Jealousy and in the Labyrinth (33 page)

This pseudo-lieutenant (but the insignia missing from his jacket were those of a corporal, their outline remaining clearly visible on the brown material), this man who took in the wounded or the sick must have first leaned out of a second floor window, probably the one just over the door, in order to try to see, in the darkness, who wanted to come in. However this does not resolve the main problem: how had he known that there was someone on the doorstep? Had the boy knocked on the closed door when he got there? Therefore, the soldier, having finally caught up with his guide after a considerable delay, since he had no longer been following him for some time now save by his tracks, had not suspected that his presence would already be announced and that while he was perched on the narrow stoop vainly trying to decipher the inscription stamped on the polished plaque by passing his fingertips back and forth across it, his host, three yards above him, was minutely observing part of his overcoat which stuck out beyond the doorway: a shoulder, a stained sleeve hugging a package whose shape and size resembled those of a shoe box.

Yet no window was lighted, and the soldier had thought this house, like the others, deserted by its inhabitants. Having pushed open the door, he had soon realized his error: a large number of tenants were still there (as everywhere else, too, no doubt), and appeared one after the other on all sides, a young woman flattening herself at the rear of the hallway against the corner of the staircase, another woman suddenly opening her door on the left, and finally a third, on the right, revealing, after some hesitation, the vestibule leading once again to the square room where the soldier is now lying.

He is lying on his back. His eyes are closed. The lids are gray, as are the forehead and the temples, but the cheekbones are bright pink. Across the hollow cheeks, around the half open mouth and over the chin, there is a four or five days' growth of black beard. The sheet, pulled up to the chin, rises periodically with the slightly wheezing respiration. One reddish hand with black stains at the joints of the fingers sticks out at one side and hangs over the edge of the bed. Neither the man with the umbrella nor the boy is in the room any longer. Only the woman is here, sitting at the table, but at an angle, so that she is facing the soldier.

She is knitting a garment out of black wool; but her work is not yet far along. The heavy ball of yarn is lying near her on the red-and-white checked oilcloth which hangs over the edge of the table in wide, stiff folds at the corners. The rest of the room is not quite as the soldier has remembered it; not counting the day bed, whose presence he had scarcely noticed on his first visit, there is at least one important thing to be noted: a high window now completely concealed by long red curtains falling from ceiling to floor. Though wide, the day bed might easily have passed unnoticed, for it is placed in the corner concealed from the eyes of someone coming into the room by the open door; afterwards the soldier turned his back to it when he was eating and drinking at the table; and besides, he was paying little attention to the furnishings, his senses dulled by fatigue, hunger, and the cold outside. However he is surprised that his eyes were not caught by what was then, as now, just opposite him: the window, or in any case the red curtains made of some thin shiny material that resembles satin.

These curtains must not have been drawn; for, as they look today, spread out under the light, it is impossible not to be struck by their color. Probably the window itself was then visible, between two narrow vertical red strips that were not clearly lighted and so much less noticeable. But if it had been daylight, what did this window look out on? Was it a street scene which would appear through the panes of glass? Given the monotony of the neighborhood, there would certainly be nothing remarkable about such a view. Or else it was something else: a courtyard, perhaps, so narrow and dark on the ground floor level that it provided little daylight and no view of any interest, especially if thick draperies kept whatever was outside from being seen.

Despite these rationalizations, the soldier is still perturbed by such a gap in his memory. He wonders if anything else in his surroundings might have escaped him and even continues to escape him now. It suddenly seems very important to make an exact inventory of the room. There is the fireplace, about which he has remembered almost nothing: an ordinary black marble mantelpiece with a large rectangular mirror over it; its iron grate is open, revealing a heap of light gray ashes, but no andirons; on the mantelpiece is lying a rather long object, not very tall—only a half an inch, or an inch at the most—which cannot be identified from this angle, not being placed near enough the edge of the shelf (it is even possible that it is much wider than it looks); in the mirror are reflected the satiny red curtains whose folds gleam with vertical reflections . . . The soldier has the impression that all this is nothing: he must take note of other details in this room, details much more important than all the preceding ones, one detail in particular which he had been vaguely conscious of when he came into the room the other time, the day of the red wine and the slice of bread ... He no longer remembers what it was. He wants to turn around in order to examine the chest more carefully. But he cannot manage to move except in the most insignificant way, a kind of torpor paralyzing his whole body. Only his hands and forearms move with any ease.

"You want something?" the young woman's low voice asks.

She has not changed position, having stopped in the middle of her work, her knitting still held in front of her, her fingers still placed—one forefinger raised, the other bent double—as if they were about to make a new stitch, her face still bent over to make sure it is executed properly, but her eyes raised toward the head of the bed. Her features are anxious, severe, even strained by her application to her work; or else by the anxiety afforded by this wounded man who has appeared so unexpectedly in her apartment; or else for some reason unknown to the latter.

"No," he says, "I don't need anything."

He speaks slowly, in a way that he himself finds surprising, the words abnormally distinct without his making them so intentionally.

"Are you in pain?"

"No," he says, "I can't . . . move . . . my body."

"You mustn't try to move. If you need something, ask me. It's because of the shot the doctor gave you. He'll try to come by tonight to give you another one." She has begun knitting again, her eyes lowered again over her work. "If he can," she says again. "No one can be sure of anything now."

It must also be the shot which gives the soldier this nausea he has been feeling since his awakening. He is thirsty; but he does not want to get up to drink from the faucet in the latrines down the hall. Instead he will wait until the attendant in the canvas duffle-coat and the hunter's boots comes back. No, that's not it: here, it is the woman with the low voice who is taking care of him. It is only at this moment that he is surprised to be back in this room whose setting belongs to a much earlier scene. He distinctly remembers the motorcycle, the dark hallway where he lay down in darkness against the door. Afterwards . . . He no longer knows what comes after: doubtless neither the hospital nor the busy café nor the long walk through the empty streets, now impossible in his condition. He asks:

"Is the wound serious?"

The woman continues knitting as if she had heard nothing.

He repeats: "What kind of wound is it?"

At the same time he realizes that he is not speaking loud enough, that his lips are forming the words, but without adding any force to them. The second time, however, the young woman has raised her head. She sets her work down on the table beside the large black ball of yarn and remains motionless, staring at him in silence, with a look of expectation, or anxiety, or fear. Finally she decides to ask: "Did you say something?"

He repeats his question again. This time weak but distinct sounds come out of his mouth, as if her voice with its extraordinary low intonations were restoring him the use of his own; unless the woman has guessed his words by reading them on his lips.

"No, it's nothing. It will all be over soon."

"No, not today, and not tomorrow. A little later." But he has no time to lose. He will get up tonight. "The box," he says, "where is it?" To make himself understood he must start over again: "The box ... I had with me ...

A fleeting smile passes over the watchful face: "Don't worry, it's here. The boy brought it back. You mustn't talk so much. It's bad for you."

"No," the soldier says, "it isn't... very bad." She has now picked up her knitting again; she continues to look at him, her hands resting on her knees. She resembles a statue. Her regular face with its sharp features recalls that of the woman who served him some wine one day, some other time, long ago. He makes an effort to say: "I'm thirsty."

His lips have probably not even moved, for she neither stands up, nor answers, nor makes the slightest gesture. Moreover, her pale eyes had perhaps not even glanced at him, but at the other drinkers sitting farther away at other tables, toward the back of the room, where her gaze has now passed the soldier and his two companions, moving over the other tables along the wall where the small white bulletins are tacked whose fine-printed text still attracts a knot of readers, then the window with its pleated curtain at eye level and its three enameled balls on the outside of the glass and the snow behind it falling regularly and vertically in slow, heavy, close flakes.

And the new layer which gradually accumulates on the day's footprints, blurring angles, filling depressions, leveling surfaces, has quickly effaced the yellowish paths trampled by the pedestrians along the housefronts, the boy's isolated footprints, the two parallel furrows which the side car has made in the middle of the street.

But first he must make sure the snow is still falling. The soldier decides to ask the young woman about it. Does she even know, in this windowless room? She will have to look outside, to pass through the still open door back through the vestibule where the black umbrella is waiting, and through the long series of hallways, narrow staircases, and more hallways turning off at right angles, where she may easily get lost before reaching the street.

In any case it takes her a long time to come back, and it is now the boy who is sitting in her place at the table. He is wearing a turtle-neck sweater, short pants, wool socks, and felt slippers. He is sitting bolt upright without leaning against the back of the chair; his arms are stiff at his sides, his hands grasping the rattan arms of the chair; his bare legs sway between the front legs of the chair, making equal but opposite oscillations in two parallel planes. When he notices that the soldier is looking at him, he immediately stops moving; and, as if he had patiently waited for this moment to find out about something that is bothering him, he asks in his serious voice, which is not a child's voice at all: "Why are you here?"

"I don't know," the soldier says. The child has probably not heard the answer, for he repeats his question:

"Why didn't they put you in the barracks?" The soldier no longer remembers whether or not he has asked the young woman about this matter. It is obviously not the boy who has brought him here, nor the lame man. He must also ask if someone has brought back the box wrapped in brown paper. The string no longer held, and the package must have come undone.

"Are you going to die here?" the child asks. The soldier does not know the answer to this question either. Besides, he is amazed that it should even be asked. He tries to find explanations, but he has not even managed to formulate his anxiety when the boy has already turned away and is disappearing as fast as he can down the straight street, without even taking time to circle the cast-iron lampposts he passes, one after the other, without stopping. Soon only his footprints remain on the smooth surface of the fresh snow, their outline recognizable although deformed by his running, then becoming increasingly blurred as he runs faster and faster, finally growing quite vague, impossible to distinguish from the other footprints.

The young woman has not moved from her chair; and she answers quite readily, doubtless so that the wounded man will not worry. It is the child who has come to tell her that the soldier she had taken care of the day before was lying unconscious in a hallway a few streets away, curled up, no longer speaking, hearing nothing, moving no more than if he were dead. She had immediately decided to go to him. There was already a man standing beside the body, a civilian who happened to be passing at that moment, he said, but who in fact, seemed to have observed the entire scene from a distance, hidden in another doorway. She described him without any difficulty: a middle-aged man with thin gray hair, well dressed, with gloves, spats, and an ivory-handled umbrella. The umbrella was lying on the floor across the stoop, the door was wide open. The man was kneeling near the wounded man whose inert hand he was holding, grasping the wrist in order to take the pulse; he was a doctor, more or less, although not practicing. It is he who helped carry the body here.

As for the shoe box, the young woman had not noticed its precise location nor even its presence; it must have been nearby, shoved aside by the doctor in order to proceed more conveniently with his brief examination. Although his conclusions were hardly precise, he considered it was advisable in any case to put the wounded man to bed in a suitable place, despite the danger of moving him without a stretcher.

But they did not start out immediately, for no sooner had they decided to do so than the noise of the motorcycle had begun again. The man had quickly closed the door, and they had waited in the darkness until the danger was past The motorcycle had come and gone several times, passing slowly through the neighboring streets, approaching, going away, approaching again, its maximum intensity soon diminishing at each passing, however, the machine exploring streets farther and farther away. When the noise was nothing more than a vague rumble, which they even had to strain to hear at all, the man opened the door again.