Unforgiving Years (5 page)

How many times have I closed a door behind me, never to return! This time … On the landing, he took a deep breath. The salt sea air could not have been more bracing than this first breath on stepping into the unknown, a relief without joy, indeed mixed with foreboding … Once the unendurable burden has been shed, the back straightens. Glad to have proven equal to the task so far, D reckoned he had at least a forty-eight-hour start on his pursuers. The elevator was moving. He ran down a few steps and stopped short, listening. Someone was mounting the stairs with a heavy, spongy tread he thought he recognized …

This someone was in too much of a hurry to wait for the elevator to come back down. D leaned cautiously out over the stairwell and saw, two floors below, Monsieur Sixte Mougin’s plump gray hand alighting on the banister. Fugitives have instant reflex. D raced up to the fifth floor on tiptoe while his mind rattled off calculations like a crack marksman. The mind can come alive intensely in a few seconds when it engages life without emotion, while the heart beats calmly on, accustomed to the unexpected. A forty-eight-hour start on danger, eh? Not even one, my friend. You’re more like twelve to fourteen hours behind. Old Mougin’s here because they sent him. My message, left yesterday, wasn’t supposed to be delivered in Amsterdam until the morning of the day after tomorrow. I hadn’t foreseen that disinformation could work against me too, that I could forfeit the leadership’s confidence, that the special envoy could have been lying about that invitation to a meeting in Holland — or that he could have given someone else leave to open letters in his absence, those letters no one can open on pain of death … Monsieur Mougin was pressing the doorbell one floor below. Such was the silence around the mechanical hiss of the elevator, D could hear the useful rogue wheezing. The door opened, and clicked shut behind him. The street outside might already be one long trip wire, invisibly hooked up to a dozen traps. D moved the Browning from his trouser pocket to that of his coat: a laughable precaution. He entered the elevator. Inside the mahogany cabin, he deliberately turned his back on the mirror, haunted by the image of a double agent he had once escorted in the elevator of the secret prison: a handsome man with a seducer’s mustache, undone, who was promptly shot. The image of this banal face, cremated into nothing years ago, gave way to a sardonic but highly disquieting idea. What if the mad finger of suspicion had lit on Krantz, the special envoy? In that case a new man, a super-special envoy, would be opening his mail … We live in lunatic times, I shall cut through the lunacy! With this thought D leaped into the street, taking it in in both directions with one glance.

A gray Citröen stood parked and unoccupied in front of number 15. A young cyclist was starting off slowly, with a small yellow parcel dangling from the handlebars — maybe a signal. If he looks at me, that would mean … He doesn’t look, but then perhaps he’s already spotted me and he’s too well trained … A woman slackened her pace, opposite, fumbling in her handbag for something: a good way to survey the street in a pocket mirror. A green van rounded the corner of the rue de Sèvres and made a three-point turn, as though the driver wished to save himself the bother of a slight detour … Everything seemed at once unremarkable and suspect. D opted to make his way past the empty Citröen.

Nobody followed him down into the Métro. Nobody caught his attention in the first-class carriage. The warren of passages in the Saint-Lazare station lend themselves to dodging and doubling back, to abrupt corrections of deliberate mistakes … D changed direction several times. A brassy blonde wheeled around, flashing a pink-gummed grin in his face. “Do you mind!” D said irritably. It was just afterward that he realized how comical he looked, with his collar up and his overcoat grotesquely buttoned up crooked. He lit a cigarette and strolled into the railway station. Not a good idea: stations make for unexpected encounters. Sure enough here came Alain through the crowd, as though rushing out from behind a newspaper-stall display.

“It’s you!” Alain exclaimed, full of joyful surprise.

His face was frank, his eyes more alert than intelligent, his movements vigorous like those of someone used to success; D liked him, to whatever atrophied extent he was still capable of friendship. Alain was an exemplary agent, enterprising, prudent, and selfless, who owed to D his initiation into the job, that is, into the devotion that fills to the brim the cup of existence. So far, D had trusted him with only moderately risky missions, such as meeting minor functionaries or party militants who were embedded in arsenals and shipyards. In the old days, before the nightmare that had made a taciturn man out of him, D used to enjoy inviting Alain and his wife to dinner at a good restaurant. They discussed painting, theory, the news. Alain didn’t mind asking questions and D enjoyed teaching him without appearing to do so. It probably did him more good than it did to that cultivated but still rudimentary young mind.

* * *

“And you?” asked D.

“Swimmingly. In ten days, I’ll have some interesting stuff for you. You’ll be pleased.”

“And me,” thought D, “I’m rudimentary, too … It took a whole historical epoch to mold me. At twenty-five I was just like him, minus the handsome face for charming the girls …”

“Walk with me, Alain. I’m so glad I ran into you.”

They went up the rue de Rome to the place de l’Europe, the traffic circle suspended high over the railroad tracks. Under the fine drizzle which now began to fall, the great airy intersection, true to its name, drew together arteries named for all the European capitals, arteries inseparable yet foreign to one another … “Here will do fine,” said D. Soft explosions of white vapor billowed up from the station. Paris’s pallor was serene. They stopped.

“We won’t be seeing each other anymore, Alain. Someone will contact you. You’ll receive instructions.”

D watched a nascent anxiety contract the young brown eyes.

“Yes, that’s how it is. I’m saying goodbye.”

“I don’t get it,” said Alain. “Listen … You have confidence in me. You can say a word, just a word. Has something happened? Something dangerous? Are you …”

Fear was pricking Alain, the kind of fear D knew the best (there are so many different kinds!): the fear of guessing right, the fear of confronting, of understanding, the incomprehensible …

“A suspect? No. I am the same person. I’m leaving. It’s finished for me, that’s all.”

“But that’s impossible!” the young man said in a very low voice.

Further words appeared to quiver on his lips, but were held back.

“I resigned,” said D sharply. “You’re to carry on under someone else.”

He was conducting an experiment on the boy, while operating alive on himself. Putting friendship to the test by a display of futile bravado. D became aware — odd, for such sentiments ought to have died out in him — of a wish to be understood. After all, he had shaped this youth’s very soul; Alain couldn’t fail to see that if he, D, was bailing out, if D himself couldn’t go along any longer, if even D was giving it up, then serious things must be happening which finally should be condemned. A man’s conscience is secondary in the battle for such a great cause — but now it’s essential. You cast off your whole life, you “drop” the Secret Service, you say no. I who am alone, disarmed, faithful after twenty years’ labor, today I say: No. The situation must be terribly grim for me to have arrived at that conclusion.

D opens his leather cigarette case. Cyclists flit across the square like mosquitoes, human mosquitoes. They know nothing of these problems. An engine puffs below street level. Autumn seeps into the marrow, as needling as the rain. Alain is bareheaded.

“You’ll catch cold, Alain,” D says affectionately. “Let’s go our ways. Goodbye.”

But he is watching. The young face has gone pale and looks sick, even nasty. If a woman flung back at him: “Go away, I love someone else!” he might be similarly dumbfounded. Alain sees D through a dull, disfiguring space. He sees a wrinkled old face, flesh wasting away so that the skull shines through. A death’s-head pretending to be alive. You don’t quit! You run away and you are hunted down and you are finished off, justly, because running away is treason.

“I didn’t expect this from you,” Alain murmurs.

His tone changes. Rising disappointment verging on contempt, growing almost insulting. Some of the color returns to his cheeks. He blurts out: “You know better than I do that …”

(The old spool unwinds by itself: that every apparently abominable deed perpetrated corresponds to a necessity, since they are perpetrated; that the Party, steered by supremely capable hands, stands above whatever it does; that if we start to doubt we’re doomed; that those who are killed are traitors, since they are killed — that YOU YOURSELF taught me all this! D understands the precision of these exact and unalterable formulas that could not be worded any other way, as though a machine were punching them out of metal. Against them he opposes, deep inside, nothing but a stony NO of liberation, a liberation difficult to justify. His shake of the head is barely perceptible; the confident, superior smirk he puts on comes out as a grimace. Isn’t this boy going to remember all that I have meant to him, the bits of my past I have shared, the person I am?)

Alain doesn’t know what to do with his hands. The right worries a button on his mackintosh. He’s stunned. Take him by the arm, look him straight in the eye, no holding back, say: “Take it easy, kid. I haven’t changed in any way. I’ve understood, I’ve made a judgment, it’s because I’ll never change that I can no longer bear what is happening. So many corpses, so many lies, so much poison brusquely poured into our souls, into our very souls, do you understand! Forgive me for using such a mystical term …” This is only a fleeting impulse for D. It’s not possible, he knows that. It’s always rash to be too human …

“You’re going to tear off that button, Alain.”

The young man’s distress spreads across his face in a madman’s grin.

“You are a …”

He breaks off and marches jerkily away, as though willing himself not to run. So, he couldn’t quite bring himself to say the word “traitor.” Was that because of a regret? A doubt? The smallest sense of what that word’s iniquitous, unbelievable implication would be?

“I don’t care,” D answers himself. “He’s a good sort, that boy. Perhaps he’ll understand too, when it’s too late. More likely he’ll be devoured a long time before. He’s the kind who believe with their eyes closed, obey, then take the rap and languish for years in the exercise yards of penitentiaries. After that the Service is in a bind about what to do with them, pay them, earn their silence, or eliminate them … In the future they won’t be dispatched to Mexico or Argentina, but to the great beyond. Much safer. Alain, just for having known me …

But let’s put this at a distance. I didn’t want this farewell. Alain is an enemy now. When he gets over the shock, he’ll be sorry he didn’t act sympathetic — who knows? — his old respectful understanding, just to keep contact. I would have believed in his youth, his concern. He would have led me into a trap. Rule: Trust nobody this side of heaven. Since those who were deserving of all our faith are dead. Defiled and dead. And when all is said and done, we did this to ourselves.

D cast a despairing glance over the place de l’Europe. The rain was falling softly.

* * *

This was no weather for visiting the Bois, but he had time to kill before his painful three o’clock rendezvous. He wasn’t hungry. There must be some direct link between physiology and psychology. But he was thirsty for the sight of trees, water, solitary places; the ideal would be a great sweep of young green saplings and faroff mountains, crisscrossed by birds in flight, scoured by monotonous winds, warmed by a tepid sun, one of those Siberian landscapes that lends a fresh alacrity to sadness (provided you’re not in captivity). And you know that a few hours’ trek would bring you to the banks of the Irtysh, sluggish river, vision of a vast, purposeless destiny … “To the Bois de Boulogne, driver, and there’s no rush.”

The ancient taxicab listed to the left. D found himself rocking along inside a grimy, leather-lined compartment. He rolled down both windows so as to breathe in the rain … The Bois was gingery gray, ash-mauve in its feathery depths, strewn with dead leaves. A spectacle of decline, perfect for today. The tar paths, the clearings between the groves of trees, the smooth surface of the lakes like a blend of sky and mud rolled past in a stately neglect that was neither truly alive nor truly lifeless. “Slower, please, driver …”

D rested. A future resembling these paths. Wanting nothing, expecting nothing, fearing nothing. Belonging to nothing, not even to oneself. No longer holding fast to anything. No longer to be that thinking molecule within a formidable, relentless, clear-sighted collectivity, held taut by so much willpower that it no longer knew what it was doing. Am I that discouraged? I’m turning into a character out of a novel for intellectuals … Everything is falling away from me, everything: the commanding ideas, the Party, the State, the new world under construction, the hard struggles of men and women caught (much as in this chilly wood) like soldiers on the front lines under fire, taking shelter in the trenches, stubborn and exhausted, at war despite themselves for the sake of hope. And the hope betrayed! The streets of the one true capital of the world churning beneath scaffoldings and gridded blocks of broad glass panes, each cell of the concrete hive housing undernourished beings imprisoned by a prodigious destiny (and forty percent parasitic paper-shuffling). Capital of torture! The microphotography labs, the special training schools, the dungeons of the secret prison vibrating with the subway trains, the cryptography departments, the central Power. The place of execution, a solidly reinforced cellar no doubt, thoroughly hosed down, rationalized, into which so many men have descended, suddenly realizing the annihilation of everything: faith, reason, life’s work, life … The red flags … The red flags, the first raw shoots of socialist humanism that no amount of dust, filth, and blood could besmirch entirely … The charm of Western cities, so resistant to analysis, the sensation of a heedless world that knows nothing of hunger, terror, overwork, or the icy, ascetic exhilaration that alone lends meaning to the everyday round; the benign live-and-let-live attitude of that meanly commonsensical, pleasantly hedonistic world, sliding day by day toward apocalypse … The bitter joy of hand-to-hand combat with catastrophes ready to spring out of invisibility into tomorrow’s headlines, that gigantic intrigue snaring countries — pastel-colored on childhood maps — in its net of information and disinformation, ignoble acts and heroic achievements, statistics, petroleum, metals, messages … The conviction that we remain — however wretched — the most farsighted, the most humane beneath our armor of scientific inhumanity, and for that reason the most endangered, the most trusting in the future of the world — and unhinged by suspicion! Ah! With all of that falling away from me, what will be left for me, what will be left of me? This nearly old man, so wisely rational, being rattled along by an ailing taxi through a pointless landscape … Wouldn’t he be better off going home? “Shoot me, comrades, as you shot the rest!” At least such an end would follow the logic of History (since we have offered our lives to History … Carrying out our task to the end. If the sun must be extinguished, then we will extinguish it! “Necessity,” magic formula …). That would be easy; but what about complicity? What if there were no necessity? What if the great machine were running off the rails, what if its mental cogs were perverted, its social cogs corrupted? How did the Old Man put it — “Our hands have lost control, we have lost control of ourselves …” Here thought begins to founder, History being perhaps rather harder to penetrate than we’d imagined, with our three dozen trusty materialist axioms. They will probably kill me quickly. There are three good reasons for them to do so: 1. I am full of corrosive ideas (a Japanese cop would say “dangerous ideas”). 2. They are continuing the work. 3. I’m finished … But what work are they continuing, plunging headlong into what abyss?