Page:The Enormous Room.pdf/217

206 something, your fingernails or clean your ears or make wind because it's hot.... No one can beat German people; if Kaiser tell man to kill his father and mother he do it quick!"—the tall, strong, coarse, vital youth who remarked:

"I sleep with black girl who smoke a pipe in the night."

Take this animal. You hear him, you are afraid of him, you smell and you see him and you know him—but you do not touch him.

Or a man who makes us thank God for animals, Judas, as we called him: who keeps his moustaches in press during the night (by means of a kind of transparent frame which is held in place by a band over his head); who grows the nails of his two little fingers with infinite care; has two girls with both of whom he flirts carefully and wisely, without ever once getting into trouble; talks in French; converses in Belgian; can speak eight languages and is therefore always useful to Monsieur le Surveillant—Judas with his shining horrible forehead, pecked with little indentures; with his Reynard full-face—Judas with his pale almost putrescent fatty body in the douche—Judas with whom I talked one night about Russia, he wearing my pélisse—the frightful and impeccable Judas: take this man. You see him, you smell the hot stale odour of Judas' body; you are not afraid of him, in fact, you hate him; you hear him and you know him. But you do not touch him.

And now take Surplice, whom I see and hear and smell and touch and even taste, and whom I do not know.

Take him in dawn's soft squareness, gently stooping to pick chewed cigarette ends from the spitty floor ... hear him, all night: retchings which light into the dark ... see him all day and all days, collecting his soaked ends and stuffing them gently into his round pipe (when he can find none he smokes tranquilly little splinters of wood) ... watch him scratching his back (exactly like a bear) on the wall ... or in the cour, speaking to no one, sunning his soul....

He is, we think, Polish. Monsieur Auguste is very kind to him, Monsieur Auguste can understand a few words of his