Unforgiving Years (39 page)

Frau Hermenegilda showed proof of character. “So the war is over. And not an American policemen in sight! My God!” She donned her mistress’s best remaining coat and took nothing with her except a jewelry box overlooked by the reverend, and him such a careful man as a rule. He won’t see his baubles again, thought Frau Hermenegilda severely, serve him right for leaving me in the lurch. She ran away across the lawn, a little black crocheted hat squashed over her white hair. When she reached the hedge along the river, she spotted, through the branches, a switch of ginger hair that could only belong to Paulina, Doctor-at-Law Freidrich Ochsen’s junior housemaid. “Paulina!” Frau Hermenegilda cried. “Come here quick, girl, the most disgraceful things are going on!” Where had the little redhead got to? The old servant was sure they’d be safer, the two of them, hidden under the hedge. And then, suddenly, for an unforgettable instant, all she could see was the open mouth and staring eyes of Paulina, her hair spread out on the grass. A man was arched over her, Paulina was gasping. Frau Hermenegilda ran away down the river path. “Jesus and Mary, Jesus and Mary!”

Unimaginable house! The victorious prisoners saw themselves in a picture-book setting — ready to burn the fucking thing down! The semicircular drawing room, the organ, the framed photographs, the books in their glass cases, the pure-white kitchen that made one want to spit all over it, the bedrooms … Petersen crawled into the marital bed, boots and all, chortling with satisfaction. But when he spied a photo of the newlyweds on the wall — the handsome officer, the bride in white — he jumped out of bed for the pleasure of grinding it under both heels.

Alain chose for himself a girl’s bedroom on the second floor, whence an unexpected view of the wide green lawn brought him down to earth like a billy club to the kidneys. A short redhead, her fists screwed into her eyes, burst from the bushes and began stumbling across the grass. A black figure came after her, joined her, pulled her back toward the hedge. The little redhead didn’t struggle … “Fine time for a marital squabble!” thought Alain. Then, as he understood, he shrugged his shoulders. He sat down on the bed, elbows on knees, head in hands, concentrating on the blue cornflowers of the pitcher on the washstand. Drunken giants’ footfalls reverberated on the stairs. A door was broken down in the attic. His buddies made as if to enter more than once, but each time Alain turned toward the door, looking like a crazed invalid, and in a mechanical voice said, “Leave me alone, huh!” He only knew one thing, something he could not articulate even to himself. It’s all over. Finished. What is finished? Dry-eyed, he wept. He wept in spasms, his whole body trembling.

That was yesterday. Today he was washed clean, replete with half a chicken brought in by scavengers, and draped in an excellent suit that was baggy at the armholes but too short in the sleeve and leg (the pastor must have been slightly obese): Alain was becoming himself again, like the others. The atmosphere of this wealthy suburb spared by the bombers gave him a bitter feeling of well-being. The Croat’s blood spread into a puddle on the cement. Brigitte’s throat bore the shadow of petals pressed there by a strangler’s fingers. The ruins stank, the ruins snickered. And all the time this lawn was basking, gilding itself in the sun, and the reverend and his missus were being served lunch in the dining room. A little worried to be sure, but not for reasons of remorse … The world was in its death throes, we were dying like flies, these people were dining in their customary way, official, overweight, at ease, accomplices in everything … No one will ever understand it!

Alain was beginning to own things again: the Botticelli book lay open among the covers of his bed. Would you understand it, pure eyes, unveiled by Sandro? The very silence of those eyes seemed to say: Peace, be at rest, we see the other side of the world, think about what we see! And little by little, silence actually overcame the tumult. Alain roamed from room to room. He let his fingers idle over the organ keys, releasing an invisible treasure of colors and tears. Church music, the tango, Rachmaninoff, Debussy, they still exist somewhere! The idea was oddly funny and painful enough to make your head spin. Alain contemplated the flowers, he stopped to admire those of the carpet, he bent to touch them. He took men’s shirts with starched fronts out of the drawers, he felt like slashing them, but they would find buyers on the black market, got to be practical. Someone had already made off with the silver from the sideboard, but the glassware remained, useless transparence, limpid transparence; when Alain raised them carefully to the light, tiny leaves etched into the crystal sprang alive with rainbows … There were Bibles, theological tracts, books of canon law — canon law, tell me if that isn’t splendid! Burn them, burn the lot! But he couldn’t summon the energy to do it.

In the study he took the pastor’s chair, tinkered with a pencil, opened a leather folder and found blank sheets of headed consistory paper. His hand, unprompted, began to draw. The elongated body of a woman, hanging, with a thick rope around her neck and a smile of ecstasy upon her face. A rough-hatched sketch of the Arc de Triomphe at the top of the Champs-Élysées. Ruins and helmets. A skull, frontal view, superimposed. In one of the sockets a clear pale eye, a Botticelli eye, a gaze of sad innocence, a gaze of forgiveness …

He stood up, eyes moist, teeth chattering, shouting, “There is no forgiveness! There will never be forgiveness! Not for them, not for us, not for anyone!”

Alain tore the sketch into tiny pieces, flung the pencil out of the window, and ran to put his head under the faucet.

* * *

It was on the path along the river’s edge, reminiscent of a path along the banks of the Seine, that he recovered his peace of mind. An extraordinary woman was strolling toward him under the yews and willows. She arrived on an old-fashioned tram. Erna, not pretty, better than pretty. “I was looking for you. How are you feeling, Alain?”

“Magnificent. How about you?” He kissed her. “You know, I’ve just made my first drawing. It’s years since I held a pencil. A madman’s drawing, naturally … I was shouting with fury over it. But it wasn’t bad …” He was exultant. “How lovely it is around here … The war’s over.”

“Nearly,” Erna said. “And the consequences are about to begin.”

“What consequences? What do you mean?”

Thus began a long, digressive exchange between them which resembled the sparring of masked antagonists who were deeply fond, deeply mistrustful of each other and delighted by every sudden chance to face each other, for a moment, with their guard down. “Erna, you’re worth several men,” said Alain. “I see through you, more than you think. You are strong and full of faith.” (“Less than you imagine,” thought Erna.)

Alain, lying against a tree stump, looked up to where she sat, sharp-kneed, too preoccupied to reassure him.

“Don’t think too much, Erna, it drives you off the track. It becomes unlivable. The good thing about war is that it leaves no time for thinking. All you care about is not getting killed, finding something to eat, killing someone else, destroying something, and holding out another day. It puts your consciousness at ease, by suppressing it. The misfortune of prisoners is that they have time … I’ve just spent two extraordinary days, Erna, windows flying open inside my skull, my skull was like the ruins, with empty casements gaping on all sides, the sky pouring in, and the winds, the memories, the future, all this in the form of ideas without form. I couldn’t sleep, nor could I make any order out of the mess in my mind. I let it go, I thought: Either I hang myself tomorrow, singing ‘Why do you tarry under the moon, Marlene, Marlene?’ or else the mess will settle, I’ll see things more clearly, decisions will have been made … It’s now been proved, Erna; I’m not destined to hang myself. I’ve decided.”

The nurse found him childish.

“And what have you decided?”

“I’m changing my life, changing my soul. I’ve realized that everything in this world is geared to destroying mankind, to destroying me, among others. Everything: even the faith I once had. The Party, the triumphant revolution, I used to believe in all that. Deep down I still believe in it, but only as one believes in a dream after waking … I am on my own. I have the right to want to live, even through the decline of Europe. The right to defend myself and to run away. From now on I only want to serve life — my own to start with, the only one I’ve got.”

“But your life will no longer be of any use,” Erna objected.

“Say rather that it will no longer be of any use even to me? That I won’t be able to forget and that I’ll be a mere ectoplasm in the ruins or join the rodent band of schemers and survivors? I was afraid of that. But no. I am alive. I am the proof that some such remain! I take things in my hands and I work and I make something exist that didn’t before. I’m nothing, you might say? I take destruction, suicide, folly, grief, and joy and I create something new and meaningful out of them, I restore meaning to the corpses of men, cities, and ideas, to the thistles growing over them, to the stars that rise in the sky despite everything, to the lovers who walk over the earth or lie decomposing beneath it … From all this I knead an unknown substance which is my gift to all eyes, or to some eyes …”

“Art?”

“Yes, art, though I think I despise that word. I know too much about its impotence. I’ve witnessed the exhibitionism of those greater or lesser swindlers who are more con than artist, I know all about the scams of dealers and merchants, the publicity circus and the snobs in New York or elsewhere who gush — whether it’s a piece of shit, a bloody marvel, or a dark conundrum — ‘Too too fantastic, darling!’ Art be damned, if that’s all it is! But who is to bring the first hint of order to chaos, of light to the caverns, of hope to the graveyards, of balm to the wounds, who is to place a love incarnate among broken beings, an irrefutable reason beneath the cataracts of absurdity? Who else but the artist? Tell me who!”

Erna answered feebly: “The revolutionary.”

“Oh, really? Show me one, give me one name — a living one, mind you, because we could make up a dazzling catalogue of dead ones. I’ve been through the east, between escapes and arrests, I went over the lines with some German refugees. I was robbed, beaten up, and what have you by the comrades, I don’t hold that against them. I know what they’ve suffered and are still suffering, and I know what man is now. I sought among them men of faith, men of ideas, men of justice. At first my fresh illusions were protected by an elephant’s skin of ideology. Then I found the men I was looking for. They were all convicts. Every machine rolled over them. Little lieutenants who were big brutes would blow their brains out as an example, to scare the rest. I remember one of these killers shouting: ‘I need to speed up the pace here, work faster!’ I watched the road crews hacking away, nothing but women, children, old men, and I don’t know what else, not to speak of enemy prisoners. I saw them bogged down, squelching half starved through the Lithuanian mud, first-class mud it was too. It was easy for them to escape by burrowing into the mud, at the risk of getting buried and of getting your companions shot for it … I was working there too. One day on a slippery, disintegrating embankment I met an ex-sailor who spoke French, knew Marseille, who had just returned from the penal colony at Kamchatka and was nostalgic for the fisheries there. ‘So how many of you are behind the great Fatherland’s barbed-wire fences?’ I asked him. ‘Millions,’ he answered, without appearing to say anything sensational. This made me furious. ‘You’re lying! Someone should have perforated your counter-revolutionary brain long ago!’ ‘You have a point there,’ he said seriously. ‘I don’t know why I’m still trying to hang on … They promise us pardons and bonuses … But listen to me, brother, before you condemn me out of ignorance.’ We spent an hour together in the rain working out the rough statistics, by social class and by region across Eurasia … He’d been expelled from the Party, a militant from 1920 who had heard Lenin speak in the factories … A patriot and a socialist in spite of it all! Tell me it isn’t true!”

“It’s true,” said Erna. “I know it better than you.”

Alain seemed sadly satisfied.

“Once I knew a man who was authentic. A man who served. Who probably carried out his fair share of dirty work as well. A man of knowledge and will. He was strong. I believed in him. And I believed he betrayed us. I would happily have killed him. Now I understand. The traitor was myself, who understood nothing. There’s a truth about man and a truth for man, don’t you see?”

“Quite so,” said Erna dryly. “Who was he?”

He told the story as though he were sketching successive images on a pad. Erna saw a familiar face come together in the silky river dappled with leaf fronds and patches of sky. It was exactly the feeling she had experienced, in another universe, when writing the rigorous, nebulous text of a private diary whose every line was surrounded with blank spaces, silences, shadows, secret lights. She tasted sand on her lips. There is no escape from oneself or from numbers. Numbers are what give rise to chance, and this can be a prodigiously significant flash of light: the thing that counts.

By breaking the rule of secrecy, Erna unconsciously made a decision without which she could never have pronounced the syllable formed by a single initial.

“D,” she said. “I knew him too.”

Alain felt no surprise. The nature of his astonishments had changed. An exploding bomb would have startled him, but only out of instinct … But that there should be virginal grass, a simple possible future, this troubled and confused him.

“Well,” he said simply, “then you know what kind of man he was.

“Peace must be declared to the world, and at long last all the victims must be told that it’s over, over for good. That we will reconstruct with justice, after a ruthless cleansing, without forgetting that it’s the most wretched who have the greatest need of justice … Proclaim freedom, even in the midst of abysmal poverty. They hardly go together, true freedom and miserable poverty amid the rubble and tombstones; you don’t need much Marxism to see that. But the match is necessary if moral poverty is not to be added to the other kind. How can the survivor be consoled, how can he regain hope and courage if he’s not allowed to have his say — and if he stammers, that’s his right! — and to shoot his mouth off if he feels the urge? It’s a relief to mouth off when you’re backed into a corner. How can we reconstruct without first constructing a new chaos, but a chaos this time of ideas, utopias, vengeance, and generosity, an unheard-of freedom — which would be quite simple in reality?”