Such being the normal life of Oran, it will be easily understood that our fellow citizens had not the faintest reason to apprehend the incidents that took place in the spring of the year in question and were (as we subsequently realized) premonitory signs of the grave events we are to chronicle.
To some, these events will seem quite natural; to others, all but incredible.
But, obviously, a narrator cannot take account of these differences of outlook.
His business is only to say: “This is what happened,” when he knows that it actually did happen, that it closely affected the life of a whole populace, and that there are thousands of eyewitnesses who can appraise in their hearts the truth of what he writes.
In any case the narrator (whose identity will be made known in due course) would have little claim to competence for a task like this, had not chance put him in the way of gathering much information, and had he not been, by the force of things, closely involved in all that he proposes to narrate.
This is his justification for playing the part of a historian.
Naturally, a historian, even an amateur, always has data, personal or at second hand, to guide him.
The present narrator has three kinds of data: first, what he saw himself; secondly, the accounts of other eyewitnesses (thanks to the part he played, he was enabled to learn their personal impressions from all those figuring in this chronicle); and, lastly, documents that subsequently came into his hands.
He proposes to draw on these records whenever this seems desirable, and to employ them as he thinks best.
He also proposes … But perhaps the time has come to drop preliminaries and cautionary remarks and to launch into the narrative proper.
The account of the first days needs giving in some detail.
When leaving his surgery on the morning of April 16, Dr. Bernard Rieux felt something soft under his foot. It was a dead rat lying in the middle of the landing.
On the spur of the moment he kicked it to one side and, without giving it a further thought, continued on his way downstairs.
Only when he was stepping out into the street did it occur to him that a dead rat had no business to be on his landing, and he turned back to ask the concierge of the building to see to its removal.
It was not until he noticed old M. Michel’s reaction to the news that he realized the peculiar nature of his discovery.
Personally, he had thought the presence of the dead rat rather odd, no more than that; the concierge, however, was genuinely outraged.
On one point he was categorical: “There weren’t no rats here.”
In vain the doctor assured him that there was a rat, presumably dead, on the second-floor landing; M. Michel’s conviction wasn’t to be shaken.
There “weren’t no rats in the building,” he repeated, so someone must have brought this one from outside.
Some youngster trying to be funny, most likely.
That evening, when Dr. Rieux was standing in the entrance, feeling for the latch-key in his pocket before starting up the stairs to his apartment, he saw a big rat coming toward him from the dark end of the passage. It moved uncertainly, and its fur was sopping wet.
The animal stopped and seemed to be trying to get its balance, moved forward again toward the doctor, halted again, then spun around on itself with a little squeal and fell on its side. Its mouth was slightly open and blood was spurting from it.
After gazing at it for a moment, the doctor went upstairs.
He wasn’t thinking about the rat.
That glimpse of spurting blood had switched his thoughts back to something that had been on his mind all day.
His wife, who had been ill for a year now, was due to leave next day for a sanatorium in the mountains.
He found her lying down in the bedroom, resting, as he had asked her to do, in view of the exhausting journey before her.
She gave him a smile.
“Do you know, I’m feeling ever so much better!” she said.
The doctor gazed down at the face that turned toward him in the glow of the bedside lamp.
His wife was thirty, and the long illness had left its mark on her face. Yet the thought that came to Rieux’s mind as he gazed at her was: How young she looks, almost like a little girl! But perhaps that was because of the smile, which effaced all else.
“Now try to sleep,” he counseled. “The nurse is coming at eleven, you know, and you have to catch the midday train.”
He kissed the slightly moist forehead.
The smile escorted him to the door.
Next day, April 17, at eight o’clock the concierge buttonholed the doctor as he was going out. Some young scallywags, he said, had dumped three dead rats in the hall.
They’d obviously been caught in traps with very strong springs, as they were bleeding profusely.
The concierge had lingered in the doorway for quite a while, holding the rats by their legs and keeping a sharp eye on the passers-by, on the off chance that the miscreants would give themselves away by grinning or by some facetious remark.
His watch had been in vain.
“But I’ll nab ’em all right,” said M. Michel hopefully.
Much puzzled, Rieux decided to begin his round in the outskirts of the town, where his poorer patients lived.
The scavenging in these districts was done late in the morning and, as he drove his car along the straight, dusty streets, he cast glances at the garbage cans aligned along the edge of the sidewalk.
In one street alone the doctor counted as many as a dozen rats deposited on the vegetable and other refuse in the cans.
He found his first patient, an asthma case of long standing, in bed, in a room that served as both dining-room and bedroom and overlooked the street.
The invalid was an old Spaniard with a hard, rugged face.
Placed on the coverlet in front of him were two pots containing dried peas.
When the doctor entered, the old man was sitting up, bending his neck back, gasping and wheezing in his efforts to recover his breath.
His wife brought a bowl of water.
“Well, Doctor,” he said, while the injection was being made, “they’re coming out, have you noticed?”
“The rats, he means,” his wife explained.
“The man next door found three.”