...of signs

Having no further recourse but to leave, Kim is about to go back down the stairs. She takes one step to the side and notices again, at the bottom of the steep stairs, the little men moving about, increasingly numerous and threatening to rush up the stairs. She quickly draws back out of their hypothetical field of vision, to begin climbing the next flight of stairs which is exactly the same as the first but rising in the opposite direction. On the landing of the third floor there are only two doors, the first of which is barred by three slender wooden laths nailed one on top of the other across the frame, to form a cross with six branches: two horizontal and four oblique (along the diagonals of the rectangle). The second door is wide open: this is the source of the vague light which made climbing the steps easier. In a rather long room, where the light enters through a screened bay window opening onto a balcony covered with drying laundry, about a hundred people - mostly men - are sitting on benches arranged in parallel rows; they are all listening closely to an orator delivering a speech, standing on a little dais at one end of the room. But his speech is a mute one, consisting entirely of complicated, rapid gestures in which both hands play their part, and which is doubtless intended for deaf-mutes.
But now steps can be heard coming up from the lower part of the staircase, quick yet heavy steps, belonging to several individuals running at different rates of speed. They approach so quickly that the decision cannot await any further reflection. Since the stairs go no higher than this third floor, Kim quite casually enters the lecture hall where, with the assurance and naturalness of someone who had come here on purpose to attend this event, she sits down on the empty end of one of the benches. Yet some heads turn toward her and are perhaps surprised by her presence; her neighbours make signs to each other with their fingers, analogous to those of the speaker: it is not mostly men who are around her, but only men. She wonders what can be the subject of the meeting for which they are gathered; there are so many problems which do not concern women, or which at least cannot be discussed in front of them (which would make her situation more awkward). In any case, the question of discovering whether this is a speech in English or Chines should not come up. (Is this certain?) Two new arrivals appear in the doorway (do they seem out of breath from climbing the stairs too rapidly?) who glance around the room, looking for empty places, that are rare and difficult to determine because of the absence of individual seats. Once they have noticed two located side by side, they hastily occupy them. Is it their steps which are heard echoing up the wooden staircase? And was it deaf-mute gestures which the little men on the sidewalk were making to each other, in the rectangle of light?

[La Maison de Rende-vous, Robbe-Grillet, A.]