“Did you find your son?” asked Wokurka.
“No,” said Angelina, “he was already gone.”
“Pity, pity,” he said. “It would have been nice to have him here.” But he said it only to please Angelina. His mind was on his homeland and the journey they would soon take.
He began to serve food that he had prepared himself. They were the dishes of his native country and his youth. They had the scent of his native village, the genuine fragrance of Gora Lysa. There was a soup of beets and cream, bacon with peas, and white cheese. He had also bought brandy. Nobody drank wine in Gora Lysa. He sang with a hoarse and unsteady voice his native Christmas carols. Tears formed in his festive eyes. He had to break off and start again.
“This is the last Christmas I will celebrate in Paris,” he said when he was done singing. “By this time next year, we’ll be at home!” And he slapped the leather brace of his wooden leg.
As she heard him speak those words Angelina felt a sharp pain, even though she had been prepared for the journey for quite some time already. Never had she dared to set her mind upon a specific week, and a specific day, and a specific hour for their journey. It was all well and good to go with Wokurka to his native country so long as it occurred at some as-yet-undetermined time, one that would be decided by chance. When she heard now that not chance but Wokurka himself would determine the exact time, she was filled with a fear of all that awaited her in that strange, faraway land and a sadness over all that she would be leaving behind. She began to sob so passionately she had to put down the glass that she had been poised to bring to her lips in acknowledgement of his toast to a “happy journey without return.”
“Without return!” This expression awoke in her a rapid string of terrifying thoughts; she would never see her son again, nor the city and street in which she had given birth to him, nor the palace in which she had been young and foolish, happy and miserable, calm and hopelessly flummoxed. She had no grasp of the true distance between France and Wokurka’s homeland; thus it seemed that his homeland was a faraway and hardly reachable wilderness. She crossed her arms on the table, sunk her head into them, and wept bitterly and violently. The smoke from the dying candles on the tree branches, the brandy she had ingested, the memory of her pointless trip to her son in the barracks, a sudden apprehensive affection for the child, her remorse over having promised herself to this man without thinking it through, but also the fact that she was now saddening him with her grief and disappointing him with her fears — all this descended upon her at once, burying her under a mountain of confusion.
Wokurka stroked her brittle reddish hair. He could guess everything she was feeling and knew her despair would deafen her to all his reassurances and promises. There was nothing more he could do except continue the silent conversation between his caressing hand and her red hair. After some time she raised her pale moist face to him.
“I understand, Angelina,” he said. “It’ll pass, believe me, it’ll pass; everything passes.” She began to smile an obedient smile that made her face even sadder. It was a grateful and at the same time reproachful and resigned smile, the pained and exalted glow that lights the faces of the weak who are giving themselves up.
XI
She had already given up. She had begun to make her preparations with the conscientious determination that is equally particular to the strong as it is to those who have finally resigned themselves. It had been decided they would marry in January and set out a month later. It was thus still several weeks until their departure. To Angelina, however, it seemed that Wokurka’s colossal plan decimated the laws of time. As she feared that her determination might falter, she believed there were no days left to waste.
She mulled over what she could leave her son, for she was certain she would never see him again. The cross she had brought with her from her homeland, the handkerchief she had stolen out of foolish love for the Emperor — she could give both to her little Pascal. She imagined what she would say to him: they were trivial, but for her, his mother, they were objects of importance, and she was giving them to him so he would always think of her. Of her, but also of the Emperor.
So she removed the handkerchief from her box, took down the cross she had hung over Wokurka’s bed, and went to the barracks.
Wokurka escorted her. He had fashioned a pair of boots for Angelina’s son, good solid boots that were fitting for a drummer.
They found the boy and went with him to the canteen. He let his mother embrace him, shook hands with Wokurka, accepted his presents, expressing delight at the handkerchief and boots, but regarding the cross, he said: “I don’t need that. Nobody needs that in our regiment!” He gave it back to his mother and said: “You need it, I think!” And he had at that moment the rumbling voice of his father, Sergeant-Major Sosthène.
The canteen was filled with boisterous soldiers. Behind the buffet, on the wall over the étagère with its multicolored bottles, hung a transparent veil covering the Imperial eagle and above that an oversized and quite obvious portrait of the returned King. His good-natured yet indifferent face, his fat droopy cheeks, and his half-shut eyelids seemed even more distant and indistinct than the veiled eagle of gleaming brass. It was as if the King’s portrait were veiling itself while the veil covering the Imperial eagle was but a passing cloud.
At the tables all around soldiers were conversing. Both the sober and the tipsy were talking about the Emperor; the drunken ones even shouted now and again: “Long live the Emperor!” Little Pascal spread out the handkerchief before him and said with an affected deep voice: “Everybody says the Emperor is coming back. We don’t give a damn about the Bourbons!” And he gestured with his little finger at the portrait of the returned King on the wall.
“He won’t come back,” said the cobbler Wokurka. “And I want to say that you, if you like, can come with us, with your mother and I, to my homeland.”
“Why?” asked the boy. “The Emperor’s coming back soon; everyone says so.”
Angelina was silent. She heard the soldiers all around her talking about the Emperor. The Emperor was not dead and forgotten; he was alive in the hearts of the soldiers and they awaited him every day. Only she had stopped waiting for him; she alone would not be allowed to wait any longer.
And she noticed that both the man and her son became strangers as soon as she thought about the Emperor. In fact, her son only seemed close because he had spoken lovingly of the Emperor, so out of fear that she might betray her confusion and would lose her determination to follow Wokurka, she said: “Let’s go,” stood up, kissed her son on the cheeks, on the forehead, and on his red hair, and turned to go before Wokurka even had time to get up.
On the way home he spoke to her, gently and timidly and somewhat uncertain. He told her that the soldiers were wrong. They did not comprehend the intricacies of the political world and therefore believed the Emperor would return. But even if the soldiers were right in their prediction and the Emperor came back, this should not hinder them, Angelina and the cobbler Wokurka, from starting a new life in a distant land, far removed from the confusion caused by the great ones in the world only so that the lowly ones might suffer.