Pedigree (14 page)

‘That would enable us to buy some new curtains, some twilled curtains. I've seen some at L'Innovation that weren't too dear…'

If he had felt things like a Peters, he would have realized that a new element had introduced itself into the house, an element so subtle that even Élise, still trembling with emotion, could not have said what it was.

Léopold had bought a sausage somewhere and was eating it without bread, in the half-light of a low tavern, gazing vaguely in front of him.

I
T WAS
the silence that morning which produced in Élise that feeling of an illness one is sickening for, which one can feel inside oneself everywhere and nowhere. The kitchen window was wide open, revealing the backs of a row of houses, the little yards, and a great stretch of bright blue sky indented by the gables; and that extraordinary, frightening silence came flooding into the room in concentric waves, travelling like the sound of a bell. It came from beyond the roofs, from behind the watercolour sky, making her long to shut the window to prevent it from invading the house.

For everybody was bound to have the impression of being the centre of that silence, everybody who, in the midst of that immense, absolute calm, set off little individual noises, with a fork, a glass, opening a door, coughing, breathing.

Outside this sonorous nucleus which each person carried around shamefacedly within him, there was nothing. The pink brick walls of the house which was being built underneath Élise's windows were deserted, indecently bare; the masons were not working and the first noise she missed was the crunching of the mortar under their trowels. In the centre of the block of houses, the forge at Halkin's, with its heavy hammer-blows and the echoing sound of sheet-iron, was dead. And at ten o'clock, in the courtyard of the Friars' school in the Rue de l'Enseignement, the shrill explosion of playtime failed to occur.

The trams were not running. They had heard two when the sun had barely risen, but these had been derailed and overturned Fétinne way. On the day before this radiant First of May, all blue and white like the Virgin, Monsieur Monnoyeur had chosen to fall ill, to wrap himself up in mufflers, and to curl up in his leather armchair.

‘What do we decide to do, Monsieur Mamelin?'

And Désiré had replied simply:

‘We open, of course.'

It was as much as he would do, when he was reading the paper in the evening, in his shirtsleeves, by the fireside, to tell Élise that he might not be coming home to dinner. The paper carried in big black disaster letters the words:

‘
GENERAL STRIKE DECIDED ON
.'

‘What's going to happen, Désiré?'

‘Why should anything happen?'

He had gone off as usual, with a few extra sandwiches in case the police barriers prevented him from coming home at two o'clock, but he did not think they would.

People had laid in stocks of food. There was nobody in the streets. Godard, the butcher in the Place du Congrès, had left the door of his shop ajar, but only a few neighbours had slipped inside.

It was if everybody had the plague or was afraid of catching it. No postman. The unemptied dustbins had been left on the kerbs. No schoolboys in their hooded cloaks, not a single shout, not a single noise. Unless they were all dead, the inhabitants were somewhere or other, possibly lurking behind their curtains. Now and then a door opened a fraction of an inch, and through the gap you could sense that an eye was studying the dramatic emptiness of the street, somebody who was afraid of breathing the miasmas outside, the hallucinating miasmas of silence.

Yet about ten o'clock Léopold arrived, dragging one leg along, regardless of the fact that he was awakening the echoes of the Rue Pasteur. He looked up for a long time before ringing the bell, for he had a horror of using the bell, on account of the landlady who pretended she had heard only one ring instead of two and hurried to answer the door.

‘Good morning, my girl.'

He looked the same as the other times he had been. He sat down in his usual place in Désiré's wicker armchair; Élise gave him a cup of strong coffee which she had brewed specially for him.

It was strange that he, who knew everything, gave the same answer as Désiré, who felt nothing, who would go to his office at the same time, by the same route, if the whole town were in flames.

‘What do you expect them to do?'

He never explained himself. He knew what he meant, uttered a few weighty, mysterious words of oracular wisdom, then, after a long silence, produced a disgraceful crackling noise from his old patched-up pipe.

‘Unless
the others
open fire.'

‘And what if they do?'

The oracle made no answer and plunged into his meditations which the silence of May-day failed to disturb.

Léopold had come. He had sat down. He had drunk his cup of coffee and he had gone off again.

‘Good-bye, my girl.'

Silence once more. The clatter of a spoon on a plate. The sound of footsteps, the familiar metronome footsteps, Désiré coming home at two o'clock as if nothing had happened, just as he had prophesied.

‘Well?'

‘Nothing.'

‘The strikers? The miners from Seraing?'

‘They are staging a march. They are quite calm.'

‘Dear God, Désiré!'

‘But I tell you everything's quiet. People just get worried about nothing.'

He went off as he had come. The baby seized the opportunity to scream, to howl until he was blue in the face, to pierce the circles of silence with his shrieks.

It was five minutes past four, six minutes past four, by the alarm-clock ticking feverishly on the black mantelpiece, when the feeling of suffocation from which Élise had been suffering since the morning suddenly turned into panic. She could not stand another five minutes of it. She put on her outdoor clothes, not looking at her hat in the mirror, not shutting the window, not putting any coal on the fire. She picked the baby up as if she were saving him from a disaster and went downstairs.

She knew that the landlady, Madame Martin, was listening and was going to open the door. The pram was under the stairs. The door moved. The old woman looked at her tenant. What if she tried to stop Élise from going out? But no! She stared at her in terror, without saying a word, her mouth half open like a fish, looking as if she thought that Élise had gone mad, and then shut herself in again, turning the key in the lock.

Élise walked along, pushing the pram, taking the shortest way into the town, and getting excited, all by herself in the wilderness. She wanted to know what was happening, she had to know.

‘Excuse me …'

The astonished policeman looked at her inquiringly.

‘Is it still possible to cross the bridges?'

‘That depends where you're going.'

She answered at random.

‘To L'Innovation.'

‘They'll tell you further on.'

It wasn't his sector. He didn't know. It was all one to him. She went off again, pushing the pram along with her belly. She could see some people in the distance, at the Pont des Arches, but she still could not hear any noise.

‘Where are you going?'

She had been trying to slip between the gendarmes guarding the bridge.

‘To L'Inno …'

A sudden inspiration. She corrected herself.

‘Home. I live in the Rue Léopold, over Cession's, the hat-shop…'

‘Carry on …'

She rushed triumphantly on to the deserted bridge, envied by the onlookers. At the other end, she came up against another barrier.

‘Where are you going?'

‘I live in the Rue Léopold, over Cession's, the…'

‘Carry on if you can. You'll see further on.'

She was winning points. She didn't know where she was going, what she wanted. She went forward for the sake of going forward, because her instinct was impelling her, but at the corner of the Rue de la Cathédrale she met a wall of human backs and stammered in vain:

‘Excuse me, Monsieur … Excuse me … Excuse me …'

She pushed the pram against the legs of the people lining the street and they turned round angrily.

She had come as far as she could. The policemen and the gendarmes could not do any more for her, because she had reached the route of the strikers' march. All the same, she made another attempt to slip through, stood on tip-toe, hung on, bent down, but could not see anything but heads filing past. Then, beneath the silence of the town, she heard the strangest of noises, composed of footsteps, nothing but footsteps, without a single fanfare, without a single shout, without a single voice, without a single murmur, the footsteps of one hundred and twenty thousand men, women and children who had been marching along in serried ranks since daybreak, past blind windows, with the same policemen at every crossroads, the same gendarmes with their arms at the order, who seemed to be hemming them into an ever-narrowing circle.

‘Madame, with your baby, you'd be well advised…'

But the man who spoke to her so politely was just a little noncommissioned officer whom she could talk round if she tried. Another came running up, a captain or some such rank, with sweat beading his forehead. He had caught sight of the pram.

‘Come on! Push them back! … Push the whole lot back!…'

Everybody suffered on her account. Because of her, the people who had managed to cross the Pont des Arches were forced to go back to the Outremeuse district where there was nothing to be seen.

Why did Élise suddenly feel anxious as she got nearer home? Was it because she had left the window open? Whatever the reason, she felt uneasy. She had to indulge in some complicated gymnastics to get the pram up the three steps outside the front door. On the stairs, the reason for her uneasiness became clear to her. There was somebody in the flat. Somebody was walking up and down.

Bravely, just as she had borne down upon the town, she threw open the door, and it was in a voice which astonished herself that she murmured:

‘Désiré!'

It was such a shock to find Désiré in his shirtsleeves in the middle of the kitchen! As for him, he asked her, as simply as could be:

‘Where have you been?'

‘But what about you?'

She had already understood. The civic guard's uniform …

‘Désiré! They've …'

‘The town crier has been along all the streets. All the civic guards have to report to the Place Ernest-de-Bavière at seven o'clock.'

‘But what for?'

‘They don't know themselves. Pass me my belt, will you?'

‘Wait at least until I've made some coffee for your flask.'

He did not know how dramatic these little things were. For him, this was just a general strike, a May-day rather more agitated than most, but for her it was a man, her man, putting on his uniform, buckling his belt, and wiping the grease off his rifle. This amused Désiré.

‘It seems they're going to issue us with cartridges.'

‘Take care of yourself, Désiré.'

If only Valérie had been there! She was immobilized too, over at L'Innovation, where, about three o'clock, the police had ordered them to lower the iron shutters.

What if Élise went to see Madame Pain, fifty yards down the Rue Pasteur? Alas, Madame Pain was always bemoaning her lot. She had something wrong with her liver and her womb. She was bound to be shaking with fright.

‘See you tonight or tomorrow morning. Don't worry. Nothing can happen.'

Désiré's moustache when he kissed her did not taste the same as other days.

‘Be careful.'

Careful of what? In the Rue Jean-d'Outremeuse, he met some other civic guards, friends he had been to school with, and they sauntered along like boys on holiday.

‘What are they going to make us do?'

The march was still following the route which had been marked out for it, and the strikers were respecting their leaders' instructions: they were keeping silent. What spoke for them was the flags, the trade unions' pennons, bright red for the most part, and banners stretching from one pavement to the other, swaying about at the height of the first-storey windows.

They had come a long way, from Seraing, Ougrée, Tilleur, Ans, from the collieries, from the mining villages all round the town, from the factories which you usually glimpsed only from the train, dark and mysterious, with the bloody maws of the furnaces being fed by half-naked demons.

Some had started before daybreak. They were beginning to drag their feet. Their hobnailed boots were scraping along the paving-stones or the asphalt. The men seemed to be astonished by the sight of these districts where they had never been before and where fear had blinded windows and doors.

They were eight or ten abreast. Some of them were carrying a child on their shoulders. There were women stumbling along, clutching dark shawls with thick woollen fringes to their breasts.

The miners were wearing their boiled leather helmets and some people, behind their curtains, shuddered as they watched them pass by, their eyes brighter in their hard faces than those of the other men.

Élise started praying, without knowing exactly why. She felt an urge to kneel down in a corner of the kitchen and murmur:

‘Dear God, Blessed Virgin Mary, grant that …'

Grant that nothing may happen! And yet, she would have liked … No! She didn't want anything to happen, she didn't want a riot. It was more a physical need. Her nerves were raw. She would have liked to be over there. She found it unbearable being all alone in her everyday kitchen.

‘Grant that Désiré…'

She was lying to herself. She cried a little. That calmed her down. Then she got Roger's bath ready.

What were they doing? Why was it that she still couldn't hear anything?

There were horse-guards all the way round the huge Place Saint-Lambert. The iron shutters were down at the Grand Bazaar, Vaxelaire-Claes's and L'Innovation, and, when night fell, the milky globes of the arc lamps did not light up. Darker still was the north side, the bulky Palace of the Prince Bishops with the massive pillars which looked as if they were destined to support the sky. Every now and then there was a whistle, a shouted order, a soldier riding across the empty terrace.