“But they had begun with defeat,” Georges said, “and the Spanish had beaten them in that battle Reixach commanded, and then they had had to retreat on all the roads that led down from the Pyrenees, in other words, I suppose, a few faint paths. But, roads or paths, it’s always the same: ditches lined with corpses, dead horses, burnt trucks and abandoned cannons . . .” (It was a Sunday this time and the two of them, he and Blum, were sitting there trying to warm themselves in the pale Saxon sunlight, still wearing their grotesque Polish or Czech soldiers’ overcoats, backs against the wall of their barracks and taking turns drawing on the same cigarette that they passed back and forth, keeping the smoke in their lungs as long as possible, expelling it slowly through their nostrils trying to imbue themselves with it more deeply, indifferent to the vermin swarming over their bodies, the dozens of tiny greyish lice, the first of which they had once discovered with terror, desperately pursued their followers, and which they had finally given up killing, letting them run over them now with a feeling of permanent disgust, of permanent impotence and permanent decomposition, the shouts of the men from Oran arguing reaching them through the open window, Georges taking the last drag on what might have been the last quarter of an inch of the end that burned his fingertips, throwing it away or rather (for not even enough remained to hold on to it) flicking it away with his index finger from between his lips, then standing up, stretching his legs, turning his back to the sun, resting his folded arms on the window sill, his chin on his forearms and standing there watching them round the greasy table, their greasy cards in their hands, their impassive and hard gamblers’ faces strained, implacable, gnawed by that cold, patient and attentive passion that isolated them in a kind of cage inside which they would have remained, sheltered in the violent and hard world (just as a swimmer is sheltered from the rain) by that bell, by an individual aura of risk and violence which they secreted like that ink squirted by squids: the banker, the manager somehow of the game in which whole fortunes in camp marks were won and lost, changed hands from hour to hour (and for those who had no more marks, tobacco, and for those who had no more tobacco, bread rations, and for those who no longer had their ration of bread, the ration of the next day, and sometimes of the day after that—and so there was a man from Bône (an Italian) who gambled and lost four days of rations, and starting the next day he came punctually to hand the banker his ration of black bread and his coal-oil margarine, and not a word between them, merely a nod, an imperceptible movement of the head on the part of the man who took the bread, added it to his own ration without even seeming to see the other man, and the third day the Italian fainted, and when he came to the other man took—still without looking at him—the ration of bread and margarine which he had just received and held it out to him, saying: “You want it?” and the Italian: “No,” and, still without a look, the other man put the bread and margarine back in his kitbag, and the next day he (the loser) brought his ration again (it was the fourth and last time, and during the day, at work, he had fainted once again), and the other man didn’t look at him any more than the preceding times, took the ration and without a word put it in his kitbag and someone who was watching said something like “You bastard” and he (the banker) didn’t move, kept on eating, his eyes cold, dead, resting for a moment on the face of the man who had just spoken, completely expressionless, completely cold, then turning away, his jaws still chewing, while two or three men helped the Italian stagger back to his cot), the leader, then, the manager—or banker—a Maltese (or Valencian, or Sicilian: a mixture, one of those bastard and synthetic products of harbours, of the islands of that sea, that old pond, that ancient matrix, original crucible of all bargaining, of all thought and all cunning) with a hawk’s head, little dead reptilian eyes, a thin dry black face, expressionless, ageless and of course dressed like the others in a vaguely military outfit, but you wondered what he was doing here (that is, in this war, that is, in an army, that is, why they had enrolled, mobilized a man with a face (and probably a court record too) like that one (or this one) and who obviously couldn’t be used for anything except shooting an officer in the back at the first opportunity or else the treasurer of the battalion or the regiment and running off with the cash box—unless he had been naturalized, dressed up in a uniform and provided not with a rifle but with a military record in the single and solitary anticipation of this eventuality—since it takes all kinds to make an army—that future role of playing banker in a game in a prisoners’ barracks); and facing him a calm, majestic, fat Jew (not obese: simply fat, august, and probably the only prisoner in the whole camp—but how? For during those first two months, he had, like everyone else, not received a single package—not to have lost a single ounce of fat since he had been there), who was something like a pimp in Algiers and upon whom the absurd soldier’s outfit, the ridiculous yellow coat, the shapeless cap, looked like a robe and a gold tiara, and who perpetually seemed to be sitting on a royal, biblical and assured throne, surrounded by a court of little bloodless brutes quarrelling over the privilege of lighting his cigarettes and whom he didn’t even seem to see, although he was still capable of taking his scarcely touched mess tin—Georges had seen him—and handing it to the most cadaverous of them, saying merely: “I’m not hungry. Here!”, interrupting the other’s protests, saying: “Eat!”, in the tone in which you give an order, a command, and nothing else, taking out a cigarette, lighting it or letting one of the grubs light it and, sitting there, placid, heavy, perhaps a little pale, exhaling long slow puffs of smoke while around him the others feverishly swallowed the disgusting bitter soup of which he didn’t even seem to deprive himself, he who, no more than he had grown thin, had never been seen by anyone not only doing the least amount of work, but even making the least pretence of working, dragging to the yards the shovel that had been thrust into his hands and, once there, planting it in the ground in front of him, spending eight hours leaning on it, arms crossed, smoking (for just as he seemed, by a vestige of some royal privilege, to be able to do without eating, he always had, probably by virtue of the same privilege, something to smoke) or staring with not even a contemptuous expression at the prisoners working around him, and this without a sentry or the foreman ever making any remarks, and on Yom Kippur, he who had never in his life set foot in a synagogue nor observed, nor probably even known what the Sabbath was, and still less the Torah, and who didn’t even know how to read (Georges knew that because—since he (the Jew) had either chosen not to let this weakness be known to one of the little wretches who gravitated around him, or preferred to have recourse to strangers for this task—it was Blum or Georges that he asked to write the letters he dictated to his mother (not his wives: his mother) and to read him the answers), on Yom Kippur, then, in the middle of a country where Jews were being massacred and burnt by the hundreds of thousands, went on sick leave in order not to work, and not only remained the whole day without doing a thing, clean-shaven, without eating or touching a match, but even was strong enough to oblige his kind (the members of that people of whom he once would have been—was still—king) to imitate him; both of them, then, the Sicilian and the king straight out of the Bible sitting face to face, and round them (or inside them, in other words inside what came out of them, inside that invisible cage they constructed or rather that constructed itself as soon as they sat down and took out the cards and on the sides of which it seemed that an invisible hand had written “Private” as though on the door of the back rooms of casinos or clubs) the habitual row of the gamblers’ heads, pimps, bullies, clerks, hairdressers with their hard eyes and coming to get themselves fleeced, their faces feverish and impassive, their lips scarcely moving, their hands scarcely moving to make each card slide just enough so that the right-hand corner appeared, and at the end of each deal that silent sigh, plaintive, orgastic, coming not from the players, with faces still perfectly expressionless, but from the audience, and during one of those pauses, Georges rummaging, pulling out of his pocket, quickly counting out his tiny fortune, his tiny accumulation of bits of paper (wages which a victor, who somewhere else was murdering children with a clear conscience, felt obliged, and not ironically, and not out of facetiousness, but by virtue of a principle, a law, a kind of acquired or rather learnt or rather implanted morality, irrational and apparently intransgressible, stamped by use with a kind of sacred character (although some hundred years before still perfectly unknown): that is, that all work must be paid for, with however little but paid for—the wages then which a victor who could have made them slave for nothing, and moreover did make them slave, but by a kind of homage—somehow superstitious although symbolic—rendered to a principle, believed himself obliged to pay out to them), set aside about two thirds of the total, signalled to one of the spectators who stood up, took the bits of paper, approached the Sicilian, spoke to him, returned towards the window and held out two cigarettes which Georges lit, then, turning back, let himself slide down the wall until his buttocks touched his heels, then holding out one of the lit cigarettes to Blum, and Blum saying: “You crazy?” and Georges: “Oh hell! After all, it’s Sunday, isn’t it?” and sitting down completely, inhaling an endless puff of smoke until he felt it reaching all the way to the bottom of his lungs, exhaling it as slowly as possible, saying:) “So he was there, on that road, beating a pathetic retreat, with that hat, that two-cornered clownishly feathered hat, the flap of his coat draped like a toga over his shoulder, his boots muddy—or rather dusty—and lost in his thoughts, or rather probably in his lack of thoughts, in the impossibility of thinking, of putting together two coherent ideas, face to face with what he doubtless thought was the collapse of his dreams, without suspecting that it was probably the contrary—but luckily for him he didn’t live long enough to realize it—that is, that revolutions reinforce and confirm themselves in disaster to grow corrupt at the end, to pervert themselves and collapse in an apotheosis of military triumphs . . .”