Collecting the fragments of the broken instruments and trying in vain to piece them back together, René bitterly thought:
“Let men harm one another – a man is no loss! A man can defend himself. A thing is a different matter. Only a scoundrel would harm a thing. A thing is defenseless.”
This feeling of innate responsibility for the lives of hundreds of these fragile creatures outweighed his human sentiments.
In moments of great cataclysms and revolutions people of René’s ilk are capable of the greatest acts of heroism and devotion to the safety of an endangered machine, while watching with indifference as human blood is spilled before their eyes.
That awareness of constant responsibility for the life of a miniature world, over which he felt himself lord and caretaker, nevertheless filled René with a deep sense of pride and a feeling of personal significance, which his colleagues clearly derided. In the fictitious hierarchy of this world’s administrators, René was a person of the lowest grade.
The whole afternoon’s visit and stroll about town was all in all a carefully planned maneuver to get Pierre, offhandedly as it were, to the door of the institute, to dazzle Pierre with his miniature kingdom.
Guiding a dumbstruck Pierre past the glass cabinets as though before the ranks of a sparkling army under his command, René reveled in his delusional might.
In front of one large cabinet where large and small test tubes filled with liquid were visible in rows of stands, he found himself compelled to deliver a brief lecture on bacteriology, illustrated by the colonies of silent microbes imprisoned in the hermetically-sealed glass.
“Here, behind this seemingly inconspicuous pane of glass, we keep a unique menagerie. All the possible plagues of the world. In that test tube on the left, you’ve got scarlet fever; a little further on – tetanus; in this one – spotted fever; in that one, way in back – typhoid fever; there, sixth from the end – cholera. Quite a collection, eh? You see those two test tubes on the right with the white, opaque liquid? That’s the apple of our assistant’s eye – the bubonic plague. He’s been working on it for a year, sustaining it on a nourishment of his own invention, and he says that some incredible strains have been developed. Bacteria like stallions. This autumn he will be appearing with his brood at a bacteriological conference. He’s boasted that he’ll start a revolution in bacteriology. So, what do you think of the place? Not bad, eh? Just imagine if you were to set all these bugs loose while strolling through town – what do you think, would there be much left of our Paris?”
Pierre nodded absent-mindedly.
The visit drew on into the evening. It was already late when Pierre finally bid his hospitable friend farewell and, shown out through the gate, was back on the street.
He was supposed to have the night shift, at midnight, at the water tower, and he needed to make it to Saint-Maur by then.
It was now dusk, and the streets were illuminated by the matte moons of electric lamps.
After the memorable encounter with René on the boulevard bench, Pierre had conscientiously avoided being in the city at night. At nightfall, the familiar daytime cube of the city, so devoid of mysteries, shed its familiar contours, burst with a thousand alleyway cracks invisible by daylight, and became populated by armies of blazing lamps rushing about in a panic, ominous phantoms of glowing inscriptions, the screeching of monsters with fiery, bulging eyes.
Venturing into this labyrinth, Pierre felt his head spin and he immediately lost his bearings. The old, familiar waves snatched him up like a ball.
He got to a small island with the remains of his strength and leaned against the stone portal of the Saint-Denis gate. The streets were already ablaze with colorful bubbles of paper lanterns for the next day’s celebration. Here and there people started dancing. The sidewalks and streets swarmed with throngs of couples in a clinch.
Pierre suddenly felt as though an underground current, dammed somewhere deep down by the bricks jammed tight over the previous few days, was welling up inside him, undermining the masonry. He felt the jostled bricks popping out one after another, the scrape of the mortar coming apart – the floors of his daily affairs, erected as painstakingly as swallows building a nest, sinking into the tide one by one – and a warm red stream slowly flooded his eyes. He shut them, wracked with pain.
When they opened, he saw only the blinking of the countless hotels, the swarm of blood-red, bloated necks and the thousands of feminine profiles, as identical as photo-reproductions of a face he remembered so well.
Through every doorway, pressed tight to their apoplectic suitors, came and went dozens and hundreds of Jeannettes in a feverish haste, one identical to the next, Jeannette in an enchanted hall of mirrors, in a living forest with tree trunks of flabby, bulging necks.
Pierre’s seething hatred made him start to swoon and choke. For a moment, like a distant reflection, there hovered the vision of his taut hands clenched around the neck of the fat man from the Montmartre hotel, the lardy folds seeping between his fingers, and then it disappeared, without leaving the satisfaction he craved.
No! Not enough! What good would one do! One thousand! One million! All of them! The city! Where to find those gigantic hands, those mile-long fingers, to throttle those phlegmy, jiggling throats with one squeeze? All of them! Crumple! Topple! Imbibe their powerless gurgle! Hands! Where to find such hands?
Suddenly an unexpected clarity, a blinding magnesium flame, illuminated his brain, and he stood there baffled, stunned, and silent. For a moment he was thunderstruck, then he turned on the spot and started back the way he came, straight through the crowd, like Christ walking on water, giant and majestic, as though bearing aloft the beaming monstrance of his hatred. He felt people stepping aside for him, opening before him a long stretch of road unto a vanishing point.
Finding himself once more before the door of the institute he had left just moments before, Pierre calmly rang the bell.
René opened the door, surprised at the unexpected repeat visit. Pierre calmly explained that he had forgotten his cane, which – as far as he could recall – he had left in the laboratory.
They went up the wide, stone staircase, cold as a tunnel.
The cane wasn’t in the laboratory. Pierre asked René if he would check the other rooms, while Pierre had one last look in all the corners.
When René returned empty-handed after a few minutes of fruitless searching, he found Pierre still poking behind one of the laboratory cabinets. The cane wasn’t there.
Pierre admitted he might not even have left home with it – he would have to check the following day – and for the second time he said goodbye to his hospitable friend, who was earnestly surprised by this remarkable display of absent-mindedness.
The third-class carriage on the train traveling to Saint-Maur that evening was full of smoke, noise, and suburbanites excited by the approaching holiday. A slim, red-haired man sitting on a corner bench stood out in the hum of the general conversation, as he took no part in the chitchat and seemed to be eavesdropping, silent and distracted.
The man got out at the Saint-Maur station. The conversation continued.
Arriving at the water tower, Pierre noticed he was a full five minutes late, and he ran upstairs to relieve the day shift.
The engineer on duty appeared, finishing his nightly rounds. In a moment the last footsteps below faded to silence.
Then Pierre dipped his hand into his pocket and took out two small test tubes. He carefully held them up to his eyes. The test tubes contained a thick, whitish liquid. Pierre shook them gently under the light.
Then with the test tubes in one hand he approached the big centrifugal pump, powered by a diesel engine.