Balcony in the Forest

by Julien Gracq

  When he had finished reading the papers, Grange poured himself a little coffee out of the pot on the stove and lit a cigarette. He did not settle down to reading at once (he had brought in his gear, along with a few detective novels—already devoured, but he reread them—a pocket Shakespeare, Gide’s Journal which had just been published, and an English edition of Swedenborg’s Memorabilia), but tried for a moment to conceive of the coming war, that is, forced himself to construct a somewhat plausible image of events which would involve the indefinite continuation of his encampment in the forest. It was not so much the danger of a real war that preoccupied him as it was movement: the worst disaster would be to have to leave the blockhouse. But, on the whole, chances were reasonably in his favor. The invasion of Belgium was unlikely: once was enough. Perhaps the Germans would attack through Switzerland—or else directly invest the Maginot Line: that would take a long time: a rather academic artillery duel, something like the siege of Paris in 1870, when families in their Sunday best would make a tour of the ramparts to collect shell splinters after Mass. Or else the question would be settled by the aviators. Sometimes he imagined two armies of sentinels indefinitely continuing their guard duty on each side of a border grown into a jungle of briars: this was the idea that pleased him the most; the recollection of The Cossacks provided a kind of poetry: it would be a primitive life, long drinking bouts, the companionship of forest vagabonds, nights in ambush among the wild beasts passing so close you could reach out and touch them. A certain measure of normal existence, in the long run, would not become impossible; but it would be more dangerous, wider awake, and the sound of gunfire would not necessarily mean someone hunting game. He would live here, with Mona.

  “Yes, who knows?” he told himself, squinting a little against this surge of blind joy he had never experienced before. It alarmed him—and he hurriedly rapped his fingers on the raw wood table: several weeks ago he had started becoming superstitious. Yet even this dream did not comfort him long: it was the body’s pseudo-sleep when the rhythm of the night train rocks it back and forth in its seat.

  From his post at the window, he caught sight of Mona at the turn of the path from Les Falizes, half a mile away—a tiny black speck that seemed to hesitate a moment in the distance, then changed its course and glided toward the blockhouse: he was certain it was Mona—there were people on the road only at certain hours and Grange knew them all. Sometimes another black speck, which was Julia, kept her company: from as far off as possible he tried to make out which was Mona, and even before any detail was discernible he recognized her by her freer, lighter step, her way of slipping along the path like a boat surrendering itself to the current’s pressure. On each side of the white road stretched the empty woods that glowed now as far as the eye could reach with a tawny cast beneath the huge sky: around him, he felt the world disturbed and dark, in the image of this troubled forest, but before him lay that road: it seemed as if she were coming to him by a road opened in the sea.

  Nights in the forest were not always so calm now. Orders had come from Moriarmé to check all clandestine crossings of the frontier between the blockhouses; a series of night patrols was instituted, and the blockhouse at Les Falizes was often alerted for this duty by the morning supply truck. All the men had volunteered for these nocturnal excursions; they were pleased that the service had become more active; too dead a calm was ominous, but this night watch officially established them in an inoffensive war: it was reassuring. Grange preferred taking Hervouët along because of his taciturn disposition and his almost feline agility. They slipped out of the blockhouse on a night so calm that as they walked down the road they heard a distant church in the valley strike eleven, the notes rich and heavy despite the distance, then, distinctly nearer, the slightly cracked chimes of a Belgian steeple. They followed the road for half a mile; beyond a turn, the trees suddenly clustered around and above the road, plunging it into a deep hollow where an odor of moss and stagnant water floated on the darkness. The outer rim of this shadowy thicket marked the frontier; they stopped here to light a cigarette and smoke in silence for a moment at the brim of sleeping Belgium, like strollers whose path ends at the cliff’s edge. The grove was pitch dark—a few steps from Grange everything vanished into the black underbrush which cast still thicker shadows; he noticed only the glowing tip of a cigarette next to him, and heard the click of the cartridge Hervouët was slipping into his pistol. Then the silence of the place became almost magical. A strange feeling ran through him each time he lit a cigarette in this forgotten wilderness; it was as if he were slipping his moorings; he entered a world redeemed, rid of men, pressed against its starry sky with that same dizzying swell of the empty sea. “I’m alone in the world,” he told himself rapturously.

  Sometimes the two men stood there for a long time, saying nothing. Beyond the frontier the forest emitted a few vague noises—which they unconsciously strained to hear—like the uninterpretable flotsam the sea washes up on a beach and which the eye mechanically fixes on: this dimly wakened border where the patrolled forests of the war harbored a fabulous, enchanted silence that was somehow alive and alert fascinated Grange, intrigued him. Hervouët threw away his cigarette and drank a few mouthfuls from his canteen: they left the road and turned down a service path that closely paralleled the frontier for some distance. From this moment on, they ceased speaking entirely, advancing, hunched over, along what seemed an improvised though already ancient trail carpeted with rotten leaves that muffled their footsteps. When Grange pointed his flashlight ahead of him and turned it on, the cone of light suddenly revealed the low branches that wove themselves into a vault of slender twigs above the path: they trudged on, as lost here as a flea in the roots of a fur pelt; when Grange switched off the flashlight a long, faintly phosphorescent streak appeared in the treetops overhead, where the darkness had been thickest. As they advanced, the night changed: the midnight sluggishness gradually mounted above the trees, and a lighter atmosphere infused the underbrush with a vapory blue incense; the moon was rising and made the land passable as far as the eye could reach, as gently as the sun, appearing among clouds, dries the rainy roads. Behind him, Grange heard only Hervouët’s footsteps, occasionally making the dry branches snap, and the regular clicking of his bayonet sheath which resumed each time he released it to drink out of his canteen. Shining his flashlight left toward the heart of the forest, Grange could see the gleaming wires beaded with dew and the stakes of the low network that ran along the frontier at ground level—several pairs of eyes shone for a second, caught in the beam of light, and they heard the rabbits’ tiny thunder rush across the leaves. To the right, his eyes followed a long reach of the forest descending in ravines toward the Meuse; a shy moon sailed high above the black woods; burdened by the cold, circles of smoke from the charcoal burners’ fires floated in large gray puddles that gently revolved over the trees, their edges rising with the slow, circular motion of jellyfish. Grange watched, his forehead lined with concentration and a mysterious expectancy. There was a powerful charm in standing here, so long after midnight had sounded from the earth’s churches, deep in this placeless gelatin masked by pools of fog and steeped in the vague sweat of dreams, at the hour when the mist floated out of the forest like spirits. Grange gestured to Hervouët and both men held their breath for a moment, listening to the great respiration of the woods around them that made a kind of low and intermittent music, the long, deep murmur of an undertow that came from the groves of firs near Les Fraitures; over this tidal undulation they could hear the crackle of branches along some nocturnal creature’s course, the trickling of a spring, or sometimes a dog’s high-pitched howl roused by the moon, such sounds rising at one moment or another out of the smoking vat of the forest. As far as the eye could reach a fine blue vapor floated over the forest—not the dense fumes of sleep but rather a lucid, quickening exhalation that disengaged the mind, making all the paths of insomnia dance before it. The dry and sonorous night slept with its eyes wide open; the
secretly wakened earth was full of portents once again, as in the age when shields were hung in the branches of oaks.

  Behind the pine grove of Les Fraitures, they followed a ravine back to the highway and sat down on the roadside grass, smoking in silence until they heard footsteps on the asphalt beyond the bend: the patrol from the blockhouse of Les Buttés. Grange’s mind felt marvelously clear; a marrow-piercing cold rose from the earth in the small hours of the morning; squatting on the grass in his overcoat, he concentrated entirely on the aroma of the hot coffee Lieutenant Lavaud, a man of prudence, would pour him out of his thermos. There was a certain fitness that the war should announce itself this way, in a clash of raw sensations. Sometimes, when the patrol was late, Grange dozed off a little despite his hunger, and almost at once began dreaming where he crouched on the frozen grass. It was almost always a dream of roads. He dreamed of tanks rolling toward the blockhouse down the long forest road in front of the embrasure. He dreamed of what was to happen.

  When the night was clear and the roads dry, Grange left Hervouët where the service path turned off under the great oaks and sent him back to the blockhouse; he kept on straight ahead, taking a short cut through a grove of young pines to Les Falizes: from this side, he reached the clearing through cherry orchards and alfalfa beds where the stone rollers lying in the grass raised their shafts to the moon. Grange jumped over the stiles and crossed the gardens to the door of Mona’s little house; before opening it, he wrapped his handkerchief around the old wrought-iron lock in order not to waken her; even from the threshold, crouching deep in the shadows where the moonlight struck steely reflections from the furniture, he could hear the long, light breathing that rose to meet his own fatigue. The pot-bellied wardrobes smelled of lavender; through the open door he could see the first few pear trees that lined the alley, their branches stiff as corals in the moonlight. He sat down beside Mona’s sleeping body and covered her shoulders with the red patchwork quilt which had slipped to the floor: like a sleeping kitten sharpening its claws on the rags in its basket, Mona could sleep comfortably only after creating terrible carnage among the bedclothes.

  He did not awaken her as she lay hidden by the darkness, submerged in a mysterious, remote comfort; he did not even look at her. Pressed against her hip, he heard only her long breathing, and through the open door the great tidal murmur of the pines at Les Fraitures fading away in the distance. It seemed as if his life were no longer divided, partitioned, as if everything were of a piece because of one door left ajar that blurred the hours of sleep with those of daylight and cast him upon Mona from the heart of the war’s watchful night. He closed his eyes a second and listened in the darkness to their mingled breathing, rising and falling against the long, low rustle of the forest: it was like the sound of ripples deep in a cave, the backwash against the clamor of the breakers; the same enormous impulse of the tide that swept the earth raised them in its swell, bearing sleep and waking onward together. Before leaving, Grange brushed his finger tips across the moist hollow of Mona’s hand which lay open in her sleep, palm upward in the darkness, seeking some blind acquiescence, an acknowledgment that left him appeased.

  Returning to the blockhouse along the road, he saw the spotlights above the Meuse valley still bright against the first gleams of dawn: the work continued by day as well as by night. The casements were further along now. An advance unit of the Engineers had been encamped near Les Buttés, and Moriarmé sent word that during the month following road blocks would be installed and mine fields laid around the blockhouse, as provided for.

  IT WAS toward the end of December that the first snow fell on the Ardennes. When Grange awakened, a white and sourceless light oozed up from the earth, blurring the shadow of the windowframes against the ceiling; but his first impression was less that of unaccustomed brightness than of an abnormal suspension of time itself: at first he thought his alarm clock had stopped; the room, the whole house, seemed to be soaring down a long landslide of silence—a delicious, downy, cloistral silence that would never be broken. He got up, saw the forest white as far as the eye could reach, and lay down again in his noiseless room with a joy so great it made him blink. The silence around him was even subtler in this luxuriant light. Time came to a stop: for the inhabitants of the Roof, this magical snow that closed the roads opened the long vacation.

  Communications with Moriarmé were soon severed almost entirely. The wheezing supply truck, despite the chains on its tires, after floundering once or twice in the drifts, rarely risked crossing the icy slopes of l’Eclaterie. Every two days, Gourcuff, ballasted with a canteen of brandy and armed with knapsacks, trudged down to the battalion headquarters: he came back very late, very red, very drunk, his knapsacks bulging with mail, cans of food, and bags of biscuits. The blockhouse crew, field glasses trained on his premonitory zigzags in the failing light, encouraged him up the last few hundred yards with an anticipatory concert of mugs and canteens clashed together.

  “Come on, Gourcuff, give it the gas!” Hervouët shouted, while the black shape staggered through the snow, magically increasing its speed. In the Meuse army, almost all the slang was motorized.

  They hoisted him up the iron staircase into the common room, where Olivon pushed him into a chair with its back to the glowing stove and “defrosted” him with a mugful of the hot grog that now replaced the coffee in the pot. A cloud of vapor rose from Gourcuff’s clothes while a pool spread under his chair—then he sneezed with a kind of majesty, and a rainbow of curious distillations volatilized in the room.

  “Worse than a locomotive, with all that steam,” Olivon declared with an admiring whistle, clapping him on the back. “But you’ve got to admit he burns up a lot. . . .”

  •

  In his office in Moriarmé, the snow made Varin increasingly gloomy. The first bad weather clogged the joints of this wheezing army, stalled the rattletrap engines that were scarcely serviceable for summer maneuvers. Over six inches of snow and construction, convoys, maneuvers, transport, communications, target practice—all the daily grindings and gnashings of machinery stopped as though bewitched: the roof garrison became a horde stupefied by hibernation, little groups burrowing into the warm holes of their stoves and igloos. The orders slept, unopened, on the captain’s desk. After having asked without much conviction for “ski troops” and “high-altitude materiel,” Varin threw up his arms and began talking with glum distaste of “living off the country.” The captain’s tone comprised a whole Retreat from Moscow. The men, divining their present freedom, were ecstatic. They had not enjoyed the image of what lay before them, that last, all too likely battle they advanced toward with all the slow enthusiasm of a Percheron between its shafts: as soon as they felt the reins slacken, they too thrust their noses into the roadside grass, looking for the ostrich’s sand-buried dreams. And beneath this soft snow which smoothed the earth and masked all roads, they nursed a vague illusion of making themselves invisible, of giving fate the slip.

  The snow conferred on this low and shaggy Ardennes forest a charm which even the lofty mountain treetops or the Vosges firs do not possess for all their ice candles. Across these short, stiff twigs, the white ropes of snow hung unbroken for weeks at a time, welded to the bark by tiny wads of ice that were the melted drops seized in their fall by the long night’s cold: for whole days at a time, in air decanted by the freeze, the Roof covered itself with dust-sheets, pale bundles, gossamers, and the long white lace of frosty mornings. A violent blue sky glistened over this holiday landscape. The air was piercing but almost warm; at noon, from each patch of sun that made the snow sparkle, you could hear the slow gurgle rising from the thaw’s entrails, but as soon as the short twilight reddened the horizon toward the Meuse, the cold again brought a magical suspense to the Roof: the sealed forest became a snare of silence, a winter garden whose barricades yielded only to the comings and goings of ghosts. For the snow clung to the faintest gleams of light, and even by night the uplands of the Meuse seemed alive; often, now, be
hind the aureoles of the concrete mixers, the anti-aircraft searchlights swept the forest sky beyond the frontier with their quadruple bars of light, and a phosphorescence glowed and faded across the snow between the coal-black trunks, like the sudden gentle flames that devour a wad of cotton. These northern lights, this glory of glacial illumination which explored the empty night and seemed to sharpen the cold, made place and season alike look unfamiliar. Sometimes the beams crossing his uncurtained window wakened Grange during the night, like the lighthouse that had brushed across his panes on that Breton island where he had slept so badly; he got up, leaned on the sill, and for a moment watched the strange columns of light slowly, warily wheeling in the winter sky; then an image from his childhood reading occurred to him; he remembered H. G. Wells’ sick Martian giants screaming their incomprehensible woes across the stupefied landscape.