Pedigree (56 page)

‘Impossible, Monsieur Bernard!'

Under a sky so vast and blue that, from the spire of Saint-Nicolas, you could almost see the green plain round Visé where the Meuse broadened out!

Mademoiselle Frida, stiff and erect, was standing at the door of her room.

‘Do you know if the trains are still running?'

After that, everything became confused; there was no telling who was coming and who was going, what had happened before and what happened after. Élise had not taken time off to cry. She had just knocked on the door of the next house, and old Madame Delcour had appeared, bent double, the face under her black bonnet wearing a surprised expression.

‘It's war, Madame Delcour! Monsieur Bernard has just come home from the hospital. He's already putting on his uniform.'

A skeletal figure half lying on a couple of chairs, the man with the sleeping-sickness looked at Élise with his empty eyes, and nothing in him moved but his fingertips.

‘What are you going to do, Mademoiselle Frida?'

‘I'm leaving.'

‘You're going back to your country? But you won't be able to go through Germany.'

‘I'll go through France and Switzerland.'

She packed her bags. Monsieur Bogdanowski arrived in his turn, in a state of feverish excitement. More cautious in his ways, he had already been to the station to reserve a seat in a train.

‘You have to fight to get a ticket. If you could see the crowd …'

Monsieur Bernard came downstairs, in the bottle-green uniform of a rifleman.

‘Are we having dinner all the same?' he joked without much gaiety.

‘What I'm wondering, Monsieur Bernard, is why my husband hasn't come home. I don't suppose they're going to keep the office open. Dear God, Roger! Why have you come downstairs? Mind your leg. What do you want?'

‘I want the plaster taken off.'

‘What ought we to do, Monsieur Bernard?'

Here came Monsieur Jacques Dollent with his fine black beard, looking rather awkward in uniform, for he had already been to the Bavière hospital, where he was an intern, to change his clothes.

‘You couldn't sew a button on for me, could you, Madame Mamelin?'

She thought, automatically, for it was Monsieur Dollent's favourite phrase, which he used to say half in jest, half in earnest:

‘My gratitude will die only with my last breath…'

She did not say it. She would think of it later on; she would think of it often.

‘Are you going to fight?'

‘I don't know. I've got to join my regiment at the Fort of Boncelles. I'm trying to get hold of a bike so that I can travel faster.'

‘Listen …'

They listened. They could not hear anything.

‘Gunfire … A dull noise … Don't move your feet about, Roger …'

They listened again and this time they made out a distant rumble. Monsieur Bernard ate his dinner. Monsieur Jacques, as calm as ever, with astonishingly delicate gestures for a man, loosened the contraption imprisoning Roger's knee.

‘My gratitude will die only with my last breath …'

Alas, it would not be long in coming! That very evening, Monsieur Dollent, who had red hair, Monsieur Dollent, who was trying to get hold of a bike so that he could travel faster, would be killed in that forest of Sart-Tilmant, near Boncelles, where they had so often gone picnicking and where two regiments of riflemen would wipe each other out, each mistaking the other for the enemy.

They did not even know how the Germans were dressed. They were not made for war. It was all a ghastly mistake.

Élise served dinner, anywhere, anyhow, all the time keeping an eye on the bright rectangle of the street door which had been left open. Everybody was still joking, especially young Bernard who, finding his medical studies too long and too arduous, had decided to make do with a diploma in dentistry.

‘Have a good trip, Mademoiselle Frida. Perhaps we'll meet again in Berlin, seeing that the Russians are on our side.'

They came and went, not listening to one another, not thinking. They knew that it was war, because everybody said so and those who had come from the centre of the town had seen the posters, but an optimistic fever was buoying them all up, and it was as if they had been expecting it, expecting to be freed at last from the everyday routine, from the pile of accumulated worries which everybody trailed behind him.

Little by little the house emptied, the doors left open as after a house-moving, and things lying about on the bedroom floors: a broken comb, an empty tube of toothpaste, some cardboard boxes, a few balls of crumpled paper. When at last Désiré's footsteps could be heard, he came walking in as usual and bent down automatically to kiss his son on the forehead.

‘Well, Désiré?'

Gravely, simply, he said:

‘It's war.'

‘Have they called out the civic guard?'

He nodded, then smiled quickly.

‘We've got to guard the public monuments. They're probably afraid that the Town Hall or the Law Courts are going to run away. Don't worry. They aren't entitled to send us to the front.'

He changed into uniform, put on the strange hat with the reddish-brown plumes which he had worn so many times at reviews, or to go to the communal shooting-gallery where the best shot of the year won a silver place-set. Désiré had already won two sets. They had decided not to use them until they had one for each member of the family.

Élise accompanied him to the door, made an effort to smile.

‘Come back quickly, won't you?'

He would not go very far. With a few others from his company, including little Grisard, he would be sent to guard the slaughter-house, which the people from the back-streets had started looting. It was there, at the end of the Quai des Pêcheurs, that Roger used to go every morning with his grandfather, Monsieur Pelcat, Monsieur Repasse and Monsieur Fourneau, when they went to swim in the Meuse at half past six.

Now Roger was playing marbles, all by himself, in front of the door; twice he went to the end of the street, but his friend Albert did not put in an appearance.

Élise finally sat down in her kitchen and her whole body relaxed. There no was fever left in her and no thoughts. With one elbow on the table and a hand on her forehead, she ate some cold food which she took from any plate which was to hand—it didn't matter any more—and when she stood up, she looked around without knowing what to do next. She tidied up out of habit, even though it no longer served any purpose, and she felt as tired as if she had just done a fortnight's washing.

T
HE
voice of Father Renchon, who was giving his history lesson, was flowing along, as monotonous and fluid as the rain which had been falling for days and days from a twilight sky. Everything in the classroom was damp and grey—the whitewashed walls, the black desks which had been wiped with wet sleeves, the concrete floor which showed every footprint—and when Roger, in his corner by the window, moved his head, it touched the coats hanging on the hooks, with cold drops clinging to the woollen hairs.

Sitting on a bench without a back, with his shoulders hunched, he was pretending to be writing in a notebook spread out in front of him, but it was further down that his gaze was directed, at the book with the cloth covers lying open on his knees, hidden by the desk.

The book smelled of the lending library, the coats hanging from the hooks smelled of wet wool, the classroom smelled of foul ink and stale chalk; everything was dull, everything seemed old and dirty, with excessively bold forms, excessively harsh outlines against a vague background, like the glistening roofs which could be seen beyond the huge courtyard of the college, or like that distant window, already lit up, behind which somebody came and went without your being able to tell whether it was a man or a woman, or what mysterious task it was performing.

Roger Mamelin drank in this atmosphere every time that he turned a page and raised his eyes for a moment, before looking down again at
La Dame de Monsoreau
, for which he had imagined a setting in black and grey, with patches of dull white, like nineteenth-century engravings.

Everything tied up, connected, harmonized; everything, including Father Renchon's voice, melted into his little world, to such an extent that he started when the tone of that voice altered. Then, hurriedly shutting his book, he lost no time in coming to the surface.

With a gentle courtesy which underlined every word, the voice said:

‘Monsieur Neef, if what I am saying has not the good fortune to interest you, may I ask you at least to make a pretence of listening politely?'

Roger, like the rest, turned to look at first one Neef, then the other, for there were two in the class, two Neefs with no family connection, Neef-the-aristocrat, who lived in a château and came to school every morning on horseback, followed by a flunkey, and Neef-the-peasant, the son of a country brewer, who started and blushed every time a master spoke to his namesake.

Curiously enough, despite their dissimilarities, the two Neefs had one thing in common: they were both far too old to be in the third year, among boys of fifteen. They were already men, the brewer's son with his upper lip darkened by brown hairs and his deep bass voice, and the other with his lop-sided, thoroughbred face and his mincing, foppish manners.

‘Didn't you hear me, Monsieur Neef? Yes, you. It's to you that I'm talking.'

Father Renchon imperceptibly quickened his delivery, this being the only outward sign he ever gave of being angry.

‘Seeing that your presence is no more agreeable to me than my lesson seems to be to you, I gladly give you permission to go for a walk until the latter comes to an end.'

Without any sign of emotion, the Neef in riding-breeches and boots stood up, bowed as he passed the rostrum as if in gratitutde for some favour, made for the door, and turned round, just as he was going out, to wink at his fellow pupils.

Roger lowered his head, promptly found his page and the thread of his story, read a phrase here and picked out a word there, skipping whole passages and remarks which he had guessed in advance; everything returned to normal around him, including the voice of the master, who resumed his lesson in an uncertain tone as if he were tuning a violin.

Yet there was something wrong. Roger could feel it, since he looked up again at the precise moment that Father Renchon stopped talking. He saw every face turned towards the windows, and outside, in a gallery which served a whole row of classrooms and looked like a gigantic ship's gangway, a Neef who appeared to be acting for his own amusement, gravely miming a drawing-room scene, kissing the hand of an invisible lady, gracefully refusing a cup of tea, chatting, playing the sweetheart, and finally inviting his companion to dance.

Behind him, the hard lines, drawn in Indian ink, of the iron balustrade, the slender pillars, and the uniform, dreary sky which looked like a photographer's backcloth.

Neef did not seem to be aware of this setting. He was playing his part with such conviction that he created invisible presences around himself; and he was taking the first steps of a tango, his body tense, his eyes half shut, when a monstrous silhouette entered the scene, as dark and hard as reality, slow and implacable, the big chief himself, the bogy-man of the school, Father Van Bambeek, the master in charge of discipline.

Then laughs started in tight throats, eyes smarted, the boys felt like shouting, and Father Renchon himself did not succeed straight away in turning his smile into an austere grimace; but a glance from Father Van Bambeek through the window-panes was sufficient to freeze every face, and the master began droning away again, after a sharp tap of the ruler on his rostrum.

Roger had lowered his eyes again on to his book, which could not be seen from outside, but the spell was broken, and he read uncomprehendingly, attentive to the two silhouettes which for ten minutes would go on passing slowly backwards and forwards in front of the windows, appearing and disappearing at regular intervals, the huge Jesuit father who had once been a cavalry officer flanked by the puny Neef who had lost nothing of his self-assurance.

Just now, to amuse his friends, he had acted a part for them, and now he was making practically the same gestures, or rather he was the same man. For the two men, the Jesuit father and the squire's son, were chatting on an equal social footing, far removed from the school and its classes, the courses and impositions; and, when they parted, beyond the window through which only Roger, from his privileged position, could see them, they shook hands, and Neef came back to his bench as naturally as he had left a little earlier, while a slight flush, Roger was sure of that, coloured Father Renchon's forehead.

The minutes passed, the rain fell, and other windows lit up in the distant block of houses. Suddenly footsteps rang out in the gallery, and this time Roger, who had recognized the usher, knew that it was for him; everybody knew it, everybody looked at him, and the other Neef, the peasant with the hobnailed boots, tried to encourage him with a sad, kindly, dog-like glance.

‘Monsieur Mamelin, will you kindly come with me to see the director of studies.'

For all that he was expecting it, it came as a shock. Roger stood up, crossed the classroom, and followed the usher along the cold gallery, catching sight of pupils in their classrooms, masters on their rostrums, equations on a blackboard. The usher walked in front and seemed to be pulling him along on the end of an invisible chain. He knocked on a glazed door and stood to one side. Not a sound, nothing but a scratching on paper, and darkness everywhere, except on the desk, which was lit by a lamp with a green shade. A face grotesquely sculpted by this light, a bulbous nose surrounded by deep, flabby folds, an imperceptible sliver of a glance under the lowered eyelids.

The director of studies, who was deputizing for the headmaster, went on writing in a fluid, regular script, and long minutes went by without his appearing to suspect that anybody was there. Then his hand picked up a blotter, he carefully blotted what he had been writing, and he reached out, not without disgust, for a piece of paper of which Roger had been so proud only the day before and which suddenly disappointed him with its indecent vulgarity.