Funeral Rites (16 page)

It was a rough-and-tumble—or rather a systematic labor—in which I tried in every possible way to return to the larval form by virtue of which one goes back to limbo. Paulo's behind was just a bit hairy. The hairs were blond and curly. I stuck my tongue in and burrowed as far as I could. I was enraptured with the foul smell. My mustache brought back, to my tongue's delight, a little of the muck that sweat and shit formed among Paulo's blond curls. I poked about with my snout, I got stuck in the muck, I even bit—I wanted to tear the muscles of the orifice to shreds and get all the way in, like the rat in the famous torture, like the rats in the Paris sewers which devoured my finest soldiers. And suddenly my breath withdrew, my head rolled and, for a moment, lay still on one buttock as on a white pillow.

I was sure of my strength. Yet I felt that that naked part of me in the room was vulnerable. I was being spied upon from all sides, and the enemy spies might worm their way in through that orifice. The Parisian youngster was doing his job valiantly. At first, he was afraid of hurting the Führer. The essential part of Paulo the torture-machine was the penis. It had the perfection of clockwork, of a precision-tooled connecting rod. Its metal was solid, flawless, imperishable, polished by the work and the hard use it was put to: it was a hammer and a miner's bar. It was also without tenderness, without gentleness, without the trembling that often makes even the most violent ones quiver delicately. Paulo was overjoyed to feel the thrill of happiness and to hear the happy moan of Madame. The recognition of the beauty of his work made him proud and more ardent. The Führer was now lingering over it with veneration rather than simple respect. Being the object of such a cult, Paulo's rod was never more beautiful. It quivered with insolence, was set apart for deification, while, at the end of it, Paulo, now
shy and simple, watched the ceremony without curiosity and was bored. Finally, Hitler gave it a more devout kiss. Then he put his right arm around it and cuddled it in the hollow, in the fold formed by the inner side of the elbow. Such a gesture would have made anyone other than Paulo let his prick be transformed into a babe in arms to be cuddled. He didn't bat an eyelash. Boredom made him flee the place, but the wheedling movement of my head brought him back. He did not put down his arms. He did not allow his naughty tool to lose any of its hardness, and I remained a poor fellow, a poor abandoned kid whom life sweeps up in a nausea of happiness and sadness.

“He's going to kill me,” Paulo thought. “Since he won't be able to accuse me openly, I'll be poisoned. Or shot. They'll give me the works in a hurry, in a garden.”

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For a moment, hope welled up in Paulo, he had a feeling of confidence, of peace. Then suddenly, because upon turning around to button himself he saw on the wall a photograph of the Führer, who was so like the man whose death rattle he had just heard, with a hop, skip, and jump, fear came from the end of the world and sat on his shoulders. He took a step on the rug. Hitler was behind him, ready to intervene. Paulo was slowly buttoning himself up and waiting. His lips were parted and his eyes staring. He looked at the white porcelain bidet, the wallpaper, the cheap furniture. In the silence he could hear the earth rotating on its axis and revolving about the sun. He was filled with fear. He oozed fear. He was not trembling. From all his pores, traversing the cloth of his mechanic's overalls, seeped a very light but luminous
vapor which enveloped his whole body and which he seemed to be emitting (as ships do their artificial fogs at sea) in order to camouflage himself, to disappear. Fear assured him invisibility. In the thickness of light in which he was shrinking to the size of a twig, he felt quite safe. His entire skin was pleating, like an accordion, and if, with a kind of superhuman courage (no doubt impossible amidst those milky and too blindingly bright jitters), he had dared to make the gesture of putting his hand to his fly, he would have seen his prick, which usually stuck such a long way out of his foreskin, withdraw into itself, as on cold days, completely covered by the skin. The piteous thing barely dangled. He walked to the window slowly and lifted the lace curtain where I watched the Seine flow slowly by.

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Riton, who was constipated and whose whole digestive system had been upset by fatigue, felt a fart coming. He squeezed his buttocks, he tried to make it flow upward so that it would explode inside him, but his armor was too tight, and for several moments the gases which he was holding in for the sake of decency could no longer be controlled. He farted. This made a muffled and rather brief sound in the darkness, a sound which was quickly checked. The soldiers were behind him, in the room.

“They're Germans,” he thought to himself. “Maybe they don't realize.”

He hoped so. The soldiers weren't shy in his presence. For three days he had been at war, and close contact revealed that the sternest-looking warriors probably were rotten inside. In spite of their example, he dared not forget himself in their presence, dared not relieve himself
openly, but his discomfort was too great that evening. Erik whispered “Sh!” as he rolled his eyes and pointed with his finger to indicate that the darkness could hear the slightest noise. Then he smiled a little. Riton felt his humanity more keenly. He was still in a world where one dared not fart. Death was not with us. The ears of the two friends were full of the crickets of silence. A shot rang out in the distance. Riton trembled. That fatal contraption was surmounted by a very beautiful head of curly hair. Erik recognized and did not recognize the little fellow in the subway. The picture he had of him and the sight of him that evening in battle dress made him compare Riton to an unhappy, new-born snail that he might have first met without its shell. A hermit without the cave in the rocks who is living out his fate. The kid of the subway and of all the encounters had not yet donned his tough-mindedness or parade dress to confront death, glory, and shame. The charming little creature of the past was perhaps a gentler sister of his. We know nothing about the prodigies that transform a passing child who sings and whistles into a delicate instrument of death whose slightest movement, even a frown, the too elegant play of an invisible fan, reveals a will to destruction. Erik had before him what, to a German, is the most amazing creation that there can be: a youngster betraying his country, but a madly courageous and bold little traitor. At that moment, he was on the alert so as to kill like a murderer.

“No, there's nothing,” mumbled Riton.

"Wie?
Nothing?
Nichts?"

"Nichts.”

In order to utter this last word, which he pronounced “nix,” distorting it the way Paris street boys did, Riton turned his head all the way around and smiled. His smile
reached Erik, who returned it. The sky above them was studded with stars. The shagginess of Riton's curls gave him an even crueler look, which the smile did not dispel. The darkness was working away on Erik's tired face. It was furrowing the eyebrows and hardening the fleshy parts, which seemed made of stone. It cast the shadow of the nose very low, and from the four-day growth of beard a very soft, blond light flowed. Separated by Riton's machine gun, they looked at each other in silence. The sergeant, who was behind them, approached in his stocking feet. His silence added, for a moment, to that of the other two. He asked Erik softly whether he had noticed anything suspect. There was nothing. He told him to go in, and, taking Riton by the hand, he succeeded in saying, talking to him very slowly: “You . . . should . . . take off . . . the bullets.”

Riton tried to explain silently that he wanted to keep his coat of mail on, but the sergeant insisted. Riton turned around so as to go in behind the sergeant, and it was at that moment that his eyes spotted a strange thing which he had not yet noticed, a kind of rag hanging from a window of the house at the left. Leaning forward, he recognized the broad-striped American flag. He hardly thought it was on display, but rather that it was a secret signal. He went in. With infinite care Erik and the sergeant undid his metal bands. As they had just been operating in silence with cautious movements, the three of them had kept their mouths open. They needed a bit of water to moisten their dry palates.

"Wasser.
. . .”

Riton whispered, inverting his thumb above his mouth as if it were a faucet run dry,
"Wasser,
sergeant . . . I'm thirsty. . . .”

“No.”

“A drink. . . .”

“No water. . . .”

“In the kitchen?”

The sergeant made a broader grimace as his lips silently formed the word
Nicht,
and he moved his forefinger back and forth in front of Riton's face. Riton was about to insist, not understanding why he was being refused water, but the sergeant went to the bedroom. He silently opened the wardrobe, took two armfuls of linen, carried it to the bathroom, where he made a kind of mattress of it in the bathtub, then went back to get Riton, whom he wanted to sleep there. Riton refused. A touch of pride bade him do so, as did the respect for German hierarchy which he had already acquired after two days of life in common with the Fritzes. The sergeant insisted.

“You are very little . . . very young.”

In the darkness, clinging to the sergeant's arm so as to put his mouth against the other's ear, the kid tried to sound firm.

“No, sergeant,” he whispered, “me a private, you a noncom.”

And he added, beating his chest with broad silent slaps, “Me strong, me hefty.”

But though the sergeant was worried for a few seconds about allowing him to be at liberty among the weapons (his plan was to lock him in the bathroom), he remembered how devoted Riton had been on the Rue de Belleville, and that reassured him. Finally, his own fatigue made him want the little bed he had just prepared in the bathtub. He went back to the dining room, again very quietly, to shut the windows. Riton looked for a glass in the darkness, found one on the shelf above the washbowl, and turned on the faucet. There was no water. He finally realized why the sergeant had refused. In desperation,
fuming like a kid who feels his thirst more acutely, he went back to the dining room. The sergeant had already had time to mumble in German to Erik, who was sitting in a chair with his elbows on his knees and his head in his hand, “I'm leaving you with the Frenchman. So keep your eyes open.”

He shook hands with Riton and went quietly back to the bathroom. For a few seconds the kid remained standing silently beside the table. Erik, who was at the back of the room, saw him outlined against the light background of the window. Disencumbered of his metal garment and his weapon, Riton realized how tired he was. Everything drained out of him at the same time—his pride, his shame, his hatred, his despair. All that remained was a poor, exhausted child's body overcome with weariness, and a mind disintegrating with fatigue. With minute attention to his movements, he moved forward to Erik's chair. He groped for a few seconds, grazed the hair, the collar, the shoulder. When he recognized the feel of the German insignia, he felt a discharge in his arm, in his shoulder, in his entire body. The monstrousness of his situation was more keenly apparent to him in the deep darkness. He was the prey of the insignia which, when he was a kid of twelve just before the war, had been the mark of the devil. No movement of withdrawal betrayed his anguish. At the first touch of a hand on his hair, Erik started as he recognized the little militiaman. He waited without moving so as to know the boy's intention. The hand seeking in the darkness found one of Erik's and squeezed it. As Riton bent forward until his breath lightly stroked the Fritz's neck, he murmured with a gentleness that more and more became his tone of voice,
"
Gute
nacht,
Erik.”

"Gute nacht,
good night, Riton.”

“Good night.”

With the same caution Riton moved back to the window and lay down on the rug very quietly with his hands clasped behind his head. A very slight excitement had swollen his prick when he was next to Erik, but no sooner did he stretch out than he felt only the bliss of being in that position. Peace had entered him, and in order to prolong the enjoyment of it he kept his eyes open in the darkness and refused to fall asleep. His limbs and outstretched body grew heavier with fatigue; his bulk lay heavy on the rug, which was becoming the very stuff of his life, for the entire day had been one long fall. The feeling of certainty of his presence assembled his body from all parts of the horizon, sent out a call to arms toward an ideal point in the middle of himself by carrying to it, on a blissful surge, from the outermost tips of his fingers and toes to that imprecise point of the body (it is not the heart) where the lines of force converged, a message of peace and orderliness of the limbs, of the extremities, of the head itself. In exchange, that certainty of presence relieved the limbs of their function; it discharged them of all responsibility. Only his presence was awake, his muscles no longer existed. The goal of that day, to stretch out on the rug, had just been attained. That makeshift berth was more restful to the boy than a soft bed would have been. He felt secure in it. Every point of his body found a reassuring support in it. And also, the silence, the darkness, and the presence of the sleeping Erik, who was mightier by virtue of his sleep, protected his rest by thick walls, behind which, unfortunately, was enclosed, without anyone's being able to drive it away, a frightful anxiety: who was the tenant of that empty dwelling at the top of a house that was mined with the presence, on every floor, of hate-ridden Frenchmen
bent on the greatest evil, who would blow up or set fire to the building in order to kill the pack of Boches, the swarm of wasps clinging to its summit? They wouldn't get out of the scrap unscathed. The only refuge was his trust in Erik. The breadth and strength of the dark chest, the hair of which Riton had seen through the opening of the shirt, was apparent to his mind's eye. Riton also hoped, for the space of one brief reverie, that all the tenants would be Germanophiles and that the flag at the window was there only to put people off. He even hoped that they would be decent and would not denounce him to the insurgents. He dared imagine that they had a greatness of soul larger than life. But no sooner did these hopes light up than they went out.