The mother might be twenty-six. She stands in cold light from an open window. Her upturned face is broad and white, the angora beret on her head is white moss. She has wrapped a tatty fur around her neck, like an old Russian countess. Her handbag seems the old displaced-person sort, too — big, and bulging with canceled passports. She speaks in the thin voice of this city, the high plucked wire of a voice that belittles the universe.
“I’ve had enough, and I’ve told him so,” she says, without caring who might hear. It sounds at least the start of a tragedy, but then she invites the hag, who, with a tablecloth around her head, is hanging out the window, to stop by and share the television later on. At half past seven there will be a program called L‘Homme du XXe Siècle.
Ernst followed this woman because she was fit for his attention. He would have sought a meeting somewhere, but the weather was against it. He could not have brought her to Willi’s room, because Willi has scruples about gossip and neighbors. Ernst could have gone upstairs (he does not doubt his success for a moment), but the walls are cardboard and he would have drawn notice to his marked civilian self.
Early in the morning, the mother’s voice is fresh and quick. The father leaves for work at six o’clock. She takes the child to school at a quarter to eight. The child calls her often: “Maman, come here.” “Maman, look.” She rushes about, clattering with brooms. At nine she goes to market, and she returns at ten, calling up to her crony that she has found nothing, nothing fit to eat, but the basket is full of something; she is bent sideways with the weight of it. By noon, after she has gone out once more to fetch the child for lunch, her voice begins to rise. Either the boy refuses what she has cooked for him or does not eat quickly enough, but his meal is dogged with the repeated question “Are you going to obey?” He is dragged back to school weeping. Both are worn out with this, and their late-afternoon walk is exhausted and calm. In the evening the voice climbs still higher. “You will see, when your father comes home!” It is a bird shrieking. Whatever the child has done or said is so monstrously disobedient that she cannot wait for the father to arrive. She has to chase the child and catch him before she can beat him. There is the noise of running, a chair knocked down, something like marbles, perhaps the chestnuts, rolling on the floor. “You will obey me!” It is a promise of the future now. The caught child screams. If the house were burning, if there were lions on the stairs, he could not scream more. All round the court the neighbors stay well away from their windows. It is no one’s concern. When his mother beats him, the child calls for help, and calls, “Maman.” His true mother will surely arrive and take him away from his mother transformed. Who else can he appeal to? It makes sense. Ernst has heard grown men call for their mothers. He knows about submission and punishment and justice and power. He knows what the child does not know — that the screaming will stop, that everything ends. He did not learn a trade in the Foreign Legion, but he did learn to obey.
Good-natured Willi danced a java this morning, with an imaginary girl in his arms. Fortunately, he had no partner, for she would have been kicked to bits. His thick hands described circles to the music from the radio, and his thick legs kicked sideways and forward. Ernst saw the soles of Willi’s shoes and his flying unmilitary hair, and his round face red with laughter. When the music stopped, he stopped, and after he had regained his breath, used it to repeat that he would come home early to cook the stew for their last supper. Willi then went off to work. Today he is guide and interpreter for seventeen men from a German firm that makes bath salts. He will show them the Emperor’s tomb and the Eiffel Tower and leave them to their fate up in Pigalle. As Willi neither smokes nor drinks, and is not even objectively interested in pictures of naked dancers, he can see no advantage in spending an evening there. He weighs the free banquet against the waste of time and chooses time. He will tell them what the limit price is for a bottle of champagne and abandon them, seventeen of them, in hats, scarves, overcoats, and well-soled shoes, safe in an establishment where Man spricht Deutsch. Then he will hurry home to cut up the leeks and carrots for Ernst’s last stew. Willi has a sense of responsibility, and finds most people noisier and sillier than they were ten years ago. He does not know that ten years have gone by. His face does not reflect the change of time, rate, and distance. He is small in stature, as if he had not begun his adolescent growth. He looks and speaks about as he did when he and Ernst were prisoners in the west of France eighteen years ago.
This morning, before attending to his seventeen men from the bath-salts factory, Willi went to the market and came back with a newspaper someone had dropped in a bus shelter. What a find! Twenty-five centimes of fresh news! He also had a piece of stewing beef and a marrow bone, and he unfolded an old journal to reveal four carrots and two leeks. The grocer weighed the vegetables and the journal together, so that Willi was cheated, but he was grateful to be allowed to purchase any vegetables at all. The only vegetables on public sale that morning were frozen Brussels sprouts.
“It is like wartime,” says Willi, not displeased that it is like wartime. He might enjoy the privations of another war, without the killing. He thinks privation is good for people. If you give Willi a piece of chocolate, he gives half of it away to someone else and puts the rest aside until it has turned stale and white. Then he eats it, slowly and thankfully, and says it is delicious. Lying on the floor, Ernst has watched Willi working — typing translations at four francs a page. His blunt fingers work rapidly. His eyes never look up from the paper beside the machine. He has taught himself to translate on sight, even subjects about which he cares nothing, such as neon tubes and historical principles. They have come only a short distance from their camp in 1945, where someone said to Ernst, “You have lost the war. You are not ordinary prisoners. You may never go home again.” At the other end of the camp, on the far side of a fence, the Foreign Legion recruits played soccer and threw leftover food into garbage cans; and so Ernst left Willi with his bugs, his potato peelings, his diseased feet, his shorn head, and joined the Legion. Willi thought he would get home faster by staying where he was. They were both bad guessers. Willi is still in Paris, typing translations, guiding visiting businessmen, playing S.S. officers in films about the last war. It is a way of living, not quite a life. Ernst teases Willi because he works hard for little money, and because he worries about things of no consequence — why children are spoiled, why girls lose their virtue, why wars are lost, won, or started. He tells Willi, “Do you want to go to your grave with nothing but this behind you?” If Ernst really believes what he says, how can one explain the expression he takes on then, when he suddenly rolls over on the floor and says, “Girls are nothing, Willi. You haven’t missed much. You’re better off the way you are.”
This is a long day without daylight. Ernst’s duffel bag is packed. He has nothing to do. He has forgotten that Willi asked him to put the marrow bone and stewing beef in a pan of water on the electric plate no later than four o’clock. In the paper found at the bus shelter Ernst discovers that because of the hard winter — the coldest since 1880—the poor are to be given fifty kilos of free coal. Or else it is one hundred and fifty or one hundred kilos; he cannot understand the news item, which gives all three figures. Gas is to be free for the poor (if consumed moderately) until March 31. Willi’s gas heater flames the whole day, because Ernst, as a civilian, is sensitive to weather. Ernst will let Willi pay the bill, and, with some iridescent memory of something once read, he will believe that Willi had free gas — and, who knows, perhaps free rent and light! — all winter long. When Ernst believes an idea suitable for the moment, it becomes true. He has many troubles, and if you believe one-tenth of anything he tells you, he will say you are decent.