CROSSING PARIS
575
he ran to the easel, his knife held firmly in hand. He planted the
knife in the painted sky, cut the portrait across, and with another
slash ripped it from top to bottom.
"I know how to amuse myself with other people's work, too."
He got hold of the landscape that stood at the foot of the easel,
but Grandgil was already upon him. While they fought, the siren
began to sound the end of the alert, and Martin did not even hear
the faint moan the painter uttered when the knife entered his belly.
The butcher offered him a cold lunch, but Martin would accept
only a glass of wine. Having swallowed it at one gulp, he remained
motionless on the chair where he had let himself sink down on
entering the back shop. The last lap had exhausted him. The butcher
said that he did not understand how any man had been able to climb
the hardest part of the hill with a load of more than two hundred
pounds. Martin did not reply to his exclamations. He looked at his
hands trembling with fatigue, and he still felt on the back of his neck
and his shoulders the weight of the leather strap from which he had
swung the valises two by two. During the journey from the studio to
the butcher shop, absorbed in his effort and with the determination
of a beast of burden, he had thought only with his muscles. Now,
though his mind was still foggy with weariness, clear consciousness
was coming back to him little by little. One recollection kept coming
to the surface of his memory, impressed itself on his mind. It was that
of the Turkish soldier disembowelled by a knife thrust in 1915. The
body still warm, lying on its right side, legs curled up and hands
clenched on his blood-soaked belly- never before had Martin re–
captured the scene so clearly, in such detail.
Discouraged by his guest's silence, the butcher went into the
shop to weigh the valises and put away the sections of meat in the
refrigerator. Martin did not see him go out. He was seeing the dead
man. From time to time, the corpse of Grandgil displaced the corpse
of the Turk, and disappeared immediately. Martin, vaguely aware
of his casuistry, profited by this commingling to excuse his crime :
"It
was war. I would have asked nothing better than to let him live.
I'm not a bad man.
It
was him or me. We don't do what we wish
to do. That's the truth. We don't do what we wish to do." The butcher
telephoned.
