A Fable

‘Take them on,’ the sergeant’s voice said. Though before the iron clash of the door had ceased the corporal was already speaking, not loud: just prompt, still mild, not peremptory: just firm:

‘Eat.’ The same man essayed to speak again but again the corporal forestalled him. ‘Eat,’ he said. ‘Next time he will take it out.’ But they were spared that. The door opened almost immediately, but this time it was only the sergeant, alone, the eleven heads which remained turning as one to look at him where he faced the corporal down the length of the littered table.

‘You,’ the sergeant said.

‘Me?’ the corporal said.

‘Yes,’ the sergeant said. Still the corporal didn’t move. He said again:

‘You mean me?’

‘Yes,’ the sergeant said. ‘Come on.’ The corporal rose then. He gave one rapid look about at the ten faces now turning from the sergeant to look at him—faces dirty, unshaven, strained, which had slept too little in too long, harassed, but absolute, one in whatever it was—not trust exactly, not dependence: perhaps just one-ness, singleness.

‘You’re in charge, Paul,’ he said to the Breton.

‘Right,’ the Breton said. ‘Till you get back.’ But this time the corridor was empty; it was the sergeant himself who closed the door behind them and turned the heavy key and pocketed it. There was no one in sight at all where he—the corporal—had expected to find armed men bristling until they in the white glittering room in the Hôtel de Ville sent for them for the last time. Then the sergeant turned from the door and now he—the corporal—realised that they were even hurrying a little: not at all furtive nor even surreptitious: just expedite, walking rapidly back up the corridor which he had already traversed three times—once yesterday morning when the guards had brought them from the lorry to the cell, and twice last night when the guards had taken them to the Hôtel de Ville and brought them back, their—his and the sergeant’s—heavy boots not ringing because (so recent the factory—when it had been a factory—was) these were not stone but brick, but making instead a dull and heavy sound seeming only the louder because there were only four now instead of twenty-six plus the guards. So to him it was as though there was no other way out of it save that one exit, no destination to go to in it except on, so that he had already begun to pass the small arch with its locked iron gate when the sergeant checked and turned him, nor any other life in or near it so that he didn’t even recognise the silhouette of the helmet and the rifle until the man was in the act of unlocking the gate from the outside and swinging it back for them to pass through.

Nor did he see the car at once, the sergeant not quite touching him, just keeping him at that same pace, rapidity, as though by simple juxtaposition, on through the gate into an alley, a blank wall opposite and at the curb-edge the big dark motionless car which he had not noticed yet because of the silence—not the subterrene and cavernous emptiness in which their boots had echoed a moment back but a cul-de-sac of it, himself and the sergeant and the two sentries—the one who had unlocked the gate for them and then locked it after them, and his opposite flanking the other side of the gate—not even at parade rest but at ease, their rifles grounded, immobile and remote, as though oblivious to that to which they in their turn were invisible, the four of them set down in a vacuum of silence within the city’s distant and indefatigable murmur. Then he saw the car. He didn’t stop, it was barely a falter, the sergeant’s shoulder barely nudged him before he went on. The driver didn’t even move to descend; it was the sergeant who opened the door, the shoulder, a hand too now, firm and urgent against his back because he had stopped now, erect, immobile and immovable even after the voice inside the car said, ‘Get in, my child;’ then immovable for another second yet before he stooped and entered it, seeing as he did so the pallid glint of braid, a single plane of face above the dark enveloping cloak.