Journey to the End of the Night

by Louis-Ferdinand Celine

  I never saw that husband again. Never. I was badly disappointed by the events of that Sunday and tired besides.

  I had hardly gone a hundred yards in the street when I saw Robinson coming my way, loaded down with all kinds of boards, big ones and little ones. I recognized him in spite of the darkness. He was embarrassed at seeing me and tried to get away, but I stopped him.

  “Why aren’t you in bed?” I asked him.

  “Not so loud!” he said. “I’ve come from the building site …”

  “And what are you doing with all that wood? Building what? A coffin … You stole it, I bet?”

  “No. A rabbit hutch …”

  “You raising rabbits now?”

  “No, it’s for the Henrouilles …”

  “The Henrouilles? They’ve got rabbits?”

  “Yes, three. They’re going to keep them in the little yard, you know, where the old woman lives …”

  “You’re fixing to build them a rabbit hutch at this time of night? Funny time to …”

  “It was his wife’s idea …”

  “Some idea! … What’s she going to do with rabbits? Sell them? Make top hats?”

  “You’ll have to ask her when you see her. As long as she comes across with the hundred francs, I …”

  This business with the rabbit hutch struck me as very odd … at that time of night. I kept at him.

  He changed the subject.

  “But what were you doing at their house?” I asked. “You didn’t know the Henrouilles.”

  “The old lady took me to see them … that day I met her in your office … The old woman is a big talker once she gets started … You can’t imagine … No getting away from her … So now I’m sort of pals with her and with them too … Some people like me, you know …”

  “You never said a word about all that … But since you see them, maybe you know if they’re managing to get the old woman committed …”

  “No, not from what they tell me …”

  He wasn’t enjoying this conversation at all, I could feel that, he didn’t know how to get rid of me. But the slipperier he got the more I wanted to know …”

  “Life is hard, you got to admit it … the things a man has to do …” he said vaguely. But I brought him back to the subject. I was determined to make him come clean …

  “They say the Henrouilles have more money than meets the eye … What do you think, now that you’ve been seeing them?”

  “Yes, maybe they have, but one thing is sure, they want to get rid of the old woman.”

  Robinson had never been much good at deception.

  “It’s because of the cost of living, you know, that keeps going up … that’s why they want to get rid of her. They told me one time that you refused to certify her … Is that true?”

  Then quickly, without insisting on an answer, he asked me which way I was going.

  “Been visiting a patient?”

  I told him something about my adventures with the husband I had just lost by the wayside. That gave him a good laugh, but it also made him cough.

  His cough doubled him up so bad I could hardly see him though he was right next to me. All I could vaguely make out was his hands, folded in front of his mouth like a big livid flower, trembling in the night. He couldn’t stop. “It’s the drafts,” he finally said when the cough had spent itself and we’d come to the door of his house.

  “One thing my pad is full of is drafts! And fleas! Have you got fleas in your place too?”

  I had. “Naturally,” I told him. “I bring them home from my patients.”

  “Sick people smell of piss, don’t they?” he said.

  “Yes, and sweat …”

  “All the same,” he said slowly after thinking it over. “I’d have liked to be a hospital orderly.”

  “Why?”

  “I’ll tell you … because people with nothing wrong with them, you can’t get around it, are frightening … Especially since the war … I know what they’re thinking … They don’t always know it themselves … but I know what they’re thinking … As long as they’re up, they think about killing you … but when they’re sick, no two ways, they’re not as frightening … You’ve got to be prepared for anything, I tell you, as long as they’re up. Don’t you see it that way?”

  “Yes,” I had to say.

  “Is that why you decided to become a doctor?” he asked.

  Thinking it over, I realized that maybe Robinson was right. But then he had another of his coughing fits.

  “Your feet are wet,” I said. “You’ll come down with pleurisy wandering around like this at night. Go home,” I advised him. “Go to bed.”

  His nerves were on edge from all that coughing.

  “I wouldn’t be surprised if Grandma Henrouille came down with the flu,” he said, laughing and coughing into my ear.

  “What makes you say that?”

  “You’ll see,” he said.

  “What have they dreamed up now?”

  “That’s all I can tell you. You’ll see …”

  “Come on, Robinson, you stinker, tell me. You know I never repeat anything …”

  Suddenly he wanted to make a clean breast of it, maybe in part to convince me that he wasn’t as resigned and lily-livered as he looked.

  “Go on!” I prodded him in a whisper. “You know I never talk …”

  That was all the encouragement he needed.

  “That’s a fact,” he admitted. “You know how to keep your mouth shut.” And right away he starts to come seriously clean. You wanted it, here it is …

  There wasn’t a soul around us at that time of night on the Boulevard Coutumance.

  “Do you remember,” he starts in, “the story about those carrot peddlers?”

  Offhand I didn’t remember any story about carrot peddlers.

  “Come off it,” he insists. “You know … You told me the story yourself!”

  “That’s right!” … All at once it came back to me. “The brakeman on the Rue des Brumaires? … The one who got his balls blown off while stealing rabbits?”

  “Yes, that’s it, from the grocer on the Quai d’Argenteuil…”

  “Yes,” I say. “I remember now. So what?”

  I still didn’t see the connection between that ancient incident and Grandma Henrouille.

  He came out with it soon enough.

  “Don’t you see?”

  “No,” I said. But soon I was afraid to see.

  “You’re being awfully slow …”

  “It’s just that it looks like a nasty business for you to be getting into. You can’t be going to murder Grandma Henrouille just to please the daughter-in-law?”

  “Of course not. I’m just building the rabbit hutch they asked for … The fireworks are up to them … They’ll do the rest … if they want to …”

  “How much have they given you for all this?”

  “A hundred francs for the wood and two-fifty for my work and a thousand more for the idea … And, you understand … this is only a beginning … a story like that … if properly told … is as good as a pension! … Well, son … now do you see?”

  I saw very well, and I wasn’t surprised. It only made me sad, a little sadder than before. Anything you can say to dissuade people in a case like that is bound to be feeble. Has life been kind to them? So why would they take pity on anybody? What for? What are other people to them? Has anybody ever been known to go down to hell to take someone else’s place? No. They send other people down, that’s all.

  The vocation for murder that had suddenly come over Robinson struck me in a way as an improvement over what I’d observed up until then in others, always half hateful, half benevolent, always boring with their vagueness, their indirection. I had definitely learned a thing or two by following Robinson in the night.

  But there was a danger: the Law. “The Law is dangerous,” I told him. “If you’re caught, you with the state of you
r health, you’ll be sunk … You’ll never leave prison alive … It’ll kill you …”

  “That’s just too bad,” he said. “I’m fed up with honest work … I’m getting old … still waiting my turn to have some fun, and when it comes … if it does, with plenty of patience … I’ll have been dead and buried long ago … Honest work is for suckers … You know that as well as I do …”

  “Maybe … but crime, you know, everybody’d go in for it if there weren’t risks … And the police are rough … There’s the pro and con …” We examined the situation.

  “I won’t say different, but doing my kind of work, in my condition, coughing, not sleeping, doing jobs that no horse would touch … Nothing worse can happen to me now … That’s how I feel about it … Nothing …”

  I didn’t dare tell him that all in all he was right, because he’d have held it up to me later on if his new racket misfired.

  To cheer me up he listed a few good reasons why I shouldn’t worry about the old woman, first of all because any way you looked at it she hadn’t long to live, she was already too old as it was. He would just be arranging for her departure.

  All the same it was a very nasty business. The whole thing had been worked out between him and the couple. Seeing the old woman had taken to leaving her shack, they’d send her to feed the rabbits one evening … The fireworks would be carefully placed … They’d go off full in her face the moment she touched the door … Exactly what happened at the grocer’s … The neighborhood people already thought she was mad, the accident wouldn’t come as a surprise to anybody … They’d say they had warned her never to go near the rabbits … And she had disobeyed them … At her age there was certainly no chance of her surviving an explosion like the one they were fixing for her … right square in the puss.

  No two ways, that was some story I had told Robinson.

  And the music came back with the carnival, the music you’ve heard as far back as you remember, ever since you were little, that’s always playing somewhere, in some corner of the city, in little country towns, wherever poor people go and sit at the end of the week to figure out what’s become of them. “Paradise” they call it. And music is played for them, sometimes here, sometimes there, from season to season, it tinkles and grinds out the tunes that rich people danced to the year before. It’s the mechanical music that floats down from the wooden horses, from the cars that aren’t cars anymore, from the railways that aren’t at all scenic, from the platform under the wrestler who hasn’t any muscles and doesn’t come from Marseille, from the beardless lady, the magician who’s a butter-fingered jerk, the organ that’s not made of gold, the shooting gallery with the empty eggs. It’s the carnival made to delude the weekend crowd.

  We go in and drink the beer with no head on it. But under the cardboard trees the stink of the waiter’s breath is real. And the change he gives you has several peculiar coins in it, so peculiar that you go on examining them for weeks and weeks and finally, with considerable difficulty, palm them off on some beggar. What do you expect at a carnival? Gotta have what fun you can between hunger and jail, and take things as they come. No sense complaining, we’re sitting down, aren’t we? Which ain’t to be sneezed at. I saw the same old Gallery of the Nations, the one Lola caught sight of years and years ago on that avenue in the park of Saint-Cloud. You always see things again at carnivals, they revive the joys of past carnivals. Over the years the crowds must have come back time and again to stroll on the main avenue of the park of Saint-Cloud … taking it easy. The war had been over long ago. And say, I wonder if that shooting gallery still belonged to the same owner? Had he come back alive from the war? I take an interest in everything. Those are the same targets, but in addition, they’re shooting at airplanes now. Novelty. Progress. Fashion. The wedding was still there, the soldiers too, and the town hall with its flag. Everything. Plus a few more things to shoot at than before.

  But the people were getting a lot more fun out of the Dodge’em cars, a recent invention, because of the collisions you kept having and the terrible shaking they gave your head and innards. More howling lunatics kept pouring in for the pleasure of smashing ferociously into one another and getting scattered in all directions and fracturing their spleens at the bottom of their tubs. Nothing would make them stop. They never begged for mercy, it looked as if they’d never been so happy. Some were delirious. They had to be dragged away from their smash-ups. If they’d been offered Death as an extra attraction for their franc, they’d have gone right in. At about four o’clock the town band was supposed to play in the middle of the carnival ground. It took some doing to collect the musicians, because of the neighborhood bars, all of which wanted a turn at them. A last one was always missing. The rest waited. Some went looking for him. While waiting for them to come back, the others would be stricken with thirst and two more would disappear. They had to start all over again.

  Incrusted with dust, the gingerbread pigs turned into relics and gave the prize-winners a devastating thirst.

  Family groups are waiting for the fireworks before going home to bed. Waiting is part of the carnival too. Thousands of empty bottles jiggle and clink in the shadow under the tables. Restless feet consent or say no. The tunes are so familiar you hardly hear the music or the wheezing motor-driven cylinders behind the booths, which put life into things it costs two francs to see. When you’re tipsy with fatigue your heart pounds in your temples. Bim! Bim! It beats against the velvet around your head and inside your ears. One of these days you’ll burst. So be it! One of these days, when the movement inside catches up with the movement outside, when your thoughts scatter far and wide and rise up at last to play with the stars.

  A lot of crying went on all over the carnival, children getting accidentally squeezed between chairs and others being taught to resist their longings, to forego the enormous little pleasure of another ride on the merry-go-round. For character building the carnival hasn’t its equal. It’s never too soon to start. The little darlings don’t know yet that everything costs money. They think it’s pure generosity that makes the grownups behind the brightly lit counters incite the public to treat themselves to the marvels which they have amassed and which they guard with their raucous smiles. Children don’t know the law. Their parents slap them to teach them the law and protect them from pleasure.

  There’s never a real carnival except for the shopkeepers, and then it’s deep down and secret. The shopkeeper rejoices at night when all the unsuspecting yokels, the public, the profit fodder, have gone home, when silence returns to the avenue and the last dog has squirted his last drop of urine at the Japanese billiard table. That’s when the accounts are totted up, when the shopkeepers register their receipts and take stock of their powers and their victims.

  On the last Sunday evening of the carnival, Martrodin’s barmaid cut her hand pretty badly cutting sausage.

  Late that night, the things around us suddenly became quite distinct, as if they were sick of wobbling from one side of fate to the other and had all come out of the shadow at once and started talking to me. But you’d better not trust things and people at such times. You think objects are going to talk but they don’t say a thing, and often enough the night swallows them up before you can understand what they were trying to tell you. Anyway that’s been my experience.

  Be that as it may, I ran into Robinson that same night at Martrodin’s café just as I was getting ready to dress the barmaid’s wound. I remember the circumstances exactly. There were some Arab customers nearby, a whole raft of them were dozing on the benches. They didn’t seem interested in anything that was going on around them. Speaking to Robinson, I was careful not to bring up our conversation of the other night, when I’d caught him carrying boards. I had trouble sewing up the barmaid’s cut, because I couldn’t see very well at the back of the bar. I had to pay close attention and that kept me from talking. As soon as I’d finished, Robinson drew me into a corner and informed me without my asking that everything wa
s all set for his scheme, it would be coming off soon. His telling me that didn’t suit me at all, I could have easily done without it.

  “Soon? What?”

  “You know as well as I do.”

  “What? The same old business?”

  “Guess how much they’re giving me?”

  I had no desire to guess.

  “Ten thousand! … Just to hold my tongue!”

  “That’s a lot of money!”

  “It’ll save my life, that’s all,” he said. “Those are the ten thousand francs I’ve needed all along! … The first ten thousand! … See? … I’ve never really had a trade, but now with ten thousand francs! …”

  He must have started blackmailing them already …

  He listed his projects, all the things he’d be able to do with ten thousand francs … Leaning against the wall, in the shadow … He gave me time to think about them. A new world. Ten thousand francs!

  Yes, but thinking it over, I wondered if I wasn’t running some risk myself, if I wasn’t slipping into some sort of complicity by not trying to talk him out of his scheme. Actually I should have reported him. Not that I gave a damn about morality, any more than anyone else. What business was it of mine? But all the nasty stories, all the complications the law stirs up when a crime has been committed, just to entertain the taxpayer, the prurient bastard! … When that happens, it’s hard to clear yourself … I’d seen it happen … Trouble for trouble, I preferred the quiet kind that’s not splashed all over the newspapers.

  To make a long story short, I was fascinated and horrified at the same time. I’d gone this far, and once again I hadn’t the courage to get really to the bottom of things. Now that the time had come to open my eyes in the darkness, I almost preferred to keep them shut. But Robinson seemed to want me to open them, to know all about it.