Unforgiving Years (16 page)

“Quick, Nadine! We’re off in ten minutes …” “This place is awful,” Nadine answered in a low voice. “But do we really have to leave?”

* * *

We are made in such a way that our fears subside and our obsessions vanish by virtue of a rhythm we don’t understand: often a change of scene is enough. The Battistis felt good in Le Havre. The air was salty and damp; light mists blew in from the Channel and floated over the avenues of the prosperous, peaceful city. The trees themselves, though bare of leaves, looked nourished by a richer sap, a healthier breeze, than those of Paris. The big cafés displayed a prosperous dignity. Bruno Battisti was unconcerned to find no reference to the Negro’s arrest in the papers. “They might very well keep it quiet for days,” he said to Noémi. (“Let’s get used to our new names.”) The green, foam-flecked, heavily churning sea instilled in them the carefree sense of having completed their escape, as though their connection to insoluble problems would be broken by crossing the ocean.

We live by memories accumulated within the unconscious, thought Bruno. We breathe more freely among mountains, because they arouse a quivering reminder of the primeval forest; caverns oppress us, echoing the age of fear and primitive magic — while oceans promise escape, adventure, discovery. For as long as humans have been persecuting and killing one another, hunted men have sought salvation on the seas, in such numbers that their flight must have contributed to the peopling of the earth; and it is surely fugitives, rather than conquerors, who led the way to new worlds … Even the legend of the Argonauts is that of Jason’s banishment and flight, the Golden Fleece perhaps no more than a symbol of escape. Modern man could usefully return to the study of ancient myths in the light of his recent experience … And what of our feeling that the sea is beautiful, when it is actually an inhuman, featureless mass of an enormity to appall the thinking insect standing on the beach? The expanse of it, the aimless movement, the elementary power … shattering concepts! And yet the promise of an imagined safety is stronger still.

Now that cablegrams, police descriptions, secret orders, lies can circle the globe in a matter of hours and there are no more islands to discover, no more hideaways in which to slip the net of the special services, the urban labyrinth is a safer bet than any distant archipelago; which means we are the dupes of a memory wired to our instincts, when we listen to the millenarian song that hums in our breast in communion with the ancestors, paddling out to sea in their canoes … The city is our admirable prison, outside which we now find it almost impossible to live. We long to escape it, just as we involuntarily wish — in horror — for the deaths of our nearest and dearest, no doubt because through their extinction we aspire to our own …

“Nadine-Noémi, I’ve worked out beautiful plans, like an engineer applying himself to a construction problem. We have very little money, and that merely by chance. They controlled us through that as well, it hadn’t occurred to me. (Disregard for money was one of our strengths and it’s turned against us.) “We still have our hands, and our heads, useless now … I’ve decided on definitive liberation, goodbye to Europe, Asia, cities, the coming war … Tolstoy was on the right track in some ways. How much earth does a man need? Enough to feed him and to bury him … We’ll have that much in a country that’s hot and violently alive. Because in losing everything, we should at least recover the primordial sensation of life.”

Noémi rejoined lightheartedly, “The great mystical count professed the philosophy of a petty vegetarian rentier. At least that’s what they taught me. Don’t sulk, my last-minute Tolstoyan, I love to hear you talk like that.”

It was their last morning in Europe. They spent it walking on a wet stony beach at the edge of the cold sea, making fun of the ugly villas that dotted the shoreline, houses as tawdry and pretentious as the stunted lives within. And oddly touching, all the same, for even this second-rate architecture had something to say about man’s resistance to the destruction of the best in him. An aspiration to adventure, to aesthetics, translated as plaster busts of Second Empire demimondaines protruding from the rocaille of gardens no bigger than the exercise yard of a prison cell; the love of light, of the purity of the heavenly spheres, was expressed in arrangements of tinted glass balls over fountains kept dry out of thrift. There were villas trying to look like Scottish castles, Bavarian chalets, Turkish pavilions, or Gothic piles; they looked like toys for overgrown children whose imaginations were waging a losing battle against extinction.

Beyond loomed the noble form, gray and tormented, of the cliffs. All the forms of the earth are great and noble. Have you noticed how no terrestrial thing is ridiculous? Ridicule and meanness appear in the works of men. They are defeats … We are all limited and ridiculous … Yellow grasses tousled the cliff top; below, birds nested in the holes and there was a great palaver of beating wings to deter nest-robbers. The toylike cannons of a fort poked over the summit; its blue-white-red flag waved innocently in the wind … The Battistis were forced to skirt a recent cave-in. As they contemplated this display of ruined might, they were accosted by a woman with a shopping basket on her arm, returning to some isolated cottage on the beach, curious about this pair of bad-weather walkers.

“It came crashing down a month ago,” she said. “Quite a fall!”

“No one killed, I hope?” Bruno asked out of politeness, naturally assuming that no one would be killed out in this lonely place.

“No, no! People only come here on Sundays, during the good weather. It was a weekday and out of season … Just a dog trainer who lived in a hut.”

“Of course,” said Nadine, as if in agreement. “That doesn’t count. Good day, Madame.”

They retraced their steps, feeling sobered and yet amused. A cliff battered by the tides cracks open, starts to shift, becomes treacherous moving earth of unstable times, begins to slide; a distant rumbling gathers force, a keening, a subterranean chant, a song! A hunk of chalk and clay, long accustomed to the blistering winds, breaks off and pitches forward slowly like an instantaneous murder. Insignificant catastrophes are prepared and consummated much like those of whole societies, heralded by a mounting murmur that can be heard, provided one has one’s ear to the ground rather than listening to jazz. “Nothing to worry about,” is the complacent response, “we’ve heard such noises before, the world is perfectly stable, the proof, look how healthy we are …”

“I can still hear that stupid lady saying ‘Oh no, no one was killed … ’ ” began Noémi. “ ‘Nobody but a dog trainer.’ Think of him, patiently building his shack out of bits of wreckage, sleeping alone under the fissured cliff to the sound of the tides, waking up to this bleak landscape … I wonder what he trained his dogs to do? Fetch starfish? Beg on their hind legs for a lump of sugar? How many contingencies had to come together for him to die here with his dogs!”

She sized up the cliff face with a glance.

“Do you know, I wouldn’t mind living here myself. It looks solid enough. I’d happily run the risk … Then if one night we were buried under tons of rock, so what? It’d be natural. No one else, just us …”

Bruno said, “Soon they’ll be writing, ‘just’ a town, ‘just’ an army, ‘just’ a people, ‘just’ a country … A little country under a collapsing cliff … In a time of wholesale collapse. Professionally trained military staffs are this minute working out the figures for the whole of Europe, in accordance with various scenarios. The first year of the war will cost
X
million young lives, resulting in an
X
percent fall in the birthrate and having
X
impact upon production. Not unlike planning for the annihilation of, say, Belgium — machines, bodies, and souls under a toppling Himalaya … It’s only a matter of time. Our calculations are as precise about the initial time frame as in predicting an eclipse … The latest possible date is already settled, though events may well jump the gun. The madman-god of history is in a hurry …”

A nippy salt-sea wind had risen against them. Noémi turned around, the better to be enfolded by it. She saw Bruno trudging toward her, hunched, bareheaded, his hands stuffed into his pockets. His determined tread over the slippery stones, his wrinkled brow, the bitter set of his mouth, made her shout, “What did you say? I could hardly hear … the wind … Sacha …”

“Nothing … nothing.”

With all his strength, he wanted to shout, “Nothing … I announce Nothing! Cruelty, destruction, madness, nothingness … Nothing!” For this long-ripened vision burst within him with the impersonal clarity of a mathematical formula explaining the past, the murders, the future. “I have to stay … To defend … What? You’d defend nothing, you’d disappear before you could move. Nothing is possible … The magic word, the keyword of our time: Nothing.

“If only I could be one of those industrious ants who will soon be trying absurdly to rescue a child, an injured man, a tool, a book from the rubble of some flattened city … One of the infinitesimal brains working underground in enemy strongholds, tirelessly sapping the bureaus of the planners of destruction … The final justification of life: to destroy the destroyers without knowing whether one is not, in reality, finishing the job for them.”

He cried out into the wind, with a bitter joy, “Nadine-Noémi, I’ve found the formula …” (A gulp of salt air made him cough and spit, touched by the thought of poison gas attacks.) “Here’s the formula: the destroyers … will be destroyed … destroyed!”

The wind suddenly dropped. Noémi let him catch up, and he put his arms around her.

“What were you shouting, Sacha? You looked half insane. It suited you, actually.”

“Nothing.” (Is that word to come up again and again of its own accord, is it my answer to everything?) “I was thinking we should stay, whatever happens. I’m fond of this world, and we should stand up for it. I’m ashamed to be running away …”

“Stay, where, old friend? Doing what? You know what would happen … It hurts me as much as you.”

Disheveled, he shook his head, losing his excited grip on the vision, annoyed to be showing his weakness.

“Don’t worry, we’ll be boarding ship in a little while. I’m tense and I’m depressed, that’s all. I need rest. It’s nothing.”

Nothing. Another discovery of lucidity. If you were fully conscious of it, could you go on living? You always return, without knowing how, to your own reasonable normality. That’s better.

They boarded the liner quietly in the afternoon. Unimpeachable passports, the real thing at last, and the right nationality — Blackshirt Italy inspires such confidence, not like the travel passes of stateless aliens or Spanish Republicans! There were no obviously suspicious characters among the groups lining the quay (or there were nothing but). D felt almost disappointed at things proceeding so smoothly. They took possession of their cabin which was decorated in two colors, cream and blue. D asked the purser about their neighbors and any notables among the passengers: there was Herr Schwalbe, the diamond magnate, and his lady wife; Pastor and Mrs. Hooghe and their small son; Monsieur Gilles Gurie, French vice-consul at … ; Miss Gloria Pearling, the dancer, and her secretary. “Excellent,” said Mr. Battisti, “I see we shall be traveling in good company …” “Most emphatically, Monsieur. We also have Crown Prince Ouad and his court, and the American philanthropist, Mrs. Calvin H. W. Flatt …”

“Oh là là!” commented D, in a vulgar voice that contrasted with his manner and diction.

The purser disappeared down a staircase leading to the bowels of the ship. So one is saving his diamonds in time; another has religiously wound up his European tour with its museum visits, evangelical dinners, and surreptitious, burning glances at the perdition of Paris; the third is off to his pleasant sinecure overseas, congratulating himself on dodging the prospective mobilization, at least for the moment; while the platinum-haired dancer drawls to her copper-haired secretary — chosen for contrast. “Alone at last, darling!” crude as the hand she claps on a dusky breast. And who’s this prince? An Egyptian? An Iraqi? Awash in dollars stained by the sweat of Bedouins and fellahin? Does he go around in a burnoose, for photogenic effect, or as an habitué of Monte Carlo? Is he interested in oil? Will he seduce the philanthropist from Chicago or be seduced by the dancer? Our purser seems to have taken his cast from a penny novelette. So it goes. To each his checkbook, and may the world go to hell! The joke is that in all probability these are people — possibly excepting the prince — who are innocent of the least villainy and who would be amazed to learn that they have no more notion of what’s happening in the world than do moths crackling blindly into lanterns in a garden … At the end of a chic garden party, of course. The only counterfeit in this company is myself, for I am fully authentic. The only one who knows what he is running from, and wishes he were not fleeing … Or else I have too much trite imagination.

“Wait here for me,” Bruno said to Noémi. He prowled the ship, scrutinizing forms and faces, and returned from his inspection content — which proved nothing. Nothing at all.

The last scattered points of light on the coast of Europe disappeared over the horizon. The ship’s hull was plowing through a resisting mineral sea at the end of which, perhaps, lay nothing.

¹
Alexander Blok, 1914

²
André Salmon, 1919.

T
HE ANTIQUATED
bomber banked ponderously through the freezing mist. “Difficult zone … Tara-ta-ta …” breathed Klimentii. The cold cut through his furs because the cold was already in his bones. To make a joke of it, he joyfully exaggerated the chattering of his teeth. He said, “I’ve gone through it so often, nothing can happen to me now. Only trouble is, Comrade, I know that’s a superstitious idea … so it bothers me just a bit. What if luck were a superstition, when luck is all a man has left?” Daria said, “You’re not superstitious, you’re healthy as a wolf … You look like a wolf … True luck is courage, when it comes down to it. Nothing more real.”