Now she had taken his arm.
“I just find it strange that it only occurred to me today, and that it already seems so familiar to me, as though I’d been lugging it around with me for I don’t know how long already. What do you think? Isn’t it strange? — Really, it’s not worth it. — A person would think that saying ‘you’ll do it’ has to have some kind of effect; that afterwards everything would seem different to you, changed; and yet it’s only something else than— well, yes — than something else; and, at the same time, not.
“And in the end I’ll run into you — straight into you.”
She laughed.
“I was startled at first, so much so that it gave me chills, the way you fell into my lap — forgive me. But to meet you of all people today — it’s like it was meant to be. .
“Forgive me,” she added, so virtuous somehow, “but with you it seems so natural.”
They were under the arc of Le Pont Royal.
“Throw me in.”
He broke free from her and leaped back. She followed.
“I’m asking you to help me out.”
She pulled at him; she was strong; still, he broke free.
“On the meadows behind the mill, you promised the moon and stars, and now nothing. I’m telling you I want it, I want it.”
She circled him like a stray bitch; she grabbed hold of him. She hopped, she crouched, to make for him again.
It struck him “like the wrestlers at Le Bal Tabarin,” and it’s odd he didn’t yelp with pain for having recalled so crude a spectacle for a woman who was wheedling her death out of him. Odd that he didn’t yelp, but he was in no position to make so much as a peep, and perhaps you could read it in his eyes that he was rather calling for help, but that he couldn’t manage anything unless mutely. For in his eyes she had hit her mark, and having hit her mark her own eyes lit up, as though victorious, that she would yet achieve what she’d wanted after all. And now they were grappling with each other again.
“Throw me in; I don’t want to do it myself; the Lord forbids it; throw me in.”
She was shaking him, pulling him toward the river. He was aware of it. And all of a sudden he sensed, not seeing, that they were on the very edge. He sensed it as though through the wacky notion that there is never an end to life, that hope is a virtue “and so forth,” and from that “and so forth” he was suffused with the kind of strength he would never have anticipated. He didn’t want to go there, he wouldn’t go there. He extricated himself the only way he could: by giving her a brutal shove.
He heard a “Help!” but not the splash. And yet, right away, there was silence, silence more striking somehow than the yelp for help, and a silence that met no end. Until the ever-so-distant end of the roaring silence resounded with hurried, heavy footsteps. He stood there as if he were a host readying himself for the arrival of an esteemed guest. Now it’s not only footsteps; hooves, a cavalcade, a cavalcade at first hard, then unexpectedly limber, majestic, and disciplined by a baton whose rhythmic taps could be precisely heard. A weight on the shoulder, a musty odor all around. And creatures tossed like fantastic boulders, strength flowed from them, a great strength, serene, occupied impassively.
“What’s this then?”
Someone says, “She overpowered me. . She jumped. . I don’t know. .” and something tells him that it is he who is speaking.
“Fine.”
That “fine” is just as great, serene, and impassively occupied as those as-yet inexplicably multiplied creatures. Something pliable is lying at his feet, you’d say it was a person, but it’s somehow too small to be a person. It has a sandy-blond head; it’s turned on its side, and oddly so. It’s a clump that’s suddenly, as though it felt like putting itself in order, become truly three-dimensionaclass="underline" a perpendicular has sprouted from it, if it weren’t so skimpy it could perhaps be an arm, something came unstuck at the end. A finger? Isn’t it pointing at him? If only it had at least enough strength to be able to stretch out completely, to point properly, to help him! But the perpendiculars are already collapsing again, hardly having waved. A massive, impassive voice has as if stood in for it:
“He hasn’t had a finger in this pie? We’ll see about that.”
The voice that said “come here” was already a banal cop voice.
Just so we know: the authorities. Really? The authorities. — The slummocker! He pulled off his cap and flung it away; it described a well-trained arc and ended up on the bench. “To substitute for the luminous course of my Star of Bethlehem,” but he was touching the scruff of his neck, for he felt bad that something like this had occurred to him. — He looked toward where his cap had landed, went there as if under orders, and sat down beside it. Right away he saw that things were fine: the police station hadn’t come down on him; that was his version of praise.
He was in a strange locale: secure. A metal stove, and metal like plates of armor. Makeshift writing tables that had the timelessness of busted kitchen tables made from soft wood. On a peg in the lobby, askew, decorative cloaks and coats: they admitted that they were in contempt, that they were here because they were here: the police dressed differently.
And everything, all the rest, was soused in the miserable and imposing braggadocio of the grand and immune plenipotentiaries of human authority. With regard to this self-confident obduracy, all that remained for the apprehended man was a greensick apology, a red-flushed excuse, a fumbling, fast one.
He picked up his cap, held it between his knees. — A sergeant was sitting astride a wobbly chair; he was smoking and staring at the ceiling. Performing his duty, he reached over his shoulder, took the evening paper from the table, spread it open, and read. Then he folded the newspaper into quarters and smacked it sullenly against his thigh. His boredom was flabbergasted by the innumerable anchor points all around him: which one do you hang yourself on?
“You there,” he said.
“Yes?”
“So what really happened?” the sergeant barked into a hovering ring.
“Some whore. Apparently threw herself in the water.”
“Her pimp. You’re her pimp, is that it?” and he came forward.
“Not at all. — She wanted to.”
So that something would jam up in him, nothing jammed up in him.
“Aha, she wanted to. Ça va. And you helped her out, eh?”
He didn’t answer. And how was he to hear amidst this delectation? How was he to answer? He delectated in the immeasurable certainty, in the bottomless fearlessness. As though it were a satiny, barely rippled eddy of oily liquid oozing down the walls of an elaborate funnel. To somewhere. He didn’t answer, because he was delectating in his admiration for an indifference as smooth as a jailhouse wall, but an indifference that was also so high that it was like the wall of a jailhouse without boundaries. He came to know that it’s nothing, but his cell was the universe. He longed to be confronted with the most perfect, most noble, most exacting, most misdemeanor-proof being — God? — for he had an urge to look into the eyes of someone who sees more touchily than anyone or anything: he knew that he would hold out even against such as this.
Instead, there was the bailiff-like gaze of the policeman, who, not waiting for an answer, moved on quickly:
“I’m talking! You helped her, no?”