Jealousy and in the Labyrinth (21 page)

"Where did you sleep?" he says at last.

The soldier makes a vague gesture with his chin, without bothering to take a hand out of his pocket. "Back there."

"In the barracks?"

"That's right, in the barracks."

The child examines his uniform from head to foot. The greenish overcoat is neither more nor less ragged, the leggings are just as carelessly wrapped, the boots have virtually the same mud stains. But the beard may be a little darker.

"Where is your barracks?"

"Back there," the soldier says. And he repeats the same gesture with his chin, pointing vaguely behind him, or over his right shoulder.

"You don't know how to wrap your leggings," the child says.

The man bends forward slightly and looks down at his boots. "It doesn't matter any more now, you know."

As he straightens up again he notices that the boy is much closer than he expected him to be: only three or four yards away. He did not think the child had come so close to him, nor does he remember having seen him come nearer afterwards. Still, it is hardly likely that the child has changed position without the soldier's knowing it, while the latter's head was down: in so short an interval of time he would scarcely have been able to take a step. Besides, he is standing in exactly the same position as when they first met: stiff in the black cape held shut—even tight, around the body—by his invisible hands, his eyes raised.

"Twelve thousand three hundred forty-five," the child says, reading the regimental number on the overcoat collar.

"Yes," the soldier says. "But that isn't my number."

"Yes it is. It's written on you."

"But now, you know ..."

"It's even written twice." And the child sticks one arm out from under his cape and points his forefinger toward the two red diamond shapes. He is wearing a navy blue sweater and a knitted wool glove the same color.

"All right..." the soldier says.

The child puts his arm back under the cape, which he carefully closes again, holding it tight from inside.

"What's in your package?"

"I've already told you."

Suddenly the child turns his head toward the door of the apartment building. Thinking he has seen something unusual there, the soldier turns to look too, but sees only the same vertical dark opening, a hand's width across, separating the door from the jamb. Since the boy is still looking attentively in this direction, the man tries to discern some figure in the shadowy doorway, but without success.

Finally he asks: "What are you looking at?"

"What's in your package?" the child repeats instead of answering, still not looking away from the open door.

"I've already told you: things."

"What things?"

"My things!"

The boy looks at his interlocutor again:

"You have a knapsack to keep your things in. Every soldier has a knapsack."

He has become increasingly self-assured during the conversation. His voice is now not at all remote, but firm, almost peremptory. The man, on the other hand, speaks lower and lower:

"It's all over now, you know. The war's over . .

Again he feels how tired he is. He no longer wants to answer these questions that lead nowhere. He was almost ready to give the boy the package. He looks at the box in its brown wrapping paper under his arm; in drying, the snow has left dark rings on it, their edges fringed with tiny scallops; the string has stretched and slipped toward one of the corners.

The soldier then looks past the still motionless boy down the empty street. Having turned toward the opposite end, he sees the same shallow vista.

"Do you know what time it is?" he asks, resuming his initial position against the cast-iron shaft.

The boy shakes his head several times, from left to right, from right to left.

"Does your father serve meals?"

"He's not my father," the child says; and without giving the man time to ask his question again, he turns on his heel and walks stiffly toward the half-open door. He stops on the doorstep, pushes the door a little farther open, slips into the opening, and closes the door behind him without slamming it but so that the click of the latch falling back into place can nevertheless be clearly heard.

The soldier no longer sees anything in front of him now but the snow-covered sidewalk with its yellowish path on the right side and, to the left, a smooth surface broken by a single, regular set of tracks: two small, widely spaced footprints running parallel to the gutter, then, about four yards from the lamppost, coming together to form an irregular circle before turning at right angles to join the narrower path leading to the apartment house door.

The soldier raises his face toward the gray façade with its rows of uniform windows, a white streak along the bottom of each recess, thinking perhaps he will see the boy appear at one of the windows. But he knows that the child in the cape does not live in this house, for he has already gone with him to where he lives. Besides, judging from the look of the windows, the whole apartment building seems unoccupied.

The heavy red curtains extend across the entire wall from floor to ceiling. The wall opposite them has the chest against it and above that, the picture. The child is where he was, sitting on the floor with his legs folded under him; it looks as if he wants to slide all the way under the bench. But he continues to stare straight ahead, his attention indicated, for want of anything else, by his wide-open eyes.

This sign, of course, is not infallible; if the artist has meant the child to be looking at nothing in particular, if he has imagined no specific feature for the fourth wall of this rectangular room where only three are shown, it could be said that the child is merely staring into space. But in that case, it was not logical to represent him staring at the only one of the four walls that apparently looks out onto something. The three walls shown in the print have, as a matter of fact, no visible opening in them. Even if there is an exit at the left, behind the coat racks, it is certainly not the main entrance to the tavern, whose interior arrangement would then be too out of the ordinary. The main entrance, with white enamel letters spelling out the word "café" and the proprietor's name in two curved lines pasted on the glass in an oval, and below this a pleated curtain of thin, translucent material, obliging anyone who wants to look over it to stand close against the door—this main entrance can be nowhere else but in the wall not shown in the print, the rest of this wall being occupied by a large window, also with a long curtain covering its lower half, and decorated in the middle by three spheres attached to the glass—one red one above two white ones—certainly suggesting that the exit behind the coat racks leads to a poolroom.

The child holding the box in his arms would therefore be looking toward the door. But he is sitting almost at floor level and obviously cannot see the street over the curtain. He is not looking up to see some pale face pressed against the glass, cut off at the level of the neck by the curtain. His gaze is virtually horizontal. Has the door just opened to let in a newcomer who would attract the boy's attention by his unusual attire: a soldier, for instance? This solution seems unlikely, for ordinarily the main entrance is placed next to the bar, that is, in this case, on the far left, where there is a small cleared space in front of the men standing dressed in middle-class clothes. The child, though, is sitting on the right-hand side of the picture, where no passage among the jumble of benches and tables would permit access to the rest of the room.

The soldier, moreover, came in a long time ago. He is sitting at a table, far behind the child, who does not seem at all interested in his uniform. The soldier is also staring straight ahead, his eyes fixed slightly higher; but since he is much farther away from the window than the boy, he need only raise his eyes a few degrees to look through the window above the curtain at the heavily falling snow which again obliterates the footprints, the single set of tracks, the intersecting yellowish paths that run parallel to the high façades.

At the corner of the last apartment house, standing in the L-shaped strip of snow between the latter and the path, his body cut vertically by the angle of the stone, one foot, one leg, one shoulder, and half the black cape out of sight, the boy is on the lookout, his eyes fixed on the cast-iron lamppost. Has he come out of the apartment by another door opening on the cross street? Or has he stepped through a ground floor window? In either case, the soldier pretends not to have noticed his reappearance. Leaning against his street light, he is absorbed in examining the other end of the empty street.

"What are you waiting for?" Then, in the same tone of voice, after about ten seconds: "What are you waiting for there?"

The voice is certainly the boy's, the tone deliberate, calm, and not friendly, a little too deep for a boy of ten or twelve. But it sounds quite close, scarcely two or three yards away, whereas the corner of the building is at least eight yards off. The man feels like turning around to verify this distance and see if the child has not come closer again. Or else, without looking at him, he might answer his question with the first thing that comes into his head: "The streetcar," or "Christmas," to make the child understand what a bother he is. The soldier continues to stare down the street.

When he finally turns to look at the boy, the latter has completely disappeared. The soldier waits another minute, thinking the boy has only stepped behind the corner of the apartment house and will soon peek out from behind his hiding place. But no such thing happens.

The man looks down at the fresh snow, where the newly made footprints turn at a right angle just in front of him. In the section parallel to the sidewalk the footprints are wide apart and smudged by running, a tiny heap of snow having been thrown up behind each one by the movement of the shoe; on the other hand, the few footprints leading to the path show the pattern of the soles very clearly: a series of chevrons across the width of the sole and, beneath the heel, a cross inscribed in a circle—that is, on the heel itself, a cross inscribed in a circular depression in the rubber (a second round hole, much shallower and of extremely small diameter, perhaps indicating the center of the cross, with the shoe size shown by figures in relief: thirty-two, perhaps, thirty-three or thirty-four).

The soldier, who had bent over slightly to examine the details of the footprints, then walks to the path. As he does so, he tries to push open the apartment house door, but the door resists: it is shut tight. It is a wooden door with ornamental moldings and extremely narrow jambs on either side. The man continues walking toward the corner of the building and turns down the cross street, which is as empty as the one he has just left.

This new route leads him, like the other, to a right-angle crossroad with a last street light set some ten yards before the end of the sidewalk and identical façades on each side. The base of the cast-iron lamppost is a truncated cone embossed with a strand of ivy, with the same curves, the same leaves growing at the same places on the same stems, the same faults in the casting. The entire design is accentuated by the snow borders. Perhaps the meeting was supposed to be at this crossroads.

The soldier raises his eyes to look for the enamel plaques which should show the names of these streets. There is nothing visible on one of the stone walls at the corner. On the other, about three yards from the ground, is attached the usual blue plaque, from which the enamel has chipped off in large flakes, as if some boys had relentlessly aimed at it with pebbles; only the word "Rue" is still legible, and, further on, the two letters: . . na . . ." followed by a downstroke interrupted by the concentric rings of the next chip. Besides, the original name must have been an extremely short one. The depredations are quite old, for the exposed metal is already badly rusted.

As he is about to cross the street, still following the thin yellow path, to see if he cannot find other street signs in better condition, the man hears a voice quite close by, speaking three or four syllables whose meaning he has not time to grasp. He immediately turns around; but there is no one in sight. In this solitude, the snow probably conducts sound peculiarly.

The voice was low and yet it did not sound like a man's voice ... A young woman with an extremely low voice— that may have been what it was, but the recollection is too fleeting: already nothing remains but a neutral timbre, without any particular tone; it could belong to anyone, and might not even be a human voice at all. At this moment the soldier notices that the corner apartment house door is not closed. Automatically, he takes a few steps toward it. The interior is so dark that it is impossible to see anything through the gap. To the right, to the left, up above, all the windows are closed, their dirty black panes with neither curtains nor shades suggesting no trace of life in the un- lighted rooms, as if the entire building was deserted.

The wooden door has ornamental moldings and is painted dark brown; on either side of the open leaf are the narrow jambs. The soldier pushes the door wide open as he steps up onto the snowy stoop, already covered with footprints, and steps inside.

He is standing at the end of a dark hallway with several doors opening off it. At the other end can be seen the beginning of a staircase that soon vanishes in the darkness. The end of this long narrow hallway opens onto another hallway perpendicular to it, indicated by even darker shadows on each side of the staircase. The hallway is empty, without any of those household objects that generally suggest the existence of life: door mats in front of the doors, toys left at the foot of the stairs, a bucket and mop in a corner. Here there is nothing, except the floor and the walls; and even the walls are bare, all painted some very dark color; immediately to the left of the entrance is tacked the small white civil defense bulletin instructing the residents what to do in case of fire. The floor is made of wood blackened by mud and slops, as are the first steps—the only ones clearly visible—of the staircase. After five or six steps the staircase seems to turn to the right. The soldier can now make out the wall behind the stairs. Here, flattened against the wall, her arms held stiffly at her side, there is a woman in a full skirt with a long apron tied around her waist; she is staring at the open door and the figure standing in it, silhouetted against the light.