Jealousy and in the Labyrinth (29 page)

The soldier shrugs evasively: "I have things to do."

"And what have you got in your box?" the lame man asks.

Starting down the stairs without stopping this time, the soldier grumbles an irritated answer: "Nothing much." Standing opposite the man, he suddenly flattens himself against the railing. Nimbly the lame man shifts his crutch and moves toward the wall. The soldier passes in front of him and continues down the hallway. He has no need to turn around to know that the lame man is staring after him, leaning forward on his crutch.

The door to the street is not locked. As he is turning the handle the soldier hears the bantering, vaguely threatening voice behind him: "You seem to be in a hurry this morning." He goes out the door and closes it behind him. On the stamped metal plaque fastened to the jamb he reads: "Headquarters, Military Stores of the North and Northwest Regions."

It is so cold in the street that the soldier is shocked. Yet he feels that the cold is doing him good. But he would like to sit down. He must content himself with leaning against the stone wall, setting his feet on the strip of fresh snow between the housefronts and the trampled, yellowish path. In his overcoat pocket his right hand again comes in contact with the large, smooth marble.

It is an ordinary glass marble about an inch in diameter. Its entire surface is completely regular and highly polished. The interior is colorless and transparent except for a central opaque nucleus the size of a pea. This nucleus is black and round. From whatever angle the marble is examined, the nucleus appears as a black disc a fraction of an inch across. Around it the mass of limpid glass reveals only unrecognizable fragments of the red-and-white pattern of which it occupies a circular fraction. Beyond this circle extends on all sides the checkerboard pattern of the oilcloth covering the table. But in the surface of the marble is also reflected, pale and distorted and greatly reduced in scale, the furnishings of the café.

The child rolls the marble gently across the red-and- white checked oilcloth, not pushing it hard enough to make it move beyond the edges of the rectangular surface. It crosses the latter diagonally, follows the long side, returns to its point of departure. Then the child picks it up, stares at it a long time, turning it round and round. Then his large serious eyes shift to the soldier: "What's inside it?" he says, in his voice which is too low to be a boy's.

"I don't know. Glass too, probably."

"It's black."

"Yes, it's black glass."

The child examines the marble again and asks: "Why?" And when the soldier does not answer he repeats: "Why is it inside?"

"I don't know," the soldier says, then after a few seconds: "To look pretty probably."

"But it's not pretty," the child says.

He has lost almost all his mistrust now, and although his voice still has its grave, almost adult timbre, he speaks with a childish simplicity, sometimes even with a naïve abandon. He is still wearing his black cape over his shoulders, but he has taken off his beret, revealing his short blond hair parted on the right.

This boy is the one from the café, apparently, who is not the same as the one who took the soldier (or who will take him, afterwards) to the barracks—from which, as a matter of fact, he has brought back the marble. In any case, it is this boy who has brought the soldier into the café run by the large, thickset, taciturn man, where he has drunk a glass of red wine and eaten two slices of stale bread. He felt stronger after this snack, and to thank the child he has given him the glass marble that was in his overcoat pocket.

"Are you really giving it to me?"

"Yes, I told you so."

"Where does it come from?"

"From my pocket."

"And before that?"

"Before that? I don't know about before that," the soldier says.

The child glances at him inquisitively, and probably incredulously. He immediately becomes somewhat more reserved again and his voice is much colder when he remarks, his eyes fixed on the overcoat collar:

"You've unsewn your number."

The soldier tries to make a joke of the matter. "It's no use any more, you know."

The child does not smile. He does not look as if the explanation were satisfactory.

"But I know it," he says. "It was 12,345."

The soldier does not answer. The boy continues:

"Is it because they're going to come today that you took it off?"

"How do you know they're going to come today?"

"My mother ..." the boy begins, but he goes no further.

To say something, the soldier asks: "And she lets you run around the streets?"

"I don't run around. There was an errand to do."

"Is she the one who sent you?"

The child hesitates. He looks at the soldier as if he were trying to guess what is coming next, where he is being led to, what kind of trap is being set for him.

"No," he says finally, "she's not."

"So it was your father?" the soldier asks.

This time the boy decides not to answer. The soldier himself has been speaking more slowly during the last few remarks. The slight animation the wine had given him has already vanished, and his fatigue gradually masters him again. Probably he still has fever; the effect of the pills has not lasted long. Nevertheless he continues, his voice lower:

"I ran into him this morning, I think, as I was leaving the barracks. He does pretty well on his bad leg. Yes, I'm sure that's who it was. So he wasn't at home..."

"He's not my father," the child says, and he turns his head toward the door.

The two workers at the next table have broken off their conversation, perhaps some time ago. The man whose back was turned has pivoted on his chair without letting go of his glass or raising it from the table, and he has remained in this position, his body half turned to look behind him toward the soldier, or toward the child. The latter has moved away. At least he is now some distance from the soldier to the left, near the wall where the white bulletins are posted announcing the military evacuation of the city. Complete silence has fallen in the room.

The soldier has remained in the same position: his elbows and forearms in front of him, his grease-spotted hands lying near each other about four inches apart, the right hand still holding the empty glass.

The bartender, a tall, thickset figure, has returned to the room and is standing behind his bar at the far right. He is motionless too, leaning slightly forward, his arms wide apart, his hands grasping the edge of the bar. He too is looking at the soldier, or at the child.

The child has put his beret back on his head. He has pulled both sides far down in order to cover his ears as much as possible, and he has pulled the cape around his body, holding it closed with both hands from inside. At the other end of the room, the bartender has not moved either. When he served the soldier just now, he told him that when he had first seen him through the glass, then crossing the threshold, he had taken him, in this city where no soldiers circulated any longer, and where everyone expected to see the newcomers appear at any moment—he had taken him for one of the latter. But this was only the effect of surprise, and once the soldier had come in, the bartender had immediately recognized the familiar uniform with the long overcoat and the leggings.

The boy had then closed the door behind this unexpected customer. The bartender standing at his post, the customer in middle-class clothes standing near the counter, the two workers sitting at their table, all stared at him without saying anything. It was the boy who had broken the silence, his low voice sounding so little like a child's that the soldier had supposed one of the four men watching him come in had spoken. The child was still standing near the door at this moment, behind him. But the others facing him remained motionless, mouths closed, lips motionless; and the sentence, without someone to have spoken it, seemed to be a title underneath a picture.

Afterwards the soldier, his glass of wine finished, has remained no longer in this silent café. He has picked up his package from under his chair and has left the room, accompanied as far as the door by the stares of the bartender and the two workers. After quickly readjusting the distended white string, he has put the package wrapped in brown paper back under his left arm.

Outside, the cold has shocked him once again. This overcoat must not be as thick as the other, unless the temperature has dropped a great deal during the night. The snow, hardened by repeated trampling, grates under his hobnail boots. The soldier walks faster in order to warm himself; urged on by the regularity of the noise his boots make as he walks, he advances without looking where he is going, as though aimlessly, through the deserted streets. When he decided to continue on his way, it was because of the notion that there still remained something to be done in order to get the box to its proper recipient. But when he found himself on the sidewalk again, having closed the café door behind him, he no longer knew which way to turn: he simply tried to proceed to the first meeting place (where he had not been met), without, moreover, losing any time thinking out the best way to get to it, since the man was no longer waiting for him there, now, in any case. The soldier's only hope is that the man lives in the vicinity and that he will meet him on his way. At the first crossroad he has found the lame man again.

Approaching the crossroad where the man is standing, at the corner of the last house, he realizes that it is not the lame man but the man in middle-class clothes who was drinking at the bar just now; he is not leaning on a crutch, but on an umbrella which he is holding in front of him, its tip stuck in the hard snow. His body leans forward slightly. He is wearing spats over his well polished shoes, narrow trousers, and a short overcoat which is probably fur-lined. He has no hat on his head, which is bald in front.

Just before the soldier reaches him, the man bows quickly, his umbrella remaining stuck at an angle in the snow in front of him. The material of the umbrella, rolled tight, is protected by a black silk sheath.

The soldier answers the bow with a nod and attempts to continue on his way, but the other man makes a gesture with his free hand, and the soldier imagines that the man is about to speak to him. He turns toward him and stands still, raising his eyebrows with the look of someone expecting to be spoken to. The man, as if he had foreseen nothing of the kind, then lowers his eyes toward the end of his umbrella stuck at an angle in the hard yellow snow. Yet he has kept his left arm half raised, elbow bent, hand open, thumb up. On his third finger he is wearing a heavy signet ring with a gray stone in it.

"Nasty weather, isn't it?" he says at last, and turns his head toward the soldier. The latter thus finds his expectation justified: he has the feeling again, very distinctly, that this little remark is only a prelude to more personal information. He therefore merely answers it by a vague acquiescence, a kind of grumble. He is still preparing to listen to what follows.

There is a considerable lapse of time, nevertheless, before the man with the umbrella and the fur-lined coat makes up his mind to ask: "Are you looking for something?" Is this the signal?

"I was supposed to meet. . ." the soldier begins.

Since the rest is too long in coming, the other man finishes the sentence himself: "Someone who never showed up?"

"Yes," the soldier says. "It was yesterday ... I mean the day before yesterday ... It was supposed to be at noon . .."

"And you came too late?"

"Yes . . . No. I must have come to the wrong place. A street corner . . ."

"It was a crossroads like this one? Under a lamppost?"

A black lamppost, its base embossed with a garland of stylized ivy whose pattern the snow accentuates . . . Immediately the soldier goes into a more detailed explanation; but no sooner has he begun than he is overcome by doubt and decides to confine himself, out of caution, to a series of incoherent phrases without apparent connection, for the most part incomplete and in any case quite obscure to his interlocutor, in which he himself, moreover, becomes more involved at each word. The other man does not show any sign that his attention is flagging; he listens with polite interest, his eyes squinting slightly, his head tilted to the left, showing no more comprehension than astonishment.

The soldier no longer knows how to stop. He has taken his right hand out of his pocket and moves it forward, clenching his fingers like someone afraid of losing some detail of a memory he thinks he is about to recapture, or like someone who wants to be encouraged, or who does not manage to be convincing, and he continues talking, losing himself in a plethora of increasingly confusing specifications, suddenly conscious of this, stopping at almost each step in order to start again in a different direction, convinced now, but too late, of having blundered from the beginning, and not seeing any means of extricating himself without planting still deeper suspicions in this anonymous pedestrian who merely mentioned the temperature or some banal subject of the sort, or who even asked him nothing at all—and who, moreover, continues to say nothing.

Even while struggling in his own nets, the soldier tries to reconstitute what has just happened: it must have occurred to him (but this now seems incredible) that the man he has been running after since his arrival in the city was perhaps this very man, with his silk-sheathed umbrella, his fur-lined coat, his big ring. He has wanted to allude to what he expected of him, yet without revealing his true mission, permitting the man, all the same, to determine it, if he was actually the man for whom the box wrapped in brown paper was intended, or at least the man who could say what must be done with it.