How could he have supposed that he would feel safe in a restaurant? There was no longer any place where he could be outside the world; in his situation nothing could be relied on. The longer he looked at people, the more unimaginative he became. They — and he too — were all characters in a film, the story of which was obvious after the very first frame. (Hadn’t the waiter known in advance what he was planning to order? So naturally he had ordered something else.) Maybe he had been observing them in the wrong way, in the wrong place, with the wrong attitude — in any event, regardless of how he put his perceptions together, they arranged themselves, independently of him, into the traditional well-bred nonsense. The imposture of napkins on laps! The perfume of the women brought up memories he didn’t want, and the pommes frites, which until very recently he had thought of as “good old pommes frites,” only gave him a headache. Long long ago Keuschnig had imagined people he disliked asleep, so as to like them better; now they continued to revolt him even when he thought of them with their knees drawn up in eternal sleep. And the “charming sights,” which had once meant so much to him, or so he thought — the sight, for instance, of the child wearing a dress that was too big for her, accompanied by the strange conviction, the CERTAINTY, that she would GROW INTO it — were of shorter and shorter duration; worst of all, they had lost their afterglow. It was easy for that woman outside, passing the open door, to smile at him; they were safe from one another. The woman inside, on the other hand, sitting alone at a table, had taken one look at him and instantly compressed her parted lips, repelled by the chaos in his face. She hadn’t even wanted to change her place, for fear he might misinterpret the least move as a kind of complicity, if not as sexual provocation. Yet, before catching sight of him, she had been sitting there red-nosed, quietly weeping. — You’re boring, he wanted to say to her, as boring as the world. I need a daydream, he thought, or I’ll start howling like an animal; but to set my mind free, I’d have to be able to stop looking at those people. He did indeed look away, but only as a reflex — when somebody dropped a knife … How steadfastly they go through with it! he thought: and then they go out into the street so nonchalantly, with their palms turned outward. The one link between us is that more and more dandruff falls on our coat collars as we eat. It was still early afternoon, and already everything seemed hopeless again.
Outside on the square a half-naked drunk was bellowing; at the sight of him a mood of smug complicity enveloped many of the diners, who were not only clothed but also more or less sober. A few began talking from table to table, even to Keuschnig. He looked down at his trousers. That’s their kind of solidarity, he thought — though only a short while ago he had thought of solidarity first as the illusion of being taken back into the fold after being cleared of a grave suspicion, and second as a last moment of belonging before one is isolated forever. The innocence of the child, who, while all the others were smirking at each other, was merely frightened by the bellowing! For the first time he was glad to be alone with her.
North of the Place Clichy, after crossing the Montmartre Cemetery on the raised rue Caulaincourt and turning left into the somewhat quieter rue Joseph-de-Maistre, you come to a dusty, grassless park with a children’s playground in one corner. Keuschnig had lived in the neighborhood some years before and sometimes on Sunday mornings he had put the child, who could barely stand at the time, in the sandbox. Since this park was not far from the Place Clichy, he now headed for it, but took a more roundabout route by way of the Avenue de Saint-Ouen. He saw few SIGNS on the way, and even those seemed to tease rather than threaten him: a single boot in a supermarket cart that someone had left standing in the street; a bus ticket which fell from his hand and blew away every time he stooped to pick it up … The beggar who twittered like various kinds of birds was still standing on his old corner, to which the ladies of the neighborhood were dragged by their leashed dogs, which proceeded to piss right next to him, so that their owners felt obliged to give him a pittance to compensate for the humiliation … It gave Keuschnig a sense of well-being to walk slowly through the bright, hot streets with the child hop-skip-jumping beside him. He hadn’t wanted to go to the movies because to judge by the pictures at the Place Clichy the films seemed to take place entirely indoors. What a lot of automatic machines are still out of order around here, he thought in passing, almost cheerfully: washing machines, stamp vending machines, and now this photostating machine outside the stationery store, which even in those days had an EN PANNE sign on it. The air was so hot that vapor formed in cellophane packages of crepes outside a bakery. A thin bony man overtook Keuschnig; of all the people on the street, he was the only one who seemed to be in a hurry; his prominent shoulder blades jiggled under his tight-fitting summer jacket. Here and there North African workers, apparently grown accustomed to the lack of space, were sitting on doorsteps, waiting for the end of the lunch hour. A pale counter girl, with a name tag on the collar of her apron, stepped out of a pastry shop, closed her eyes, sighed and bent back her head so as to get the sun in her face. Another girl, carrying a cup of coffee, crossed the street very very slowly, step by step, for fear of spilling the coffee. Keuschnig stopped still and without a word from him Agnes stopped too — because it was so hot, just plain hot. The street trembled as the Métro passed inaudibly underneath. Keuschnig felt the tremor. This is it! he thought. Yes, this is it! — an experience that he had given up expecting.
They walked in a primeval heat, in which far and wide there was no more danger, step by step like the girl with the cup, but for the pleasure of it, not because they had to. Keuschnig no longer had to adjust to the child’s slow unthinking gait; now he walked like that of his own accord, and the summer breeze, in which a branch crackled now and then, nothing more, seemed a fulfillment, yet still full of promise. High in the air a plane flew by and for a short moment the light changed, as though the shadow of the plane had passed quickly over the street. He wanted to shout at far distant trees that were gleaming in the sun and tell them to stay just as they were. Why didn’t anyone speak to him?
In a side street Keuschnig saw the house he had lived in some years before, with a maple tree in front of it that reached just up to the windows of his old apartment. In that moment he was overcome with bitterness at all the wasted time since then and with disappointment with himself. Since then he had experienced nothing, undertaken nothing. Everything was as muddled as ever, and death, from which he had then been safe, was much nearer. I’ve got to do something, he thought in despair, and no sooner had the thought passed through his mind than he said to the child: “I’m going to start working. I’m going to invent something. I need the kind of job that gives me a chance to invent something.” Agnes, who had heard nothing but his voice, responded with a carefree hopping step, and for the first time in ages his feeling toward her was one of friendliness, rather than of absent-minded indifference and anxious love.
Thinking he’d like to read in the playground, he went to a bookshop and bought a paperback volume of Henry James short stories. Again, as on the morning “when it all began,” he saw a marble plaque in memory of a Resistance fighter who had been shot by the Germans on that spot. This one, too, had a withered fern under it. He told the child what had happened thirty years ago. The man’s first name had been Jacques, and he had been killed at this same season, in late July. And today the Square Carpeaux was as dusty as it had been three years ago, yet as never before. — Keuschnig felt that he was close to discovering the insignificant detail which would bring all other things together.