Balcony in the Forest

by Julien Gracq

  “What is there between the war and me?” he wondered, and felt himself engulfed for a moment in a strange abstraction. “That isn’t the question.” His mind grew aware of a fresh, daybreak murmur: as if suddenly a noise, a hum, imperceptible as long as it was habitual, had stopped confusing his life. “It began last night,” he reflected, “when I started walking down the middle of the road with my hands in my pockets. The Germans are going to come, but I’m not really answerable to anyone. Who could have thought it was so easy to get back to the sea again?” He raised his coat collar against the piercing chill: drops streamed from the branches down the back of his neck. “But it’s still a bad spot to be in,” he murmured, with a grimace that pursed his lips. Grange realized now that the end of his adventure was fast ripening behind the curtain of fog, that the silence of the forest was becoming more improbable from minute to minute. He had not stopped being afraid. Yet if French troops had appeared on the road just then, if some reinforcement had come to the rescue, he would have felt cheated.

  Grange came out of the tunnel and took a few steps as far as the edge of the road, ducking to avoid being lashed by the branches. The night was gradually losing its walnut-husk color; the road ahead of him stretched out in a soft milky way that seemed to float between the trees. When he was standing in the middle of the road, the silence became even more obsessive than that of the underbrush, suspended, it seemed, over a bottomless void, almost ceremonial. Grange began to understand why a lost troop of men instinctively marches into cannonfire: the emptiness of a field of battle was a kind of disequilibrium, like an affliction of the ears; the world without sight or sound lost its moorings, sinking, deaf and blind, through layers of soft sargasso weed.

  “The Meuse!” he thought suddenly. “What’s happening on the Meuse? The Germans must be farther than Moriarmé by now!” In his imagination, the war continued on its own momentum, following in the furious wake of the routed cavalry. “We must be in a kind of pocket here. . . . Maybe the war is over,” he thought. All these possibilities jostled together at once, but gently; he felt scarcely concerned, watching the thread of yellow smoke from his cigarette separate itself from the pale cotton wool of the fog. “This must be the dawn,” he decided with a tiny prickle of delight: he remembered that the day begins when a soldier can tell a white thread from a black one. The earth still swam in a greenish pool of oil that was over a man’s head, but the treetops were sharp now against the pale sky; a few feet away, he made out a denser clot of darkness, which was the outline of the blockhouse. The calm was absolute—the silence and the chill at the dawn’s heart gave the light a strangely solemn tinge: this was not daylight penetrating the earth, but a pure anticipation not of this world, the gaze of a half-open eye across which floated the hint of an intelligible meaning. “A house,” he mused, as if he were seeing it for the first time, “a single window looking down a road where something is supposed to happen.”

  “IT MUST be almost five,” Grange decided even before looking at his watch. The shadow of the clustered oaks now reached all the way across the path. The waning day’s first stir of air did nothing to cool the blockhouse, which continued steeping in its rancid humidity, but the day itself grew heavy, hesitating at the moment of its decline. When they looked out through the embrasure, there was nothing but the road’s rough ribbon of slag to see, beneath shadows that were already longer. Silence had seized the forest again; every now and then a faint breeze rustled the branches.

  “It’s like a railroad with the tracks taken up,” Grange thought. “We’ve been cut off. . . .”

  He remembered hearing of outlaws who gave themselves up, a need stronger than hunger luring them out of hiding to buy the newspaper. For hours now the men had been prowling inside the blockhouse like caged animals.

  “You take over,” he said to Olivon, handing him the strap of his field glasses. “No one outside till I come back. I’m going to take a look toward Les Houches.”

  As soon as he stepped out of the concrete block, he was struck by a wakened, vibrant animation of the air which did not penetrate through the narrow embrasures. Grange walked half bent over under the arching branches across a stretch of grass and thick moss, trying not to step on branches that would crack; he began to hurry. The sunny afternoon was much less asleep than they thought in the blockhouse; the forest itself cocked its ears for a distant murmur from the low crest to the north—the ground, though padded by moss, reverberated at intervals with a faint shudder. Every ten yards or so, Grange turned and glanced suspiciously at the empty thickets: this pocket of calm half-light around him was becoming venomous, like the shadow of the manchineel tree.

  “If only you could see something!” he thought. Suddenly this shadowy solitude made him feverish; he would have given a year of his life to tear away the curtain of branches, spread the bars of the green cage, around which the earth was catching fire.

  Before turning down toward Les Houches, the path paralleled the crest of the plateau for about a hundred yards, running toward Les Buttés through a grove of pine saplings where the forest seemed to spread a little. The horizon was still hidden behind the branches, but a lively, already cool breeze from the north swept the crest and carried sounds with it. Despite the sun, the place was dark and gloomy—at the foot of a pine, water dripped from one of those moss-grown stone troughs that recalled Shakespeare’s Arden, restoring the Roof to a still more primitive savagery. Once he was on the plateau itself, the wind carried through the pines a kind of broad, dark murmur, a confusion of heavy vehicles interminably lurching down torn roads, that seemed to fill the whole of the northwest horizon.

  “It’s not so far from the blockhouse as I thought,” Grange decided. “It even might be . . .” He strained to hear, curiously stirred. The open space, the long slope of the plateau that tilted, he guessed, behind the vault of branches, toward the north, for the first time gave the battle a panoramic character: the sense of danger, the fear of solitude disappeared in the feeling of a new scale: a face of the earth was at grips with the fire of heaven. What he might think of it was not very important. Only, if you listened carefully, above the ground base of massive corrosion—that collapsing cliff attacked by the waves—you could distinguish a nearer sound that cut across the forest toward the road from Les Houches: a continual throbbing of motors and behind that a jolting dance of clashing metal, as if enormous plates of tin were slowly being dragged over a rough pavement. The caterpillars.

  “There they are!” Grange told himself, growing pale and stepping behind a tree. He felt a little dizzy; incredulously he stared around him at the forest’s absurd opera decor. A bewildering feeling of let it go at that paralyzed his arms and legs. The stream of iron crawled on its way, peaceful, lulling, interminable: in a kind of daze, he watched the cavalcade pass.

  Walking back to the blockhouse, he whistled to warn his men. As soon as he stepped off the crest, the clatter of machines, the battle’s racket, stopped as if by magic. A faint mist of heat still trembled over the road where a dozen crows were pecking in the sunlight, laced now by the shadows of branches. The image of the enchanted castle, the sheltered island, occurred to him again, unconsciously comforting him with a wild hope.

  “You can’t tell much,” he said, back inside the blockhouse. “They’re bombarding along the Meuse. Anyway,” he added a little too quickly, shrugging his shoulders, “we’ll know before nightfall.”

  Soberly, they took turns drinking from Gourcuff’s canteen and resumed their posts. Without a word Olivon shook the last drops out onto the concrete. “They know,” Grange realized, startled. “Or they’ve guessed. My voice.” Despite himself, his heart felt a little lighter.

  Another half hour passed. There was a subtle silence in the blockhouse now, the silence of keen eyes, which weighs less than that of straining ears—it was the silence of a workroom absorbed in delicate needlework. Every now and then, Grange, finding it difficult to focus his binoculars through the narrow embrasure, nudged He
rvouët and put his eye for a second to the gun sight: nothing stirred in the block’s half-darkness save this sly, childish war of elbows. The light was turning yellow. The road slag, which had glared during the afternoon through the tiny aperture, now became quite soft and pulpy in the distance, like sand on a beach; the evening’s nuances appeared one after another with an almost Chinese delicacy, as if in a darkroom. A thin hyphen drawn by an agile, cursive hand, crossed the white road and disappeared into the grass: a marten. There was another moment of calm silence. Then, all together, the crows flew off, like Wotan’s crows, and a clear rumble, gay in the gentle evening air, wakened down the road.

  “Ready!” Gourcuff shouted, almost bayed, at Hervouët.

  The noise was in no hurry to reveal its source: it took its time. They could hear the driver changing gears as he took the invisible slope of the rise, and something unexpected in the sound, something too light, too fast, made Grange slip his hand into his pocket, nervously fumbling for the booklet of silhouettes.

  The truck suddenly appeared, much farther away than they expected: a dark, slender silhouette half swallowed up by the trembling of the road. Slender and delicate—delicate. At first it grew larger though remaining perfectly immobile, then, as it gradually descended the slope, it headed for the side of the road and stopped in front of the mined trench with the somewhat comical perplexity of an ant testing the danger of a plank’s underside.

  “The bastards!” Olivon whispered, dumfounded.

  “Ready!” Hervouët breathed; his eye glued to the sight, he stroked the range finder wickedly. “It’s a green.”

  The truck, having satisfied itself as to the obstacle, began moving very slowly, and suddenly lurched into the ditch more heavily than they expected. “No sightseeing bus,” Grange thought. On smooth terrain now, the truck rapidly grew larger, straight and dark in a kind of bellicose, bullish charge—levantando—as if it were breathing fire. “Now!” Grange thought. A last terrible hesitation twisted his stomach, but two inches from his cheek he saw Hervouët’s mouth slowly opening.

  “Fire!” he whispered.

  The shot left the gun with such brutal force that Grange, lying alongside the barrel, thought the impact had crushed his shoulder. A kind of cough shook the truck, which suddenly spat out of its hood a bouquet of long paper streamers, then turned off toward the shoulder at the right, digging up the ground a little as it plunged but not overturning, coming to a dead stop against the trees.

  “Right in the kisser!” Gourcuff growled, his teeth clenched, and with the furious explosion of a motorcycle warming up in a tiny garage, he emptied half a machine-gun belt into the wreck.

  In the circle of the binoculars, behind the smashed windshield, the seat seemed empty, but the branches hanging down over the road kept Grange from seeing it distinctly. One of the front tires had been torn open. In any case, the first glance settled all questions: the truck was dead, dead the way a man can be dead, already a prey to the weeds, subject to a livid discoloration that must have been the dust of the shattered windshield; it looked like a fly wrapped up in a spiderweb. The carnage left Grange with sweating palms; he felt a cold bar against the back of his neck and smelled the bitter fume of sweat that rose from Hervouët’s jacket. Gunpowder prickled sharply in his nose and the clichés told the truth: it was intoxicating.

  “Go take a look,” Grange ordered Olivon. “Out the hatch and through the woods. We’ll cover you.”

  Soundless behind their reloaded weapons, they followed Olivon’s silhouette which threaded its way between the branches, moving with a dreadful slowness: they felt like giving him a push. The air had grown cooler; the splotches of sunshine disappeared from the road one by one. The silence that had fallen now was the petrified silence after the explosion of a slap: they sensed that a cold, enormous rage was gathering somewhere before exploding.

  “It’s not so much as if we were going to be killed,” Grange reflected, moistening his dry gums with his tongue. “It’s strange—it’s more as if we were going to be punished.”

  Through the binoculars he saw Olivon jump into the rear of the truck and then run back to the blockhouse along the road.

  “There are two men,” he gasped, out of breath. “Young . . .”

  He tossed two gray-green shoulder tabs onto the cartridge case and two heavy, old-fashioned revolvers and a few pale gray lumps the color of cardboard: rye knackebrot that crunched in their jaws with a stale, sharp taste—sorry food.

  “No,” he added, a little shamefully, “there weren’t any papers.”

  “And the stuff in back?”

  “They must be account books, mon yeutenant,” he answered, looking embarrassed. “Boxes full of account books.” In a lifeless tone he added: “There must be enough for a whole division, that’s for sure.” They stared at each other, dumfounded.

  “Shit!” Hervouët finally whispered, furious. A vague, appalling ghost of the sacred suddenly appeared in the forest, conjured out of the depths of the army barracks: they had laid hands on the arcana. No one could foresee the consequences.

  They uncorked a bottle of the réserve and went back to their posts. The atmosphere was heavy now, the red wine weighed in their stomachs. The bitter smell of powder filled the humid air of the block. The last slanting ray of sunlight climbed up the forest wall on the left side of the road and disappeared; suddenly the whole landscape shifted in the cool evening air. Then, once again, without hurrying, like a wasp’s nest slowly wakening, the distant hollow of the road sent up a second rumble. And this time a terrible shudder seized them all. The invisible humming filled the evening—even the woods around them seemed to become uncertain, hostile, suddenly swarming along all the hidden paths.

  The sound of the motor died before it reached the crest, but almost at once another picked it up. Behind the short rise of the road, sometimes shrill, sometimes deep, the venomous humming of the secret meeting did not stop again.

  “Maybe they’ve set up a cross-country shuttle. That’s what they must have done—cross-country . . .” Grange strained to hear, stupidly, desperately, trying to convince himself that the rumble was heading off toward the left. All at once a heavy, brutal hail lashed against the concrete, and Grange, staring through the embrasure, suddenly saw a cluster of sparks rise out of the earth and spread in all directions through the branches, dragging a scratchy, agonized caterwauling behind them.

  “God!” Olivon said in a hollow voice, “tracer bullets,” and again they heard nothing in the block but their own harsh breathing.

  “Send out a squirt,” Grange snapped nervously at Gourcuff.

  Gourcuff shook his head. In the half-light, he was steaming in front of his machine gun, like an old horse. “Can’t see. . . !” His voice was a childish, terrified whimper.

  “The trees in back—spray there!”

  There was no time. A dim shock that echoed in their chests, a dry, massive combustion smashed against the blockhouse, followed by cascades of tinkling broken glass. In a second, the sandbags stuffing the embrasures fell away and a sudden sinister whiteness swept across the whole concrete block. Facing the naked daylight that burst in upon them, the last thing Grange saw was Hervouët, a little pale, edging backward step by step toward the rear wall, as if an angel were pushing him by the shoulders against his will.

  “Time to b——”

  “It’s inside!” Grange thought. “No, it’s outside. . . . No, it’s inside.” There wasn’t that much smoke. When a violent whiplash had wrapped around his calf and thigh, he had instinctively thrown himself to the ground, almost gently, like a boxer rolling with the blow. He didn’t feel very seriously hurt. He looked up through the dust that filled his throat at the grayish concrete roof, pitted now with clear round holes, as if a mattock had struck between its ridges. He felt only an emptiness in his head and a coolness at his temples—he was very near fainting, wanted to faint, and then, strangely beyond fainting, experienced a relief which was the comfort of a page turned, a
nd the day over.

  GRANGE pushed Gourcuff toward the hatchway; halfway down the stairway, he turned for a last look around the blockhouse. Since the shell had exploded, there had not been one moment of panic. He felt somehow invulnerable. Olivon and Hervouët were laid out on the mattress; the overcoat thrown over them was too short: rather than leave the faces covered and the feet showing, which seemed to Grange like some hideous joke, they had pulled the coat down over the feet. And in order not to see the faces any more, they had turned the bodies on their flank, side by side, faces toward the concrete wall. Grange felt the two identity tags in his pocket—he had taken them off their wrists and could hear them clinking against another piece of metal: Mona’s key. The blockhouse was a chalky wreck where Grange’s feet stumbled over pieces of twisted iron; the plaster dust was already whitening the folds of the overcoat, filling the hollows with a sordid snow. Something about it infuriated Grange: he hoisted himself out of the hatchway again, shook the coat furiously, and laid it over the bodies up to the shoulders. Then he slipped into the tunnel without turning back and pulled the hatch closed over his head.