Germinal - Emile Zola [26]
‘God! Is it that time already…Is that you, Catherine?’
‘Yes, Dad…The clock downstairs has just struck.’
‘Hurry up then, you lazy girl! If you hadn’t spent all Sunday night dancing, you could have got us up earlier…Anyone would think we didn’t have a job of work to go to!’
He grumbled on, but gradually sleep overtook him again; his reproaches became muddled and eventually subsided to be replaced by a new bout of snoring.
The girl moved about the room in her nightshirt, barefoot on the tiled floor. As she passed Henri and Lénore’s bed, she covered them with the blanket, which had slipped off the bed; neither woke up, since both were lost to the world in the deep sleep of children. Alzire had opened her eyes and rolled over without a word to occupy the warm spot left by her elder sister.
‘Come on, Zacharie! You, too, Jeanlin,’ Catherine repeated, standing by her two brothers who each lay sprawled on his front with his nose in the bolster.
She had to grab the older of the two by the shoulder and shake him; and then, while he was muttering insults under his breath, she decided to strip the sheet off the bed. She thought this was a great joke and began to laugh at the sight of the two of them flailing about with bare legs.
‘Stop messing about. Leave me be!’ grumbled Zacharie crossly after he had sat up. ‘It’s not funny…And now we’ve bloody got to get up!’
He was a thin, gangling type of fellow, with a long face smudged by the beginnings of a beard and with the same yellow hair and anaemic pallor as the rest of his family. His nightshirt had ridden up round his stomach and he pulled it down, not for decency’s sake but because he was cold.
‘The clock downstairs has gone four,’ Catherine repeated. ‘Come on, get a move on! Father’s getting angry.’
Jeanlin, who had curled up again in a ball, shut his eyes and said:
‘Get lost. I’m asleep.’
Once more she gave a good-natured laugh. He was so small, with his frail limbs and huge joints swollen from scrofula,2 that she gathered him up in her arms. But he tried to wriggle free, and his face – a wan, wrinkled, monkey-like mask pierced by two green eyes and widened by two large ears – was white with rage at his own weakness. He said nothing, and bit her on the right breast.
‘Little bastard!’ she muttered, stifling a cry and putting him down.
Alzire had not gone back to sleep but lay there silently with the sheet pulled up to her chin. With her clever, sick-child eyes she watched as her sister and brothers now got dressed. Another quarrel broke out over by the basin when the two boys shoved Catherine aside because she was taking too long to wash. Night-shirts were abandoned as, still half asleep, they relieved themselves, without embarrassment, as easy and natural with each other as a litter of puppies who have grown up together. In the end Catherine was ready first. She slipped on her miner’s trousers, donned her cloth jacket, and fastened her blue cap3 over her hair-bun; and in her clean Monday clothes she looked just like a little man. Nothing of her own sex remained, only the gentle sway of the hips.
‘The old man’s going to be really pleased to find the bed unmade when he gets back,’ Zacharie said grumpily. ‘I’ll tell him it was you, you know.’
The ‘old man’ was Bonnemort, their grandfather, who worked nights and so slept by day, with the result that the bed never got cold. There was always someone snoring away in it.
Without a word of reply Catherine had already begun to straighten and smooth the blanket. By now noises could be heard coming from the neighbouring house, on the other side of the wall. These brick constructions put up by the Company were cheaply built, and the walls were so thin that one could hear the slightest sound. Everyone lived cheek by jowl, from one end of the village to the other; and none of life’s intimacies remained hidden, not even from the children. Stairs shook with heavy footsteps, and then there was a gentle thud, followed by a contented sigh.
‘As usual!’ said