And so the struggle began again. They had lit the last lamp, and in its dwindling light they could see the floodwater steadily, stubbornly, rising. It reached their ankles, then their knees. The road sloped upwards, so they sought refuge at the far end, which gave them a few hours’ respite. But the water caught up with them, and it was soon waist-high. Standing with their backs pressed against the rock, they watched it rise and rise. Once it reached their mouths, it would all be over. They had hung the lamp from the roof, where it cast a yellow gleam over the rippled surface of the fast-moving water; but as it faded, all they could see was its semicircle of light being gradually eaten away by the darkness, which itself seemed to increase as the floodwater rose; and suddenly the darkness engulfed them, the lamp had spluttered on its last drop of oil and gone out. They were in total, utter blackness, the blackness of the earth where now they would sleep without ever again opening their eyes to the brightness of the sun.
‘God Almighty!’ Étienne swore softly.
Catherine huddled against him, as though she had felt the darkness trying to grab her. Quietly she recited the miners’ saying:
‘Death blows out the lamp.’
Yet in the face of this new threat they instinctively fought on, revived by a feverish desire to live. Étienne began furiously to dig into the shale with the hook from the lamp, and Catherine helped with her bare nails. They carved out a kind of raised bench, and when they had hoisted themselves on to it, they found themselves sitting with their legs dangling and their backs hunched under the roof. The icy water now reached only as far as their heels; but gradually they felt its cold grip on their ankles, and their calves, and their knees, as the flood rose remorselessly, inexorably, higher and higher. They had not been able to level the seat out properly, and it was so wet and slimy that they had to hold on tight in order not to slide off. The end had come, for how long could they go on waiting like this, exhausted, starving, without food or light, and confined to this niche in the wall where they didn’t even dare move? But it was the darkness they found the hardest to bear, for it prevented them from observing the approach of death. There was deep silence. The bloated mine lay perfectly still; and all they could feel beneath them, swelling up from the roadways below, was the rising tide of its noiseless sea.
Hour followed upon black hour, though they could not tell how long it had been for their sense of time was now almost gone. Their torment should have made the minutes drag, but instead it made them race past. They thought they’d been trapped for only two days and one night whereas in reality they were coming to the end of their third day. They had given up all hope of being saved; nobody knew they were there – in any case nobody had the means to reach them – and hunger would finish them off even if the floodwater didn’t. They thought of tapping out the signal one last time, but the stone was under the water. In any case, who would hear them?
Catherine had leaned her aching head against the coal-seam in weary resignation when suddenly she gave a start:
‘Listen,’ she said.
At first Étienne thought she meant the faint sound of the rising water. So he lied, hoping to comfort her:
‘It’s only me. I was moving my legs.’
‘No, no, not that!…Further away. Listen.’
And she pressed her ear to the coal. He realized what she meant and did the same. They held their breath and waited for some seconds. Then, far away, very faintly, they heard three carefully spaced taps. But they still couldn’t believe it; perhaps their ears were making the noise, perhaps it was the rock shifting. And they didn’t know what they could use to answer with.
Étienne had an idea.
‘You’ve still got the clogs. Take them off and use the heels.’
She tapped out the miners’ signal; they listened, and once again, far away, they made out the sound of three taps. Twenty times they did it, and twenty times the reply came. They were crying and hugging each other, nearly falling off as they did so. The comrades were there at last, they were on their way. All memory of their anguished waiting and of the fury they had felt when their earlier tapping had gone unanswered was swept away in an outpouring of joy and love, as if all the rescuers had to do now was to open up the rock with their little fingers and set them free.
‘How about that!’ she exclaimed happily. ‘Lucky I leaned my head when I did!’
‘That’s some hearing you’ve got!’ he replied. ‘I didn’t hear a thing.’
From then on they took it in turns so that one of them was always listening and ready to reply to the slightest signal. Soon they could hear the sound of picks: they must be beginning to cut a way through to them, they must be sinking a new shaft. Not a sound escaped them. But their elation subsided. Try as they might to put on a brave face for each other, they were beginning to lose hope again. At first they had discussed the situation endlessly: it was clear the men were coming from Réquillart, they were digging down through the seam, perhaps they were making three shafts, because there were always three men digging. But then they began to talk less and eventually relapsed into silence when they considered the enormous mass of rock separating them from the comrades. They pursued their thoughts in silence, calculating the days upon days it would take someone to bore through so much rock. The men would never reach them in time, they could both have died twenty times over by then. Not daring to say anything to each other as their own anguish increased, they gloomily answered the calls by drumming out their signal with the clogs, not in hope but out of an instinctive need to let people know that they were still alive.
Another day passed, and then another. They had now been down there for six days. The water, having reached their knees, was neither rising nor falling; and their legs felt as though they were dissolving in its icy bath. They could lift them out for an hour or so, but it was so uncomfortable sitting in this position that they suffered terrible cramp and were forced to put them back. Every ten minutes they had to wriggle their bottoms back up the slippery rock. Jagged fragments of coal dug into their backs, and they had a permanent sharp pain at the tops of their spines from bowing their heads all the time to avoid the rock above. The atmosphere was becoming more and more suffocating, since the water had compressed the air into the sort of bubble they were sitting in. The sound of their voices, muffled therefore, seemed to come from a long way away. Their ears started buzzing with strange noises: they would hear bells ringing madly or what sounded like a herd of animals galloping through an endless hailstorm.
At first Catherine suffered horribly from the lack of food. She would press her poor clenched fists to her throat, and her breath came in long, wheezing, ear-splitting moans as if her stomach were being removed by forceps. Étienne, racked by the same torture, was groping round desperately in the dark when, right next to him, his fingers came on a piece of half-rotten timber, which he broke up with his nails. He gave Catherine a handful, which she devoured greedily. For two days they lived off this mouldy piece of wood; they ate the whole thing and were in despair when they finished it, scratching away till their fingers were raw in the attempt to start on other bits of wood that were still sound and whose fibres refused to give. Their torment grew worse, and they were furious to find that they couldn’t eat the material of their clothes. Étienne’s leather belt brought a modicum of relief: he bit off little pieces for her, which she chewed to a pulp and tried her hardest to swallow. It gave their jaws something to do while affording them the illusion of eating. Then, when the belt was finished, they started to chew their clothes again, sucking them for hours on end.
But soon these violent cramps passed, and their hunger was no more than a dull pain deep inside them, the sensation that their strength was slowly and gradually ebbing out of them. They would no doubt have died already if they had not had as much water as they wanted. They had only to bend over and drink from their cupped hands; and they did so continually, for they had such a burning thirst that even all this water could not quench it.
On the
seventh day Catherine was leaning forward to drink when her hand knocked against something floating in front of her.
‘Here, what’s this?’
Étienne felt around in the darkness.
‘I don’t know. It seems to be the cover of a ventilation door.’ She drank the water, but as she was taking a second mouthful, the object touched her hand again. And she gave a terrible shriek:
‘Oh, my God! It’s him!’
‘Who?
‘Him. You know. I could feel his moustache.’
It was Chaval’s body, which had floated up the incline towards them on the rising water. Étienne stretched out his arm and felt the moustache and the crushed nose; and he shuddered with revulsion and fear. Catherine suddenly felt terribly sick and spat out the rest of the water. It was as though she’d just been drinking blood, as though the deep pool in front of her was actually a pool of this man’s blood.
‘Hold on,’ Étienne stammered, ‘I’ll soon get rid of him.’
He pushed the body away with his foot. But soon they could feel it bumping against their legs again.
‘For Christ’s sake, go away!’
But after a third attempt Étienne had to let it be. Some current must be bringing it back all the time. Chaval was refusing to leave; he wanted to be with them, to be right up close to them. He was a gruesome companion, and his presence made the air even fouler. All through that day they went without water, resisting the need and believing they would rather die than drink it, and only on the following day did the pain finally change their minds: they would push the body away each time they took a mouthful, but drink they did. They might as well not have bothered smashing his skull in if he was now going to come between them again, as stubbornly jealous as ever. Even though he was dead, he would always be with them, to the bitter end, preventing them from ever being alone together.
Another day went by, and another. With each little wave Étienne could feel the man he had killed gently bumping against him in the water, like a companion nudging him quietly to remind him of his presence. And each time he would give a shudder. He kept seeing him in his mind’s eye, all green and bloated, with his squashed face and his red moustache. Then he couldn’t remember any more and began to think he hadn’t killed him, that this was Chaval swimming in the water and about to bite him. Catherine now cried constantly for long periods at a time, after which she would lapse, exhausted, into semi-consciousness. Eventually she fell into a deep sleep from which it was impossible to rouse her. Étienne would wake her up, and she would mumble incoherently before going straight back to sleep, sometimes without even opening her eyes; and he had now put his arm round her waist in case she slid off and drowned. It fell to him to reply to the comrades. The sound of the picks was getting closer, from somewhere behind his back. But his own strength was failing, and he had lost the will to tap. They knew they were there, so why tire himself out further? He no longer cared whether they came or not. The long wait had left him in such a dazed state that for hours at a time he would quite forget what it was he was actually waiting for.
There was one crumb of comfort. The water was going down, and Chaval’s body drifted away. The rescue party had been at work for nine days now, and Étienne and Catherine were just taking their first steps along the roadway again when a horrifying explosion threw them to the ground. They groped for each other in the dark and then huddled together, terrified out of their wits, uncomprehending, thinking that disaster had struck once more. Nothing stirred, and the sound of the picks had stopped.
In the corner where they were sitting side by side, Catherine gave a little laugh:
‘It must be lovely outside…Come on, let’s go and see.’
At first Étienne fought against this delusion, but even his stronger head found it catching, and he lost all grip on reality. Their five senses were beginning to play them false, especially Catherine’s, who was delirious with fever and tormented by the need to speak and make gestures with her hands. The ringing in her ears had turned into birdsong and the gentle murmur of running water; she caught the strong smell of trampled grass; and she clearly saw large patches of yellow swimming in front of her eyes, so large that she thought she was out in the cornfields by the canal on a beautiful sunny day.
‘Oh, it’s so hot today!…Come, take me, and let’s be together for ever and ever.’
As he held her, she rubbed herself slowly against his body, chattering away in a happy girlish fashion:
‘We’ve been so silly to wait all this time! I’d have gone with you from the start, but you didn’t realize and just sulked…And then, do you remember, those nights at home when we couldn’t sleep, lying there listening to each other breathing and desperately wanting to do it?’
Her gaiety was infectious, and he joked as he recalled their unspoken affection for each other:
‘Remember that time you hit me! Oh yes, you did! You slapped me on both cheeks!’
‘It was because I loved you,’ she murmured. ‘You see, I’d forbidden myself to think about you. I kept telling myself it was all over between us. But deep down I knew that one day sooner or later we’d be together…We just needed the opportunity, some lucky moment, didn’t we?’
A cold shiver ran down his back, as though he wanted to banish such fond thoughts, but then he said slowly:
‘It’s never all over. People just need a bit of luck, and then they can start over again.’
‘So you’ll have me, then? Is this the moment at last?’
With that she went limp in his arms, barely conscious. She was so weak that her already faint voice trailed away altogether. Fearing the worst, he pressed her to his heart:
‘Are you all right?’
She sat up in astonishment.
‘Yes, of course!…Why not?’
But his question had roused her from her dream. She stared wildly at the darkness and wrung her hands as a fresh wave of sobbing overtook her.
‘My God, my God! It’s so dark!’
Gone were the cornfields and the smell of grass, the skylarks singing and the big yellow sun. She was back in the mine with its rock-falls and floods, back in the stench-filled darkness and listening to the lugubrious sound of dripping water, down in this cave where they had lain dying for so many days. The tricks played by her senses now made it all seem even more horrific. Once again she fell prey to the superstitions of her childhood and saw the Black Man, the old miner whose ghost haunted the pit and strangled the life out of naughty girls.
‘Listen, did you hear that?’
‘No, I can’t hear anything.’
‘Yes, you can. It’s the Man…You know?…There, that’s him…The earth has bled itself to death out of revenge because somebody cut its vein, and now he has come. Look, there he is! You can see him! Blacker than the darkness…Oh, I’m so afraid, so afraid!’
She shivered and fell silent. Then, very quietly, she went on:
‘No, it isn’t. It’s still the other one.’
‘Which other one?’
‘The one who’s with us. The one who’s dead.’
She couldn’t get the thought of Chaval out of her head, and she began to talk about him in a rambling way, about the miserable life they’d had together, about the one time he’d been nice to her, at Jean-Bart, and about all the other days of cuddles and bruises when he’d smother her with kisses having just beaten the daylights out of her.
‘Honestly, he’s after us! He’s going to have another go, he wants to stop us ever being alone together!…It’s his same old jealousy!…Oh, send him away! Please! Keep me with you, keep me all to yourself!’
She had thrown her arms round Étienne’s neck and was clinging to him, seeking out his mouth and pressing her lips passionately against his. The darkness parted, the sun returned, and she began once more to laugh the happy laugh of a girl in love. And he, trembling as his skin felt the touch of her body, half naked under her jacket and tattered trousers, pulled her towards him, roused in his manhood. Now
at last they had their wedding night, down in this tomb upon a bed of mud. For they did not want to die before knowing happiness: theirs was a stubborn need to live life, and to make a life, just one last time. And thus, despairing of all else, they loved each other, in the midst of death.
Then there was nothing. Étienne sat on the ground, still in the same corner, with Catherine lying motionless across his knees. Hour after hour went by. For a long time he thought she was asleep, then he touched her: she was very cold. She was dead. And yet he did not move, for fear of waking her. The thought that he had been the first to have her as a woman, and that she could be pregnant, moved him. He had other thoughts, too, about wanting to go away with her and about the joyous things they would do together, but they were so vague that they seemed simply to stroke his brow like the gentle breath of sleep. He was growing weaker and could manage only the smallest movement, such as slowly raising his hand to stroke her cold, stiff body, making sure she was still there, like a child asleep on his lap. Everything was gradually fading into nothingness: the darkness itself had vanished, and he was nowhere, beyond time and space. Yes, there was a tapping sound just behind his head, and it was getting louder and louder; but to begin with he had felt so completely exhausted that he couldn’t be bothered to go and reply, and now he had no idea what was happening and kept dreaming that Catherine was walking ahead of him and that he was listening to the gentle clatter of her clogs. Two days went by: she hadn’t moved, and he stroked her automatically, glad to know that she was so peaceful.
Étienne felt a jolt. He could hear a rumble of voices, and rocks were rolling down to his feet. When he saw a lamp, he wept. His blinking eyes followed the light, and he couldn’t watch it enough, in ecstasy at the sight of this pinprick of reddish light which barely pierced the darkness. But now some comrades were lifting him up to carry him away, and he allowed them to pour spoonfuls of broth between his locked jaws. It was only when they reached the main Réquillart roadway that he recognized someone, Négrel the engineer, who was standing there in front of him; and these two men who despised each other, the rebellious worker and the sceptical boss, threw their arms round each other and sobbed their hearts out, both of them shaken to the very core of their humanity. And into their immense sadness entered all the misery of countless generations and all the excess of pain and grief that it is possible to know in this life.