Jealousy and in the Labyrinth (20 page)

But the voice has stopped, as if unable to struggle further against the silence which has prevailed again. The child, too, may have fallen asleep.

"No . .. Yes ... I know," the soldier says.

Neither one has moved. The child is still standing in the half-darkness, his arms at his sides. He has not even seen the man's lips moving as he sits at the table under the one light bulb that is still on in the room; his head has not moved at all, his eyes have not even blinked, and his mouth is still closed.

"Your father . . the soldier begins. Then he stops. But this time the lips have stirred a little.

"He's not my father," the child says.

And he turns his head toward the door with its black rectangle of window glass in the upper half.

Outside it is snowing. The fine flakes have begun falling thickly again on the already white road. The wind has risen and is blowing them horizontally, so that the soldier has to keep his head down, a little farther down, as he walks, pressing the hand shielding his eyes still closer against his forehead, leaving visible only a few square inches of thin, crunching snow that is already trampled hard. Reaching a crossroad, the soldier hesitates and looks around for the plaques that should indicate the name of that cross street. But it is useless, for there are no blue enamel plaques here, or else they are set too high and the night is too dark; besides, the fine, close flakes quickly blind him when he tries to look up. Then too, a street name would hardly furnish him much in the way of helpful information: he does not know this city anyway.

He hesitates for another moment, looks ahead again, then back at the road he has just taken, with its rows of street lights whose circles of light, closer and closer together and increasingly dim, soon disappear in the darkness. Then he turns right, into the cross street which is also deserted, lined with the same kind of apartment houses and the same row of street lights, set fairly far apart but at regular intervals, their dim circles of light revealing as he passes the oblique fall of the snow.

The white flakes, falling thick and fast, suddenly change direction; vertical for a few seconds, they suddenly become almost horizontal. Then they stop suddenly and, with a sudden gust of wind, begin to blow at virtually the same angle in the opposite direction, which they abandon after two or three seconds just as abruptly as before, to return to their original orientation, making new, almost horizontal parallel lines that cross the circle of light from left to right toward the unlighted windows.

In the window recesses the snow has formed an uneven layer, very shallow on the sill but deeper toward the back, making an already considerable drift that fills the right corner and reaches as high as the pane. All the ground floor windows, one after the other, show exactly the same amount of snow which has drifted toward the right in the same way.

At the next crossroad, under the corner street light, a child is standing. He is partially hidden by the cast-iron shaft whose broader base conceals the lower part of his body altogether. He is watching the soldier approach. He does not seem bothered by the storm, or by the snow that whitens some of his black cape and his beret. He is a boy of about ten, his expression serious and alert. He turns his head as the soldier approaches him, watching him as he reaches the lamppost, then passes it. Since the soldier is not walking fast, the child has time to examine him carefully from head to foot: the unshaven cheeks, the apparent fatigue, the dirty ragged overcoat, the sleeves without chevrons, the wet package under his left arm, both hands thrust deep in his pockets, the hurriedly wrapped, irregular leggings, the wide gash down the back of the right boot, at least four inches long and so deep it looks as if it pierces the leather; yet the boot is not split and the damaged area has merely been smeared with black polish, which now gives it the same dark-gray color as the adjoining surfaces that are still intact.

The man has stopped. Without moving the rest of his body, he has turned his head around toward the child looking at him, already three steps away, already crisscrossed by many white lines.

A moment later, the soldier slowly pivots and takes a step toward the street light. The boy steps back, against the cast-iron shaft; at the same time he pulls the bottom of his cape around his legs, holding it from the inside without showing his hands. The man has stopped. Now that the gusts of snow are no longer striking him directly in the face, he can raise his head without too much trouble.

"Don't be afraid," he says.

He takes a step toward the child and repeats a little louder: "Don't be afraid."

The child does not answer. Without seeming to feel the thickly falling flakes that make him squint slightly, he continues to stare at the soldier directly in front of him. The latter begins:

"Do you know where . . ."

But he goes no further. The question he was going to ask is not the right one. A gust of wind blows the snow into his face again. He takes his right hand out of his overcoat pocket and shields his eyes with it. He has no glove, his fingers are red and dirty. When the gust is over he puts his hand back in his pocket.

"Where does this road go?"

The boy still says nothing. His eyes have left the soldier to look toward the end of the street in the direction the man has nodded toward; he sees only the succession of street lights, closer and closer together, dimmer and dimmer, which vanish into the darkness.

"What's the matter, are you afraid I'll eat you?"

"No," the child says. "I'm not afraid."

"Well then, tell me where this road goes."

"I don't know," the child says.

And he looks again at this badly dressed, unshaven soldier who does not even know where he is going. Then, without warning, he makes a sudden turn, skillfully avoids the base of the lamppost, and begins to run as fast as he can along the row of apartment houses, in the opposite direction from the way the soldier came. In a few seconds, he has disappeared.

At the next street light, he appears again for several seconds; he is still running just as fast; his cape billows out behind him. He reappears at each lamppost, once, twice, then no more.

The soldier turns back and continues on his way. Again the snow strikes him directly in the face.

He puts the package under his right arm to try to shield his face with his left hand, for the wind is blowing more continuously from this side. But he soon gives this up and puts his hand, numb with cold, back in his overcoat pocket. Now he merely turns his head away to get less snow in his eyes, tilting it toward the unlighted windows where the white drift continues to accumulate in the right-hand corner of the recess.

Yet it is this same boy with the serious expression who led him to the café run by the man who is not his father. And there was a similar scene under the same kind of lamppost, at an identical crossroads. Perhaps it was snowing a little less heavily. The flakes were thicker, heavier, slower. But the boy answered with just as much reticence, holding his black cape tight around his knees. He had the same alert expression and seemed to be just as untroubled by the snow. He hesitated just as long at each question before giving an answer which furnished his interlocutor no information. Where did the street go? A long silent stare toward the presumed end of the street, then the calm voice:

"To the boulevard."

"And this one?"

The boy slowly turns his eyes in the direction the man has just nodded toward. His features reveal no difficulty remembering, no uncertainty, when he repeats in the same expressionless tone:

"To the boulevard."

"The same one?"

Again there is silence, and the snow falling, slower and heavier.

"Yes," the boy says. Then, after a pause: "No," and finally, with a sudden violence: "It's the boulevard!"

"And is it far?" the soldier asks again.

The child is still looking at the series of street lights, closer and closer together, dimmer and dimmer, which here too vanish into the darkness.

"Yes," he says, his voice calm again and sounding as if it came from far away.

The soldier waits another minute to make sure there will not be another "no." But the boy is already running along the row of apartment houses, down the trampled snow path the soldier followed in the opposite direction a few minutes earlier. When the running boy crosses a circle of light, his black cape billowing out behind him can be seen for a few seconds, once, twice, three times, smaller and vaguer at each reappearance, until there is nothing but a confused whirl of snow.

Yet it is certainly the same boy who walks ahead of the soldier when the latter comes to the café. Before crossing the threshold, the child shakes his black cape and takes off his beret, which he knocks twice against the door jamb in order to brush off the bits of ice which have formed in the folds of the cloth. Then the soldier must have met him several times, while walking in circles through the maze of identical streets. He has never come to any boulevard, any broader avenue planted with trees or differing in any way at all from the other streets he has taken. Finally the child had mentioned a few names, the few street names he knew, which were obviously of no use at all.

Now he is knocking his beret sharply against the door jamb in front of which they have both stopped. The interior is brightly lit. A pleated curtain of white, translucent material covers the lower part of the window that is set in the upper half of the door. But it is easy for a man of normal height to see the entire room: the bar to the left, the tables in the middle, a wall on the right covered with posters of various sizes. There are few drinkers at this late hour: two workers sitting at one of the tables and a better-dressed man standing near the zinc-topped bar over which the bartender is leaning. The latter is a thickset man whose size is even more marked in relation to his customer because of the sightly raised platform he is standing on. Both men have simultaneously turned their heads toward the door where the boy has just knocked his beret against the jamb.

But they see only the soldier's face above the curtain. And the child, turning the doorknob with one hand, again knocks his beret, this time against the door itself, which is already some distance from the jamb. The bartender's eyes have already left the soldier's pale face that is still silhouetted against the darkness, cut off at the level of the chin by the curtain, and are fixed on the widening gap between door and jamb where the child is about to come in.

As soon as he is inside, the latter turns around and gestures to the soldier to follow him. This time everyone stares at the newcomer: the bartender behind his bar, the man dressed in middle-class clothes standing in front of it, the two workers sitting at a table. One of the two, whose back was to the door, has pivoted on his chair without letting go of his glass that is half full of red wine and set in the middle of the checkered oilcloth. The other glass, just beside the first, is also encircled by a large hand which completely conceals the probable contents. To the left, a ring of reddish liquid indicates another place previously occupied by one of these glasses, or by a third.

Afterwards, it is the soldier himself who is sitting at a table in front of a similar glass, half full of the same dark-colored wine. The glass has left several circular marks on the red-and-white checked oilcloth, but almost all are incomplete, showing a series of more or less closed arcs, occasionally overlapping, almost dry in some places, in others still shiny with the last drops of liquid leaving a film over the blacker deposit already formed, while elsewhere the rings are blurred by being set too close together or even half obliterated by sliding, or else, perhaps, by a quick wipe of a rag.

The soldier, motionless at the foot of his lamppost, is still waiting, his hands in his overcoat pockets, the same package under his left arm. It is daylight again, the same pale, colorless daylight. But the street light is out now. These are the same apartment houses, the same empty streets, the same gray and white hues, the same cold.

It has stopped snowing. The layer of snow on the ground is scarcely any deeper, perhaps only a little more solidly packed. And the yellowish paths hurrying pedestrians have made along the sidewalks are just the same. On each side of these narrow paths, the white surface has remained virtually intact; tiny changes have nevertheless occurred here and there, for instance the circular area which the soldier's heavy boots have trampled near the lamppost.

It is the child who approaches him this time. At first he is only a vague silhouette, an irregular black spot approaching fairly fast along the outer edge of the sidewalk. Each time this spot passes a street light it makes a sudden movement toward it and immediately continues forward in its original direction. Soon it is easy to make out the agile legs in their narrow black trousers, the black cape billowing out over the shoulders, the beret pulled down over the boy's eyes. Each time the child passes a street light he stretches out his arm toward the cast-iron shaft which his gloved hand grasps while his whole body, with the momentum of its accumulated speed, makes a complete turn around this pivot, his feet scarcely touching the ground until the child is back in his original position on the outer edge of the sidewalk where he continues running forward toward the soldier.

He may not have noticed the latter immediately, for the soldier is partly concealed by the cast-iron shaft his hip and right arm are leaning against. But to get a better look at the boy whose movement is interrupted by pivots and gusts of wind which make his cape billow out each time, the man has stepped forward a little, and the child suddenly stops halfway between the last two lampposts, his feet together, his hands pulling the cape around his rigid body, his alert face with its wide eyes raised toward the soldier.

"Hello," the soldier says.

The child looks at him without surprise, but also without the slightest indication of friendliness, as if he found it both natural and annoying to meet the soldier again.