It was then that he suddenly noticed half a dozen hungry pairs of eyes outside the window following his every movement. The spectators huddled together were not content with observing him as, having eaten so much he was fit to burst, he drew on the napkin, furtively suppressing a belch. They would have preferred him to go on eating rather than scribbling on napkins. They waited impatiently for the appearance of further courses, being unsated with the ones they had already seen. They would have wanted to see other delicious morsels raised on his fork, so as once again to devour them with their gaze until they disappeared into the pink mouth beneath the neatly trimmed mustache. A rap on the windowpane gave mild expression to the commander’s irritation, but it did not scare the mob away; quite the opposite, they responded by making faces and giggling impudently. There was no one around to drive them back behind the iron ring of the tracks.
If the commander of the guard had had his boots on, he would have run out on the spot and dealt with them himself. It would have been enough, he believed, to grab one of them by the scruff of the neck and give him a few kicks on the shin; the rest would have quieted down at once and would not have said another word. In the meantime, the general and the major have already gotten back their boots, which have been polished till they gleam; the captain is just getting ready to pull his on, and the adjutant will be next. If I am the leader of the guard, I demand my boots! This instant! Yet the boots are still in the closet by the cloakroom, next to the adjutant’s, last in line for being cleaned. The waiter would not dare bring them as they are, dirty and smelly; he prefers to grovel tearfully and offer endless apologies. And so minutes go by, and the spectators outside the window, relishing the commander’s helplessness, torment him by aping his gestures, laughing as they shake their fists. In response to the curses spilling from the commander’s lips, barely audible murmurs of reassurance come from the back room. So the commander starts pounding on the window; a moment longer and he’d be brought to his senses by the sound of breaking glass he knows so well. And the children scatter. They run away and hide in courtyards, attics, and who knows where else. If I am the commander, I have my men to thank for all this. They evidently all went off home the moment their superior officer was out of sight — for, extraordinary as it seems, they too were eager for their lunch.
The waiter, a figure of the most beggarly cut, is of too little significance here to be able to make amends for the indignity he has caused the commander — the regrettable moment when he left him in his stockinged feet in front of an insolent derisive rabble. And because of this, the long-awaited lunch with the officers went unappreciated. The admiring and grateful question of where the waiter had obtained the pork knuckle, and how he had miraculously been able to marinate it and roast it, would never be uttered. If anything at all here could be made right, it would only happen if the waiter were forced to take all of the mockery upon himself, to be submerged in it, to sink in ridicule without mercy and without end. When the boots are finally brought, then, the commander will grab them by the uppers and for a long time will assail this figure, who in his consternation will be lisping even more than usual, until the offense is washed away in blood. It will drip from a cut over the eye onto the black tailcoat and the white shirt front. The airmen pretend they are involved in their game of billiards, their backs turned, rather than watch this scene, which reminds them only too much of the barracks. The balls click against one another unconvincingly and miss the pockets. A word of gratitude will be found for the commander, but not until he is pulling on the boots, for only then will they sense it’s finally over, and breathe a sigh of relief. Their thanks will sound rather offhand considering the care with which they have been treated, the cordial hospitality and the astonishing lavishness of the meal. The reserve with which the airmen shake hands with the commander is especially painful to him, though on the other hand he understands that he ought not to bear a grudge.
Alas, nothing has gone as planned, and it’s no surprise he has grown solemn. With one more longing glance into the cloakroom, at the gold-trimmed greatcoat which would have been so much more effective than his own jacket in setting the tone of his relations with the world, the leader of the guard sets out on his business, not noticing that his boots still smell. Only one course of action remained to him, one last resort: he must now gather his subordinates, line them up, and call to account the first one at hand. Returning from their homes, the guardsmen assembled in the school yard. Given soup and chops by their mothers, they had no excuses. All the more so because after lunch barely half of them had returned to their unit. What had happened to the rest? Had their mothers kept them at home and made them do their homework? If they started doing what their mothers said, the whole lot of them would end up deserting. That was what he was afraid of. For the moment, though, they stood in a shortened but orderly double line in the grammar school yard, while he stormed back and forth in front of them, furious at those he could no longer reach. The longer he raged, the angrier he became. As he screamed till he was out of breath, meaningful pauses came of their own accord. In this way it cost no effort whatsoever to imitate the harsh tone of the radio broadcast. But the cadences of his speech were drowned out by dance music. Fox-trots could be heard coming from the café, where the gramophone with its big trumpet had been turned up to full volume.
By early afternoon someone had already picked up the chalk-and-plaster fragments left after the incident that some time ago had interrupted the distribution of the rolls, and had put them to use. The first scrawl to deface the walls had appeared on the façade of the cinema. It was a question mark with a provocatively curving belly, devoid of any context whatsoever. Since no one knew what it referred to specifically, it brought everything without exception into question, including the lace curtains in the windows, the ornamental railings, the widely accepted principle that one’s fingernails ought to be clean, and the dignity of the life being led all around. Through its suggestiveness, the question mark became vulgar and offensive in and of itself. The guards were ordered to scratch it out, making use of their unlimited access to school supplies of chalk. From that moment, for a long while they were kept busy, because question marks kept popping up here, there, and everywhere. Yet no one was caught red-handed. At least four such marks blighted the front of the government offices alone, one standing out mockingly beneath the damaged emblem. Two could be seen at number seven, a larger one and a smaller one, joined together in a single visibly obscene figure. The orphanage children, who were sticking their noses into everything, may well have preferred to write plainly and simply that, for example, here at number seven a young lady went with a young man. But that would have taken too many letters. A question mark is the easiest thing to scribble in haste, when the writer is all set to scram at a moment’s notice. Exposed to the public view, it immediately takes on a shared meaning that is allusive in the most general sense. The guards ran from place to place, smudged in chalk from head to foot, till the last question mark had vanished, and all the buildings around the square were covered near ground level with a rash of expressive blotches that would never let anyone forget that here anything could be called into question.
In the meantime the orphanage children were already busy with something else. Seizing the opportunity, they were prowling the unwatched courtyards while the concierges were minding the front of their buildings. In threes and fours, they hurriedly emptied the trash cans they found there. Up to their knees in the contents, they sought remnants of food. They picked out kitchen scraps and stuffed themselves. The things they ate upset their stomachs, and soon they were dirtying entrance-ways, landings, and anyplace they happened to be. It was as if they were deliberately provoking the residents, especially those in the buildings overlooking the street, who, according to the universally respected order of things, had the right to give a wide berth to all that was revolting, including by-products of the pure elixir of their life. To see excrement at every step was a true plague, compared with which the isolated incident involving the drifting smell and the ochre smear on the sidewalk was a matter of no consequence.