Andre Malraux - Man's Fate

At last, without his knowing how, departure became possible. He was able to go out, and began to walk in a state of oppressive well-being which covered over eddies of limitless hatred. When he had gone thirty meters he stopped. “I left the door open on them.” He retraced his steps. As he drew near, he felt sobs rising, becoming knotted in his chest below his throat, and remaining there. He shut his eyes, drew the door shut. The lock clicked: locked. He started off again. “It’s not finished,” he said hoarsely as he walked. “It’s beginning. It’s beginning. ” His shoulders thrust forward, he pushed ahead like a barge-tower towards a dim country of which he knew only that one killed there, pulling with his shoulders and with his brain the weight of al his dead who, at last! no longer prevented him from advancing.

His hands trembling, his teeth chattering, carried away by his terrible liberty, he was back at the Post in ten minutes. It was a two-story building. Behind the windows, mattresses were undoubtedly piled up: in spite of the absence of blinds, no luminous rectangles were visible through the fog, but only vertical slits. The calm of the street, hardly more than an alley, was absolute, and those slits of light took on the intensity, both tiny and sharp, of spark-plug flashes. He rang. The door opened a fraction of an inch: he was known. Behind, four militants holding Mausers watched him pass. Like a nest of insects, the vast hall was alive with an activity whose meaning was obscure but whose movement was clear-everything came from the cellar; the ground-floor was deserted. Two workers on the landing of the stairs were installing a machine-gun which commanded the hall. It did not even glisten, but it attracted attention like the tabernacle in a church. Students, workers were running. He passed in front of bundles of barbed wires (what use could they be?), mounted the stairs, circled the machine-gun, and reached the stair-head. Katov was coming out of an office, and looked at him questioningly. Without a word, Hemmelrich held out his bloody hand.

“Wounded? There are bandages downstairs. You’ve hidden the kid?”

Hemmelrich could not speak. He stubbornly showed his hand, with a stupid air. “It's their blood,” he was thinking. But it could not be said.

“I have a knife,” he said at last. “Give me a gun.” “There aren’t many guns.”

“Grenades.”

Katov hesitated.

“Do you think I'm scared, you son of a bitch?”

“Go downstairs. There are grenades in the cases. Not many. Do you know where Kyo is?”

“Haven’t seen him. I saw Ch’en: he’s dead.”

“I know.”

Hemmelrich went down. With their arms buried up to their shoulders, comrades were rummaging in an open case. So the supply was nearly exhausted. The mingled bodies were moving about in the full light of the lamps- there were no vent-holes-and the volume of those dense bodies around the case, encountered after the shadows that passed back and forth under the dimmed light- bulbs in the corridor above, surprised him as if, in the face of death, these men had acquired a sudden right to a life more intense than that of the others. He filled his pockets, went upstairs again. The others, the shadows, had finished installing the machine-gun and placed the barbed wires behind the door, back just far enough to allow it to open. Every minute or two the door-bell rang. He looked through the peep-hole: the misty street was still calm and empty. The comrades were arriving, formless in the fog like fish in stirred water, in the streak of shadow cast by the roofs. He was turning round to go and look for Katov: suddenly, two hurried rings, a shot, and the piercing gasp of someone being strangled, then the fall of a body.

“Here they are!” several of the men guarding the door shouted at once. Silence fell upon the corridor, subdued by the voices and the rattle of arms that rose from the ceUar. The men were taking their fighting-posts.

Clappique, emerging from his lie as from a fit of drunkenness, was stalking through the lobby of his Chinese hotel where the “boys,” slumped on a round table under the call-board, were spitting sunflower seeds at the spittoons. He knew he would not sleep. He opened his door mechanicaUy, threw his coat on the familiar copy of the Tales of Hoffmann and poured himself some whiskey: alcohol would sometimes banish the torment which seized him at moments. Something was changed in this room. He strove not to notice it: the inexplicable absence of certain objects would have been too alarming. He had managed to escape almost everything upon which men base their lives-love, family, work; but not fear. It rose in him, like an acute consciousness of his solitude; to banish it he usually ran to the nearest Black Cat, sought refuge in the women who open their thighs and their hearts while thinking of something else. Impossible tonight: worn out, fed up with lying and provisional intimacies. He saw himself in the mirror, went up to it:

“After all, my good fellow,” he said to the Clappique in the mirror, “why run away? How long is all this going to last? You’ve had a wife: let’s forget it, oh! let’s forget it! Mistresses, money; you can always think of them when you need phantoms to make an ass of you. Not a word! You have gifts, as they say, a sense of humor, all the qualities needed to make a parasite: you can always be a valet at Ferral’s when age has brought you to perfection. There is also the profession of gen- tleman-beggar, the police and suicide. A pimp? The delusion of grandeur again. Which leaves suicide, I tell you. But you don’t want to die. You don’t want to die, you little bastard! And yet look at yourself-a fine face to use for a dead man. ”

He drew still nearer, his nose almost touching the glass; he twisted his face, mouth open, into a gargoyle’s grimace; and, as if the mask had answered him:

“Everyone can’t be dead? Obviously: it takes a little of everything to make a world. Pshaw! When you’re dead you’ll go to Paradise. And what a companion God will be for a fellow of your sort. ”

He made a different face, mouth shut and drawn towards the chin, eyes half-opened, like a carnival samurai. And immediately, as if he had found a way of expressing directly in all its intensity the torment which words were not adequate to translate, he began to make faces, transforming himself into a monkey, an idiot, a terrified person, an apoplectic, into all the grotesques that a human face can express. This no longer sufficed: he used his fingers, drawing out the corners of his eyes, enlarging his mouth for the toad face of the man-who- laughs, flattening his nose, pulling out his ears. Each of these faces spoke to him, revealed to him a part of himself hidden by life; this debauchery of the grotesque in the solitary room, with the night mist piled against the window, was assuming the atrocious and terrifying humor of madness. He heard his own laughter-a single note, the same as his mother’s; and, suddenly perceiving

his face, he withdrew with horror and sat down, panting. There was a pad of paper and a pencil on the arm-chair. If he went on in this way he would really go mad. To protect himself from the frightful mirror he began writing to himself:

You would end up as a king, my old Toto. King: good and warm in a cozy insane-asylum, thanks to delirium tremens, your only friend, if you keep on drinking. But at this moment, are you drunk or sober? … You who imagine so many things, what are you waiting for to imagine yourself happy? Do you think.

Someone knocked.

He tumbled down to earth. Rescued but dumbfounded. The knocking was repeated.

“Come in.”

A wool cloak, a black felt hat, a head of white hair: old Gisors.