Étienne looked at him and then at the stain he had just made on the ground.
‘So,’ he went on, ‘have you been working at the pit for long?’
Bonnemort spread his arms wide.
‘Long? I should say!…I wasn’t even eight years old the first time I went down a mine. It was Le Voreux, as it happens. And today I’m fifty-eight. You work it out…I’ve done every job there is down there. Simple pit-boy to start with, then putter once I was strong enough to push the tubs, and then hewer for eighteen years. After that, because of my damned legs, they put me on maintenance work, filling in seams, repairing the roads, that sort of thing, until the day they had to bring me up and give me a surface job because the doctor said otherwise I’d ’ave stayed down there for good. So five years ago they made me a driver…Not bad, eh? Fifty years working at the pit, and forty-five of them underground!’
As he spoke, flaming coals would now and again fall from the brazier and cast a gleam of blood-red light across his pallid face.
‘And then they tell me to call it a day,’ he went on. ‘Not likely. They must think I’m daft!…I can manage another two years all right, till I’m sixty, so I get the pension of a hundred and eighty francs. If I was to pack it in now, they’d turn round and give me the one at a hundred and fifty. Cunning buggers!…Anyway, I’m as fit as a fiddle, apart from my legs. It’s the water that’s got under my skin, you see, what with getting soaked all the time down at the coal-face. Some days I can’t even put one foot in front of the other without screaming the place down.’
He was interrupted by another fit of coughing.
‘And that’s what makes you cough as well?’ asked Étienne.
But he shook his head fiercely. When he could speak, he continued:
‘No, no, I caught a cold, last month. I never used to cough, but now I just can’t get rid of it…And the funny part is I keep coughing this stuff up. More and more of it.’
A rasp rose in his throat, and he spat black phlegm.
‘Is it blood?’ Étienne asked, eventually daring to put the question.
Slowly Bonnemort wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.
‘It’s coal…I’ve got enough coal inside this carcass of mine to keep me warm for the rest of my days. And it’s five whole years since I was last down the mine. Seems I was storing it up without even knowing. Ah well, it’s a good preservative!’
There was silence; the distant, rhythmic sound of hammering could be heard coming from the pit, and the moan of the wind continued to sweep past, like a cry of hunger and exhaustion rising from the depths of the night. Standing beside the startled flickering of the flames, the old man went on, lowering his voice as he revisited his memories. Oh yes indeed! He and his family were old hands at cutting the coal! They’d been working for the Montsou Mining Company ever since the beginning, and that was a long time ago, one hundred and six years to be precise. It was his grandfather, Guillaume Maheu, then a lad of fifteen, who had discovered soft coal at Réquillart, which had become the Company’s first pit but was now just an old disused shaft, over near the Fauvelle sugar-refinery. That much was common knowledge, and proof was that the new seam had been called the Guillaume seam, after his grandfather’s Christian name. He hadn’t known him himself, but he’d been a big man by all accounts, and very strong. Died in his bed at the age of sixty. Then there was his father, Nicolas Maheu, known as Maheu the Red. He’d died when he was barely forty, at Le Voreux, back when they were still sinking the shaft; a rock-fall it was, completely flattened him, swallowed him whole, bones, flesh, blood, the lot. Two of his uncles and then, later on, his own three brothers had all lost their lives down there. As for him, Vincent Maheu, he’d managed to escape more or less unscathed, apart from his gammy legs, that is, and everyone thought him a clever bastard for doing so. But what else could you do? You had to work, and this was simply what they did, from father to son, the same as they’d have done any other job. And now here was his own son, Toussaint Maheu, working himself to death down the pit, and his grandsons too, and everybody else who lived over there in the village. A hundred and six years of cutting coal, first the old men, then the kids, and all for the same boss. There weren’t many bourgeois, were there, who could trace their ancestry for you quite so neatly?
‘So long as we’ve got something to eat!’ Étienne muttered again.
‘That’s just what I say. As long as there’s bread to eat, we’ll survive.’
Bonnemort fell silent, his gaze directed towards the village where gleams of light were beginning to appear one after the other.
Four o’clock was chiming on the Montsou clock-tower. The cold was getting even sharper.
‘So it’s rich then, is it, this Company of yours?’ Étienne went on.
The old man’s shoulders rose in a shrug and then sagged as though beneath an avalanche of gold coins.
‘Oh, yes, it’s rich all right…though maybe not as rich as the one next door, the one at Anzin.6 But it’s got millions and millions all the same…They’ve lost count. Nineteen pits they have, with thirteen producing coal – like Le Voreux, La Victoire, Crèvecœur, Mirou, Saint-Thomas, Madeleine, Feutry-Cantel and the others – and then six for drainage or ventilation, like Réquillart…Ten thousand workers, concessions stretching over sixty-seven communes, a production level of five thousand tons a day, a railway linking all the pits, and workshops, and factories!…Oh, yes, there’s plenty of money around all right!’
The big yellow horse pricked his ears at the sound of tubs rumbling across the trestles. They must have fixed the cage down below, the banksmen had returned to work. As he harnessed his horse for the downward journey, the driver added softly, addressing the animal:
‘Mustn’t get into the habit of standing about nattering, eh, you lazy old thing!…If Monsieur Hennebeau knew how you were wasting your time!’
Étienne was staring pensively into the night.
‘So the mine belongs to Monsieur Hennebeau, does it?’ he asked.
‘No,’ the old man explained. ‘He’s only the colliery manager. He gets paid just like the rest of us.’
The young man pointed towards the vast expanse of darkness:
‘So who owns all this, then?’
But Bonnemort was temporarily seized by another coughing fit of such violence that he could not catch his breath. At length, having spat and wiped the black spittle from his lips, he answered above the strengthening wind:
‘What’s that? Who owns it all?…Nobody knows exactly…People just…’
And with a wave of his hand he gestured towards an indeterminate point in the gloom, a remote, unknown place inhabited by these ‘people’ on whose behalf the Maheu family had been working the seams for over a century.
His voice had assumed a tone of almost religious awe, as though he were talking about some forbidden temple that concealed the squat and sated deity to whom they all offered up their flesh but whom no one had ever seen.
‘But if we at least had enough to eat,’ Étienne said for the third time, without apparent connection.
‘That’s true enough! If there was always enough bread to eat, we’d be laughing!’
The horse had set off, and the driver in turn disappeared, dragging his ailing limbs. The tippler-operator had not stirred and continued to sit there hunched in a ball, his chin thrust between his knees, staring into the void with wide, expressionless eyes.
Étienne picked up his bundle but lingered a while longer. He could feel the icy blasts of wind on his back while his chest roasted in the heat from the fire. Perhaps he should try at the pit all the same, the old man might be mistaken; and anyway he was past caring now, he’d take whatever they gave him. Where else could he go, what else could he do, when so many people round about were starving and out of work? Was he to end up like a stray dog, a dead carcass lying behind some wall or other? And yet something made him hesitate, a fear of Le Voreux itself, out here in the middle of this open plain that lay buried in thick
darkness. With each gust the force of the wind seemed to increase, as if it were blowing in from an ever-widening horizon. No dawn paled the dead sky; there was only the blaze of the tall blast-furnaces and the coke-ovens, turning the darkness blood red but shining no light into the unknown. And Le Voreux, crouching like some evil beast at the bottom of its lair, seemed to hunker down even further, puffing and panting in increasingly slow, deep bursts, as if it were struggling to digest its meal of human flesh.
II
Surrounded by the fields of corn and beet, the mining village called Two Hundred and Forty1 lay sleeping beneath the black sky. One could just make out the four huge blocks of little back-to-back houses, all geometrically arranged in parallel lines like the blocks of a barracks or a hospital and separated by three broad avenues of equal-sized gardens. And across the deserted plateau all that could be heard was the moaning of the wind as it blew through the broken lattice fences.
At the Maheus’ house, Number Sixteen in the second block, nothing stirred. Thick darkness filled the one and only first-floor room: it bore down like a crushing weight on the people sleeping there, whose presence could be felt rather than seen as they lay crowded together, their mouths open, stunned by exhaustion. Despite the bitter cold outside, the air was heavy with the warmth of the living, that stuffy heat to be found in even the best-kept bedrooms, with its reek of the human herd.
The cuckoo clock downstairs struck four, but still nothing, only the faint whistle of breathing and the deeper sound of two people snoring. And then, all of a sudden, it was Catherine who rose first. In her tiredness she had counted the four chimes as usual, through the floorboards, but without finding the strength to rouse herself completely. Then, having swung her legs out of bed, she groped about and finally struck a match to light the candle. But she remained seated, her head so heavy that it slumped back between her shoulders, yielding to an irresistible desire to fall back on to the bolster.
The candle now lit up the square room, which had two windows and was filled with three beds. There was a wardrobe, a table and two chairs made of seasoned walnut whose smoky-brown colour stood out starkly against the walls, which were painted bright yellow. And that was all, apart from some clothes hanging on nails and a jug standing on the tiled floor next to a red earthenware dish that served as a basin. In the bed on the left, Zacharie, the eldest, a lad of twenty-one, lay beside his brother Jeanlin, who was nearly eleven; in the bed on the right, two little ones, Lénore and Henri, the first aged six, the other four, lay in each other’s arms; while the third bed was shared by Catherine and her sister Alzire, aged nine, who was so puny for her age that Catherine wouldn’t even have felt her next to her had it not been for the sickly child’s hunchback, which kept digging into her. The glass-panelled door to the bedroom stood open, and one could see the landing beyond, a kind of alcove in which their father and mother occupied the fourth bed. Next to it they had had to install the cradle of the latest addition to the family, Estelle, who was barely three months old.
Catherine made a supreme effort to force herself awake. She stretched and then ran her taut fingers through the tousled red hair that fell over her forehead and down the nape of her neck. She was of slight build for a fifteen-year-old, and all that could be seen outside the tight sheath of her nightshirt were her bluish feet, which looked as though they had been tattooed with coal, and her delicate arms whose milky whiteness stood out against her sallow complexion, itself already ruined by constant scrubbings with black soap. Her mouth, which was a little large, opened in a final yawn to reveal a fine array of teeth set in pale, anaemic gums. Her grey eyes watered as she struggled to stay awake, and they held such an expression of pain and exhaustion that her whole body seemed to be swelling with fatigue.
But a growling sound came from the landing as, in a voice thick with sleep, Maheu muttered:
‘God! Is it that time already…Is that you, Catherine?’
‘Yes, Dad…The clock downstairs has just struck.’
‘Hurry up then, you lazy girl! If you hadn’t spent all Sunday night dancing, you could have got us up earlier…Anyone would think we didn’t have a job of work to go to!’
He grumbled on, but gradually sleep overtook him again; his reproaches became muddled and eventually subsided to be replaced by a new bout of snoring.
The girl moved about the room in her nightshirt, barefoot on the tiled floor. As she passed Henri and Lénore’s bed, she covered them with the blanket, which had slipped off the bed; neither woke up, since both were lost to the world in the deep sleep of children. Alzire had opened her eyes and rolled over without a word to occupy the warm spot left by her elder sister.
‘Come on, Zacharie! You, too, Jeanlin,’ Catherine repeated, standing by her two brothers who each lay sprawled on his front with his nose in the bolster.
She had to grab the older of the two by the shoulder and shake him; and then, while he was muttering insults under his breath, she decided to strip the sheet off the bed. She thought this was a great joke and began to laugh at the sight of the two of them flailing about with bare legs.
‘Stop messing about. Leave me be!’ grumbled Zacharie crossly after he had sat up. ‘It’s not funny…And now we’ve bloody got to get up!’
He was a thin, gangling type of fellow, with a long face smudged by the beginnings of a beard and with the same yellow hair and anaemic pallor as the rest of his family. His nightshirt had ridden up round his stomach and he pulled it down, not for decency’s sake but because he was cold.
‘The clock downstairs has gone four,’ Catherine repeated. ‘Come on, get a move on! Father’s getting angry.’
Jeanlin, who had curled up again in a ball, shut his eyes and said:
‘Get lost. I’m asleep.’
Once more she gave a good-natured laugh. He was so small, with his frail limbs and huge joints swollen from scrofula,2 that she gathered him up in her arms. But he tried to wriggle free, and his face – a wan, wrinkled, monkey-like mask pierced by two green eyes and widened by two large ears – was white with rage at his own weakness. He said nothing, and bit her on the right breast.
‘Little bastard!’ she muttered, stifling a cry and putting him down.
Alzire had not gone back to sleep but lay there silently with the sheet pulled up to her chin. With her clever, sick-child eyes she watched as her sister and brothers now got dressed. Another quarrel broke out over by the basin when the two boys shoved Catherine aside because she was taking too long to wash. Night-shirts were abandoned as, still half asleep, they relieved themselves, without embarrassment, as easy and natural with each other as a litter of puppies who have grown up together. In the end Catherine was ready first. She slipped on her miner’s trousers, donned her cloth jacket, and fastened her blue cap3 over her hair-bun; and in her clean Monday clothes she looked just like a little man. Nothing of her own sex remained, only the gentle sway of the hips.
‘The old man’s going to be really pleased to find the bed unmade when he gets back,’ Zacharie said grumpily. ‘I’ll tell him it was you, you know.’
The ‘old man’ was Bonnemort, their grandfather, who worked nights and so slept by day, with the result that the bed never got cold. There was always someone snoring away in it.
Without a word of reply Catherine had already begun to straighten and smooth the blanket. By now noises could be heard coming from the neighbouring house, on the other side of the wall. These brick constructions put up by the Company were cheaply built, and the walls were so thin that one could hear the slightest sound. Everyone lived cheek by jowl, from one end of the village to the other; and none of life’s intimacies remained hidden, not even from the children. Stairs shook with heavy footsteps, and then there was a gentle thud, followed by a contented sigh.
‘As usual!’ said Catherine. ‘Down goes Levaque, and up comes Bouteloup. La Levaque here we come!’
Jeanlin sniggered, and even Alzire’s eyes shone. Each morning they shared the same joke about the three
some next door, where a hewer was renting a room out to one of the stonemen, which meant that the wife could have two men, one for the night and one for the day.
‘Philomène’s coughing,’ Catherine went on, after listening for a moment.
She was talking about the Levaques’ eldest daughter, a tall girl of nineteen, who was Zacharie’s girlfriend and had already had two children by him. As if that was not enough, she had such a weak chest that she had never been able to work down the mine and worked instead in the screening-shed.
‘Pah! Philomène!’ Zacharie retorted. ‘Fat lot she cares, she’s asleep!…It’s disgusting, it really is, lying in like that till six in the morning.’
He was in the middle of pulling on his trousers when suddenly an idea occurred to him and he opened the window. Outside in the darkness the village was waking, and lights were going on one by one, visible between the slats of the shutters. There was another argument: as Zacharie leaned out to see if he could spot the overman from Le Voreux emerging from the Pierrons’ house opposite, where people said he was sleeping with Pierron’s wife, his sister shouted at him that Pierron had been working on the day shift at pit-bottom since yesterday and that therefore Dansaert would obviously not have been able to spend the night there. Gusts of icy-cold air were blowing into the room, and the two of them were angrily insisting on the accuracy of their information when there was a sudden wailing and screaming. It was Estelle in her cot, who had been disturbed by the cold.
Maheu woke up at once. What on earth was the matter with him? Here he was going back to sleep like some good-for-nothing layabout. And he swore so savagely that the children in the next room did not breathe another word. Zacharie and Jeanlin finished washing, slowly, for both of them were already weary. Alzire kept staring, wide-eyed. The two little ones, Lénore and Henri, still lay wrapped in each other’s arms, both of them breathing in the same short breaths; neither had stirred an inch, despite the racket.