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Peer flails at their forelegs, whips their nostrils bloody, pokes out their eyes as if lashing at the perpetual nightmare of the war and hoping in his "state of damnation ... to reveal the truth about this desolate world." Rarer than the power to shock is Author Gascar's power to evoke disgust, which he does by combining familiar objects in unfamiliar ways until they become surreal and emetic. In Gaston he describes a rat: "It looked rather like a great hairy carrot; it crouched there as all rats do, as soon as dusk has fallen and there is nothing to distinguish them from a lost slipper or a forgotten rag except that long worm lying along the floor . . . that suspicious-looking shoelace that will suddenly, swift as a whipped top, grow tense with terror." Gaston of the title is a black-spotted rat, as big as a rabbit, and he is stalked through the sewers of a French provincial town by the health board and its ratcatchers as assiduously as Melville's Ahab hunted the great white whale. Like Moby Dick, the great black rat is a symbol of evil and of an ambiguous enveloping doom far beyond the petty retribution of its death.
A Pocketful of Acorns. What that doom might be—a universal death for all mankind in a new war—Author Gascar hints at most movingly in his last and longest tale, The Season of the Dead. It is about the Nazi massacre of east European Jewry. The story is not new, but this is perhaps one of the rare times that a writer of fiction has taken it through the tunnel of horrors into the light of art.
Peter, a captured French soldier, and his buddy are allowed by the Germans to tend the graves of their fellow French in a bucolic cemetery on the outskirts of Brodno, Poland. Peter thinks of death as a quiet neighbor until the freight cars of ill-fated Jews rumble past and the calling and weeping of human voices is carried on the wind until it fades into the distance, "leaving behind it that same serene sky, that store of blue that bewildered birds and dying men can never exhaust."
Serene, too, is the German sentry: "I'm told it's with electricity or gas. Oh, they don't suffer anything." The trains roll on. Finally the Jews of Brodno go, all except one who lives in the trees by day, sleeps in one of Peter's empty graves by night, leaving him tiny scraps of messages ("They've killed them all, Peter, killed them all! What is loneliness?"). The last message Peter finds in the grave is not worded: it is a black jacket with a pocketful of acorns, and its owner is gone—to death or madness. Peter knows not.