distant screech of occasional streetcars, death seemed insipid yet insistent too, and it was death’s
summons, its damp breath, that Mersault sensed at the very moment he began walking away rapidly,
without turning back. Suddenly the odor, which he had forgotten, was all around him: he went into the
restaurant and sat down at his table. The man was there, but without his matchstick. It seemed to Mersault
that there was something distraught in his eyes. He dismissed the stupid notion that occurred to him. But
everything was whirling in his mind. Before ordering anything he jumped up and ran to his hotel, went to
his room, and threw himself on the bed. Something sharp was throbbing in his temples. His heart empty,
his belly tight, Mer-sault’s rebellion exploded. Images of his life rushed before his eyes. Something inside
him clamored for the gestures of women, for arms that opened, and for warm lips. From the depth of the
painful nights of Prague, amid smells of vinegar and sentimental tunes, the anguished countenance of the
old baroque world which had accompanied his fever mounted toward him. Breathing with difficulty,
seeing nothing, moving mechanically, he sat up on
25
his bed. The drawer of the night table was open, lined with an English newspaper in which he read a whole article. Then he stretched out on the bed again. The man’s head had been lying on the wound, and
three or four fingers would have fit inside that wound. Mersault stared at his hands and his fingers, and
childish desires rose in his heart. An intense and secret fervor swelled within him, and it was a nostalgia
for cities filled with sunlight and women, with the green evenings that close all wounds. Tears burst from
his eyes. Inside him widened a great lake of solitude and silence above which ran the sad song of his
deliverance.
2
In the train taking him north, Mersault stared at his hands. The train’s speed turned the lowering sky into
an onrush of heavy clouds. Mersault was alone in the overheated compartment—he had left suddenly in
the middle of the night, and with the dark morning hours ahead of him, he let the mild landscape of
Bohemia rush by, the impending rain between the tall silky poplars and the distant factory chimneys
filling him with an impulse to burst into tears. Then he looked at the white plaque with its three sentences: Nicht hinauslehnen, E pericoloso sporgersi, II est dangereux de se pencher au-dehors. He looked again at his hands, which lay like live, wild animals on his knees: the left one long and supple, the right thicker,
muscular. He knew them, recognized them, yet they were distinct from himself, as though capable of
actions in which his will had no part. One came to rest against his forehead now, pressing against the
fever which throbbed in his temples. The other slid down his jacket and took out of its pocket a cigarette
that he immediately discarded as soon as he became aware of an overpowering desire to vomit. His hands
returned to his knees, palms cupped, where they offered Mersault the emblem of his life, indifferent once
more and offered to anyone who would take it.
He traveled for two days. But now it was not an
instinct of escape which drove him on. The very monotony of the journey satisfied him. The train which
was jolting him halfway across Europe suspended him between two worlds—it had taken him abroad, and
would deposit him somewhere, draw him out of a life the very moment of which he wanted to erase and
lead him to the threshold of a new world where desire would be king. Not for a single moment was
Mersault bored. He sat in his corner, rarely disturbed by anyone, stared at his hands, then at the
countryside, and reflected. He deliberately extended his trip as far as Breslau, merely rousing himself at
the border to change tickets. He wanted to stay where he was, contemplating his freedom. He was tired
and did not feel well enough to move; he hoarded every last fragment of his strength, his hopes, kneaded
them together until he had refashioned himself and his fate as well. He loved these long nights when the
train rushed along the gleaming rails, roaring through the village stations where only a clock was
illuminated, the sudden stops among the clustered lights of city stations where there was no time to
discover where he was before the train was already swallowed up, a golden warmth cast into the
compartments and then gone. Hammers pounded on the wheels, the engine exhaled its cloud of steam,
and the robot gesture of the switchman lowering his red disc hurled Mersault into the train’s wild course,
only his lucidity, his anxiety awake. The crosswork puzzle of lights and
shadows went on in the compartment, a black and gold motley: Dresden, Bautzen, Gerlitz, Lugknitz. The
long lonely night ahead of him, with all the time in the world to decide on the actions of a future life, the patient straggle with the thoughts eluding him on a station siding, recaptured and pursued again, the
consequences reappearing and escaping once more before the dance of wires glistening under the rain and
the lights. Mersault groped for the word, the sentence that would formulate the hope in his heart, that
would resolve his anxiety. In his weakened state, he needed formulas. The night and then the day passed
in this obstinate struggle with the word, the image which from now on would constitute the whole tonality
of his mind, the sympathetic or miserable dream of his future. He closed his eyes. It takes time to live.
Like any work of art, life needs to be thought about. Mersault thought about his life and exercised his
bewildered consciousness and his longing for happiness in a train compartment which was like one of
those cells where a man learns to know what he is by what is more than himself.
26
On the morning of the second day, in the middle of a field, the train slowed down. Breslau was still hours away, and the day broke over the vast Silesian plain, a treeless sea of mud under an overcast sky sagging
with rainclouds. As far as the eye could see and at regular intervals, huge black birds with glistening
wings flew in flocks a few yards above the
ground, incapable of rising any higher under a rain-swollen sky heavy as a tombstone. They circled in a
slow, ponderous flight, and sometimes one of them would leave the flock, skim the ground, almost
inseparable from it, and flap in the same lethargic flight, until it was far enough away to be silhouetted on the horizon, a black dot. Mersault wiped the steam off the glass and stared greedily through the long
streaks his fingers left on the pane. Between the desolate earth and the colorless sky appeared an Image of
the ungrateful world in which, for the first time, he came to himself at last. On this earth, restored to the despair of innocence, a traveler lost in a primitive world, he regained contact, and with his list pressed to his chest, his face flattened against the glass, he calculated his hunger for himself and for the certainty of the splendors dormant within him. He wanted to crush himself into that mud, to re-enter the earth by
immersing himself in that clay, to stand on that limitless plain covered with dirt, stretching his arms to the sooty sponge of the sky, as though confronting the superb and despairing symbol of life itself, to affirm
his solidarity with the world at its worst, to declare himself life’s accomplice even in its thanklessness and its filth. Then the great impulse that had sustained him collapsed for the first time since he left Prague.
Mersault pressed his tears and his lips against the cold pane. Again the glass blurred, the landscape
disappeared.
A few hours later he arrived in Breslau. From a distance the city looked like a forest of factory chimneys
and church steeples. At close range, it was made of brick and black stone; men in visored caps walked
slowly through the streets. Mersault fol-lowed them, spent the morning in a workmen’s cafe. A boy was
playing the harmonica: tune of a senti-mental stupidity which eased the soul. Mersault de-cided to travel
south again, after buying a comb. The next day he was in Vienna. He slept a part of the day and the whole
next night. When he awak-ened, his fever was completely gone. He stuffed himself on soft-boiled eggs
and thick cream for breakfast, and feeling a little squeamish walked out into a morning speckled with
sunshine and rain. Vi-enna was a refreshing city: there was nothing to visit. St. Stephen’s Cathedral was
too big, and bored him. He preferred the cafes around it, and in the evening a little dancehall near the