The Sermon on the Fall of Rome, стр. 21

walls of Cirta to restore Sophonisba’s kiss to Massinissa after she had been stolen from him, both the walls and the men who had laid siege to them had returned to dust and nothingness together, for marble and flesh are equally subject to decay, at Bône all that remained of the cathedral beneath whose vault Augustine had preached and where his last breath was drowned by the clamor of the Vandals, was a wasteland, covered in yellow plants and battered by the wind. He moved into his billet at Casablanca, firmly resolved to redeem himself from his indolence and become a proper soldier, but the Americans were not delivering the anti-aircraft guns and the wait soon became so unbearable that he almost went back to the brothel. He could not bring himself to believe that at this time, when the future of the world was at stake, he had once more been condemned to tedium, and the vastness of the Atlantic brought him no consolation. After a month he heard that they were looking for officers in the service corps and immediately put in an application. If they refused him the satisfaction of fighting, at least he could become what he had always wanted to be. He felt happy at last and remained so until the colonel summoned him to rebuke him for his shameful conduct in unbelievably violent terms, he foamed at the mouth, he banged his fist on his desk, you’re nothing but a little shit heap, Antonetti, a double-dyed coward, and Marcel, distraught, stammered in vain, but, you see, mon colonel, mon colonel, and the colonel bellowed, service corps officer? the service corps? repeating the words “service corps,” as if this were an unspeakable obscenity that soiled his mouth, so you’re scared of fighting, is that it? You’d rather sit there counting pounds of potatoes and pairs of socks? You bastard! You little bastard! And Marcel swore to him that he lived only for fighting but that he had always wanted to become an officer and this had seemed like an opportunity to be seized, but the colonel did not calm down, if you wanted to be an officer you should have come to see me, an artillery officer, sir! an honorable officer! I would have assigned you to a platoon, but the service corps? The service corps, God dammit? Not one of my men will end up in the service corps, do you understand! Now fuck off before I knock your block off! Marcel went out with his stomach on fire, all his hopes ruthlessly swept aside once more, and all he could do was continue to wait for the anti-aircraft guns, which still did not come, until in the end he was posted to the staff of a lieutenant in the service corps without the colonel or anyone else seeing anything at all paradoxical or scandalous in this. He arrived back in France with the lieutenant at the end of 1944 and they made their way slowly northwards several hundred miles behind the front line. Marcel took care of the paperwork and made vile coffee. He never heard the clash of arms. Just once, at Colmar, a few hundred yards from the vehicle he was driving, a stray shell landed, throwing up dust and rubble. Marcel stopped. He looked around him at the town in ruins which no shell could do more to destroy. For several minutes there was a pleasant buzzing in his ears. He turned to the lieutenant and asked him if he was alright and dusted off his sleeve with the flat of his hand, with a little frown, and this was his only feat of arms, the one thing that might help him to think the war had not held him completely at arm’s length. And now the war is over and he is back at the village in the bosom of his family. He lets himself be embraced by his father, who hugs him to himself along with Jean-Baptiste, relaxes his embrace and then draws them to himself again, as if unable to believe that neither of his sons has been taken from him. Jean-Baptiste is radiant and has grown terribly fat. He has spent the last three years of the war on a farm in Bavaria managed by four sisters, he winks whenever he talks about them, after first making sure his wife is not looking his way and Marcel is afraid he wants to get him on his own so he can come out with a flood of smutty confidences. He has no desire to hear these. He is twenty-six. He will never again see the courtyard of the primary school at Sartène, he is too old and, when he takes a look at his hands, he has the feeling that they will soon disintegrate like hands made of sand. In Paris, where she went to look for Jean-Baptiste, Jeanne-Marie has met a young man, much younger than herself, a resistance fighter back from deportation, and announces that she is going to marry him. She is already irremediably worn out by grief and knows it, but she behaves as if she still believed in the future. Marcel resents her making such vain and ludicrous efforts to appear full of life, it pains him to see his sister acting out this masquerade of forgetting, he refuses to pretend to be joyful and all the time she is busying herself with preparations for the wedding he resists her with a stubborn and contemptuous silence. But in the church, as she walks up the aisle to where André Degorce is waiting, slim and youthful in his Saint-Cyr military college uniform, she stops for a moment and turns to Marcel, giving him a childlike smile, and, as if in spite of himself, he can only smile back. This is no charade, she is neither demeaning herself in an act of renunciation nor making a mockery, because the boundless capacity for love that