Page 72 - The Thief's Journal

enter G. H.'s home with more assurance,
The Thief's Journal
1. A French fascist organization of storm−troopers. (Translator's note)
with less wonderment. Each object no longer looks as if it belongs to another master, as if it were under the sway of another soul. Everything here quite definitely belongs to its present possessor. When we left the apartment, Lucien said to me on the stairs, “It must be fun working with that guy.”
“What work?”
“His.”
“Which?”
“You know well enough—robbery.”
Perhaps Armand lives in similar luxury or perhaps he has been shot. When the Germans occupied France, to which he had returned, it was natural for him to enlist in the Gestapo. I learned this from a police inspector who found his photo on me when I was arrested. That was where he was bound to go and where I should have followed him. His influence had been leading me there.
(Having lost a large part of this journal, I can no longer remember the words in which I recalled the adventure of Albert and D., which I witnessed, though without taking part in it. I don't feel I have the strength to go into the whole story again, but a kind of respect for the tragic tone they gave their love makes it my duty to mention it. Albert was twenty years old. He came from Le Havre. D. had met him at the Sante Prison. When they got out, they lived together. As the Germans were in France, D. was admitted into the Gestapo. One day, in a bar, he shot and killed a German officer who was making fun of his friend. In the confusion, he had time to slip Albert his weapon.
“Ditch the gun.”
“Beat it. Beat it, Dede!”
Before he had gone fifty yards, he was prevented from fleeing by a barrier. He doubtless foresaw with lightning speed the tortures he was in for.
“Hand me the gun,” he said to Albert. Albert refused.
“I'm telling you to hand it to me! I want to shoot myself.”
It was too late. The Germans were near them.
“Bebert, I don't want them to get me alive. Kill me.”
Albert fired a bullet into his head and then he committed suicide.
When I wrote this lost fragment of the journal, I was for a long time haunted by Albert's beauty. He always wore a bargeman's cap (the black ribbon of which is brocaded with flowers). D. used to strut insolently around Montmartre with his boots. They were always quarreling (D. was forty at the time), right up to that death, which I did not witness. In the form in which I first cast this account, I must have made it serve some moral conclusion, which I no longer remember. I don't feel impelled to rewrite it.)
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