Germinal (78 page)

‘Go on, love.'

The tears that she had been holding back now poured down her cheeks. She cried for a long time, neither having the strength to get up nor knowing whether or not she was hungry, but aching her whole body through. Étienne had got up and was pacing up and down, vainly tapping out the miners' tattoo and infuriated at having to spend the last remaining vestiges of his life down here, cheek by jowl with a rival he detested. There wasn't even enough room for them to die apart! Ten paces only, and then he had to turn round and there he was tripping over him again! And then there was the poor girl. Here they were fighting over her underneath the bloody ground! She would
belong to whoever survived the other, and if he himself went first, Chaval would steal her from him once again. Time dragged by as hour followed hour, and the revolting consequences of their life at close quarters grew worse, with their foul breath and the stench of bodily needs satisfied in full view of each other. Twice Étienne lunged at the rock as though to cleave it asunder with his own bare fists.

Another day was drawing to a close, and Chaval had sat down next to Catherine to share his last half-slice of bread with her. She was painfully chewing each mouthful, and he was making her pay for each one with a caress, determined in his jealousy to have her once more, and in the other man's presence. Past caring, she let him do as he pleased. But when he tried to take her, she protested.

‘Get off. You're crushing me.'

Étienne was shaking, having pressed his forehead against the timbering in order not to see. He leaped towards them in a fury.

‘Leave her alone, for Christ's sake!'

‘It's none of your business,' said Chaval. ‘She's my woman. I can do what I bloody like with her!'

He grabbed hold of her again and held her tight in his arms, out of bravado, crushing his red moustache against her mouth:

‘Leave us in peace, will you! Why don't you bugger off over there for a while.'

But Étienne, white-lipped, shouted:

‘If you don't leave her alone, so help me I'll throttle you.'

Chaval was on his feet in a flash, realizing from the piercing tone in Étienne's voice that he meant to have the matter out once and for all. Death seemed to be a long time coming: one of them would have to make way for the other here and now. It was their old enmity showing its face again, down beneath the earth where soon they would both be laid to rest; and yet there was so little room to move that they couldn't even brandish their fists without grazing them on the rock.

‘You'd better watch out,' growled Chaval. ‘This time I'm going to have you.'

At that, Étienne went mad. His eyes clouded over with a red mist, and his throat bulged as the blood rushed to his head. He
was seized with the need to kill, an irresistible, physical need like a tickle of phlegm in the throat that brings on a violent, unstoppable fit of coughing. It rose up and burst forth, beyond his power to control it, under the impulse of the hereditary flaw within him. He grabbed hold of a lump of shale in the wall, loosened it and tore it free. It was large and heavy. Using both hands and with superhuman strength, he brought it crashing down on Chaval's skull.

He did not even have time to jump back. He fell where he was, his face smashed, his skull split open. His brains had spattered against the roof, and a jet of purple was pouring from the wound like water spurting from a spring. A pool formed immediately, reflecting the hazy star of the lamp. Dark shadow filled the walled cave, and the body on the ground looked like the black hump of a pile of coal.

Étienne leaned over him, wide-eyed, and stared. So it was done, he had killed. The memory of all his past struggles came confusedly to his mind, memories of his long, futile battle against the poison that lay dormant in every sinew of his body, the alcohol which had slowly accumulated over the generations in his family's blood. And yet if he was drunk now, it could only be on hunger: his parents' alcoholism had sufficed at one remove. His hair stood on end at the horror of this murder and, though all his upbringing was against it, his heart was racing with joy, the sheer animal joy of a sated appetite. And then he felt an upsurge of pride, the pride of the fittest. He had suddenly remembered the young soldier, his throat slit with a knife, killed by a child. Now he, too, had killed.

Catherine had got to her feet, and she gave a loud shriek.

‘My God! He's dead!'

‘Are you sorry?' Étienne asked fiercely.

She was gasping for breath, at a loss for words. Then she swayed and flung herself into his arms.

‘Oh, kill me too! Let's both of us die!'

She wrapped her arms round his shoulders and hugged him tight, as he hugged her; and together they hoped that they were about to die. But death was in no hurry, and they loosened their embrace. Then, as she hid her eyes, he dragged the poor wretch
across the ground and pushed him down the incline, to clear the cramped space they still had to live in. Life would have been impossible with that corpse under their feet. But they were horrified to hear the body land with a splash. What? Had the flood filled the hole up already? Then they caught sight of it, overflowing into their roadway.

And so the struggle began again. They had lit the last lamp, and in its dwindling light they could see the floodwater steadily, stubbornly, rising. It reached their ankles, then their knees. The road sloped upwards, so they sought refuge at the far end, which gave them a few hours' respite. But the water caught up with them, and it was soon waist-high. Standing with their backs pressed against the rock, they watched it rise and rise. Once it reached their mouths, it would all be over. They had hung the lamp from the roof, where it cast a yellow gleam over the rippled surface of the fast-moving water; but as it faded, all they could see was its semicircle of light being gradually eaten away by the darkness, which itself seemed to increase as the floodwater rose; and suddenly the darkness engulfed them, the lamp had spluttered on its last drop of oil and gone out. They were in total, utter blackness, the blackness of the earth where now they would sleep without ever again opening their eyes to the brightness of the sun.

‘God Almighty!' Étienne swore softly.

Catherine huddled against him, as though she had felt the darkness trying to grab her. Quietly she recited the miners' saying:

‘Death blows out the lamp.'

Yet in the face of this new threat they instinctively fought on, revived by a feverish desire to live. Étienne began furiously to dig into the shale with the hook from the lamp, and Catherine helped with her bare nails. They carved out a kind of raised bench, and when they had hoisted themselves on to it, they found themselves sitting with their legs dangling and their backs hunched under the roof. The icy water now reached only as far as their heels; but gradually they felt its cold grip on their ankles, and their calves, and their knees, as the flood rose remorselessly, inexorably, higher and higher. They had not been able to level
the seat out properly, and it was so wet and slimy that they had to hold on tight in order not to slide off. The end had come, for how long could they go on waiting like this, exhausted, starving, without food or light, and confined to this niche in the wall where they didn't even dare move? But it was the darkness they found the hardest to bear, for it prevented them from observing the approach of death. There was deep silence. The bloated mine lay perfectly still; and all they could feel beneath them, swelling up from the roadways below, was the rising tide of its noiseless sea.

Hour followed upon black hour, though they could not tell how long it had been for their sense of time was now almost gone. Their torment should have made the minutes drag, but instead it made them race past. They thought they'd been trapped for only two days and one night whereas in reality they were coming to the end of their third day. They had given up all hope of being saved; nobody knew they were there – in any case nobody had the means to reach them – and hunger would finish them off even if the floodwater didn't. They thought of tapping out the signal one last time, but the stone was under the water. In any case, who would hear them?

Catherine had leaned her aching head against the coal-seam in weary resignation when suddenly she gave a start:

‘Listen,' she said.

At first Étienne thought she meant the faint sound of the rising water. So he lied, hoping to comfort her:

‘It's only me. I was moving my legs.'

‘No, no, not that!…Further away. Listen.'

And she pressed her ear to the coal. He realized what she meant and did the same. They held their breath and waited for some seconds. Then, far away, very faintly, they heard three carefully spaced taps. But they still couldn't believe it; perhaps their ears were making the noise, perhaps it was the rock shifting. And they didn't know what they could use to answer with.

Étienne had an idea.

‘You've still got the clogs. Take them off and use the heels.'

She tapped out the miners' signal; they listened, and once again, far away, they made out the sound of three taps. Twenty
times they did it, and twenty times the reply came. They were crying and hugging each other, nearly falling off as they did so. The comrades were there at last, they were on their way. All memory of their anguished waiting and of the fury they had felt when their earlier tapping had gone unanswered was swept away in an outpouring of joy and love, as if all the rescuers had to do now was to open up the rock with their little fingers and set them free.

‘How about that!' she exclaimed happily. ‘Lucky I leaned my head when I did!'

‘That's some hearing you've got!' he replied. ‘I didn't hear a thing.'

From then on they took it in turns so that one of them was always listening and ready to reply to the slightest signal. Soon they could hear the sound of picks: they must be beginning to cut a way through to them, they must be sinking a new shaft. Not a sound escaped them. But their elation subsided. Try as they might to put on a brave face for each other, they were beginning to lose hope again. At first they had discussed the situation endlessly: it was clear the men were coming from Réquillart, they were digging down through the seam, perhaps they were making three shafts, because there were always three men digging. But then they began to talk less and eventually relapsed into silence when they considered the enormous mass of rock separating them from the comrades. They pursued their thoughts in silence, calculating the days upon days it would take someone to bore through so much rock. The men would never reach them in time, they could both have died twenty times over by then. Not daring to say anything to each other as their own anguish increased, they gloomily answered the calls by drumming out their signal with the clogs, not in hope but out of an instinctive need to let people know that they were still alive.

Another day passed, and then another. They had now been down there for six days. The water, having reached their knees, was neither rising nor falling; and their legs felt as though they were dissolving in its icy bath. They could lift them out for an hour or so, but it was so uncomfortable sitting in this position that they suffered terrible cramp and were forced to put them
back. Every ten minutes they had to wriggle their bottoms back up the slippery rock. Jagged fragments of coal dug into their backs, and they had a permanent sharp pain at the tops of their spines from bowing their heads all the time to avoid the rock above. The atmosphere was becoming more and more suffocating, since the water had compressed the air into the sort of bubble they were sitting in. The sound of their voices, muffled therefore, seemed to come from a long way away. Their ears started buzzing with strange noises: they would hear bells ringing madly or what sounded like a herd of animals galloping through an endless hailstorm.

At first Catherine suffered horribly from the lack of food. She would press her poor clenched fists to her throat, and her breath came in long, wheezing, ear-splitting moans as if her stomach were being removed by forceps. Étienne, racked by the same torture, was groping round desperately in the dark when, right next to him, his fingers came on a piece of half-rotten timber, which he broke up with his nails. He gave Catherine a handful, which she devoured greedily. For two days they lived off this mouldy piece of wood; they ate the whole thing and were in despair when they finished it, scratching away till their fingers were raw in the attempt to start on other bits of wood that were still sound and whose fibres refused to give. Their torment grew worse, and they were furious to find that they couldn't eat the material of their clothes. Étienne's leather belt brought a modicum of relief: he bit off little pieces for her, which she chewed to a pulp and tried her hardest to swallow. It gave their jaws something to do while affording them the illusion of eating. Then, when the belt was finished, they started to chew their clothes again, sucking them for hours on end.

But soon these violent cramps passed, and their hunger was no more than a dull pain deep inside them, the sensation that their strength was slowly and gradually ebbing out of them. They would no doubt have died already if they had not had as much water as they wanted. They had only to bend over and drink from their cupped hands; and they did so continually, for they had such a burning thirst that even all this water could not quench it.

On the seventh day Catherine was leaning forward to drink when her hand knocked against something floating in front of her.

‘Here, what's this?'

Étienne felt around in the darkness.

‘I don't know. It seems to be the cover of a ventilation door.' She drank the water, but as she was taking a second mouthful, the object touched her hand again. And she gave a terrible shriek:

‘Oh, my God! It's him!'

‘Who?

‘Him. You know. I could feel his moustache.'

It was Chaval's body, which had floated up the incline towards them on the rising water. Étienne stretched out his arm and felt the moustache and the crushed nose; and he shuddered with revulsion and fear. Catherine suddenly felt terribly sick and spat out the rest of the water. It was as though she'd just been drinking blood, as though the deep pool in front of her was actually a pool of this man's blood.