“In one throw!”
“Do it again!”
“We were supposed to croak? What about him?”
“Maybe he really poisoned the water? They wrote in the papers that test tubes of plague were stolen from Pasteur!”
“He definitely poisoned it! The bandit! You can see it in his face!”
“Pound the maniac!”
“Hit the scum!” roared dozens of savage voices.
“Gentlemen – this is clearly a madman!” someone yelled, but the shout sank like a stone in the sea of tumult.
“Where did the plague come from?”
“What about the test tubes?”
“He obviously poisoned it!”
“Kill the dog!”
Struck down by a third well-aimed bottle, the red-haired man staggered and collapsed onto the sidewalk, spurting blood. He was smothered by a wave of rabid people, a forest of raised sticks, the crash of breaking bottles and the piercing shrieks of women.
When the tide ebbed, there was no more than a motionless, red splotch left on the sidewalk.
The majestic policeman – he had gotten lost somewhere and was suddenly located – looked the other way with a grimace of disgust. Five minutes later the café was evacuated.
At one o’clock a.m. bulletins from the prefecture were hung up all around town calling an end to the festivities and banning gatherings. They appeared, as usual, after the fact, at a time when the streets were more or less already empty. Ambulances had already taken the last stubborn dancers, still spinning in convulsive contortions, to the local hospitals.
The nightly editions of the newspapers, which by now only the newsboys read, noted sixty thousand new cases on the day of July 15.
A hollow vacuum reigned in the streets. Cars flying Red Cross flags were practically the only ones about.
On July 16, a second proclamation from the Parisian prefecture appeared on the walls. The prefecture announced that in the interests of localizing this exceptionally pernicious epidemic and preventing its spread throughout France, Paris had been surrounded by a military cordon during the previous night. Any attempt to leave the city was futile and would carry the death penalty. The prefecture urged the residents to stay calm and rational, and not to leave their apartments.
The day arrived pale, shaky and scorching. Stores remained closed. Café chairs sat motionless in the streets, as if frozen where they had been strewn.
Cheap paper lanterns swayed over the abandoned streets like bubbles over a petrified whirlpool. Half of the newspapers went unpublished.
The radio reported that by noon one hundred and sixty thousand fatal cases had been recorded. Even when all the city and municipal vehicles had been converted to ambulances, there still weren’t enough for all the victims. All manner of public institutions were hastily converted into hospitals. A mandatory Red Cross confiscation of private automobiles was forecast.
At six p.m., the Eiffel radio station broadcast political news.
Having spent his vacation at the seaside, the President of the Republic arrived in Lyon, where he immediately summoned the majority of vacationing deputies and senators, as well as the members of parliament enjoying some recreation in the provinces. At midnight an emergency assembly of the Chamber of Deputies was to be convened in Lyon, presided over by the president himself, to discuss the lamentable events of the past few days.
Paris was perishing softly, with dignity, to the clamorous funeral march of car horns and the jazzy clattering of bells. Eiffel Radio reported half a million fatalities.
On the fifth day, in defiance of the prefecture’s ban, Parisians who had been impatiently crammed in their apartments – from which many corpses still awaited removal – wandered irresolute into the streets. Somebody decided that alcohol was the best antidote to the plague. The bistros pulsed. Corks flew. Jazz bands rattled. Hotel signboards once more began flashing. A possessed Paris numbed itself with wine.
Down the riverbeds of the streets, down the ribbons of slick, asphalt streams, flowed a flock of automobiles like dead, powerless birds carried along the surface of a glossy, black current.
Bells rang from Sacré-Coeur.
Notre Dame, Madeleine, and all the small, scattered churches responded with the rueful echo of Paris’s bells.
A religious psychosis was slowly but systematically taking hold of a growing segment of the population.
Overhead the hollow, moaning bells beat their cupped bronze chests with lead fists, and the church interiors replied with the rumble of convulsively clenched fists and a spiteful, pious murmur. The Host was continuously raised by waxen priests, swooning from exhaustion.
In the Orthodox church on Rue Daru, a metropolitan in gold trim read the Gospels in a throaty, dignified bass, and all the bells rang as though it were Easter.
In the synagogue on Rue de la Victoire, candles burned over the striped crowd in tallithim; the congregants, like the tongues of invisible bells, swung in a pendular rhythm, and the air, like a bell, replied with a lament.
In the face of the leveling strickle of death, the people dissolving in the giant vat of the city clung spasmodically, in a blind centrifugal urge, to every aspect of their individuality, crowding together around the temples of their own rituals, like iron shavings around magnesium poles. Like so many lightning rods, the spires of the cathedrals, Orthodox churches, and minarets sent heavenward a magnetic current of separatism that grew with each passing moment, amassing the scattered human herd into self-contained racial and religious complexes.
The first eruption took place in the milieu that was the most distinct – due to the very pigment of its skin – and was without its own lightning-rod temple.
II
A window is a picture nailed to the dead, stone rectangle of the gray wall of the day.
The buildings on Place du Panthéon have thirty-six windows apiece: six rows of six. In building number 17, the sixth window in the third row is always lit during the day with the white glow of an unpainted canvas, with the matte smear of a latched shutter, disquieting as the milky-white eye of a blind man stubbornly fixed on the solemn profile of the Panthéon.
The evening patrols of the morgue vehicles had already passed through the streets, collecting the dead from the homes and streets and alerting the living to this fact with their unnerving bells, when P’an Tsiang-kuei, in pajamas and house slippers, pushed open the paralyzed wing of the shutter and appeared in the square of the frame, his face half lathered.
Finishing his shave in front of the mirror, P’an Tsiang-kuei carefully wiped his face, hands, and the whole of his body with a transparent solution, gargled long and scrupulously, and spritzed his laid-out underwear and clothing with an atomizer. Having performed these preparatory activities, P’an Tsiang-kuei quickly got dressed, slipped on a pair of gray gloves, wrapped his neck tightly with a scarf (the least possible surface area of skin was to come in direct contact with the pestilential air), and quickly ran downstairs.
It was crowded and bustling in the small Chinese restaurant at that time of day. Finding a free table was out of the question. After a moment of indecision, P’an Tsiang-kuei sat himself at a corner table occupied by a lone and elderly gentleman – not Chinese – wearing gold-rimmed glasses and a disheveled goatee that resembled a grayish feather duster.
In silence, without bothering to look at his chance neighbor, P’an Tsiang-kuei bent over his favorite dish: a steaming bowl of bird’s nest soup.
He was just lifting the last spoonful to his lips when he felt someone’s sharp fingers clutching his elbow. The gray man with the goatee was hunched over the table and staring at him over the tops of his glasses and, reddening in the face, said in a decided, though somewhat quavering voice: