If one was to believe what one read in them, our populace was giving “a fine example of courage and composure.”
But in a town thrown back upon itself, in which nothing could be kept secret, no one had illusions about the “example” given by the public.
To form a correct idea about the courage and composure talked about by our journalists you had only to visit one of the quarantine depots or isolation camps established by our authorities.
As it so happens, the narrator, being fully occupied elsewhere, had no occasion to visit any of them, and must fall back on Tarrou’s diary for a description of the conditions in these places.
Tarrou gives an account of a visit he made, accompanied by Rambert, to the camp located in the municipal stadium.
The stadium lies on the outskirts of the town, between a street along which runs a car line and a stretch of waste land extending to the extreme edge of the plateau on which Oran is built.
It was already surrounded by high concrete walls and all that was needed to make escape practically impossible was to post sentries at the four entrance gates.
The walls served another purpose: they screened the unfortunates in quarantine from the view of people on the road.
Against this advantage may be set the fact that the inmates could hear all day, though they could not see them, the passing streetcars, and recognize by the increased volume of sound coming from the road the hours when people had knocked off work or were going to it.
And this brought home to them that the life from which they were debarred was going on as before, within a few yards of them, and that those high walls parted two worlds as alien to each other as two different planets.
Tarrou and Rambert chose a Sunday afternoon for their visit to the stadium.
They were accompanied by Gonzales, the football-player, with whom Rambert had kept in contact and who had let himself be persuaded into undertaking, in rotation with others, the surveillance of the camp.
This visit was to enable Rambert to introduce Gonzales to the camp commandant.
When they met that afternoon, Gonzales’s first remark was that this was exactly the time when, before the plague, he used to start getting into his football togs.
Now that the sports fields had been requisitioned, all that was of the past, and Gonzales was feeling—and showed it—at a loose end.
This was one of the reasons why he had accepted the post proposed by Rambert, but he made it a condition that he was to be on duty during week-ends only.
The sky was overcast and, glancing up at it, Gonzales observed regretfully that a day like this, neither too hot nor rainy, would have been perfect for a game.
And then he fell to conjuring up, as best he could, the once familiar smell of embrocation in the dressing-rooms, the stands crowded with people, the colored shirts of the players, showing up brightly against the tawny soil, the lemons at intermission or bottled lemonade that titillated parched throats with a thousand refreshing pin-pricks.
Tarrou also records how on the way, as they walked the shabby outer streets, the footballer gave kicks to all the small loose stones.
His object was to shoot them into the sewer-holes of the gutters, and whenever he did this, he would shout:
“Goal!”
When he had finished his cigarette he spat the stub in front of him and tried to catch it on his toe before it touched the ground.
Some children were playing near the stadium, and when one of them sent a ball toward the three men, Gonzales went out of his way to return it neatly.
On entering the stadium they found the stands full of people.
The field was dotted with several hundred red tents, inside which one had glimpses of bedding and bundles of clothes or rugs.
The stands had been kept open for the use of the internees in hot or rainy weather.
But it was a rule of the camp that everyone must be in his tent at sunset.
Showerbaths had been installed under the stands, and what used to be the players’ dressing-rooms converted into offices and infirmaries.
The majority of the inmates of the camp were sitting about on the stands.
Some, however, were strolling on the touchlines, and a few, squatting at the entrances of their tents, were listlessly contemplating the scene around them.
In the stands many of those slumped on the wooden tiers had a look of vague expectancy.
“What do they do with themselves all day?” Tarrou asked Rambert.
“Nothing.”
Almost all, indeed, had empty hands and idly dangling arms.
Another curious thing about this multitude of derelicts was its silence.
“When they first came there was such a din you couldn’t hear yourself speak,” Rambert said. “But as the days went by they grew quieter and quieter.”
In his notes Tarrou gives what to his mind would explain this change. He pictures them in the early days bundled together in the tents, listening to the buzz of flies, scratching themselves, and, whenever they found an obliging listener, shrilly voicing their fear or indignation. But when the camp grew overcrowded, fewer and fewer people were inclined to play the part of sympathetic listener.
So they had no choice but to hold their peace and nurse their mistrust of everything and everyone.
One had, indeed, a feeling that suspicion was falling, dewlike, from the grayly shining sky over the brickred camp.
Yes, there was suspicion in the eyes of all.
Obviously, they were thinking, there must be some good reason for the isolation inflicted on them, and they had the air of people who are puzzling over their problem and are afraid.
Everyone Tarrou set eyes on had that vacant gaze and was visibly suffering from the complete break with all that life had meant to him.
And since they could not be thinking of their death all the time, they thought of nothing.
They were on vacation.
“But worst of all,” Tarrou writes, “is that they’re forgotten, and they know it.
Their friends have forgotten them because they have other things to think about, naturally enough.
And those they love have forgotten them because all their energies are devoted to making schemes and taking steps to get them out of the camp.
And by dint of always thinking about these schemes and steps they have ceased thinking about those whose release they’re trying to secure.
And that, too, is natural enough.
In fact, it comes to this: nobody is capable of really thinking about anyone, even in the worst calamity.