Kitabı oku: «The Mandarins», sayfa 3

‘Am I still your beautiful wisteria vine?’

‘Now and always.’

‘And do you love me? Do you really still love me?’

He did not have the courage at that moment to provoke a scene, he was resigned to avow anything – and Paula knew it. ‘Yes, I do.’

‘Do you belong to me?’

‘To you alone.’

‘Tell me you love me, say it.’

‘I love you.’

She uttered a long moan of satisfaction. He embraced her violently, smothered her mouth with his lips, and to get it over with as quickly as possible immediately penetrated her.

When finally he fell limp on Paula, he heard a triumphant moan.

‘Are you happy?’ she murmured.

‘Of course.’

‘I’m so terribly happy!’ Paula exclaimed, looking at him through shining tear-brimmed eyes. He hid her unbearably bright face against his shoulder. ‘The almond trees will be in bloom …’ he said to himself, closing his eyes. ‘And there’ll be oranges hanging from the orange trees.’

II

No, I shan’t meet death today. Not today or any other day. I’ll be dead for others and yet I’ll never have known death.

I closed my eyes again, but I couldn’t sleep. Why had death entered my dreams once more? It is prowling inside me; I can feel it prowling there. Why?

I hadn’t always been aware that one day I would die. As a child, I believed in God. A white robe and two shimmering wings were awaiting me in heaven’s vestry and I wanted so much to break through the clouds and try them on. I would often lie down on my quilt, my hands clasped, and abandon myself to the delights of the hereafter. Sometimes in my sleep I would say to myself, ‘I’m dead,’ and the voice watching over me guaranteed me eternity. I was horrified when I first discovered the silence of death. A mermaid had died on a deserted beach. She had renounced her immortal soul for the love of a young man and all that remained of her was a bit of white foam without memory and without voice. ‘It’s only a fairy tale,’ I would say to myself for reassurance.

But it wasn’t a fairy tale. I was the mermaid. God became an abstract idea in the depths of the sky, and one evening I blotted it out altogether. I’ve never felt sorry about losing God, for He had robbed me of the earth. But one day I came to realize that in renouncing Him I had condemned myself to death. I was fifteen, and I cried out in fear in the empty house. When I regained my senses, I asked myself, ‘What do other people do? What will I do? Will I always live with this fear inside me?’

From the moment I fell in love with Robert, I never again felt fear, of anything. I had only to speak his name and I would feel safe and secure: he’s working in the next room … I can get up and open the door … But I remain in bed; I’m not sure any more that he too doesn’t hear that little, gnawing sound. The earth splits open under our feet, and above our heads there is an infinite abyss. I no longer know who we are, nor what awaits us.

Suddenly, I sat bolt upright, opened my eyes. How could I possibly admit to myself that Robert was in danger? How could I ever bear it? He hadn’t told me anything really disturbing, nothing really new. I’m tired, I drank too much; just a little four-o’clock-in-the-morning frenzy. But who’s to decide at what hour one sees things clearest? Wasn’t it precisely when I believed myself most secure that I used to awaken in frenzies? And did I ever really believe it?

I can’t quite remember. We didn’t pay very much attention to ourselves, Robert and I. Only events counted: the flight from Paris, the return, the sirens, the bombs, the standing in lines, our reunions, the first issues of L’Espoir. A brown candle was sputtering in Paula’s apartment. With a couple of tin cans, we had built a stove in which we used to burn scraps of paper. The smoke would sting our eyes. Outside, puddles of blood, the whistling of bullets, the rumbling of artillery and tanks. In all of us, the same silence, the same hunger, the same hope. Every morning we would awaken asking ourselves the same question: Is the swastika still flying above the Senate? And in August, when we danced around blazing bonfires in the streets of Montparnasse, the same joy was in all our hearts. Then the autumn slipped by, and only a few hours ago, while we were completing the task of forgetting our dead by the lights of a Christmas tree, I realized that we were beginning to exist again each for himself. ‘Do you think it’s possible to bring back the past?’ Paula had asked. And Henri had said, ‘I feel like writing a light novel.’ They could once again speak in their normal voices, have their books published; they could argue again, organize political groups, make plans. That’s why they were all so happy. Well, almost all. Anyhow, this isn’t the time for me to be tormenting myself. Tonight’s a holiday, the first Christmas of peace, the last Christmas at Buchenwald, the last Christmas on earth, the first Christmas Diego hasn’t lived through. We were dancing, we were kissing each other around the tree sparkling with promises, and there were many, oh, so many, who weren’t there. No one had heard their last words; they were buried nowhere, swallowed up in emptiness. Two days after the liberation, Geneviève had placed her hand on a coffin. Was it the right one? Jacques’s body had never been found; a friend claimed he had buried his notebooks under a tree. What notebooks? Which tree? Sonia had asked for a sweater and silk stockings, and then she never again asked for anything. Where were Rachel’s bones and the lovely Rosa’s? In the arms that had so often clasped Rosa’s soft body, Lambert was now holding Nadine and Nadine was laughing the way she used to laugh when Diego held her in his arms. I looked down the row of Christmas trees reflected in the large mirrors and I thought, ‘There are the candles and the holly and the mistletoe they’ll never see. Everything that’s been given me, I stole from them,’ They were killed. Which one first? He or his father? Death didn’t enter into his plans. Did he know he was going to die? Did he rebel at the end or was he resigned to it? How will I ever know? And now that he’s dead, what difference does it make?

No, tombstone, no date of death. That’s why I’ve been groping for him through that life he loved so tumultuously. I hold out my hand towards the light switch and hesitantly withdraw it. In my desk is a picture of Diego, but even though I looked at it for hours I would never find again under that head of bushy hair, his real face of flesh and bones, that face in which everything was too large – his eyes, nose, ears, mouth. He was sitting in the study and Robert had asked, ‘What will you do if the Nazis win?’ And he had answered, ‘A Nazi victory doesn’t enter into my plans.’ His plans consisted of marrying Nadine and becoming a great poet. And he might have made it, too. At sixteen he already knew how to turn words into hot, glowing embers. He might have needed only a very little time – five years, four years; he lived his life so fast. Huddled with the others around the electric heater, I used to enjoy watching him devour Hegel or Kant; he would turn the pages as rapidly as if he were skimming through a murder mystery. And the fact of the matter is that he understood perfectly everything he read. Only his dreams were slow.

He had come one day to show Robert his poems, which was how we first got to know him. His father was a Spanish Jew who was stubbornly determined to continue making money in business even during the Occupation. He claimed the Spanish consul was protecting him. Diego reproached him for his luxurious style of living and his opulent blonde mistress; he preferred our austerity and spent almost all his time with us. Besides, he was at the hero-worshipping age; and he worshipped Robert. The moment he met Nadine, he impetuously gave her his love, his first, his only love. For the first time she had a feeling of being needed; it overwhelmed her. She immediately made room in the house for Diego and invited him to live with us. He had a great deal of affection for me as well, even though he found me much too rational. At night, Nadine insisted upon my tucking her in, the way I used to when she was a child. Lying next to her, he would ask me, ‘And me? Don’t I get a kiss?’ And I would kiss him. That year, we had been friends, my daughter and I. I was grateful to her for being capable of a sincere love and she was thankful to me for not opposing her deepest desire. Why should I have? She was only seventeen, but both Robert and I felt that it’s never too early to be happy.

And they knew how to be happy with so much fire! When we were together, I would rediscover my youth. ‘Come and have dinner with us. Come on, tonight’s a holiday,’ they would say, each one pulling me by an arm. Diego had filched a gold piece from his father. He preferred to take rather than to receive; it was the way of his generation. He had no trouble in changing his treasure into negotiable money and he spent the afternoon with Nadine on the roller coaster at an amusement park. When I met them on the street that evening, they were devouring a huge pie they had bought in the back room of a nearby bakery; it was their way of working up an appetite. They called up Robert and asked him to come along too, but he refused to leave his work. I went with them. Their faces were smeared with jam, their hands black with the grime of the fairground, and in their eyes was the arrogant look of happy criminals. The maître d’hôtel must have surely believed we had come there with the intention of squandering some ill-gotten gains. He showed us to a table far in the rear of the room and asked Diego with chilly politeness, ‘Monsieur has no jacket?’ Nadine threw her jacket over Diego’s threadbare sweater, revealing her own soiled, wrinkled blouse. But in spite of it all, we were served. They ordered ice cream first, and sardines, and then steaks, fried potatoes, oysters, and still more ice cream. ‘It all gets mixed up inside anyhow,’ they explained to me, stuffing the food into their mouths. They were so happy to be able for once to eat their fill! No matter how hard I tried to get enough food to go around, we were always more or less hungry. ‘Eat up,’ they said to me commandingly, as they slipped slices of pâté into their pockets for Robert.

It wasn’t long after this that the Germans one morning knocked at Mr Serra’s door. No one had informed him that the Spanish consul had been transferred. Diego, as luck would have it, had slept at his father’s that night. They didn’t take the blonde. ‘Tell Nadine not to worry about me,’ Diego said. ‘I’ll come back, because I want to come back.’ Those were the last words we ever heard from him; all his other words were drowned out forever, he who loved so much to talk.

It was springtime and the sky was very blue, the peach trees a pastel pink. When we would ride our bicycles, Nadine and I, through the flag-decked parks of Paris, the fragrant joy of peacetime weekends filled our lungs. But the tall buildings of Drancy, where the prisoners were kept, brutally crushed that lie. The blonde had handed over three million francs to a German named Felix who transmitted messages from the prisoners and who had promised to help them escape. Twice, peering through binoculars, we were able to pick out Diego standing at a distant window. They had shaved off his woolly hair and it was no longer entirely he who smiled back at us; his mutilated head seemed even then to belong to another world.

One afternoon in May we found the huge barracks deserted; straw mattresses were being aired at the open windows of empty rooms. At the café where we had parked our bicycles, they told us that three trains had left the station during the night. Standing by the barbed-wire fence, we watched and waited for a long time. And then suddenly, very far off, very high up, we made out two solitary silhouettes leaning out of a window. The younger one waved his beret triumphantly. Felix had spoken the truth: Diego had not been deported. Choked with joy, we rode back to Paris.

‘They’re in a camp with American prisoners,’ the blonde told us. ‘They’re doing fine, taking lots of sun baths.’ But she hadn’t actually seen them. We sent them sweaters and chocolate, and they thanked us for the gifts through the mouth of Felix. But we stopped receiving written messages. Nadine insisted upon some sort of sign to prove they were still alive – Diego’s ring, a lock of his hair. But it was just then that they changed camps again, were sent somewhere far from Paris. It became increasingly difficult to locate them in any particular place; they were gone, that was all. To be nowhere or not to be at all isn’t very different. Nothing really changed when at last Felix said irritably, ‘They killed them a long time ago.’

Nadine wept frantically night after night, and I held her in my arms from evening till morning. Then she found sleep once more. At first Diego appeared every night in her dreams, a wretched look on his face. Later even his spectre vanished. She was right; I can’t really blame her. What can you do with a corpse? Yes, I know. They serve as excuses for making flags, heroic statues, guns, medals, speeches, and even souvenirs for decorating the home. It would be far better to leave their ashes in peace. Monuments or dust. And they had been our brothers. But after all, we had no choice in the matter. Why did they leave us? If only they would leave us in peace! Let’s forget them, I say. Let’s think a little about ourselves now. We’ve more than enough to do remaking our own lives. The dead are dead; for them there are no more problems. But after this night of festivity, we, the living, will awaken again. And then how shall we live?

Nadine and Lambert were laughing together, a record was playing loudly, the floor was trembling under our feet, the blue flames of the candles were flickering. I looked at Sézenac who was lying on the rug, thinking no doubt of those glorious days when he strutted down the boulevards of Paris with a rifle slung over his shoulder. I looked at Chancel who had been condemned to death by the Germans and at the last moment exchanged for one of their prisoners. And Lambert whose father had denounced his fiancée, and Vincent who had killed a dozen of our home-grown Nazi militiamen with his own hands. What will they all do with those pasts of theirs, so grievous and so brief? And what will they do with their shapeless futures? Will I know how to help them? Helping people is my job; I make them lie down on a couch and pour out their dreams to me. But I can’t bring Rosa back to life, nor the twelve Nazis Vincent killed. And even if I were somehow able to neutralize their pasts, what kind of future could I offer them? I quiet fears, harness dreams, restrain desires; I make them adjust themselves. But to what? I can no longer see anything around me that makes sense.

No question about it, I had too much to drink. After all, it wasn’t I who created heaven and earth; no one’s asking me to give an accounting of myself. Why must I forever be worrying about others? I’d do better to worry a little about myself for a change. I press my cheek against the pillow; I’m here, it’s I. The trouble is there’s nothing about me worth giving much thought to. Oh, if someone asks who I am, I can always show him my case history; to become an analyst, I had to be analysed. It was found that I had a rather pronounced Oedipus complex, which explains my marriage to a man twenty years my elder, a clear aggressiveness towards my mother, and some slight homosexual tendencies which conveniently disappeared. To my Catholic upbringing I owe a highly developed super ego – the reason for my puritanism and my lack of narcissism. The ambivalent feelings I have in regard to my daughter stem from my aversion to my mother as much as to my indifference concerning myself. My case is one of the most classic types; its segments fall neatly into a predictable pattern. From a Catholic point of view, it’s also quite banal: in their eyes I stopped believing in God when I discovered the temptations of the flesh, and my marriage to an unbeliever completed my downfall. Politically and socially Robert and I were left-wing intellectuals. Nothing in all this is entirely inexact. There I am then, clearly catalogued and willing to be so, adjusted to my husband, to my profession, to life, to death, to the world and all its horrors; me, precisely me, that is to say, no one.

To be no one, all things considered, is something of a privilege. I watched them coming and going in the room, all of them with their important names, and I didn’t envy them. For Robert it was all right; he was predestined to be what he was. But the others, how do they dare? How can anyone be so arrogant or so rash as to serve himself up as prey to a pack of strangers? Their names are dirtied in thousands of mouths; the curious rob them of their thoughts, their hearts, their lives. If I too were subjected to the cupidity of that ferocious mob of ragpickers, I would certainly end up by considering myself nothing but a pile of garbage. I congratulated myself for not being someone.

I went over to Paula. The war had not affected her aggressive elegance. She was wearing a long, silk, violet-coloured gown, and from her ears hung clusters of amethysts.

‘You’re very lovely tonight,’ I said.

She looked at herself quickly in one of the large mirrors. ‘Yes, I know,’ she said sadly. ‘I’m lovely.’

She was indeed beautiful, but under her eyes there were deep circles that matched the colour of her dress. At heart she knew very well that Henri could have taken her to Portugal. She knew much more than she pretended to know.

‘You must be very happy; your party’s a great success.’

‘Henri loves parties so much,’ Paula said, her hands, heavy with rings, mechanically smoothing her shimmering silk dress.

‘Won’t you sing something for us? I’d so much like to hear you sing again.’

‘Sing?’ she said, surprised.

‘Yes, sing,’ I replied laughingly. ‘Have you forgotten that you used to sing once upon a time?’

‘Once – but that was long ago,’ she answered.

‘Not any more it isn’t. Now it’s like old times again.’

‘Do you really think so?’ Paula asked, staring intently into my eyes. She seemed to be peering into a crystal ball somewhere beyond my face. ‘Do you think it’s possible to bring back the past?’

I knew how she wanted me to answer that question, but with a slightly embarrassed laugh I said only, ‘I don’t know; I’m not an oracle.’

‘I must get Robert to explain the meaning of time to me,’ she said meditatively.

She was ready to deny the existence of space and time rather than admit that love might not be eternal. I was afraid for her. She had been well aware during these past four years that Henri no longer felt anything more than a wearied affection for her. But ever since the liberation, I don’t know what insane hope had awakened in her heart.

‘Do you remember the Negro spiritual I used to like so much? Won’t you sing it for us?’

She walked over to the piano and lifted the keyboard cover. Her voice seemed slightly hollow, but it was just as moving as ever. ‘You know, she ought to appear in public again,’ I said to Henri, who greeted my words with a look of astonishment. When the applause died down, he went over to Nadine and began dancing with her. I didn’t like the way she was looking at him. There was nothing I could do to help her, either. I had given her my only decent dress and lent her my prettiest necklace; that was all I had the power to do. I knew it would be useless to probe her dreams; all she needed was the love Lambert was so anxious to give her. But how could I prevent her from destroying it, as I knew she ultimately would? And yet when Lambert entered the room, she raced down the little stairway from the top of which she had been surveying us with a look of disapproval. She stopped dead on the last step, embarrassed by her too-open display of affection.

Lambert walked over to her and smiled gravely. ‘I’m glad you came,’ he said.

‘The only reason I came was to see you,’ she said brusquely.

He looked handsome this evening in his dark, well-cut suit. He always dresses with the studied severity of a person much older than himself; he has ceremonious ways, a sober voice, and he exercises a very careful control over his smiles. But his confused look and the softness of his mouth betray his youthfulness. Nadine, obviously, is at once flattered by his seriousness and reassured by his weakness.

‘Did you have a good time?’ she asked, looking at him with an affable, somewhat silly expression. ‘I hear that Alsace is very beautiful.’

‘Once a place is militarized, you know, it becomes utterly dismal.’

They sat down on one of the steps of the stairway, chatted, danced, and laughed together for quite a long while. And then they began to argue. With Nadine it always ended like that. Lambert, a sullen look on his face, was now sitting next to the heater, and Nadine was standing by the stairway. Bringing them together from opposite ends of the room and joining their hands was completely out of the question.

I walked over to the buffet and poured myself a brandy. My eyes glanced down along my black skirt and stopped at my legs. It was funny to think I had legs; no one ever noticed them, not even myself. They were slender and well-shaped in their beige stockings, certainly no less well-shaped than many another pair. And yet one day they’d be buried in the earth without ever having existed. It seemed unfair. I was still absorbed in contemplating them when Scriassine came over to me.

‘You don’t seem to be having a very good time,’ he said.

‘Well, I’m doing the best I can.’

‘Too many young people here. Young people are never gay. And far too many writers.’ He pointed his chin towards Lenoir, Pelletier, and Cange. ‘They’re all writers, aren’t they?’

‘Every one of them.’

‘And you, do you write, too?’

‘God, no!’ I said, laughing.

I liked his brusque manner. Like everyone else, I had read his famous book, The Red Paradise. But I had been especially moved by his book on Austria under the Nazis. It was something much more than a mere journalistic account; it was an impassioned testimony. He had fled Austria after having fled Russia and finally became a naturalized French citizen. But he had spent the last four years in America and we had met him for the first time only this autumn. Almost immediately he began calling Robert and Henri by their first names, but he never seemed to notice that I existed.

‘I wonder what’s going to become of them,’ he said, turning his eyes from me.

‘Who?’

‘The French in general and these people here in particular.’

I studied his triangular face with its prominent cheekbones, its hard, fiery eyes, its thin, almost feminine mouth. It wasn’t at all the face of a Frenchman. To him Russia was an enemy nation, and he did not have any great love for the United States. There wasn’t a place on earth where he really felt at home.

‘I returned from New York on an English boat,’ he said with a slight smile. ‘One day the steward said to me, “The poor French! They don’t know if they won the war or lost it.” It seems to me that that sums up the situation rather well.’

There was an irritating complacency in his voice. ‘I don’t think it matters much what kind of tag you put on things that happened in the past,’ I said. ‘What does matter is the future.’

‘That’s just it,’ he said spiritedly. ‘To make something good of the future, you have to look the present in the face. And I get the distinct impression that these people here aren’t doing that at all. Dubreuilh talks to me of a literary review, Perron of a pleasure trip. They all seem to feel they’ll be able to go on living just like before the war.’

‘And of course, you were sent from heaven to open their eyes,’ I said dryly.

Scriassine smiled. ‘Do you know how to play chess?’

‘Very poorly.’

He continued to smile and all trace of pedantry vanished from his face – we were intimate friends, accomplices, had known each other since childhood. ‘He’s working his Slavic charm on me,’ I thought. And as a matter of fact, the charm worked; I smiled back at him.

‘When I’m just watching chess, I can spot good moves more clearly than the players themselves, even if I’m not as good at the game as they are. Well, that’s the way it is here; I’m an outsider, an onlooker, so I can pretty well see what’s in store for you people.’

‘What?’

‘An impasse.’

‘An impasse? What do you mean by that?’

Suddenly, I found myself anxiously awaiting his reply. We had all been living together in such a tightly sealed circle for so long a time, with no intrusions by outsiders, any witnesses, that this man from without troubled me.

‘French intellectuals are facing an impasse. It’s their turn now,’ he added with a kind of satisfaction. ‘Their art, their philosophies can continue to have meaning only within the framework of a certain kind of civilization. And if they want to save that civilization, they’ll have no time or energy left over to give to art or philosophy.’

‘This isn’t the first time Robert’s been active in politics,’ I said. ‘And it never before stopped him from writing.’

‘Yes, in ’34 Dubreuilh gave a great deal of his time to the struggle against fascism,’ Scriassine said in his suave voice. ‘But to him, that struggle seemed morally reconcilable with literary preoccupations.’ With a slight trace of anger, he added, ‘In France, the pressure of history has never been felt in all its urgency. But in Russia, in Austria, in Germany, it was impossible to escape it. That’s why I, for example, was never able to write.’

‘But you have written.’

‘Don’t you think I dreamed of writing other kinds of books, too? But it was out of the question.’ He shrugged his shoulders. ‘To be able to continue taking an interest in things cultural in the face of Stalin and Hitler, you have to have one hell of a humanistic tradition behind you. But, of course,’ he went on, ‘in the country of Diderot, Victor Hugo, Jaurès, it’s easy to believe that culture and politics go hand in hand. Paris has thought of itself as Athens. But Athens no longer exists; it’s dead.’

‘As far as feeling the pressure of history is concerned,’ I said, ‘I think Robert could give you a few pointers.’

‘I’m not attacking your husband,’ Scriassine said, with a little smile that reduced my heated words to nothing more than an expression of conjugal loyalty. ‘As a matter of fact,’ he continued, ‘I consider Robert Dubreuilh and Thomas Mann to be the two greatest minds of this age. But that’s precisely it; if I predict that he’ll give up literature, it’s only because I have confidence in his lucidity.’

I shrugged my shoulders. If he was trying to soften me up, he was certainly going about it the wrong way. I detest Thomas Mann.

‘Robert will never give up writing,’ I said.

‘The remarkable thing in all of Dubreuilh’s works,’ said Scriassine, ‘is that he was able to reconcile high aesthetic standards with revolutionary inspiration. And in his own life, he attained an analogous equilibrium: he was organizing vigilance committees at the same time he was writing novels. But it’s precisely that beautiful equilibrium that’s now becoming impossible.’

‘You can count on Robert to devise some new kind of equilibrium,’ I said.

‘He’s bound to sacrifice his aesthetic standards,’ Scriassine said. Suddenly his face lit up and he asked in a triumphant voice, ‘Do you know anything about prehistoric times?’

‘Not much more than I do about chess.’

‘But perhaps you know this: that for a vast period of time the wall paintings and objects found in caves and excavations bear witness to a continuous artistic progress. Abruptly, both drawings and sculptures disappear; there’s an eclipse lasting several centuries which coincides with the development of new techniques. Well, just now we’re at the edge of a new era in which, for different reasons, humanity will have to grapple with all sorts of difficult problems, leaving us no time for the luxury of expressing ourselves artistically.’

‘Reasoning by analogy doesn’t prove very much,’ I said.

‘All right then, let’s forget that comparison,’ Scriassine said patiently. ‘You’ve probably been too close to this war we’ve gone through to properly understand it. Actually, it was something entirely different from a war – the liquidation of a society, and even of a world, or rather the beginning of their liquidation. The progress that science and engineering have made, the economic changes that have come about, will convulse the earth to such an extent that even our ways of thinking and feeling will be revolutionized. We’ll even have difficulty remembering just who and what we had once been. And among other things art and literature will become nothing more than peripheral divertissements.’

I shook my head and Scriassine resumed heatedly: ‘Don’t you see? What weight will the message of French writers have when the earth is ruled by either Russia or the United States? No one will understand them any more; very few will even speak their language.’

‘From the way you talk, it would seem you’re rather enjoying the prospect,’ I said.

He shrugged his shoulders. ‘Now isn’t it just like a woman to say a thing like that! They’re simply incapable of being objective.’

‘Well, let’s be objective then,’ I said. ‘Objectively, it’s never been proved that the world must become either American or Russian.’