Balcony in the Forest Read online

  “We’re out of gas,” the sublieutenant said. “Is there a telephone around here we can use? I don’t think anyone else will be coming this way,” he added, making a face as he glanced behind him down the empty road.

  There was no telephone line to Les Falizes. Grange sent Gourcuff, just returned, by bicycle to Moriarmé. The repair truck would not be up before two o’clock. Grange invited the stranded crew in and brought out a new bottle. In this army thirty years behind the times, motorization revived a whole forgotten hierarchy. With their diving helmets, their big goggles, their grease-stained monkey-suits, the cavalrymen somehow impressed Grange; he felt like a peasant before these turn-of-the-century chauffeurs who had stopped their thundering chariots at his roadside cottage for a drink.

  “Not a bad little bungalow you’ve got here,” the lieutenant remarked, whistling admiringly when they had climbed up the staircase. “And what do you do down there—raise mushrooms?”

  The cavalrymen stared around the room and looked out the windows walled in by branches with a somewhat baffled expression.

  Grange explained. The mystery of the blockhouses was an open secret, but the apathy of this army asleep on its feet somehow shielded the fact of their existence nevertheless: he knew that behind the Meuse no one, or almost no one, had heard of them. When he was through, there was a moment of silence in the room.

  “Not bad, not bad at all,” the lieutenant said rather coldly, obviously looking for something to say. He drew near the window and began to talk about hunting: the week before, at Les Houches, a man in his company had shot a boar that was about to charge his tank.

  “I only hope you won’t have bigger game to shoot at,” Grange remarked politely.

  They exchanged a few commonplaces, emptying the bottle. Grange felt uncomfortable; the lieutenant remained standing, and his eyes slipped toward the windows: a sickroom visitor suddenly tormented by his desire to escape to the fresh air outside. It had grown quite dark now.

  “Why don’t you show me the block,” the lieutenant said suddenly, in a tone that seemed to ask for a moment of confidential conversation.

  The steps were wet and slippery: the drizzle had begun at nightfall. The flashlights made the blockhouse look still less appealing than by day. A cavelike suppuration trickled down the walls in great shiny sheets: occasionally in the humid darkness their boots cracked open the shell of one of the wood-snails that had crawled in through the embrasures. From the forest rose a heavy, viscous odor that stuck in Grange’s throat—the moldy smell of walled-up cellars and mushroom beds.

  “Quite a den you’ve got down here!” the lieutenant said, grimacing. He shuddered in the stagnant chill of the place and sniffed the exhausted air. His hand slid along the cannon’s slender barrel and lifted the canvas hood off the breech. “It’s like a mausoleum, isn’t it? I hope the joke isn’t too close for comfort,” he said, his smile a trifle embarrassed.

  “You get used to it,” Grange said dryly, shrugging his shoulders. He no longer felt in a very good humor and was beginning to regret having invited the cavalrymen. “In your tanks, when the oil starts getting hot . . .”

  “Yes, of course, it all depends on what you’re used to,” the lieutenant interrupted, his tone conciliatory. He glanced with interest at the embrasure. All the irony in his face was concentrated in the nostrils and the upper lip, which trembled slightly but continuously, like a rabbit’s nose: this constant, creaturely sniffing irritated Grange: it was as if the man had scented a suspicion on the heavy air, something less material than an odor. From time to time the lieutenant glanced sidelong at Grange with a friendly wink that the place made vaguely sinister.

  “What’s that?” he asked, pointing to the tunnel hatchway.

  Grange raised it: his flashlight revealed the first steps descending into the darkness; a faint smell of roots and wet earth rose from the opening.

  “And you expect to stop the panzers like this?” the lieutenant resumed, thrusting his hands into his pockets and puffing out his cheeks, as if he found the notion prodigiously funny.

  “I don’t see how the tanks would get through the woods,” Grange said, raising a hostile eyebrow. “And this will do some damage, anyway.” He indicated the cannon breech with the tip of his boot.

  “You won’t have only tanks.”

  The lieutenant’s voice had become crisp and precise, curiously impartial.

  “You can keep your stovepipe and all that goes with it. Along with the first armored units you’ll have engineers and motorized sections right away—and tough ones. And those bastards won’t come by the road, either: they’ll go around. They’ll come and knock very politely at your bank-vault door, but after a couple of hand grenades you can say good night.”

  He glanced up at the ceiling again and tapped the wall with his fingernail, whistling ominously.

  “We’ll have to put mines around the blockhouse. And besides, what can I do about it?” Grange asked, shrugging his shoulders.

  “Are you a reservist?”

  Grange nodded.

  “There’s only one thing for you to do, my friend. . . .” He rested his hand lightly on Grange’s shoulder and stared into his eyes, no longer joking. “Some good advice in return for your good wine: if I were you I’d arrange to get a transfer. You know what I’d call this little place they’ve rented for you out here in the woods? Don’t let it upset you, but I’d call it a real hellhole. You’ll be caught in here like a rat in a trap.”

  There was a moment of silence.

  “I’m only telling you what I think.” He smiled a little, almost courteously. “After all, you’re out in the open here. You can always pray the good Lord they won’t come.”

  A horn blew noisily on the road and they climbed out of the block. The repair truck had arrived; the cavalrymen said good-bye.

  “I’ll burn some sulphur in the block,” Grange thought, exasperated. Fortunately no one else had been there. He felt deceived rather than in danger, like a man who discovers he has just lent all his money to a swindler.

  THE autumn lingered on the heights of Les Falizes much longer than Grange had expected; after days of rain that turned the underbrush to jelly and stuck rafts of rotten leaves to their shoes, suddenly a dry, clear east wind swept the sky and hardened the roads, crackling the pin-oak leaves that still hung from the branches; it was as if a brisk and biting St. Martin’s summer, already hemstitched with frost, had ventured into the very heart of December.

  When Grange came downstairs to smoke his first cigarette outside after the morning coffee, there was a pearl of white frost on each blade of grass, but the branches were already dripping heavily onto the roadside shoulders. Above the forest, which looked, because of its oaks, as if it were still in leaf, a cold glassy sky hardened under the freshening wind. Grange liked this frost that made the roads firm again and carried all the way up to the blockhouse the whine of the little sawmill at Les Falizes and the crack of trees falling beneath the ax: on the road, where his steel-soled boots struck sparks from the gravel, the day smelled of fresh wood and flint—for a few minutes, he unconsciously breathed the morning’s penetrating air with that almost ecstatic gaiety of wartime wakenings, the result of a renewed victory over fatigue, the tonic cold of the outdoors, the liberty of roads passable again. All the signs of approaching winter delighted him; he loved this sheltered season of deep sleep and short days: this was time embezzled with a bad conscience, but dearer than any other, like the magical vacations fire or epidemic grants to schoolboys.

  On his way to Les Falizes now, Grange left the road where the clearing began and took a dirt path that ran between the forest and the thorn hedges of the little gardens: nothing pleased him more, when he had the whole day free, than to waken Mona, arriving in her house with the scent of the dewy morning still upon him. When he started very early, a pool of fog still lingered on the meadows, out of which emerged only the houses themselves, the hedge tops, and the clumps of the round apple trees. A threa
d of smoke already rose from the chimneys; sometimes a woman, wading through the fog along some invisible path, was hanging out her wash between the gardens at this first daylight hour. Grange had always associated happiness with an image of garden paths, and the war made it only all the more vivid: this night-washed alley, choked with fresh growth and edible abundance, now led to Mona too; he approached the clearing as if it were one of the Islands of the Blessed.

  Mona’s door was never locked—not so her lover could enter her house without wakening her, but because she belonged to that race of nomads tortured by the sound of a key in a lock: wherever she was, she always pitched her tent in the open air. When Grange came in, the square of grayish light from the open door fell on the brass table and the contents of her pockets which she had emptied there before going to bed: a jumble of keys, mint pastilles covered with lint, an agate marble, a tiny flask of perfume, a gnawed pencil stub, and seven or eight one-franc pieces. The rest of the room was very dim. Grange did not open the shutters right away, but noiselessly sat down near the bed, which emerged from the shadow, huge and dim, lit from below by the coals in the fireplace and the vague reflections from the brass andirons. When Mona awakened (she could also pass instantly from light to shadow, or from speech to sleep, falling asleep in the middle of a sentence, like a very young child), her wild caresses, her blows and bites, made Grange feel as though he were under an April shower; he was dispossessed of himself for the day; but this moment when he watched her still sleeping was more serious: sitting beside her, he had the feeling he was protecting her. The room grew chilly despite the dying fire; through the ill-fitting shutters filtered a gray dawn; for a moment he felt drawn into the heart of an extinguished world, ravaged by opposing stars, entirely controlled by some dark design: he glanced around him as if to look for the mortal wound that made the morning so pale, draining this dim chamber to the point of death. “Don’t let her die,” he murmured superstitiously, and the word wakened a vague echo in the shuttered room: the world had made its appeal and lost: as if, during its sleep, a listening ear had turned away.

  Mona was lying flat on her belly, the covers heaped around her, her arms stretched out at full length, hands thrust beneath the pillow and gripping the bed on both sides; leaning over her, Grange smiled unconsciously, always amazed that even in its sleep this little body should cling so greedily to what it had already recognized as its need and comfort. Often she fell asleep naked; pulling up the sheet to cover her shoulders, Grange realized that this sudden, annihilating, childlike sleep of hers that astonished him so had mingled the recollection of a sweet subjection with the last moment of her exhaustion: it was as if a certain haste had borne her toward him across the long winter night, and something stirred within him at the thought: he quickly undressed without making a sound, and lay down beside her. Sometimes he slipped one arm beneath her, and curving the other around the pit of her belly, held her for a moment sleeping in his arms, wrapped in her roll of blankets: for moments at a time, feeling the warmth of his full hands rise to his shoulders along his tingling arms, he watched her, marveling and intimidated, as if she were some baby kidnapped in its swaddling clothes. He pressed his mouth against her shoulder: she wakened in a second, clutched him with both hands, and suddenly offered her insistent forehead to his lips: she was a rain of tireless kisses, a storm of tender gaiety, prodigal caresses.

  He leaped naked from the bed to open the shutters on a morning that had cleared now, where the fog was already rising off the garden, and a great sheet of sunshine fell upon the sheets; drained, their bodies did not separate: for hours together, drenched in the yellow sun that stretched a shadowy network of branches across the ceiling she lived and grew against him like a tree espaliered on a wall. A sly finger scratched at the door, and without waiting for a reply Julia appeared with the steaming breakfast tray. Grange hurriedly pulled up the sheet but Mona remained naked, sitting up in the tangled bed, and Julia, leaning over to set down the tray, gave a little throaty giggle at the sight of those delicate breasts and that young belly emerging from the foam of sheets as from the sea. “Her mistress,” he thought distractedly, and the word suddenly dissolved all his feelings into a wild confusion: the bold eyes and the smile on this other young and knowing mouth gave Mona’s kisses a kind of frenzy, a certain disorder . . . Nothing puzzled him more than his hunger for her, in which there was never satiety, nor weariness, and which her first appearance, disturbing, ironic, so meagerly sensual, had utterly belied: he was obsessed with the idea that she had captured him, thrown him on her bed with this wild haste which left him breathless still; he read in it the signs of a genius for passion.

  “In love,” he told her, “you use Napoleon’s tactics: you join battle, and see what happens afterwards.” With one finger he played with the little gold cross she wore around her neck; he remembered how she said her prayers before going to sleep, like a good convent girl, and made Julia read aloud passages from the Golden Legend which she herself knew by heart. The first time he slept with her, while they were resting in the darkness, she had begun telling him quite spontaneously, with a kind of childish grace, the story of Saint Benedict and his sister Scholastica, who rejoiced because a storm had kept her brother near her and allowed her to profit by his conversation and his lessons. Outside, the heavy rain of the Ardennes battered the forest for miles and miles. It was all so unexpected, yet so charming. The extraordinarily childish tone was that of schoolgirls huddling together in some shelter against the downpour, telling each other stories until the storm had passed.

  “But how did you know?” he asked sometimes with entranced perplexity, pressing her tiny head with its blue eyes and blond hair against his shoulder.

  “You’re not stupid,” she answered, making her wise matron’s face. She leaned back on one elbow and stared at him closely, shrewdly, putting a finger on his lips. “You’re not stupid—but you’re a little simple.”

  Even when they ate their lunch, she wound her legs in his, nibbled at his hand that stirred the coffee or reached for the sugar. “You’re like a parrot,” he told her, laughing and plunging his hand into the long mane that flowed like water down her back—“always hanging on by its beak and one foot.” Then the nibbling became a bite; he pressed her against him, his nails digging into her flesh with a touch of madness that roused the taste for blood within him—at the same time that he watched the yellow spot of sunlight already sinking down the wall to the level of the bed. “So little time,” he reminded himself with a kind of stupefaction—“I’ve so little time.” He leaped out of the bed and hurriedly dressed: it was time for the truck to be at Les Falizes. The war always plunged Mona into an incredulous, indulgent astonishment.

  “What can you do about it, chéri, in that house that’s so ugly?” she would sometimes ask him while he was dressing. She watched him, her brows furrowed over a difficult idea, lying across the bed with both elbows propped on its edge, her chin deep in her hands, and suddenly these words separated him from her, disengaged him from his moorings: he felt as if a giant hull were floating beneath him, a vessel nothing could stop on its aimless course, already washed beyond recovery by the rhythm of the sea’s breathing.

  Back at Les Falizes, the rest of Grange’s day loomed empty and exposed before him; even when he had no rendezvous with Mona, he never quite lost sight of the possibility that she might be there from one moment to the next: either she hitched a ride in the truck down to Moriarmé, or she took a walk in the woods with Julia—suddenly he would hear the light footsteps rushing up the blockhouse stairs: it was as if the slack had gone out of his life. Even her absence was easy for him to bear: he advanced into each of his days as down those airy seaside avenues where at each corner one unconsciously glances up to see if the vista still leads to the sea.

  As well as supplies and mail, the truck also brought the newspapers from Moriarmé: often on the afternoons when he was expecting Mona in the blockhouse, Grange would sit at the window where he could lean
out and look down the path, eager to see her a long way off, and while he was waiting he would examine the bundle of papers on his lap. His reasons for this interest were uncertain, and the result of his reading was like a well-mannered tedium; it was as if the dog days were being yawned away, the summer’s orchestra relieved by an unexpected yet discreet entrance of the brasses, combining a taste for Sporting Events with the last sighs of Advice to the Lovelorn: a group commander drowned in Lorient harbor while making a tour of inspection.——Until 38, a love story, after 38, a life of glory: the heroic and legendary life of Kosciusko.——Why not play a few bars of La Marseillaise after God Save the King, General Spears asks the House of Commons. This sickroom gossip circled a void that became almost dizzying: all at once a mysteriously allusive sentence gaping at the end of a paragraph made him wonder if a page had been torn out.

  Here and there the war sputtered and smoked like an imperfectly extinguished forest fire; a breath of wind suddenly leaped over hundreds of miles, spreading sparks into the remotest Karelian forests. What could the war possibly be doing in Finland? Somewhere in the distance, under another sky, the world was listlessly continuing on its way, perhaps, and the reports of its progress did not seem very different from what they usually were; it was surprising, in fact, that a war should be so inhabitable—its gesticulation remained wordless, as if observed through plate glass, as if an enormous bell jar had been lowered over the heart of Europe, over the world’s heart; he felt himself trapped beneath this bell, the exhausted air tight against his temples and his ears ringing.

  From time to time Grange looked up from these papers heavy with lacunae and stared into the forest: he remembered the yellowed papers of 1914 which as a child he loved poring over in the attic—all full of that brutal, swaggering parade to the starting line, set off in front of an audience stunned by the starter’s gun: how could this war infect the world with such a sleeping sickness? From time to time a dry leaf let go its hold and slipped noiselessly to the path, trivial in the cold, clear air, but what was coming was not winter’s sleep but something more like the world that had collapsed at the approach of the millennium, sick at heart and everywhere abandoning its plows and harrows, waiting for signs. Not, Grange decided, that they were expecting the horsemen of the Apocalypse this time; as a matter of fact, they anticipated nothing at all, unless, already vaguely apprehended, that final sensation of falling free that cuts through the stomach in bad dreams and which, if you had tried to determine it more clearly—but you didn’t really want to—might have been called the end of the reel: best, now, was the drunken sleep on the brink; never before had France pulled the sheet over her head with this feverish hand, this taste of nausea in her mouth.