“Things stil bad, upstairs?”
“Not quite so bad. But bad enough. Poor kid!. With his skinny body and his big head, he looks like a skinned rabbit. Leave me. ”
The Belgian freed himself savagely, stopped, then walked to the other end of the room with a curiously childish movement, as if he were sulking.
“And that’s not the worst of it,” he said. “No, don’t act like a fellow who’s got flea-bites and stands squirming and looking embarrassed: I haven’t tipped off the police about Ch’en. It’s all right. Not yet, at least. ” Katov shrugged his shoulders gloomily.
“You’d better tell me all about it.”
“I wanted to go with ^m.”
“With Ch’en?”
Katov was sure, now, that he would no longer be able to find him. He spoke with the calm, weary voice of someone who has been beaten. Chiang Kai-shek would not return before night-fall, and Ch’en could attempt nothing until then.
Hemmelrich pointed with his thumb, over his shoulder, in the direction from which the child’s cry had come:
“And there you are. There you are. What do you expect me to do?”
“Wait. ”
“Because the kid will die, I suppose? Listen: half the day I wish for it. And if it happens, I shall wish him to remain, not to die, even sick, even an invalid. ” “I know. ”
“What?” said Hemmelrich, as if he were being robbed. “What do you know about it? You’re not even married!” “I’ve been married.”
“I’d like to have seen that. With your looks. No,
they’re not for us, all those cute little strutting cunts we see passing in the street. ”
He felt that Katov was thinking of the woman who was watching the child, upstairs.
“Devotion, yes. And everything she can. The rest- what she hasn’t got-is all for the rich. When I see people who look as if they’re in love, I feel like smashing them in the face.”
“D’votion is a lot. The main thing is not to be alone.”
“And that’s why you’re staying here, isn’t it? To help me?”
“Yes.”
“Through pity?”
“Not through pity. Through. ”
But Katov could not find the word. And perhaps it did not exist. He tried to say what he meant indirectly:
“I’ve felt it-or almost. And also your kind of. rage. How do you expect anyone to understand things, except through mem’ries?. That’s why you don’t irritate me.”
He had drawn near and was speaking, his head between his shoulders, with his voice that swallowed the syllables, looking at him out of the comer of his eye; both of them, their heads lowered, looked as though they were getting ready to fight, right there among the records. But Katov knew he was the stronger, although he did not know in what way. Perhaps it was his voice, his calm, his friendship even, that were telling.
“A man who’s reached the point where he doesn’t give a damn about anything, if he really comes across d’votion, sacrifice, anything of that sort, he’s done for.”
“No fooling! Then what does he do?”
“Becomes a sadist,” answered Katov, looking at him quietly.
“Sadism with pins,” he went on, “is rare; with words, far from rare. But if the woman is abs’lutely submissive, if she can survive it. I knew a fellow who took and gambled the money which his woman had saved up for years to go to the san’torium. A matter of life or death. He lost it. (In such cases you always lose.) He came home all in pieces, abs’lutely broken up like you now. She watched him come over to her bed. She understood right away, you see. And then, what? She tried to console him. ”
“Easier,” said Hemmelrich slowly, “to console others than to console yourself. ” And, suddenly raising his eyes:
“Were you the fellow?”
“That’ll do!” Katov banged the counter with his fist. “If it was me, I’d say so.” But his anger fell immediately. “I haven’t gone that far, and it isn’t necess’ry to go that far. … If you believe in nothing, especially because you believe in nothing, you’re forced to believe in the virtues of the heart when you come across them, no doubt about it. And that’s what you’re doing. If it hadn’t been for the woman and the kid you would have gone, I know you would. Well, then?”
“And as we live only for those virtues of the heart, they get the better of you. Well, if you’ve always got to be licked, it might as well be them. But all that’s absurd. It’s not a matter of being right. I can’t stand the idea of having put Ch’en out, and I couldn’t have stood to have kept him.”
“We can only ask the comrades to do what they can. I want comrades, and not saints. No confidence in saints. ”
“Is it true that you voluntarily went with the fellows to the lead-mines?"
“I was in the camp," said Katov, embarrassed: “the mines or the camp, it’s all the same thing. "
“All the same thing! That’s not true."
“What do you know about it?"
“It’s not true! And you would have kept Ch'en."
“I have no children. "
“I have a feeling it would be less. hard for me, even the idea that they’ll him, if he wasn’t sick. I. I’m dumb. It’s true I’m dumb. And I guess I’m not much of a worker either. I feel like a lamp-post that everything free in the world comes and pisses on.”
He pointed once again to the floor above with a movement of his flat face, for the child was crying again. Katov did not dare to say: “Death wil free you." It was death that had freed him. Since Hemmelrich had begun to speak, the memory of his wife stood between them. Having re^turned from Siberia without hope, beaten, his medical studies shattered, and having become a factory worker, convinced that he would die before seeing the Revolution, he had sadly proved to himself that he still possessed a remnant of life by treating a little working- girl who loved him with deliberate brutality. But hardly had she become resigned to the pains he inflicted on her than he had been suddenly struck by the overwhelming quality of the tendeme^ of a creature who could share his suffering in spite of his brutality. From that moment he had lived only for her, continuing his revolutionary activity through habit, but carrying into it the obsession of the limitless tenderness hidden in the heart of that slightly feeble-minded girclass="underline" for hours he would cares her hair, and they would lie in bed together for days on end. She had died, and since then. That, in any case, stood between Hemmelrich and himself. Not enough.
Through words, he could do almost nothing; but beyond words there were the things which gestures, looks, mere presence were capable of expressing. He knew from experience that the worst suffering is in the solitude which accompanies it. To express it also gives relief; but few words come less readily to men’s tongues than those of their deep griefs. To express himself badly, or to lie, would give Hemmelrich a fresh impulse to despise himself: he suffered above all from himself. Katov looked at him without focusing his eyes on him, sadly-it struck him once more how few and awkward the expressions of manly affection are:
“You must understand without my saying anything,” he said. “There is nothing to say.”
Hemmelrich raised his hand, let it fall again heavily, as though he had to choose only between the distress and the absurdity of his life. But he remained standing before Katov, deeply moved.
“Soon I shall be able to leave and continue looking for Ch’en,” Katov was thinking.
Six o'clock in the evening
“The money was delivered yesterday,” said Ferral to the colonel, who this time was wearing a uniform. “How do we stand?”
“The Military Governor has sent a lengthy note to General Chiang Kai-shek to ask what he should do in the eventuality of an uprising.”
“He wants to be covered?”
The colonel looked at Ferral over the white spot in 208
his eye, answered merely: “Here is the translati-on.”