He had never done anything like that before. The very thought was a horror, pissing into a lovely white, cleanly scrubbed wash-basin intended for personal hygiene and dish-washing! Never would he have believed that he could sink so low, never that he might find himself physically constrained to commit such a sacrilege. But now, as he watched his piss flow, totally uninhibited and unchecked, blending with the water and gurgling down the drain, and as he felt the glorious easing of the pressure in his abdomen, tears flowed from his eyes at the same time for the very shame of it. When he was finished he let the water run for a while and gave the basin a thorough scrubbing with a scouring liquid, eliminating even the slightest traces of the outrage he had committed. “Once doesn’t count,” he muttered to himself as if apologising to the wash-basin, to the room, or to himself, “once doesn’t count, it was a one-off emergency, it will certainly never happen again …’

  He grew calmer now. The activities of wiping up, storing away the bottle of scouring liquid, wringing out the rag – well-practised, comforting dexterities – restored his sense of pragmatic action. He looked at the clock. It was just a little after seven fifteen. Normally by seven fifteen he would already have shaved and made his bed. But the delay was within acceptable limits; he would be able to make it up, if necessary, by forgoing his breakfast. If he forwent breakfast – so he calculated – he would actually be seven minutes ahead of his regular schedule. The crucial thing was that he had to leave his room by five past eight at the latest, since he had to be at the bank by a quarter past eight. How he would manage that he did not know yet, but he still had forty-five minutes’ grace. That was a lot. Forty-five minutes was a lot of time when you had just stared death in the eye and only narrowly escaped a heart attack. The time counted for double once you were no longer under the imperative pressure of a full bladder. His first decision therefore was to behave as if nothing had happened and to pursue his usual morning chores. He filled the wash-basin with hot water and shaved.

  While he was shaving, he engaged in painstaking deliberation. “Jonathan Noel,” he said to himself, “you were a soldier in Indo-China for two years and mastered many a risky situation there. If you ravel up all your courage and all your native wit, if you arm yourself accordingly and if you have good luck, then your sortie out of your room should be a success. But what if it does succeed? What if you indeed get by that ghastly animal at your door, make it to the stairway unscathed, and find yourself out of harm’s way? You will go to work, will be able to get through the day unbruised – but what do you do then? Where will you go this evening? Where will you spend the night?” Because having once escaped it, he did not want to meet the pigeon a second time; in no circumstances could he live under the same roof with this pigeon, not a single day, not a single night, not a single hour – that much was settled, unalterably settled. He would therefore have to be prepared to spend the night and perhaps the following nights in a boarding-house. That meant that he had to take his shaving gear, toothbrush, and a change of underwear with him. Besides which he would need his cheque-book and, just to be sure, his savings book as well. He had twelve hundred francs in his current account. That would last for two weeks, assuming he found a cheap hotel. If the pigeon was then still blocking his room, he would have to dip into his savings. He had six thousand francs in his savings account, a lot of money. He could live in a hotel for months on that. And in addition he would still be getting his salary, three thousand seven hundred francs a month, take home. On the other hand he had to pay Madame Lassalle eight thousand francs at year’s end, the last instalment for his room. For his room. For this room that he would no longer be living in. How was he to explain to Madame Lassalle a request to postpone the last payment? He could hardly say to her: “Madame, I cannot pay you the last instalment of eight thousand francs, since I’ve been living in a hotel for months now because the room that I intended to buy from you is blockaded by a pigeon.” He could hardly say that, could he? … Then it occurred to him that he still owned five gold pieces, five napoleons, each of them easily worth a good six hundred francs, which he had bought for fear of inflation during the Algerian war of 1958. By no means ought he to forget to take along those five napoleons … And a slender golden bracelet that he still had from his mother. And his transistor radio. And an elegant silver-plated ballpoint that each of the bank employees had received for Christmas. If he were to sell all these treasures, he could, if he were utterly frugal, live in the hotel until the end of the year and still pay Madame Lassalle her eight thousand francs. After January 1, the prospects would look better, since he would then be the owner of the room and would no longer have to come up with the rent. And perhaps the pigeon would not survive the winter. How long did a pigeon live? Two years, three years, ten years? And what if it was an old pigeon? Perhaps it would die within the week? Perhaps it would die this very day. Perhaps it had come for the sole purpose of dying….

  Once he had finished shaving, he drained the basin, rinsed it, filled it again, washed his torso and feet, brushed his teeth, drained the basin yet again, and wiped it clean with a rag. Then he made his bed.

  Under the cupboard stood an old cardboard suitcase where he kept his dirty clothes, which he carted off to the laundry once a month. He pulled it out, emptied it, and put it on his bed. It was the same suitcase with which he had travelled from Charenton to Cavaillon in 1942, the same one with which he had come to Paris in 1954. And now as he saw this old suitcase lying on his bed, and as he began to fill it, not with dirty but with clean clothes, with a pair of oxfords, with underwear, his iron, cheque-book, and prized treasures – as if for a journey – the tears rose again to his eyes, this time, however, not from shame but from quiet desperation. It seemed to him as if he had been hurled back thirty years, as if he had lost thirty years of his life.

  When the packing was completed, it was a quarter to eight. He dressed, first in his regular uniform: grey trousers, blue shirt, leather jacket, leather belt with a holster for his pistol, grey official cap. Then he armed himself for his encounter with the pigeon. Most of all he was disgusted by the thought that it could come into physical contact with him, peck at his ankle perhaps or, fluttering up, brush his hands or his neck with its wings, or even settle down on him with its clawlike feet splayed. And so he did not put on his lightweight oxfords, but his rough, high leather boots with the lamb’s-wool inner soles, which he normally used only in January or February, slipped into his winter coat, buttoned it up from top to bottom, wrapped a wool scarf around his neck and up over his chin, and protected his hands with lined leather gloves. In his right hand he held an umbrella. At seven minutes to eight, thus equipped, he stood ready to dare the sortie from his room.

  He took off his official cap and laid an ear to the door. Nothing was to be heard. He put the cap back on, settling it firmly on his brow, picked up the suitcase and placed it at the ready beside the door. In order to have his right hand free, he hung the umbrella over his wrist, grasped the knob with his right hand, the button on the security lock with his left, turned back the bolt, and opened the door a crack. He peered out.

  The pigeon was no longer sitting at the door. On the tile where it had sat there was now an emerald green splotch about the size of a five-franc piece and a tiny white downy feather that trembled softly in the draught from the door crack. Jonathan shuddered with disgust. He would have loved to slam the door shut again. His instincts were to retreat, back into the safety of his room, away from the terror out there. But then he saw that it was not just a single splotch, but that there were many splotches. The whole section of hallway that he could survey was sprinkled with these emerald green, moistly shimmering splotches. But remarkably what happened was not that Jonathan’s repulsion grew more intense, but that on the contrary, he felt a compulsion to resist: he would perhaps have retreated before that single splotch and that single feather and have closed the door, for good and all. Except that the pigeon’s having apparently shat the entire hallway full – the pervasiveness of this loathsome phenomenon – mobilized his courage. He opened the door all the way.

  Now he saw the pigeon. It was sitting to his right at a distance of about five feet, at the very end of the hall, crouched in one corner. So little light fell on the spot, and Jonathan cast such a brief glance in that direction, that he could not discern whether it was asleep or awake, whether its eye was open or closed. He did not want to know either. He would have preferred not to have seen it at all. In his book on tropical fauna he had once read that certain animals, above all orang-utans, pounced on you only if you looked them in the eye; if you ignored them, then they left you alone. Perhaps that was true of pigeons as well. At any rate, Jonathan decided to act as if the pigeon were no longer present, or at least to look upon it no more.

  Slowly he shoved his suitcase out into the hall, very slowly and carefully out between the green splotches. Then he opened the umbrella, held it with his left hand before chest and face like a shield, stepped into the hall, paying constant attention to the splotches on the floor, and pulled the door closed behind him. Despite all intentions to act as if nothing were happening, he took fright again nonetheless, and his heart pounded clear up into his throat, and when he could not immediately extract his key from his pocket with his gloved fingers, he began to tremble so from nervousness that he almost dropped the umbrella, and in grabbing for it with his right hand in order to clamp it between shoulder and cheek, his key actually did fall to the floor, just missing the splotch by a hair, and he had to bend down to pick it up, and once he finally had a firm hold on it, he was so excited it took three thrusts at the lock, each one a miss, before he finally got the key in and turned it over twice. In that moment it seemed to him as if he heard a fluttering behind him … or was it only his umbrella striking the wall? … But then he heard it again, unmistakable, a short, dry flap of wings, and he panicked. He snatched the key from the lock, snatched up his suitcase, and scurried off. The raised umbrella scraped along the wall, the suitcase bumped against the doors to the other rooms, in the middle of the hall the opened casements of the window were in his way – he forced past them, giving the umbrella such a violent and clumsy tug behind him that the taut material ended in tatters, to which he paid no attention; none of this was important, he just wanted to get out, out, out.

  Only when he had reached the stairway landing did he stop for a moment to close the cumbersome umbrella and cast a glance back: the bright rays of the morning sun fell through the window, engraving a sharp-edged block of light out of the dusky shadows of the hallway. You could hardly see through it, and only when he squinted his eyes and strained to look, did Jonathan see how, right at the back, the pigeon extracted itself from the dark corner, took a few rapid, wobbling steps forward, and then settled back down again, right in front of the door to his room.

  He turned away, his flesh creeping, and descended the stairs. In that moment he was certain that he would never be able to return.

  With each stair tread he took, he grew calmer. At the third-floor landing, a sudden wave of heat triggered his awareness of the fact that he had on a winter coat, scarf, and fur-lined boots. At any moment a servant girl on her way out to shop could step through one of the doors leading from the kitchens of the elegant apartments on to these back stairs, or Monsieur Rigaud might put out his empty wine bottles, or, worse still, Madame Lassalle herself, for whatever reason – she rose early, did Madame Lassalle, she was up even now, you could smell the penetrating odour of coffee up and down the staircase and Madame Lassalle would have the back door to her kitchen wide open, and there he, Jonathan, would stand before her on the stairs, in this grotesque winter costume in the brightest August sunshine – and he simply could not walk away from an embarrassment of such magnitude, he would have to explain himself, but how could he do that?, he would have to invent some lie, but what sort of lie? There was no plausible explanation for his appearance at the moment. People could only assume he was crazy. Perhaps he was crazy.

  He set his suitcase down, extracted the pair of oxfords from it, and quickly took off gloves, coat, scarf, and boots; slipped into the oxfords, stuffed scarf, gloves, and boots into the suitcase, and threw the coat over his arm. And now, so he thought, his existence was once again justified in any man’s eyes. If the need arose, he could always maintain that he was taking his washing to the laundry and his winter coat to the cleaner’s. With considerable relief, he continued his descent.

  In the back courtyard he met the concierge, who with her little trolley was wheeling the empty rubbish bins in from the street. At once he felt himself caught red-handed, his step faltered. He could not pull back into the darkness of the stairwell, she had already seen him, he must go on. “Good day, Monsieur Noel,” she said as he passed her at an intentionally vigorous pace.

  “Good day, Madame Rocard,” he muttered. They never said more than that to one another. For ten years – as long as she had lived in the building – he had never said more to her than “Good day, madame,” and “Good evening, madame,” and “Thank you, madame,” when she handed him his mail. Not that he had anything against her. She was not an unpleasant person. She was no different from her predecessor and her predecessor’s predecessor. Like all concierges, she was of an indefinable age, between late forties and late sixties; like all concierges, her gait was shuffling, her figure stoutish, her complexion maggoty, and her odour musty. When she was not carting the rubbish bins in or out, cleaning the staircase, or hastily doing some shopping, she sat by fluorescent light in her little concierge’s lodge at the passage between street and courtyard, left her television on, sewed, ironed, cooked, and got drunk on cheap red wine and vermouth, just as every other concierge did. No, he really had nothing against her. He just had something against concierges in general, because concierges were people who for professional reasons were constantly watching other people. And Madame Rocard in particular was someone who permanently watched him, Jonathan, in particular. It was completely impossible to pass by Madame Rocard without her taking notice of you, even if it was only of the briefest sort, hardly a visible lifting of the eyes. Even when she was sitting asleep in her chair inside her lodge – which chiefly occurred in the early hours of the afternoon and after her evening meal – the soft creak of the entrance door sufficed for her to awaken for a few seconds and to take notice of the passer-by. No one in the world took notice of Jonathan as often and as precisely as Madame Rocard. He had no friends. At the bank he was, so to speak, part of the inventory. Customers regarded him as decor, not as a person. In the supermarket, on the street, on the bus (but when did he ever get a bus!), his anonymity was preserved by the mass of others. The sole exception was Madame Rocard, who recognised and scrutinised him and gave him her candid attention at least twice daily. She was thus able to gain such intimate information about his modus vivendi as: what clothing he wore, how often per week he changed his shirt, whether he had washed his hair, what he brought home with him for his evening meal, if and from whom he received mail. And although, as noted, Jonathan had nothing against Madame Rocard personally and although he knew quite well that her indiscreet glances originated not from any curiosity but rather from her sense of professional duty, nonetheless he always felt those glances falling upon him like some mute reproach, and every time he walked past Madame Rocard – even after so many years – he felt a brief, hot surge of indignation: why the hell is she watching me again? Why is she checking me over yet again? Why, just for once, doesn’t she allow me my integrity by taking no notice of me? Why are people so pushy?

  And because, considering what had just happened, he was especially touchy today and bore, or so he believed, the misery of his existence for all to see in the form of a suitcase and a winter coat, Madame Rocard’s glances struck him as especially painful; above all, her greeting of “Good morning, Monsieur Noel!” seemed to him the purest mockery. The wave of outrage, which until now had been dammed up within him, crested into outright fury, and he did something he had never done: he stopped, once he had passed Madame Rocard, stood there, set his suitcase down, laid his winter coat over it, and turned around; turned around, fiercely resolved to counter the impertinence of both her glance and her greeting once and for all. He did not yet know what he would do or say as he walked towards her. He only knew that he would do and say something. The wave of his outrage had broken and bore him towards her, and his courage was boundless.

  She had set the rubbish bins back in place and was about to return to her concierge’s lodge when he confronted her, more or less in the middle of the courtyard. They came to a halt about two feet apart. He had never seen her maggoty face from so close up. The skin of her puffy cheeks seemed of great delicacy, like old, fragile silk, and her eyes, brown eyes, when viewed from close up, had no meddlesome sting to them at all, revealing instead something soft, something almost like virginal modesty. But Jonathan did not allow the sight of such details – which certainly contradicted the image of Madame Rocard he bore within him – to bother him. Adding an official note to his démarche, he tapped his uniform cap and said rather caustically: “Madame! I must have a word with you.” (At this point he still did not know what he actually wanted to say.)