The other one has a slightly longer jacket, that’s for when you carry your revolver behind your back, a holster on your belt at the back American-style, now he’s in the back of the shop, the other one has stayed to the right of the door, normally they’d send in a couple, the woman looks at me, stares at me and while she does I stop looking at the man in the back of the shop and I wonder why arms grab me from behind, a bear-hug, my young friend smiles, I’m not even trembling, I’m driven out into the country, to a forest, there you can make a noise, and this time there’s no one telling me it’s going to get very cold.
Now Gédéon is attacking the wolf, attacking the wolf is always the right thing to do, especially when you’re powerless against the hunters, the French wolf is called Ysengrin, terror of the farmyard, ‘Gédéon and his friend Briffault the dog saw Ysengrin hiding in a barrel where he could keep watch through the bung-hole for the flock of harmless sheep who passed by’, I never liked sheep, someone always eats them in the end.
The wolf is hiding in the barrel, his tail is sticking out through the bung-hole, Briffault sinks his teeth into the part of the tail that’s sticking out, won’t let go, caudal appendage, in children’s books, a tail is called a caudal appendage, French kiddies don’t know how lucky they are, the wolf can’t get out, he values his tail too much, and the farmer’s wife fills the barrel with milk, terrible mess, in the background there’s a very nice half-timbered building, the outline is clearly recognisable.
The beige overcoat has stopped by the Flash Gordons, the grey raincoat hasn’t moved, the two youths in trainers have walked out, we don’t do underground stuff, the owner doesn’t like it, pity, I sent them round to the Thé Troc, the bookseller there is a friend of Crumb and Shelton, they’ll find what they’re looking for. And four customers to keep an eye on was hard, the nub of the question is whether reason is autonomous with regard to every other principle liable to deny or transcend it, that’s Hegel, everything which is rational is real, everything that is real is rational, except that reason can only be a product of the interaction of men with the world, that interaction being set in time, in other words in History, I’m sure the owner prefers it when I’m the one who gets conned, I hate all this watching, he says theft is death to us.
The wolf starts struggling about all by himself in the barrel, he keeps trying to get out but the dog Briffault has sunk his fangs into the part of his caudal appendage which sticks out of the bung-hole, he won’t let go ‘his legs thrashed for so long and with such vigour that the creamy drink turned to butter, and in the end the wolf was so worn out that he was forced to stop’, good children, mark and learn, it is quite all right to be cruel if you’re being cruel to wolves, and only wolves, the hard part comes when you’ve learned to be cruel and you can’t break the habit, especially if people don’t call it cruelty, the sort of cruelty where you don’t see any blood, the butter must be revolting, a slab of at least forty kilos, they’ve removed it from the barrel.
An enormous pat of well-churned butter with a wolf inside it, they’re going to kill the wolf, no, they leave the butter in the farmyard, they go off elsewhere to celebrate, and the wolf is able to escape because the butter softens overnight, a grave oversight.
Dangerous chap, oversight, on our side we too were capable of cruelty towards the careless, all you had to do was come up with solid evidence and if the evidence wasn’t solid enough then there was the evidence of the question, the revealing question, an effective byproduct of prosecution dialectic:
‘We do not yet know, ex-comrade, if you have been guilty merely of an oversight or if you are deliberately engaged in sabotaging the tasks entrusted to you by the people of our Democratic Republic, but the very fact that we have been led to ask ourselves the question and specifically with you in mind…’
Crucial that word ‘specifically’, meaningless in the context, but effectiveness guaranteed.
‘… this simple question which we’ve been led to ask about you is revealing in itself of the threat which you may well represent.’
Clever, that ‘which you may well’, poor sod’s as good as in jail already, there is nothing more he can do, but he is still allowed a ‘may’, they used it on me, this revealing question, on my stool, with jabs to my liver and kidneys, the wolf managed to get away, and now we see the farmers selling the wolf butter, eight francs a kilo, nauseating, I must ask my young friend how much eight francs was worth at the time the book was written, he’s bound to know, bloody kulaks, always the same, selling butter that smells of wolf for eight francs a kilo, and they’ll find buyers, when you’ve got butter to sell, you can always find buyers.
Also I mustn’t look as if I’ve got my eye on these two older men all the time, shop window’s really filthy, I’ll have to clean it, that being said it doesn’t get as dirty here as on the Boulevard, the woman from Unilivres was telling me that if she didn’t keep the dust down every couple of days the books would get a sort of greasy film on them which spoilt everything, she said imagine our lungs, I didn’t fancy imagining her lungs because on top of everything else she smokes like a chimney, I said to her:
‘You should try to give up smoking.’
‘I’m fifty-three years old and I’m not afraid of dying, what I’m afraid of is getting the sack.’
Last year they sacked her most experienced assistant, she was too expensive, the girl in question went home, to Orange, it wouldn’t be as hard there for her in the provinces, also she had her parents living close by.
Outside the window of the bookshop, in the middle of the alleyway, a man has stopped, oddly dressed, a workman straight off the job or a house painter or a window-cleaner, in a vest, but all he’s carrying is a large plastic bag with ‘Tati’ written on it, the girl at the till is also looking at him, the man has a mop of blond hair, very pale eyes, he’s not looking at the bookshop nor the shop opposite which sells African artefacts, he’s standing motionless in the middle of the alleyway, he’s looking intently towards the end which opens on to the Boulevard, he’s strongly built, muscles like a boxer, you can hear him shout:
‘You bloody wogs can keep your traps shut!’
I knew it, it’s starting.
‘This is France!
It was too quiet.
Lilstein has stopped moving. This is it, it’s now, an agitator, an incident, the police, they’re going to pick me up, classic trap, this is what they’ve cooked up, a man starts shouting, he comes into the shop, he starts on me, the police, everyone is nicked, the man is tough, a voice that carries, a passer-by just centimetres from him, and it’s as if the man didn’t see him, the passer-by is there in support, this is it, another passer-by, and they say nothing, and if I’d had an escort…
‘Foreigners, shut your mouths, in France, declaration, rights of man, article one…’
The two passers-by would be used to block my escort, if I had one.
‘… a foreigner should keep his trap shut!’
The man has stopped shouting, he looks at me, a trap, that’s it, I’ve had enough.
Lilstein moves three paces towards his friend in the beige overcoat, he shouts:
‘That’s enough!’
I’ve been protecting him for thirty-five years, a bastard, beige is a bastard’s colour.
‘D’you hear, Morel? tell them to end this charade, it’s over! Are you happy now? Tell them to stop! Make them shut that lout up, him and his insults, there’s no point, I’ve had enough! Let them come and take me away!’