by BORIS VIAN

The carriage door stuck as usual; at the other end of the train, the big hat chief leaned hard on the red button, and the compressed air squirted into the tubes. The assistant strained to force the two panels apart. He was hot. Drops of gray sweat zigzagging across his face, like flies, and the dirty collar of his insulated zephyr shirt was exposed.

The train was about to start when the chief released the button. The air belched joyously under the train, and the assistant almost lost his balance as the door suddenly gave way. He stumbled down, not without ripping open his collecting bag on the latch.

The train started, and the resulting atmospheric displacement pushed the assistant against the malodorous latrines, where two Arabs were discussing politics with great knife-blows.

The assistant shook himself, patted his hair, which was crushed against his soft skull like rotten weeds. A faint mist rose from his half-naked torso, from which stood out a jutting clavicle, and the beginnings of one or two pairs of uncouth, badly planted ribs.

With a heavy step, he went down the platform tiled with hexagons of red and green, soiled here and there with long black trails: it had rained octopuses during the afternoon, but the time that the station employees were supposed to dedicate to mopping the platform, according to their monumental chart, had been passed in the satisfaction of unmentionable needs.

The assistant rummaged in his pockets, and his fingers encountered the coarse corrugated pasteboard that he had to surrender at the exit. His knees hurt, and the dampness of the pools he had explored during the day made his badly fastened joints grind together. It must be said, he had gathered a more than honorable booty in his bag.

He handed his ticket to the dim man standing behind the grille. The man took it, looked at it and smiled ferociously.

“You haven’t got another one?” he said.

“No,” said the assistant.

“This one is forged.”

“But it was my boss that gave it to me,” said the assistant nicely, with a charming smile and a little nod.

The clerk giggled. “I’m not surprised it’s forged, then. He bought ten from us, this morning.”

“Ten what?” said the assistant.

“Ten forged tickets.”

“But why?” said the assistant. His smile grew weaker and drooped to the left.

“To give them to you,” said the clerk. “Primo, so as to get you sworn at, to begin with, which I am about to do; and secundo, so that you’d have to pay the fine.”

“Why?” said the assistant. “I’ve got hardly any money.”

“Because it’s slimy to travel with a forged ticket,” said the clerk.

“But you’re the ones that forge them!”

“We have to. Because there are characters slimy enough to travel with forged tickets. You think it’s fun, hey, to forget tickets all the while?”

“You’d certainly do better to clean up a tile,” said the assistant.

“No word games,” said the clerk. “Pay the fine. It’s thirty francs.”

“That’s not true,” said the assistant. “It’s twelve francs when you haven’t got a ticket.”

“It’s much more serious to have a forged one,” said the clerk. “Pay, or I’ll call my dog!”

“He won’t come,” said the assistant

“No,” said the clerk, “but it’ll make your ears hurt, anyhow.”

The assistant looked at the gloomy and emaciated face of the clerk, who gave him a venomous stare in return.

“I haven’t got much money,” he muttered.

“Me either,” said the clerk. “Pay up.”

“He gives me fifty francs a day,” said the assistant, “and I have to eat.”

The clerk tugged at the visor of his cap, and a blue screen dropped over his face. “Pay up,” he said with his hand, rubbing the thumb and forefinger together.

The assistant reached for his shiny, patched-up wallet. He took out two creased ten-franc notes and a little five-franc note that was still bleeding.

“Twenty-five,” he proposed uncertainly.

“Thirty,” said the three outstretched fingers of the clerk.

The assistant sighed, and his boss’s face appeared between his toes. He spat on it, right in the eye. His heart beat faster. The face dissolved and blackened. He put the money in the outstretched hand and left. He heard the click of the visor returning to its usual place.

Walking slowly, he reached the foot of the hill. The bag bruised his skinny hips, and the bamboo handle of his net whipped his frail, malformed calves at random as he walked.

* * * *

He pushed against the iron gate, which opened with a frightful groan. A big red lamp went on at the top of the steps, and a bell echoed faintly in the vestibule. He entered as quickly as he could and closed the gate, not without giving himself an electric shock because the anti-burglar decoration was not in its usual place.

He went up the walk. Right in the middle, his foot struck something hard and a jet of ice-water sprang from the ground, between his ankle and his trouser leg, wetting him to the knee.

He began to run. His anger, as it did every night, mastered him progressively. He went up the three steps, fists clenched. At the top, his net got itself between his legs, and in the movement he made to keep from falling, he ripped his bag a second time on a nail that appeared out of nowhere. He felt something twist inside him, and panted without saying a word. After a few moments he calmed himself, and his chin fell on his chest. Then he felt the chill of his wet trousers, and grabbed the doorknob. He let go of it precipitously. An evil-smelling vapor arose, and a fragment of his skin, stuck to the burning porcelain, blackened and shriveled. The door was open. He went in.

His weak legs would not support him, and he slid down in a corner of the vestibule, on the cold leprous-smelling tiles. His heart groaned between his ribs and shook him with great, brutal, irregular blows.

* * * *

“It’s poor,” said his boss.

He was examining the contents of the bag.

The assistant waited, standing in front of the table.

“You’ve spoiled them,” added the boss. “The perforations of this one are completely ruined.”

“It’s the net—it’s too old,” said the assistant. “If you want me to catch young stamps in good condition, you’ve got to buy me a decent net.”

“Who is it that uses this net?” said the boss. “Is it you or me?”

The assistant did not answer. His burned hand was paining him.

“Answer me,” said the boss. “Is it you or me?”

“It’s me, for you,” said the assistant.

“I don’t force you,” said the boss. “If you claim to earn fifty francs a day, you’ve got to justify it, anyhow.”

“Less thirty francs for the ticket,” said the assistant.

“What ticket? I pay you for the round trip.”

“With forged tickets.”

“All you have to do is pay attention.”

“How am I supposed to tell the difference?”

“It isn’t hard,” said the boss. “They’re obviously forged when they’re made of corrugated pasteboard. Ordinary tickets are wood.”

“Good,” said the assistant. “You’ll give me back my thirty francs.”

“No. All these stamps are in poor condition.”

“That isn’t true,” said the assistant. “I spent two hours fishing for them, and I had to break the ice. I took every precaution, and there’s hardly two spoiled ones out of sixty.”

“These aren’t the ones I want,” said the boss. “I want the 1855 two-cent Guiana. I’m not interested in the Zanzibar series, which you caught already yesterday.”

“I catch what I can find,” said the assistant. “Especially with a net like that. And anyhow, it’s not the season for Guianas. You can exchange the Zanzibars.”

“Everybody’s finding them, this year,” said the boss. “They’re not worth anything any more.”

“And the jet of water in my legs, and the decoration on the gate, and the doorknob—” suddenly exploded the assistant. His thin yellow face folded up in wrinkles, and he looked as if he were about to cry,

“That’ll toughen you up,” said the boss. “What am I supposed to do with myself here? Me, I get bored.”

“Go hunt for stamps,” said the assistant. He succeeded in controlling himself at the price of a considerable effort.

“I pay you for that,” said the boss. “You’re a thief. You steal the money you earn.”

The assistant wiped his forehead with his threadbare sleeve, in a weary gesture. His head was clear as a bell. The table drew away from him slightly and he looked for something to catch hold of again. But the mantelpiece escaped in its turn, and he fell down.

“Get up,” said the boss. “Not on my carpet.”

“I want my dinner,” said the assistant.

“Next time, come back earlier,” said the boss. “Get up. I don’t like to see you on my carpet. Get up, in God’s name!” His voice trembled with fury, and his knotty hands pounded on the desk.

The assistant made a terrible effort and succeeded in getting to his knees. His belly hurt, and blood and serum were flowing from his hand. He had wound a dirty handkerchief around it.

The boss made a rapid choice and hurled three stamps at his face. They stuck to his cheek with a slight cupping-glass sound.

“You go and put those back where you got them,” he said. He hammered out the syllables to give them the form of points of steel.

The assistant was crying. His soft hair fell over his forehead, and the stamps marked his left cheek. He got up heavily.

“For the last time,” said the boss, “I don’t want stamps in poor condition. And don’t tell me any tales about the net.”

“No, sir,” said the assistant.

“Here’s your fifty francs,” said the boss. He took a banknote from his pocket, spat on it, tore it half-way across, and threw it on the floor.

The assistant lowered himself painfully. His knees cracked in brief, dry triplets.

“Your shirt is dirty,” said the boss. “You’ll sleep outside tonight.”

The assistant picked up the banknote and left the room. The wind blew harder and shook the corrugated window in front of the ironwork grille of the vestibule door. He closed the door of the office, with a final glance at the silhouette of his boss. The latter, bent over his Zanzibar album, with a large loupe in his eye, was beginning to compare and evaluate.

* * * *

He went down the steps of the stairway, wrapping himself in his long jacket, which was green-stained from having been too long in contact with the water in the stamp pools. The wind insinuated itself into the holes in the cloth and swelled his back so much that it gave him the look of a hunchback, not without damage to his spinal column; he suffered from internal mimicry, and had to struggle every day to keep his poor organs in their ordinary shape and their habitual function.

It was night now, and the earth gave forth a cheap, tarnished glimmer. The assistant turned to the right and followed the wall of the house. He guided himself by following the black line made by the uncoiled hose that his boss used to drown the rats in the cellar. He reached the worm-eaten doghouse nearby where he had already slept the previous night. The straw inside was damp and smelled of cockroaches. An old piece of quilt covered the arched doorway. When he lifted it to grope his way inside, there was a blinding glare and an explosion. A giant firecracker had just exploded inside the doghouse, filling it with a violent stench of powder.

The assistant had started, and his heart was racing. He tried to quell the beating by holding his breath, but almost immediately his eyes began to dance, and he greedily swallowed a mouthful of air. The smell of powder entered his lungs at the same time, and calmed him a little.

He waited for the silence to return and listened attentively, then whistled softly. Without turning around, he crept into the doghouse and curled up on the sickly straw. He whistled again, then strained his ears. Light, small footsteps were approaching, and in the pale glimmer of the earth, he could see his living thing, which was coming to find him. It was a soft, shaggy, tame living thing, which he fed as well as he could on dead fish. It came into the doghouse and lay down against him. All at once he came to himself and put his hand to his cheek. The three stamps were beginning to suck his blood, and he tore them off brutally, holding himself in so as not to scream. He threw them away from him, outside the doghouse. The dampness of the ground would preserve them, probably, until tomorrow. The living thing began to lick his cheek, and he spoke to it to calm himself. He spoke to it in a low voice, for his boss had ways of listening to him when he was alone.

“He gets on my nerves,” he panted.

The living thing murmured softly and licked him harder.

“I think I ought to do something. Not let myself be bullied, get some decent shirts in spite of him, and have forged tickets in wood. And then, mend the net and keep him from poking holes in it. I think I ought to refuse to sleep in the doghouse, and demand my room, and demand a raise, because I can’t live on fifty francs a day. And also gain weight, and become very strong and very handsome, and rebel before he expects it, and heave a brick in his face. I think I will.”

He changed his position and pondered with such intensity that the air in the doghouse was expelled in great puffs from the rounded hole, and not enough was left inside to breathe. A little came back in through holes under the floor of the doghouse, through the straw, but that again increased the smell of cockroaches, with which now was mingled the disagreeable odor of slugs in heat.

“I don’t like this doghouse. It’s cold. Luckily you’re here. There are noises in the cellar, it’s the water that comes in through the rat holes. You can’t sleep with the roaring of rats in your ears every night of your life. Why does he want to kill those rats at any price, and kill them with water? You kill rats with blood.”

The living thing stopped licking him. He could make out its profile against the gray background of the luminous earth, with its slender muzzle and its pointed ears, and its yellow eyes that reflected some cold lightnings. It turned in a circle, hunting for a convenient place, and nestled against him, nose on his thighs.

“I’m cold,” said the assistant.

He began to sob quietly. His tears slipped onto the straw, from which arose a thin vapor, and the outlines of objects became blurred.

“Wake me up tomorrow morning,” he added. “I have to take the three stamps back. I hope he doesn’t give me a forged ticket for the train.”

There was a distant hubbub, then some piercing hisses, and the sounds of small galloping feet.

“Oh!” said the assistant. “That’s it! He’s beginning again with the rats! I hope it’s a rat. I’d hold the hose myself. I hope he’ll give me fifty francs tomorrow night. I’m hungry. I could eat a rat alive.”

He squeezed his belly with both hands, still crying, and then the rhythm of his sobs diminished little by little, as a machine runs down, and his twisted body stretched itself out. His feet protruded through the opening of the doghouse, and he slept, with his cheek on the evil-smelling straw. In his empty stomach, there was a sound of gravel.

* * * *

From the room where he crouched, the boss heard the melodious phrase with which the pepper vendor usually announced her passage. He got to his feet and ran toward the vestibule, whose door he opened with conscious brutality. Standing on the stair, he watched the girl approach.

She had on her usual uniform, a little pleated rump-length skirt, short red and blue socks, and a bolero that left bare the lower part of her breasts, not to mention the red and white striped cotton cap, which the pepper vendors of Mauritius have imposed on the world by force of patience.

The boss nodded to her and she came up the walk. He went down the steps at the same time and advanced to meet her.

“Good day,” he said. “I want some pepper.”

“How many grains?” she asked with an artificial smile, for she detested him.

Her black hair and her fair skin had the effect on the boss of a glass of cold water on the nuts, in truth, a most important effect. “Go up the steps,” he said, “and I’ll specify the quantity.”

“You want to stay behind and look at my thighs, that’s it, right?”

“Yes,” said the boss, drooling. He reached out his hands,

“Pay for the pepper first,” she said.

“How much?”

“‘A hundred francs a grain, and you taste first.”

“Will you go up the steps?” murmured the boss. “I’ll give you a Zanzibar series.”

“My brother brought three of them up to the house yesterday,” she said with a mellifluous chuckle. “Taste my pepper.”

She offered him a grain, and the boss did not perceive that it was toxic carnation seed. Unsuspectingly, he put it in his mouth and swallowed it.

The pepper vendor was already moving away.

“What?” wondered the boss. “How about the steps?”

“Ha! ha! ha!” said the pepper vendor, with consummate wickedness.

Meanwhile, the boss was beginning to feel the comforting effect of the poison, and he began to run at full speed around the house. Leaning against the gate, the pepper vendor watched him.

On the third lap, she waved to him and waited until he looked back at her, which he did on the fourth lap, still running faster and faster. Then she tucked up her little pleated skirt, and from where she stood she saw the boss’s face turn violet, then completely black, then begin to burn, and as he kept his eyes fixed on what she was showing him, he tripped over the garden hose that he used to drown the rats; he fell with his face against a large stone, which fitted itself precisely between his cheekbones, in place of his nose and jaws. His feet stayed behind on the ground and dug a double trench, where, little by little, according to the rate at which his shoes wore out, could be seen the trail of five clumsy toes, which served to keep his socks on.

The pepper vendor closed the gate and went on her way, tossing the tassel of her cotton cap to the other side, in sign of derision.

* * * *

The assistant tried vainly to open the carriage door. It was very hot in the train; in that way, the passengers caught cold in getting out, for the engineer had a brother who was a handkerchief salesman.

He had toiled the whole day for a miserable catch, and his heart swelled with satisfaction, for he was going to kill his boss. He succeeded at last in forcing apart the two halves of the door, by pulling them up and down, and realized that the big hat chief had turned them on their sides as a spiteful practical joke. Pleased to have foiled him this time, he leaped lightly onto the platform and fumbled in his pocket. He found without trouble the bit of corrugated pasteboard that he had to surrender at the exit, and advanced rapidly toward that spot, occupied by a man with a sly expression in whom he recognized the clerk of yesterday.

“I have a forged ticket,” he said.

“Ah?” said the other. “Let’s see.”

He offered his ticket and the man took it, then examined it with such concentrated attention that his cap opened up to let his ears enter the lining.

“It’s a good copy,” said the man.

“Except it isn’t wood, it’s pasteboard,” said the assistant.

“Really?” said the man. “You’d swear it was wood; if you didn’t know it was pasteboard, naturally.”

“All the same,” said the assistant, “just think, my boss gave it to me for real.”

“A real one costs only twelve francs,” said the man. “He pays a lot more for these.”

“How much?” asked the assistant.

“I’ll give you thirty francs for it,” said the man, and put his hand in his pocket.

The assistant recognized from the ease of this gesture that he must be a degenerate character. But the man only brought out three ten-franc notes forged with walnut dye. “Here!” he added.

“They’re counterfeit, of course?” said the assistant.

“I can’t give you good ones for a bad one, you must realize,” said the clerk.

“No,” said the assistant, “but I’ll keep mine.”

He crouched and took a great leap, by means of which his small fist was able to take the skin off the whole right side of the face under the cap. The man put his hand to his visor and fell at the salute, which caused him to bang his elbow on the hard cement of the platform, paved, at that particular spot, with hexagons of a phosphorescent blue.

The assistant stepped over the body and went on. He felt himself saturated with warm, limpid life, and hurried to ascend the hill. He removed the thong from his net and used it as a climbing rope. In passing, he harpooned the heads of the iron pillars that supported the guard fence along the track cutting, and, pulling on the handle, hauled himself easily up among the sharp-edged stones of the path. After a few yards, the torn net flew away. He would put the ring of steel wire around his boss’s neck.

He reached the gate quickly and pushed it open without precautions. He hoped to receive the current to strengthen his anger, but felt nothing, and stopped. In front of the steps, something stirred feebly. He ran along the walk. In spite of the cold, his skin began to redden, and he smelled the neglected odor of his body, with a moldy smell of straw and cockroaches.

He hardened his stringy biceps, and his fingers curled around the bamboo handle. His boss, no doubt, had killed someone.

He stopped dumbfounded, recognizing the dark suit and the shiny starched collar. His boss’s head was no more than a blackish mass, and his legs had managed to dig two deep, grooved ruts.

A kind of despair took possession of him and he trembled all over, shaken by his anger and his longing for massacre. He glanced all around, uneasy and confused. He had prepared a lot of things to say. He had to say them.

“What did you do that for, you crumb?”

The “crumb” resounded in the neutral air with a disused and insufficient sonority.

“Crumb! Bum! Son of a bitch! Jerk! Dirty son of a bitch! Robber! No-good! Son of a bitch!”

Tears streamed from his eyes, for the boss did not answer. He took the bamboo handle and placed it in the middle of the boss’s back.

“Answer me, you old bastard. You gave me a forged ticket.”

He leaned with all his weight and the handle sank into the tissues softened by poison. He turned it to grind out the worms, holding the other end of the handle like the stem of a gyroscope. “A forged ticket, straw full of roaches, and I’m hungry enough to eat gravel, and what about my fifty francs for today?”

The boss hardly stirred any more, and the worms wouldn’t come out.

“I wanted to kill you, dirty son of a bitch. I’ve got to kill you. Kill you dead, you old bastard, yes, you. What about my fifty francs, hey?”

He pulled the handle out of the wound and struck great blows on the carbonized skull, which sank in like the crust of an overdone souffle. Where the boss’s head should be, there was nothing any more. It ended at the collar.

The assistant stopped trembling.

“You’d rather go away? All right. But me, I’ve got to kill someone.”

He sat on the ground, he wept as he had the night before, and his living thing ran up light-footed, seeking friendship. The assistant closed his eyes. He felt the tender, soft touch on his cheek, and his fingers closed around the frail neck. The living thing made no movement to free itself, and, when the caress grew cold on his cheek, he knew that he had strangled it. Then he rose. He stumbled along the walk and went out into the road; he turned to the right, without knowing, and the boss did not stir at all.

* * * *

He saw the big blue-stamp pool directly ahead of him. Night was falling, and the water glimmered with mysterious and distant reflections. The pool was not deep; you found stamps there by the hundred, but they had no great value, because they reproduced themselves all year round.

He took two stakes out of his bag and planted them close to the pool, a yard apart. Between them he stretched a strident steel wire and touched it with a finger, for a sad note. The wire stood four inches above the ground, parallel to the edge of the pool.

The assistant went a few steps away, then turned, facing the water, and walked straight toward the wire. He had his eyes closed and was whistling a tender melody, the one that his living thing liked. He went slowly, with short steps, and tripped over the steel wire. He fell with his head in the water. His body lay motionless, and, under the mute surface, blue stamps were already attaching themselves to his sunken cheeks.