by Guy Endore
Then she thought: But Barral’s parents, who lived in the country and were known to be but slightly pleased at their son’s affair, might not let her, a Jewess, be buried in a Christian cemetery? And the whole story took on once again its threatening aspect and descended on her chest like a heavy stone.
In the morning there was not a shred left of her dreams. Daylight filtered in through the draperies of the window. She was lying in her lovely bed with its gilt cupids. Above her head was her familiar azure ciel-de-lit, spangled with gold stars and illuminated by a white moon stitched with silk.
Gone were the crazy dreams of cemeteries, of Barral swearing vengeance, all the stupid cobwebs with which darkness litters the brain. If she rose early, before her mother, she might have her mother’s maid to help her dress and arrange her hair. And soon the mailman would come and bring her Barral’s description of her loveliness on the previous evening and his assurance of eternal love. Such were the dreams of the day.
The nights might become even more horrible. The Germans might move their gun-emplacements to within a few miles of the ring of forts and drop their bombs into the very city. Then one had to go to bed without any light at all, or only the slightest illumination, and sleep was often impossible. The winter nights were cold and long. It required effort not to scream out in anguish. But then the day was all the more to be enjoyed. Every second must offer her a laugh, otherwise life would bring no compensation for the inevitable night.
Thus her days were full of laughter and her nights full of anguish. But, so she used to think, “I, at least, have the compensation of wealth. What do the poor do?” She had Barral. What did those poor girls do, who had no letters from Barral?
During her hours at the canteen, she thought of Barral. He would come and fetch her. She would see him from a distance. Either on foot or on horse, but always in a bright blue uniform with golden aiguillettes.
The men, too, saw him coming. They nudged each other and smiled. But there was one young man, neither very handsome nor ugly, with only great brown eyes to recommend him. Every day, Sophie noticed, while the others smiled, he remained sullen.
Once, when she bent to rinse a glass, she looked full into those sad eyes. There was something strangely moving in them. Something that brought her night-thoughts to mind. She looked away because she feared he might have seen into her eyes and that he might have read there the thoughts he had called up, her thoughts of terror and of death.
But again and again, at the canteen, when she thought he wasn’t looking, she would glance at those eyes, wide open, under heavy brows. Almost always his glance shifted quickly toward hers and he caught her eye. Then she would look away. But a moment later she would look again. There was something compelling in his eyes. Something of that strange compulsion of an abyss. That invitation of the void, of great heights: Come, cast yourself down. Just let yourself go. How do you know it isn’t sweeter than anything you have ever imagined or experienced in life? Why do you fear? Why do you fear what you do not know as yet? Come! Come!
Oh! The opium-sweet attraction of death!
She knew that attraction. How many times had she not revolved such thoughts in her mind, at night, when she had extinguished the gas and blown out the candle. During the day, when away from the canteen, she rarely thought of those eyes, but at night they haunted her. They were there before her in the darkness, and had that strange phosphorescent glow that the eyes of some animals have. Those eyes mingled with her night-thoughts. They were her companions during the long ugly night. They were with her in the Jewish cemetery at Père-Lachaise. She was not alone at night any longer. Those eyes had rescued her from her lonely nightmares.
She asked those eyes: What of the grave? What of the moldering bodies in the grave? And the eyes had an answer. The eyes said: Wherever you are, I will be with you. Nightandday. Life and death.
In the morning these thoughts were gone. She had Barral’s letter, and as she planned what visits, what shopping she might do during the day, her light laughter resounded again and again. Even in his bureau, her father could hear her. He smiled and shook his head. “Gay little chick. How can one be so perpetually light-hearted? Especially our Sophie, who was, so to speak, born out of the grave. God bless her.”
But in the afternoon, when she entered the canteen, her eyes began to seek for him at once. If he was not there she was almost glad, but not quite. She found herself looking around expectantly, hoping to see him come in. Hoping with that tremor of mingled fear and desire. And while she smiled at the men as if she had not another thought in the world but pleasure, gaiety, amusement, she looked around.
He came. He always came. He sat alone and brooded. Brooded on the crazy fate that had made him half a man and half a beast. Sometimes he thought he would consult a doctor. It might be that there existed a cure for such cases as his. But no. His case was unique.
Besides, it was silly to think of such things. He could not go to a doctor. He did not dare. The number of his crimes barred that way forever. Perhaps if he were wounded, taken to a hospital, there might be a possibility of interrogating a physician.
He used to pause at the bookstalls and examine medical texts, but what he discovered was of little value. He learnt that his disease was known, that is to say, it had a name, but observers classed it either as a fraud or as a delusion, and as far as curing it goes, no one had any suggestions to offer except that the medieval method of burning was an unmerited cruelty.
He began to think that this rejection of the cure by fire was as superficial a decision as that which rejected his disease, and that there was, on the contrary, much to recommend the stake. He contemplated seriously the necessity of taking his life.
These thoughts had grown more frequent when he stepped by chance into the canteen where Sophie worked. He saw her and was at once in love with her. Thereafter he came every day. She represented to him all that he was not. All that he could never be. She was the epitome of that which he had lost and could never recover: the joie de vivre.
Then he began to notice that she was observing him. And one day when their eyes met he had the feeling that there was a bond between her and him. He shuddered to think of the filth from which he dared look up to her purity, and he vowed seriously that he would reform himself. He decided that hereafter he would gorge himself with human food during the day, so that his ghastly appetite of the night would diminish. But that first night, despite the gorging, he woke up from his sleep, his body tense, robbed of all desire for further rest, his skin aching to feel the freedom of the night air, his limbs yearning to touch the ground, his jaws to bite and rend. For a while he fought with himself to keep her image uppermost in his mind.
He panted through his opened mouth. And he felt his tongue, his tongue, the short and bulky tongue of man, begin to flatten and lengthen. “God help me!” he cried. But now that tongue was curling out of his mouth, was hanging over his teeth. Unable to resist any more, he sprang from his bed. He went to a corner of his room, muzzled under a piece of cloth, and dragged forth an arm, a human arm. The last of the two arms he had taken from La Belle Normande.
He sank his teeth into it. His eyes glared around suspiciously. Low growls came from his throat. For a while there was silence, then there were more noises, the slap of the hard, dead hand as it hit the floor, the crunching of a bone, and occasionally a sharp tick as a ring on one finger struck wood.
At last his hunger was appeased, but he had no recollection of it. Morning found him in bed, his head heavy, his neck aching, his tongue furred. It was difficult to get up, but having succeeded at last, he began the disgusting task of cleaning up the remains on the floor. He dressed himself and went out to join his regiment.
As he traversed the courtyard, the fat concierge came dashing out: “Monsieur, monsieur. Leave me your key, finally. I would like to clean your room.”
“Here it is,” he said darkly, “but in that case, I’m moving.”
“Ah monsieur…” she said.
“How many times have I told you that I don’t want my room cleaned? What do you think I had my own lock put on for? So you could come in and disturb me whenever you pleased?”
“Ah, mais—”
“Well, do you want the key or not?”
“Ah, mais, voyons…”
“Merde alors!” he exclaimed and walked off.
“Peuh!” she breathed. “Quelle bête féroce! You’d think I wanted to spy on him. Well, I bet he has something to conceal, if he keeps his door locked that way.” Self-righteous, her lips compressed, she returned to her interrupted scrubbing.
When his duties were over, Bertrand went to the canteen and sat sullen, filled with horror at himself. “You’ve besmirched yourself foully. How dare you even come into the same room with that pure being?”
He wished with all his strength that he might turn into some loathsome insect, a spider, for example, and that he could run beneath her foot and die crushed under her sole. “No,” he thought, “she would not even step on me. Even a poisonous bug she would let live. She’s too good.”
But though he tried to restrain himself, he did at last look up. Her eyes were upon him, but she shifted her glance quickly. Her gaze wandered back, however. As if magnetized, her eyes looked into his, and his looked into hers. It lasted but a fraction of a second, but it might have been years.
That evening he made a deep vow, and when he reached his room he wrapped all the flesh and bones he had and, adding a stone for weight, made a tight package which he contrived unnoticed to sink into the Seine.
“No more of that,” he said. “No more. Never. I swear it by your eyes.”
He was in love. He was in love. As he wandered home a woman accosted him, but he shook his head violently. “Ugly creature,” he said to himself. He was through with that sort. He had suddenly become very prim. He went home and slept soundly. In the morning he woke up from a dreamless sleep.
“I’m cured!” he wanted to shout to the sunlight that in the early morning found its way into his room. “I’m cured! She has cured me. With her help, it needed only a good effort.”
In the afternoon at the canteen he was moved to rush up and thank her, but he did not dare. However, he found a piece of paper and wrote: “You have rescued me from my nightmares. You are an angel.” But for two days he carried the scrap of paper around and did not dare give it to her.
Finally, one afternoon, when he sawher coach drivingup and the possibility about to be lost for another day, he walked rapidly past the counter and pushed the paper across to her. She snatched it and hid it away in her sleeve as if she had been expecting a message from him, as if she had been secreting billets-doux from him all her life.
Before she rode off with Barral she had a chance to glance at the note: “You have rescued me from my nightmares.” The effect on her was electrical. How did he know? How did he know about her dreams?
She was not in the mood for Barral’s gaiety. But she dissembled. It had come to be natural for her to be perpetually smiling and laughing. She could do it despite her trembling heart.
“Sophie,” said Aunt Louise shaking her head, “will you never be serious?”
Sophie stopped laughing. She was struck by the similarity of their thoughts. She, like Aunt Louise, had been thinking: “Is that all you have, Barral, jokes and smart replies and pretty nonsense? What do you think of at night?”
She could formulate the answer he wouldgive to such a question. “I think of you all nightlong, and if God is good I dream of you too in my sleep.” A pretty conceit and nothing more. A good fellow, this Barral, but shallow and silly. And she held that reply against him without ever giving him the opportunity to make it.
For several weeks Sophie and Bertrand confined themselves to an exchange of notes. But these protestations of mutual dreams and love soon ceased to satisfy. She craved more intimacy.
In the evenings at home, with Barral, and generally under the watchful eye of Aunt Louise, Sophie nearly yawned. “If Barral would only leave,” she thought, “then I could go to bed and be with my Bertrand’s eyes.” She was no longer so afraid of the dark, no longer so afraid of death, since she knew her fate shared.
Once Aunt Louise left them alone for a minute. And Sophie, unaware of what she was doing, ceased her light chatter. She was thinking: “Poor Barral, I’ll be leaving you soon.” And under a sudden impulse of pity, she laid her hand in his. Frightened by this open declaration of affection, a token greater than any she had ever shown him, he clasped his fingers round hers and was so weak with love that he could not say anything. With astonishment and a joy so deep that it was painful, he saw her eyes fill with tears, he heard her say: “Poor Barral.”
Aunt Louise entered and suggested that it was late. He took her home, feeling all the while as if he were floating on clouds, and when he had reached his apartment, he forgot to take off his cape in his haste to sit down and write to Sophie. He filled more pages than ever. He described his emotions a dozen times, swore his love in every paragraph, and when he went out to post his letter, it was three o’clock, but he was in no mood for sleep that night.
In the morning Sophie took his letter to her room and sat down, intending to read it. But her thoughts carried her off to Bertrand. She wondered how best to arrange a meeting with him. It grew late, and time to hasten off to a silly appointment which she regretted ever havingmade, except insofar as such appointments kept people from discovering her secret.
But before she left home she must write a note for Bertrand. Why not say that she would come to his house? Yes, she must do that. Soon, almost any day now, the siege might be over and with that the canteens and a large measure of her freedom. She wrote the note and was about to hurry off. Then she remembered Barral’s letter which she had not yet read. “Bah,” she said, “some other time,” and threw it unopened into a drawer of her secretaire.
That evening Bertrand could scarcely control himself from shouting with joy. She was comingto his house. She, yes, she. She was actually coming into his room. She could only spare a half-hour, but she would come sharp at the dot and they would be together and alone.
The night no longer had any terrors for him. He knew he would sleep through, and if he dreamt at all, it would be of her. In the morning as he was leaving, he bethought himself:
“Mme Labouvaye!” he shouted into a dark hole.
“Oui, monsieur! Oui, monsieur!” the concierge shouted back and came running out, her ample bosom dancing with the motion imparted by her strides.
“Voilà la clef,” he said. “Please clean up thoroughly.”
She was too astonished to speak.
In spite of himself, he smiled. He could smile now that he belonged to the human race again. “Someone is coming to see me.”
She understood and laughed with him. “Ah, monsieur,” she said, drawing out her words. Then she chuckled: “I’ll clean it. I’ll scrub your room so clean you will be able to eat off the floor.”
He shuddered, controlled himself, and smiling a goodbye, walked off. She remained looking after him, standing out in the chilly winter air. “Hmm. And so that’s all he wanted to make him act more human? Those young fellows take that sort of thing too seriously. But after all, what else is there to life?”
Sophie came on time. He met her at the corner of the street and showed her through the maze of courts and dark corridors to his room.
“I’ll remember, next time,” she said and smiled up at him.
Within, she noted the ugliness of his chamber. The window that did not look out upon the sky, but upon walls. The chairs that were hard and uncomfortable.
They sat together on the bed and held each other’s hands. And they were silent, filled with rapid thoughts and emotions, but embarrassed. What should they do now that they were together? They did nothing, just sat and looked at each other.
At last, in a voice that was hoarse from its weight of love, he excused the meanness of his quarters. And she, in a voice warm
and throbbing, expressed some equally trite remark.
They may have been sitting thus for some twenty minutes or more and exchanging remarks that were far from inspired, when a strange thought obtruded itself into her mind. What was she doing here in this room? Who was this young man whose hand she was holding in her own, clasping it with force as if she would have sooner parted with her life? Why…?
A strange terror took hold of her, the kind of a terror one has when, just before waking from a bad dream, one’s whole being shrieks: This can’t be true! and yet fears that it may.
Abruptly she dropped his hand and rose.
“You’re not going yet?” he exclaimed.
“I must,” she said.
“Don’t,” he pleaded.
Her eyes were darting around the room as if she imagined she were trapped in a cage. And indeed she did feel trapped. She must get out! She had put herself into a living nightmare. She had entombed herself alive! She made a move toward the door, but he caught hold of her hand again and held her.
“Let me go,” she cried in a whisper.
He wanted to let her go, but his fingers wouldn’t loosen. He drew her slowly back toward himself. She held her hand before her face as if she would ward him off. Her eyes were wide open in terror.
“Don’t hurt me!” she begged. “Oh, please don’t hurt me!”
Thereupon he suddenly released her. “I wasn’t going to hurt you,” he said in a pained voice. He looked away and said: “You may go if you like. Shall I show you the way to the street?”
Her momentary terror vanished. What had she been afraid of? She was filled with contrition instead. Impulsively she put her arms around him.
His own arms remained at his side. It was now his turn to be frightened. He realized that for a moment at least he had lost control of himself. He did not dare clasp her in his arms. It would be better if he never saw her again. Better still if he killed himself quickly.
“Bertrand,” she said softly, entreatingly.