The Interrogation Page 4

  ‘French girls are pretty, isn’t that so?’ said the American. ‘I’d like to – marry one.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Adam, ‘so would I.’

  ‘Listen,’ said the American, ‘you want to know what Mireille was like? She was like this; like this! In summer she used to wear hats, how d’you call ’em? She had a white dog. He’s died since, I believe. I wanted her to go back with me afterwards, to the States. Yes. I said to her, you come; but she said no. I’d have liked her to, no kidding.’

  The sailor stared hard at Adam for a moment. Then he said: ‘You want a drink?’

  ‘No,’ said Adam. He revolved slowly on his stool and leant back with his elbows on the edge of the bar and the middle of his spine pressed against its metal rim. He looked at the three uniformed figures moving about on his right. The peace, thus composed of talk between strangers, tips, parts of evenings joined together without rhyme or reason, could easily be transformed into hostilities, stale bread, scraps of terror by night, and then, all of a sudden, into war, with code language, passwords, blood, trails of black smoke. He could sense wars going on all over the world; in his brain there was a peculiar region that encroached upon the others, a jungle site where nature was truly strange; the vegetation consisted of barbed wire like hard, stiff lianas, with small, spiky knots every six inches instead of leaves.

  But the great thing was to know what one would do when the war was over. One might go into business, take up teaching or spend the rest of one’s life writing novels about the army. Failing that, one might become a jazz musician, like John Beaujolais of Portland, Maine. Or join up again, pick up one’s kitbag and make off into the North African mountains, carrying a big machine-gun – wastelands, pylons, expeditions at 6 in the morning, with a heavy mist clinging to the contours of the ground so that the flights of ducks are half-concealed – just enough for purposes of slaughter. But after that, on leaving the army, would one be able to climb a hill and live all alone in a big, empty house, put two deck-chairs face to face and lie sweating in the sun for days on end, almost naked and sometimes quite naked? To believe that one needn’t make money in order to keep alive, but that one does need to defend oneself against all those (and there are plenty of them) who’d like to murder one?

  Adam was trying to recapture some link with the past ten years; some phrase, some army habit, the name of some place; anything that would make clear to him how he had spent his time and finally, finally, later on, where he had been before this.

  A French soldier came into the restaurant; he wore the uniform of the Alpine regiment and seemed to be looking for somebody; he had the alert, forceful expression customary to those who disregard the petty details of life. Adam felt irresistibly drawn towards him; he could not prevent himself from getting up, walking over to the man and speaking to him without more ado; sweat broke out on his chest as he did so.

  ‘You’re a soldier, are you?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes. Why?’ replied the other.

  ‘What company?’

  ‘Twenty-second Chasseurs alpins.’

  ‘Do you know a place called Msila?’ Adam demanded.

  The other stared at him, surprised.

  ‘No… Where is it?’

  ‘In Algeria.’

  ‘I’ve never been over there,’ said the other man. ‘Besides…’

  ‘Wait a minute!’ Adam continued, ‘I’m trying to think – I know the map, you see. It’s near Bordj-Bou-Arreridj.’

  ‘I dare say,’ said the soldier. ‘But excuse me, I haven’t got time… I’m waiting for a girl…’

  He turned away as if to sit down at a table; Adam followed him, pressing his point:

  ‘Msila, in Bibania. In the foothills of the Hodna mountains. The nearest town is Setif. You must have heard of Setif?’

  ‘But I tell you,’ the man interrupted, ‘I’ve never set foot in your damned sector…’

  ‘How many months have you been in the army?’

  ‘Three!’ he shouted. ‘Three, and I – ’

  ‘Then it’s possible,’ said Adam, ‘it’s possible I’ve never been there. You understand, I’m trying to remember – anyway, what does it matter? I’m sure to find out one day. You won’t have a drink while you wait for your girl?’

  ‘No thanks, I’m not thirsty,’ said the soldier. He added ‘Good night,’ and walked quickly to an unoccupied table. When Adam got back to his stool he found the three American sailors had gone. He lit a cigarette and tried to think things out. But his attention was constantly distracted by a host of small happenings he had scarcely noticed before, but which now swelled to huge proportions and clung to his sensory structure like iron filings to a magnet, accumulating and getting in the way.

  A handsome auburn-haired girl came into the restaurant, holding herself very straight but wriggling her hips in a slightly ridiculous manner, and walked across to the French soldier’s table. The man reddened, stood up and pulled out a chair for her, smearing the edge of his khaki jacket with ash from a cigarette he had dropped on the table and forgotten; it now rolled jerkily to the opposite corner and fell to the ground by its own impetus, not making the slightest sound when it hit the floor; when Adam, in imitation, pushed a cigarette across the metal top of the bar until it fell off, the noise it made was at least a thousand times louder.

  Adam huddled on his stool; shut in by a strange old age, he was quietly resuming his place in the sun, in the deserted house at the top of the hill, taking no interest in the countryside, in the town or the sea, no interest in the aircraft that flew along the horizon, sometimes noisy, sometimes silent, no interest in ocean cruises or in the fine, realistic books people occasionally write after their military service, recording in meticulous detail that on a certain day in a certain month of June they were told to swill out the latrines directly after being made to peel forty pounds of potatoes; no interest in the many who are incapable of dying for love of a diadem spider, for the languors of nature, who cannot be brought to the verge of tears when the silence is rent by a drop of water falling into the waste-pipe of a washbasin. Those who refuse to live in the bosom of the earth, in the warm bosom, the bosom full of scents, rustlings and haloes, of the earth; of our microbial earth.

  Step by step he was taking up his withdrawn position at the open window, crouching on the ground between the two empty deck-chairs, and he was becoming aware that he did not understand anything at all. There was nothing in the actual structure of these horrible things to show him definitely whether he had just come out of a mental home or out of the army.

  E. Michèle had an awful job finding Adam’s house. The bus put her down on the road at the first turn after the beach. She looked round at the houses and gardens and the hills rolling softly into the distance, covered with thicker vegetation; but recognized nothing that could guide her in all this. She walked slowly along the bank that bordered the road, stepping cautiously on the gravel as though intent on bending either sandal in turn to the exact point – an angle of about 30° – where the instep stretched the leather straps absolutely taut, making them squeak, just once, a sharp squeak that kept time with her steps.

  From her jacket pocket she took a plan Adam had drawn one day on the underneath of a beer-mat. Both sides of the card bore a printed slogan, something like:

  Drink Slavia, it’s different… your very good health!

  but she did not look at that; she studied the plan, a rough pencil-sketch running across the words of the advertisement. A curved line represented the bay beyond the harbour. Two parallel lines marked the road, the one she was on now. To either side of the road and below the S of Slavia a number of little circles or squares had been hastily scrawled, and Michèle remembered what Adam had said:

  ‘There are some shanties there, up and down the hillside. I won’t mark them all, because it would take the whole blessed day – there are so many of them. I’m telling you that so you won’t think I’ve underestimated the landscape. Look, I’ll write it for you – there: shant
ies.’

  Further on there were two more parallel lines, closer together this time; that was the path. To left and right of the path the cardboard was covered with a very light network of crisscross lines; a word had been written on top of the cross-hatching, but it was too rubbed to be legible. Some distance up the path, on the left, there was a square which was perfectly clear; it had obviously been drawn with care and was much larger than the others. It was marked in the middle with a kind of St Andrew’s cross. That was where Adam lived – the little, insignificant spot on the earth’s surface that one underlines, that one marks in perpetuity somewhere or other, just as one scribbles an indecent drawing on a lavatory door so that, for once at any rate, all the lavatories in the world shall have their centre of gravity.

  On reaching the top of the parallel lines of the path, Michèle looked to the left. But the rectangle indicated by the cross could not be seen, owing to the uneven ground, the houses and shrubs. She had to set off at a venture, through a tangle of brambles, at the risk of emerging too high up or too low down, or trespassing on private property. Below her stretched the rounded sea, pricked here and there with white sails: The sun’s reflection swung over its surface, flashing like a crystal chandelier, and the waves lay motionless like furrows. The sky was twice its proper size, and in places, particularly in the vicinity of the line of mountains that cut off the horizon beyond the bay, the land was badly put together; its colours clashed and its planes were often heaped one upon another, with a curious disregard for the most elementary notions of balance and perspective; one felt that this landscape would seize any opportunity – a red sunset or a purple eclipse, to take only two examples – of being cheaply melodramatic.

  Michèle kept coming upon what might be clearings or uneven patches, craters like shell-holes, inhabited by snakes and ant-lions, or great beds of prickly plants. She caught sight of Adam’s house some distance away and realized she must have misread the map, for she was well below the marked point.

  She began climbing the hill again, her shirt drenched with sweat and the hook at the top of her check swim-suit digging into her back as the bra was stretched by her bowed shoulders. This time the sun was behind, throwing her shadow directly ahead and painting the front of the house a sickly white.

  Adam, at the window, had seen her approaching; he drew back for a moment, uncertain, wondering who the intruder could be; at less than fifty yards he recognized Michèle. Thus reassured, he left his observation post and sat down again in the deck-chair. A voice, hoarse with heat or fatigue, hailed him by his first name:

  ‘Adam! Hi, Adam!’

  In this arid terrain the cry sounded so unpleasant that for fear it should be repeated he climbed out of the window and stood at the edge of a flower-bed. Without noticing it, he trod on and squashed two red and black ants, one of which was carrying the remains of a dung-beetle. He waited till Michèle was only a few yards away, and then said, with a perfect imitation of naturalness:

  ‘That you, Michèle? Come on up.’

  He took her hand and helped her over the last lumps of earth; he watched her when she stopped, out of breath, her face glistening and her damp clothes clinging to her body.

  ‘You gave me a fright,’ he said. ‘For a moment I wondered who it could be.’

  ‘What? Who did you think it might be?’ Michèle panted.

  ‘I don’t know – one never knows…’

  He cast a glance of concern at his naked stomach.

  ‘I’m terribly sunburnt there, round my navel,’ he said.

  ‘Why – why do you always have to be talking about your navel, your nose, your hands or your ears, or something of that kind?’ asked Michèle.

  He ignored the remark.

  ‘I ought to get dressed,’ he muttered. ‘Just feel that – no, not there, my stomach.’

  She touched his skin and flapped her hand as though she had burnt herself.

  ‘Go and get dressed, then.’

  Adam nodded and went indoors by the route he had taken to come out; Michèle followed him, but in a way he didn’t care. After putting on his shirt he lit a cigarette and turned to look at her. He saw she had a parcel in her left hand.

  ‘You’ve brought me something?’ he inquired.

  ‘Yes, some newspapers.’

  She undid the parcel and spread out its contents on the floor.

  ‘About a dozen daily papers, a Match and a movie magazine.’

  ‘A magazine? Which one? Show me…’

  She held it out to him, Adam turned over a few pages, sniffed them near the cover, and dropped the magazine on the floor.

  ‘Interesting?’

  ‘I took what I could find.’

  ‘Yes, of course,’ he said. ‘Anything to eat?’

  Michèle shook her head.

  ‘No – but you told me you didn’t need anything.’

  ‘I know,’ said Adam. ‘And money? Can you lend me some?’

  ‘Not more than a thousand,’ said Michèle. ‘Want it now?’

  ‘Yes, if possible.’

  Michèle held out a note; he thanked her and thrust it into his trousers pocket. Then he pulled one of the deck-chairs into the shade and sat down.

  ‘Would you like a drink? I’ve got two and a half bottles of beer left.’

  She said ‘Yes.’ Adam fetched the bottles, took a penknife from somewhere near the heap of blankets, and prised the cap off a full bottle. He offered it to Michèle.

  ‘No, give me the half that’s left over, it’ll be enough for me.’

  They drank straight out of the bottles, several good gulps without a pause. Adam was the first to put down his bottle; he wiped his mouth and began to talk, as though continuing some old story:

  ‘Apart from that, what’s the news?’ he asked. ‘I mean what’s the news on the wireless, the TV and so on?’

  ‘The same as in the newspapers, you know, Adam…’

  He persisted, frowning:

  ‘All right, then, let’s put it another way: what news is there that isn’t in the papers? I don’t know, but for anyone who lives among other people, like you do, it’s not the same, is it? There must be things the papers and the radio don’t mention, but that everybody knows? Aren’t there?’

  Michèle reflected.

  ‘But things like that aren’t news. Otherwise they’d be in the papers. They’re people’s opinions, and so forth – ’

  ‘Call it what you like – people’s opinions, rumours going around – What’s the latest? Is there going to be – at least, do they think there’s going to be an atomic war, soon?’

  ‘Atomic?’

  ‘Yes, atomic.’

  She shrugged.

  ‘I haven’t the faintest idea – how should I know? No, I don’t believe they think that. I don’t think they believe there’ll be an atomic war. As a matter of fact I don’t believe they give a damn.’

  ‘They don’t give a damn, eh?’

  ‘I think, perhaps…’

  Adam sneered.

  ‘Okay, okay,’ he said, with a shade of absolutely unjustifiable bitterness, ‘so they don’t give a damn – Neither do I. The war’s over. I didn’t finish it, nor did you, but that’s beside the point. It’s behind us. You’re right. Only one day, it’s a hopeless business, you see funny cast-iron animals, painted khaki, the camouflage colour, real tanks, appearing from all directions and swooping down on the town. You see little black dots spreading over the whole district. You wake up, pull back the curtains, and there they are, down in the street; they’re coming and going, you wonder why, they’re very like ants, you might mistake them for ants. They have kind of hose-pipes that they drag after them everywhere; and with a very soft sound, puff! puff!, they spout jets of napalm on to the buildings. Where can I have seen that, I wonder? The tongue of flame that comes out of the pipe – it goes on through the air by itself, in a slight curve, and then it stretches out longer and longer, it goes in at a window, and suddenly, without your really noticing, the house
is on fire, it’s erupting like a volcano, the walls are collapsing all in one piece, slowed down by the air, which is incandescent, with big curls of sooty smoke, and the fire pouring out in all directions like sea-water. And the guns and the bazookas, the dum-dum bullets, the trench-mortars, the hand-grenades, etc., and the bomb that drops on the harbour when I’m eight years old and I tremble and the air trembles and the whole earth trembles and sways under the black sky? When a big gun goes off, I tell you, it jerks back with a graceful, agile movement, just like a shrimp if you stretch out your hand towards it, with your fingers all swollen and red because the water’s cold. Yes, when a big gun goes off it makes a graceful movement like a well-oiled machine, a graceful mechanical twitch. It growls, it springs back like a piston and it makes splendid holes three hundred yards away, holes that aren’t too messy and that turn into pools afterwards, when it rains. But one gets used to it – there’s nothing one gets used to as easily as war. There’s no such thing as war. People die every day, and so what? War is all or nothing. War is total and permanent. I, Adam, I’m still in it, come to that. I don’t want to get out of it.’

  ‘Stop it for a second, will you, Adam? In the first place, what war are you talking about?’

  She had taken advantage of Adam’s speech to finish her bottle of beer quietly; she liked to drink beer unhurriedly, taking big mouthfuls and letting them filter down slowly between her tongue and her uvula – all but counting the thousands of bubbles that fizzed through her mouth, that searched every tiny crevice and spot of decay in her teeth, took possession of her entire palate and went up into the back of her nose. Now she had finished, and as what Adam was saying did not interest her she thought this would be a good way of stopping him.

  ‘Well, what war are you talking about?’ she repeated. ‘The atomic one? It hasn’t happened yet. The 1940 war? You didn’t even fight in that one, you must have been twelve or thirteen years old at the time…’