Page 21 - The Thief's Journal

The Thief's Journal
Not knowing whether he was crazy, he checked; he found nothing. Hoping against the evidence, he resigned himself and stretched out on his bed only to get up again and search in places where he had already looked. I saw his certainty, the certainty of a man four−square on his thighs and sure of muscle, crumble, pulverize, powder him with a sweetness he had never had, disintegrate his sharp angles. I was present at this silent transformation. I feigned indifference. However, this young, self−confident soldier seemed to me so pitiful in his ignorance that his fear, almost his wonderment, as to a malignity of which he had been unaware — not thinking that it would dare manifest itself to him for the first time by actually taking him for victim — his shame too, almost softened me so far as to make me want to give him back the hundred−franc note which I had hidden, folded up into sixteen parts, in a crack of the barrack−room wall, near the clothes−drier. The head of a robbed man is hideous. The robbed men's heads which frame him give the thief an arrogant solitude. I dared say, in a dry tone of voice, “You're funny to watch. You look as if you've got a belly−ache. Go to the can and pull the chain.”
This reflection saved me from myself.
I felt a curious sweetness; a kind of freedom soothed me, gave to my body as it lay on the bed an extraordinary agility. Was that what betrayal was? I had just violently detached myself from an unclean comradeship to which my affectionate nature had been leading 'me, and I experienced the astonishment of thereby feeling a great strength. I had just broken with the Army, had just shattered the bonds of friendship.
The tapestry known as “Lady with the Unicorn” excited me for reasons which I shall not attempt to go into here. But when I crossed the. border from Czechoslovakia into Poland, it was a summer afternoon. The borderline ran through a field of ripe rye, the blondness of which was as blond as the hair of young Poles; it had the somewhat buttery sweetness of Poland, about which I knew that in the course of history it was always being hurt and sinned against. I was with another fellow who, like me, had been expelled by the Czech police, but I very quickly lost sight of him; perhaps he had strayed off behind a bush or wanted to get rid of me. The rye−field was bounded on the Polish side by a wood at whose edge was nothing but motionless birches; on the Czech side, by another wood, but of fir trees. I remained a long time squatting at the edge, intently wondering what lay hidden in the field. What if I crossed it? Were customs officers hidden in the rye? Invisible hares must have been running through it. I was uneasy. At noon, beneath a pure sky, all nature was offering me a puzzle, and offering it to me blandly.
“If something happens,” I said to myself, “it will be the appearance of a unicorn. Such a moment and such a place can only produce a unicorn.”
Fear, and the kind of emotion I always feel when I cross a border, conjured up at noon, beneath a leaden sun, the first fairyland. I ventured forth into that golden sea as one enters the water. I went through the rye standing up. I advanced slowly, surely, with the certainty of being the heraldic character for whom a natural blazon has been shaped: azure, field of gold, sun, forests. This imagery, of which I was a part, was complicated by the Polish imagery.
“In this noonday sky the white eagle should soar invisible!”
When I got to the birches, I was in Poland. An enchantment of another order was about to be offered me. The “Lady with the Unicorn” is to me the lofty expression of this crossing the line at noontide. I had just come to know, as a result of fear, an uneasiness in the presence of the mystery of diurnal nature, at a time when the French countryside where I wandered about, chiefly at night, was peopled all over with the ghost of Vacher, the killer O1 shepherds. As I walked through it, I would listen within me to the accordion tunes he must have played there, and I would mentally invite the children to come and offer themselves to the cut−throat's hands. However, I have just referred to this in order to try to tell you at what period of my life nature disturbed me, giving rise within me to the spontaneous creation of a fabulous fauna, or of situations and accidents, whose
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