Unforgiving Years (7 page)

“Little and awful don’t go together,” he said, intent on her.

She brushed her fingers over the man’s hand where it lay on the tablecloth.

“I love someone else, quite differently from the way I love you. I was very happy. I wasn’t planning to keep it from you or to hurt you unduly. We’ll always be what we are — if you want. I can’t imagine myself without you, Sacha … But there’s this person I love. He doesn’t prevent me being yours. You’ve got to understand … And now, now …”

If a relationship is not free, it’s unhealthy. Sexuality can only be mastered through reason, by granting to it the part of us it demands. Thus delivered from its imperious claims, we can live for acts of intelligence and will. The human machine requires a good control mechanism which our physiologists — or moralists — named the brake. Repression diminishes a man as much as promiscuity. Jealousy is a leftover from an obsolete set of customs (among us), based on the subjugation of the female by the male and on private property. Moral hygiene, physical hygiene … The couple is a partnership of free beings, founded on comradeship in struggle … and so on and so forth, in formulas rehashed by Youth Club lecturers until the message had imprinted itself upon the smallest nerve filament. At least that’s what D thought up to a few seconds ago. We live on limited notions, dried out like plants pressed in a book. Under the shock, he pretended to stand by those shattered clichés. “Bad timing, in any case …” And four o’clock already. No time to lose.

“Who? Is he one of us?”

He only threw in the second question to provide a spurious justification for the first. What did it matter, when all was said and done? Bad timing for you too, Nadine, it’s just your hard luck. Now suffer. (He almost snickered.) We’re being tracked down together. The afterthought flashed through him that from now on she might — if push came to shove — betray him. Never expect too much of a woman: she has thousands of years of subjugation behind her.

“Who is he?”

“I can’t tell you. Forgive me. It’s impossible. I’ll take care of everything necessary, and we’ll leave whenever you say. But I …”

A stubborn violence rose in him. Who? “I need to know so as to take adequate precautions.”

“I can’t. But I promise, you have no complications to fear from that quarter.”

“The quarter of the flesh,” he reflected bitterly, with a vision of Nadine’s sculpted body, the raised mound of her sex, the thick curls that were lighter than her hair … “It’s beautiful,” he’d said to her once, “it charms me in the same way as your face.” Push those images aside. Nadine looked so woefully disconsolate that he was ashamed of feeling dominated by instinct — and of being, as instinct would have it, the stronger of the two.

“Very well, Nadine. Let’s assume I don’t care, even if I do — more than I would have expected. All I insist on are the precautions. No goodbyes. No letters or signals of any kind, to anyone.” (He imagined how many problems this could cause.) “You see, we are in the greatest danger. I’ve got you a new passport, with visa, and I’ve reserved a cabin. You have to follow my instructions to the letter. We sail on the seventh. Let’s go.”

All this pretended calm cost him effort. Oh to send the tea service flying, pick a fight with the naval officer, smash his face in, forbidden pleasures! He accompanied Nadine in a taxi to a point not far from her mid-price pension on the rue d’Amsterdam (it was bound to be staked out by now), which she would be leaving that same evening. “Say you’re going abroad, leave everything in order as though you were coming back, and later have a letter posted there from London, so nobody worries about your disappearance. Watch out for anyone taking photos, all right? I’ll expect you after nine. Keep in mind you could be tailed, and being tailed could be lethal …” Business over, as they sat side by side, without touching, in a muffled silence like a fog, D was wondering: “Who is he? One of us? A stranger she met on a train, at the beach, at the pension? Our life was wretchedly separate, between hasty meetings … I don’t want this obsession. I don’t care. Enough. Finished. But who?” Nadine took his hand.

“Have I hurt you terribly? I never thought …”

So convenient, never to think … !

“Oh, I don’t know. I’m fine. Worried — especially by your carelessness. It’ll work out … See you later.”

The cab was driving past the pension. D didn’t like the look of the news vendor leaning against the wall. “Is he always there?” “I … I don’t think so … If I remember right, he used to stand farther down, by the haberdashery …”

“Bye now, Sacha. Don’t be nervous.”

Nadine offered her cheek. He placed a cold kiss on it. She got out.

* * *

It was the day after a hike over the Roof of the World, in a Xinjiang village, if a point on the sterile steppe where a few mud huts cluster around a well can be termed a village. I was dying as I explored the Roof of Life, the environs of death, and they acquired for me the simple features of a continent’s bare peak. A diminutive yellow man with an Astrakhan bonnet and a triangular face, his pupils opaque within the fleshy slits of his lids, had fired a slim Japanese bullet at me from his rampart of ruins. I was in love with the ruins. After decoding the dispatches and encoding the reports; after the ceremonious interviews with turbaned elders in striped robes, venerable, devious, and unwashed, and greasy junior notables who were always smiling, homosexual, guarded, and false; after the tea, the salaam, the agreements that neither side would honor; after the hours spent mulling over the probable treacheries, the possible ambushes, and the itinerary of bands on the march along the goat tracks — then, when dusk cooled the air, I would leave the low longhouse of baked clay. First I went to visit N’ga, the keeper of the water. At the center of a blue-white space, jars of cold water stood coated with a sweat of droplets. No one was allowed to approach this water, which N’ga personally drew from the well. The people of this country were adept at poisons that had no taste and that could shrivel a man in a matter of weeks. Your mucus turns blue, your teeth rattle, you become sleepy, incurably sleepy, with a dull ache in your bones … N’ga was devoted to me. He clothed in white his ephebe’s body, molded by the lusts of local chiefs, he trilled piercingly on his flute, he played knucklebones all by himself, hooting with girlish laughter when he won. I had healed the sores that were torturing him, swabbed away his pus and his fleas, cleansed him of fear. He loved me with a servile passion, conveyed through his beautiful, blank eyes: it must come as a puzzle that the Powerful White Man from the Country of the Bear felt no hankering for his caresses. We had few words in common. I would ask, “Is the water cold and pure, faithful N’ga?”

His musical voice always made the same reply, gravely reciting, “Water refreshes the wise man, the rose, the beloved …”

This did not bode well for its capacity to refresh me, but I delighted in its taste of melted snow. Wryly, because solitude is a souring experience, I paraphrased the versicle to myself: “The same water refreshes the poisonous plant, the syphilitic woman, the traitor, and the torturer,” four classes of being I did my best to avoid.

On a crate within reach of N’ga’s tapered fingers lay a curved dagger and a revolver.

I followed a narrow alleyway of a uniform ocher color, reddened as the sun went down. Old low walls punctuated by rare, cramped openings onto other walls. The universe was made of petrified sand, drenched long ago in a deluge of blood. During the hot season, the air was rough and papery; when the wind picked up, the sand whipped the eyeballs, crunched between the teeth, adhered to the skin beneath one’s clothing. The alleyway petered out abruptly into a dry streambed. Strange, stunted cacti, robbing the aridity of some vital substance they defended with militant spines, burgeoned between purplish stones, the refuge of scorpions. Some undetectable calamity had recently exterminated the lizards — or they had scampered, sensing the approach of calamity. And this was the Year of the Lizard! Above the line of the horizon rose a marvelous transparency of sky. There were cold days when you could make out every detail of a distant rider’s dress with the naked eye, from several miles away … I was going toward the ruins. What ancestor, what descendant of Tamerlane had decided one day to raise a pile of severed heads in the long-gone oasis as a testimony to his greatness? Nomad civilization destroyed the farmers and their crops in order to re-establish the old grazing grounds … The ruins bristled forlornly in an expanse that had only just ceased to be scorching, and still gave off an insidious heat. A town, a fortress, a graveyard? It is often tombs which stand up best to time, for they have time, and speak to men through time, to tell them of the tomb. Some crumbling stands of blue- and rusty-colored masonry seemed older than the desert. The ruins spoke in a stifled, stifling language to me, like a waking dream. They came alive in my nocturnal dreams, encircled by poplars from Europe, as structures multiplied in eerie slow motion, portals swung open, and a rushing river glistened beyond. Valentine bounding lightly down the black marble staircase, a gaiety soft as shadow floating over her, before the trac-tac-tac of a machine gun mowed down her smile and I came awake. I believe this dream visited me more than once … It was, in psychological terms, a wish-fulfillment dream, and perhaps this impelled me to return to the ruins in search of a precise reminiscence which I could never find. The uncanniness of the space was deepened by a square doorway, half buried in the sand. I wanted to pass through it, but would have had to wriggle, and run a gauntlet of snakes and scorpions; my life was not mine to gamble with, I was being childish. What possible thing could lie beyond this door that I was stumbling my way around? I laughed at myself as one does in delirium or fright, or again, in the presence of some completely meaningless revelation. Were these ruins pre-Turkish, pre-Mongolian, perhaps more recent? What is time, what are ages? If I’d had a work of archaeology handy I would have reveled in tearing it up on the spot, page by page, and scattering the pieces to the wind of the ruins.

Returning from my accustomed stroll, the bullet of a Mongol or Turk grazed my breast. The gunman scurried off down the riverbed, swiveling nervously like a hunted fox. I felt neither pain nor anger. I could have shot back, I didn’t care to do so. I pressed down against the scratch with my handkerchief. N’ga dressed it with the pretty hands he then laid, joined together, under the wound to gauge the beating of my heart. “A strong heart!” I told him, for I was proud of it and N’ga’s damsel eyes pleased and repelled me in the same second by their meekness. I collapsed with exhaustion. It had been a sweltering day. I fell asleep with two cool hands over my heart.

I must have slept a long time, and did not wake once. In sleep I slid into fever, into visions, into the other delirious reality that had been lying in wait for me. It was magnificent. Heat weighed upon the ancient bricks and insinuated itself into the white room; together sun, desert, and sickness consumed me upon a calm white bonfire; and I felt, at times, bathed in freshness, pure joy, friendship, unselfish love — all the things I had never really known. If I passed my memories in review, scant happiness was there, no serenity, much harshness, steely exaltation, labor, hunger, filth, danger, and moments torn as if slashed by knives; a host of cherished dead whose faces memory averts (because they were often worth more than I was), the women of a night or of a season, the one I thought I loved who betrayed me while I was in prison, and the one who was faithful but died of typhus during a winter of famine, and I arrived too late to see her again, having crossed three hundred miles of snow; there was nothing left for me to keep of her, the neighbors had filched the sheets from the deathbed, the bed boards, the four books we owned, the toothbrush. I called together the taciturn bearded men, the women whose faces were stiff with guilt, the nail-biting children. “Citizens!” I said. “You have stolen nothing from us. You have taken what is yours. The belongings of the dead are for the living, and for the poorest first. And we are scarcely the living! We live for the men of the future …” I was a bad speaker in those days. Some of them came up and shook my hand, saying, “Thanks, Citizen, for your kind words, your human words. What do you want us to give back?” I cried: “NOTHING!” It was then that I understood the grandeur of the word nothing. All words are human, I reflected, even the ugliest of them, and nothing is left. I flew into a hopeless rage against inhuman death. “A biological fact!” I kept telling myself. “Valentine, where are you?” I yearned for church singing, the biology of the void! I was raving. I opened heavy dictionaries at the entry for Death. The Encyclopedia said: “Cessation of the functions of life, disintegration of the organism …” The printed paragraphs were dead themselves. Materialist that I am, I leafed forward, full of guilt, to look up Eternity. A definition as lifeless as the other … This was what I was carrying inside of me, in the neurological crannies where memories endure. And yet the days of fever had a prodigious clarity filled, thanks to a past free of death, with natural resurrection, with clarity, true thoughts, clear streams, comforting shade — all in disorder. Valentine was present whenever I wished for her, we were fused impossibly into a single joyous vibration that was calm, calm! The delirium soothed me for having lived. I don’t know how long it lasted; I existed beyond time. There were moments when I recognized the reality around me, but it was suspect, fragile, I felt for the case of secret documents under my pillow, I asked if the water was pure, and listening to the reply — “the wise man, the rose, the beloved” — I realized with no dismay that I was dying. I questioned N’ga: “Have the planes passed over yet?” “Seven,” signed his white fingers. Seven were sufficient for the operation under way. N’ga held a mirror over me and I saw, from my detachment, the chest wound that had blown huge and crimson, like a rose, a beloved, a wise man — a suppurating flower of hideously decomposed flesh, eating into me … No, eating into someone else, the rose, the beloved, death, biology, eternity, the encyclopedia! “What mysterious bliss,” I thought, and by simply closing my eyes I could summon up the delirium.