The Melancholy of Resistance (21 page)

… and then it made no difference whether we bore left or right, we simply flooded every street and square, for one thing and one thing alone drove us and confronted us at every turn, a hollow sense of fear combined with resignation that left us with some hope of mercy; nor were there any orders or words of command, no attempt at calculation, no taking of risks and no danger, since there was nothing left to lose, everything having become intolerable, unbearable, beyond the pale; each house, each fence, each advertising pillar, telegraph post, shop or the post office, even the lightly drifting odours of the bakery, had become intolerable; intolerable too every precept of law and order, every petty demanding obligation, the continuous and hopeless expenditure of energy in the attempt to suggest that there might be some point to all this rather than be faced by the unyielding, indifferent, universal incomprehensibility of things; intolerable too the inexplicable ground-rules of human conduct. No amount of screaming would have helped us find a chink in the enormous armour of silence that slowly descended on us, so we proceeded without a word, hearing only the scrape and rumble of our own progress over the crisp and brilliant sharp frost, unstoppable and tense to the point of snapping, down those dark airless streets, seeing no one else, never stopping to look at each other, or if we did, only to note a hand or a foot, for we were a single body with one single pair of eyes, ardent for one single act of destruction, one single fatal impulse, impervious to entreaty. And there really was nothing to oppose us: heavy bricks swam effortlessly in the air to smash shopfronts and the dirty, blindly flickering windows of private houses, while stray cats stood as if rooted to the spot by the blinding light of reflectors and suffered passively, not moving a muscle, while we strangled them, and young trees allowed themselves sleepily to be turned out of their beds of cracked soil. But nothing could assuage the unconscious fury of our new and tragic understanding, our sense of having been cheated, our fear, for, however we looked for it, we could not find a fit object for our disgust and despair, and so we attacked everything in our way with an equal and infinite passion: we broke up shops, threw from the windows anything that was movable and ground it under our heels outside, and if we couldn’t move it, we smashed it to pieces with iron bars or pans of shutters; then followed hairdriers, bars of soap, loaves, coats, surgical boots, tins of food, books, suitcases and children’s toys, unrecognizable fragments of which we trod on so we could turn over cars parked at the side of the road, so we could tear down desolate signs and billboards, occupy and wreck the telephone exchange because someone had left the lights on in it, and we left the building only to join the jostling crowd at the gates once the two female telephone operators had also been trodden underfoot, lost consciousness, and slid down the wall like two used rags, lifeless, their hands slumped in their laps, while torn telephone wires hung in tangles from the blood-covered table and the switchboards lay in an unrecogizable mess on the floor, obscuring the view. We saw that nothing was impossible now, convinced that all common everyday knowledge was useless, understood that what we did was meaningless since we were only a moment’s victims in an infinitely vast arena, that from such an ephemeral position there was no way of estimating the precise magnitude of that vastness, for the force of sheer velocity can know nothing of the nature of a speck of drifting dust, for motion and object can have no consciousness of each other. We smashed and pounded everything we could lay our hands on until we arrived back where we started, but there was no stopping, no brake, the blinding joy of destruction impelled us to surpass ourselves time and again, so we trampled, always dissatisfied, always silent, over the remains of hairdriers, bars of soap, loaves, coats, surgical boots, tins of food, books, suitcases and children’s toys, so as to provide ever more material to lay over the roadside debris which now extended over the whole town, one patch of waste merging with another, and in order to breach the petty and false mire of submissiveness and resignation which sought to defend that which was indefensible. We found ourselves back in streets that led to the square in front of the church, with the impenetrable night all about us, our energies raging bloody and unchecked within us; we felt dangerously light of heart, aware of the intoxicating heartbeat of resistance; everything was a challenge, a kind of suffocating weight we had to shed. There was a point where a number of side-streets and alleyways converged on the main road, and at the far end of one of them we could make out three figures in the darkness (the vague outlines of a man, a woman and a child, as it turned out a few steps later) who, having spotted the threatening mob approaching them, were paralysed with fear, then tried backing up keeping close to the wall, hoping to disappear in the dense darkness: but they were too late, nothing on earth could help them, and even if they had succeeded in concealing themselves so far in shady corners on what was probably their homeward journey, they could find no shelter now, their fate was utterly sealed, because there was no more place for them in the ruthless halls of justice where we operated, since we were sure it was our task to stamp on the dying embers of family, hearth and home, and they were dying in any case, all thought of ‘refuge’ being hopeless and superfluous; it was pointless seeking a hiding place, pointless trusting to the future; all joy, all childish laughter, all the false consolations of solidarity or seasons of goodwill had been clouded over, obliterated for ever. A few of us, about twenty or thirty in the front rank, set straight off after them, and once we reached the closed rectangle of the square in front of the church and had given the fugitive group a good looking over, we started making our way to them over the ruins and piles of rubble, and, though they were clearly trying to escape to the safety of one of the side-streets, their stiff postures showed they needed every ounce of their rapidly dwindling confidence not to break into a desperate run but keep up the appearance of people calmly making their way home. We could have reached them in a few strides if we really wanted to but that would have meant giving up the dark, as yet unknown, aura of magic or mystique, full of the tempting surprises, risks and dangers, of pursuit, which is the spell that haunts the hunter as he patiently tracks the hunted deer, and prevents him dispatching it until the animal itself is terminally exhausted and, reconciled to its fate, more or less offers itself up; so we did not charge at them immediately, but let them believe they might avoid danger and escape the annihilating effects of our close attention: that it would be like waking from a bad dream. Whether we were a real threat to them or if it was merely a laughable misunderstanding, that, of course, they couldn’t decide for the time being, and they probably continued in that state of mind for some few minutes before realizing it was no mistake, no misunderstanding, that they were in fact the objects of some as yet unclear menace, that it was undoubtedly them we were following, that they, and no one else, were the targets fixed on by this dour, unspeaking group, since, short of breaking down the doors of these bourgeois houses with their thick walls and trembling occupants, we could find no one in our path but them, these stray sheep far from the fold; by some peculiar ill-luck it was only they who could satisfy and, at the same time, increase our terrible hunger for adequate and properly punitive recompense. The child clung to its mother and the mother hung on to the father, who kept turning round, ever more frequently, ever more anxiously, walking ever faster: it was no use though, the distance between us did not increase, and if we did slow down now and then it was only so that we might move even closer to them the next time, because, strangely enough, we felt a wild excitement knowing how they must be swinging between waves of hope and disappointment. They took the first right turn down another side-street and by this time even the woman, who was now clinging to her husband with clear desperation, and the child, who kept glancing back at us with uncomprehending terror in its eyes, had been forced into a run, so they shouldn’t trip as they kept pace with the man, who was walking faster and faster and who, naturally, had not yet made up his mind whether to make a real dash for it, fearing that if he did so we too would be compelled to run, in which case he would have absolutely no hope of saving both his family and himself at the moment of what, for them, must have been still unimaginable contact. The bitter, evil pleasure of seeing these three lonely shadows helplessly swaying ahead of us, not even knowing for certain what was in store for them, exceeded even the power of the spell cast by the sight of the smashed-up town, meant more than the satisfaction occasioned by all the pieces of useless stuff we had trampled underfoot, for in that perpetual holding back, in the sheer joy of deferral, in that infernal putting off, we savoured something wry, mysterious and ancient that lent our least movement a fearsome dignity, the kind of unimpeachable pride possessed by all barbaric hordes, even when they know they might be scattered far and wide the day after, mobs whose momentum is unstoppable since they have appropriated even the thought of their own death, should they decide to make an end, their mission done, having had their fill for ever of both earth and heaven, with misfortune and sadness, with pride and fear, as well as with that base, tempting burden which will not allow one to give up the habit of pining for liberty. There was a dull murmuring somewhere in the distance which quickly died away. In front of us a few stray cats were sidling through gaps in the fence into silent courtyards. It was freezing cold and the air was so dry it scratched our throats. The child started coughing. By now—their route clearly having led them out of town rather than homeward—the man too recognized that their situation was increasingly hopeless; occasionally he hesitated before a possibly familiar entrance, but only for an instant since it wasn’t difficult to calculate that by the time someone opened the door to their knocking or ringing and they stepped inside to evade their pursuers, we would have caught up with them—not to mention the fact that they would have to accept that this transparently childish recourse would solve nothing, for he was forced finally to realize that whatever they did, whatever they tried, they were lost. But just as a hunted beast keeps going to the end, he too refused to surrender; you could see that the father, charged with the protection of his dependants, was desperately contriving ever new strategies, each hope that glowed then rapidly faded directed some uncertain manoeuvre which was almost immediately abandoned as useless, each plan failed, all hope false. Suddenly they took a sharp right down a narrow street but by now we were sufficiently acquainted with the town (some of us, in fact, were local people) to forestall him; five or six of us ran round the block and by the time they reached the main road we had blocked off the way to the police station which left them with no alternative but to head for the railway station instead, looking ever more harassed, ever more terrified by the persistent dumb detachment that followed them. The man had picked up the exhausted child, then, at the next corner, he passed it on to the woman with one rapid movement and shouted at them, but the woman, after disappearing down another street for a few moments, quickly hastened back to her husband as if recognizing that she was unable to assume sole responsibility for flight together with the child, clearly feeling that she could bear anything but to be eternally parted from him. The fact that we seemed to be pushing them in some specific and sinister direction completely confused them, which was the only reason they gave up the notion of turning off down some potentially valid escape route back towards the town centre at the next comer, perhaps hoping that should they reach the railway station unscathed they would find secure shelter there. We were steadily catching up with them, ever more electrified by the pursuit while they were growing ever more tired, so that slowly, even in the darkness, we could make out the shape of the man’s bent back, the long fringe of the woman’s thick scarf, the handbag that kept bouncing off her hip, and the furry ear-flaps of the child’s hat which had come untied and were occasionally rising and falling with the icy wind as they stared terrified back at us and could, in their turn, see us clearly with our heavy overcoats, our muddy boots, in one great mass as we proceeded towards them, and here and there a few of us with dead cats slung over our shoulders or iron bars in our fists. By the time they reached the empty square in front of the station only ten or eleven paces separated us, so they had to sprint the few yards remaining in order to tear open the heavy entrance gates and rush down the silent and deserted hall with its blind, curtained counters, but whatever hope still remained in them was immediately crushed because there was not a soul in sight, each door and window bore a clumsy lock, the waiting room was a hollow echoing box, and if they hadn’t noticed a faint light burning in the staffroom, their story and ours would have come to an unavoidable end right there and then. But it wasn’t to last much longer anyway, for when we heard a window creak open on the side of the building and spotted the shadow of a man running almost certainly for help, crossing the tracks and disappearing under one of the carriages of a long goods train in an attempt to vanish right under our noses, three of us immediately left the others to deal with the lock on the frail little door of the staffroom and set off in pursuit of him, then, having reached the little group of houses scattered behind the tracks, separated and approached him from three directions at once. The squeaking of his boots and the way they kept sliding along the ground, not to mention his loud, sibilant breathing, were perfect indicators of his precise position, so it wasn’t too difficult to corner him once we passed the buildings, which appeared to be frozen in sleep, and reached the ploughed fields behind. By now the man himself realized that he was trapped; he carried on running a little
way down deep furrows that were cold and hard as steel but then it was as if he had come to a brick wall that left only the route back, and so, as if bracing his back against the night sky behind him, he turned round and faced us …