Journey to the End of the Night (8 page)

That was all the old lady knew, the rest of what had happened was a blank to her. Lola wanted to go and look at the empty tents, one of those funny sad impulses. We counted about twenty of them, a long one full of mirrors and a lot of small ones, candy stands, lotteries, even a small theater traversed with drafts. There was a tent in every space between the trees; one of them, near the Grand Avenue, had lost its flaps, it was as well ventilated as a punctured mystery.

These tents were leaning close to the mud and fallen leaves. We stopped near the last, the one that was bent lowest, it was pitching on its poles like a ship in the wind, with wildly flapping sails ready to snap the last of its cables. It swayed in the rising wind, a sheet of canvas flew up above the roof and flapped and flapped. The old name of the stand was written on the front in green and red letters; it had been a shooting gallery, the Gallery of the Nations. There was no one to take care of it now. Maybe the owner had gone shooting with the rest of them, with his customers.

What a lot of bullets the little targets in the stand had taken! All of them riddled with little white dots! A wedding, that always got a laugh out of them: tin figures in the first row, the bride with her flowers, the cousin, the soldier, the groom with a big red face, and in the second row the guests, who must have been killed a good many times when the carnival was still operating.

"I bet you're a good shot, aren't you, Ferdinand? If the carnival were still running, I'd challenge you ... You are a good shot, aren't you, Ferdinand?"

"No, I'm not a very good shot ..."

In the last row behind the wedding, another row was daubed in, the town hall with its flag. People must have shot at the town hall, too, when the gallery was working, at the windows, they'd open and a bell would clang, and they even shot at the little tin flag. And they'd shot at the regiment marching on an incline nearby, like mine on the Place Clichy, this one was between the pipes and the little balloons. People had shot at those things for all they were worth, and now they were shooting at me, yesterday and tomorrow.

"They're shooting at me, too, Lola!" I cried. It slipped out of me.

"Let's be going," she said ... "You're talking nonsense, Ferdinand, and we'll catch cold." We descended the main avenue, the Avenue Royale, toward Saint-Cloud, avoiding the mud. She held me by the hand, hers was tiny, but I couldn't think of anything but the tin wedding at the shooting gallery up there, which we had left behind us in the shadow of the trees. I even forgot to kiss Lola, something had come over me, I felt very funny. I think it was then that my head became so agitated, with all the ideas going around in it. It was dark when we got to the Pont de Saint-Cloud.

"Ferdinand, would you like to have dinner at Duval's? You like Duval's, don't you ... It would cheer you up ... There's always such a big crowd ... Unless you's rather eat in my room ... ," She was being very considerate that evening.

We finally decided on Duval's. But we'd hardly sat down when the place struck me as monstrous. I got the idea that these people sitting in rows around us were waiting for bullets to be fired at them from all sides while they were eating.

"Get out!" I warned them. "Beat it! They're going to shoot! They're going to kill you! The whole lot of you!"

I was hurried back to Lola's hotel! Everywhere I saw the same thing ... The people in the hallways of the Paritz all seemed to be on their way to be shot and so did the clerks behind the big desk, all of them just ripe for it, and the character down at the door with his uniform as blue as the sky and as golden as the sun, the doorman, and the officers and generals walking this way and that not nearly so gorgeous of course, but in uniform all the same, all ripe to be shot, there'd be shooting from every side, no one would escape, not this one, not that or the other. The time for joking was past ...

"They're going to shoot!" I yelled at the top of my lungs in the middle of the lobby.

"They're going to shoot! Beat it, all of you! ..." I went to the window and shouted some more. What a disturbance! "Poor soldier boy!" the people said. The concierge led me gently to the bar, by suasion. He gave me something to drink and I drank quite a lot, and then the M.P.'s came and took me away, not so gently. There'd been M.P.'s at the Gallery of the Nations, too. I'd seen them. Lola kissed me and helped them to take me away with their handcuffs.

Then I fell sick, I was delirious, driven mad by fear, they said at the hospital. Maybe so. The best thing to do when you're in this world, don't you agree, is to get out of it. Crazy or not, scared or not.

There was quite a commotion. Some people said: "That young fellow's an anarchist, they'll shoot him, the sooner the better ... Can't let the grass grow under our feet with a war on! ... But there were others, more patient, who thought I was just syphilitic and sincerely insane, they consequently wanted me to be locked up until the war was over or at least for several months, because they, who claimed to be sane and in their right minds, wanted to take care of me while they carried on the war all by themselves. Which proves that if you want people to think you're normal there's nothing like having an all-fired nerve. If you've got plenty of nerve, you're all set, because then you're entitled to do practically anything at all, you've got the majority on your side, and it's the majority who decide what's crazy and what isn't.

Even so my diagnosis was very doubtful. So the authorities decided to put me under observation for a while. My little friend Lola had permission to visit me now and then, and so did my mother. That was all.

We, the befogged wounded, were lodged in a secondary school at Issy-les-Moulineaux, especially rigged to take in soldiers like me, whose patriotism was either impaired or dangerously sick, and get us by cajolery or force to confess. The treatment wasn't really bad, but we felt we were being watched every minute of the day by the staff of silent male nurses endowed with enormous ears.

After a varying period of observation, we'd be quietly sent away and assigned to an insane asylum, the front, or, not infrequently, the firing squad.

Among the comrades assembled in that suspect institution, I always wondered while listening to them talking in whispers in the mess hall, which ones might be on the point of becoming ghosts.

In her little cottage near the gate dwelt the concierge, who sold us barley sugar and oranges as well as the wherewithal for sewing on buttons. She also sold us pleasure. For noncoms the price of pleasure was ten francs. Everybody could have it. But watch your step, because men tend to get too confiding on such occasions. An expansive moment could cost you dearly. Whatever was confided to her she repeated in detail to the Chief Medical Officer, and it went into your court-martial record. It seemed reliably established that she'd had a corporal of Spahis, a youngster still in his teens, shot for his confidences, as well as a reservist in the corps of engineers, who had swallowed nails to put his stomach out of commission, and a hysteric, who had described his method of staging a paralytic seizure at the front. One evening, to sound me out, she offered me the identification papers of a father of six, who was dead, so she told me, saying they might help me to a rear echelon assignment ... In short, she was a snake. In bed, though, she was superb, we came back again and again, and the pleasure she purveyed was real. She may have been a slut, but at least she was a real one. To give royal pleasure they've got to be. In the kitchens of love, after all, vice is like the pepper in a good sauce; it brings out the flavor, it's indispensable. The school buildings opened out on a big terrace, golden in summer, surrounded by trees, with a magnificent panoramic view of Paris. It was there that our visitors waited for us on Thursdays, including Lola, as regular as clockwork, bringing cakes, advice, and cigarettes. We saw our doctors every morning. They questioned us amiably enough, but we never knew exactly what they were thinking. Under their affable smiles as they walked among us, they carried our death sentences.

The mealy-mouthed atmosphere reduced some of the patients under observation, more emotional than the rest, to such a state of exasperation that at night, instead of sleeping, they paced the ward from end to end, loudly protesting against their own anguish, convulsed between hope and despair, as on a dangerous mountain spur. For days and days they suffered, and then suddenly one night they'd go to pieces, run to the Chief Medical Officer, and confess everything. They'd never be seen again. I wasn't easy in my mind myself. But when you're weak, the best way to fortify yourself is to strip the people you fear of the last bit of prestige you're still inclined to give them. Learn to consider them as they are, worse than they are in fact and from every point of view. That will release you, set you free, protect you more than you can possibly imagine. It will give you another self. There will be two of you.

That will strip their words and deeds of the obscene mystical fascination that weakens you and makes you waste your time. From then on you'll find their act no more amusing, no more relevant to your inner progress than that of the lowliest pig.

Beside me, in the next bed, there was a corporal, a volunteer like me. Up until August he had been a teacher at a secondary school in Touraine, teaching history and geography, so he told me. After a few months in the front lines this teacher had turned out to be a champion thief. Nothing could stop him from stealing canned goods from the regimental supply train, the quartermaster trucks, the company stores, and anywhere else he could find them. So he'd landed there with the rest of us, while presumably awaiting court martial. But since his family persisted in trying to prove that he had been stupefied and demoralized by shell shock, the prosecution deferred his trial from month to month. He didn't talk to me very much. He spent hours combing his beard, but when he spoke to me it was almost always about the same thing, about the method he had discovered for not getting his wife with any more children. Was he really insane? At a time when the world is upside down and it's thought insane to ask why you're being murdered, it obviously requires no great effort to pass for a lunatic. Of course your act has got to be convincing, but when it comes to keeping out of the big slaughterhouse, some people's imaginations become magnificently fertile.

Everything that's important goes on in the darkness, no doubt about it. We never know anyone's real inside story.

This teacher's name was Princhard. What can the man have dreamed up to save his carotids, lungs, and optic nerves? That was the crucial question, the question we men should have asked one another if we'd wanted to be strictly human and rational. Far from it, we staggered along in a world of idealistic absurdities, hemmed in by insane, bellicose platitudes. Like smoke-maddened rats we tried to escape from the burning ship, but we had no general plan, no faith in one another. Dazed by the war, we had developed a different kind of madness: fear. The heads and tails of the war.

In the midst of the general delirium, this Princhard took a certain liking to me, though he distrusted me of course.

In the place and situation we were in, friendship and trust were out of the question. No one revealed any more than he thought useful for his survival, since everything or practically everything was sure to be repeated by some attentive stool pigeon.

From time to time one of us disappeared. That meant the case against him was ready and the court-martial would sentence him to a disciplinary battalion, to the front, or, if he was very lucky, to the Insane Asylum in Clamart.

More dubious warriors kept arriving, from every branch of service, some very young, some almost old, some terrified, some ranting and swaggering. Their wives and parents came to see them, and their children too, staring wide-eyed, on Thursdays. They all wept buckets in the visiting room, especially in the evening. All the helplessness of a world at war wept when the visits were over and the women and children left, dragging their feet in the bleak gas-lit corridor. A herd of sniveling riffraff, that's what they were; disgusting.

To Lola it was still an adventure, coming to see me in that prison, as you might have called it. We two didn't cry. Where would we have got our tears from?

"Is it true that you've gone mad, Ferdinand?" she asked me one Thursday.

"It's true," I admitted.

"But they'll treat you here?"

"There's no treatment for fear, Lola."

"Is it as bad as all that?"

"It's worse, Lola. My fear is so bad that if I die a natural death later on, I especially don't want to be cremated. I want them to leave me in the ground, quietly rotting in the graveyard, ready to come back to life ... Maybe ... how do we know? But if they burned me to ashes, Lola, don't you see, it would be over, really over ... A skeleton, after all, is still something like a man ... It's more likely to come back to life than ashes ... Reduced to ashes, you're finished! ... What do you think? ... Naturally the war ..."

"Oh, Ferdinand! Then you're an absolute coward! You're as loathsome as a rat ..."

"Yes, an absolute coward, Lola, I reject the war and everything in it ... I don't deplore it ... I don't resign myself to it ... I don't weep about it ... I just plain reject it and all its fighting men. I don't want anything to do with them or it. Even if there were nine hundred and ninety-five million of them and I were all alone, they'd still be wrong and I'd be right. Because I'm the one who knows what I want: I don't want to die."

"But it's not possible to reject the war, Ferdinand! Only crazy people and cowards reject the war when their country is in danger ..."

"If that's the case, hurrah for the crazy people! Look, Lola, do you remember a single name, for instance, of any of the soldiers killed in the Hundred Years War? ... Did you ever try to find out who any of them were? ... No! ... You see? You never tried ... As far as you're concerned they're as anonymous, as indifferent, as the last atom of that paperweight, as your morning bowel movement ... Get it into your head, Lola, that they died for nothing!