“Yes, Monsieur Noel?” Madame Rocard said with a little twitch that tilted her head back.

  She looks like a bird, Jonathan thought; like a little frightened bird. And he repeated his address in the same caustic voice: “Madame, I have the following to say to you …” only to join her in hearing, much to his own amazement, how the driving force of his outrage quite involuntarily took shape as: “There is a bird, madame, at the door to my room,” and further, specifying, “a pigeon, madame. It is sitting on the tiles at my door.” And only at this point did he succeed in reining in the gush of words coming from his subconscious and steering them in a particular direction with the addendum: “This pigeon, madame, has already soiled the entire hallway on the seventh floor with its droppings.”

  Madame Rocard shifted her weight a couple of times from one foot to the other, threw her head back a little further still, and said: “Where did the pigeon come from, monsieur?”

  “I don’t know,” said Jonathan. “Probably it forced its way in through the hall window. The window is open. The window should always be kept closed. That’s part of the house rules.”

  “Probably one of the students opened it,” said Madame Rocard, “on account of the heat.”

  “That may be,” said Jonathan. “But it should be kept closed nevertheless. Especially in summer. If a thunderstorm comes up, it can bang shut and get broken. That’s what happened once, in the summer of 1962. At the time it cost one hundred and fifty francs to replace the pane. Since then the house rules state that the window must always be kept closed.”

  He was indeed aware that there was something ridiculous about his constant reference to the house rules. Nor did it interest him in the least how the pigeon had got in. Indeed, he did not want to go into particulars about the pigeon; this horrible problem was no one’s concern but his own. He wanted to give vent to his outrage at Madame Rocard’s glances, nothing more, and that had been accomplished with those first sentences. The outrage had ebbed now. He did not know how to go on from here.

  “Someone will simply have to chase the pigeon off again and close the window,” Madame Rocard said. She said it as if that were the simplest matter in the world and as if everything would then be all right again. Jonathan kept silent. With one glance he had got himself trapped in the brown fundament of her eyes, he was in danger of sinking, as if into a soft, brown swamp, and had to close his own eyes for a second to get out of it and to clear his throat to find his voice again.

  “It’s …” he began, clearing his throat yet again, “it’s so bad that there’s nothing but splotches. Nothing but green splotches. And feathers too. It’s soiled the whole hallway. That’s the main problem.”

  “Of course, monsieur,” Madame Rocard said, “the hallway will have to be cleaned. But first, someone must chase off the pigeon.”

  “Yes,” said Jonathan, “yes, yes …” and he thought: What’s she thinking? What does she want? Why did she say: someone must chase off the pigeon? Does she perhaps mean that I should chase it off? And he wished that he had never dared accost Madame Rocard.

  “Yes, yes,” he stammered on, “someone … someone must chase it off. I … I would have chased it off long ago, but I didn’t get around to it. I’m in a hurry. As you can see, I have my laundry with me today and my winter coat. I have to take the coat to be cleaned and the laundry to be washed, and then get to work. I’m in a great hurry, madame, which is why I couldn’t chase off the pigeon. I simply wanted to report the incident to you. Especially because of the splotches. The main problem is that the pigeon has soiled the hallway with splotches and that’s contrary to house rules. The house rules read that the hallway, stairs, and toilet are always to be kept clean.”

  He could not remember ever having carried on such a bungled conversation in all his life. His lies, it seemed to him, were apparent, crudely obvious, and the sole truth that they were meant to disguise – that he would never, ever be able to rout the pigeon, that indeed the pigeon had long since routed him – was most embarrassingly manifest; and even if Madame Rocard had not picked up on this truth from his words, she must certainly be able to read it now in his face, as he flushed and the blood rose to his head and his cheeks burned with shame.

  Madame Rocard, however, acted as if she had noticed nothing (or perhaps she had really noticed nothing?) and just said: “Thank you for the information, monsieur. I’ll take care of the matter when I get a chance,” and, lowering her head, skirted around Jonathan to shuffle off to the outhouse beside her lodge and vanish inside it.

  Jonathan watched her go. If he had had any hope whatever of someone’s saving him from the pigeon, that hope vanished with the bleak vision of Madame Rocard vanishing into her outhouse. She’s not going to take care of anything, he thought, of anything at all. And why should she? She’s just a concierge and as such her job is to sweep the stairs and the hallway and to clean the shared toilet once a week, but not to rout pigeons. By this afternoon, at the latest, she’ll be drunk on vermouth and have forgotten the entire affair, if she hasn’t, at this very moment, forgotten it already …

  Jonathan was at the bank punctually at eight fifteen, exactly five minutes before the vice-president, Monsieur Vilman, and Madame Roques, the head cashier, arrived. Together they swung open the entrance doors: Jonathan the outer folding gate, Madame Roques the outer bulletproof-glass door, Monsieur Vilman the inner bulletproof-glass door. Then Jonathan and Monsieur Vilman used their socket keys to deactivate the alarm system; Jonathan and Madame Roques opened the double-locked fire door to the lower level; Madame Roques and Monsieur Vilman disappeared into the cellar to open the strong room with the appropriate keys, while Jonathan, having in the meantime locked his suitcase, umbrella, and winter coat in his locker next to the toilets, took his position at the inner bulletproof-glass door and provided entry to the employees, arriving one by one, by pushing two buttons, which alternately released the inner and outer bulletproof-glass doors electrically, like a series of sluice gates. By eight forty-five the whole staff had gathered, each of them having made his or her work station ready behind the counter, in the accounting room, or in the offices, and Jonathan left the bank to take up his position on the marble steps before the doorway. His real duties now began.

  For thirty years now, from nine o’clock in the morning until one in the afternoon and from two thirty in the afternoon until five thirty in the evening, these duties had consisted of nothing other than Jonathan’s either standing stock-still at the doorway or at most patrolling back and forth in measured steps along the lowest three marble steps. Around nine thirty and between four thirty and five, there was a short break, occasioned by the arrival and subsequent departure of the black limousine of Monsieur Roedel, the president. That meant leaving his station on the marble steps, hurrying the twelve yards along the bank building to the entrance gate of the rear courtyard, shoving open the heavy steel grille, laying his hand to the rim of his cap in deferential greeting, and allowing the limousine to pass. Much the same sort of thing could happen early in the morning or late in the afternoon when the blue armoured truck from Brink’s Transport Service pulled up. The steel grille had to be opened for it as well, and its occupants likewise received a salute, not, to be sure, the deferential one with the palm placed to the rim of his cap, but a more cursory salute to colleagues, with the index finger at the rim of his cap. Otherwise, nothing happened. Jonathan stood, stared, and waited. Sometimes he stared at his feet, sometimes at the pavement, sometimes he stared across to the café on the other side of the street. Sometimes he wandered along the lowest marble step, seven paces to the left and seven paces to the right, or he left the lowest step and took a position on the second one, and sometimes, if the sun was blazing down all too fiercely and the heat was causing the water to squeeze against the sweatband of his cap, he even scaled the third step, which was shaded by the canopy of the doorway, to stand there, once he had briefly doffed his cap and wiped his moist brow with his forearm, and to stare and wait.

  He had once calculated that by the time of his retirement he would have spent seventy-five thousand hours standing on these three marble steps. He would then assuredly be the one person in all Paris – perhaps even in all France – who had stood the longest time in just one place. Presumably he had already achieved that, since by now he had spent fifty-five thousand hours on those marble steps. There were in fact very few permanently employed guards left in the city. Most banks subscribed to so-called tangible assets protection companies and let them place before their doors young, bow-legged, glumly self-absorbed fellows, who were soon replaced within a few months, often within weeks, by other, equally glumly self-absorbed fellows – ostensibly for reasons of work psychology: a guard’s attention span, so it was said, diminishes if he serves too long at one and the same spot; his perception of events around him grows dull; he becomes lazy, careless, and thus unfit for his tasks …

  All nonsense! Jonathan knew better: a guard’s attention was burnt out within hours. From the first day on, he was no longer consciously aware of his surroundings or even of the many hundreds of people who entered the bank – nor was that even necessary, for you could not distinguish a bank robber from a bank customer in any case. And even if a guard could do that and threw himself across the path of the robber, he would be shot down and dead long before he had so much as released the safety loop on his pistol holster, for robbers had an advantage over the guard that it was impossible to equalise, that of surprise.

  Like a sphinx, is how Jonathan thought of it (for he had once read about sphinxes in one of his books) – a guard was like a sphinx. He functioned not by some deed, but rather by his mere bodily presence. He confronted the potential robber with that and that alone. “You must pass by me,” said the sphinx to the grave robber. “I cannot thwart you, but you must pass by me; and if you dare to do so, then the revenge of the gods and of the pharaoh’s manes will come upon you!” And the guard: “You must pass by me, I cannot thwart you, but if you dare to do so, you will have to shoot me down, and the revenge of the courts will come upon you in the form of a conviction for murder!”

  Now of course Jonathan knew quite well that the sphinx was in command of more effective sanctions than was a guard. No guard could threaten the revenge of the gods. And even if it was a robber who didn’t give a hang about sanctions, the sphinx was hardly in danger. It was hewn from basalt, from purest rock, cast in bronze or built of solid brick. With no effort at all, it outlasted mere grave robbery by five thousand years … while during an attempted bank robbery, a guard would inevitably lose his life within five seconds. And yet they were alike, so Jonathan thought, the sphinx and the guard, for the power of both was not instrumental, it was symbolic. And solely in the awareness of this symbolic power – which was his pride and glory and the basis of his self-respect, which endowed him with his strength and stamina, which shielded him better than vigilance, weapons, or bulletproof glass – Jonathan Noel had stood on the marble steps in front of the bank and kept watch for thirty years now, without fear, without self-doubt, without the least sense of discontent and without the slightest look of glumness, until today.

  But today everything was different. Today Jonathan was having no success whatever at achieving his sphinx-like calm. After only a few minutes he could feel the burden of his body as a painful pressure on his soles; he shifted his weight from one foot to the other and back again, sending him into a gentle stagger and making him interpolate little side-steps to keep his centre of gravity – which until now he had always held on classical plumb – from slipping off balance. He also felt a sudden itch on his thigh, on the flank of his chest, and at the nape of his neck. After a while his forehead itched, as if it had become dry and chapped as it was sometimes in winter – whereas the day had in fact turned hot now, inexcusably hot really for nine fifteen in the morning; his brow was already as damp as it actually ought to have been around eleven … the itch moved to his arms, his chest, his back, down his legs; everywhere there was skin he itched, and he would have loved to scratch himself, all abandon and voracity, but that just wasn’t done, ever, a guard scratching himself in public! And so he took a deep breath, thrust out his chest, hunched and relaxed his back, raised and lowered his shoulders, employing such means to scrape against the inside of his clothing and provide relief. Such extraordinary contortions and twitches, however, magnified the stagger again, and soon the little side-stepping sallies no longer sufficed to maintain his balance, and Jonathan found himself forced against custom to abandon his stance of a statuesque sentinel even before the arrival of Monsieur Roedel’s limousine at half past nine and to switch to patrolling back and forth, seven paces to the left, seven paces to the right. In doing so, he tried to clamp his gaze on the edge of the second marble step, to let it move him back and forth as a kind of trolley on a steady rail, so that through the monotone infusion of just this one image, the edge of the marble step, the sphinx-like composure for which he longed might arise within him and let him forget the heaviness of his body and his itchy skin and this whole curious turmoil of body and mind. But that did no good. The trolley was constantly derailing. Every time his eyelid batted, his gaze broke from the confounded edge and sprang to some other thing: to a scrap of newspaper on the pavement; to a foot in blue stockings, some woman’s back, a shopping basket with loaves of bread in it, the knob on the outer bulletproof-glass door, the shining red rhombus of the Tabac monopoly above the café opposite, a bicycle, a straw hat, a face…. And nowhere did he succeed in getting a firm clamp on things, in establishing a new fixed point that might support and orient him. Hardly was the straw hat on his right in focus, when a bus dragged his gaze down the street to his left, only to hand it over a few yards farther on to a white convertible sports car, which then drove it back along the street to the right, where in the meantime the straw hat had disappeared; his eye roamed frantically among the throng of passers-by, among the throng of hats, got snagged on a rose swaying on a totally different hat, wrenched itself away, and finally fell back to the edge of the step, but once again could not rest there, strayed away, fidgeted from point to point, from spot to spot, from line to line …. It was as if the air were wavering in the heat today, the way it does only on the hottest July afternoons. Transparent veils fluttered before things. The outlined contours of buildings, eaves, roof-tops were glittering and garish, and at the same time indistinct, frazzled. The edges of curbs and the cracks between the stone squares of the pavement – normally as if drawn with a straight-edge – meandered along in glistening curves. And the women seemed all to be wearing garish clothes today, they blazed past like flames, drawing his gaze and yet not holding it fast. Nothing was left clearly delineated. Nothing was left to be precisely fixed. Everything quivered.

  It’s my eyes, Jonathan thought. I’ve turned short-sighted during the night. I need glasses. As a child he had had to wear glasses at one point, not strong ones, minus 0.75 dioptre, left and right. It was very strange that this short-sightedness was giving him trouble again now at his advanced age. With age you were more likely to get long-sighted, he had read, and your old short-sightedness decreased. Maybe what he was suffering from was not classic short-sightedness at all, but something that could in fact no longer be cured by glasses: a cataract, glaucoma, a torn retina, cancer of the eye, a tumour in his brain pressing down on the optic nerve …

  He was so very busy with this dreadful thought that the repeated short honks failed to force their way into his conscious mind. Only with the fourth or fifth one – someone was honking in drawn-out tones now – did he hear and react and lift his head: and there indeed at the entrance grille stood Monsieur Roedel’s black limousine! They honked again and even waved, as if they had been waiting for several minutes now. At the entrance grille! Monsieur Roedel’s limousine! When had he ever missed its approach? He normally did not even have to look, he sensed that it was coming, he could hear it in the hum of the motor, he could have been asleep and would have awakened like a dog at the approach of Monsieur Roedel’s limousine.

  He did not rush, he plunged towards it – almost falling in his haste – he unlocked the grille, pushed it back, he saluted, let them pass, he could feel his heart pounding and his hand trembling against the rim of his cap.

  When he had closed the gate and returned to the main entrance, he was bathed in sweat. “You missed Monsieur Roedel’s limousine,” he muttered to himself in a voice quivering with despair and repeated it as if he could not grasp it himself: “You missed Monsieur Roedel’s limousine … you missed it, you’ve failed, you have flagrantly neglected your duties, you’re not just blind, you’re deaf, you’re old and worn out, you’re no longer fit to be a guard.”

  He had arrived at the lowest of the marble steps; he stepped up on it and tried to stand at attention again. He noticed at once that he was not succeeding. His shoulders wouldn’t go square any more, his arms dangled at his trouser seams. He knew what a ridiculous figure he made at that moment, and could do nothing about it. In his despair he looked at the pavement, at the street, at the café opposite. The shimmering in the air had ceased. Things stood on the plumb again, the lines ran straight, the world lay clear before his eyes. He heard the noise of the traffic, the hiss of the bus doors, the shouts of the waiters from the café, the clattering of the women’s high-heeled shoes. Neither his vision nor his hearing was in the least affected. But sweat was running in streams from his brow. He felt weak. He turned around, climbed the second step, climbed the third step, and took up position in the shade of the column beside the outer doors of bulletproof glass. He crossed his hands behind his back so that they were touching the column. Then he let himself fall gently back, against his own hands and against the column, and leaned, for the first time in his thirty-year career of service. And for a few seconds he closed his eyes. He was so very ashamed of himself.

 

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