The clouds were low, the rain was still falling. Herman took his umbrella, but he had nothing to put on his feet except the flimsy pair of shoes that had drawn the gendarme’s gaze, and they were still thoroughly soaked. For that matter, the ambient wetness seemed to have already impregnated his clothes, the mattress, even the furniture, which looked oddly dark and damp. His hair felt faintly wet, the house funereal.
“Everything’s turned hostile all of a sudden,” he groaned. “Is it because I’ve seen the fall, is this the price you have to pay?”
He slammed the door as he walked out, not locking it. And with that he made a wish not to cross the threshold of that house again until the next summer, whatever happened, and he even thought he’d been very reckless to come back without first ascertaining the dangers of acting on his own—flouting the laws and customs that must govern post-summer life in this place.
The front yard was already dotted with puddles the size of small ponds. He hopped over them gracelessly. His bones, he thought, his entrails, everything in him was similarly saturated, stiff and cold. He followed the lane down into town, now indifferent to the mud that splashed under his feet and soiled his pant legs. He went straight to the town hall and found it open, though it was only a little past eight. It was an old half-timber house, away from the center of town, across from the gendarmerie. From the street it was narrow and tall, but as soon as he stepped into the lobby, where he’d never been, Herman saw a long succession of rooms extending toward the back. A great many women in clacking high heels came and went from room to room, carrying files or thick binders, pens tucked behind their ears or thrust into their hair. He was taken aback by the extreme modernity of the furnishings and décor, remembering the city hall of his arrondissement back in the capital, its cramped little rooms, grimy wooden floors, yellowing walls, a scattering of cheap chairs. He was also surprised to see so many women at work here. They all wore the same outfit: a dark blue suit over that traditional blouse, whose colored ribbons hung from under the short jacket and bounced merrily on their hips. As for the rooms they were streaming out of, at the back of the building, Herman peered through the open doors but couldn’t see to the end, and he concluded the rooms must have been six or seven deep.
Suddenly intimidated, ashamed of his filthy shoes, he approached a receptionist sitting up very straight behind a long glass desk.
“I’d like to see the mayor, it’s serious.”
“Do you have an appointment?” she asked in a metallic voice.
“No, no, but it’s urgent, it’s very urgent.”
She raised her eyebrows, regretful, elegant, and undertook to explain that the affairs attended to by the mayor each day starting at seven in the morning were all, every one, of the greatest urgency, the rest were handed off to secretaries or functionaries, and she couldn’t possibly let Herman take the place of someone who, for similarly urgent reasons, had requested an appointment sometimes weeks in advance.
“But my case is particularly serious!” Herman cried, though in truth he was already beaten.
Had he ever rebelled against administrative rules when they were rationally, implacably laid out for him? The receptionist demurely asked to be allowed to point out that every urgent case possessed the same exceptional seriousness in the eyes of the petitioner.
“Yes,” said Herman, “but…”
“Would you like me to submit your case to a secretary?”
He jumped back in horror and sharply refused. Then, hoping to erase the memory of that reaction, he assumed a humble voice and asked what all these people were employed to do.
“It’s a big township,” the receptionist answered, a little surprised. “This is the seat of the canton, there are a great many problems and questions to see to.”
He was still intrigued and unsatisfied. But, vaguely fearing that if he displayed his ignorance of the workings of the village’s institutions he might be looked on less benevolently, he gravely nodded his head, doing his best to look as if he understood.
“Who’s the most important auxiliary or aid, I mean the one closest to the mayor, whom I could see immediately?”
“Well, there’s the president of the Chamber of Commerce,” said the receptionist, with an attentive, engaging smile.
“She wants to help me,” thought Herman.
He agreed at once, stammering out a few quick words of thanks. But his thoughts were darkened by deep discouragement, his will dissolving at the thought of wasting time with someone whose position gave Herman no reason to believe he might be of use in the search for Rose and the child. The receptionist stood up and asked him to follow her.
“These people are so considerate, so obliging,” Herman told himself. “They’re holding me captive, more securely than they ever could with orders and interdictions.”
He then chided himself for having refused to have his case placed in the hands of a secretary, who might immediately have grasped its importance, even all its potential tragedy, and passed it straight on to the mayor. Because now, convinced Herman would be all the happier and more confident for it, the receptionist was informing him that the president of the Chamber of Commerce was also the head of the festivities committee. Herman was almost offended.
“That’s not what I need at all,” he said, a little too loudly.
And his eyes stung with helplessness. The receptionist pretended not to have heard him, out of tact, he supposed. She led him to a steep, narrow stairway that spiraled up from the lobby. As she walked in front of him, he noticed her blouse had no ribbons: it must have been secured by a clip on that side.
“So she’s not married,” he told himself, proud of his penetrating eye.
They climbed to the fourth floor, the receptionist quick and lithe, Herman trudging. The woman’s calves were oddly muscular and bulging, and that—combined with the lack of ribbons and the solicitousness that in this place sometimes came close to a languorous caress (the gendarme had taken that same honeyed tone with Herman)—vaguely stirred him. No one in Paris would have spoken to him so caringly, and no one would have gone to such lengths to make him feel they had no greater desire than to serve him, even if all manner of obstacles Herman couldn’t quite make out had so far prevented any actual help from being given.
“I have to be careful not to complain, and not to make any demands,” Herman told himself in a sudden surge of gratitude toward the receptionist. “Everyone here knows their job, and for that matter my case might already be known to more people than I imagine; maybe at this very moment the mayor is considering the steps to be taken even while someone is briefing him on one of those urgent matters they sometimes have to wait so long to have attended to…
Assuaged, trusting, he wordlessly accompanied the receptionist down a hallway that vanished into the back of the building, very straight, so long that Herman lost any clear sense of the village’s dimensions.
“How could this building be so deep?” he whispered.
“Why, we’re under the hill now!”
The receptionist stifled a little laugh, then gave him an almost tenderly reproachful glance over her shoulder.
“Don’t you know? All the houses on the main street are built into the hill. It’s very hard not to know that here.”