Funeral Rites (12 page)

Erik had been transformed. He cropped his hair less closely. What had been too soft in his expression had hardened. His cheeks had grown hollow. He had a growth of beard which he shaved every day. Marching, exercise, and physical training had strengthened his muscles even more. But his eyes still had a bland, faraway look, and his mouth, which was sharply outlined and amazingly sinuous, was as sad as ever. His voice finally now had assurance when he spoke to the executioner. It no longer had shrill notes and the trembling that accompanied them, notes that will come back when he is a prisoner in the apartment of Jean's mother.

Yet there were times when he would have liked to be the executioner so as to be able to contemplate himself
and enjoy from without the beauty he emitted: to receive it. As for me, I would have loved to perform a single one of those gestures so as to have been caught, if only fleetingly, in a moment of beauty. When a speeding train gives me a glimpse of a boy standing in a fog amidst wet leaves and dead branches, a boy whose shoulder supports the weight of a big fellow whose breath mingles with his friend's, I no doubt envy his beauty, his ragged grace, and his luck in serving a happy minute. I console myself with the thought that he can't enjoy the moment because he is unaware of its charm and is waiting to get it over with.

I said earlier that Pierrot was willful and gentle. A word about his will: as a child, he spent the summer in the country. He would often fish in a stream and bait his line with the long worms called earthworms. He would look for them in loose ground and cram them into a pocket of his kneepants. The habit of biting one's nails is often accompanied by a corollary of putting into the mouth whatever the hand happens upon. Pierrot would mechanically pick from his pocket the dried bread crumbs of his four o'clock snack and eat them. One evening, he took from his pocket something hard and dry and put it into his mouth. The warmth and moisture quickly restored the softness of the shriveled worm which had remained in the pocket where it had dried and which the darkness had prevented the boy from recognizing. He found himself caught between fainting with disgust or mastering his situation by willing it. He willed it. He made his tongue and palate knowingly and patiently suffer the hideous contact. This willfulness was his first poet's attitude, an attitude governed by pride. He was ten years old.

Other and more generally practiced concerns were
going to direct Erik as he pursued his individual destiny. Although the theft of the watch had delivered that proud young brute to the executioner, pride had led him to Russia where at times he still suffered at the memory of two years of humiliation. As shame assured him that not a single bond remained between him and human beings, he was ready for anything. In short, since circumstances—then judged unfortunate—had set him on a path that leads to the renunciation of honor, he would take advantage of them to rebuild his life on the basis of that terrible failing, not so as to erect it with abjection as its foundation but rather to allow the abject to make it achieve power.

I still do not know why it is necessary for Erik to commit a murder at this point. The explanations I shall give will not seem valid at first. However, if the murder of the child is out of place, that is, not in accordance with a logical order that justifies its presence in the novel, I must state that this act of Erik's comes in here, at this particular point, because it forces itself on me. It may shed light on what happens later in the story.

If the only sin—evil according to the world—is to take life, it is not surprising that murder is the symbolic act of evil and that one instinctively recoils from it. The reader will therefore not be surprised that I wanted to be helped in my first murder. The declaration of war thrilled me. My hour had struck. I could kill a man without danger, I would know what one kills in oneself, and what remorse after killing is like. But without danger, I mean without danger of social reprobation, without incurring the prison sentence of the person who destroys life. At last I was going to strike out for my freedom.

One evening when I was strolling outside a small French village that had recently been taken, a stone
grazed the bottom of my trousers. I thought it was an attack or insult. My hand flew to my revolver. I was immediately on guard, that is, I bent one knee and spun around. I was on a small dune in the deserted countryside. Sixty feet away I saw a kid of about fifteen playing with a puppy, throwing stones which the animal retrieved. One of the carelessly thrown stones had grazed me. Fear and then anger of having been afraid and reacting with fear in sight of a child's innocent eyes, and the fact of having been a Frenchman's target, plus the nervousness of all my gestures, made me grab the grip of my revolver and tear it from its holster. In any other circumstance, I would have come to my senses. I would have sheathed my weapon, but I was alone and felt I was. Immediately, on looking at the child's delicate face, which delicacy made ironic, I realized that the moment had come to know murder. The swift, shoreless rivers of green anger were flowing within me, from north to south, from one hand to the other, mingling their boiling, impetuous waves and their calm, flat ones. My gaze was fixed in a set, grim, and yet sparkling face, for rays from all the features converged around the bridge of the nose. A cry might have saved me from the mute, blurred rattle that rose up, without emerging, from my stomach to my mouth. The child bent down in the twilight to take the slobbery stone from the dog's mouth. He straightened up with a laugh. Snow fell. Before my eyes, such gentleness descended upon the woebegone landscape to soften the ridges of things, the angles of gestures, the thorny crown of the stones, a snow so light that my hand with the gun lowered a little. The joyous black puppy yelped twice as it frisked about the child. The twilight soothed bleeding Europe. The boy's lips were parted, and I parted mine in the same way, but without smiling, for I inhaled not
air but more hatred. The dog was leaping about its bare-kneed master without a sound.

The green waves, which had grown calm for a moment, rolled through me faster and faster. The cataracts set electrical machines going, turbines, something like that, dynamos which emitted a terrible current that escaped through the gauze, piercing the veil of snow, splitting the muslins that the sweetness of the child's face spread like a twilight of milk over the countryside which had been frightened by the anger of the offended soldier.

“Violence calms storms, the time has come.”

I felt my weapon in my right hand. A column of darkness or pure water, contained by the shape of our lips, circulated from my open mouth to the open mouth of the child sixty feet away and linked us down as far as our stomachs. But my periwinkle gaze was destroying the strict appearances and seeking the secret of death. My black police cap, which had been too far down over my eye, was displaced by my brusque about-face, fell on my shoulder and to the ground.

“I'm shedding my leaves” was a thought that flashed through my mind, barely grazing me. My left hand made a very subtle gesture to snatch up the fallen cap. A faint green vapor rose up over my subsided rivers. A touch of humanity brought thought back to me, slowly, though only three seconds had elapsed between the brusque about-face and the gesture of aiming. My more human glances were even graver, more bent on melting the gentleness that the boy's smile had snowed over the stunned countryside, which had fallen on its ass without daring to complain. In order to aim, I had only to shift the gun imperceptibly, to right the muzzle, whose cunning black mouth, though it had been humiliated for a moment at watching the earth laugh below, suddenly became strong
in the assurance that it was expressing an eternal, obvious truth: a tiny fraction of an inch in the new aim was sufficient. Nevertheless, my hand moved slowly and solemnly as I readjusted my aim. The black-sleeved arm holding the gun strayed a huge distance away, moved the hand into the darkness, passed behind the mound over which the child towered, enveloped him several times, bent back, returned, passed behind me, and tied me to the child, who was still linked to me by the column of darkness. Then, getting still longer and suppler, the arm enclosed the countryside, seized the darkness, compressed it, fastened it in that slow but sovereign movement of encircling the moment and turned it into a repulsive block traversed by the blue ray of Erik's increasingly human gaze. The arm made a few more loops, grabbing and strangling every living thing it encountered, and brought back in front of me, waist-high—a bit higher—and slightly more to the right, the resolute revolver. The first stroke of seven rang out from the invisible belfry. Stars in the sky, maybe one or two. I felt that the gun was becoming an organ of my body, an essential organ whose black orifice, which was marked by a more gleaming little circle, was, for the time being, my own mouth, which at last was having its say. My finger on the trigger. The highest moment of freedom was attained. To fire on God, to wound him and make him a deadly enemy. I fired. I fired three shots.

“A boy as pretty as that can make me shoot three times.”

Anyway, the first shot was the only one that mattered. The child fell as one does in such cases, giving way at the knees and with his face against the ground. I immediately looked at the gun and knew I was truly a murderer, with the muzzle of my revolver like that of the
gangsters, the killers, in the comic books of my childhood. The dramatic moment and movement were fortunately not over, for contact with life would have killed me. Everything that bore on the drama continued it. The smoke and the black muzzle, shadowed by the powder, were the main things that riveted my attention on the drama. With my eyes still fixed on them, I lowered my body, not by stooping, but by bending my knees, and, with my left hand, picked up my cap, which lay at my feet. I kept it in my hand and stood up, without losing sight of the muzzle. I knew that my return to earth would be frightful. The last stroke of seven rang out. From the dryness that coated my lips and palate, I realized that my mouth was still open, and I felt the horror of having a physical and magical relationship with a warm corpse. The child must have clenched his teeth, must have cut the column of darkness that was traversed by starlit waves with his incisors; it had probably been broken by the body's falling on the face. Nevertheless, I closed my mouth so as to cut off all contact with the child. Then, I tried to turn around and leave without seeing the result of my first murder. I felt somewhat ashamed of my cowardice. The German columns were on the lookout all around.

“I will. Why not? Maybe he's only wounded. No, he'd scream. No, they don't always scream. The executioner used to tell me about his ax jobs.”

“He taught me courage. I will.”

I shifted my eyes to the outstretched child, but at the same time I raised the revolver so that my gaze would cross and register the muzzle, which was still warm, and include it in the game that had been bagged, where it would perform the function of establishing the continuity of the drama, thus keeping me on a nervous pinnacle of
calm and silence where men's fear and their cries and their indignation could not reach me. I looked at my outstretched victim. The astonished dog sniffed at his feet and head. I was surprised that the black puppy did not begin a clever funeral ceremony worthy of a prince by a secret process known to black dogs, that it did not summon a band of angels to come and bring its master back to life or carry him up to heaven. The dog was still sniffing.

“Luckily it's not howling, it's not wailing. If it wailed, all the angels would come running.” I thought that very fast, as my left foot was simultaneously stepping back. The ground was soft. I sank a little into a small hole and immediately felt I was supported at the waist by the executioner with whom I had been mired in the Tiergarten. Then the thought of my boots occurred to me, and the boots reminded me that I was a German soldier.

“I'm a German soldier,” I thought. Then, with my eyes still on the scene of the corpse and the dog, I lowered my left arm; the gun, which was both executant and sign of the drama, disappeared from the scene, which I saw in its cold nakedness, in its commonplace abandon, even more lonely in that lovely twilight of peace, as a foul murder discovered at dawn near the slums. Feeling a little stronger and more sure of myself, I noted the details: the child's round behind, his curly head on his bent arm, his bare calves, the surprised black dog, a vague clump of trees. I took a second step back. Suddenly, I was afraid of having that murder at my heels pursuing me through the night. Finally I dared to turn around. Holding my black cap in my left hand, which hung motionless against my body, and the revolver at the end of my outstretched right arm, rather far from my body, I slowly went down into the night in my German boots and my black trousers,
which were swollen with sweaty effluvia and curly vapors, and began moving toward the dreadful and comforting life of all men, followed by a procession of helmeted, powdered, flower-bedecked, fragrant warriors, some of them laughing and some severe, some of them naked and some clad in leather, iron, and copper, emerging in a body from the gaping chest of the murdered kid. They were carrying red oriflammes with black symbols and were being led by the solemn march of the world's silence. Trampling on the bleeding vanquished, frightened not by remorse or possible punishment but by his glory, Erik Seiler returned to barracks. He went by roads that ran along a torrent whose roaring filled the darkness. His curls were damp. At the roots of the hair above the forehead were delicate beads of sweat. He felt he was borne up by fear itself and that if it stopped he would not only collapse but be annihilated, for he realized he was now only a very fragile framework of salt that was supporting the undamaged head, with its eyes and hair and its mass of brain that secreted fear. The flesh of his body had all melted away. Only the white, very light frame was left. (Do you know the amusing physical experiment in which a ring that hangs from a thread is supported after the thread is burned? The thread is soaked in very salty water. The ring is then tied to it. Then you burn the thread with a match. The ring stays up, supported by the delicate cord of salt.) Erik felt he was composed of a skeleton as breakable and white as that cord, which was traversed by a shudder from one particle of salt to the next, also like a chain composed of doddering old men. If a shock occurred, if fear itself were lacking, he would crumble beneath the great weight of his head, which was needed to preserve his consciousness of fear. He was walking at the edge of the torrent and heard its
roar. The big shadow of the executioner was walking at his right, supported by the bulkier and slightly paler mass of Hitler, who loomed against the starry background of the night as a block of blacker darkness in which one felt there were sharp rocks, and also caverns whose silent call was a danger to Erik who—had he heeded their wailing ever so little—would have been willing to lie down in them and sleep and die, that is, to let himself be caught in the austere reins of remorse and oblivion. The torrent was booming at his left. The noise became almost visible. The soldier's blue scarf shivered in the wind. He thought he recognized a man's breath, the caress of a lock of blond hair, of a finger of light and ivory. His skeleton of salt shuddered. Then calm and flesh returned to him when he realized it was the silk and the wind. I could make out in the darkness a tangle of stiff, mournful branches that loomed against the sky like black Chantilly lace. Its strangeness exceeded ugliness to the point of the most evil intent. I kept walking, though without hesitation. In that nocturnal landscape, near an abbey where I was recopying this idiotic and sacred book, reliving Erik's anguish and giving it life by means of my own, I thought I recognized the dangerous spots where the fellows in the Resistance were on the lookout, and among them, just behind that rock, ready to pick me off, was Paulo, who was enveloped in shadow, silence, and hatred. I also imagined him in the midday sun observing from a distance the funeral of the maid's daughter as the procession very slowly made its way to the cemetery by the white motionless roads of a rocky countryside. The horse that was drawing the hearse was weary. The two choirboys, one of whom was holding a holy-water basin, were whistling a java under their breath. The priest was engaged in a monologue with God. The little maid was
perspiring in her black clothes under her veils. She tried for a while to keep up with the procession, but she was soon tired and the hearse outdistanced her. Her shoes hurt her. One of them became unlaced and she dared not tie it, for she was not supple enough to bend down, and on the day of her child's funeral it would not have been proper for her to put her foot on a stone during the procession, for such a gesture, in addition to immobilizing you in the jaunty posture of a very proud lady going up a flight of stairs, distracts you from your grief (or from everything that should signify it, which is even more serious) by interesting you in the things of this world. The rites allow only a few gestures; drying one's tears with a handkerchief. (One can know that one has a handkerchief, although not to know it and to let the tears flow is proof of greater sorrow, but the maid was too weary to weep.) You can also wrap yourself in your crape. On the way from the hospital to the church she let the veil fall over her face, and as she was looking at the world through the transparent black cloth, it seemed to her that the world was grieved, mourning her sadness, and that touched her. In addition, the veil, by isolating her, endowed her with a dignity she had never known, and the great heroine of the drama was herself. She herself was the dead person who was solemnly walking the road of the living, for the last time exposing herself to everyone's respect, a dead yet living person on the way to the grave. From the hospital to the church, she was that dead person, taking it upon herself to allow—conscious that she was doing so—her daughter to tread the everyday road for the last time. But when she left the city to go to the cemetery in the country, she put the veil behind her by simply turning that fantastically winged hat around her head. Walking then became an act of drudgery, which
she piously wanted to perform but the difficulty of which exhausted her. She undid a hook of her corset, and then, a hundred yards farther, another. The procession drew away from her. She was surprised, however, to recognize the fields, the groves, the dry stone walls. “After all, I'm going to the cemetery,” she said to herself, “and now that I'm so far away from my daughter (for she thought she would never catch up with the hearse) I could take a short cut.” She didn't dare. Her shoe was hurting her more and more. Soldiers, using a slang expression, sometimes say during forced marches: “My dogs are barking.” “My dogs are barking,” thought the little maid, but she reproached herself for the thought, which recalled too precisely her relations with a private in an eastern city. She turned her mind to her daughter and, immediately raising her eyes, saw her so far away that she tried to catch up by walking faster: “It's walk or croak.” She thought of the soldiers again and again felt ashamed. All these inner incidents were exhausting her.