Pedigree

by Georges Simenon

  While he was walking along, hypnotized by the disheartening sight of the windows, he bumped into somebody, no, he just avoided him, a man standing all by himself in the middle of the wilderness. Roger froze, filled with an instinctive fear, but at last the usher’s voice reassured him.

  ‘Good evening, Monsieur Mamelin.’

  ‘Good evening, Monsieur Sacré.’

  There were bicycles lined up on the right, under a shed, hundreds of bicycles at rest; but Roger did not possess one and never would, for a bicycle cost far too much. He plunged into a sort of passage which grew narrower with every step. The yard finished in the form of a funnel, with two walls coming closer together, an icy archway, and finally a door, the one to which he had taken a dislike on his very first day.

  Out in the street, his step became lighter; a tram was going downhill, another was coming up, and they stopped for each other at the crossroads; the shop windows were dimly lit, for fear of air-raids; in the very centre of the town, you might have thought you were in a dreary suburban street, and from a distance the big stores all looked like those poor little shops in working-class districts in which you see a few withered vegetables next to some candles, sweets and cakes of soap.

  It was raining, the pavement was wet, and his shoes started taking in water; there were no shoes to be bought in the shops any more; most boys wore shoes with wooden soles, but you could not go to the Collège Saint-Servais like that, whatever Élise might say.

  ‘At least your feet would be dry, and you needn’t take any notice of what the other boys say.’

  The war had been going on for three years now and for three years the glass panes of the street-lamps had been painted blue, so that they shed scarcely any light; and when, at six o’clock, the shops closed their shutters, you wandered along the streets like a ghost, pointing the dancing ray of a torch in front of you. Now and then there would be a burst of laughter, girlish laughter particularly. You would come across a couple pressed against a door or in a corner, and try your best to light up a patch of bare thigh.

  Roger’s face was still burning with the warmth which had invaded it in the director of studies’ room. He turned right into an alley-way, to take a short cut. It was an alley-way which was out of bounds to the schoolboys, but he had never taken any notice of the ban. They were forbidden to smoke too, and it was on purpose that he filled his pipe as soon as he was out of the door.

  This particular evening he was full of a vague feeling of rancour, and now and then he kicked the kerb of the pavement like a street-urchin.

  He hated school. He had been almost relieved that afternoon at the prospect, frightening though it was, of being expelled, of never having to go back there; and yet now, coming out of the alley-way and crossing the Boulevard d’Avroy, he envied the pupils in his class whom he had left sitting on their benches, waiting for four o’clock and listening to Father Renchon’s monotonous voice.

  Above all he envied the way they went off in groups, for they nearly all lived in the same districts, the rich districts of the town; their parents knew each other, had their names on brass plates, were doctors, barristers, solicitors, magistrates, industrialists; the boys talked about their maids and the seaside resorts where they went every year; they had sisters who were already young women.

  In summer especially they gave an impression of radiant life when, riding nickel-plated bicycles and casually holding the handlebars with only one hand, they went off in a group, waiting for one another as they sneaked in and out of the crowds in the Rue Saint-Gilles before regrouping on the shady boulevard.

  No other pupil went Mamelin’s way, and if by chance he heard hurried footsteps behind him, if somebody caught up with him, panting for breath, it was Neef, Neef-the-peasant of course, who accompanied him as far as the Pont d’Amercoeur where he had to catch the tram to Chênée. Roger avoided him, shook him off. However humbly poor Neef might offer him his friendship and devotion, he spurned them; he felt guilty about it sometimes, but he could not help it, he preferred his solitude to the company of the yokel in his corduroy velvet clothes.

  He went along the Rue Hazinelle. Already, in the shadow of the pavements, on both sides of the Girls’ High School, youths and men were waiting for the girls to come out. There was a little square there with two alley-ways leading into it, and because of those figures lying in wait, because of the stories which went the rounds, because of certain scandals which the papers had reported, you felt a special sort of fever there; the walls, the doors, the few bare trees, and above all the patches of shadow did not look the same and did not smell the same as they did elsewhere.

  It was rumoured that a certain number of girls from Hazinelle—some said three, others more—had been found by the police in a furnished room in the Rue de la Casquette in the company of some German officers.

  Every time he passed the school, Roger visualized the same picture which he had built up out of nothing, or rather which had formed itself in his mind almost without his knowing and which he always rediscovered unchanged, with some indistinct parts, patches of shadow, and, on the other hand, excessively sharp details, as in certain photographs which schoolmates had shown him and which always produced the same feeling of uneasiness in him.

  The bedroom in the Rue de la Casquette looked like Mademoiselle Lola’s room, but the light was green as it was in Monsieur Saft’s room, and what is more the leather armchair from the drawing-room was there. One of the officers looked like Major Schorr who had a shameful disease, while the other looked like the caricatures of the Kronprinz which were circulated secretly. Of the girls, all he could see was thin, pale faces, tired eyes, pinched nostrils, and milky patches of flesh under hitched-up skirts.

  He quickened his pace, crossing the busier streets as if they were rivers with fords, and constantly taking short cuts like Élise, not so much in order to save time as out of a liking for those narrow alley-ways with their lop-sided houses where tilting stones flanked the doorways and dark passages led off heaven knows where.

  Now and then the sound of footsteps made him start. He was frightened, but his fear was a pleasurable fear, as when he went to serve Mass at the Bavière hospital at six o’clock in the morning. Invariably, in the winter-morning darkness, there would be somebody walking along a hundred yards behind him, and after keeping his nerves under control for a while, Roger could not restrain himself from running as fast as he could, until he finally came to a stop in the pale light of the doorway, panting for breath and clinging to the knocker.

  Nearly all his memories were blurred, with ambiguous lights and mysterious glows in settings plunged in shadow. The war itself was something dark, heavy and oppressive: the cellar where they had cowered with unknown neighbours during the bombardment; the charred paper floating in the air like an infernal snow, which they had seen through the ventilators gradually covering the pavements when the municipal library in the Rue des Pitteurs had gone up in flames; then the Uhlans, the first to enter the town—it was said that they had come to parley—whom they had anxiously watched going by, seeing nothing of them but their boots; and the lamps or candles which they had had to keep alight in all the windows of every house while the troops had marched past night after night…

  The Rue Puits-en-Sock and the Rue Jean-d’Outremeuse had changed colour, and the house in the Rue de la Loi which the Mamelins had left six months before and which he scarcely recognized, struck him as narrow and dirty, without any life or personality. He was rather ashamed of it, and felt a certain malaise at the idea that it was there that he had spent the greater part of his childhood. Indeed, he blushed over his childhood itself, and it was with a feeling of repugnance that once again—he had just decided it would be the last time—he went through the green door, heedless of the brass plate on which, from his doorstep, half-shutting his sunbaked eyelids, he had once spelt out the words ‘Institut Saint-André’.

  The waiting-room on the right of the porch was no longer lit, to save on gas; as he went past
, Roger could only just make out the mothers sitting in the damp darkness, clutching their shawls round their shoulders.

  He could have sworn that there was less light in the classroom. He crossed the courtyard. He was no longer a pupil. For those sitting on the polished wooden benches, he was a big boy, almost a man. He went straight to the kitchens; the big vat of gruel had just arrived from the food-kitchens, yellow, sugary, and with a basis of maize sent by the American Red Cross.

  Roger felt sick at the sight of it, and decided that he would not even eat any today. This evening, for the last time, he had not a single word or smile for the cook with the big, pear-shaped belly, common face and soiled cassock. He knew that his mother would insist that he should go on leaving school at half past three and coming to serve their extra meal to the pupils of the Institut Saint-André.

  This was another idea of hers. She was obsessed by her desire to keep his strength up. Food had become so short that it had become necessary to provide supplementary rations in the schools.

  In the higher classes and in the colleges, all that the pupils were given was a tiny white roll, but the little children in the primary schools were also entitled to a bowl of that gruel which Roger, with the cook’s help, was carrying across to Brother Mansuy’s classroom.

  On the platform, it was he who filled the bowls which the queue of children held out to him one after another; he too who kept an eye on the rolls which they took afterwards from a basket.

  In return for this service, when he had finished doling out the rations in every classroom, he was entitled to as much gruel as he could eat and to three or four rolls, for there were always a few children absent and ill.

  Never again would he taste that warm, sticky, ugly yellow paste with which he had sometimes filled his stomach until he could not breathe. It was a sort of revenge he was taking.

  He would never come back to the Rue de la Loi. He would come out of school at the same time as the others. He was going to tell his mother so straight away. He had already told Brother Médard, blushing as he did whenever he told a lie.

  ‘Father Renchon is afraid that my missing lessons, sometimes important lessons, may affect my studies.’

  Lord, how dark the school was, and on the green walls, on the shelves, on the desks, how old-fashioned things looked: the measuring-jars for instance, and the maps which had turned almost brown, and the glossy pictures, printed in Leipzig, which showed the seasons. Roger felt a pang as he looked at the one of winter, with the fair in a little town, the man in the bottle-green coat and the girl with the sledge, which had remained in the same position ever since he had left school.

  He would have liked to be sure that it was really over, that he would never come back. In the yard he breathed in for the last time the smell of the slate-roofed lavatories, and in one corner he caught sight of the pale sink and the tap to which, in his capacity as Brother Médard’s pet, he had held the key.

  It was no longer his street, or his district. He crossed the Pont d’Amercoeur, which they had never crossed in the old days except to go once a year to the Robermont cemetery, turned left, and went along a shabby boulevard lined with little houses, ware-houses and strips of waste ground.

  The district humiliated him. It was almost on a par with Bressoux, where the little street-urchins came from who used to invade the Place du Congrès and whom the mothers tried in vain to drive away. And if their house on the corner of the Rue des Maraîchers was a handsome one, too handsome and too big for them, it was by chance, almost by charity that they were in it.

  Anybody would think that Élise was unable to live like other people, that there was a spell on her. How had she come by this house which had previously been an important post office? She never gave a satisfactory answer to this sort of question, and you always felt there was something suspicious behind it all. In this case an old doctor, who lived by himself in the house opposite and had been given the task of finding a tenant, had accepted a derisory rent for the duration of the war.

  There would be a scene, on account of the rolls. For seeing that Roger could eat as much maize gruel as he liked, Brother Médard’s rolls were shared out among the family.

  As was his habit, Roger repeated as he walked along the phrases he was going to use.

  ‘I’m not going to help any more at the Institut Saint-André.’

  And when his mother asked why not? Would he lie as he had done to Brother Médard? Instead he felt a spiteful urge to state flatly:

  ‘Because I don’t want to.’

  ‘Why don’t you want to?’

  ‘Because I want to stay at school until four o’clock like the others.’

  If his mother insisted too much, he would tell her that he was tired of being a beggar.

  He was impatient to be home, imagining that he could already breathe the scent of battle which was going to invade the kitchen whose light he could glimpse as he came round the corner.

  He turned the key in the lock, put his satchel down and hung his overcoat on the hallstand. Hullo, there was somebody there! Hanging on one of the brass hooks he saw a woman’s coat which he had never seen before and, on top of it, a little old woman’s hat with a purple flower.

  He frowned, suspicious, jealous of their tranquillity. Pushing open the kitchen door, his mouth already half open to ask a question, he bumped into his mother, who had got up suddenly with a smile which he knew very well, the sweetest smile she could summon up.

  ‘May I introduce my son, Mademoiselle Rinquet. My Roger who’s just come home from the Collège Saint-Servais, where he’s studying to become an officer. Come in, Roger. Just imagine, Mademoiselle Rinquet, who is a retired postmistress, is going to live here with us.’

  And she smiled more than ever, turning towards Désiré’s armchair where a sharp-eyed little old woman was sitting darning a black woollen stocking.

  ‘Well, aren’t you going to say good evening to Mademoiselle Rinquet? It’s a surprise for him, Mademoiselle. I hadn’t mentioned it to either my husband or my son. But you’ll see, you’ll be one of the family straight away.’

  CHAPTER THREE

  THEY had come together accidentally, as they did every now and then, on Sunday morning at Aunt Cécile’s. In the old days Désiré used to say:

  ‘I’m going home.’

  Or else they went to the Rue Puits-en-Sock. Nowadays, they went to Cécile’s, even though Chrétien Mamelin was still there. He took up less space than he used to, his tall figure seemed to have shrunk, and people sometimes started when he appeared in front of them, he made so little noise.

  Out of habit, everybody still dropped into the kitchen for a moment, where the smell had changed slightly, had gone sour, on account of Cécile’s three little children. It was for their sake too, in order to keep an eye on them in summer when they were playing in the yard, that the coloured paper had been scratched from one of the window-panes.

  Cécile was ill. For the first time, that morning, they had found a stranger doing the housework and the cooking, a strapping girl who was a maid at Gruyelle-Marquant’s, and all the Mamelin sons were shocked to see her cooking the Sunday stew.

  Cécile, wrapped in a shawl, was sitting by the cooker, and when Lucien came in, or Arthur, or Désiré, she explained all over again how it had come over her, lifting her dress up to show her swollen ankles, which were an unhealthy white.

  She was disconsolate rather than worried. It was her enforced inactivity which was undermining her and making her feel ashamed. She kept an eye and an ear on everything and followed all the maid’s movements; but it seemed to her that everything was going wrong, and she suffered physically at seeing a strapping girl of twenty-two incapable of dressing children properly.

  To cheer her up, everybody teased her, Désiré like the others, in his booming voice.

  ‘Hullo, all! Well, Cécile, how are you? Admit that you just wanted to have a little rest. Hullo, so you’re here, Roger!’

  Désiré, who had just come ou
t of High Mass at Saint-Nicolas, warmed his hands over the saucepans, breathing in their aroma.

  ‘I say, everybody, guess what we’re going to have for dinner. You first, Cécile … No, you’ll never guess. Will she, Roger? Chips, yes, chips! Just imagine, yesterday, at the office, a country client for whom I’d performed a few little services brought me a couple of pounds of potatoes. You can’t find them even at fifteen francs a pound in the shops. When I opened the parcel at home, Roger nearly cried. Then I said to Élise:

  ‘ “We’re going to do something silly, but never mind! It will take our ration of lard, but tomorrow we must have chips for dinner.” ’

  They had gone on chattering a little longer, about this and that, each in his corner, warm and snug, and finally Cécile ended up by forgetting that all the housework was going wrong.

  ‘Coming, son?’

  They went home together, walking at the same pace. It was bitterly cold. That morning, they had had to use the handle of a hammer to break the layer of ice which had formed during the night in the china jugs.

  ‘Cécile doesn’t look at all well,’ observed Désiré, who had a marked predilection for his younger sister. ‘When you’ve a minute to spare during the week, you ought to drop in on her to say hullo.’

  He spoke to his son as man to man. They understood one another. They both knew that Cécile’s husband, Marcel, was a brute of a man, bursting with health, who could not imagine that his wife might be seriously ill.

  ‘A cigarette, son?’

  The gesture touched Roger, that familiar gesture of the father offering his cigarette-case quite naturally to his son as he would to a friend. Then, walking along side by side, they both thought about something else, the same thing; they wanted to talk about it but hesitated.