A Fable

Then she was not even watching the road as her hand, releasing the shawl, brushed past the front of her dress and stopped, her whole body motionless while her hand fumbled at something through the cloth, fumbling at whatever it was as if even the hand didn’t know yet what it was about to find. Then she thrust her hand inside the dress and brought the object out—the crust of the bread which the man had given her in the boulevard almost twelve hours ago, warm from her body and which by her expression she had completely forgotten, even the putting it there. Then she even forgot the bread again, clutching it to her mouth in one thin voracious fist, tearing at it with quick darting birdlike snatches as she once more watched the gate which those entering now approached with creeping and painful slowness. Because these were the dregs, the residue—the very old and the very young, belated not because they had had further to come but because some of them had been so long in life as long ago to have outlived the kin and friends who would have owned carts to lend or share with them, and the others had been too brief in it yet to have friends capable of owning carts and who had already been orphaned of kin by the regiment at Bethune and Souchez and the Chemin des Dames three years ago—all creeping cityward now at the pace of the smallest and weakest.

When she began suddenly to run, she was still chewing the bread, still chewing when she darted under the old twilit arch, running around an old woman and a child who were entering it without breaking stride but merely changing feet like a running horse at a jump, flinging the crust behind her, spurning it with her palm against the hollow purchaseless air as she ran toward a group of people coming up the now almost empty road—an old man and three women, one of them carrying a child. The woman carrying the child saw her and stopped. The second woman stopped too, though the others—an old man on a single crutch and carrying a small cloth-knotted bundle and leaning on the arm of an old woman who appeared to be blind—were still walking on when the young woman ran past them and up to the woman carrying the child and stopped facing her, her wan face urgent and frantic again.

‘Marthe!’ she said. ‘Marthe!’

The woman answered, something rapid and immediate, not in French but in a staccato tongue full of harsh rapid consonants, which went with her face—a dark high calm ugly direct competent peasant’s face out of the ancient mountainous central-European cradle, which, though a moment later she spoke in French and with no accent, was no kin whatever to the face of the child she carried, with its blue eyes and florid coloring filtered westward from Flanders. She spoke French at once, as if, having looked at the girl, she realised that, whether or not the girl had ever once understood the other tongue, she was past comprehending or remembering it now. Now the blind woman leading the crippled old man had stopped and turned and was coming back; and now you would have noticed for the first time the face of the second woman, the one who had stopped when the one carrying the child did. It was almost identical with the other’s; they were indubitably sisters. At first glance, the second face was the older of the two. Then you saw that it was much younger. Then you realised that it had no age at all, it had all ages or none; it was the peaceful face of the witless.

‘Hush now,’ the woman carrying the child said. ‘They wont shoot him without the others.’ Then the blind woman dragged the old man up. She faced them all, but none in particular, motionless while she listened for the sound of the girl’s breathing until she located it and turned quickly toward the girl her fierce cataracted stare.

‘Have they got him?’ she said.

‘As we all know,’ the woman with the child said quickly. She started to move again. ‘Let’s get on.’

But the blind woman didn’t move, square and sightless in the road, blocking it, still facing the girl. ‘You,’ she said. ‘I dont mean the fools who listened to him and who deserve to die for it. I mean that foreigner, that anarchist who murdered them. Have they got him? Answer me.’

‘He’s there too,’ the woman carrying the child said, moving again. ‘Come on.’

But still the blind woman didn’t move, except to turn her face toward the woman with the child when she spoke. ‘That’s not what I asked,’ she said.

‘You heard me say they will shoot him too,’ the woman carrying the child said. She moved again, as though to touch the blind woman with her hand and turn her. But before the hand touched her, the woman who could not even see had jerked her own up and struck it down.

‘Let her answer me,’ she said. She faced the girl again. ‘They haven’t shot him yet? Where’s your tongue? You were full enough of something to say when you came up.’ But the girl just stared at her.

‘Answer her,’ the woman carrying the child said.

‘No,’ the girl whispered.