Planus (2 page)

I cannot for the life of me say how it was that I became involved with Korzakow, nor how, nor why, nor for what purpose I persuaded him to leave Paris and come to Belgium with me.

me. ... A hundred times between Paris and Antwerp I told myself that only the thickness of the little volume I carried in my pocket (Villon's
Testament)
separated me from my companion and prevented my becoming a perfect bum like him. . . . But does one ever know? Perhaps I was wrong. We are not made all of a piece. And a hundred times during the trip I had realized what it was about Korzakow that attracted me. .. .

Was I captivated by him? Hardly. —

Did I want him to become a friend? Frankly, no, but a travelling companion, and no ordinary one either, a hell of a fellow from whom it would be necessary, one day, to detach oneself. . . .

First, there was his marvellous contempt for circumstances, an absolute lack of any sense of propriety, his nonchalance, his appetite, his boozing (I was staggered, he could drink almost as much as I could!), his transcendental cynicism, which was not the end- product of a systematic philosophy, but a jet of sperm from his mind, his way of being, his way of making out with women and getting all he wanted from them (even money, not to mention the food he managed to scrounge from farms at every turning of the road), his good humour, his gigantic laughter, his sheer animal strength, his good health; but he also had the fundamental qualities of his race : the art of being a vagabond, which I find so appealing and which is considered a sacred art among the Russians, knowing how to light a fire, how to make shift for himself in the wilds, a feeling for nature, a naive faith in communion with the Earth and a love of life, come what may. . . .

Physically he was a well-proportioned Colossus, not too heavy, unlike many Russians, except that his hands, the hands of an ex- quartermaster of the Imperial Navy, were misshapen, powerful, hairy as a gorilla's, and as round and hard as Belgian clogs. He had a large head, like an Aunt Sally at a fair, teeth all askew, traces of smallpox on his face, a sharp eye, a mocking air, a conk like a knot of rope, a greedy mouth. His laugh had the heartiness of Chaliapin's and he had the same bass voice, coming from the depths of the belly. With all this he was as fly as a gutter-snipe and had a lively imagination, like all men who live on their wits.

'Your books, your lousy old books, how are we going to get them out of there?' he said, scratching his head now on one side, now on, the other, and screwing his battered old felt hat round on his head.

We were standing in front of the forbidding facade of the furniture depository of the General Stores, whose large, brand-new buildings, made of reinforced concrete without windows, blocked one end of the quay at the far side of the port. The place attracted us irresistibly. We would plant ourselves there every evening, outside the closed gates. Behind the gates the concierge and the night- watchmen were eating their supper roun,d a little table they had carried out into the open air, for the weather was still fine. They were drinking beer by the bucketful, lighting their pipes and chatting. An official poster was pinned to the notice-board reserved for announcements of public auctions: there would be a sale at the end of the month. There was no time to lose. Amongst a long list of heteroclite merchandise, damaged or unclaimed, ten crates of books were mentioned.
My
books.

'We can't do a damned thing,' said Korzakow, 'let's go.'

And we would turn back and amble along the quays, in search of some casual resting-place.

We hadn't a bean.

We were broke.

Hunger was oozing out of our eyes, but the hardest thing was that our eyes started out of our heads with horror and disgust whenever we contemplated all that water in the Escaut, wine-red in the setting sun, murky as golden absinthe, shimmering and rippling like moire silk, as if all the alcohol from all the bars had been poured into it instead of the fuel oil and other filth from the boats that made oily patches, while we, we two, could find nothing to drink, nothing drinkable.

We were stumped.

I am dying of thirst beside the fountain. . . .

'Listen,' I said to Korzakow. 'We're going to smarten ourselves up a bit. Then I'm sending you into town on an errand.'

We were at the fountain behind the fish-market. We stripped to the waist and began washing down, ignoring the scathing comments and not deigning to reply to the heckling and jibes of the passing housewives and the fishwives of Antwerp, whose tongues are as glib as the tongues of fishwives elsewhere, notably in Marseille. Korzakow's chest was covered in tattoos, which provoked some very colourful comments.

But I had an idea.

Clean, spruce and clear-headed, I took Korzakow to a good restaurant opposite the station. On the other side of the station is the Jewish Quarter, not a ghetto but a well-to-do neighbourhood inhabited by diamond merchants.

'What's up?' asked Korzakow. 'Has someone left you a fortune?'

'Don't worry. Sit down. First, we'll have something to eat,' I replied, 'then we shall see . .

And I ordered a good lunch and several bottles of good wine.

Korzakow ate enough for four men and I did likewise. It was eleven o'clock in the morning when we sat down to table, and, at three o'clock in the afternoon, when I ordered coffee, liqueurs, cigars and writing materials, we had still not appeased our ravenous appetites.

'That's better,' said Korzakow, belching like an Oriental. 'And now what do we do?'

'We'll have coffee.'

'Have you gone crazy?' said Korzakow. 'Shouldn't we scoot, make a run for it?'

The room was three-quarters empty. The waiter was in the kitchen. The cashier shut up in his cage. The head waiter was chatting to a late customer, an old gentleman wearing decorations, who was folding his napkin. We could just slip out! And Korzakow winked his eye towards the open door.

'No,' I said to him, 'I'm staying here. I'm going to write a note. You'll take it into town. Then, we'll see. . . .'

He laughed. He had pushed back his chair. He had his cigar rammed sideways into his mouth. He was gulping down little glasses of old Chartreuse. He preferred the green to the golden. He was chatting with the waiter, who had served his apprenticeship for a while in Paris, and was asking him for news of some night-club or other in Montmartre.

'Here,' I said to Korzakow, handing him the letter I had just sealed. 'Take it to the address on the envelope. It's right nearby, on the other side of the station, and try to bring the fellow back to me, or the money. You will give him this little book....'

I took the volume of Villon out of my pocket. The waiter had moved away. I leaned towards Korzakow : 'This is worth about two thousand. Behave yourself, and look sharp. . . .'

Korzakow looked at me, astounded. He turned the little volume round and round in his enormous paws. It was a very old edition — Lyon, 1546. He did not seem to know what to do with it.

'Gee-up!' I said to him. 'Stuff it in your pocket and piss off. . .

He grabbed his old hat, plonked it on his head and went out like a whirlwind.

'He's a card,' said the waiter.

'Yes, he
is
a card.'

'Would Monsieur like anything else?' the waiter asked me again.

'Bring me another cigar.'

Would Korzakow come back, or would I wind up in jail ?

'Have you got a newspaper?' I asked the waiter.

I lit my cigar.

The waiter brought me the papers.

This is what's known as obtaining goods under false pretences, I said to myself, puffing away at my cigar.

It seemed to me that the waiter was watching me now out of the corner of his eye. I buried my nose in the newspapers. But my mind kept wandering and I soon put them down to settle myself more comfortably on the bench.

It was only then, as I stretched out my legs, that I noticed my shoes were torn and dirty, and I realized what a poor figure I cut.

But it was all the same to me.

I was longing desperately for a snooze. Almost dropping off.

People in the catering trade are poor psychologists: they take an industrial baron, with false rings on every finger, for a genuine prince, and assume that a card-sharper, who makes an impression by having his cases stamped with a crown, is a monarch travelling incognito. You read about it every day in the papers. But me? . . .

'Waiter!'

'Yes, sir?'

'The bill, please.'

I am laughing with tears in my eyes beside the fountain. . ..

Time was passing.

In Belgium, it is rather like Russia, people eat at virtually all hours of the day, but in Antwerp there are two sittings in the restaurants, one at 11 a.m., before the Corn Exchange opens at noon, and the other at 5 p.m., the hour when the diamond merchants have finished their work. And now, the diamond merchants were beginning to come in.. ..

. . . And still I could not pay the bill, and Korzakow had not returned.

Ach, the bastard!

Not every polisher of spectacle-lenses is a Spinoza, but Mandaieff, to whose house I had sent Korzakow, was a pure intellectual who devoted himself to mathematics and was a great bibliophile.

The proportion of intellectuals among the corporation of diamond merchants is amazingly high. By intellectuals I do not mean those young products of a recently completed university course, who are destined to make a more or less official career for themselves, but professional men, members of a great family of craftsmen, who, following a tradition that has endured for two or three centuries, work with their hands to gain a livelihood, and, at the same time, practise logic, dialectics and rationalism, aware of the need to see clearly and keep their minds free, and who, being products of the most famous rabbinical colleges in Poland and southern Russia, have lost their faith by dint of ratiocinating on the commentaries of commentaries (what else is the Talmud?), no longer practise the prescribed rites, and have been atheists from one generation to the next, ever since the gem-cutters came from Spain and the goldbeaters from Portugal, to be the first inhabitants of the ghettoes of the Low Countries. Such are the diamond-cutters of Antwerp, or at least a very small group of them, exclusive, given to contemplation of the Holy Spirit and to mysticism, critics of pure reason. It is a very closed circle. They all belong to Jewish families.

ing you from the street for over a quarter of an hour. Hasn't Grischa come, then?'

'Grischa? No . . . but who is Grischa?' I said, as if in a dream, painfully hauling myself to my feet to greet her and offer her my seat on the bench.

'Grischa?' she said, taking my seat, warmed by the half-day I had been sitting on it like a broody hen. 'Grischa? But he's my fiance!'

'My felicitations,' I said, bowing and kissing her hand.

She was gripping her handbag with both hands, as if it contained a fortune, a consignment of jewels perhaps, or sick pearls for curing. ^

'And how is your work going? Are you still enjoying it?' I asked her for the sake of something to say.

I was in a bad mood. The waiter was beginning to congratulate himself on having had confidence in me. He was bringing another glass!

'We have not been working for months and months. . . . My brother cannot carry on. . . . He is dying. . . . And I simply haven't the heart' .. . Sephira replied distractedly.

It was easy to see that things were not going smoothly for her. She must be at the end of her tether.

She was impatient. She was restless. She avoided my eye. She leaned to the right and then to the left, as if she were looking for something under the table or for someone lost at the far end of the restaurant. She looked nervously at the time, sometimes at the restaurant clock, sometimes at a minute watch, a diamond cut into a ball and attached by a ring of elephant hair to a bracelet on her wrist.

'And Grischa?' she asked me. 'Hasn't he come, really?'

'But I don't know Grischa, Sephira.5

'Please don't lie to me, Monsieur Cendrars. He is your friend . . . the one who brought me this little book, earlier on, at home. . . . He has a beautiful voice. . .. What does he do?'

And she drew the little Villon out of her purse and threw it down on the table. She was giving me back my Villon.

That wretch Korzakow! I did not even know he had a Christian name of his own. Amongst his intimates, that is to say the card- sharpers of the rue Cujas, he was called Paul, Big Paul.

I was on the point of answering Sephira by way of asking her an indiscreet question about her engagement, when I saw Korzakow come in.

The blackguard was all decked out in new clothes.

Ach, the swine!

So I said nothing.

We dined without saying a word and it was Korzakow who settled the bills.

It was absurd, and it was the waiter who was victorious!

It was past midnight.

We did the rounds of Antwerp like Grand Dukes.

Still I did not say anything.

And then, embarrassed and finding little to say to each other, the betrothed couple went dancing.

We visited all the dance-halls in Antwerp. Perfect. It was Korzakow who paid everywhere. I burst out laughing. . . .

In the early hours we took Sephira home in a taxi. We went upstairs for a couple of minutes. I went into Mandaieff's room to see how he was faring. He was in bed. He was at death's door amongst his books and some oxygen cylinders, his gaunt head supernaturally lit by one of those water-globes which diamond-cutters place in front of a light so as to reflect and concentrate the luminosity on a single point. He was holding a book in his hand. I do not remember what it was. I had nothing much to say to him. As for Mandaieff, his face was already turned towards death.

. . . And we walked away through the deserted streets, Korzakow carrying me off to Julia's place where, so he had always claimed, ever since our arrival in Antwerp, he had made a hit.

'Well, we had a damned good blow-out today!' he said as we entered the brothel. I went to see Rij.