When Besson had finished looking at all the pictures, and had read every caption, he took out his ball-point pen and did the crossword. He studied the clues for a moment, then began filling in the empty squares. Three across was ‘Signifies proximity’; Besson wrote ‘Here’. ‘Close pair’ produced ‘Tights’. ‘All the clues there if you follow them’ suggested ‘Thriller’. Ten across was ‘Spy with the field variety?’: Besson filled in ‘Glasses’. ‘Mutual absorption’ turned out to be ‘Osmosis’. Thirteen across, ‘Roussel had them all dancing right through his party’, defeated him.1 ‘La Fontaine made one for the nymphs of Vaux’—‘Elegy’. He turned from Across to Down. ‘Completely effaced’ must be ‘Erased’, while ‘Accustomed to a new way of life’ was ‘Acclimatized’. Four down, ‘bare horror’, produced ‘Stark’, but ‘Scarcely more than skin and bone’ he left blank. ‘Saurians from tropical America’ were ‘Iguanas’. Thirteen down, ‘Arab water-hole’, was ‘Oasis’. ‘A hundred down here in Paris produces Roman dual’: Besson wrote ‘ii’. Nine down, ‘Money’s the surest one’, turned out to be ‘Investment’. ‘Sometimes broken in conversation’ was ‘Thread’.
Besson passed a good half-hour in this way. Then he got up and walked across to the right-hand window. It was a large window, taller than it was wide, with eight panes of glass mounted in a brown wooden framework. The fourth pane up was cracked from top to bottom. The sixth vibrated very faintly. Besson looked out through the third at the houses and street, the passing scene before him. Through the fine drizzle tiny figures, old and young, men and women, were hurrying to and fro. Cars slid to a stop at the cross-roads, changed gear, moved off again. From time to time someone would sound his horn, a sharp and generally brief blaring note which produced no echo. It was a familiar and superficially peaceful scene. Yet all the same there was something disturbing about it. To be high up in this apartment block offered security of a kind, but not for ever. The tide of activity gradually surrounded you, cut you off without your noticing it. Its clamorous, eddying flow constantly wore away the walls of the building, rubbing off fragments of plaster, tiny bits of stone, loose flakes of ochre-coloured paint. These men skulking along the sidewalks were not as inoffensive as they looked. Their lowered heads concealed murderous thoughts, and it would take very little — a revolution, for instance, a simple upsurge of mob fury — to bring them out. They would advance like a horde of voracious ants, and gather in crowds under the windows, shouting and waving their fists, screaming for blood. They would surge up every stairway, break down all the doors, and strike without mercy, again and again, great razorish slashes, till finally each head fell free from its body, the neck one red and gaping wound, the life-blood ebbing away.
Best not to think about such things, best to see no further than the surface appearance of reality, to play with it continually like a set of knuckle-bones. Obstinately Besson set himself to count the cars passing by outside. He took a sheet of paper and a ball-point pen. A few minutes later he had produced the following list:
Citroën
14
Fiat
9
Renault
51
Alfa-Romeo
1
Dauphine
29
Volkswagen
1
4 CV
12
Ford
1
R4, R8
10
Porsche
1
Peugeot (403, 404)
25
Dodge Dart
I
Panhard
5
Volvo
1
Simca
6
Unidentified makes
3
People still crowded along the sidewalks behind one another. From his high eyrie François Besson watched them attentively, forehead pressed to the window. He saw young women dressed in red and black macintoshes, some bare-headed, others wearing scarves or hats. There were men in their forties, smoking as they walked. There were old men, and soldiers in uniform, and middle-aged women with children, or dogs, who dithered a long time on the edge of the pavement before crossing the road. Besson saw groups of little girls on their way to or from school, satchels slung over their shoulders, always jostling each other and squealing. He saw a man in a dark grey overcoat who stared at all the women passing by. He saw dawdlers and hurriers, cripples, polio cases, one-legged men on crutches. Some walked with a brisk, decisive step, others slouched; one or two turned their toes in. He saw them all, tiny manikins stretched out in insect-like columns, tight-packed, wedged against one another, timid, ridiculous, anonymous creatures — it made one feel sick to look at them. These were the people who owned the town, who had jobs and professions, who thought a little, who spent all their time swarming through this labyrinthine gallery-ridden termite-hill of theirs. Life here belonged to them. They had taken possession of this territory and become its exclusive occupants. None of them ever gave up. None of them ever renounced his shadowy status as a living creature, none of them ever simply stepped out of his clothes and his skin, and quietly melted away on the tarred asphalt. Such an idea never occurred to them. They were strong, incorruptible. Amazingly strong.
With a twinge of regret Besson sensed that from now on he would not be able to look at them all that often. He opened the window, and took a deep breath of cold, rain-damp air. For a little longer he continued to watch the wet street below, with its endless stream of mauve and green cars (more figures for his list) and all the women in loud raincoats, heels tapping a frenzied tattoo along the pavement. Then he drew the shutters to, and carefully closed them. He walked back to the middle of the darkened room, hesitated a moment, then went over to the door, pressed the light-switch, and watched brightness instantly spring out from the bulb.
The light hung directly above the table. Besson stood facing it for a moment; then he sat down in the chair and stared at the litter of papers spread out in front of him. The sheet of newspaper he had been looking at now lay close to one corner of the table: Besson gently dropped it on the floor. The entire working surface was cluttered up with scribbled sheets of manuscript, letters half-sticking out of their envelopes. Everything was in a chaotic muddle, but the muddle possessed a small confused life of its own, that kept whispering endless confidences in one’s ear. It made one want to send messages everywhere, all over the world, postcards with ‘kind regards’ written in the space reserved for correspondence — just ‘kind regards’, nothing more. It made one want to write stories, odd and trivial stories with the names of places or people, and dialogue, and inverted commas and exclamation-marks and question-marks and dashes. It made one want to doodle little patterns on a scratch-pad, crosses and spirals and circles. Or to play soldiers, sketching a mountain range at the bottom of the page, and putting in rows of little men with guns — white heads on the left, black on the right. A flag and a colour-bearer in each camp, too, that was essential. Then you made them shoot at each other, by tracing a long black line from the muzzle of the gun, which would curve over and down into the enemy’s camp. One for the whites and one for the blacks. After that you counted up the corpses to decide which side had won.