Unforgiving Years (13 page)

At a Trade Mission soiree in Berlin, there she was, looking elegant and youthful, her health restored. She was attached to a clandestine branch that took care of certain prisoners; having grown up with French and German governesses, she was able to pose as the wife of the political prisoners she visited. The jails of the Weimar Republic were tolerably good, in keeping with a judicious liberalism comfortably greased by dollars. “What do you think of those men, Daria?” “I think they’re admirable and mediocre. I like them. Nothing great will be achieved through the likes of them.” Her white teeth were laughing. We were of one mind about the frailties of the West: its deep-seated habits of selfishness, its total oblivion to the implacable rigors of History, its fetishization of money, its craven slippage toward disaster due to the fear of taking risks … Its absurd belief that things will always die down so that people can go on living. “Whereas we,” Daria said, “we know how inhuman the dying-down can be … That’s what makes us superior.” A year’s prison sentence, served in Central Europe, spared her the heartache of our first internal crises.

And years later, we were walking along Kurfürstendamm toward Am Zoo, through the flurry, the luxury, the bright lights and ready pleasures of Berlin at midnight. Here and there a jobless man slunk through the cosseted throng of men with porcine rolls for necks and she-grenadiers covered in furs. Girls with painted faces — the only attractive creatures in sight — mimicked the airs of perverse young men. Daria burst out: “Our unemployed are going over to the Nazis, who buy them bread and boots … How do you think it’s going to end?” “In apocalyptic slaughter …” We saw each other in Paris, Brussels, Liège, Stuttgart, Barcelona … Daria married a construction engineer who got caught up in a purge of technicians; she divorced. “He’s honest, but stubborn. We don’t build as others do, we build the way you put up concrete bunkers on the front line … He’ll never grasp that reason and justice take second place to efficiency, and as we’re sacrificing millions of peasants, we can’t appear to be letting the technicians off …” I was glad to hear her being so sensible. As the dark years wore on, those of us working with the secret services abroad were in no position to know or sense everything that was going on. We heard of new towns rising on lands which only yesterday lay fallow, of automobile, aluminum, aviation, and chemical industries developed in less than five years … On the banks of a Meuse river clad in gray silk, outside the stern old Maison Curtius washed up there like a stone coffer full of the wealth of an artisan people, Daria lectured me on the by-products of the tinplate industry. “Production will bring about justice. The rational exploitation of by-products is more important, in the short term, than ideological errors or judicial excesses. All those faults can be rectified over time, so long as there are enough little medicine tins being made … And if political reputations are unjustly damaged along the way, well, that’s secondary, don’t you think?” I was the one nagged by doubt. Should one not, while attending to all those pillboxes and blast furnaces, have a thought for man? A thought for the poor devil of today, for the occasionally great poor devil, who cannot content himself with straining under the yoke while waiting for tomorrow’s medicines and railway lines? — The end justifies the means, what a swindle. No end can be achieved by anything but appropriate means. If we trample on the man of today, will we do anything worthwhile for the man of tomorrow? And what will we do to ourselves? But I was grateful to Daria for not doubting, at least not overtly.

When our blood began splattering the front page of every newspaper and flowing down every sewer, Daria seemed to me to get older; she put on the expression of an embittered nun with that pursed, slightly skewed mouth, and we avoided all talk of what would have made us lie and dissemble for safety’s sake, or question everything and feel helpless, and admit that our very horror of treachery was tempting us to flee, to betray … We chatted about films and music. But once, in a cinema on the Champs-Élysées, Daria had a nervous breakdown. She seemed to be sobbing over the tragedy of Mayerling … It was right after the secret execution of the twenty-seven.

* * *

The beat of the tom-tom filled the cellar with a hectic panting. It projected an anxious din of constant celebration against the empty night; a clamor reverberating under the low vaults of the ceiling. Brown-skinned men dressed in white whipped their African instruments into an exultant frenzy. The glare of a naked lightbulb exposed sinewy arms, gleaming teeth, and the animal sadness beneath their impudent laughter. This group blocked the entrance to a private room, where a party was in full swing. A sallow boy in pantaloons and fez was carrying in a tray of liqueurs. The youngest of the musicians plunged into this secret redoubt in one effete, athletic bound … The club’s public section, linked to the street by a narrow flight of steps which one could only descend bent double, feeling along the lime-washed walls, imitated a rather dingy Algerian café, partitioned by the cellar structure into a dim maze of booths where groups and couples sat on benches covered with old carpets. The torrent of barbaric rhythms, slamming from wall to wall in brutal waves, invaded brains, throats, nerves, and eyeballs like an elementary toxin.

“I’ve been thinking about Daria and you’re right, Nadine, I have to see her.”

They were coming to the end of a depressing evening during which they had steered clear of bright plazas, cinemas, cafés, and boulevards so as not to tempt the fate that presides over chance encounters. Here they felt secure, protected by darkness as they huddled close together under a low arch; all they could see clearly of the booth next door was a pair of long legs sheathed in black silk fishnets. A woman with a mane of orange hair lay flung back against the indistinct body of a man. The reddish tip of her cigarette traveled slowly from fingers to lips. Curlicues of smoke rose and mingled under the vault. Whenever the drumming was interrupted, silence burst like a breaker exploding into countless droplets of spray; the head filled with throbbing emptiness like an undersea cave … Fortunately, this emptiness never lasted long before the trance returned.

Nadine turned an imploring face toward Sacha’s shoulder.

“Do we have to go back to that horrid hotel? It spooks me. As late as possible, Sacha.”

“But it’s a perfectly nice hotel! What more could you ask?”

“Tell me about that murder in the newspaper which interested you so much.”

“Which didn’t interest me at all, you mean. I was trying to put together a few dates”

Nadine hugged up against him. “I can’t tell you how fed up I am with murders. I see their shadow everywhere. I fancy the passengers in the Métro are thinking about murder. Some are afraid, watchful, agitated, everyone’s caught in a huge dragnet … Will it ever end?”

The stifled, stifling din of the tom-toms bore down on them with all its beneficial weight. D sniffed the air saturated with noise, smoke, breath, mold, and perspiration. The Berbers or Arabs who were making this music, the music of an oasis in heat, exuded a muscular joy … Here’s something that cerebral people have lost: the elation of leaping around a bonfire to the cadence of drums, the intoxication of feeling alive, simply. This loss must result in many strangely disastrous crimes …

“Nadine, for us it’ll be finished in just a few days.”

D was thinking: “Unless it is we who are finished … Anyway we remain on the level of victims … A semi-deliverance already … I hate the role of victim — only the opposite is worse. A necessity that resembles complicity often binds a victim to his torturer, the man on the scaffold to his executioner … It’s an unhealthy notion … Nemesis …” During the days when we were performing so many terrible deeds in order to lay the foundations of a different future, we regarded ourselves as righteous. For it was we who sought to break the vicious circle of warfare and man’s dehumanization at the hands of man. And yet we had sporadic intimations, without admitting the idea, that we deserved to be punished … That our attempts to outwit the logic of blood were merely dragging us more deeply into it. Should we have opted, then, for nonviolence? If only it were possible! (The shape of a long-dead comrade, fallen at the Far Eastern front and buried beneath the snow with what humble military honors we could provide, derisory materialist speeches of “Eternal in our memory, brother!” — this outline appeared on the inner screen. A fine, leonine figure of a man, who emerged from a victory followed by mass executions, bellowing like a drunken prophet: “Just wait and see, my friends! Winners or losers, ten months, ten years from now, we’ll all wind up shot! Necessarily.” We flung a bucket of cold water over him. The eldest of our company, reputed to be a sage, was muttering: “Nemesis.” I flew into a rage. “What does old Greek mythology — the devil take it — have to do with our Marxist revolution?” This old comrade cursed me for a fool. He was the author of long, remarkable books on the problem of culture. The books were banned. The author died of scurvy in sub-Arctic latitudes where neither knowledge nor ideas, nor culture, nor authentic stoicism are worth a warm reindeer skin.)

A dancing girl from south of Oran came in. (The reindeer civilization knew Greek dances from the Black Sea region … FinnoUgrian, Mongol, and Scythian women re-created the magic dances of the Ionian Isles … And what of the continuity, the human constant that is dance … Something to think about.) She was a vigorous dark girl, almost black, but amber-black, high-waisted, and wide-hipped, whose muscles in repose played softly beneath the skin. A saffron turban wound about her head, her full breasts held by a band of raw silk, a low-slung skirt falling to her bare toes, she began by sending out slow currents with the undulations of her cool, strong arms. Her navel quivered, and the smooth dark stomach became a concentrated vortex of female vitality. The heavy face, set into an inert smile, conveyed nothing but the blankness of animal beatitude. D observed her from a distance at first — from a different bend of the single spiral along which we all move. Gorgeous creature sold to our gazes, help me banish the troubles, the memories, the worry, and the bitterness that rise from my belly, just as the oldest temptation rises from yours! I thank you. The dancer, standing stretched like invisible palm fronds, let herself be borne upward by a lascivious violence. Belly, hips, and eyes quickened into rapture, agleam with sweat. Her arms flew up to undo the turban which now she tied around her haunches like a sash, forming a big rose of saffron silk that flicked between her thighs. She fell to her knees and arched her back, miming the swoon of passion.

“Has this splendid escapade lightened your mood, Nadine? Shall we go?”

They left the cellar. The street was deep in its midnight reverie. They paused at the gates of the Luxembourg to look in at the sleeping garden, utterly different from its luminous or hazy daytime self. A whiff of decay drifted from piles of dead leaves. Bare boughs peopled the darkness, striking motionless poses without shadow or duration.

“The future,” Nadine said.

D seized her brusquely by the wrists.

“I didn’t know you were so weak. I forbid you to be like this. What are you afraid of? Being killed, like so many others? It would only be a relief. I tell you we’re starting our life over again — blindly. All we ever worked for was life, in the end, we’ve got a right to it.”

Emerging out of the asphalt and the shadows a shuffling form approached: it was an old man in a dented felt hat, leaning on a cane. A hoarse voice spoke to them softly from the depths of weariness: “Ya’ shounna make a scene ’frunna the little lady, M’sieur. What can she do about it? Don’t you agree?”

“Hear that?” D exclaimed, “the night itself is speaking to us … What can you do about it?”

The limping form passed on, leaving a trail of words waning behind. “Course night shpeaks sometimes, why shounna it shpeak, night? Gotta be …”

Nadine and D burst into laughter together. Let’s go home. The cafés threw their cozy glow across the intersection. At the end of rue Soufflot, the peristyle of the Panthéon guarded a necropolis eerily blanketed in mists, but life, simple and unadorned, retained its usual charm along the boulevard Saint-Michel.

* * *

Precaution might be regarded as an abstract, practical science, analogous to geometry (the non-Euclidean kind, needless to say). Given irregular surface
A
, bounded by mobile straight and curved lines
D
(for danger), insert point
Z
, likewise mobile, into one or more zones
W
(work) at the greatest possible distance from lines
D
… Bear in mind as you perform this exercise that the dynamics of the problem include unknown quantities
O
and
I
, pertaining to a fourth dimension that corresponds to enemy levels of organization and intelligence. Further bear in mind the fifth dimension
P
, for psychology: nerves, fear, betrayal; and, lastly, random elements
X
. To all these oppose dimension
U
(us), comprised of our own organization, our own intelligence, our own nerve. From now on, as far as D was concerned, the seventh dimension
U
was coterminous with the fourth, fifth, and sixth! Point
Z
was left with nothing to guide his movements but a demagnetized compass. No support from any quarter, and everything to fear from the services to which he so recently belonged. As days went by they were regrouping, positioning their guns, spreading their nets. It was impossible to guess what they knew, what orders they would receive, how they would plan to strike. The hypothesis of calculated inaction, however implausible, could not be ruled out. In formal terms, D’s resignation infringed none of the articles of the special law that entailed the death penalty; but resignation was not envisaged by any of them. An unwritten law dictated the elimination of agents who were guilty of grave disobedience, and disapproval of the regime was the worse disobedience of all, implying the revolt of that metaphysical
X
— personal conscience — whose mere existence could not be brooked, for it would pull down the whole edifice of what we called “iron discipline” and others called, “corpse’s discipline.” As a citizen, D came within the scope of legal provisions for the punishment (death, without trial, on simple proof of identity) of soldiers deserting abroad, even in peacetime. He knew all about the ruling psychoses, for he was standing up against them. The notion that a man might bow out without betraying, as faithfully as it were humanly possible (the vagueness of that formula!), faithful to the extreme of objecting to the intolerable, and its destruction of us; that a man might withdraw only to vanish into insignificance, well, any of his chiefs willing to believe that would be deemed a lunatic, or an accomplice to be liquidated without delay.