired at some fellows crossing the boulevard. The question of shooting had been discussed. They had decided to fire only when it was essential so as to husband ammunition, and particularly
so
as not to give away their hideout. The house was certainly not abandoned. They were to shoot mainly to help German comrades who were grappling in the street with insurgents. The sergeant seemed frightened by the sniper's firing. They no doubt had a plan of escape over the rooftops, but they could not have gone very far since the block of houses was only a steep rock cut out among four streets. If they were found, it was sure death. After the shots the silence became crueler. Anxiety made its way into the apartment in the form of signs revealed by the objects. It seemed impossible that a radio would be there or that the frame of a photo would be turned or that a spot on the wall would be visible if they were not to die that day, if they were not to be blasted. The seven males and the kid, who were all tired from the struggle, which had lasted perhaps a quarter of an hour, were caught in the pose in which the burst of gunfire had stopped them. An anguish had been floating in the apartment since morning, an anguish so painful that it made the air in the rooms and the look of the faces almost black. Every angle, every sharp point of a motionless gesture, a badly wrinkled fold of cloth, a hole, a finger, instantly emitted distress signals. They were extremely nervous. The anguish with which the rooms were mined increased a hundredfold in two seconds. The sergeant muttered reproaches to the sniper, who answered in a scarcely higher tone with another mutter whose meaning was conveyed chiefly by the lips. The sergeant mastered
his desire to scream an order, but the impossibility of expressing his rage exasperated him. He made the unfortunate gesture of pushing the soldier away from his weapon and giving it to a comrade whom he posted in his place. The sniper's little mug, buffeted by locks of hair, contracted, the look on his face hardened. Under constraint, the anger grew. This rapid and necessarily silent scene was prolonged as the men waited anxiously. The soldier had half sprung up, with one knee barely touching the floor and his hands empty, one of them hanging at his side, the other clutching his hair, but quivering with an uncompleted movement, somewhat like that of the runner set to go waiting impatiently to continue—and already continuing by the quivering of his body—with a run or a leap. Anger contorted his mouth, turned his face pale, the accompanying hatred brought his knitted eyebrows together into a mass of darkness from which lightning flashed at regular intervals to strike the sergeant and destroy Germany. Cowed by the necessity of being submissive even at such a moment, the soldier remained in that position, stupefied and motionless. But anxiety had made its way into the apartment. Sitting at the foot of the bed, on the edge, Erik, without realizing it, kept his dry lips on the bee's nest of his harmonica. He didn't give a damn. They waited. The sergeant, who, after his short-tempered gesture, had remained still for a moment, hesitated a second and went into the living room. As he walked out, his body discovered Riton, who was crouching, gaping, as the sniper stared at him. It was nighttime. Unless it was continually day. I even think there was neither night nor day at the top of the tall building. In broad daylight they were sometimes in utter darkness, that is, every moment revealed a nighttime activity. They went through space so gently, the movement of the Earth
was so slow, that the soldiers’ gestures were all gentleness. A body was asleep with its head on a heap of rope. Or a boy was whispering. A boy was dreaming. The maneuver was muted. Riton got up. Suddenly he was concerned with what day it was. He went to the wall to tear off the pages of the calendar. This gesture drew him out of the tragic a little and then put him back into it more deeply.

“It's ass-headed, but I've got to see what day it is.”

As he stood up, his trousers, which had no belt loops, slid completely out from under the belt, and the shirt bunched up against his chest and back. He was hardly aware of it, yet he made the gesture of pulling up his pants with his hand. In order to go to the wall, he had to push aside or disturb the sniper, who had not moved and whose eyes, which had been hostile since the sergeant had left the room, weighed on Riton. When the kid neared him, the soldier, on seeing the sloppiness of his attire, finally found an excuse for releasing his anger. He roughly grabbed the belt and pulled the kid, whose torso was delicate despite its hardness. It was also flexible, and it bent back, as if to regain its balance, or to escape, but the soldier prevented it by putting his left hand even more angrily around his waist. Riton thought he was being playful and, though he had seldom fooled around with that soldier, supported himself with both hands on the curly head which the swiftness of the whole rather brusque movement had knocked against him. Now, the soldier, despite his anger, was unable, on feeling the irony, to keep from being (in, to be sure, a very imprecise way) under the charm of the noblest posture of respect and faith. A kind of confusion ruffled his soul and made him slightly dizzy. The child, who saw in the mirror over the fireplace that Erik was watching him from behind, tried to get away. The soldier felt it and tightened his embrace,
and Riton, clutching the Fritz's hair, pressed the head harder against himself. The forehead rested on his belly, in the space between the belt and the trousers, while the mouth was crushed on the stiff blue cloth of the fly. The significance of the posture was changing. The German seemed to be clinging to the kid by the belt, as to a lifebuoy. The wounded male, who was in a rage, was on his knees before a sixteen-year-old Frenchman who seemed to be his protector and to be indulgently crowning his head with two strong clasped hands. Everyone in the room waited in silence. The soldier refused to let go of the kid, holding him firmly with his muscular arms, furious and humiliated at the fact that his face was lost in the shadow of the trousers, whose smell he breathed in with his open mouth. He tried to raise his head, but the buckle of the belt scraped his forehead. Pain made him finally make the gesture toward the performing of which everything was converging, the gesture after which the day was later named: with wild fury, the German, whose arms were tensed and whose torso had suddenly come to Me on his thighs, which were buttressed by his rising motion, bent the kid under him. Riton's eyes became those of a hunted animal. He wanted to flee, but he was trapped, and his head banged against the wooden bed. The three other soldiers were silently watching this almost motionless
corps à corps.
Their attention and silence were part of the action itself. They made it perfect by making it public and publicly accepted. Their attention—their presence, at three points in the room—enveloped the action. Two men and a soldier were on guard at the sixth-floor windows of a mined building, which was menaced by a hundred rifles, so that a black pirate could bugger a young traitor at bay. Fear is a kind of element in which gestures are made without their being
recognized. It could play the role of the ether. It even lightens acts that are not conditioned by what caused it. It quickens one's knowledge of them. It weighs down and blurs others. This fear that the nest would be spotted, that the house would explode, that they would be drilled, did not seem to preoccupy them. Rather, it made a kind of emptiness inside them, in which there was room only for that extraordinary fact, which was really unexpected at the hour of death. Since they were at the edge of the world, at the top of that rock posted at the outermost point of Finis Terrae, they could watch with their minds at ease, could give themselves utterly to the perfect execution of the act. Since they could view it only in its closed form, which was cut off from the future, it was the ultimate one. After it, nothing else. They had to make it as intense as possible, that is, each of them had to be as acutely conscious of it as he could be so as to concentrate as much life as possible in it. Let their moments be brief, but charged with consciousness. A faint smile played over their lips. Erik's hand, which was lying on the bed, was still holding his harmonica. He was smiling with the same smile as the others. When Riton's head banged against the wooden bed, there was a dull but weak thud, and he uttered a very faint moan of pain. The three witnesses of the struggle, who felt no pity but were very angry with the one who threatened to botch everything, made the same gestures of the arms and silently articulated, opening their mouths wide, the same threats whose meaning the kid understood from the hardness of their features and expressions. Instead of cursing the torturer, their hatred was directed toward the child who was capable of depriving them of the joy of his tortures. Finally sure that the thud would be without danger, the hatred subsided when silence was restored.
The subtle smile flowered on their mouths again, but the kid, who had been knocked out by the blow on the chin, from which blood was flowing, was already lying on the bed, with his pants down, his face against the sheets, his body pounded by the husky body of the soldier, who had the self-possession to lay down his burden delicately so as not to make the spring of the mattress groan. There was only the barest creaking. For Riton it had happened. . . . Unable to imagine how far that fury would go, he nevertheless made the movements that might help calm the soldier. The militiaman on the mattress placed his legs, which had been dangling down to the floor, next to Erik, who had remained seated, with his harmonica in his fist. The other soldiers looked on.

“Good thing I cleaned my hole a little.”

The sergeant, who was at the door, was also watching. Annoyed at having been too rough with a soldier who was fighting and who would probably die that day, he dared not interfere. Besides, he was under the sway of a feeling that I shall speak about presently. In the silence of the city, which was at times disturbed by the sound of a Red Cross car carrying arms, there entered through the half-open window, from a thin, cracked voice, purer for being cracked—a broken toy—the following song, composed of the tenacity of the weak, which rose up from the pavement and, passing through the foliage of the trees, reached the ear of Riton, to whom the melody seemed radiant:

They have broken my violin . . .

Riton, who had been knocked senseless by the Fritz, bit the bolster so as not to scream. The brute stopped and panted a little, letting his cheek rest against the
back of Riton's neck. He snorted. A short rest, a lull in the fellow's fury, enabled the kid to make out the end of the stanza, which the fragile voice was repeating:

For its soul was French.

It fearlessly made the echoes

Sing the Marseillaise.

Riton dared not stir. He first wondered anxiously whether he should clean himself or simply suck the jissom in. And what could he clean himself with if there was no water? He could only wipe himself. With his handkerchief. The soldier, whose bearded chin Riton felt on the back of his neck, gave a shove, which made the kid groan.

. . .
Sing the Marseillaise . . .

Erik had not stirred. He had to watch the kid who had been downed by force get sawed in half.

Riton wanted the rape to be over with, and he feared the end of it.

Surely they would all take a crack at him. Erik's presence, which he still felt at the edge of the bed, kept him from moving his rump to make the soldier come more quickly.

. . .
made the echoes . . .

Finally the warmth of the liquid escaped in slower and slower throbs, like the blood of a cut artery. The fellow from the North was discharging into his bronze eye. . . . When he raised himself up, gently so as not to make any noise, the soldier was calm. He was smiling. He remained standing beside the bed for a moment. He
looked defiantly at his smiling cronies, then, slowly, smiling more broadly and tossing back his blond hair with a flick of his head, he adjusted his trousers and little black tank driver's jacket and rebuckled his belt. He said to the soldiers:

“What are you waiting for?”

He looked Erik in the eye. Riton, relieved of the bruiser but still outstretched, had pulled up his pants and tucked in his shirttails. Turning his head, he waited with a feeble smile on his lips. One of the soldiers who was sitting in the armchair was about to follow up, but he changed his mind and, turning to the door, laughingly invited the sergeant to enjoy himself first. The sergeant looked at Erik and signaled to him. Erik whispered a word, and they all went out. Nothing happened. They had to flee by the rooftops.

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The little housemaid left the tomb toward evening and returned on foot by narrow, shadowy roads. She was alone, with a daisy in her hand, and was amazed at being free. She was losing her flesh-colored stockings. She hardly noticed it and did not notice that she still had on her head the wreath of glass pearls with the little pink porcelain angel, who trembled at every step at the end of a brass prong wrapped in green silk thread. She kept the crown on, tilted over her ear like an apache's cap, all the way from the cemetery to her room. A fart that had been rolling in her stomach for some time broke free with such a burst that she thought she had been transformed into a seashell.