“It really strikes me as quite unhealthy—absolument malsain—for him to spend his days in that box. It’s particularly unhealthy for a royal general who counts upon going down in history books.”
As I had foreseen, Mlle. Foucault became agitated. The syringe shook with the rhythm of the old maid’s anger as it was filled with the oily yellow medication.
“And you, why don’t you ever go out of this house, Monsieur Negovan?”
“I’m an owner of property, a renter of houses, mademoiselle.” Whenever possible, I avoided comparisons with commerce. “Je ne suis pas un soldat! My affairs can very well be carried on from here. Indeed, I would say that they can be carried on better from here. The further removed one is from one’s place of business, the better. But wars, Mademoiselle Foucault, wars cannot be waged from behind a desk. I’m not saying they can’t be planned from behind a desk, but wars are waged on a battlefield. Au champ de bataille. And, I imagine, usually waged instead of planned.”
Under the stress of her intense feelings, Mlle. Foucault answered in her own language. “Mais on ne fait pas la guerre, monsieur! Thank God, we’re not at war.”
“Really,” I said passively, “I don’t know anything about that, I don’t read the newspapers or listen to the radio. I’ve no idea what wars are going on at the moment, or whether there are any at all. I don’t build up my beautiful houses, Mademoiselle Foucault, so that some blockheads of generals — with due respect to my martial brother — can try their stone-breaking machines out on them, but if there is a war going on somewhere, I’m sure that he’s participating in it, moving little celluloid flags over the map and pushing cardboard tanks over plaster molds of the terrain. Now tell me how does the general plan to win further promotion in the service?”
“Monsieur le général cannot be promoted any higher,” she said sternly. “He is… well, retired.”
“Nous y voilà!” I exclaimed, still trying to draw Mélanie’s bypassing gaze.
Of course a promotion was impossible. Not because he was retired, but because he was dead. He’s been buried these twenty years, for two decades, in the family vault at the New Cemetery (Concession No. 17), where I, who am so different from the other Negovans, will certainly not allow myself to be buried.
Indeed, it was quite incomprehensible to me that they should have surrounded me for the last twenty-seven years and with the best of intentions with a kind of barbed-wire fence. All of them: Katarina; this penniless Auvergnate who is a kind of memorial to Franco-Serbian brotherhood-in-arms, the friends and relations who come to visit me; that harebrained but useful lawyer; even Isidor, Isidor hardly ever comes now — all of them really imagine that, thanks to their naive conspiracy of silence, I know nothing of what’s going on outside; that I don’t know of my brother’s funeral; that because I don’t go out of the house — not so much because of the threat to my health, but more from mistrust of the future — I’m prevented from knowing about anything or anyone of them, from participating, from taking any action, even from living.
In all honesty, I heard about George’s demise quite by chance. I could barely make out the words. They were broken, hardly penetrating the bedroom (Katarina’s indisputable kingdom), and they were not intended for me even though they concerned me in the highest degree, since they were about my brother’s wretched and quite unbefitting end. They further demonstrated the family accord never to tell me anything, an agreement which I had mutely legalized and in fact required of them. From the conversation I concluded that the general had perished as a result of a still unexplained but fateful misunderstanding in connection with his passion (oh, those tormenting Negovan passions!) for General Staff games. Afterward I in no way let on that I knew about the general’s inglorious fate, but as a result of that otherwise welcome misunderstanding I sometimes got myself into that situation in which I now found myself: of asking after my dead brother, which I did with the same unswerving sternness and careless sarcasm as when my brother was alive, and on this occasion spurred on by the desire to get rid of Mlle. Foucault as quickly as possible.
In any case I felt no particular commiseration. On the contrary, all I felt was bitterness. When I thought about my brother, no endearing images of childhood sprang before my eyes, and those real ones, the daguerreotypes in the album with its silver, flower-shaped binding, I had thrown out to make space on the shelves for my account books. However much I tried, I couldn’t conjure up from memory a single touching moment of brotherly solidarity, yet it would be inadmissible to say that I was indifferent to George’s fate. So as usual I said without dissimulation that my brother, who had chosen a career which no one in the family had pushed him into — on the contrary, we had all tried to deter him from it—ipso facto had chosen a heroic death as its inseparable, natural, and so to speak crowning act, and that a military career without a warlike death is a good beginning without a fitting end, a meal without spice, a trick, an illusion, une tromperie, une tricherie.
“So you tell me he’s gone into retirement?”
“You know very well he has!” answered Mlle. Foucault, holding a tuft of cotton in her bony fingers, and pushing it sharply into the neck of the alcohol bottle.
“He isn’t dead?”
“Non, monsieur!”
“Vous voyez, if he is retired, then how does my respected brother hope to die a martial death?”
Since Mélanie was at the limits of her patience, I knew that however much she had prepared herself for this visit, my provocation would get through to her sufficiently for her to throw in my face that her untouchable, son bien-aimé et courageux général, whatever else I might think about him, had died a warlike death — without a weapon in his hand, it’s true, but still laid low like any other soldier by shots from a rifle, at the door of his house, exactly as if on the exposed earthworks of the trenches, and in defense of something the poor wretch considered the hallowed essence of his warrior’s profession. Moreover, spurred on by my malice, which such duels only inflamed further, she would tell me all the rest that she kept to herself — all that in theory for my own good had been kept silent — so as to demolish me once and for all. Yet she had promised Katarina to respect “Arsénie’s special condition,” so now she could only go on torturing herself, or get up and leave. But she seemed to be stuck to the chair. She just went on squeezing the piece of cotton, and the sharp smell of alcohol filled the room. To hide my agitation, I selected a Graetz from the collection of single-barreled binoculars which I used in strong summer sunlight because of its blue-tinted eyepiece, and set about wiping the lens with a chamois cloth.
“You ought to get ready now,” she said with the unimpassioned tone of an executioner.
Although she had been giving me injections for a long time — very skillfully, I must admit, and without excessive pain — I still felt humiliated after each session. I was not ashamed to bare myself before a stranger; I was too old to be shy, and anyway I did it cleverly, turning onto my side and using both hands at once so that I exposed only a very limited area of skin, hardly big enough for a thorn. No, it was that intolerable feeling of dependence which sometimes also gave my relationship with Katarina the form of open hostility. And so, taking up the required position with as little movement as possible — with my knees on the seat, my chin on the back of the chair, and my hands behind my back firmly gripping my infinitesimally lowered trousers — I expressed the hope that she would be careful and forget about our passing misunderstanding while giving the injection.