Page 71 - The Thief's Journal

The Thief's Journal
Each of the men I am speaking of was to know periods of glory. They were luminous then. I knew Labussiere. I have seen him going out with mistresses, in luxurious cars. He was sure of himself, established in his truth, at ease at the center of his activity as a well paid stool−pigeon. Nothing tormented him.
“Scruples and feelings which in others create such uneasiness that you can see it on their faces leave Lucien's candor intact,” I said to myself.
Bob hoped, by describing him to me as a rat, to detach him from me. On the contrary, he attached me to him even more. I amorously imagined him “bumping off” and torturing people. I was wrong. He never betrays. When I asked Lucien whether he would agree to lead my life with me, including even the dangers it might hold in store, he looked me in the eyes and never have I seen so fresh a gaze. It was a spring flooding a meadow already damp, where you find forget−me−nots and that graminaceous plant which in Le Morvan is called trembling grass. Then he said to me, “Yes.”
“I can count on you, on your friendship?” Same look and same answer. “I'll lead the same life as you, except that I don't want to steal.” “Why?”
“No. I'd rather work.”
I remained silent.
“You say that if I left you, you'd become a bandit. Why?”
“Because I'd be ashamed of myself.”
A few days later I said to him, “You know, we'll have to manage with what's left. We're almost broke.”
Lucien was walking with his eyes lowered. “If only we could find something to swipe,” he said. I was careful to handle gently, so as not to break it, the fragile mechanism which made him utter such a remark, careful to say nothing too brutally victorious. I spoke of something else. The day after a visit to G. H. he became more precise.
G. H. lives in an apartment which he furnished in four days when the Germans entered Paris. He and three friends put on Wehrmacht uniforms (uniforms stolen by whores from soldiers groggy with fatigue, liquor and sex) and rifled a few private mansions of Parisians who had taken flight. His loaded truck traveled back and forth from Passy to the garage. Now he owns furniture and rugs. Carpets of that kind, I say to myself, where discretion enters me by the feet, create silence—even the solitude and quietude offered by a mother's heart. There one may utter the vilest words, prepare the most abominable of crimes. The chandeliers are stacked in his apartment. His friends had an equal share of the booty. Two are dead, killed in Italy while fighting in the
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Darnand militia.
conviction have sanctified G. H.'s proprietary rights. They have authenticated it. Sure—or not—of never being discovered, he walks on his rugs and lolls in his armchairs with an authority he had not hitherto had.
“Let them come and put me out,” he said to me.
He draws his strength from the certainty of his right to occupy this conquered furniture, these rich spoils which Lucien admires. The apartment, qua fact, as an action continuing to unfold, belongs to the drama. It is the infinitely precious tabernacle where the witness keeps vigil. Now that I know about these deaths, I myself
The other one has just been condemned to hard labor for life. These two deaths and the
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