To smash my fist right through these walls
Of ugliness and emptiness,
And gently touch your face."
– STABBING WESTWARDS, "So Far Away"
"And that," Grantaire concluded, "is what happened. I didn't see him for four or five days after that. But he was back at the Musain within a week and behaving as though nothing had happened. He didn't have to use the cane for long, and the bruises eventually faded and his voice came back. He never did talk about it, except for a month later when Courfeyrac noticed that he had bought a new watch – they'd taken the old one." He swallowed. "That's what they got out of it – forty francs and a pocket watch."
Grantaire had narrated the story quickly, clumsily. The longer it took to relate, the clearer the memories became. Enjolras' classically beautiful face became bruised and swollen once more, his eyes haunted, agonised, half-mad with terror. During the following weeks Grantaire had been unable to stop thinking about what had happened. He lay awake at night conjuring up vivid recreations of the event, putting different faces on the assailants, different weapons in their rough hands. What would have gone through Enjolras' head as he stood in the doorway, watching five men tear his home apart? Would he have stepped towards them, taken the offensive? And when they were beating him – five of them – did he fight back?
Bahorel had been unable to come up with any possible leads and reluctantly accepted that it had been just another random act of violence in a city that was too full of them anyway. Gavroche had not heard anything either, but during the next few weeks he paid Enjolras the respect due to a man who, in his words, had "copped a pounding" like that and was still able to walk about. Only once, much later, had Enjolras himself come close to touching the topic . . . and that had been when he thought he and Combeferre were alone.
in others words it did affect him
"Maybe it did." Grantaire looked away from the crow, back out the window. "But he was was dead in seven months, so what does it matter?"
any fool can die grantaire the question isn't how it's why
The crow thought it was stating a simple fact – and one that the boy would have to get used to very quickly – but the boy's head jerked up and his dark, deep-set eyes blazed. Grantaire took a stumbling step towards the crow, and it hopped back further along the dresser.
"H-he said that," Grantaire stammered. "Not in those exact words, but he said that."
His feet gave way beneath him and he crashed down to the floor. He had never known whether Enjolras had meant the words or whether he had merely spat them out in defence, a verbal reaction to Grantaire's probing. The argument had been short but savage and neither of them had ever mentioned it again. Just another dark cloud to brood heavily over the gaping chasm that separated them, isolated them and left them staring at one another in mute frustration and bewilderment.
The crow dropped lightly to the wooden floorboards and hopped towards him.
when did he say that
Grantaire looked back up at the bird, but at the same time he appeared not to see it, he appeared to be looking straight through it and back into the past. Ready at last to confront this half-acknowledged secret pain.
"The night he was attacked. We were the last two to leave the Musain. Earlier that evening we had been talking about the Fernier case – he was another activist who'd been arrested that week, but on a murder charge that was clearly false. There had been rumours that there would be a riot on the day of his trial. Hardly promised to be the beginnings of the new revolution, but the victim had been a Guardsman so there were plenty of ugly feelings between the cock's-tails and the workers. The others had been discussing whether the Friends of the ABC should turn out in force, or just put a few representatives amongst the crowd at the courthouse gates. Enjolras said that he was going to be there, so of course everybody else said they would be there too."
Grantaire closed his eyes, swallowed. The crow watched him closely. Remembering hurt.
"I thought it was absolutely ridiculous. If there was a scuffle outside the courthouse, what would happen? People would get hurt, that's all. The general populace was ambivalent about Fernier – he hadn't shot that Guardsman but he had connections to the Communards which most felt was leaning a little too far in the opposite direction. They'd hardly be taking to the streets if the death penalty was passed. So after everybody left, that's what I waited to tell Enjolras. That the entire thing was pointless."
Only, it hadn't come out quite that way. As he watched the other students leave, Grantaire had frantically tried to compose a set speech in his head, to find a way to say things he had to say – only to find that it wasn't possible. What did he have to say, after all? That he thought this fist-waving was a waste of time, and Enjolras knew that he thought that anyway. That if there was a riot, nothing would come of it except for injury to those who were unlucky enough to get in the way of the Guardsmen's sabres. He finished off his second bottle of wine – a remarkably sober evening it had been – and watched as Enjolras sat at his usual table, reading the paper and stonily ignoring him.
Don't go to the courthouse next week, he wanted to say. Don't run such a risk over so trifling a matter.
As soon as he'd said the words in his head, Grantaire knew that he would never be able to say them aloud. Because that would be an acknowledgement that Enjolras would eventually have to run greater risks. On most days Grantaire was able to block out that first bleak realisation that he had made when Enjolras had first told a group of young men what he believed they were capable of achieving. But on others he was unable to forget it. The sun would catch in Enjolras' hair, he'd look quickly towards a speaker, tap his fingers on a tabletop, stand waiting for a cart to pass before he crossed the street. And Grantaire would look at him and remember This man will die young. And that was something that Grantaire occasionally woke up screaming about, drenched in sweat.
So that night, he had shambled uneasily towards Enjolras' table without knowing what he wanted to say. Enjolras had looked up at him in irritation, seeing only a grotesque parody of Socrates in his gadfly incarnation – an inarticulate cynic with alcohol on his breath, whose stinging needling words provoked exasperation and frustration, not deeper thought.
"I attempted to broach the subject," Grantaire told the crow. "And of course I failed. He was looking up at me with those cold, angry eyes. He didn't want me there, standing over him, talking to him. I wanted so much to tell him that I cared – not about his cause, but about him. But how could I? How the hell could I?"
The crow bowed its head. Grantaire hauled himself to his feet, and the crow felt the vibrations through the floorboards as the man returned to the window.
"He thought I was just picking a fight. And you know what – I was. Because I didn't know how else to do it. My God, sometimes I think that if we could have just sat down and had a proper conversation, then . . ." He fell silent, scrubbed silently at the dusty glass with the palm of his hand. Soon the pane was clean enough to see through. The sky, thick with clouds, was dark. He wondered what the time was – it felt like he had been here with the crow for a lifetime.
Maybe I have been.
He dusted his hands off. The cat was back at his feet, rubbing around his legs and purring hopefully. He permitted that.
"The words just came tumbling out, and they tumbled out wrong. I said, 'You're here. You're alive. You're now. And you're going to throw it away.' He said nothing, he just looked at me but I knew he was thinking, Oh, this is nice. The wine-cask telling me that I'm wasting my life. I tried to clarify, I asked him: What are you trying to prove? That you don't mind getting hurt, that you don't care if you get killed? Because that's all that is going to happen to you.
"And then he looked at me, really looked at me. And he said . . ."
Enjolras' eyes were like ice, and Grantaire felt as though he was hearing the other man's voice from a million miles away.
"If all I wanted to do was die, I could go find myself a bridge and do it tonight. I don't think you have ever lived, Grantaire, so don't you dare talk to me about death. I do what I do because I know that I am right. I am deeply sorry that I have an understanding of my capabilities and limitations, and of what I want to do and where I am going. I'm even more sorry that you do not have those things . . . and that you despise me because I do. I accept your presence here only because the Republic cannot afford to turn men away from her. The others like you, I do not.
"Do you think I wish for death – that I walked out into the streets in July last year with open arms, waiting for it to embrace me? I don't, and I didn't. In dying, man's only victory is over death, and what does that matter – we'll all die some day. No. The true battle, the one that matters, is fought by the living. We may die, but others will not. It's remembering that that keeps me from falling apart, when I'm exhausted and afraid, when I just stop short and think 'What the hell am I doing? Am I failing my friends, risking them for no good reason?' I remember that this isn't about me, it isn't about the individual. Is that so hard to understand?"
There had been no anger in Enjolras' voice – only resignation and an eerie sadness that made Grantaire's skin crawl. For a frozen moment, Enjolras looked like a man of seventy, or a general in war who knows that no matter what decisions he makes, an entire battalion of brothers, sons and husbands is going to be massacred. It was the longest that Enjolras had ever spoken to him directly, and it was as though he somehow understood that these words had to be said, even though Grantaire was the last person in the world that he wished to say them to. A confession of true feeling made in exhausted anger – in reaction to a clumsy declaration of care unrecognisable for what it was. Grantaire had wished he could have said "Yes, I understand." But he did not, because no matter how Enjolras put it, what had come out of his mouth that night was an acknowledgement that he too understood that a debt collector with hollow eyes was waiting patiently in the shadows for him – and in waiting for him was waiting for his friends. He was acknowledging that he knew this, and that he did not care.
"Neither of us said much after that," Grantaire continued. "Then, about five minutes later he said that he was going home. I blurted out, without thinking, 'Can I walk with you?' Not 'Would you like me to walk with you?' or 'It's late – maybe you shouldn't go back alone,' but 'Can I walk with you?' He looked at me again, but this time there was no anger or frustration. He was just confused. 'I don't know what you want from me,' he said, 'and I don't have the energy to try and find out tonight. Good-night.' And then he was gone."
The cat reached up Grantaire's trouser leg – clawed the material. Again he nudged it down.
and what did you want from him
"Just that night?" Grantaire shrugged. "To see him home safely. I shouldn't have said anything, I should have just followed him. But I didn't. I sat there alone for another hour and then went home myself. And he went home and found five thieves in his apartment."
Found them right here in this room.
Grantaire looked about again. The door to No. 40 was at the end of a hall, around a corner. Enjolras would have seen the door was open, heard the sounds of furniture being thrown about – maybe he'd started running towards his door – and the men would have been in here. And what they had done to Enjolras had changed him.
And it was as simple as that.
The thought was made tangible before Grantaire could stop it, and there was no taking it back.
His demeanour in the weeks following the break-in . . . Joly openly noted that he looked unwell . . . slender to begin with he had lost even more weight . . . a half-heard conversation between him and Combeferre when they thought they were alone . . . he had gone to the courthouse for Fernier's trial even though the others did not think that he was strong enough . . . somebody mentioned that he wasn't turning up at some of his classes . . . and all the way through he never spoke about what happened, made it obvious that he didn't want others to speak about it either. Bahorel had put it perfectly, he was being "Enjolraic" about the whole thing and that should have been a good sign, but Grantaire didn't like it, whenever he thought about he grew uneasy. He would watch Enjolras closely, trying to convince himself that he should bring the subject up, that there was cause for concern. But time passed and as June 1832 grew nearer it became less important amongst everything else that was happening and he maybe even forgot it had ever happened.
Until the moment of Enjolras' death.
Because he had looked like that before, for that one moment when he limped out of the Musain the day after the break-in and his eyes had met with Grantaire's.
"I have to understand what happened," he said to the crow, unable to keep his voice from trembling. "I need to know who those men were and what they wanted. I don't want to know, but I have to, don't I?"
to understand you will have to see
He nodded, mouth suddenly dry. He understood how he would be able to see – it had happened in this very room. And if he willed himself – forced himself – to look, then all would be revealed. He crossed the floor to the door, and all of a sudden the sound of his boots on the floorboards was empty and hollow. This room had been a home once, Enjolras had been safe here, much as Grantaire didn't like to admit it, out of harm's way. Then that had changed and there was much more to it than a break-in gone wrong.
He examined the door and its frame. Opened it, tested the ease with which the handle turned, the shape of the lock and the bolt. The crow had returned to the dresser, from which it watched him.
"This door wasn't forced," Grantaire said. "The doorjamb hasn't been damaged. Even if the bolt had had to be replaced, you'd be able to see the repair work and the bolt itself would look new. Either the lock was picked or . . ."
The little grey cat sat curled up in the armchair, warm and drowsy, brimming with milk the young man had brought home. The young man sat at his desk, he had been sitting there for quite some time, and the cat could hear the scritch-scratch of his pen on paper. As always, it hoped against hope that the young man would forget to put it out before he went to bed.
A knock at the door. The young man jumped and the cat's ears pricked.
Grantaire himself jumped, whirled around and stared at the cat. It sat in the middle of the floor looking back up at him.
He didn't walk in on a break-in. He lied to us.
And the cat . . . it had seen.
The crow watched in silence as the man closed the door and then walked towards the small animal, crouched down on the floor before it, hand outstretched. Trembling. Although it hadn't been expecting the boy to learn this way, it knew that he had discovered a key, found a window through which he could see what had happened that November.
Enjolras glanced down at his watch on the table. Nearly a quarter to one. People knew better than to come unannounced to his door at this hour of the night. Unless something had happened . . .
Whoever it was knocked again, louder.
He put down his pen, and folded down the top corner of the page of Candide to ensure he wouldn't lose his place.
The little cat was now sitting bolt upright, ears pricked forward and pupils dilated. Alert.
Enjolras crossed to the door and opened it a cautious inch or two.
Standing in the hall were four men. Strangers. He tensed – unknown visitors could hardly be good news.
"Is this the home of Justin Enjolras?" one of them asked.
Enjolras kept his countenance neutral. "Who wants to know?"
"We do."
Four shoulders rammed against the door, slamming it inwards.
The impact sent Enjolras back towards the centre of the room and he could only watch in breathless horror as the four men strode across the threshold and into his home. Behind him the cat leapt down from the chair, ran for the door, skirting around the men. One of them – dark-haired with rings in his ears – kicked savagely at it. It stumbled sideways with a screech, then picked itself up again and raced out of the door.
Almost without realising, moving on instinct alone, Enjolras took a step towards the men, forced himself to speak with a steady voice.
"Who are –"
A heavy fist shot out, seemingly from nowhere, and smashed across his face.
In the following days, Enjolras would realise that he had no idea how much time passed between the moment that the men came through the door and the moment that they left. Even if he had thought of it he wouldn't have been able to check his watch, because they took it with them. But they did leave, leaving the air in the room thick with fear and pain, leaving his home in shambles, leaving him on the floor without the strength or will to move because everything hurt so much.
Some time later the cat returned . . . slinking in through the door the men had left ajar. It limped across the floor to him and he forced himself to sit up, run his swollen aching fingers over its flanks, seeing whether anything felt broken. Then Enjolras himself rose to his feet, limped past his overturned desk and scattered books . . . into his bedroom with the drawers wrenched out of the bureau and his belongings torn or smashed or thrown about.
It felt as though he was someone else . . . some person who was completely unconnected to everything that had happened here. It felt as though he was standing in the corner watching another young man, a man whose fair hair had seemingly turned to russet, whose face was bruised and swollen, whose aching body trembled within his torn and blood-stained clothes. He watched as the young man poured water from a jug into a basin and picked up a washcloth, dampened it. Stopped short.
He watched as the young man sank slowly to the floor once more, and lay motionless there, curled up on one side and crying silent tears.
Grantaire heard a soft caw, far off in the distance. He was reluctant to respond to it, unwilling to open his eyes and leave this darkness where he was unable to see Enjolras and what had been done to him. The floorboards were cool and hard beneath him and all of a sudden he found himself wondering whether the grave had felt like this – solid beneath you, darkness around you. The cat had sensed whatever passed between it and the man when they touched, and had fled to some dark corner of the room. He could sense its presence – afraid, knowing that something about this man separated him from other men.
He could sense another presence but was not sure what it was.
Then the crow's voice crackled through the shouts and thuds and cries echoing in the silence.
might want to open your eyes boy
It took a moment, it was as though his drying tears had glued them closed.
It took him another moment to recognise what he was looking at when he opened them.
A young woman was sitting beside him, looking down at him with wide eyes and parted lips.