Balcony in the Forest

by Julien Gracq

  “Julia! Tea! Bring tea, my love, lots of tea, darling! We have company. . . . An officer. A handsome officer! . . .” A few seconds later a little bell rang wildly behind the hedge, a gate creaked, doors slammed, rousing the clearing’s echoes with a housewifely din.

  The rather large room Grange stepped into gave an impression of comfortable warmth and almost of luxury, surprising in this forgotten village after the muddy billets of the Meuse. To judge from the heavy rafters, the great, rough chimney with its slate hearthstone, the peasant-style double door with its leaves opening one above the other and its wrought-iron bolts and latches, this was an old farm that had been remodeled for summer visitors or for the boar hunters who came up here in the fall. The floor was covered with a thick carpet; the light from a raffia-shaded lamp and the bramble fire crackling on the hearth drew several pieces of heavily-waxed, pot-bellied country furniture out of the shadows. In one corner he could see a day bed, and above it shelves stuffed with books; in the middle of the room stood a low Moroccan table made out of a great embossed brass tray. It was evident that the taste in charge of this refurnishing was strict in its own way, even severe; yet over these massive pieces, this foursquare arrangement, was cast the charming disorder of a nursery. Records in torn covers and open books lay piled on the carpet, glass marbles rolled behind the armchair cushions, salacious post cards were thumbtacked to the walls with pictures of actors and newspaper clippings. On a cord stretched from the cupboard keyhole to the window latch hung various articles of feminine underwear—a heavy stable lantern was suspended over the bed by a complicated system of string and clothespins. Between the two wrought-iron brackets in the corner opposite the bed was slung a hammock, in which lay a litter of fashion magazines, a harmonica, a pair of read leather slippers, nail scissors, a fan, and a huge, carved Spanish tortoise-shell comb. Above this gypsy-camp disorder floated a faint stimulating odor, a morning scent—more distinctly than on the road, Grange smelled the forest around him here.

  As soon as they were inside, Mona had wriggled out of her cloak, which flew across the room and landed on the clothesline. A flood of wheat-colored hair fell down her shoulders, reaching to the small of her back. Beneath her cloak she was wearing a blue, ink-stained blouse and a skirt. Her neck, once she had let down the burden of her hair, assumed a more languid bend, and when she shifted her shoulders a little to caress them with this heavy curtain of hair, she was entirely a woman again, as warm as an unmade bed.

  “Come and warm yourself,” she said, taking his hand and drawing him before the crackling thorns with boyish brusqueness, but the “tu” did not surprise Grange at all: it was obvious that in her speech “vous” was more unaccustomed and strained. “Say hello to Julia—she takes care of me,” and, turning around, he discovered a pair of inquisitive, circumspect eyes staring at him behind the tea tray, a maid as childish-looking as Mona, whose manners she evidently imitated, save that she wore her hair short and curly and used lipstick. Tied around her waist was a white lace apron so small that it seemed purely emblematic, but in Julia, who had only the natural beauty of her youth, the somewhat disturbing quality of Mona’s looks turned to downright suggestiveness: despite the innocence of her eyes, Julia’s mascara and lipstick, her small, bold breasts, and the tiny excuse for an apron gave her the air of a soubrette in a magazine for men.

  “Let me fix your hair, dear,” Mona said, handing Grange her cup, throwing her arm around Julia’s neck, and pulling her in front of the mirror. Her mouth full of hairpins, she rummaged among Julia’s curls, the girl laughing beneath her tickling fingers and swaying her hips a little as she glanced over her shoulder at Grange. Amid too-shrill laughter, a sudden red flare from the hearth revealed two laughing witches somehow at liberty in the chaotic household of a sorcerer’s apprentice.

  When Julia had disappeared with the tea tray, there were several moments’ silence. Outside the half-open window, behind the closed shutters with their heart-shaped perforations, Grange heard the forest dripping, and sometimes, quite close, the creak of branches rising again after the downpour. Mona sat on the edge of the divan, heaving a little sigh of fatigue, and then, with that thrust of her chin already familiar, once again threw back her hair and lifted her eyes and her mouth to Grange, with the movement of a plant turning to the sun.

  “Take off my boots for me,” she said in a low, almost hoarse voice. “My feet are so cold—they’re all wet.”

  Under her rubber boots, each with a puddle of water inside, she wore heavy men’s wool socks, now completely soaked. Grange slipped them off. His eyes were smarting, a painful tenderness filled his throat, and he realized he was clenching his teeth to keep them from chattering. He touched the wet toes curling under with cold, then the smooth sole: a few shreds of wool had caught at the edge of the slightly bluish toenails; suddenly an overwhelming sense of pity flooded through him: he pressed his mouth against the icy toes until he felt the wool against his teeth.

  Suddenly Mona wrenched her body backward with the furious thrust of a trapped animal, and, throwing herself flat on the day bed, pulled him against her with both hands; he felt his mouth upon hers, and her entire woman’s body against him, heavy and full, open as the furrowed earth. In a matter of seconds she was naked, her clothes torn off by a violent storm that pasted them against the furniture like washing blown into a thorn bush, but at the cyclone’s center was this mouth that clung to his own so frankly, so greedily; he discovered he was within her without knowing when it had happened. “You’re a paradise!” he gasped with a kind of calm stupefaction; and he was astonished at his own words. When her finger tips had groped toward the lamp and put it out, the room seemed plunged in a pool of dim water; only the transom over the door and the heart-shaped holes in the shutters made pale spots in the darkness; the woods had stopped dripping, the moon must have risen over the forest; he took her again, gently, and from the soles of her feet to the roots of her hair she trembled—not feverishly, but almost solemnly, like a young tree answering the wind with all its leaves. He felt neither strain nor anxiety: as if a river murmured in the shade of trees, at noon. “Like a fish in its stream,” he thought. “I’ve found my element; it’s easy, I can always be happy here.” From time to time, he took between his lips first one and then the other nipple of her breasts, which slipped a little to each side of her chest: he felt the long nocturnal thrust from deep within her that raised them again his lips.

  “How good you are!” he told her in that undeceitful language he was beginning to discover, in which “good” no longer had any other meaning in the mind but ‘good to take.’

  “I have seduced you!” she whispered in a tiny, complacent voice, taking his head between her hands and pulling it a little away from hers to look at him with both eyes; then she pushed her headstrong mouth against his once more, and went on browsing. . . .

  He walked back to the blockhouse in a cloud; when he wakened the next morning, bright sunshine was already moving across the room; even in his sleep he had heard the tiny, clear voice, already familiar as the fountain heard all night in the garden, parleying under his window with Olivon; he jumped out of bed and ran to the window, looking down at the blue hood planted there beneath his shutters as matter-of-fact as any mushroom.

  “How wonderful!” he thought, blinking in the raw light—“it’s starting again!” A moment afterwards, she was in his room: already the chin was lifting her fresh wet face to him; he looked at her, amazed, incredulous, as if she had come down the chimney.

  THE cavalry’s tanks and units of the mounted dragoons were maneuvering along the road. These were small units, for there was not enough room to spread out between the Meuse and the frontier, and the armored formations—if the rumors were to be believed—were being kept quite far behind the lines, in the Champagne camps; but the Meuse cavalry, in any case, was to operate in the Ardennes, strung out along these threadlike forest roads which the service paths connected so fragmentarily: apparently the essence of these e
xercises that sometimes awakened Les Falizes with the sudden roar of motors was to set the comb’s teeth along the same line. On these days, when Olivon knocked early at Grange’s door (“The Tour de France has started, mon yeutenant”), the men left their hermitage and in fine weather sat for hours beside the road, like woodsmen of a manorial forest watching the great hunt processions pass; furthermore, the cavalrymen they chatted with during the halts, and who traveled far and fast in their cars, constituted almost a port of call: they brought news of friends who had vanished into the regular army corps beyond the Meuse, a wind from abroad, a further echo of the great world. Grange liked the cavalrymen: officers and soldiers alike seemed younger to him than the worn reservists he encountered at Moriarmé: an eagerness circulated among them, like the atmosphere that fills a stadium, a kind of swaggering that was not disagreeable—there was also a certain consolation, which he did not try to explain too clearly to himself, in seeing troops and materiel pass in good condition, destined to be engaged far ahead of them the day the Germans attacked. The automatic machine guns, the half-tracks, the dragoons’ cars, paraded up the long slope toward Belgium with the thunder of great herds of cattle, the sound of the caterpillar treads on the rough gravel almost drowning out the whine of the motors in low gear. Sometimes Grange would close his eyes and discover, astonished, how the war, even in its most somnolent moments, roused the ear so much more intimately than the eye by this giant harrow’s clatter passing over the broken earth. He was struck too by the forest’s facile adaptation to these fierce and arrogant cavalcades. The long perspectives of its roads, the tunnels running for miles through the trees toward a mysterious disc of daylight at the horizon, were not made for the colorless lives of woodcutters and charcoal burners who had vegetated here waiting for the curtain to rise. The forest breathed, more ample now, awakened, alert, its remotest hiding places suddenly stirred by the enigmatic signs of time’s reversion—an age of great hunts, of proud cavalcades—as if the old Merovingian lair were quickened by a forgotten scent in the air that made it live again.

  Grange and Olivon were sitting not far from the road on empty gasoline tins, watching the armored units pass. They were not quite interested—the spectacle was hardly a new one—but they were not quite bored. Grange thought of the concierges straddling their kitchen chairs on summer evenings beside the boulevard traffic: in their way, Olivon and he were also escaping their airless porter’s lodge: a free wind from far away passed over the road with these fast-moving troops.

  Grange was fascinated by the tanks: he wondered what new kind of soul the lurching inhabitants of these heavy machines might unexpectedly develop: a fellow officer had spoken to him once of the strange, irrational security you felt, suddenly, just rolling along inside that way, your helmet lining pressed up against the armor plate in that colossal racket. Officers constantly doubled the column in their command cars along the road’s shoulders; the convoy flowed on as far as the eye could reach in a grinding of gears, enveloped by a heavy cocoon of gray smoke that hung above the road, powdering every twig with a thick layer of grayish-brown flour that resembled the dust on a limekiln road. The machinery slid over the gravel like a river in spate, very dirty and very gray, with bottlenecks and eddies, a clatter of stones and a lashing of branches, almost as if it were a phenomenon of nature: Grange felt that the war had installed its furniture in the landscape with the—exhausting—casualness of those overprovided tenants who never see the end of the trunks they are expecting.

  “It’s just the same,” Olivon remarked, shrugging his shoulders when he had watched the clattering procession for a long time without saying a word—“they don’t have it any easier in the cavalry. That’s no road to drag tanks over.”

  “There’s not much chance of doing them any harm.”

  “Oh, that’s not it, mon yeutenant.” Olivon shrugged again. “It’s the treads. They wear out. . . .”

  Grange stared at him, nonplussed. Olivon always staggered him. “There’s no doubt about it,” he thought, “you see everything in a war. Even soldiers trying to economize.”

  “See if you can find us something to drink,” he said. He sensed that Olivon wanted to talk. It was one of those days when he made up the war, as Grange said: the passing cavalry always suggested his own notions of strategy. Grange handed him the key to the concrete block: they kept their bottles cool in the escape tunnel. Once they had glasses in their hands, each vehicle behind its dust cloud offered a salvo of heavy-handed jokes and thirsty noises as it passed. When Olivon occasionally toasted the convoy, holding the bottle at arm’s length, the cries redoubled, as when Punch lifts the curtain.

  “They’re not thirsty,” Grange decided grudgingly. “They’re saluting a fetish.”

  “They’ll do anything for it, mon yeutenant.” Olivon shook his head with an aggrieved expression. “In this army, all they care about is drinking.”

  “What’s the matter, Olivon?”

  “Some days . . .” He shrugged his shoulders. “I’m not saying we don’t have it easy. Sometimes I’d almost . . .” He shook the bottle over the gravel with an air of pretended indifference. “They talk big in the cavalry. They say if there’s a heavy attack, they’re supposed to fall back to Liège. It takes them four hours.”

  “Maybe.”

  Grange liked to discourage curiosity, his own first of all. Instinctively, he reacted to all war news—whatever snatches of information managed to reach him, rumors about the turn the campaign might take one day or the next—the way skin tautens and shrinks before a needle’s point. These provinces of the phony war were habitable, even comfortable, provided you lived in them as if the air’s oxygen content were lowered, as if the light had imperceptibly dimmed: it was a world where there was no longer any good news: you survived by ignoring all extremities, concealed by guilty stratagems that shifted with every wind, from minute to minute, at the thought of what might happen; a world, in fact, of diseases that were painless but annoyingly prone to take a turn for the worse—a world of prognosis reserved.

  “There are farms, down at Les Falizes; the mayor went round there the day before yesterday. Told them to send their kids inland,” Olivon continued. He always managed not to look at Grange, fixing his eyes on the road where the wheels were churning up the gravel as fast as they could go.

  “There’s been no evacuation order.”

  “No? . . .” Olivon weighed the news gravely, but did not seem completely reassured. “Even so, someone big went through Moriarmé yesterday. Hervouët heard about it at the yard.”

  “Someone big?”

  “Yes, big: generals,” Olivon said, with a bored grimace. “For inspection. Even went up to the border. Around the blockhouse at Les Buttés.”

  Grange was always surprised by this subtle network of intelligence that circulated among the men, carefully short-circuiting the officers as if they were settlers isolated among native hordes.

  “Then we won’t have them here, at least.”

  “That’s for sure!” This time Olivon turned to Grange with a relieved, momentary smile. “All the same,” he resumed, gloomy again, “it’s a bad sign. They’ve been putting the heavy stuff behind the Meuse for eight days. It might be for this week. . . .”

  “What do you mean ‘it’?”

  “Oh, well, mon yeutenant . . .” Olivon turned his head away with an embarrassment that was almost scandalized . . . “The big push, you know. . . .”

  “And the sun is unmentioned, but his power is among us,” Grange thought. A prickling sensation ran between his neck and his shirt collar. His mind was so constituted that a logical idea of his own rarely unsettled it, but someone else’s premonition penetrated there with almost no resistance: what had merely irritated him coming from Varin now attacked his nerves in a subtler fashion: it was like the smell of lightning in the air, the cattle’s contagious fear before the storm.

  “The Germans aren’t crazy,” he said, shrugging his shoulders. “In November! Once it�
��s snowed, the roads around here . . .”

  He prodded unenthusiastically with the end of his switch at the litter of dead leaves the wind had heaped beside the road. They fluttered a moment in the eddying wake of the tanks, already dry and gray. On each side of the road, between the naked branches, a paler sky now appeared over the diminished forest. Far away, against the shaggy surface of the trees, a slender coil of dust rose slowly above the branches: the cavalry was maneuvering on the road to Les Houches as well. The war was settling in, not steadily or fast, but by sudden, almost imperceptible touches taking possession of the earth, like a gray season: when they stopped speaking, they could hear nothing but the hum of motors and, from the valley, the distant whine of a training plane gently poised above the mist of the Meuse. The day was clear, but already cold: sounds carried very far.

  “The Germans are clever, mon yeutenant.” Olivon tossed his head with the stubborn, sullen look of a man who knows what he knows. “They have their tricks!”

  They finished the bottle without much more talk. The tanks were now passing at longer intervals; the silence of the dim winter twilight fell on the forest again. As they stood up to return to the blockhouse, a motor behind them coughed and came to a stop: a light machine-gun tank pulled over to the side of the road, almost beside them, its artillery-gray outlines massive in the failing light. The driver and the officer in command jumped out, and, after poking around in the motor and gauging the gas supply, headed toward Grange, who had stopped to watch them under cover of the trees.