He had his place beside the man with the red star who came only in the evenings, drank a beer and chewed on his matchstick. At dinner, too, the blind man played his accordion, and. Mersault ate quickly, paid his bill, and returned to his hotel and the unfailing sleep of a feverish child. Every day he thought of leaving, and every day, sinking a little deeper into desolation, his longing for happiness had a little less hold over him.
He had been in Prague four days now, and he had not yet bought the comb whose absence he discovered each morning. Yet he had the vague sense of something missing, and this was what he irresolutely waited for. One evening, he walked towards his restaurant down the little street where he had first smelled the cucumbers.
Already he anticipated that odour, when just before he reached the restaurant, on the pavement opposite him, something made him stop, then come closer. A man was lying there, arms folded, head fallen on the left cheek. Three or four people were standing against the wall, apparently waiting for something, though very calm. One was smoking, the others were speaking in low voices. But one man in shirtsleeves, his jacket over his arm, hat pushed back on his head, was performing a kind of wild dance around the body, his gestures emphatic and disturbing.
Overhead, the faint light of a distant street-lamp mingled with the glow from the nearby restaurant. The man tirelessly dancing, the body with its folded arms, the calm spectators, the ironic contrast and the inexpli-cable silence — here at last, combining contemplation and in-nocence, among the rather impressive interplay of light and shadow, was a moment of equilibrium past which it seemed to Mersault that everything would collapse into madness. He came closer: the dead man’s head was lying in a pool of blood.
The head was turned so that it rested on the wound. In this remote corner of Prague, between the faint light on the moist pavement, the long wet hiss of passing cars a few steps away, the distant screech of occasional trams, death seemed insipid yet insistent too, and it was death’s summons, its damp breath that Mersault sensed at the very moment he began walking away, very fast, without turning back.
Suddenly the odour, which he had forgotten, was all around him: he went into the restaurant and sat down at his table. The man was there, but without his matchstick. It seemed to Mersault that there was something distraught in his eyes. He dismissed the stupid no-tion that occurred to him. But everything was whirling in his mind. Before ordering anything he jumped up and ran to his hotel, went to his room and threw himself on the bed. Some-thing sharp was throbbing in his temples.
His heart empty, his belly tight, Mersault’s rebellion exploded. Images of his life rushed before his eyes. Something inside him clamoured for the gestures of women, for arms that opened, and for warm lips. From the depth of the painful night of Prague, amid smells of vinegar and sentimental tunes, mounted towards him the anguished countenance of the old baroque world which had accompanied his fever. Breathing with difficulty, seeing noth-ing, moving mechanically, he sat up on his bed. The drawer of the bedside table was open, lined with an English newspaper in which he read a whole article.
Then he stretched out on the bed again. The man’s head had been lying on the wound, and three or four fingers would have fitted inside that wound..Mersault stared at his hands and his fingers, and childish desires rose in his heart. An intense and secret fervour swelled within him, and it was a nostalgia for cities filled with sunlight and women, with the green evenings that close all wounds. Tears burst from his eyes. Inside him widened a great lake of solitude and silence above which ran the sad song of his deliverance.
Chapter Two
IN the train taking him north, Mersault stared at his hands. The train’s speed traced an onrush of heavy clouds across the low-ering sky. Mersault was alone in this overheated compartment he had left suddenly in the middle of the night, and with the dark morning hours ahead of him, he let the mild landscape of Bohemia rush by, the impending rain between the tall silky poplars and the distant factory chimneys filling him with an impulse to burst into tears.
Then he looked at the white plaque with its three sentences: Nicht hinauslehnen, E pericoloso sporg-ersi, Il est dangereux de se pencher au-dehors. He looked again at his hands, which lay like living, wild animals on his knees: the left one long and supple, the right thicker, muscular. He knew them, recognized them, yet they were distinct from himself, as though capable of actions in which his will had no part.
One came to rest against his forehead now, pressing against the fever which throbbed in his temples. The other slid down his jacket and took out of its pocket a cigarette that he immediately discarded as soon as he became aware of an overpowering desire to vomit. His hands returned to his knees, palms cupped, where they offered Mersault the emblem of his life, indifferent once more and offered to anyone who would take it.
He travelled for two days. But now it was not an instinct of escape which drove him on. The very monotony of the journey satisfied him. This train which was jolting him halfway across Europe suspended him between two worlds — it had taken him abroad, and would deposit him somewhere, draw him out of a life the very memory of which he wanted to erase and lead him to the threshold of a new world where desire would be king.
Not for a single moment was Mersault bored. He sat in his corner, rarely disturbed by anyone, stared at his hands, then at the countryside, and reflected. He deliberately extended his trip as far as Breslau, merely rousing himself at the border to change tickets. He wanted to stay where he was, contemplating his freedom.
He was tired and did not feel well enough to move; he hoarded every last fragment of his strength, of his hopes, kneaded them together until he had refashioned himself and his fate as well. He loved these long nights when the train rushed along the gleaming rails, roaring through the little stations where only a clock was illuminated, the sudden stops among the clustered lights of cities where there was no time to discover where he was before the train was already swallowed up, a golden warmth cast into the compartments and then gone.
Hammers pounded on the wheels, the engine exhaled its cloud of steam, and the robot gesture of the signalman lowering his red disc hurled Mersault into the train’s wild course, only his lucidity, his anxiety awake. The crossword puzzle of lights and shadows went on in the compartment, a black and gold motley: Dresden, Bautzen, Görlitz, Lugknitz.
The long lonely night ahead of him, with all the time in the world to decide on the actions of a future life, the patient struggle with the thoughts eluding him on a station siding, recaptured and pursued again, the consequences reappearing and escaping once more before the dance of wires glistening under the rain and the lights.
Mersault groped for the word, the sentence that would formu-late hope in his heart, that would resolve his anxiety. In his weakened state, he needed formulas. The night and then the day passed in this obstinate struggle with the word, the image which from now on would constitute the whole tonality of his mind, the sympathetic or miserable dream of his future. He closed his eyes. It takes time to live. Like any work of art, life needs to be thought about.
Mersault thought about his life and exercised his bewildered consciousness and his longing for happiness in a train compartment which was like one of those cells where a man learns to know what he is by what is more than himself. On the morning of the second day, in the middle of a field, the train slowed down. Breslau was still hours away, and the day broke over the vast Silesian plain, a treeless sea of mud under an overcast sky sagging with rainclouds.
As far as the eye could see and at regular intervals, huge black birds with glistening wings flew in flocks a few yards above the ground, incapable of rising any higher under a sky heavy as a tomb-stone. They circled in a slow, ponderous flight, and sometimes one of them would leave the flock, skim the ground, almost inseparable from it, and flap off in the same lethargic flight, until it was far enough away to be silhouetted on the horizon, a black dot.
Mersault wiped the steam off the glass and stared greedily through the long streaks his fingers left on the pane. Between the desolate earth and the colourless sky appeared an image of the ungrateful world in which, for the first time, he came to himself at last. On this earth, restored to the despair of innocence, a traveller lost in a primitive world, he retained contact, and with his fist pressed to his chest, his face flattened against the glass, he calculated his hunger for himself and for the cer-tainty of the splendours dormant within him.
He wanted to crush himself into that mud, to re-enter the earth by
