Instead of which Pin is now crawling on all fours into his sister’s room, bare foot, with his head already beyond the curtain, into that smell of male and female which goes straight to the nostrils. He can see the shadows of the furniture in the room, the bed, the chair, the oblong bidet on its triangular stand. There; now that dialogue of groans is beginning from the bed, and he can creep ahead on all fours, taking care to go very slowly. Perhaps, though, Pin would prefer if the floor creaked, the German heard and suddenly put on the light, and he had to run out of the house on bare feet with his sister shouting behind him: ‘Little swine!’; prefer it, perhaps, if the whole neighbourhood heard too and people talked of it in the tavern as well, and he could tell the story to Driver and the Frenchman, with so many details that they would believe him and say: ‘All right. It didn’t come off. Don’t let’s talk about it any more.’
The floor does in fact creak, but so many other things are creaking at that moment that the German does not hear. Pin is now touching the belt, and it turns out to be quite solid, not magical, and it slips down from the back of the chair almost frighteningly easily, without even banging on the floor. Now ‘it’ has happened; the fear he had only imagined before has become real fear. The belt must now be hurriedly wrapped round the holster, and all of it pushed under his jumper without getting entangled in his arms and legs; the next thing to do is go back on his tracks on all fours, very slowly and without ever taking his tongue from between his teeth; if he took that tongue away perhaps something awful would happen.
Once out of the room, he realizes that he can’t now go back to his little bed and hide the pistol under the mattress, as he does with apples stolen from the fruit market. In a short time the German will be getting up and looking for his pistol and turning the whole place upside down.
Pin goes out into the alley; the pistol is not worrying him very much at the moment; hidden like that in his clothes it is an object like any other and he can forget he has it; Pin rather regrets his own indifference, and would like to feel at least a shiver whenever he thinks about it. A real pistol. A real pistol. Pin tries to excite himself with the thought. Someone who has a real pistol can do anything, he’s like a grown-up. He can threaten to kill men and women and do whatever he likes with them.
Pin now thinks he will grasp the pistol and walk round with it always pointed at people; no one will be able to take it away from him and everyone will be afraid of him. But the pistol, wrapped in its belt, is still under his jumper, and he cannot make up his mind to touch it; in a way he almost hopes that when he looks for it, it will have vanished, melted away by the heat of his body.
The place to look at the pistol is a hidden flight of steps under an arch where children go to play hide-and-seek, lit only by a glimmer of light from a twisted street lamp. Pin unrolls the belt, opens the holster, and with a gesture as if he were taking a cat by the neck pulls out the pistol. It is really very big and threatening; if Pin had the courage to play with it he would pretend it was a cannon. But he handles it as if it were a bomb. The safety-catch, where can the safety-catch be?
Finally he decides to grasp it by the butt, though he’s careful not to put his finger near the trigger; he holds it tightly; even like this he can still hold it properly and point it against anyone he wants. Pin first points it at the gutter-pipe, right up against the metal, then at a finger, one of his own fingers, making a fierce face, drawing back his head and hissing: ‘Your money or your life’; then he finds an old shoe and points it against that, first the heel, then the inside; then he runs the barrel along the stitching of the uppers. What fun! A shoe, such an ordinary object, particularly for a cobbler’s apprentice like him, and a pistol, such a mysterious, almost unreal thing; by putting them up against each other he can do wonders, make them tell marvellous tales.
But then suddenly Pin cannot resist the temptation any more and points the pistol against his temple; it makes his head swim. On it moves, until it touches the skin and he can feel the coldness of the steel. Suppose he put his finger on the trigger now? No, it’s better to press the mouth of the barrel against the top of his cheek bone, until it hurts, and feel the circle of steel with its empty centre where the bullets come from. Perhaps if he suddenly pulls the gun away from his temple, the suction of the air will make a shot go off; no, it doesn’t go off. Now he can put the barrel into his mouth and feel its taste against his tongue. Then, the most frightening of all, put it up to his eyes and look right into it, down the dark barrel which seems deep as a well. Once Pin saw a boy who had shot himself in the eye with a hunting-gun being taken off to hospital; his face was half-covered by a great splodge of blood, and the other half with little black spots from the gunpowder.
Pin has now played with a real pistol. He has played with it enough, and can give it to the men who asked for it, he now can’t wait to give it to them, in fact. When he has not got it any more it will be the same as if he’d never stolen it, and the German can be as furious as he likes and Pin can laugh at him behind his back again.
His first impulse is to rush into the tavern and call out: ‘I’ve got it! I’ve got it!’ amid general enthusiasm and exclamations of surprise. Then it occurs to him that it would be cleverer to say: ‘Guess what I’ve brought!’ and keep them waiting a little before telling them. But they would be sure to think of the pistol at once, so he had better mention it at first and then go on to give them a dozen different versions of what happened, hinting that things went badly, until when they are on tenterhooks and have lost the drift, he’d put the pistol on the table and say: ‘Look what I’ve found in my pocket,’ and watch the expressions on their faces.
Pin enters the tavern silently, on tiptoe; the men are still talking round a table, their elbows rigid as if they had taken root. Only the unknown man is no longer there; his chair is empty. Pin is now standing behind them and they have not noticed him; he waits for them to catch sight of him suddenly and start up with questioning looks. But no one turns. Pin moves a chair. Giraffe twists his neck round and frowns at him, then goes on talking in a low voice.
‘Hey, guys,’ exclaims Pin.
They give him a glance.
‘Uglyface,’ says Giraffe, in a friendly way.
No one says anything else.
‘Well …’ says Pin.
‘Well …’ says Gian the driver. ‘What’s new?’
Pin is beginning to feel rather deflated.
‘Well …’ says Michel the Frenchman. ‘Feeling low? Sing us a song, Pin.’
They’re pretending not to be interested, thinks Pin, but really they’re dying to know what I’ve done.
‘Right then,’ says Pin. But this doesn’t work: his throat is dry, it feels as if he has a lump in it like when he is afraid of breaking down and crying.
‘Right then,’ he says again. ‘Which song do you want?’
‘Which song?’ echoes Michel.
Giraffe then says, ‘How boring it is tonight, I wish I was home in my bed.’
Pin is now fed up with this game and asks, ‘And what about that man?’
‘Who?’
‘The man who was sitting there before?’
‘Ah,’ the others reply, shaking their heads. Then they start talking in a low voice again.
‘I for one,’ says Michel to the others, ‘would not want to compromise myself too much for these people from the Committee. I don’t feel like risking my skin just to save their faces.’
‘It’s alright,’ says Gian the driver. ‘After all, what have we agreed to? We said we’ll see. For the time being it is in our interests to have some connection with them without committing ourselves, and to bide our time. In my case I’ve got a score to settle with the Germans from the time I served on the front with them, and if it’s a case of getting stuck in, I’m willing enough.’
‘That’s all very well,’ says Michel, ‘but remember that the Germans are no laughing matter, and no one knows how all this is going to end up. The Committee wants us to form
a Gap; right then, we’ll set up our own Gap.’
‘Meanwhile,’ says Giraffe, ‘we’ll show them that we’re on their side and get guns. Once we’ve got guns, though …’
Pin has a gun: he can feel the pistol underneath his jacket, and puts his hand over it, as though the men were about to take it from him.
‘Have you got arms?’ he asks.
‘Don’t you worry about that,’ exclaims Giraffe. ‘You worry about getting hold of that German’s pistol, as we’d agreed.’
Pin’s ears go up. Now he’ll say: ‘Just guess …’
‘Make sure you don’t lose sight of it, once you’ve set eyes on it.’
This is not what Pin expected. Why are they so uninterested in it now? He begins to wish he had not taken the pistol, and feels like going back to the German and putting it back where it was.
‘For one pistol,’ says Michel. ‘It’s not worth the risk. Anyway it’s an old model; heavy, it jams.’
‘Still,’ says Giraffe, ‘we must show the committee we’re doing something, that’s the important thing.’ And they continue their discussion in low voices.
Pin cannot hear what they are saying. Now he’s sure he won’t give them the pistol; he has tears in his eyes and can feel his gums drawn with rage. Grown-ups are an untrustworthy, treacherous lot, they don’t take their games in the serious wholehearted way children do, and yet they too have their own games, one more serious than the other, one game inside another, so that it’s impossible to discover what the real one is. Before it seemed that they were playing a game with the unknown man against the German, now they are playing one on their own against the unknown man; what they say can never be trusted.
‘Well, sing us something, then, Pin,’ they say now, as if nothing had happened, as if there had never been that definite pact between them, a pact consecrated by that mysterious word: Gap.
‘Alé,’ says Pin, pale, his lips trembling. He knows he cannot sing now. He feels like bursting into tears; instead of which he breaks into a shriek high enough to break the eardrums, ending in a string of curses: ‘Bastards! The mother of every one of you was a pox-ridden bitch, a filthy stinking cow of a whore!’
The others stare at him, wondering what is wrong with him, but Pin has already rushed out of the tavern.
Outside, his first impulse is to look for that man, the one they call ‘Committee’, and give him the pistol; he’s the only one for whom Pin feels any respect now, though he had been so quiet and serious he had made Pin distrustful before. But now Pin feels that he is the only person who can understand him and admire what he has done; perhaps ‘Committee’ would take Pin off to fight the Germans with him, just the two of them, armed with that pistol, firing from street corners. But who knew where Committee had gone to now? Pin cannot ask around after him, as no one had ever seen him before.
So Pin decides that he will keep the pistol himself and not give it to anyone or tell anyone that he has it. He’ll just hint that he possesses a terrible power, and everyone will obey him. Whoever owns a real pistol must be able to play wonderful games, games which no other boy has ever played. But Pin is a boy who does not know how to play games, and cannot take part in the games either of children or grown-ups. So he will go off now, away from everyone, and play with his pistol all on his own, games that no one else knows and no one else can ever learn.
It is dark now. Pin turns out of the huddle of old houses into paths running between vegetable patches and rubbish-pits. The wire-netting around the crops throws a network of grey shadows over the moonlit ground. The hens are now sleeping in rows on their perches in the coops, and the frogs are out of the water and chorusing away along the bed of the whole torrent, from source to mouth. What would happen if he shot at a frog? There’d be nothing left, perhaps, but green slime squashed on the stones.
Pin wanders along the paths which wind along the side of the torrent, steep parts which no one cultivates. Here there are paths which he alone knows and which the other boys would love to be told about. There is a place where spiders make their nests. Only Pin knows it. He’s the only one in the whole valley, perhaps in the whole area. No other boy except Pin has ever heard of spiders that make nests.
Perhaps one day Pin will find a friend, a real friend, who understands him and whom he can understand, and then to him, and only to him, will he show the place where the spiders have their lairs. It’s on a stony little path which winds down to the torrent between earthy grassy slopes. There, in the grass, the spiders make their nests, in tunnels lined with dry grass. But the wonderful thing is that the nests have tiny doors, also made of dried grass, tiny round doors which can open and shut.
When Pin has played some particularly cruel joke and has laughed so much that a heavy sadness has finally filled his chest, he wanders all alone along the paths by the torrent, looking for the place where the spiders make their nests. With a long stick he can probe right into the nests and skewer the spider, a small black spider with little grey markings on it, like those on the summer dresses of old village women.
It amuses Pin to break the doors of the nests down and skewer the spiders on sticks, and to catch grasshoppers and gaze close into their absurd, green, horse-like faces, then cut them up into pieces and make strange designs with their legs on a smooth stone.
Pin is cruel to animals; to him they are as monstrous and incomprehensible as grown-ups; it must be horrible to be an insect, to be green and to shit in little drops, and always to be frightened that a human being like him might come along, with a huge face full of ginger and brown freckles, and fingers that can pull grasshoppers to bits.
Pin is now all alone among the spiders’ nests, and around him is night, infinite as the chorus of the frogs. He is alone but he has the pistol with him; now he puts on the belt with its holster to dangle over his bottom like the German; only the German was so fat the belt was large enough to be worn round Pin’s neck like the bandoliers worn by warriors in the films. Now he can pull the pistol out with a grand gesture as if he were drawing a sword, and shout: ‘Forward, men!’ as boys do when they play at pirates. But he cannot understand what pleasure those silly fools get in saying and doing that; Pin, after jumping around on the grass for a time, waving the pistol and aiming it at the shadows of olive trees, is already bored and does not know what to do with the gun next.
At that moment the spiders underground are gnawing away at worms or coupling together, males and females, giving out little threads of slime; they are as filthy as men are, Pin thinks, and he pushes the barrel of the pistol into the opening of a nest, longing to kill them. What would happen if a shot went off? The houses are some way off and no one would realize where it came from.
Pin now has his finger on the trigger, with the pistol pointed into a spider’s nest; it is difficult to resist the longing to press the trigger, but the safety-catch must be on and he does not know how to cope with it.
Then a shot goes off so suddenly that Pin does not even realize he has fired it; the pistol jumps back in his hand, smoking and dirty all over with earth. The tunnel of the nest has collapsed; on to it has fallen a little landslide of earth and the grass is singed.
At first Pin is terrified, then delighted. How lovely it was, how good the powder smells! But then he is terrified again to find the frogs have suddenly all gone silent and not a sound is to be heard, as if that shot had killed off the entire world. Then, very far away, a frog begins to croak again, and another nearer by, and others nearer still, till the chorus starts up again and the croaking seems to Pin louder, much louder, than before. From the houses a dog barks and a woman calls from a window. Pin thinks he won’t fire again, for that silence and then those sounds have frightened him. But he’ll come back another night and nothing will frighten him then; he’ll fire every round in the pistol, even at the bats and the cats prowling round the chicken-coops.
Now he must find a place to hide the pistol; in the trunk of an olive tree; or burying it would be better; or better sti
ll scoop out a hole in the grassy bank where the spiders’ nests are and cover it over with mould and grass. Pin begins scooping away with his hands at a part where the earth is already honeycombed with tunnels made by the spiders, takes the pistol off its belt and puts it into the holster, and covers it all over with mould and grass and bits from the walls of chewed grass made by the spiders. Then he places some stones so that he can recognize the spot, and runs off lashing out at the bushes with the gun-belt. His way home takes him back along the little man-made channels running above the torrent-bed, with narrow lines of stones to walk on.