“It's ass-headed, but I've got to see what day it is.”
As he stood up, his trousers, which had no belt loops, slid completely out from under the belt, and the shirt bunched up against his chest and back. He was hardly aware of it, yet he made the gesture of pulling up his pants with his hand. In order to go to the wall, he had to push aside or disturb the sniper, who had not moved and whose eyes, which had been hostile since the sergeant had left the room, weighed on Riton. When the kid neared him, the soldier, on seeing the sloppiness of his attire, finally found an excuse for releasing his anger. He roughly grabbed the belt and pulled the kid, whose torso was delicate despite its hardness. It was also flexible, and it bent back, as if to regain its balance, or to escape, but the soldier prevented it by putting his left hand even more angrily around his waist. Riton thought he was being playful and, though he had seldom fooled around with that soldier, supported himself with both hands on the curly head which the swiftness of the whole rather brusque movement had knocked against him. Now, the soldier, despite his anger, was unable, on feeling the irony, to keep from being (in, to be sure, a very imprecise way) under the charm of the noblest posture of respect and faith. A kind of confusion ruffled his soul and made him slightly dizzy. The child, who saw in the mirror over the fireplace that Erik was watching him from behind, tried to get away. The soldier felt it and tightened his embrace, and Riton, clutching the Fritz's hair, pressed the head harder against himself. The forehead rested on his belly, in the space between the belt and the trousers, while the mouth was crushed on the stiff blue cloth of the fly. The significance of the posture was changing. The German seemed to be clinging to the kid by the belt, as to a lifebuoy. The wounded male, who was in a rage, was on his knees before a sixteen-year-old Frenchman who seemed to be his protector and to be indulgently crowning his head with two strong clasped hands. Everyone in the room waited in silence. The soldier refused to let go of the kid, holding him firmly with his muscular arms, furious and humiliated at the fact that his face was lost in the shadow of the trousers, whose smell he breathed in with his open mouth. He tried to raise his head, but the buckle of the belt scraped his forehead. Pain made him finally make the gesture toward the performing of which everything was converging, the gesture after which the day was later named: with wild fury, the German, whose arms were tensed and whose torso had suddenly come to Me on his thighs, which were buttressed by his rising motion, bent the kid under him. Riton's eyes became those of a hunted animal. He wanted to flee, but he was trapped, and his head banged against the wooden bed. The three other soldiers were silently watching this almost motionless corps à corps. Their attention and silence were part of the action itself. They made it perfect by making it public and publicly accepted. Their attention—their presence, at three points in the room—enveloped the action. Two men and a soldier were on guard at the sixth-floor windows of a mined building, which was menaced by a hundred rifles, so that a black pirate could bugger a young traitor at bay. Fear is a kind of element in which gestures are made without their being recognized. It could play the role of the ether. It even lightens acts that are not conditioned by what caused it. It quickens one's knowledge of them. It weighs down and blurs others. This fear that the nest would be spotted, that the house would explode, that they would be drilled, did not seem to preoccupy them. Rather, it made a kind of emptiness inside them, in which there was room only for that extraordinary fact, which was really unexpected at the hour of death. Since they were at the edge of the world, at the top of that rock posted at the outermost point of Finis Terrae, they could watch with their minds at ease, could give themselves utterly to the perfect execution of the act. Since they could view it only in its closed form, which was cut off from the future, it was the ultimate one. After it, nothing else. They had to make it as intense as possible, that is, each of them had to be as acutely conscious of it as he could be so as to concentrate as much life as possible in it. Let their moments be brief, but charged with consciousness. A faint smile played over their lips. Erik's hand, which was lying on the bed, was still holding his harmonica. He was smiling with the same smile as the others. When Riton's head banged against the wooden bed, there was a dull but weak thud, and he uttered a very faint moan of pain. The three witnesses of the struggle, who felt no pity but were very angry with the one who threatened to botch everything, made the same gestures of the arms and silently articulated, opening their mouths wide, the same threats whose meaning the kid understood from the hardness of their features and expressions. Instead of cursing the torturer, their hatred was directed toward the child who was capable of depriving them of the joy of his tortures. Finally sure that the thud would be without danger, the hatred subsided when silence was restored. The subtle smile flowered on their mouths again, but the kid, who had been knocked out by the blow on the chin, from which blood was flowing, was already lying on the bed, with his pants down, his face against the sheets, his body pounded by the husky body of the soldier, who had the self-possession to lay down his burden delicately so as not to make the spring of the mattress groan. There was only the barest creaking. For Riton it had happened. . . . Unable to imagine how far that fury would go, he nevertheless made the movements that might help calm the soldier. The militiaman on the mattress placed his legs, which had been dangling down to the floor, next to Erik, who had remained seated, with his harmonica in his fist. The other soldiers looked on.
“Good thing I cleaned my hole a little.”
The sergeant, who was at the door, was also watching. Annoyed at having been too rough with a soldier who was fighting and who would probably die that day, he dared not interfere. Besides, he was under the sway of a feeling that I shall speak about presently. In the silence of the city, which was at times disturbed by the sound of a Red Cross car carrying arms, there entered through the half-open window, from a thin, cracked voice, purer for being cracked—a broken toy—the following song, composed of the tenacity of the weak, which rose up from the pavement and, passing through the foliage of the trees, reached the ear of Riton, to whom the melody seemed radiant:
They have broken my violin . . .
Riton, who had been knocked senseless by the Fritz, bit the bolster so as not to scream. The brute stopped and panted a little, letting his cheek rest against the back of Riton's neck. He snorted. A short rest, a lull in the fellow's fury, enabled the kid to make out the end of the stanza, which the fragile voice was repeating:
For its soul was French.
It fearlessly made the echoes
Sing the Marseillaise.
Riton dared not stir. He first wondered anxiously whether he should clean himself or simply suck the jissom in. And what could he clean himself with if there was no water? He could only wipe himself. With his handkerchief. The soldier, whose bearded chin Riton felt on the back of his neck, gave a shove, which made the kid groan.
. . . Sing the Marseillaise . . .
Erik had not stirred. He had to watch the kid who had been downed by force get sawed in half.
Riton wanted the rape to be over with, and he feared the end of it.
Surely they would all take a crack at him. Erik's presence, which he still felt at the edge of the bed, kept him from moving his rump to make the soldier come more quickly.
. . . made the echoes . . .
Finally the warmth of the liquid escaped in slower and slower throbs, like the blood of a cut artery. The fellow from the North was discharging into his bronze eye. . . . When he raised himself up, gently so as not to make any noise, the soldier was calm. He was smiling. He remained standing beside the bed for a moment. He looked defiantly at his smiling cronies, then, slowly, smiling more broadly and tossing back his blond hair with a flick of his head, he adjusted his trousers and little black tank driver's jacket and rebuckled his belt. He said to the soldiers:
“What are you waiting for?”
He looked Erik in the eye. Riton, relieved of the bruiser but still outstretched, had pulled up his pant
s and tucked in his shirttails. Turning his head, he waited with a feeble smile on his lips. One of the soldiers who was sitting in the armchair was about to follow up, but he changed his mind and, turning to the door, laughingly invited the sergeant to enjoy himself first. The sergeant looked at Erik and signaled to him. Erik whispered a word, and they all went out. Nothing happened. They had to flee by the rooftops.
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The little housemaid left the tomb toward evening and returned on foot by narrow, shadowy roads. She was alone, with a daisy in her hand, and was amazed at being free. She was losing her flesh-colored stockings. She hardly noticed it and did not notice that she still had on her head the wreath of glass pearls with the little pink porcelain angel, who trembled at every step at the end of a brass prong wrapped in green silk thread. She kept the crown on, tilted over her ear like an apache's cap, all the way from the cemetery to her room. A fart that had been rolling in her stomach for some time broke free with such a burst that she thought she had been transformed into a seashell.
“A seashell doesn't have feet,” she said to herself. “How am I going to get home?”
She had had no news of Jean for a long time. He shifted from one underground group to another and no longer came home. It was she who occasioned my love for Erik. I had been at the home of Jean's mother for some minutes, chatting with the Fritz, when I tried to cover up a yawn.
“Are you hungry?” he asked.
“A little.”
He stood up, opened the door, and through the opening I caught sight of Juliette, who was walking through the other room. She was wearing a gray apron over a short black dress, so that my whole image of that vision is gray and sad. Her hair was uncombed, and there were a few tufts of wool or bits of fluff in it. Had she perhaps just been cleaning the bedroom? So the most palpable remains of Jean, his fiancée, were in the likeness of a dirty, unkempt housemaid. What was there about Jean that had made him love so unlovely a creature? Had he chosen her out of excessive humility, because he himself was equal to assuming the beauty of the couple? Erik had pushed open the door with his foot and then kept it open with his big arm, so that it was beneath that arch that I saw the maid go by and disappear. The sadness I felt did not lessen my love for Jean, but I felt furious with him for leaving me that girl with the hideous function as memento of him. I felt abandoned, weary, wretched. Erik called out:
“What time is it?”
His voice was heavy and hollow. I looked at his face, which I saw in profile, for his head was turned, and my anguish latched on to the hard, long muscle that bulged in his neck. The sight of the maid had just opened my heart to weariness. My muscles themselves were numbed, and my mouth and throat were clogged with a wad of dirty hair. Had I been smoking too much, or was Erik's presence acting thus, by that indirect means, so that I would love the deserter?
Never would I have the strength to bear my love for Jean if I leaned on that wretched girl. On the other hand I could indulge myself completely if I were supported by Erik. My heart had been opened by disgust, and love swept into it. A transport swept me toward the Boche. I clung to him in thought, grafted my body to his, so that his beauty and hardness would give me strength to bear and repress my nausea. I loved Erik. I love him. And as I lay in the Louis XV bed, Jean's soul enveloped the bedroom in which the naked Erik was operating with hard precision. I turned away from Paulo. With my head in the hollow of his legs, my eyes sought the sacred crabs, and then my tongue, which tried to touch that precise and tiny point: a single one of them. My tongue grew sharper, pushed aside the hairs very delicately, and finally, in the bushes, I had the joy of feeling beneath my papillae the slight relief of a crablet. At first, I dared not remove my tongue. I stayed there, careful to keep the joy of my discovery at the top of my tongue and of myself. Finally, having been granted sufficient happiness, I let my head and closed eyes roll into the hollow of the valley. My mouth was filled with tremendous tenderness. The insect had left it there, and the tenderness descended into me by the throat and flowed through my body. My two arms were still encircling Erik, and my hands were gently grazing his back and the root of his buttocks, and I thought I was stroking the hairy slopes of a wondrously large crab, which I would have worshiped. “A louse,” I said to myself, “would have transported and fixed my love better. It's bigger, has a more beautiful shape, and, when enlarged a hundred thousand times, its features are more harmonious.” Unfortunately, Jean had not left me any lice. Then, with my teeth pressing hard on the muscle of the inner thigh, I tried to mark off a sacred area, a garden even more precise and precious than the rest of the forest. My hands, which were in back of Erik, dug into his buttocks and helped my head, which was slightly cramped by Erik's belly and cock. I felt in my mouth the presence of the insect that was the bearer of Jean's secrets. I felt it getting bigger. I heard a noise. I turned around. Paulo was entering. His rifle was slung across his back. We were already friendly enough for him to shake my hand. He did so casually.
“How goes it?”
“All right, and you?”
“All right.”
He said nothing to Erik. He went to the window and looked into the street without removing his gun, which intrigued me. Paulo could no doubt have joined the liberators of Paris, but I could not keep from thinking that he was tied up with the Germans, and I included him among the militiamen who, at the beginning of the insurrection, had joined the French Resistance. They fought at the side of sincere Frenchmen, but within the ranks they continued their struggle. Though almost all of them realized that the German card had lost, they kept playing it on the sly. They sped through Paris and France in cars that sent out volleys of bullets and were described in posters on all the walls. I am still amazed at the thought of that riffraff carrying on an underground struggle on behalf of a fallen master for whom they never felt any love. But Paulo seemed, under his dirt, to be fighting for freedom. Erik had shut the door again. The sight of Paulo beneath that burden and in that posture, which defined his avenging activity, made me feel a little ashamed of loving a Boche. I said:
“The Germans had better behave with Paulo around.”
I was smiling, but I felt like being spiteful, and Erik sensed it. He looked at me. He was pale. No doubt my spitefulness was meant mainly to cover up my love. My comment wounded Erik. He said nothing. I added:
“Aren't you scared?”
Paulo had heard the first sentence; he had come in. With his gun over his shoulder, he was leaning on the table with both hands and watching us. I mechanically took a pack of cigarettes out of my pocket. I took one and handed the pack to Erik. He shook his head and said, “No, thanks.”
“You want one?” I asked, turning to Paulo.
He moved his hand. His gesture, which was contained in the whole bearing of his body, was about to unfold, to unroll, to emerge from those eyes, from that body, from that arm, and to extend all the way to me. . . .
“Me? Oh, no!”
He shook his head just as Erik had done.
“No, no,” he said, “I don't want one.”
I put the pack back into my pocket and lit the cigarette that was in my mouth. I was less annoyed at their refusing my offer than at discovering to what degree Paulo secretly loved Erik, since, unwilling to leave him there alone, he was bent on sharing his solitude. I did not think I could declare my love to Erik yet, nor to Paulo either. For he had never made any allusion to my affair with Jean. The maid opened the door and said:
“It's a quarter past twelve.”
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The German soldiers and Riton had gone back to the roof. They felt they were being pursued less by the tenants of the building than by fear. They were fleeing from it. Slowly, in broad daylight, following the least exposed slopes of the roof, they
got to a corner formed by three chimneys. The hiding place was narrow. It could hardly contain them, though they squatted together in a kind of cluster from which the notion of the individual disappeared. No thought was born of that armed mass, but rather a somnolence, a dream whose chief and mingled themes were a feeling of dizziness, the act of falling, and nostalgia for the Vaterland. No longer worried about being heard, they spoke aloud. Riton was caught in Erik's legs. They crouched against each other, and they spent the day that way, crushed by the five soldiers who at times overflowed onto the sky. There were potshots all around them, but they could see nothing, not a single patch of street, or a single window of an apartment. The heat was overpowering. Toward evening, the mass of males was loosened by a little elasticity. Numbed limbs came to life again. Erik and Riton awoke. Beneath the shelter of the chimneys, the sergeant divided the remaining food and they ate their last meal. The general idea was to get down under cover of darkness and make their way to the Bois de Vincennes. There was much less shooting. Evening was imposing its calm. There was nothing visible on the rooftops; yet they felt that every windowsill, every balcony, concealed a danger, the side of every chimney was capable of being a soldier's shield and the other side that of his enemy. The sergeant and the men crawled off to explore. Two Germans remained in the hideout with the weapons and water. They were to shoot only in case of emergency. Erik and Riton went around the chimney and sat down at the foot of that cliff, with the machine gun between Riton's legs. Erik was weary. His springy blond beard softened his face, which was hollowed by fatigue. Neither of them spoke. They were coming out of their tangled sleep. Their eyes were dim, their mouths slack. The visibility was a little better from their observatory and they could see a few housefronts and windows. Opposite them, about two hundred yards away, one of the windows lit up with a faint, shifting light. A man's silhouette stood out in the rectangle. Riton aimed and then fired a burst. The silhouette moved back into the shadow. Erik's firm, imperious hand came down on Riton's.