Funeral Rites Read online

  “. . . Dear God, forgive me. You see me as I am, simple, naked, tiny.”

  I was praying spontaneously, from my heart and lips. This attitude estranged me from Jean, whom I was betraying for too lofty a personage. I seized upon this pretext of a delicate sentiment to avoid creasing my trousers. I sat down and thought about Jean with far greater ease. The star of my friendship rose up larger and rounder into my sky. I was pregnant with a feeling that could, without my being surprised, make me give birth to a strange but viable and certainly beautiful being, Jean's being its father vouched for that. This new feeling of friendship was coming into being in an odd way.

  The priest said:

  “. . . He died on the field of honor. He died fighting the invader. . . .”

  A shudder ran through me and made me realize that my body was feeling friendship for the priest who was making it possible for Jean to leave me with the regrets of the whole world. Since it was impossible for me to bury him alone, in a private ceremony (I could have carried his body, and why don't the public authorities allow it? I could have cut it up in a kitchen and eaten it. Of course, there would be a good deal of refuse: the intestines, the liver, the lungs, the eyes with their hair-rimmed lids in particular, all of which I would dry and burn—I might even mix their ashes with my food—but the flesh could be assimilated into mine), let him depart then with official honors, the glory of which would devolve upon me and thus somewhat stifle my despair.

  The flowers on the catafalque grew exhausted from shedding their brightness. The dahlias were drooping with sleep. Their stomachs were glutted when they left the funeral parlor. They were still belching.

  I followed the priest's oration:

  “. . . this sacrifice is not wasted. Young Jean died for France. . . .”

  If I were told that I was risking death in refusing to cry "Vive la France” I would cry it in order to save my hide, but I would cry it softly. If I had to cry it very loudly, I would do so, but laughingly, without believing in it. And if I had to believe in it, I would; then I would immediately die of shame. It doesn't matter whether this is due to the fact that I'm an abandoned child who knows nothing about his family or country; the attitude exists and is intransigent. And yet, it was nice to know that France was delegating its name so as to be represented at Jean's funeral. I was so overwhelmed with the sumptuousness of it all that my friendship went to my head (as one says: reseda goes to my head). Friendship, which I recognize by my grief at Jean's death, also has the sudden impetuousness of love. I said friendship. I would sometimes like it to go away and yet I tremble for fear it will. The only difference between it and love is that it does not know jealousy. Yet I feel a vague anxiety, a weak remorse. I am tormented. It is the birth of memory.

  The procession—where could that obscure child have made so many friends?—the procession left the church.

  The matchbox in my pocket, the tiny coffin, imposed its presence more and more, obsessed me:

  “Jean's coffin could be just as small.”

  I was carrying his coffin in my pocket. There was no need for the small-scale bier to be a true one. The coffin of the formal funeral had imposed its potency on that little object. I was performing in my pocket, on the box that my hand was stroking, a diminutive funeral ceremony as efficacious and reasonable as the Masses that are said for the souls of the departed, behind the altar, in a remote chapel, over a fake coffin draped in black. My box was sacred. It did not contain a particle merely of Jean's body but Jean in his entirety. His bones were the size of matches, of tiny pebbles imprisoned in penny whistles. His body was somewhat like the cloth-wrapped wax dolls with which sorcerers cast their spells. The whole gravity of the ceremony was gathered in my pocket, to which the transfer had just taken place. However, it should be noted that the pocket never had any religious character; as for the sacredness of the box, it never prevented me from treating the object familiarly, from kneading it with my fingers, except that once, as I was talking to Erik, my gaze fastened on his fly, which was resting on the chair with the weightiness of the pouch of Florentine costumes that contained the balls, and my hand let go of the matchbox and left my pocket.

  Jean's mother had just gone out of the room. I uncrossed my legs and recrossed them in the other direction. I was looking at Erik's torso, which was leaning slightly forward.

  “You must miss Berlin,” I said.

  Very slowly, ponderously, searching for words, he replied:

  “Why? I'll go back after the war.”

  He offered me one of his American cigarettes, which the maid or his mistress must have gone down to buy for him, since he himself never left the small apartment. I gave him a light. He stood up, not straight but leaning slightly forward, so that in drawing himself up he had to throw his torso backward. The movement arched his entire body and made his basket bulge under the cloth of his trousers. He had at that moment, despite his being cloistered, despite that sad, soft captivity among women, the nobility of a whole animal which carries its load between its legs.

  “You must get bored.”

  We exchanged a few more trivialities. I could have hated him, but his sadness made me suddenly believe in his gentleness. His face was slightly lined with very fine wrinkles, like those of twenty-five-year-old blonds. He remained very handsome, very strong, and his sadness itself expressed the lasciviousness of the whole body of this wild animal that was reaching maturity.

  He spoke to me very quietly. Perhaps he was afraid I might denounce him to the police. I wondered whether he was carrying a gun. My eyes furtively questioned his blue denim trousers, pausing over every suspect bulk. Though I intended my gaze to be light, it must have weighed on the fly, for Erik smiled, if I may say so, with his usual smile. I blushed a little and looked away, trying to veil my blush by exhaling a cloud of smoke. He took advantage of this to cross his legs and say in a casual tone:

  “Jean was very young. . . .”

  He said “Djian,” pronouncing the “an” very curtly.

  I did not reply. He said:

  "Aber, you too, you Jean.”

  “Yes.”

  I was thinking of the warm, wide, heavy Louis XV bed covered with Venetian point lace in which Jean's mother pressed against Erik at night and no doubt during the day, either in a nightgown or naked. The bed was alive in the darkness of the bedroom, was emitting its rays, which reached me despite the walls. It was certain that one day or another Erik's and Paulo's thighs would constrict me there, they themselves getting their bellies all raddled with the maid and the mother, in a room watched over by the memory of Jean.

  At the end of my fourth visit, Erik accompanied me alone to the entryway. It was late, it was getting dark. The entryway was very narrow. He pressed against my back. I felt his breath on my neck, and, close to my ear, he murmured:

  “See you tomorrow, nine o'clock, Jean.”

  He took my hand and insisted:

  “Nine o'clock, yes!”

  “Yes.”

  The gesture of surprise he had just made on realizing that the two names were the same tightened the trousers against his buttocks and enhanced them. The outline of the muscles excited me. I tried to imagine what his relationship had been with Jean, whom he hated and who hated him. Erik's strength probably enabled him to seem very mild as he bullied the child. I looked at his eyes and composed in my mind the following sentence:

  “So many suns have capsized beneath his hands, in his eyes. . . .”

  When I left the apartment after our first meeting, I attempted to retrace the course of his life and, for greater efficiency, I got into his uniform, boots, and skin. Drunk with the somewhat blurry vision of a tall, young Negro behind the windows of the café on the Boulevard de la Villette where he was leaning against a juke box listening to javas and popular waltzes, I wormed my way into his past, gently and hesitantly at first, feeling my way, when the iron toe-plates of one of my shoes accidentally struck the curb. My calf vibrated, then my whole body. I raised my head and
took my hands out of my pockets. I put on the German boots.

  The fog was thick and so white that it almost lit up the garden. The trees were caught. Motionless, attentive, pale, nude, captured by a net of hair or a singing of harps. A smell of earth and dead leaves gave reason to think that all was not lost. The day would see the reign of God. A swan flapped its wings on a lake. I was eighteen, a young Nazi on duty in the park, where I was sitting at the foot of a tree. Since the seat of my riding breeches (I was preparing for the artillery) was leather-lined, I did not mind the dampness of the grass. Far off, behind me, an automobile drove by in the Siegesallee with its lights off, its noises muffled. Five o'clock was about to strike. I started to get up. A man was coming toward me. He was walking on the grass, ignoring the footpaths. His hands were in his pockets. He was heavy and yet light, for each of his angles was imprecise. He looked like a walking willow, each stump of which is lightened and thinned by an aigrette of young branches. He had a revolver. A force prevented me from getting up. The man was very close. His forehead was narrow, his nose and entire face were flattened, but their muscles were firm, as if wrought by a hammer. He was about thirty-five. He had the face of a brute. As he neared the tree under which I was sitting, he raised his head.

  “Why is that man walking on the grass of the lawns?” I thought to myself.

  “Say, he oughtn't to be there,” thought the man, referring to me. “He's crossed the boundary.”

  He was smoking. Upon seeing me, he straightened up and threw back his chest with a strong, calm movement of his shoulders. He saw that I was a member of the Hitler Youth.

  “You're going to get cold.”

  “I'm on guard.”

  “What are you guarding?”

  “Nothing.”

  The man was satisfied with this reply. He was not sad, but indifferent or interested in other things than what he seemed to be. I was watching him. Though he was very close, I still could not see him clearly.

  “Here.”

  He took a cigarette from his trouser pocket and handed it to me. I removed my gloves, took it, and stood up in order to light it from his. I was no stronger standing than sitting. The mere bulk of the man crushed me. I could tell that under his clothes, under his open shirt, was a terrific set of muscles. Despite his bulk and shape, he was lightened by the fog, his outline was blurred. It was also as if the morning mist were a steady emanation from his extraordinarily powerful body, a body strong with such glowing life that the combustion caused that motionless, thick, and yet luminous white smoke to seep out through all its pores. I was caught. I dared not look at him. Germany, stunned and staggering, was just managing to recover from the deep, rich drowsiness, the dizziness, the suffocation fertile in the new prodigies into which it had been plunged by the perfumes and charms emitted slowly and heavily by that strange curly poppy, Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld.

  In the triangle of the V-necked shirt, in the middle of a tuft of hair that implied a fleece all over him, I saw, snug and warm, a little gold medallion cuddling in that wool, which was fragrant with the odor of armpits, like a plaster Jesus in the straw and hay dazed by the smell of the droppings of the ox and the ass. I shivered.

  “Are you cold?”

  Yes.

  The executioner said with a laugh that he had more heat than he needed, and, as if wanting to play, he drew me to him and put his arms around me. I dared not move. My long pale lashes fluttered a bit when the killer grabbed me and looked at me at closer range. A slight quiver ruffled the part of the face which is so sensitive in adolescents: the puffy surface around the mouth, the spot that will be covered by the mustache. The executioner saw the trembling. He was moved by the youngster's timorous flutter. He hugged him more gently, he softened his smile and said:

  “What's the matter? Are you scared?”

  I was wearing the wristwatch I had stolen the day before from one of the other boys. Was I scared? Why had he asked me that question point-blank?

  More out of delicacy than pride, I almost answered no, but immediately, sure of my power over the brute, I wanted to be mean and I said yes.

  “Did you recognize me?”

  “Why?”

  Erik was surprised at hearing slightly hesitant inflections in his voice which he had not been aware of and, at times, under the stress of greater anxiety, a slight trembling over a few notes that were too high for his usual timbre.

  “Don't you recognize me?”

  I kept my lips parted. I was still in the embrace of that unyielding fellow whose smiling face was armed with the glowing cigarette and bent over mine.

  “Well? Can't you see?”

  I had recognized him. I dared not say so. I replied:

  “It's time for me to be getting back to the barracks.”

  “Are you scared because I'm the executioner?”

  He had spoken until then in a hollow voice, in keeping with the blurriness of things or perhaps because he feared a danger might be hidden behind the fog, but when he uttered those words, he laughed with such violence and clarity that all the watchful trees suddenly came to attention in the wadding and recorded the laugh. I dared not move. I looked at him. I inhaled smoke, took the cigarette from my mouth and said:

  No.

  But my “no” betrayed fear.

  “No, you mean it, you're not scared?”

  Instead of repeating the word no, I shook my head and, lightly tapping the cigarette twice with my forefinger, dropped a bit of ash on his foot. The casualness of these two gestures gave the boy such an air of detachment, of indifference, that the executioner felt humiliated, as if I had not deigned even to see him. He hugged me harder, laughingly, pretending that he wanted to frighten me.

  “No?”

  He peered into my eyes and dove right in. He blew the smoke in my face.

  “No? Are you sure?”

  “Of course I am, why?” And, to mollify the executioner, I added: “I haven't done any harm.” The stolen watch on my wrist was punctuating my uneasiness.

  It was cold. The dampness was penetrating our clothes. The fog was rather thick. We seemed to be alone, characters without a past or future, composed simply of our respective roles of Hitler Youth and executioner, and united to each other not by a succession of events but by the play of a grave gratuitousness, the gratuitousness of the poetic fact: We were there, in the fog of the world.

  Still holding me by the waist, the executioner walked a few steps with me. We went down a path and then walked up onto another lawn to reach a clump of trees that made a dark spot in the pale dawn. I could have repeated that my duty obliged me to stay on the footpath. All I wanted was to have a smoke. I said nothing. But my chest was tight with fear and swollen with hope. I was one long, silent moan.

  “What will be born of our love-making? What can be born of it?”

  Until then I had known only unexciting play with a friend who was too young. Today it is I whom a fellow over thirty, and a headsman, is leading imperiously to love, at an hour when one gets the ax, in the seclusion of a clump of trees, near a lake.

  The Berlin executioner was about six feet one. His muscular build was that of an executioner who chops on a block with an ax. His brown hair was cropped very close, so that his completely round head was that of a beheaded man. He was sad despite his smile, which was meant to brave me and tame me. His sadness was profound, its source was deeper than his profession, being, rather, in his strength itself. He lived alone in a comfortable apartment which was tastefully furnished and resembled any other bourgeois apartment in Berlin. Every morning an old woman came to do the cleaning and left in a hurry. He ate in a restaurant. On days when capital punishment was scheduled, he did not go home in the evening. He would stay in a cabaret until daybreak, then wander in the dawn and dew through the lanes and lawns of the Tiergarten. The day before he met Erik and led him beneath the branches of a diamond-studded fir tree, he had detached a murderer's head from its trunk. Our faces were breaking the gossamer.

 
Now that I was sitting opposite Erik and seeing the beauty of his buttocks and the elegant impatience of his movements, not only was it obvious to me that his adventure had been lived, but, in addition, it fitted him so perfectly that I felt a kind of peace, the deep satisfaction of being present at the revelation of a truth. But my forsaking Jean, or rather granting his enemies such favor, delicately tortured my mind, into which remorse had worked its way and which it then ground, though very gently, with a few gentle writhing movements. I knew that I ought not abandon the boy whose soul had not yet found rest. I ought to have helped him. A few of the crabs he had probably picked up from a whore still clung to me. I was sure that the insects had lived on his body, if not all of them at least one whose brood invaded my bush with a colony that was digging in, multiplying, and dying in the folds of the skin of my balls. I saw to it that they stayed there and in the vicinity. It pleased me to think that they retained a dim memory of that same place on Jean's body, whose blood they had sucked. They were tiny, secret hermits whose duty it was to keep alive in those forests the memory of a young victim. They were truly the living remains of my friend. I took care of them as much as possible by not washing, not even scratching. At times, I would pluck one of them out and hold it between my nail and skin: I would examine it closely for a moment, with curiosity and tenderness, and then replace it in my curly bush. Perhaps their brothers were still living in Jean's hairs. The morgue keeps bodies for a long time. It has apparatus, refrigerators. Although Jean had been killed on the nineteenth, we did not know of his death until August 29. He was buried on September 3. I had been informed of some of the circumstances of his death by his comrades in the Communist Party, who had also told me where he had been killed. I was forced there by anxiety. On the afternoon of the first of September, I walked to Belleville and then to Ménilmontant, both of which I had forgotten about. The heat of the struggle was still visible on people's faces, but in the few days that had gone by they had lost their vigor. Their faith was slackening. The weather was hot. Although I kept my eyes lowered, I could see the open shops. Wicker baskets, chairs, and mats were being woven in the sky, people were eating fruit in the street, workers were smoking cigarettes made with Virginia tobacco. Nobody was aware of my pilgrimage. A huge sigh congested my chest and throat and might have caused my death. I was on the sunny side of the street. I asked a girl: