UMBERTO ECO : THE PRAGUE CEMETERY (60 page)

I had already guessed as much after my nocturnal meeting with Osman Bey. Abbé Barruel had decided not to pursue my grandfather's allegations after reading his letter because he feared a general massacre. But what my grandfather had wanted was probably exactly what Osman Bey and Golovinsky were predicting. Perhaps my grandfather had condemned me to making his dream come true. Oh, God! Fortunately it wasn't up to me to eliminate an entire people, but I was making a contribution in my own modest way.

And it was, after all, a profitable business. The Jews would never pay me to exterminate all Christians, I thought, since there are too many Christians and if it were possible they would do it themselves. Wiping out the Jews, when all is said and done, would be possible. Despite their numbers, God Almighty succeeded in drowning all of humanity during the time of the Flood, and the Jews were a minuscule percentage of the earth's inhabitants in Noah's time.

I wouldn't have to destroy them myself— I am (as a rule) a man who recoils from physical violence — but I knew how it had to be done, since I lived through the days of the Commune. Take gangs of men who are well trained and indoctrinated, and drag anyone you meet with a hooked nose and curly hair straight up against the wall. You'd end up losing a few Christians but, in the words of the bishop who had to attack Béziers when it was occupied by the Cathars, it is better to be prudent and kill the lot. God will recognize his own.

As it is written in their Protocols, the end justifies the means.

27

DIARY CUT SHORT

20th December 1898

Having handed over to Golovinsky all the remaining material for those cemetery Protocols, I felt an emptiness. "And what now?" I wondered, like a young student after graduation. Cured of my split consciousness, I no longer had anyone to tell my story to.

I had completed my life's work, which had begun when I read Dumas'
Balsamo
in the attic in Turin. I think of my grandfather, his eyes staring into the distance as he described the specter of Mordechai. Thanks to my work, all the Mordechais in this world are on their way to a tremendous raging pyre. But what about me? There's a certain melancholy when a duty is completed, a melancholy greater and more impalpable than the sadness of a steamship voyage.

I continue to counterfeit wills and sell a few dozen hosts a week, but Hébuterne doesn't come to see me any longer — perhaps he thinks I'm too old — and I might as well forget about the army, where my name must have been erased from the minds of those who remembered it, if any of them are still there, now that Sandherr lies paralyzed in a hospital bed and Esterhazy is playing baccarat in some smart London brothel.

It's not that I need the money— I've saved up quite enough — but I'm bored. I have gastric upsets and can't even enjoy good food. I make myself broth at home, and if I go to a restaurant I am kept awake all night. Sometimes I vomit. I pass water more often than I would wish.

I still visit the offices of
La Libre Parole
, but Drumont's anti-Semitic ranting no longer interests me. As to what happened in the Prague cemetery, the Russians are now working on that.

The Dreyfus case still simmers away. Today there's a lot of fuss over a surprise article by a Catholic Dreyfusard in
La Croix
, a newspaper that has always been rabidly anti-Dreyfusard (what wonderful times they were when
La Croix
campaigned in support of Diana!), and yesterday the front pages were full of news about a violent anti-Semitic demonstration in place de la Concorde. A satirical newspaper recently published a double cartoon by Caran d'Ache: in the first, a large family is sitting happily at table as the father cautions the others not to discuss the Dreyfus affair; the caption under the second explains that someone has mentioned it, and we see a furious dustup.

The affair still divides the French and (from what I've read here and there) the rest of the world. Will they retry the case? Meanwhile, Dreyfus languishes in Cayenne. Serves him right.

I went to see Father Bergamaschi and found him tired and much aged. Hardly surprising — if I am sixty-eight, he must be eighty-five.

"Simonino," he said, "I want to say goodbye. I'm returning to Italy, to end my days in one of our houses. I've worked enough for the glory of Our Lord. And you? You're not going to get yourself into any more trouble? I live in fear of trouble. How simple it all used to be in your grandfather's day — the Carbonari on one side, we on the other. Everyone knew who and where their enemies were. It's not like that any longer."

He is losing his mind. I gave him a fraternal embrace and left.

Yesterday evening I was passing in front of Saint-Julien-le-Pauvre. Sitting right by the main door was a human wreck, a blind
cul-de-jatte
, his bald head covered with livid scars. He played a strained melody on a pennywhistle that he held to one of his nostrils, while the other produced a dull hissing sound, as his mouth opened to take in breath, like someone who was drowning.

 

I went to see Father Bergamaschi and found him tired and much aged.

I don't know why, but it frightened me. As if life were a terrible thing.

I cannot sleep. I have restless dreams in which Diana appears, pale and disheveled.

Often, rising at daybreak, I go out and watch the collectors of cigar stubs. They have always fascinated me. In the early morning I see them going about with their stinking sacks tied with a string to their waists and a stick with a metal spike that they use to harpoon the stub, even from under a table. It's amusing to watch them being thrown out of the open-air cafés by the waiters, who sometimes spray them with a soda-water siphon.

Many collectors spend the night along the Seine embankment, and they can be seen in the morning, sitting on the
quais
, separating the tobacco, still moist with saliva, from the ash, or washing their shirts stained with liquid tobacco and waiting for them to dry in the sun while they continue their work. The bolder ones collect not just cigar butts but also cigarettes, where separating the damp paper from the tobacco is an even more disgusting task.

You also see them swarming around place Maubert and thereabouts, selling their wares and, as soon as they have earned a few cents, disappearing into a tavern to drink toxic alcohol.

I watch other people's lives as a way of passing the time. I live the life of a pensioner, or a veteran.

It is strange, but I feel a certain nostalgia about the Jews. I miss them. Since my childhood I have constructed my Prague cemetery, stone by stone (you might say), and now it seems that Golovinsky has stolen it from me. Who knows what they are doing with it in Moscow? Perhaps they're putting my Protocols together into a dry bureaucratic document devoid of its original setting. No one will want to read it. I'll have wasted my life producing a testimony for no purpose. Or per- haps this is how my rabbis' ideas (they were always
my
rabbis) will spread throughout the world and will accompany the final solution.

I read somewhere that there is a cemetery for Portuguese Jews at the far corner of an old courtyard in avenue de Flandre. A townhouse was built there at the end of the seventeenth century and belonged to someone called Camot, who allowed Jews, mostly Germans, to bury their dead there at a cost of fifty francs for adults and twenty for children. The house later passed to a man named Matard, an animal skinner who began burying the remains of his flayed horses and oxen next to the Jews, and the Jews protested. The Portuguese Jews bought an adjoining piece of land for their burials, and Jews from countries to the north found another place at Montrouge.

It closed early this century, but you can still visit. There are about twenty gravestones, some with Hebrew writing and others in French. I saw a strange one that read: "God Almighty has called me in the twenty-third year of my life. I prefer my situation to slavery. Here lies the blessed Samuel Fernandez Patto, died 28 Prairial of the second year of the one and only French Republic." Precisely. Republicans, atheists and Jews.

The place is desolate, but it helped me imagine the Prague cemetery, which I have seen only in illustrations. I was a good narrator, I should have been an artist: from a few details I created a magical place, the sinister moonlit center of the universal conspiracy. Why did I let my creation slip out of my hands? I could have done so much else with it.