A Fable

‘Come on, Corp,’ a voice said. ‘Let’s go.’

‘O.K.,’ the corporal said. ‘Watch it now.’ But still there was no stampede, rush. It was just a crowding, a concentration, a jostling itself almost inattentive, not of famishment, hunger but rather of the watchful noncommittance of people still—so far at least—keeping pace with, holding their own still within the fringe of a fading fairy-tale, the cursing itself inattentive and impersonal, not eager: just pressed as they crowded in onto both the fixed benches, five on one side and six on the other facing them until the twelfth man dragged up the cell’s one stool to the head of the table for the corporal and then himself took the remaining place at the foot end of the unfilled bench like the Vice to the Chair in a Dickensian tavern’s back room—a squat powerful weathered man with the blue eyes and reddish hair and beard of a Breton fisherman, captain say of his own small tough and dauntless boat—laden doubtless with contraband. The corporal filled the bowls while they passed them hand to hand. But still there was no voracity. A leashed quality, but even, almost unimpatient as they sat holding each his upended unsoiled spoon like a boat-crew or a parade.

‘This looks bad,’ one said.

‘It’s worse,’ another said. ‘It’s serious.’

‘It’s a reprieve,’ a third said. ‘Somebody besides a garage mechanic cooked this. So if they went to all that trouble——’ a third began.

‘Hold it,’ the Breton said. The man opposite him was short and very dark, his jaw wrenched by an old healed wound. He was saying something rapidly in an almost unintelligible Mediterranean dialect—Midi or perhaps Basque. They looked at one another. Suddenly still another spoke. He looked like a scholar, almost like a professor.

‘He wants someone to say grace,’ he said.

The corporal looked at the Midian. ‘Say it then.’ Again the other said something rapid and incomprehensible. Again the one who resembled a scholar translated.

‘He says he doesn’t know one.’

‘Does anybody know one?’ the corporal said. Again they looked at one another. Then one said to the fourth one:

‘You’ve been to school. Say one.’

‘Maybe he went too fast and passed it,’ another said.

‘Say it then,’ the corporal said to the fourth one. The other said rapidly:

‘Benedictus. Benedicte. Benedictissimus. Will that do?’

‘Will that do, Luluque?’ the corporal said to the Midian.

‘Yes yes,’ the Midian said. They began to eat now. The Breton lifted one of the bottles slightly toward the corporal.

‘Okay?’ he said.

‘Okay,’ the corporal said. Six other hands took up the other bottles; they ate and poured and passed the bottles too.

‘A reprieve,’ the third said. ‘They wouldn’t dare execute us until we have finished eating this cooking. Our whole nation would rise at that insult to what we consider the first of the arts. How’s this for an idea? We stagger this, eat one at a time, one man to each hour, thirteen hours; we’ll still be alive at … almost noon tomorrow——’

‘—when they’ll serve us another meal,’ another said, ‘and we’ll stagger that one into dinner and then stagger dinner on through tomorrow night——’

‘—and in the end eat ourselves into old age when we cant eat anymore——’

‘Let them shoot us then. Who cares?’ the third said. ‘No. That bastard sergeant will be in here with his firing squad right after the coffee. You watch.’

‘Not that quick,’ the first said. ‘You have forgot what we consider the first of the virtues too. Thrift. They will wait until we have digested this and defecated it.’

‘What will they want with that?’ the fourth said.

‘Fertiliser,’ the first said. ‘Imagine that corner, that garden-plot manured with the concentrate of this meal——’

‘The manure of traitors,’ the fourth said. He had the dreamy and furious face of a martyr.

‘In that case, wouldn’t the maize, the bean, the potato grow upside down, or anyway hide its head even if it couldn’t bury it?’ the second said.

‘Stop it,’ the corporal said.

‘Or more than just the corner of a plot,’ the third said. ‘The carrion we’ll bequeath France tomorrow——’

‘Stop it!’ the corporal said.

‘Christ assoil us,’ the fourth said.

‘Aiyiyi,’ the third said. ‘We can call on him then. He need not fear cadavers.’

‘Do you want me to make them shut up, Corp?’ the Breton said.

‘Come on now,’ the corporal said. ‘Eat. You’ll spend the rest of the night wishing you did have something to clap your jaws on. Save the philosophy for then.’

‘The wit too,’ the third said.

‘Then we will starve,’ the first said.

‘Or indigest,’ the third said. ‘If much of what we’ve heard tonight is wit.’

‘Come on now,’ the corporal said. ‘I’ve told you twice. Do you want your bellies to say you’ve had enough, or that sergeant to come back in and say you’ve finished?’ So they ate again, except the man on the corporal’s left, who once more stopped his laden knife blade halfway to his mouth.