Journey to the End of the Night (40 page)

No hospital? What does he think? He doesn't know. He wants to look. So he looks. I show him his wife's hole, the blood clots, the glug-glug, his whole wife seeping away. She's groaning like a big dog that's been run over by a car. He doesn't know what he wants. Somebody gives him a glass of white wine to pick him up. He sits down. He still can't make up his mind. He's a man who works hard all day. Everyone knows him in the market and especially at the freight station, where he totes sacks, and no small loads, big heavy things, been toting them for the last fifteen years. He's famous. His trousers are vast and shapeless, likewise his jacket. They don't fall off, but he doesn't seem to be very much attached to his trousers and jacket. He only seems attached to the earth and standing upright on it, with his two feet spread wide as if the earth were going to start quaking under him any minute. His name is Pierre.

We're all waiting. "Well, Pierre," they all ask him. "What do you think?" Pierre scratches himself and goes and sits down right next to his wife's face, as if he had trouble recognizing this woman who was always bringing so much pain into the world, and then he sheds a kind of tear and stands up. We all fire the same question. I make out a certificate of admission for the hospital. "Try and think, Pierre!" everyone pleads. He tries but makes a sign meaning it won't come. He gets up and staggers out to the kitchen, taking his glass with him. Why wait any longer? That husband's indecision, everybody realized, was likely to go on all night. We might as well be going.

For me it was a hundred francs lost, that's all. But one way or another I'd have had trouble with the midwife ... that was sure. On the other hand, I wasn't going to risk any surgical manipulations in front of all those people and in my state of fatigue. "Too bad," I said to myself. "No use hanging around. Maybe next time ... May as well resign myself ... Let nature take her course, the bitch!"

I'd hardly reached the stairs when they all called me back and he came running after me.

"Hey, doctor!" he yelled, "don't go!"

"What do you want me to do?" I asked him.

"Wait, I'll go with you, doctor! ... Please, doctor!"

"All right," I said, and let him go down with me. I was in the lead, so I stopped at the second floor to say good-bye to the dead cancer patient's family. The husband went into the room with me, and we came right out again. In the street he fell into step with me. There was a nip in the air. We came across a puppy who was practicing how to answer the other dogs of the Zone with long howls. He was very persistent and very plaintive. He had already mastered the art. He'd soon be a real dog.

"Hey, that's Egg Yolk," says the husband, delighted at recognizing him and at changing the subject ... "The daughters of the laundryman on the Rue des Gonesses brought him up on a baby's bottle ... Do you know the laundryman's daughters?"

"Yes," I said.

As we were walking he told me about ways they had of feeding puppies on milk without its costing too much. But behind those words he was looking all the while for an idea in connection with his wife.

A bar was open near the Porte.

"Coming in, doctor? I'll buy you a drink."

I wasn't going to hurt his feelings. "All right," I said. "Two coffees." I took the opportunity to talk about his wife. My talking about her turned him dead serious, but I still couldn't get him to make up his mind. There was a big bouquet on the bar counter. For Martrodin's birthday, Martrodin was the owner. "A present from the children," he himself told us. So we had a vermouth with him and drank his health. The Drunkenness Law and a framed school diploma were hanging on the wall. When he saw that, the husband absolutely insisted on the owner reciting the Subprefectures of the Loir-et-Cher Department, because he had learned them in school and still knew them. Then he claimed it wasn't the owner's name on the diploma but somebody else's, that made the owner sore, so the husband came back and sat with me. He was in the throes of doubt again, so tormented that he didn't even see me leave ...

I never saw that husband again. Never. I was badly disappointed by the events of that Sunday and tired besides.

I had hardly gone a hundred yards in the street when I saw Robinson coming my way, loaded down with all kinds of boards, big ones and little ones. I recognized him in spite of the darkness. He was embarrassed at seeing me and tried to get away, but I stopped him.

"Why aren't you in bed?" I asked him.

"Not so loud!" he said. "I've come from the building site ..."

"And what are you doing with all that wood? Building what? A coffin ... You stole it, I bet?"

"No. A rabbit hutch ..."

"You raising rabbits now?"

"No, it's for the Henrouilles ..."

"The Henrouilles? They've got rabbits?"

"Yes, three. They're going to keep them in the little yard, you know, where the old woman lives ..."

"You're fixing to build them a rabbit hutch at this time of night? Funny time to ..."

"It was his wife's idea ..."

"Some idea! ... What's she going to do with rabbits? Sell them? Make top hats?"

"You'll have to ask her when you see her. As long as she comes across with the hundred francs, I ..."

This business with the rabbit hutch struck me as very odd ... at that time of night. I kept at him.

He changed the subject.

"But what were you doing at their house?" I asked. "You didn't know the Henrouilles."

"The old lady took me to see them ... that day I met her in your office ... The old woman is a big talker once she gets started ... You can't imagine ... No getting away from her ... So now I'm sort of pals with her and with them too ... Some people like me, you know ..."

"You never said a word about all that ... But since you see them, maybe you know if they're managing to get the old woman committed ..."

"No, not from what they tell me ..."

He wasn't enjoying this conversation at all, I could feel that, he didn't know how to get rid of me. But the slipperier he got the more I wanted to know ..."

"Life is hard, you got to admit it ... the things a man has to do ..." he said vaguely. But I brought him back to the subject. I was determined to make him come clean ...

"They say the Henrouilles have more money than meets the eye ... What do you think, now that you've been seeing them?"

"Yes, maybe they have, but one thing is sure, they want to get rid of the old woman." Robinson had never been much good at deception.

"It's because of the cost of living, you know, that keeps going up ... that's why they want to get rid of her. They told me one time that you refused to certify her ... Is that true?" Then quickly, without insisting on an answer, he asked me which way I was going.

"Been visiting a patient?"

I told him something about my adventures with the husband I had just lost by the wayside. That gave him a good laugh, but it also made him cough.

His cough doubled him up so bad I could hardly see him though he was right next to me. All I could vaguely make out was his hands, folded in front of his mouth like a big livid flower, trembling in the night. He couldn't stop. "It's the drafts," he finally said when the cough had spent itself and we'd come to the door of his house.

"One thing my pad is full of is drafts! And fleas! Have you got fleas in your place too?" I had. "Naturally," I told him. "I bring them home from my patients."

"Sick people smell of piss, don't they?" he said.

"Yes, and sweat ..."

"All the same," he said slowly after thinking it over. "I'd have liked to be a hospital orderly."

"Why?"

"I'll tell you ... because people with nothing wrong with them, you can't get around it, are frightening ... Especially since the war ... I know what they're thinking ... They don't always know it themselves ... but I know what they're thinking ... As long as they're up, they think about killing you ... but when they're sick, no two ways, they're not as frightening ... You've got to be prepared for anything, I tell you, as long as they're up. Don't you see it that way?"

"Yes," I had to say.

"Is that why you decided to become a doctor?" he asked.

Thinking it over, I realized that maybe Robinson was right. But then he had another of his coughing fits.

"Your feet are wet," I said. "You'll come down with pleurisy wandering around like this at night. Go home," I advised him. "Go to bed."

His nerves were on edge from all that coughing.

"I wouldn't be surprised if Grandma Henrouille came down with the flu," he said, laughing and coughing into my ear.

"What makes you say that?"

"You'll see," he said.

"What have they dreamed up now?"

"That's all I can tell you. You'll see ..."

"Come on, Robinson, you stinker, tell me. You know I never repeat anything ..." Suddenly he wanted to make a clean breast of it, maybe in part to convince me that he wasn't as resigned and lily-livered as he looked.

"Go on!" I prodded him in a whisper. "You know I never talk ..." That was all the encouragement he needed.

"That's a fact," he admitted. "You know how to keep your mouth shut." And right away he starts to come seriously clean. You wanted it, here it is ...

There wasn't a soul around us at that time of night on the Boulevard Coutumance.

"Do you remember," he starts in, "the story about those carrot peddlers?" Offhand I didn't remember any story about carrot peddlers.

"Come off it," he insists. "You know ... You told me the story yourself!"

"That's right!" ... All at once it came back to me. "The brakeman on the Rue des Brumaires? ... The one who got his balls blown off while stealing rabbits?"

"Yes, that's it, from the grocer on the Quai d'Argenteuil ..."

"Yes," I say. "I remember now. So what?"

I still didn't see the connection between that ancient incident and Grandma Henrouille. He came out with it soon enough.

"Don't you see?"

"No," I said. But soon I was afraid to see.

"You're being awfully slow ..."

"It's just that it looks like a nasty business for you to be getting into. You can't be going to murder Grandma Henrouille just to please the daughter-in-law?"

"Of course not. I'm just building the rabbit hutch they asked for ... The fireworks are up to them ... They'll do the rest ... if they want to ..."

"How much have they given you for all this?"

"A hundred francs for the wood and two-fifty for my work and a thousand more for the idea ... And, you understand ... this is only a beginning ... a story like that ... if properly told ... is as good as a pension! ... Well, son ... now do you see?" I saw very well, and I wasn't surprised. It only made me sad, a little sadder than before. Anything you can say to dissuade people in a case like that is bound to be feeble. Has life been kind to them? So why would they take pity on anybody? What for? What are other people to them? Has anybody ever been known to go down to hell to take someone else's place? No. They send other people down, that's all.

The vocation for murder that had suddenly come over Robinson struck me in a way as an improvement over what I'd observed up until then in others, always half hateful, half benevolent, always boring with their vagueness, their indirection. I had definitely learned a thing or two by following Robinson in the night.

But there was a danger: the Law. "The Law is dangerous," I told him. "If you're caught, you with the state of your health, you'll be sunk ... You'll never leave prison alive ... It'll kill you ..."

"That's just too bad," he said. "I'm fed up with honest work ... I'm getting old ... still waiting my turn to have some fun, and when it comes ... if it does, with plenty of patience ... I'll have been dead and buried long ago ... Honest work is for suckers ... You know that as well as I do ..."

"Maybe ... but crime, you know, everybody'd go in for it if there weren't risks ... And the police are rough ... There's the pro and con ..." We examined the situation.

"I won't say different, but doing my kind of work, in my condition, coughing, not sleeping, doing jobs that no horse would touch ... Nothing worse can happen to me now ... That's how I feel about it ... Nothing ..."

I didn't dare tell him that all in all he was right, because he'd have held it up to me later on if his new racket misfired.

To cheer me up he listed a few good reasons why I shouldn't worry about the old woman, first of all because any way you looked at it she hadn't long to live, she was already too old as it was. He would just be arranging for her departure.

All the same it was a very nasty business. The whole thing had been worked out between him and the couple. Seeing the old woman had taken to leaving her shack, they'd send her to feed the rabbits one evening ... The fireworks would be carefully placed ... They'd go off full in her face the moment she touched the door ... Exactly what happened at the grocer's ... The neighborhood people already thought she was mad, the accident wouldn't come as a surprise to anybody ... They'd say they had warned her never to go near the rabbits ... And she had disobeyed them ... At her age there was certainly no chance of her surviving an explosion like the one they were fixing for her ... right square in the puss. No two ways, that was some story I had told Robinson.

And the music came back with the carnival, the music you've heard as far back as you remember, ever since you were little, that's always playing somewhere, in some corner of the city, in little country towns, wherever poor people go and sit at the end of the week to figure out what's become of them. "Paradise" they call it. And music is played for them, sometimes here, sometimes there, from season to season, it tinkles and grinds out the tunes that rich people danced to the year before. It's the mechanical music that floats down from the wooden horses, from the cars that aren't cars anymore, from the railways that aren't at all scenic, from the platform under the wrestler who hasn't any muscles and doesn't come from Marseille, from the beardless lady, the magician who's a butter-fingered jerk, the organ that's not made of gold, the shooting gallery with the empty eggs. It's the carnival made to delude the weekend crowd.