Repetition

by Alain Robbe-Grillet

  With these words, the officer stands up and closes the dispatch case, whose contents—he believes—prove my culpability. The double locks of the lid click, with the sound of an infallible mechanism which seems to bring our encounter to an end.

  “This man,” I say then, “who is trying to pin his crime on me is called Walther von Brücke, and he is the victim’s son.”

  “Unfortunately, that son died on May 4, during the last battles in Mecklenburg.”

  “So all the members of the conspiracy claim. But they are lying, as I can prove. And this collective, premeditated lie discloses, on the contrary, the murderer’s identity.”

  “What would be his motives?”

  “A fierce rivalry of an openly Oedipal character. This accursed family is the kingdom of Thebes!”

  The officer seems to reflect. At last he makes up his mind to pronounce, slowly and in a voice that has become dreamy, remote, vaguely humorous, the arguments which, from his point of view, clear my supposed criminal:

  “In any case, my dear sir, you are in no position to accuse someone on such grounds.… Moreover, if you know the whole affair so well, you must know that the son in question, who has in effect survived despite serious damage to his eyes, is today one of our most … unavoidable agents, precisely on account of his past, as well as his present links with the many shady enterprises, more or less clandestine societies, and settlings of accounts which flourish in Berlin. You must know, to end here, that our precious WB (as we call him) happened, at the very moment of his father’s murder, to have undergone a routine check made that very night by the military police, in the immediate environs of his residence. The coincidence is absolute between the moment of the shots noted by the construction-site watchman near Viktoria Park and the moment when WB presented his Ausweis to the American MPs two kilometers away.”

  While I compare my own movements with these last elements of the police investigation, which plunge me back into intense personal reflections and disturbing reminiscences, the satisfied official gathers up his dispatch case and heads for his Schupo posted at the entrance.… Halfway there, though, he turns back toward me to deliver an additional blow, still in the same affable tone.

  “We also have in our possession an old French identity card on which your name, given name, and birthplace have been cleverly falsified—Brest-Sainpierre substituted for Berlin-Kreuzberg, and Mathias V. Franck appearing instead of Markus von Brücke. Only the date of birth has been kept intact: October 6, 1903.”

  “You cannot be unaware that your Markus, Walther’s twin brother, died in early childhood!”

  “Of course I know that, but resurrection appears to be a hereditary habit in this fabulous family.… If you want to add something to your deposition, don’t fail to let me know. My name is Lorentz, like the providential inventor of ‘local time’ and certain equations in early relativity theory.… Commissioner Lorentz, at your service.”

  And without waiting for my response, he immediately went out toward the street, followed by the uniformed police agent to whom he returned the inestimable Pandora’s dispatch case. At the other end of the café, against the bar, lit now by a yellowish lamp, his colleague and Maria have both vanished. They must have gone into the hotel, since there is no other exit—I was assured—to the street. I remained alone for a while in the abandoned room, where it was getting darker by the moment, bewildered by that doubly false identity card which could be nothing but an absurd invention of my enemies, whose leering pack was dangerously close on my heels.

  Outside it was already night, or almost, and the clumsily paved quays seemed entirely deserted on both banks. The disjoined stones gleamed faintly, moistened by the evening mist, which accentuated their unevenness. At the end of the stagnant canal, facing me, the childhood memory was still in place, motionless and stubborn, threatening perhaps, or else merely despairing. An archaic lamppost, directly overhead, its glow blued by the nascent fog in a carefully calculated theatrical halo, illuminated the rotting wood skeleton of the phantom sailboat, eternally shipwrecked.…

  Mama remained where she stood without making a single movement now, planted like a statue in front of the blue-green water. And I clung to her inert hand, wondering what we were going to do now.… I tugged on her arm a little harder to wake her up. With a sort of exhausted resignation, she said: “Come on, Marco, we’re leaving … since the house is closed. We must be at the North station in an hour at the latest. But first I have to go and collect our bags.…” And then, instead of making some gesture to leave these dreadful and desolate premises which would have nothing to do with us, she began crying gently, noiselessly. I didn’t understand why, but I too stopped moving. It was as if both of us were dead, without realizing it.

  Of course, we missed the train. Overcome by fatigue, we finally collapsed in some anonymous premises, probably a modest hotel room near the station. Mama said nothing. Our luggage, heaped on the bare floor, looked as useless as it was wretched. Above the bed was a large framed image in color, a mechanical reproduction of a very dark painting, representing a war scene. Two dead men in civilian clothes were lying against a stone wall, one on his back, the other on his stomach, their limbs grotesquely contorted. They had apparently just been shot. Four soldiers dragging their muskets, bent beneath the burden of the task just accomplished (or of shame), were walking away to the left along a stony road. The last one was carrying a big lantern, spilling reddish gleams in the darkness, making the shadows dance in an unreal and lugubrious ballet. That night I slept with Mama.

  A light breeze had risen, and the faint lapping of invisible water against the stone wall was audible just below me. I went back up to room number 3, a prey to new uncertainties and contradictory anxieties. Without any clearly explicable reason, I was returning to my room in secret, working the door handle with infinite precautions and stepping into the dim space as furtively as a burglar who fears waking the occupant. The room was more or less dark, a vague glow coming from the bathroom, where a fluorescent light was still on, making it possible to move without difficulty. I went immediately to the coat rack on the wall. As I expected, of course, there was no longer a pistol in the pocket of my jacket hanging on its hook. But afterward, having crept along the wall where a bad copy of a Goya was hanging, virtually black in the absence of light, I could see, in a brightly lit area, that the panties with the cute bloodstained ruffles were still resting in the hollow of their hiding place above the sink, behind the mirror, which opened to reveal a cavity in the wall forming a medicine cabinet. On its lower shelf stood a great number of flasks and tubes which did not belong to me. An empty space between two bottles of colored glass revealed the trace of a missing object.

  Back in the bedroom, I finally managed to get the switch controlling the big ceiling bulb to work, and dazzled by the sudden illumination, I could not help uttering a cry of surprise: a man was sleeping in my bed. Wakened out of a deep sleep, he immediately sat up, and I saw what I had most dreaded all along: it was the traveler who had usurped my seat in the train, during the stop at Halle. A grin (of surprise, of fright, or of protest) distorted his already asymmetrical features, but I nonetheless recognized him at once. We remained just as we were, facing each other, mute and motionless. It occurred to me that perhaps I was making exactly the same grimace as my double.… And from what nightmare, or what paradise, was he abruptly summoned by my appearance?

  He was the first to pull himself together, speaking German in a low, slightly raucous voice which—I realized with relief—was not really mine, but a bad imitation. He said: “What are you doing in my room? Who are you? How long have you been here? How did you get in?”

  His tone of voice was so natural that I was almost on the point of making some excuse, caught off-guard and knowing myself quite capable of such mistakes: the door was neither locked nor bolted, I had probably mistaken the door, and these rooms were so much alike, all built and furnished on the same model.… But the man leaves me no time for exp
lanations, and a sort of nasty smile passes over his mistrustful countenance as he declares, in French this time: “I recognize you—you’re Markus! What are you doing here?”

  “Are you really Walther von Brücke? And you stay in this hotel?”

  “You must know that, since you’ve come looking for me here!” He begins to laugh, but without gaiety, rather with a sort of scorn, of bitterness, or of an old immemorial hatred suddenly resurfacing: “Markus! That damn Markus, the darling son of our mother who up and abandoned me with a light heart, taking you off to prehistoric Brittany! … So you’re not dead, drowned as a child in your Breton ocean? Unless you’re just a ghost? … Yes, I stay in this hotel, very often, right here in room number three; I’ve been here four days this time … or even five. You can check down at the hotel register.…”

  I have only one idea in my poor head: at all costs I must eliminate the intruder for good. To expel him from this room would not be enough—I must get rid of him forever. One of us two is too many in this story. I take four decisive steps toward my jacket still hanging on its wooden peg. But then I discover that the two side pickets are empty: the pistol isn’t there.… Where could I have put it? I run a hand over my face, not even knowing who I am anymore, nor where, nor when, nor why.…

  When I open my eyes and see W, still sitting up in his bed, with the feather bed down around his legs, I see that he is steadying the Beretta in both hands, as in the movies, arms stiffly extended in front of him, the barrel aimed at my chest. Doubtless he had concealed the weapon under his pillow in anticipation of my coming. And perhaps he had been pretending to be asleep.

  Articulating his words very clearly, he says: “Yes, I am Walther, and I’ve been sticking to you like a shadow ever since you got on the train from Eisenach, following behind you or ahead of you depending on where the light comes from.… Your friend Pierre Garin has need of me here, an absolute need, for more important business. In return, he’s given me this rendezvous with you, Markus known as Ascher known as Boris Wallon known as Mathias Franck … Damn you! (his voice suddenly becomes more threatening.) God damn you! You killed Father! You slept with his young wife without even knowing she belongs to me now, and you lusted after her daughter—a child! … But today I’m getting rid of you, since you’ve played your part.”

  I see his fingers tightening on the trigger. I hear the deafening sound of the shot, which explodes in my chest.… It doesn’t hurt, merely a disturbing effect of devastation. But I have no arms, no legs, no body. And I feel the deep water sweeping me away, submerging me, entering my mouth with a taste of blood, while I begin to lose my footing.…14

  * * *

  Note 14 – There, it’s all over.

  It was legitimate defense. Once he took the automatic pistol out of the pocket of his jacket hanging on the wall, I jumped up and threw myself on him—he wasn’t expecting so quick a preventive reaction. I didn’t have too much trouble getting his weapon away from him, and then I took a step back.… But he had had time to take off the safety.… The shot went off of its own accord.… Everyone will believe me, of course. His fresh fingerprints are all over the blue steel. And the Berlin police have too much need of my services. I could even, as additional proof of my perilous situation in facing an armed aggressor, have him fire a first clumsy bullet in the course of our brief struggle … which might have hit the wall behind me, for example, or the door.…

  It was right then that, turning toward the door to the hallway, I saw that it was wide open, doubtless since Markus’s arrival, he having forgotten to close it once he was inside.… Back in the dark hallway, where all the night-lights have been turned off, appear the identical faces of the Mahler twins, motionless and expressionless, as frozen as wax mannequins and pressed together, one just behind the other, so that each can observe the scene through that vertical opening, too narrow for their extreme corpulence. Since the head of the bed is up against this same interior wall of the room, I couldn’t see the door from where I was.… Unfortunately, it’s impossible to get rid of these two unexpected witnesses now.…

  While I ponder, as rapidly as the urgency of the situation requires, this present configuration of which I have lost control, hastily reviewing several solutions, all inapplicable, I realize that the twin faces are fading now, gradually retreating. The one on the right is already almost imperceptible, becoming a vague reflection of the other one, paler and slightly behind. After about a minute, Franz and Joseph Mahler have vanished, as though dissolved into the darkness. I could almost believe they were a hallucination, if I didn’t distinctly hear their heavy footsteps retreating quite deliberately along the hallway, then down the stairs to the café.

  Just what have they seen? When I discovered their twin silhouettes, I had already tossed the weapon back on the sheets. And the bed, high as it was, must have concealed that part of the floor where Marco’s lifeless body had just fallen. However, I’m almost positive that it wasn’t my shots which alerted those two. They couldn’t have got upstairs so quickly to identify the origin of the shots. So they must have witnessed the murder after all, without breathing a word.

  Suddenly I’m overcome by one conviction: it’s Pierre Garin himself who betrayed me. He claimed the two brothers were away the whole evening and till very late that night, detained by an important meeting of the NKGB in the Soviet zone. Which, of course, had not been on their schedule—rather, that’s when he told them when and where my decisive intervention would occur: at the Hôtel des Alliés, just after the Berlin police had left. Unfortunately, I was helpless against these two-timing double agents, working half the time for the CIA and therefore enjoying every possible protection.… As for lovely Io, what part could she have played in this complicated stratagem? All suspicions now seem valid.…

  I had reached this point in my anxious reckoning when two military interns of the American Hospital appeared in the room, entering quite rapidly and decisively. Without a glance or a word to me, as if no living person was there, in a series of very self-assured gestures, they loaded onto a folding stretcher a victim whose limbs had not had time to acquire that inconvenient rigidity characteristic of corpses. Two minutes later I was once again alone, no longer knowing what to do, staring at the things around me as if I would find the key to my problems fastened to some hook or fallen by accident on the floor. Everything looked normal, indifferent; no trace of blood anywhere. I went to close the door, which the silent white-winged archangels had left wide open as they carried out their inanimate prey.… Since I was still in pajamas, I decided the best thing to do would be to stretch out on my bed and wait for whatever was going to come next, or a sudden inspiration, or perhaps even to fall back to sleep.

  * * *

  The calm, the gray. And doubtless, soon, the un-nameable … Certainly nothing stirred. But these are not the heralded shades, nonetheless. Absence, forgetting, calmly waiting, steeped in a gray medium quite luminous all the same, like the translucent mists of an imminent dawn. And solitude, too, would be deceptive.… In fact there would be someone, both different and the same, the destroyer and the keeper of order, the narrating presence and the traveler … elegant solution to the never-to-be-solved problem: who is speaking here, now? The old words always already spoken repeat themselves, always telling the same old story from age to age, repeated once again, and always new.…

  Epilogue

  Markus von Brücke, known as Marco, known as “Ascher,” the gray man who emerges covered with ashes from his own cold pyre, wakens in the unrelieved whiteness of a modern hospital room. He is lying on his back, head and shoulders raised by a heap of rather stiff pillows. Tubes of glass or transparent rubber, connected to various postoperative machines, deprive his body and his limbs of a great part of their mobility. Everything seems numb, sore even, but not really painful. Gigi, standing close to the bed, observes him with a kindly smile he has never seen before. She says: “Everything’s all right, Mister von B, don’t worry about a thing.”

  �
��Where are we? Why is …”

  “The American Hospital in Steglitz. Special Treatment Pavilion.”

  Marco becomes aware of another positive element of his present situation: he can talk without too much difficulty, although in a voice that must be abnormally slow and thick: “And who’s responsible for the special treatment?”

  “The Mahler brothers, always there when you need them—promptitude, effectiveness, sangfroid, discretion!”

  “What was wrong with me, actually?”

  “Two bullets, nine-millimeter caliber, in the upper thorax. But too high and too far to the right, because of the gunman’s bad position, sitting in a bed with oversensitive springs, accentuating his defective vision caused by an old war wound. That fool Walther’s really good for nothing anymore! And so sure of himself—he didn’t even imagine his victim would deny him an opportunity for target practice, though it had already been tried by Dany the first night, on the Gendarmenplatz.… Still, you were lucky. One projectile was snugly lodged in your left shoulder, the other under the clavicle. Child’s play for the numero uno surgeons they’ve got here. The joint is virtually intact.”

  “Where did you learn all these details?”

  “The doc, of course! … He’s an habitué of the dear old Sphinx, handsome to boot, and very good with his hands.… Not like that bastard Doctor Juan. He’d have finished you off in five seconds.…”

  “If it’s not being indiscreet: who really killed the man you call Dany?”

  “You don’t expect me to call him Papa! … It was Walther, of course, who finally sent the old man ad patres. But take it easy: point-blank this time. No way to get his sharpshooter diploma for this one.”

  “And I trust he’s under lock and key, after his new attempt at murder?”

  “Walther? Of course not—why in the world? He’s been through this before, you know.… Besides, family squabbles: we settle such things among ourselves. It’s better that way.”