Funeral Rites Read Online Free PDF Page B

slight quiver ruffled the part of the face which is so sensitive in adolescents: the puffy surface around the mouth, the spot that will be covered by the mustache. The executioner saw the trembling. He was moved by the youngster's timorous flutter. He hugged him more gently, he softened his smile and said:
    “What's the matter? Are you scared?”
    I was wearing the wristwatch I had stolen the day before from one of the other boys. Was I scared? Why had he asked me that question point-blank?
    More out of delicacy than pride, I almost answered no, but immediately, sure of my power over the brute, I wanted to be mean and I said yes.
    “Did you recognize me?”
    “Why?”

    Erik was surprised at hearing slightly hesitant inflections in his voice which he had not been aware of and, at times, under the stress of greater anxiety, a slight trembling over a few notes that were too high for his usual timbre.
    “Don't you recognize me?”
    I kept my lips parted. I was still in the embrace of that unyielding fellow whose smiling face was armed with the glowing cigarette and bent over mine.
    “Well? Can't you see?”
    I had recognized him. I dared not say so. I replied:
    “It's time for me to be getting back to the barracks.”
    “Are you scared because I'm the executioner?”
    He had spoken until then in a hollow voice, in keeping with the blurriness of things or perhaps because he feared a danger might be hidden behind the fog, but when he uttered those words, he laughed with such violence and clarity that all the watchful trees suddenly came to attention in the wadding and recorded the laugh. I dared not move. I looked at him. I inhaled smoke, took the cigarette from my mouth and said:
    No.
    But my “no” betrayed fear.
    “No, you mean it, you're not scared?”
    Instead of repeating the word no, I shook my head and, lightly tapping the cigarette twice with my forefinger, dropped a bit of ash on his foot. The casualness of these two gestures gave the boy such an air of detachment, of indifference, that the executioner felt humiliated, as if I had not deigned even to see him. He hugged me harder, laughingly, pretending that he wanted to frighten me.
    “No?”
    He peered into my eyes and dove right in. He blew the smoke in my face.
    “No? Are you sure?”

    “Of course I am, why?” And, to mollify the executioner, I added: “I haven't done any harm.” The stolen watch on my wrist was punctuating my uneasiness.
    It was cold. The dampness was penetrating our clothes. The fog was rather thick. We seemed to be alone, characters without a past or future, composed simply of our respective roles of Hitler Youth and executioner, and united to each other not by a succession of events but by the play of a grave gratuitousness, the gratuitousness of the poetic fact: We were there, in the fog of the world.
    Still holding me by the waist, the executioner walked a few steps with me. We went down a path and then walked up onto another lawn to reach a clump of trees that made a dark spot in the pale dawn. I could have repeated that my duty obliged me to stay on the footpath. All I wanted was to have a smoke. I said nothing. But my chest was tight with fear and swollen with hope. I was one long, silent moan.
    “What will be born of our love-making? What can be born of it?”
    Until then I had known only unexciting play with a friend who was too young. Today it is I whom a fellow over thirty, and a headsman, is leading imperiously to love, at an hour when one gets the ax, in the seclusion of a clump of trees, near a lake.
    The Berlin executioner was about six feet one. His muscular build was that of an executioner who chops on a block with an ax. His brown hair was cropped very close, so that his completely round head was that of a beheaded man. He was sad despite his smile, which was meant to brave me and tame me. His sadness was profound, its source was deeper than his profession, being, rather, in his strength itself. He lived alone in a