The Dogs and the Wolves by Irène Némirovsky Read Free Book Online Page A

imperative force, like drunkenness. She yawned loudly several times, made her way upstairs to bed in the darkness. She took off only her dress and shoes, as they’d told her to. She slipped in between the sheets, smiling – it was lovely and warm in her old bed – and she fell asleep to the sound of the first stones breaking windows down in the lower town.

7
    For a few days the damage was limited to shouting, curses, broken windows as night began to fall. Then everything would calm down. The days were quiet. Nevertheless, the children were no longer allowed to go out, and they spent hours sitting side by side on the old settee, playing the game they’d invented, but which became more embellished, a veritable epic with a cast of thousands, with wars, defeats, sieges, victories. Every evening, new stories emerged from their original invention, like branches sprouting from the trunk of an old tree. Their game left them breathless, excited, mouths dry, dark circles beneath their eyes. As soon as dusk fell, they had nothing else to do, for they were forbidden to light the lamps. No one in the lower town dared breathe, crouched behind closed windows and shutters, in narrow rooms that were dark and hot.
    But the day finally came when the real world proved more powerful than their dreams. Ben and Ada had attained such a state of hallucination that neither of them was even listening to what the other was saying. They were both talking at the same time in quiet, steady voices, banging their feet against the wood of the settee, when suddenly the murmuring they had stopped listening to was replaced by a savage, unearthly clamour, so close by thatthey thought it was coming from their own house, from their walls and old floors. At that moment, the door flew open and someone – they didn’t recognise who it was because the face was so disfigured with fear – someone rushed in, grabbed them, pushed them and dragged them out. Ben had lost a shoe and was shouting that he wanted to go back and get it, but no one was listening to him. They were taken through the building, out through the kitchen door and thrown, pushed, pulled by their wrists, their hands, their legs, and finally hoisted up a ladder to an attic.
    They fell on to the floor, felt the corner of a trunk and an old candelabra, as they fumbled in the darkness. They were in a junk room in the eaves. Ada’s father – they could now recognise his rasping, rapid breathing behind the door – sounded as if his heart was about to burst under the strain of his mad rush and terror.
    ‘Don’t move. Don’t cry. Hide,’ he whispered through the keyhole.
    Then he added, even more quietly: ‘Don’t be afraid . . .’
    ‘But I don’t want to stay here!’ cried Ada.
    ‘Be quiet, my poor darling! Don’t move. Don’t say a word. Keep still.’
    ‘But, Papa, we’re not going to sleep here!’
    ‘But we’re hungry, Uncle!’
    They beat the locked door with all the strength their little fists could muster. But her father had hurried back down the ladder and they could hear him pulling it away. As soon as they were alone, Ben calmed down.
    ‘There’s no point in shouting. It’s no use. He’s gone.’
    The attic looked out over an indoor courtyard, high and narrow, a deep pit between two large walls. Every now and again, the terrifying noise quietened down; the crowd moved off, and they thought they could hear the sea, risen as if by some miracle into the old street, beating its waves against the house. Sometimes soldiers, tramps, professional looters, hysterical Jews would meetat the entrance to the ghetto, and whatever happened then – Ben and Ada had absolutely no idea what it might be – took place inside the doorways of their own house, on their own doorstep. Then the crowds roared like wild animals. They seemed to hurl themselves like rams against the walls, hitting them, backing off, furiously battering them again to try to knock them down, striking them again and