Free Funeral Rites by Jean Genet Page B

ashamed, but it was a shame mingled with joy. A radiant shame. The shame in him merged with the joy into a single feeling just as the same color—pink and sometimes bright red—blends them. With a sigh, he added:
    “And for a Fritz in the bargain. I'm a real case!”
    In the park, crushed by the executioner, Erik thought thus:
    “What a great beginning. A real success. He's not good-looking, he's a bruiser, he's hairy, he's thirty-five, and he's the executioner.”
    Erik said this to himself ironically, but actually he was solemn, he recognized the danger of such a situation, especially if it is accepted. He accepted it.
    “I accept it all without a word. I deserve a medal.”
    When he had pulled up his breeches and buttoned them, the executioner handed him his case and Erik took a cigarette, without saying anything, for he already knewthat his gesture meant thank you by virtue of its elegance.
    “Are we friends?”
    Erik hesitated a second or two, smiled and said:
    “Why not?”
    “Are we?”
    We are.
    The executioner looked at him tenderly.
    “You'll be my friend.”
    Expressed in this form, the sentimentality of the killer's German soul was addressing the German soul of Erik, which was already replying with a kind of spiritual trembling, a kind of hope.
    “I will.”
    The brightness of dawn made it possible to see more clearly in the mist.
    “Will you come to see me in my home?”
    The executioner's tone of voice became almost feminine at the very moment that he flicked a tiny twig or bit of fluff off the lapel of Erik's windbreaker and pulled it slightly to smooth an imperceptible crease. This first and slightly finical act on his friend's behalf did not make Erik smile until later.
    Erik, who was now in the Panzer divisionen, was at the top of a Paris building, in a lower-middle-class apartment where the men he had called had cautiously installed themselves, one by one. The last of them, Riton, had jumped nimbly to the balcony, alone, despite the soldiers’ offer of help. The straps of three loaded machine guns were wound about his shirt, went around the belt and up across the shoulders, crossed once on the chest and once on the back, and produced a copper tunic from which his arms emerged bare from the elbow almost to the shoulder, where the sleeve of the blue shirt was rolled into a thick wad that made the arm more elegant. It was a carapace,each scale of which was a bullet. This paraphernalia weighed the child down, gave him a monstrous bearing and posture that intoxicated him to the point of nausea. In short, he was carrying the ammunition supply. His uncombed hair was naked in the darkness. His battered thighs bent beneath the weight of his armor and fatigue. He was barefoot. He had jumped with wonderful suppleness and landed on his bent toes, with the barest help from Erik, who had reached out to him from the balcony. He held on to the machine gun, a lean, dark-colored, completely functional instrument. Erik entered the room through the window, and Riton spun around lightly, despite the mass of metal, and, with his mouth agape, found himself at the edge of a starry night on a rickety, ascetically simple iron bridge and confronted with an abyss of darkness that he felt was quivering with chestnut trees, though their leaves barely stirred. It was the Boulevard de Ménilmontant. Ménilmontant, the kid's neighborhood.
    A sentence: “My grief in the presence of Jean's grief reveals the force of my love for him!” The more I grieve, the more intense my feeling seems to be. Now, my suffering is often caused and always increased by remembering Jean's blackened corpse in its coffin, with the nostrils probably stuffed and the body slowly decomposing and mingling its smell with that of the flowers. My grief is heightened by the thought of Jean's suffering when he was shot, by his despair when he felt himself lose his footing and leave life for the realm of shades. My daily life is dominated by the memory of the