Funeral Rites Read online

  "Danke,” he murmured.

  Then he stood up. He looked the kid in the eye. He saw a tired, naked face powdered with darkness in which two black eyes were shining. He laid both hands on Riton's shoulders and shook him. A sliver of moon emerged from a cloud. Erik nimbly stepped behind the chimney and blended with the shadow. With equal speed, Riton made the same movement, but, thrown off balance by his harness of cartridges, he botched it. Fatigue and nervousness made him clumsy. With one leg forward and the other bent back, Riton was doing a kind of awkward split on the rooftop. Erik leaned over, grabbed the kid from behind, and locked him in his arms. Their weapons collided. The sound was imperceptible. They stood motionless for a moment, with Riton still locked in the arms of Erik, whose hands were joined by the harmonica. They waited a while, open-mouthed, until the waves of the agitation they had just caused in the darkness subsided. Erik unloosed his embrace and dropped his arms. Riton felt a slight sensation of dampness and coldness on the back of his hand and put his hand to his mouth mechanically. He was not very surprised. He realized that Erik's saliva, which had collected in the holes of the harmonica, had flowed on to his hand. The dark blue wool of the militiaman's breeches and the black wool of the soldier's both held a smell which the sweat of the August days and nights and fatigue and anxiety had accumulated and which that double gesture had freed and blended, and naked black warriors with shiny bodies, wearing scalps on their belts and carrying pikes, emerged from the bamboos. The heart of Africa was throbbing in Riton's closed hand. There was dancing to the sound of a distant and insistent tom-tom. The two kids were staggering, with their eyes popping. Fatigue was pulling and pushing them, was making them whirl and topple.

  Erik muttered:

  "Achtung, watch out, Ritônne!”

  They sat down against the chimney among the half-awake Fritzes, and Riton fell asleep. He had escorted six German soldiers and a sergeant, the only one left of the section with which his own militia group had been made to join forces. Thanks to the complicity of Juliette, whom the sergeant had been courting, they were able to reach a building where everyone was asleep, enter by the service window, and get to the roof. The sergeant was twenty; his soldiers were the same age. Keeping the little militiaman with them, they took off their shoes silently to go up to the rafters. They climbed up onto the roof around midnight. For greater security, the little group moved on to another building. Then they chose a post and, tired and despairing, squatted between the chimneys. Precisely because of their despair, they were determined to do everything possible to get out of the fix they were in. Fatigue made them drowsy. Erik, who was less drowsy, took his harmonica from the back pocket of his black breeches and played a tune. He gently ran his mouth over the bee's nest. He was playing very softly, actually in a murmur, “The Blue Java.”

  . . . It's the blue Java

  The loveliest Java

  The one that bewitches you . . .

  The modulation of the popular waltz was strangling the Boche, was squeezing his throat. He was aware that all the sad sweetness of France was flowing from his eyes. It was then that he fell asleep and rolled down the slope of the roof. Luckily his hand caught on Riton's armor; and Riton managed to get to his feet and pull him back.

  Erik was unable to sleep, despite his weariness. He wandered off. It was August, when the sky pours forth showers of stars. As he moved to the edge of the roof, he saw that he was above a narrow balcony with an iron railing that ran along three sixth-floor windows. With a single leap, he jumped down. Sure-eyed and sure-footed, he landed on the balcony, on the tips of his unshod toes, and, as he wavered on his bent calves and thighs, his hands and fingers hesitated in strange positions, but they were quickly used for balancing his whole body. The apartment was empty. When he walked through it, a slight warmth burned his cheeks for the first time. The revolt of the Parisians seemed to him a betrayal. They had tricked him by feigning a four-year sleep. Under cover of the drinking at bars, the friendly slaps on the shoulders, the kindly explanations given with the hands, the girls, women, and boys who were lazily screwed from behind like dogs by men in boots and spurs, a host of deceitful thoughts were preparing vengeance. Erik realized that friendship can be a trap. But after all, what did he care about Germany! He had joined the Hitler Youth in order to have weapons: a knife for show, and a revolver for pillage. He was like the young French militiamen whose souls thrilled at the feel of a loaded revolver under their jackets. He developed his naturally hard muscles. His life had to have the shape of his body, its delicate inner composition. His muscles, all those nervous, vibrant lumps, are the leaping and bounding of his acts. When he rebelled, his revolt had the violence not of the quivering but of the shape of the muscles of his hams, the same curve, the same opulent, unerring fullness, the run-on lines, the swelling of an iron calf directed by a bold upward thrust of the firm flesh. His desertion was as heaving as his shoulders, and any murder he carried out had the actual shape of his neck. When he felt daring and wanted to shake the world, Erik had only to squeeze that unique neck of his with his large, thick hands to feel it was a firm column that supported the world, that held its being and head high, and rose above the world.

  His will sometimes had pretty consequences: when he was confronted with an obstacle, his forehead would pucker and the golden curls of his over-brilliantined hair would fall on it; he would frown, charge the obstacle, and be gored by it.

  Throughout my youth I viewed the world from under knitted brows, so that above my eyes I saw the hard golden hairs that edged them. I knew I was bearing the burden of a very heavy crop, and even in the brightest moments I felt I was a stalk whose head bristled with grains and whose beard was the hair of my eyebrows.

  “He no longer has thirty-two creases. . . .”

  This remark, which Erik once heard made about a kid who was suspected by his bunkmates of giving himself to an officer, made him think twice and filled him with a secret fear. And when he heard: “ . . . they're going to take a print. They're going to make him sit on flour . . .” he was violently frightened for himself.

  “It can be seen,” he thought. “Does it change shape as much as that?”

  He does not hate the executioner for that. He will think:

  “I'm sure the creases come out again. . . .”

  I have created within myself an order of knighthood of which I am the originator, founder, and only knight. I award to the Erik who is rising up inside me ideal decorations, crosses, orders, grants. They are my gobs of spit.

  I was looking at myself in the wardrobe mirror of my hotel room. The picture of the Führer on the mantelpiece behind me was reflected in the glass. I was stripped to the waist and wearing my wide black breeches, which were tight at the ankles. I was looking at myself, staring into my own eyes, then staring at the Führer's image in the mirror.

  What does spit mean? Can you spit on anyone you like?

  The most important part of my body is my buttocks. My breeches keep reminding me of them because they contain them and are so tight that I can't forget about them. We constitute a regiment of buttocks.

  “What about his cock, what was it like, and how would you like to take it, sideways or crosswise?”

  A scurrilous spirit within me asks this question which I dare not answer and obliges me to look away from his rod and turn to Jean, whom I am ashamed of having left. But I am too mired in eroticism to think of Jean without thinking of our love-making. Moreover, those thoughts are forbidden. I feel I am committing an abominable crime if I recall too precisely the parts of him which I loved most and which are now decayed and being gnawed by worms. What shall I think about? The wallpaper doesn't distract me. Every flower, every damp spot, brings me back to Jean. I've got to think about him. I idealize the memory of making love so that I can avoid sacrilege. The liveliest parts of his body become spiritualized, and his rod itself, which takes possession of my mouth, has the transparency of a crystal rod. In fact, what I am holding by the prick with my teeth and p
ink lips is a fluid, milky body, a luminous fog that rises above my bed or over a wet lawn on which I am lying. It is cold to my lips; I thus avoid pleasure. My love-making continues through this icy fog, which veils it. With our hair light and tousled but damp with the droplets of mist clinging to it, after walking in the dew with our arms still around each other's waist, we came to a grove and stood under a beech with red bark. The executioner pressed me against the tree, but gently, laughing as if it were a game, a kind of friendly bullying. All along the way, which he trod with long, very heavy steps—almost as if he were booted and merging with the equally long and heavy steps of Erik in boots—from the path to the shore of the lake, in the fog, only the executioner spoke. Softening his too clear voice, which with a few blasts might have dispelled all the mist in the woods, he had said, looking at the wet grass:

  “Now's the time when mushrooms sprout. We might even find some.”

  And ten yards farther:

  “Won't you have a cigarette?”

  Erik's body was pressed against that of the executioner, whose right arm (the ax arm) was squeezing him. As the boy answered merely by pursing his lips and giving an indifferent toss of his head, the man said:

  “I'll give you one later.”

  Erik thought—but did not say—"the last cigarette, the one the executioner gives you.” They were under the beech. Their clothes were damp and their feet frozen. They sank into a sodden earth. The executioner put out his arms and held Erik by the shoulders against the tree. He was laughing silently. Despite the power of his muscles—and bones—one could feel that his strength was chiefly passive, that he was able to endure rather than to court danger, to lift heavy sacks, saw wood for days on end, push a truck that had bogged down. It was hard to imagine him fighting. His movements were not swift or dexterous, and his gestures were too mild. He asked again:

  “You're not afraid?”

  “No. I said I wasn't.”

  Erik remained calm. He did not even feel angry. His heart was on his wrist. He heard the watch ticking.

  “I'll give him the watch,” he thought, “and that'll do it.” He thought vaguely that by admitting he had the watch he would escape being buggered. Obviously one doesn't send an executioner to execute watch thieves. That's a childish fear.

  “If I can get it off. . . .”

  He managed to unbuckle the strap. The watch fell to the wet grass. He felt purer. Yet he had no doubt as to the man's intentions. They had walked a few yards farther. Erik leaned against the executioner.

  In spite of the cold and dampness and of his anxiety and disgust, Erik was thrilled. He had a hard-on. He shivered, and suddenly, brutally, he pressed against the executioner.

  “Ah!”

  The man's smile faded, then for three seconds he seemed to hesitate, to wait for an inspiration, and as his eyes met Erik's fleeting gaze, suddenly, at the right corner of his mouth, his smile returned (only to the corner), and became more pronounced, confident, and decisive.

  “You're good-looking,” he said, freeing Erik's left shoulder from his grip and stroking his cheek with the back of his hand.

  Thus the most spiritualized form of Jean was giving fleecy asylum to the love of a Berlin executioner and a young Nazi. Let's see it through. Erik and the executioner were locked in an embrace, face to face. Erik's underpants were torn. His khaki breeches were falling down and forming a thick heap of clothes between his legs, and his buttocks were crushed in the fog against the red bark, those soft-skinned, amber buttocks, as rich to the eye as the milky fog whose matter had the luster of a pearl. Erik hung from the executioner's neck with both hands. His feet were no longer touching the wet grass, though his breeches were, having fallen down between his naked calves and his ankles. The executioner, whose prick was still stiff and was now between Erik's pressed thighs, held him up and dug into the rich earth. Then-knees were piercing the mist. The executioner was hugging the boy to him and, at the same time, backing him up and crushing his ass against the tree. Erik was pulling the man's head. The executioner realized that the boy was solidly built and tremendously violent. They stayed in that position for a few seconds without moving, the two heads pressing hard against each other, cheek to cheek. The executioner was the first to break away, for he had discharged between Erik's golden thighs, which were velvety with morning mist. The position had lasted only a brief moment, but long enough to beget in the executioner and the morning's assistant a feeling of simultaneous tenderness: Erik for the executioner, whom he was holding by the neck in such a way that it could mean only tenderness, and the executioner for the youngster, for even though the gesture was necessitated by then-difference in height, it was so winning that it would have made the toughest of men burst into tears. Erik loved the executioner. He wanted to love him, and little by little he felt himself being wrapped in the huge folds of the legendary red cloak inside which he cuddled at the same time as he took a piece of newspaper from his pocket and politely handed it to the executioner who took it to wipe his prick.

  “I love the executioner and I make love with him, at dawn!”

  The same surprise, the same wonderment, made Riton say much the same sort of thing when he realized he was in love with Erik, in the small apartment where he had lain down beside the Boche who was sleeping with his mouth open. Each of his thoughts, which sprang from and were suggested by his excitement, tortured Riton. He was amazed at first at having a hard-on, with no other provocation, because of Erik, who was stronger and older than he:

  “All the same, I'm not a queer,” he thought. And a moment later:

  “All the same, I must be.”

  This certainty made him feel a bit ashamed, but it was a shame mingled with joy. A radiant shame. The shame in him merged with the joy into a single feeling just as the same color—pink and sometimes bright red—blends them. With a sigh, he added:

  “And for a Fritz in the bargain. I'm a real case!”

  In the park, crushed by the executioner, Erik thought thus:

  “What a great beginning. A real success. He's not good-looking, he's a bruiser, he's hairy, he's thirty-five, and he's the executioner.”

  Erik said this to himself ironically, but actually he was solemn, he recognized the danger of such a situation, especially if it is accepted. He accepted it.

  “I accept it all without a word. I deserve a medal.”

  When he had pulled up his breeches and buttoned them, the executioner handed him his case and Erik took a cigarette, without saying anything, for he already knew that his gesture meant thank you by virtue of its elegance.

  “Are we friends?”

  Erik hesitated a second or two, smiled and said:

  “Why not?”

  “Are we?”

  We are.

  The executioner looked at him tenderly.

  “You'll be my friend.”

  Expressed in this form, the sentimentality of the killer's German soul was addressing the German soul of Erik, which was already replying with a kind of spiritual trembling, a kind of hope.

  “I will.”

  The brightness of dawn made it possible to see more clearly in the mist.

  “Will you come to see me in my home?”

  The executioner's tone of voice became almost feminine at the very moment that he flicked a tiny twig or bit of fluff off the lapel of Erik's windbreaker and pulled it slightly to smooth an imperceptible crease. This first and slightly finical act on his friend's behalf did not make Erik smile until later.

  Erik, who was now in the Panzer divisionen, was at the top of a Paris building, in a lower-middle-class apartment where the men he had called had cautiously installed themselves, one by one. The last of them, Riton, had jumped nimbly to the balcony, alone, despite the soldiers’ offer of help. The straps of three loaded machine guns were wound about his shirt, went around the belt and up across the shoulders, crossed once on the chest and once on the back, and produced a copper tunic from which his arms emerged bare from the elbow almost
to the shoulder, where the sleeve of the blue shirt was rolled into a thick wad that made the arm more elegant. It was a carapace, each scale of which was a bullet. This paraphernalia weighed the child down, gave him a monstrous bearing and posture that intoxicated him to the point of nausea. In short, he was carrying the ammunition supply. His uncombed hair was naked in the darkness. His battered thighs bent beneath the weight of his armor and fatigue. He was barefoot. He had jumped with wonderful suppleness and landed on his bent toes, with the barest help from Erik, who had reached out to him from the balcony. He held on to the machine gun, a lean, dark-colored, completely functional instrument. Erik entered the room through the window, and Riton spun around lightly, despite the mass of metal, and, with his mouth agape, found himself at the edge of a starry night on a rickety, ascetically simple iron bridge and confronted with an abyss of darkness that he felt was quivering with chestnut trees, though their leaves barely stirred. It was the Boulevard de Ménilmontant. Ménilmontant, the kid's neighborhood.

  A sentence: “My grief in the presence of Jean's grief reveals the force of my love for him!” The more I grieve, the more intense my feeling seems to be. Now, my suffering is often caused and always increased by remembering Jean's blackened corpse in its coffin, with the nostrils probably stuffed and the body slowly decomposing and mingling its smell with that of the flowers. My grief is heightened by the thought of Jean's suffering when he was shot, by his despair when he felt himself lose his footing and leave life for the realm of shades. My daily life is dominated by the memory of the gruesome sights, of the preparations for burial. My contact with the concrete wounds my sensibility cruelly: the black escutcheon adorned with the silver-embroidered “D” that I saw on the hearse waiting at the gate of the hospital, the coffin and the poor quality of the wood, the singing in the church, the Dies Irae, the blood-red moiré ribbon on which was inscribed in gold letters: “To our leader, the Communist Youth Movement,” the priest's remarks in French, these were all knives that slashed my heart. And all these wounds gave me knowledge of my love. But Jean will live through me. I shall lend him my body. Through me he will act, will think. Through my eyes he will see the stars, the scarves of women and their breasts. I am taking on a very grave role. A soul is in purgatory and I am offering it my body. It is with the same emotion that an actor approaches the character whom he will make visible. My spouse may be less wretched. A sleeping soul hopes for a body; may the one that the actor assumes for an evening be beautiful. This is no small matter. We require the rarest beauty and elegance for that body which is charged with a terrible trust, for those gestures which destroy death, and it is not too much to ask the actors to arm their characters to the point that they inspire fear. The magical operation they perform is the mystery of the Incarnation. The soul, which without them would be a dead letter, will live. Doubtless Jean can have existed momentarily in any form whatever, and I was able, for a span of ten seconds, to contemplate an old beggarwoman bent over her stick, then a garbage can overflowing with refuse, egg shells, rotting flowers, ashes, bones, spotted newspapers; nothing prevented me from seeing in the old woman and the garbage can the momentary and marvelous figure of Jean, and I covered them, in thought, not only with my tenderness but also with a white tulle veil that I would have loved to put on Jean's adorable head, an embroidered veil, and wreaths of flowers. I was officiating simultaneously at a funeral and a wedding; I merged the symbolic encounter of the two processions into a single movement. And even from here, I was able, by fixing my gaze and remaining motionless, or almost, to delegate my powers to the famous actor in Nuremberg who was playing the role in which I was prompting him from my room or from my place beside the coffin. He was strutting, he was gesticulating and roaring before a crowd of spellbound, raving Storm Troopers who were thrilled to feel that they were the necessary extras in a performance that was taking place in the street.