The Debacle - Emile Zola [135]
Weiss looked at her, dazed. What, his wife, this woman he had yearned for so long and whom he worshipped with such loving devotion! He woke up with a shudder. What had he been doing? What had he stayed there for, firing a rifle instead of going back to her as he had sworn he would? In a flash he saw his happiness lost in a brutal separation, for ever. Then he caught sight of the blood on her forehead and said in a faltering, almost off-hand way:
‘Are you wounded, dear?… You were mad to come.’
She roughly cut him short:
‘Oh there’s nothing the matter with me, just a scratch. But you, you, why are they holding you? I won’t let them kill you!’
The officer was busying himself in the middle of the cluttered road to give his squad a little more distance, when he saw this woman hanging on to the neck of one of the prisoners and he said angrily, in French again:
‘Oh no, none of that nonsense! Where have you come from? What do you want?’
‘I want my husband!’
‘Your husband, what, that man there? He has been sentenced, and justice has got to be done.’
‘I want my husband.’
‘Look here, be sensible… Get out of the way, we don’t want to do any harm to you.’
‘I want my husband.’
So, abandoning the effort to convince her, the officer was going to give orders for her to be torn away from the prisoner’s arms, when Laurent, who so far had said nothing, but had been standing there quite unmoved, ventured to intervene:
‘I say, captain, I was the one who bumped off so many of your lot, so let me be shot, that’s all right. And what’s more I’ve got nobody, neither mother, wife nor child… But this gentleman is married… So let him go and then you can settle my account.’
Beside himself now, the captain bellowed:
‘That’s enough talk! Are you trying to pull my leg? Come on, I want a volunteer to take this woman away.’
He had to repeat the order in German. A soldier stepped forward, a thickset Bavarian with a huge head bristling with red beard and hair, in the midst of which all that could be seen was a wide potato nose and big blue eyes. He had blood on him and looked horrible, like one of those cave-dwelling bears, hairy wild beasts red with the prey whose bones they have been cracking.
In heart-rending tones Henriette went on crying:
‘I want my husband, kill me with my husband.’
The officer energetically beat his breast, declaring that he was not a murderer, and if there were some who killed innocent people, it wasn’t him. She had not been sentenced and he would cut his own hand off rather than touch a hair of her head.
Then as the Bavarian was coming she clung to her husband’s body with all the strength of her limbs, frantically.
‘Oh my darling, please keep me, let me die with you!’
Weiss was weeping bitterly, but without answering her he struggled to wrench the desperate woman’s convulsive fingers from his shoulders and waist.
‘So you don’t love me any more, and want to die without me! Hold on to me and they’ll get tired of it and kill us both together!’
He had pulled away one of her little hands and he pressed it to his mouth and kissed it while working at the other to make it let go.
‘No, no, keep me, I want to die.’
At last, with a great effort, he held both her hands. So far he had avoided speaking and remained mute. Now all he said was:
‘Good-bye, dearest wife.’
And immediately he deliberately threw her into the arms of the Bavarian, who carried her away, struggling and screaming, while, perhaps to calm her, keeping up a stream of guttural talk. With a violent effort she got her head free and saw everything.
It lasted less than three seconds. Weiss’s folding glasses had slipped down during the parting, and he quickly replaced them on his nose as though he wanted to look death squarely in the face. He backed against the wall and folded his arms, and the face of this big, good-natured fellow in his tattered jacket shone with radiance, admirable in beauty and courage. Next to him Laurent had simply thrust his hands into his pockets. He looked outraged at this cruel scene, the abomination