Outside, the sky remains the same dull white. It is still daylight. The street is empty: there is no traffic, and there are no pedestrians on the sidewalks. It has been snowing; and the snow has not yet melted. It forms a rather thin layer —an inch or so—which is quite regular, however, and covers all the horizontal surfaces with the same dull, neutral whitish color. The only interruptions visible are the straight paths parallel to the housefronts and the gutters (made even more distinct by their vertical curbs which have remained black) separating the sidewalks into two unequal strips for their entire length. At the crossroads, at the base of the street light, a small circle of trampled snow has the same yellowish color as the narrow paths that run alongside the buildings. The doors are closed. The windows show no figure either pressed against the panes or even looming farther back in the rooms. The flatness of this entire setting, moreover, suggests that there is nothing behind these panes, behind these doors, behind these housefronts. And the entire scene remains empty: without a man, a woman, or even a child.
The picture, in its varnished wood frame, represents a tavern scene. It is a nineteenth-century etching, or a good reproduction of one. A large number of people fill the room, a crowd of drinkers sitting or standing, and, on the far left, the bartender standing on a slightly raised platform behind his bar.
The bartender is a fat, bald man wearing an apron. He leans forward, both hands resting on the edge of the bar, over several half-full glasses that have been set there, his massive shoulders turned toward a small group of middle-class citizens in frock coats who appear to be engaged in an animated discussion; standing in various attitudes, many are making expansive gestures that sometimes involve the whole body, and are doubtless quite expressive.
To their right, that is, in the center of the scene, several groups of drinkers are sitting at tables that are irregularly arranged—or rather, crammed—in a space too small to hold them all comfortably. These men are also making extravagant gestures and their faces are violently contorted, but their movements, like their expressions, are frozen by the drawing, suspended, stopped short, which also makes their meaning uncertain; particularly since the words being shouted on all sides seem to have been absorbed by a thick layer of glass. Some of them, carried away by their excitement, have half risen from their chairs or their benches and are pointing over the heads of the others toward a more distant interlocutor. Everywhere hands rise, mouths open, heads turn; fists are clenched, pounded on tables, or brandished in mid-air.
At the far right a group of men, almost all workers judging from their clothes, like those sitting at the tables, have their backs to the latter and are crowding around some poster or picture tacked on the wall. A little in front of them, between their backs and the first row of drinkers facing in the other direction, a boy is sitting on the floor among all these legs with their shapeless trousers, all these clumsy boots stamping about and trying to move toward his left; on the other side he is partially protected by the bench. The child is shown facing straight ahead. He is sitting with his legs folded under him, his arms clasped around a large box something like a shoe box. No one is paying any attention to him. Perhaps he was knocked down in the confusion. As a matter of fact, in the foreground, not far from where he is sitting, a chair has been overturned and is still lying on the floor.
Somewhat apart, as though separated from the crowd surrounding them by an unoccupied zone—narrow, of course, but nevertheless wide enough for their isolation to be noticeable, in any case wide enough to call attention to them though they are in the background—three soldiers are sitting around a smaller table, the second from the rear on the right, their motionlessness and rigidity in marked contrast to the civilians who fill the room. The soldiers are looking straight ahead, their hands resting on the checkered oilcloth; there are no glasses in front of them. They are the only men whose heads are not bare, for they are wearing low-peaked fatigue caps. Behind them, at the extreme rear, the last seated drinkers are mingled with others who are standing, forming a confused mass; besides, the drawing here is vaguer too. Under the print, in the white margin, someone has written a title: "The Defeat of Reichenfels."
On closer examination, the isolation of the three soldiers seems to result less from the narrow space between them and the crowd than from the direction of the glances around them. All the figures in the background look as if they are passing—or trying to pass, for the space is cramped—behind the soldiers to reach the left side of the picture, where there is probably a door (though this hypothetical exit cannot be seen in the picture because of a row of coat racks covered with hats and coats); every head is looking straight ahead (that is, toward the coat racks), except for one here and there who turns to speak to someone who has remained in the rear. Everyone in the crowd gathered on the right is looking toward the right wall. The drinkers at the tables are represented in natural poses, turning toward the center of each group or else toward one neighbor or another. As for the middle-class citizens in front of the bar, they too are completely absorbed in their own conversation, and the bartender leans toward them without paying any attention to the rest of his customers. Among the various groups circulate a number of persons not yet settled, but obviously about to adopt one of several probable attitudes: either walking over to examine the bulletin board, sitting down at one of the tables, or else going out behind the coat racks; a moment's scrutiny is enough to reveal that each man has already determined what he is going to do next; here, as among the groups, no face, no movement betrays hesitation, perplexity, inner vacillation, or contradiction. The three soldiers, on the contrary, seem forsaken. They are not talking to each other; they are not looking at anything in particular: neither glasses, nor bulletins, nor their neighbors. They have nothing to do. No one looks at them and they themselves have nothing to look at. The position of their faces—one full face, the other in profile, the last in a three-quarters view —indicates no common subject of attention. Besides, the first man—the only one whose features are completely visible—betrays no expression whatever, merely a fixed, vacant stare.
The contrast between the three soldiers and the crowd is further accentuated by a precision of line, a clarity in rendering, much more evident in their case than in that of other individuals the same distance from the viewer. The artist has shown them with as much concern for detail and almost as much sharpness of outline as if they were sitting in the foreground. But the composition is so involved that this is not apparent at first glance. Particularly the soldier shown full face has been portrayed with a wealth of detail that seems quite out of proportion to the indifference it expresses. No specific thought can be discerned. It is merely a tired face, rather thin, and narrowed still further by several days' growth of beard. This thinness, these shadows that accentuate the features without, on the other hand, indicating the slightest individual characteristic, nevertheless emphasize the brilliance of the wide-open eyes.
The military overcoat is buttoned up to the neck, where the regimental number is embroidered on a diamond- shaped tab of material. The cap is set straight on the head, covering the hair, which is cut extremely short, judging from its appearance at the temples. The man is sitting stiffly, his hands lying flat on the table which is covered with a red-and-white checked oilcloth.
He has finished his drink some time ago. He does not look as if he were thinking of leaving. Yet, around him, the café has emptied. The light is dim now, the bartender having turned out most of the lamps before leaving the room himself.
The soldier, his eyes wide open, continues to stare into the half-darkness a few yards in front of him, where the child is standing, also motionless and stiff, his arms at his side. But it is as if the soldier did not see the child—or anything else. He looks as if he has fallen asleep from exhaustion, sitting close to the table, his eyes wide open.
It is the child who speaks first. He says: "Are you asleep?" He has spoken almost in a whisper, as if he were afraid to awaken the sleeper. The latter has n
ot stirred. After a few seconds the child repeats his question a trifle louder: "Are you asleep?" and he adds, in the same expressionless, slightly singsong tone of voice: "You can't sleep here, you know."
The soldier has not stirred. The child might suppose he is alone in the room, merely pretending to have a conversation with someone who does not exist, or else with a doll, a toy unable to answer. Under these conditions there was certainly no need to speak louder; the voice was actually that of a child telling himself a story.
But the voice has stopped, as if unable to struggle further against the silence which has prevailed again. The child, too, may have fallen asleep.
"No . .. Yes ... I know," the soldier says.
Neither one has moved. The child is still standing in the half-darkness, his arms at his sides. He has not even seen the man's lips moving as he sits at the table under the one light bulb that is still on in the room; his head has not moved at all, his eyes have not even blinked, and his mouth is still closed.
"Your father . . the soldier begins. Then he stops. But this time the lips have stirred a little.
"He's not my father," the child says.
And he turns his head toward the door with its black rectangle of window glass in the upper half.
Outside it is snowing. The fine flakes have begun falling thickly again on the already white road. The wind has risen and is blowing them horizontally, so that the soldier has to keep his head down, a little farther down, as he walks, pressing the hand shielding his eyes still closer against his forehead, leaving visible only a few square inches of thin, crunching snow that is already trampled hard. Reaching a crossroad, the soldier hesitates and looks around for the plaques that should indicate the name of that cross street. But it is useless, for there are no blue enamel plaques here, or else they are set too high and the night is too dark; besides, the fine, close flakes quickly blind him when he tries to look up. Then too, a street name would hardly furnish him much in the way of helpful information: he does not know this city anyway.
He hesitates for another moment, looks ahead again, then back at the road he has just taken, with its rows of street lights whose circles of light, closer and closer together and increasingly dim, soon disappear in the darkness. Then he turns right, into the cross street which is also deserted, lined with the same kind of apartment houses and the same row of street lights, set fairly far apart but at regular intervals, their dim circles of light revealing as he passes the oblique fall of the snow.
The white flakes, falling thick and fast, suddenly change direction; vertical for a few seconds, they suddenly become almost horizontal. Then they stop suddenly and, with a sudden gust of wind, begin to blow at virtually the same angle in the opposite direction, which they abandon after two or three seconds just as abruptly as before, to return to their original orientation, making new, almost horizontal parallel lines that cross the circle of light from left to right toward the unlighted windows.
In the window recesses the snow has formed an uneven layer, very shallow on the sill but deeper toward the back, making an already considerable drift that fills the right corner and reaches as high as the pane. All the ground floor windows, one after the other, show exactly the same amount of snow which has drifted toward the right in the same way.
At the next crossroad, under the corner street light, a child is standing. He is partially hidden by the cast-iron shaft whose broader base conceals the lower part of his body altogether. He is watching the soldier approach. He does not seem bothered by the storm, or by the snow that whitens some of his black cape and his beret. He is a boy of about ten, his expression serious and alert. He turns his head as the soldier approaches him, watching him as he reaches the lamppost, then passes it. Since the soldier is not walking fast, the child has time to examine him carefully from head to foot: the unshaven cheeks, the apparent fatigue, the dirty ragged overcoat, the sleeves without chevrons, the wet package under his left arm, both hands thrust deep in his pockets, the hurriedly wrapped, irregular leggings, the wide gash down the back of the right boot, at least four inches long and so deep it looks as if it pierces the leather; yet the boot is not split and the damaged area has merely been smeared with black polish, which now gives it the same dark-gray color as the adjoining surfaces that are still intact.
The man has stopped. Without moving the rest of his body, he has turned his head around toward the child looking at him, already three steps away, already crisscrossed by many white lines.
A moment later, the soldier slowly pivots and takes a step toward the street light. The boy steps back, against the cast-iron shaft; at the same time he pulls the bottom of his cape around his legs, holding it from the inside without showing his hands. The man has stopped. Now that the gusts of snow are no longer striking him directly in the face, he can raise his head without too much trouble.
"Don't be afraid," he says.
He takes a step toward the child and repeats a little louder: "Don't be afraid."
The child does not answer. Without seeming to feel the thickly falling flakes that make him squint slightly, he continues to stare at the soldier directly in front of him. The latter begins:
"Do you know where . . ."
But he goes no further. The question he was going to ask is not the right one. A gust of wind blows the snow into his face again. He takes his right hand out of his overcoat pocket and shields his eyes with it. He has no glove, his fingers are red and dirty. When the gust is over he puts his hand back in his pocket.
"Where does this road go?"
The boy still says nothing. His eyes have left the soldier to look toward the end of the street in the direction the man has nodded toward; he sees only the succession of street lights, closer and closer together, dimmer and dimmer, which vanish into the darkness.
"What's the matter, are you afraid I'll eat you?"
"No," the child says. "I'm not afraid."
"Well then, tell me where this road goes."
"I don't know," the child says.
And he looks again at this badly dressed, unshaven soldier who does not even know where he is going. Then, without warning, he makes a sudden turn, skillfully avoids the base of the lamppost, and begins to run as fast as he can along the row of apartment houses, in the opposite direction from the way the soldier came. In a few seconds, he has disappeared.
At the next street light, he appears again for several seconds; he is still running just as fast; his cape billows out behind him. He reappears at each lamppost, once, twice, then no more.
The soldier turns back and continues on his way. Again the snow strikes him directly in the face.
He puts the package under his right arm to try to shield his face with his left hand, for the wind is blowing more continuously from this side. But he soon gives this up and puts his hand, numb with cold, back in his overcoat pocket. Now he merely turns his head away to get less snow in his eyes, tilting it toward the unlighted windows where the white drift continues to accumulate in the right-hand corner of the recess.
Yet it is this same boy with the serious expression who led him to the café run by the man who is not his father. And there was a similar scene under the same kind of lamppost, at an identical crossroads. Perhaps it was snowing a little less heavily. The flakes were thicker, heavier, slower. But the boy answered with just as much reticence, holding his black cape tight around his knees. He had the same alert expression and seemed to be just as untroubled by the snow. He hesitated just as long at each question before giving an answer which furnished his interlocutor no information. Where did the street go? A long silent stare toward the presumed end of the street, then the calm voice:
"To the boulevard."
"And this one?"
The boy slowly turns his eyes in the direction the man has just nodded toward. His features reveal no difficulty remembering, no uncertainty, when he repeats in the same expressionless tone:
"To the boulevard."
"The same one?"
; Again there is silence, and the snow falling, slower and heavier.
"Yes," the boy says. Then, after a pause: "No," and finally, with a sudden violence: "It's the boulevard!"
"And is it far?" the soldier asks again.
The child is still looking at the series of street lights, closer and closer together, dimmer and dimmer, which here too vanish into the darkness.
"Yes," he says, his voice calm again and sounding as if it came from far away.
The soldier waits another minute to make sure there will not be another "no." But the boy is already running along the row of apartment houses, down the trampled snow path the soldier followed in the opposite direction a few minutes earlier. When the running boy crosses a circle of light, his black cape billowing out behind him can be seen for a few seconds, once, twice, three times, smaller and vaguer at each reappearance, until there is nothing but a confused whirl of snow.
Yet it is certainly the same boy who walks ahead of the soldier when the latter comes to the café. Before crossing the threshold, the child shakes his black cape and takes off his beret, which he knocks twice against the door jamb in order to brush off the bits of ice which have formed in the folds of the cloth. Then the soldier must have met him several times, while walking in circles through the maze of identical streets. He has never come to any boulevard, any broader avenue planted with trees or differing in any way at all from the other streets he has taken. Finally the child had mentioned a few names, the few street names he knew, which were obviously of no use at all.
Now he is knocking his beret sharply against the door jamb in front of which they have both stopped. The interior is brightly lit. A pleated curtain of white, translucent material covers the lower part of the window that is set in the upper half of the door. But it is easy for a man of normal height to see the entire room: the bar to the left, the tables in the middle, a wall on the right covered with posters of various sizes. There are few drinkers at this late hour: two workers sitting at one of the tables and a better-dressed man standing near the zinc-topped bar over which the bartender is leaning. The latter is a thickset man whose size is even more marked in relation to his customer because of the sightly raised platform he is standing on. Both men have simultaneously turned their heads toward the door where the boy has just knocked his beret against the jamb.
Jealousy and in the Labyrinth Page 15