Germinal (79 page)

‘Hold on,' Étienne stammered, ‘I'll soon get rid of him.'

He pushed the body away with his foot. But soon they could feel it bumping against their legs again.

‘For Christ's sake, go away!'

But after a third attempt Étienne had to let it be. Some current must be bringing it back all the time. Chaval was refusing to leave; he wanted to be with them, to be right up close to them. He was a gruesome companion, and his presence made the air even fouler. All through that day they went without water, resisting the need and believing they would rather die than drink it, and only on the following day did the pain finally change their minds: they would push the body away each time they took a mouthful, but drink they did. They might as well not have bothered smashing his skull in if he was now going to come between them again, as stubbornly jealous as ever. Even though he was dead, he would always be with them, to the bitter end, preventing them from ever being alone together.

Another day went by, and another. With each little wave Étienne could feel the man he had killed gently bumping against
him in the water, like a companion nudging him quietly to remind him of his presence. And each time he would give a shudder. He kept seeing him in his mind's eye, all green and bloated, with his squashed face and his red moustache. Then he couldn't remember any more and began to think he hadn't killed him, that this was Chaval swimming in the water and about to bite him. Catherine now cried constantly for long periods at a time, after which she would lapse, exhausted, into semi-consciousness. Eventually she fell into a deep sleep from which it was impossible to rouse her. Étienne would wake her up, and she would mumble incoherently before going straight back to sleep, sometimes without even opening her eyes; and he had now put his arm round her waist in case she slid off and drowned. It fell to him to reply to the comrades. The sound of the picks was getting closer, from somewhere behind his back. But his own strength was failing, and he had lost the will to tap. They knew they were there, so why tire himself out further? He no longer cared whether they came or not. The long wait had left him in such a dazed state that for hours at a time he would quite forget what it was he was actually waiting for.

There was one crumb of comfort. The water was going down, and Chaval's body drifted away. The rescue party had been at work for nine days now, and Étienne and Catherine were just taking their first steps along the roadway again when a horrifying explosion threw them to the ground. They groped for each other in the dark and then huddled together, terrified out of their wits, uncomprehending, thinking that disaster had struck once more. Nothing stirred, and the sound of the picks had stopped.

In the corner where they were sitting side by side, Catherine gave a little laugh:

‘It must be lovely outside…Come on, let's go and see.'

At first Étienne fought against this delusion, but even his stronger head found it catching, and he lost all grip on reality. Their five senses were beginning to play them false, especially Catherine's, who was delirious with fever and tormented by the need to speak and make gestures with her hands. The ringing in her ears had turned into birdsong and the gentle murmur of
running water; she caught the strong smell of trampled grass; and she clearly saw large patches of yellow swimming in front of her eyes, so large that she thought she was out in the cornfields by the canal on a beautiful sunny day.

‘Oh, it's so hot today!…Come, take me, and let's be together for ever and ever.'

As he held her, she rubbed herself slowly against his body, chattering away in a happy girlish fashion:

‘We've been so silly to wait all this time! I'd have gone with you from the start, but you didn't realize and just sulked…And then, do you remember, those nights at home when we couldn't sleep, lying there listening to each other breathing and desperately wanting to do it?'

Her gaiety was infectious, and he joked as he recalled their unspoken affection for each other:

‘Remember that time you hit me! Oh yes, you did! You slapped me on both cheeks!'

‘It was because I loved you,' she murmured. ‘You see, I'd forbidden myself to think about you. I kept telling myself it was all over between us. But deep down I knew that one day sooner or later we'd be together…We just needed the opportunity, some lucky moment, didn't we?'

A cold shiver ran down his back, as though he wanted to banish such fond thoughts, but then he said slowly:

‘It's never all over. People just need a bit of luck, and then they can start over again.'

‘So you'll have me, then? Is this the moment at last?'

With that she went limp in his arms, barely conscious. She was so weak that her already faint voice trailed away altogether. Fearing the worst, he pressed her to his heart:

‘Are you all right?'

She sat up in astonishment.

‘Yes, of course!…Why not?'

But his question had roused her from her dream. She stared wildly at the darkness and wrung her hands as a fresh wave of sobbing overtook her.

‘My God, my God! It's so dark!'

Gone were the cornfields and the smell of grass, the skylarks
singing and the big yellow sun. She was back in the mine with its rock-falls and floods, back in the stench-filled darkness and listening to the lugubrious sound of dripping water, down in this cave where they had lain dying for so many days. The tricks played by her senses now made it all seem even more horrific. Once again she fell prey to the superstitions of her childhood and saw the Black Man, the old miner whose ghost haunted the pit and strangled the life out of naughty girls.

‘Listen, did you hear that?'

‘No, I can't hear anything.'

‘Yes, you can. It's the Man…You know?…There, that's him…The earth has bled itself to death out of revenge because somebody cut its vein, and now he has come. Look, there he is! You can see him! Blacker than the darkness…Oh, I'm so afraid, so afraid!'

She shivered and fell silent. Then, very quietly, she went on:

‘No, it isn't. It's still the other one.'

‘Which other one?'

‘The one who's with us. The one who's dead.'

She couldn't get the thought of Chaval out of her head, and she began to talk about him in a rambling way, about the miserable life they'd had together, about the one time he'd been nice to her, at Jean-Bart, and about all the other days of cuddles and bruises when he'd smother her with kisses having just beaten the daylights out of her.

‘Honestly, he's after us! He's going to have another go, he wants to stop us ever being alone together!…It's his same old jealousy!…Oh, send him away! Please! Keep me with you, keep me all to yourself!'

She had thrown her arms round Étienne's neck and was clinging to him, seeking out his mouth and pressing her lips passionately against his. The darkness parted, the sun returned, and she began once more to laugh the happy laugh of a girl in love. And he, trembling as his skin felt the touch of her body, half naked under her jacket and tattered trousers, pulled her towards him, roused in his manhood. Now at last they had their wedding night, down in this tomb upon a bed of mud. For they did not want to die before knowing happiness: theirs was a
stubborn need to live life, and to make a life, just one last time. And thus, despairing of all else, they loved each other, in the midst of death.

Then there was nothing. Étienne sat on the ground, still in the same corner, with Catherine lying motionless across his knees. Hour after hour went by. For a long time he thought she was asleep, then he touched her: she was very cold. She was dead. And yet he did not move, for fear of waking her. The thought that he had been the first to have her as a woman, and that she could be pregnant, moved him. He had other thoughts, too, about wanting to go away with her and about the joyous things they would do together, but they were so vague that they seemed simply to stroke his brow like the gentle breath of sleep. He was growing weaker and could manage only the smallest movement, such as slowly raising his hand to stroke her cold, stiff body, making sure she was still there, like a child asleep on his lap. Everything was gradually fading into nothingness: the darkness itself had vanished, and he was nowhere, beyond time and space. Yes, there was a tapping sound just behind his head, and it was getting louder and louder; but to begin with he had felt so completely exhausted that he couldn't be bothered to go and reply, and now he had no idea what was happening and kept dreaming that Catherine was walking ahead of him and that he was listening to the gentle clatter of her clogs. Two days went by: she hadn't moved, and he stroked her automatically, glad to know that she was so peaceful.

Étienne felt a jolt. He could hear a rumble of voices, and rocks were rolling down to his feet. When he saw a lamp, he wept. His blinking eyes followed the light, and he couldn't watch it enough, in ecstasy at the sight of this pinprick of reddish light which barely pierced the darkness. But now some comrades were lifting him up to carry him away, and he allowed them to pour spoonfuls of broth between his locked jaws. It was only when they reached the main Réquillart roadway that he recognized someone, Négrel the engineer, who was standing there in front of him; and these two men who despised each other, the rebellious worker and the sceptical boss, threw their arms round each other and sobbed their hearts out, both of them shaken to
the very core of their humanity. And into their immense sadness entered all the misery of countless generations and all the excess of pain and grief that it is possible to know in this life.

Up above, La Maheude lay slumped by the side of Catherine's body uttering one long, wailing scream after another in unceasing lament. Several other bodies had already been brought up and placed in a row on the ground; Chaval, who was presumed to have been crushed by a rock-fall, one pit-boy and two hewers whose bodies had been similarly smashed, their skulls now emptied of brains and their bellies swollen with water. Some women in the crowd were going out of their minds, tearing at their skirts and scratching themselves in the face. When they finally brought Étienne out, having accustomed him to the light of the lamps and fed him a little, he was no more than a skeleton, and his hair had turned completely white. People moved away, shuddering at the sight of this old man. La Maheude stopped screaming and gazed at him blankly with huge, staring eyes.

It was four o'clock in the morning. The cool April night was warming with the coming of day. Up in the clear sky the stars were beginning to flicker and fade as the first light of dawn tinged the eastern horizon with purple. And the black countryside lay slumbering, as yet barely touched by the faint stirring that precedes the world's awakening.

Étienne was striding along the Vandame road. He had just spent six weeks in hospital in Montsou. Still sallow-skinned and very thin, he had felt strong enough to leave, and leaving he was. The Company, still nervous about the safety of its pits and in the process of carrying out a series of dismissals, had told him that they could not keep him on and offered him a grant of a hundred francs together with some fatherly advice about quitting the mines, where the work would now be too hard for him. But he had refused the hundred francs. Having written to Pluchart, he had already received a reply inviting him to Paris
and enclosing the cost of the fare. His old dream was coming true. After leaving hospital the previous day, he had stayed with Widow Desire at the Jolly Fellow. And when he got up early that morning, his one remaining wish had been to say goodbye to the comrades before catching the eight o'clock train from Marchiennes.

Étienne paused for a moment in the middle of the road, which was now flushed with pink. It was so good to breathe in this fresh, pure air of early spring. It was going to be a beautiful day. Slowly the dawn was breaking, and the sap was rising with the sun. He set off again, striking the ground firmly with his dog-wood stick and watching the distant plain emerge from the early-morning mists. He had not seen anybody since the disaster; La Maheude had visited the hospital once but had presumably been prevented from coming again. But he knew that the whole of Village Two Hundred and Forty was now employed at Jean-Bart, and that she herself had gone back to work.

The deserted roads were slowly filling up, and silent, pale-faced miners were constantly passing Étienne. The Company, so he'd heard, had been taking unfair advantage of its victory. When the miners had returned to the pits, vanquished by hunger after two and a half months out on strike, they had been forced to accept the separate rate for the timbering, this disguised pay-cut that was even more odious to them now that it was stained with the blood of their comrades. They were being robbed of an hour's pay and made to break their oath that they would never give in; and this enforced perjury stuck in their throats with the bitterness of gall. Work was resuming everywhere, at Mirou, at Madeleine, at Crèvecœur, at La Victoire. All over the region, along roads still plunged in darkness, the herd was tramping through the mists of dawn, long lines of men plodding along with their noses to the ground like cattle being led to the slaughterhouse. Shivering under their thin cotton clothes, they walked with their arms folded, rolling their hips and hunching their backs, to which their pieces, wedged between shirt and coat, added its hump. But behind this mass return to work, among these black, wordless shadows who neither laughed nor even looked about them, one could sense the teeth
gritted in anger, the hearts brimming with hatred, and the reluctant acceptance of one master and one master only: the need to eat.

The closer Étienne came to the pit, the more he saw their number increase. Almost all were walking on their own; even those who had come in groups followed each other in single file, worn out already, sick of other people and sick of themselves. He noticed one very old man with eyes that blazed like coals beneath his white forehead. Another man, young this time, was breathing heavily like a storm about to break. Many held their clogs in their hands, and it was hardly possible to hear them as they padded softly over the ground in their thick woollen socks. They streamed past endlessly, like the forced march of some conquered army retreating after a terrible defeat, heads bowed in sullen fury, desperate to join battle once more and take their revenge.