Short Stories in French

by Richard Coward

  David est appuyé contre le comptoir, son visage à la hauteur du tiroir de la caisse. Le tiroir justement est entrouvert, et il glisse lentement sur lui-même, comme si c’était la main d’un autre qui l’ouvrait, qui prenait une liasse de billets et la serrait fort, en la froissant entre ses doigts.

  Mais tout d’un coup, le vide cesse, et il n’y a plus que la peur. Quelqu’un est là, à côté de David, un jeune homme un peu gras, au visage presque féminin, encadré de cheveux bruns bouclés. Il tient David par la main, il la serre si fort de ses deux mains que David entend craquer ses jointures, et crie de douleur. Le visage de l’adolescent est tout luisant de sueur, et ses yeux brillent d’une lueur dure, tandis qu’il répète, les dents serrées, mais avec tant de véhémence qu’il postillonne: «Voleur! Voleur! Voleur!» David ne dit rien, il ne se débat même pas. Sa main gauche a laissé tomber par terre le caillou rond du fleuve, qui roule sur le plastique rouge et s’immobilise. «Voleur! Sale voleur!» continue sans se lasser le jeune homme, et maintenant il parle très fort, pour attirer l’attention des vendeuses à l’entrée du magasin.

  «Voleur! Voleur! Sale petit voleur!» crie-t-il, et son visage a une telle expression d’excitement et de colère que David n’a plus peur de lui. Simplement, il ferme les yeux, il résiste à la douleur des deux mains du garçon qui broient ses métacarpes3 et son poignet. Il ne veut pas crier, pas parler, parce que c’est comme cela qu’il doit faire, s’il veut retrouver son frère Édouard. La voix étranglée du jeune homme résonne dans ses oreilles, pleine de menace et de haine: «Sale voleur! Sale petit voleur!» Mais il ne doit pas répondre, pas supplier, ni pleurer, ni dire que ce n’est pas lui qui est venu jusqu’ici, que ce n’est pas l’argent qu’il voulait, mais le visage de son frère Édouard. Il ne doit même plus penser à cela, puisque le géant l’a vaincu, et qu’il ne sera pas roi, et qu’il ne retrouvera pas ce qu’il cherche. Mais il doit se taire, toujours se taire, même quand viendront les gardes et les policiers pour l’emmener en prison. Des femmes sont venues, maintenant, elles sont là autour d’eux, elles parlent, elles téléphonent. L’une d’elles dit: «Lâchez-le, voyons, ce n’est qu’un enfant.» «Et s’il se sauve? C’est un sale petit voleur comme il y en a partout ici, ils attendent qu’on ait le dos tourné pour mettre la main sur la caisse.» «Comment t’appelles-tu? Quel âge as-tu?» «Ce sont leurs parents qui les dressent comme ça, vous savez, ils doivent rapporter l’argent à la maison chaque soir.» «Voleur, espèce de sale petit voleur!»

  A la fin, le garçon relâche son étreinte, moins par pitié que parce que ses bras sont fatigués d’avoir tant serré la main de David. Alors David tombe par terre sur le sol rouge sang, il s’affale doucement comme un tas de chiffons, et sa main et son poignet tuméfiés pendent le long de son corps. La douleur le brûle jusque sous l’épaule, mais il ne dit rien, il ne prononce pas une parole, même si les larmes salées coulent sur ses joues et mouillent la commissure de ses lèvres.

  Il y a le silence, maintenant, pour quelques instants encore. Plus personne ne parle, et le jeune homme s’est un peu reculé loin de la caisse, comme s’il avait peur, ou honte. David entend toujours les bruits langoureux de la musique lointaine, pareille aux gémissements d’animaux qui se lamentent, il entend le bruit de son cœur qui bat fort, dans ses tempes, dans son cou, dans ses artères à la saignée du coude. La brûlure de sa main est moins forte, il sent entre ses doigts le papier froissé des billets de banque, que personne n’a songé à lui enlever. Avec effort, il se redresse un peu et il jette au loin les billets qui culbutent sur le linoléum comme une vieille boulette. Personne ne bouge pour les ramasser. Devant lui, à travers le brouillard de ses larmes, il voit aussi le visage de sa mère qui attend dans l’appartement obscur, loin au-delà des murs abrupts et des vallées turbulentes de la ville moderne. Il voit cela très vite, en même temps qu’apparaissent, au bout du grand magasin, les uniformes des gardes. Mais cela lui est égal, il n’a plus peur de la solitude, il ne peut plus craindre le monde, ni les regards des gens, parce qu’il connaît maintenant la porte qui conduit vers son frère Édouard, vers sa cachette secrète d’où on ne revient jamais.

  David

  Sometimes, he thinks that the street is his. It is the only place that he loves, truly loves, especially at daybreak, when there is still no one about, and when the cars are cold. David would like it always to be like that, with the bright sky above the dark houses, and the silence, the great silence, which one might think had come down from the sky to calm the earth. But do angels exist? In the past his mother told him long stories in which there were angels with great wings of light, who hovered in the sky above the town, and came down togive help to those who needed it, and she said that you knew when there was an angel present when you felt a draught of wind on your neck, as fast and as light as a puff of air that made you shiver. His brother Édouard laughed at him because he believed these stories, and he said that angels didn’t exist, that there was nothing in the sky other than aeroplanes. And what about clouds? But why did clouds prove the existence of angels? David can no longer remember, and it is pointless him trying, for nothing comes back to him.

  But now in the morning, it is free, too free, because there is nothing there any more, no one waiting any more. Yet he would like it always to be like this because it is afterwards that it is awful, afterwards, when the day has truly begun, and when the cars, the coaches and the motorbikes are driving past, and when all the people, with such stony faces, are walking along. Where are they going? What do they want? David prefers to think about angels, about those who fly so high they can no longer even see the earth, only the white carpet of clouds which slides slowly beneath their wings. But it must always be a morning sky, very wide and pure, because that is when the angels must be able to glide for a long time, without the chance of them meeting an aeroplane.

  At six o’clock in the morning the street is beautiful and calm. As soon as he has closed the door of his flat behind him, and put round his neck the string on which the key hangs, and pulled up the zip fastening of his blue plastic jacket, David dashes into the street. He runs between the stationary cars, he climbs up the flights of stairs, he stops in the middle of the little square, his heart beating, as though someone were following him. There is no one, and dawn has hardly broken, lighting up the grey sky, whilst the houses are still dark, shut up in the shivery sleep of the morning, their shutters closed. Some pigeons are already about, flying off in front of him with a loud rustling of wings. They go to the edges of the roofs and coo. There is still no rumbling of cars, nor the sound of men’s voices.

  David walks up to the school door, without even realizing it. It is an ugly building in grey cement that has crept in between the old stone houses, and David looks at the door, painted dark green, on which the children’s feet have left scuff marks, towards the bottom. But he perhaps did not arrive by chance; quite simply, he wants to look at it once more, the door, and also the wall with its graffiti, the staircase stained by chewing-gum, the filthy old windows blocked off with wire mesh. He wants to look at everything, and the thought that it is for the last time makes his heart beat more quickly, as if everything had already changed, and he had been chased away, pursued. It is the last time, the last time, that’s what he is thinking, and the idea spins in his head until he becomes dizzy. He has not told anyone, not even his mother, but now, for certain, everything is over.

  All the same, he stays there a long time, sitting on the steps of the small staircase which leads to the door, until the sound of the sprinkler wakens him from his reverie. The water is gushing out of the pipe, splitting it open and causing explosions, streaming along the alleyways. The jet makes the bodies of the stationary cars ring out, chases the rubbish along the gutters. David gets up, walks away from the school, begins to cross the town.

  Beyond the wide avenue is the new town, mysterious and dangerous. He has already been there, with his brother Édouard, he remembers everything, the shops, the large blocks of flats which stand in fr
ont of their tarred areas, the street lamps which are taller than the trees and which at night give off their orangey, dazzling light. These are places you do not go; about which you know nothing. The places where you get lost.

  The town is big, so big that you never see the end of it. Perhaps you could walk for days and days along the same avenue, and night would come, and the sun would rise, and you would still be walking alongside the walls, you would be crossing streets, car parks, esplanades, and you would still see shimmering on the horizon like a mirage the windows and the headlights of the cars.

  That was it, leave never to return. David felt a pang of anguish because he remembered his brother Édouard’s words, before he left: ‘One day, I shall go, and you will never see me again.’ He had said that without bragging, but with a look on his face that was so full of dark despair that David had gone and hidden in the alcove to cry. It’s always terrible saying things and then doing them.

  Today is not a day like any other. The summer light has fallen, for the first time, on the fronts of the houses, on the bodies of the cars. It is making stars everywhere, with reflections that burn your eyes, and yet despite his fear and his doubts David feels happy to be in the street. That is why he left the flat, very early, as soon as his mother closed the door to go to work, why he left without even eating the bit of buttered bread that she had left on the table, tore down the stairs, and ran out, with the key beating against his chest. That is why, and also because of his brother Édouard, because he had thought about it all night, well, a good part of the night, before going to sleep.

  ‘I’ll go a long, long way away, and I’ll never return.’ That is what his brother Édouard had said, but he had waited almost a year before doing it. His mother believed that he was not thinking about it any more, and everyone – well, those who had heard him say it – thought the same thing, but, for his part, David had not forgotten. He thought about it every day, and at night as well, but he said nothing. Besides there would have been no point in saying: ‘When are you going to leave for good?’ because his brother Édouard would certainly have shrugged his shoulders without replying. Perhaps he knew nothing about it at that time.

  It was a day like today, David remembered it very well. There was the same sun in the blue sky, and the streets of the old town were clean and empty, like after the rain, because the municipal sprinkler had just been by. But it was very empty and very frightening, and the light which shone on the windows, on the tops of the houses, and the cooing of the pigeons, and the voices of the children that could be heard, calling from one house to another, in the labyrinth of still-dark alleys, and even the calm and the silence of the morning, were frightening, because David and his mother had not slept that night, waiting for him to come back, listening out for the knocks on the door, always the same knocks: tap-tap-tap, tap-tap. Then, as it was a Sunday and his mother was not going to work, there was so much anguish in the little flat that David had not been able to put up with it, and he had been out all day, walking through the streets, going from house to house, to look for a clue, to hear a voice, as far as the parks, as far as the beach. The seagulls had flown up as he walked along the bank, coming to rest a little further away, squawking because they did not like to be disturbed.

  But David does not want to think too much about that day, because he knows that the anguish will perhaps return, and he then thinks about his mother, sitting on the chair by the window, waiting, as motionless and heavy as a statue. He sits on a bench in the small square, he looks at the people who are beginning to move around, and the children who run as they shout, before school opens.

  It is hard to be alone when you are small. David thinks of his brother Édouard, he remembers him with clarity now, as if he had left the day before yesterday. He was fourteen, he had just turned fourteen when it happened, whereas David was barely nine. It is too young to leave, that is perhaps why his brother Édouard did not want him around. At nine, can you run, can you fight, earn your living, do you know how not to get lost? Yet one day they had fought in the flat, but what about? He no longer knew but they really had fought, and before stopping him with a neck-hold, his brother Édouard had fallen, it was David who had made him fall by tripping him, and his brother had said, breathing a little heavily: ‘For a little one you don’t half know how to fight.’ David remembers it very well.

  Where is he now? David thinks so hard about him that he can feel his heart pounding in his chest. Is it possible that he cannot hear him, where he is, that he cannot feel on him the look that is calling him? But he is perhaps at the edge of the town, even further, beyond the boulevards and the avenues which are like uncrossable ditches, on the other side of the white cliffs that are the large blocks of flats, lost, abandoned. It was because of money that he left, because his mother would not give him any, because she took his pay as an apprentice mechanic, and because there was never any money to go to the cinema, to play football, to buy ice-creams or to play the pinball machines in the cafés.

  Money is dirty, David hates it, and he hates his brother Édouard for leaving because of it. Money is ugly, and David scorns it. The other day, in front of his friend Hoceddine, David threw a coin into a hole in the pavement, for no reason at all, for pleasure. But Hoceddine told him that he was mad, and he tried to fish the coin out with a stick, without success. When he has money David thinks that he will throw it on the ground, or in the sea, so that no one can find it. He doesn’t need anything. When he is hungry, in the street, he loiters around the grocery shops, he takes what he can, an apple, or a tomato, and he runs away very quickly through the alleys. Since he is small, he can get into piles of hiding places, basement windows, spaces underneath stairs, dustbin cupboards, behind doors. No one can catch him. He runs a long way away and he eats the fruit slowly, without getting dirty. He throws the skins and the pips into a gutter. He especially likes tomatoes, which always astonished his brother Édouard, and it was even for that reason that he had nicknamed him ‘Tomato’ in the past, but not maliciously, perhaps even because deep down he admired him for that, it was the only thing that he could not do.

  It is true, he also liked his name greatly, this name of David. It was their father’s name, before he died in a lorry accident, he was called David Mathis, but he was so young that he could not even remember. And their mother never wanted to talk to them about their father, except to say sometimes that he had died without leaving her anything, because she had been obliged then to begin this work as a cleaning lady in order to feed her two children. But his brother Édouard must remember him because he was six or seven when his father died, so that was perhaps the reason why sometimes he had a funny voice and his face looked troubled when he repeated his name: ‘David … David …’

  When he came to the wide avenue, the noise of the cars and the lorries was suddenly awful, unbearable. The sun shone brightly in the sky, casting shafts of light on to the car bodies, lighting up the tall fronts of the white blocks of flats. There were people walking on the pavement, but they were not poor people like in the old town, Arabs, Jews, foreigners dressed in old grey and blue clothes, here were people David did not know, very tall, very strong. David was happy to be small, because no one seemed to see him, no one could notice his bare feet in rubber shoes, nor his trousers that were worn at the knees, especially not his thin, pale face, his dark eyes. For a moment, he wanted to turn round and go back while there was still time, and his hand automatically squeezed the key hanging around his neck.

  But, when he is afraid of something, he always thinks about the story that his mother told him, that of the young shepherd who had killed a giant, with a single round stone cast from his sling, when all the soldiers and even the great king were terrified. David likes that story, and his brother Édouard likes it also, and that is perhaps why he repeated his name in that way, as if there were something supernatural in the syllables of the name. In the past, with him, he would not have been afraid to walk here, in this street whose end you could not se
e. But today it is not the same, because he knows that his brother Édouard walked here, before disappearing. He knows it deep down, better than if he saw his footprints in the cement of the pavement. He came down there, then he disappeared, for ever. David would like to forget the meaning of those words ‘for ever’, because they hurt him, they gnaw at the inside of his body, of his stomach.

  But he must watch out for those people, those passers-by, who come towards him, who come blindly towards him. The sun is high in the cloudless sky, the white blocks of flats are gleaming. David had never seen so many people, all strangers, and shop-windows, restaurants, cafés. His brother Édouard came this way, because it was money that he wanted, he wanted to conquer money. In the dark streets, in the flat, in the damp corridors with no lights, poverty is like a damp sheet against the skin, or worse, like a dirty, sweaty skin that you cannot take off. But here the light and the noise burn your skin, burn your eyes, the rumbling of the cars snatches away memories. David makes desperate efforts not to forget it all, he wants to remember always. His brother Édouard said that it was better to die in prison than to carry on living there, in the dark flat. But when David repeated this to his mother, she became angry, and she threatened to shut him away in a reformatory, a long way away, for a long time. She said that he would be a thief, a murderer, and yet other things that David did not fully understand, but his brother Édouard was very pale, and he listened, and there was a light in his dark eyes that David did not like to see, and even today, when he remembers, his heart begins to leap, as though he were afraid.