"I don't know," the soldier says.
Besides, if he had known he could probably also have said what regiment the bright-red diamonds represented. Again he looks at the photographic enlargement hanging on the wall above the woman's black hair. The picture is oval-shaped, blurred around the edges; the mat around it has remained creamy-white all the way to the rectangular frame of dark wood. At this distance, the distinguishing insignia are not visible on the overcoat collar. In any case the uniform is that of the infantry. The man must have been billeted in the city or in its immediate environs while waiting to be sent to the front; otherwise he could not have come to say goodbye to his wife before leaving. But where are the barracks in this city? Are there a lot of them? What units are billeted there in peacetime?
The soldier decides he ought to show an interest in these matters: they would provide a normal and harmless subject of conversation. But he has scarcely opened his mouth when he notices a change in the woman's attitude. She is squinting slightly as she looks at him, seeming to wait for the rest of his words with exaggeratedly strained attention, considering the importance he himself attaches to them. He pulls up short in the middle of a vague sentence hurriedly concluded in a direction its inception did not suggest; its interrogative character is so faint that the woman has every opportunity to refrain from answering. And in fact this is the solution she adopts. But her features remain tense. Such questions are obviously the very ones a clumsy spy would ask, and suspicion is natural under such circumstances . . . although it is rather late, now, to conceal the location of military objectives from the enemy.
The soldier has finished his bread and his wine. He has no further reason to linger in this apartment, in spite of his desire to enjoy a few moments more of this relative warmth, this uncomfortable chair, and this guarded presence facing him. He should think up some way of leaving gracefully which would reduce the impression left by the recent misunderstanding. In any case, trying to justify himself would be the worst mistake of all; and how explain convincingly his ignorance about . . . The soldier now tries to remember the exact words he has just used. There was the word "barracks," but he cannot recall the strange sentence he has spoken; he is not even certain he has actually referred to the location of the buildings and still less whether he has definitely indicated that he was not familiar with it.
Without realizing it, he may have passed in front of a barracks during his peregrinations. However he has not noticed any structure in the usual barracks style: a low building (only two floors, with identical windows framed in red brick) about a hundred yards long with a low-pitched slate roof surmounted by high rectangular chimneys also made of brick. The structure rises at the far end of a large, bare, gravel courtyard separated from the boulevard and its luxuriant trees by a high iron fence supported by abutments and bristling with pickets on the inside as well as toward the street. Sentry boxes, placed at intervals, shelter armed guards; these sentry boxes are made of wood, with zinc roofs, and each side is painted with large black and red chevrons.
The soldier has seen nothing of the kind. He has passed along no fence; he has not noticed any large gravel courtyard; he has encountered neither luxuriant foliage nor sentry boxes, nor of course any armed guards. He has not even walked down any tree-lined boulevards. He has always followed only the same straight streets between two high rows of flat housefronts; but a barracks might also look like these. The sentry boxes have been removed, of course, as well as anything that might distinguish the building from those on either side; there remain only the iron bars protecting the first-floor windows for most of their height. These are square vertical bars a hand's breadth apart, connected by two horizontal bars placed not far from each end. The upper ends of these vertical bars are free, terminating in points about eight inches from the top of the window recess; the bases of the bars must be set in the stone sill, but this detail is not visible because of the snow which has drifted there, forming an irregular layer across the entire horizontal surface, particularly thick on the right side.
But this might just as well be a fire house, or a convent, or a school, or an office building, or merely an apartment house whose first-floor windows are protected by iron bars. Having reached the next crossroad, the soldier turns at right angles into the adjoining street.
And the snow continues falling—slow, vertical, uniform—and the white layer thickens imperceptibly on the windowsills, on the doorsteps, on the projecting parts of the black lampposts, on the street without traffic, on the deserted sidewalks where the paths made by pedestrians during the course of the day have already disappeared. And it is night once again.
The regular flakes, all the same size, equally spaced, fall at the same rate of speed, maintaining the same distance between themselves and the same arrangements, as if they belonged to the same rigid system which shifts position from top to bottom with a continuous, vertical, uniform, and slow movement.
The footprints of the straggling pedestrian walking head down in front of the houses, from one end of the straight street to the other, appear one by one in the smooth, fresh snow into which they already sink at least a half an inch. And behind him, the snow immediately begins covering up the prints of his hobnail boots, gradually reconstituting the original whiteness of the trampled area, soon restoring its granular, velvety, fragile appearance, blurring the sharp crests of its edges, making its outlines more and more fluid, and at last entirely filling the depression, so that the difference in level becomes indistinguishable from that of the adjoining areas, continuity then being re-established so that the entire surface is again smooth, intact, untouched.
Hence the soldier cannot know if someone else has passed along here, in front of the houses with their un- lighted windows, some time before him. And when he reaches the next crossroad, no tracks appear along the sidewalks of the cross street, and this means nothing either.
However the boy's footprints take longer to disappear. In fact he leaves humps behind him as he runs: his sole, shifting sharply, accumulates a tiny heap of snow which then remains in the middle of the footprint (at the place where its outline is narrowest) whose more or less accentuated protuberance must take longer to efface than the rest; and the holes made on each side of the shoe's toe and heel are all the deeper since the boy does not follow the old paths made during the day, but prefers to walk near the edge of the sidewalk in the deeper snow (though no difference in depth is apparent to the eye), where he sinks in farther. Since, in addition, he proceeds very rapidly, from the point where he is to the last irregularity still discernible under the new layer of snow, the length of his course is much greater than that the soldier leaves behind him, particularly if the loops which punctuate the child's progress around each lamppost are included.
These loops, it is true, are not indicated with absolute clarity, for the child scarcely sets foot on the ground during the revolution he makes as he catches hold of the cast-iron shaft. As for the pattern of his rubber-soled shoes, it is already blurred: neither the chevrons nor the cross in the center of its circle are identifiable, even before the falling snow has begun to blur the image. The distortions produced by running, added to the uncertainty concerning the latter's characteristics, make it impossible, all in all, to differentiate these footprints from those left by another child of the same age—who would also be wearing, moreover, shoes with identical soles (the same shoes, perhaps, coming from the same store) and who would be making similar loops around the lampposts.
In any case, there are no tracks at all in the snow, no footprints, and the snow continues falling over the empty street, uniform, vertical, and slow. It must be entirely dark now, and the flakes are no longer visible except when they fall through the zone of light around a street light. Hence the street is punctuated at regular intervals (though these seem to grow increasingly shorter in proportion to their distance to the right or the left), punctuated with lighter zones where the darkness is stippled with innumerable tiny white particles animated with
a common falling movement. Since the window is located on the top floor, all these circles of light must look pale and distant at the bottom of the long trench formed by the two parallel planes of the housefronts; so distant, in fact, so quivering, that it is naturally impossible to tell the flakes apart: seen from so high up they form at intervals only a vague whitish halo, itself dim because the light from the street lamps is extremely weak and made still more uncertain by the diffused reflection which all these pale surfaces spread around them —the earth, the sky, the curtain of close flakes falling slowly but without interruption in front of the windows, so thick that it now completely conceals the building opposite, the cast-iron street lights, the last straggling pedestrian, the entire street.
Perhaps even the street lights have not been turned on this evening, tonight, that night. As for the sound of possible footsteps, muffled by the fresh snow, it could not reach such an altitude, penetrate the iron shutters, the windowpanes, the thick velvet curtains.
The shadow of the fly on the ceiling has stopped near the place where the circle cast by the lampshade meets the top of the red curtain. Once it is motionless, the shape becomes more complex. It is indeed the enlarged reproduction of the bent filament of the electric bulb, but the primary image is repeated nearby by two other paler, vaguer images framing the first. Perhaps, too, still other less distinct images are further multiplied on each side of the latter; they are not perceptible, for the whole of the tiny figure the fly projects is not situated in the most brightly illuminated area of the ceiling, but in a fringe of half-light about a quarter of an inch wide bordering the entire periphery of the circle, at the edge of the shadow.
All the rest of the room, lighted by only this one lamp on the corner of the table, seems to be in relative darkness compared to the brilliant circle of light cast on the white ceiling. Eyes which have stared too long at the latter no longer make out, when they turn away, any detail on the room's other walls. The picture hanging on the rear wall is nothing more than a gray rectangle framed in black; the chest beneath it is nothing more than a dark square as flat as the picture, pasted there like a piece of wallpaper; and the same is true for the fireplace in the center of the perpendicular wall. As for the wallpaper itself, the innumerable tiny spots which constitute its pattern look no more like a torch than a flower, a human figure, a dagger, a street light, or anything. The wallpaper merely looks as if silent feathers were falling in regular lines at a uniform rate, so slowly that their movement is scarcely noticeable, and it is difficult to decide whether their direction is up or down, like particles suspended in motionless water, tiny bubbles in a gaseous liquid, snowflakes, dust. And on the floor, which is also in semi-darkness, the gleaming paths have disappeared.
Only the table top under the conical lampshade is illuminated, as is the bayonet lying in the center. Its short heavy blade with two symmetrical edges reveals, on either side of the central axis, two symmetrically sloping planes of polished steel, one of which reflects the lamplight toward the middle of the room.
On the other side of the room, in the middle of the wall, the picture obscured by the darkness is nothing more than a gray oval within a vertical white rectangle, the latter framed in black.
At this moment a faint voice is heard, quite close, indistinct. The soldier lowers his gaze from the picture of the soldier fastened to the wall to the young woman sitting on her chair in front of the chest. But the voice heard just now is not hers; as low perhaps and not so young, it was certainly a man's voice this time. Besides, it is repeating a sentence of approximately the same sound, still just as incomprehensible, while the young woman remains bolt upright in her chair, her mouth closed, her eyes turned toward the corner of the room where the open door is, on the other side of the table. The dark area separating the open door from its jamb reveals nothing in the next room.
The young woman is now standing in front of this door which she has pushed farther open, wide enough to slip through it; then the door is pushed back without closing altogether, keeping the same open space as before. In the dark area which remains, the child then reappears.
At least a vertical strip of the child then reappears, consisting of an eye, the nose, three-quarters of the mouth and the chin, an elongated rectangle of blue smock, half a bare knee, a sock, a black felt slipper, remaining rigid while the man's voice repeats its same sentence for the third time, not so loud, which again keeps any sound from being recognized except the tentative noises that have no meaning. The woman's low voice answers, still more softly, almost in a whisper. The child's eye is on a level with the doorknob, a white porcelain oval. On the other side, an electric light switch also made out of porcelain is set in the wall near the jamb. An argument is going on; the young woman speaks more rapidly, giving long explanations in which the same groups of words with the same intonations seem to recur several times. The man's voice intervenes only in short sentences, or even in monosyllables, if not in snarls and grunts. The child, growing bolder, opens the door a little wider.
No, it is not the child, instead the child disappears, replaced by the young woman whose head appears a little higher in the widened opening: "It wasn't Boulard, was it?" And since the soldier looks at her questioningly, she repeats, "Rue Boulard? That isn't what you were looking for?"
"No ... I don't think so ... the soldier says in an uncertain tone of voice. Then, after a moment's thought, with a little more assurance, he shakes his head several times from right to left: "I don't think so. No." But his interlocutor is already no longer there; and now the door has been shut tight.
The white oval knob shows several shining points; the brightest point is located at the very top; another much larger but less brilliant, makes a kind of curvilinear four- sided polygon on the right side. Bright lines of various widths, lengths, and intensities follow the general contour of the rounded surface at varying distances like those customarily represented in drawings to simulate relief.
But these concentric lines, instead of according the object a third dimension, seem to make it revolve: by staring at it continuously, the soldier can see the porcelain knob move, first scarcely perceptibly, then with increasing amplitude, the axis of the oval alternately tilting ten or twenty degrees to either side of the vertical. Nevertheless the door does not open. But perhaps the child, on the other side, is playing with the handle, with the other white porcelain handle identical with this one and symmetrically placed in relation to the plane of the door.
When the door opens again, it admits neither the timid and curious child nor the young woman with pale eyes, but someone new: doubtless the person who was speaking in the next room just now; it is, in fact, a voice of similar timbre and volume which is now assuring the soldier that there is no Rue Boucharet in either this neighborhood or the whole city for that matter. It must have been "Boulard" that he heard; and the man offers to explain where this street is. "It's not very near!" he adds, examining the soldier sitting in his chair, his hands lying flat on his thighs, his back a little hunched, the battered package still tucked under his arm, scrutinizing him with an insistence which seems to be calculating the number of miles he is still capable of covering before collapsing for good.
The man himself is well within draft age, but he is lame, which explains his presence among civilians. His left leg seems unusable; he walks with the help of a wooden crutch under one armpit, using it skillfully, judging by the swift maneuver he has just made in order to come into the room and approach the table, on the edge of which his right hand is now resting, on the red-and-white checked oilcloth. Perhaps he is a war casualty: he might have been wounded at the beginning of hostilities and been sent home on foot despite his condition, before the retreat of the defeated armies and the evacuation of the military hospitals. He has a thin, carefully trimmed moustache, like the soldier in the photograph. As a matter of fact, he might resemble the latter quite closely, at least as much as a picture of that kind, after so much retouching, can resemble its model. But a picture
of that kind, in fact, proves nothing. The soldier shakes his head several times to indicate his disagreement: "No," he answers, "it didn't sound like Bouchard."
"I said Bouvard."
"I don't think so. No, it was something else."
"There is nothing else."
"Besides it was around here."
"Then you know the city?"
"No ... but it's . . ."
"Well if you don't know your way, how can you tell? I know this city. My leg hasn't always been like this . . ." With his chin he indicates his crutch. "Your Rue Bouvard is at the other end of town!"
The soldier is prepared to explain his reasons for being sure of the contrary, or, more exactly, for thinking that the street he is looking for is not the Rue Bouvard, but without going into complicated details it will be difficult for him to convince the invalid who, on his part, shows so much assurance. Besides, on reflection, his own reasons already seem less convincing to him. And he is about to resign himself to listening to the information the other man is so insistent on giving him, when the young woman also returns through the door which has remained ajar. She seems displeased. She comes in hurriedly, as if she had been delayed by a sudden, urgent task which has prevented her from accompanying the man a few moments before, or even from keeping him out of the visitor's sight.
The lame man has begun his topographical explanations in which a number of street names figure: Vanizier, Vantardier, Bazaman, Davidson, Tamani, Duroussel, Dirbonne, etc. The young woman interrupts him in the middle of his itinerary: "But he already told you it wasn't Broulard."
"Not Broulard: Bouvard! I know just where it is." And, turning toward the soldier as if he were in no doubt of the answer: "You're going to the warehouse?"
Jealousy and in the Labyrinth Page 18