Читать книгу: «The Mandarins»

CHAPTER ONE

Henri found himself looking at the sky again – a clear, black crystal dome overhead. It was difficult for the mind to conceive of hundreds of planes shattering that black crystalling silence! And suddenly, words began tumbling through his head with a joyous sound – the offensive was halted … the German collapse had begun … at last he would be able to leave. He turned the corner of the quay. The streets would smell again of oil and orange blossoms, in the evening there would be light, people would sit and chat in outdoor cafés, and he would drink real coffee to the sound of guitars. His eyes, his hands, his skin were hungry. It had been a long fast!

Slowly, he climbed the icy stairs. ‘At last!’ Paula exclaimed, hugging him tightly, as if they had just found each other again after a long, danger-filled separation. Over her shoulder, he looked at the tinselled Christmas tree, reflected to infinity in the large mirrors. The table was covered with plates, glasses, and bottles; bunches of holly and mistletoe lay scattered at the foot of a step-stool. He freed himself and threw his overcoat on the couch.

‘Have you heard the wireless?’ he asked. ‘The news is wonderful.’

‘Is it?’ Paula said. ‘Tell me, quickly!’ She never listened to the wireless; she wanted to hear the news only from Henri’s mouth.

‘Haven’t you noticed how clear the sky is tonight? They say there are a thousand planes smashing the rear of von Rundstedt’s armies.’

‘Thank God! They won’t come back, then.’

‘There never was any question of their coming back,’ he said. But the same thought had crossed his mind, too.

Paula smiled mysteriously. ‘I took precautions, just in case.’

‘What precautions?’

‘There’s a tiny room no bigger than a cupboard in the back of the cellar. I asked the concierge to clear it out for me. You could have used it as a hiding place.’

‘You shouldn’t have spoken to the concierge about a thing like that; that’s how panics are started.’

She clutched the ends of her shawl tightly in her left hand, as if she were protecting her heart. ‘They would have shot you,’ she said. ‘Every night I hear them; they knock, I open the door, I see them standing there.’ Motionless, her eyes half closed, she seemed actually to be hearing voices.

‘Don’t worry,’ Henri said cheerfully, ‘it will not happen now.’

She opened her eyes and let her hands fall to her sides. ‘Is the war really over?’

‘Well, it won’t last much longer,’ Henri replied, placing the stool under one of the heavy beams that crossed the ceiling. ‘Want me to help you?’ he asked.

‘The Dubreuilhs are coming over early to give me a hand.’

‘Why wait for them?’ he said, picking up a hammer.

Paula put her hand on his arm. ‘Aren’t you going to do any work?’ she asked.

‘Not tonight.’

‘But you say that every night. You haven’t written a thing for more than a year now.’

‘Don’t worry,’ he said. ‘I feel like writing now, and that’s what counts.’

‘That newspaper of yours takes up too much of your time; just look at how late you get home. Besides, I’m sure you haven’t eaten a thing since noon. Aren’t you hungry?’

‘No, not now.’

‘Aren’t you even tired?’

‘Not at all.’

Those searching eyes of hers, so constantly devouring him with solicitude, made him feel like an unwieldy and fragile treasure. And it was that feeling which wearied him. He stepped up on the stool and with light, careful blows – the house had long since passed its youth – began driving a nail into the beam.

‘I can even tell you what I’m going to write,’ he said. ‘A light novel.’

‘What do you mean?’ Paula asked, her voice suddenly uneasy.

‘Exactly what I said. I feel like writing a light novel.’

Given even the slightest encouragement, he would have made up the story then and there, would have enjoyed thinking it out loud. But Paula was looking at him so intensely that he kept quiet.

‘Hand me that big bunch of mistletoe,’ he said instead.

Cautiously, he hung the green ball, studded with small white berry eyes, while Paula held out another nail to him. Yes, he thought, the war was really over. At least it was for him. This evening was going to be a real celebration. Peace would begin, everything would begin again – holidays, leisure trips, pleasure – maybe even happiness, but certainly freedom. He finished hanging the mistletoe, the holly, and the puffs of white cotton along the beam.

‘How does it look?’ he asked, stepping off the stool.

‘Perfect.’ She went over to the tree and straightened one of the candles. ‘If it’s no longer dangerous,’ she said quietly, ‘you’ll be going to Portugal now?’

‘Naturally.’

‘And you won’t do any work during the trip?’

‘I don’t suppose so.’

She stood nervously tapping one of the golden balls hanging from a branch of the tree, waiting for the words she had long been expecting.

‘I’m terribly sorry I can’t take you with me,’ he said finally.

‘You needn’t feel sorry,’ she said. ‘I know it’s not your fault. And anyhow, I feel less and less these days like traipsing about. What for?’ She smiled. ‘I’ll wait for you. Waiting, when you know what you’re waiting for, isn’t too bad.’

Henri felt like laughing aloud. What for? All those wonderful names – Lisbon, Oporto, Cintra, Coimbra – came alive in his mind. He didn’t even have to speak them to feel happy; it was enough to say to himself, ‘I won’t be here any more; I’ll be somewhere else.’ Somewhere else! Those words were more wonderful than even the most wonderful names.

‘Aren’t you going to get dressed?’ he asked.

‘I’m going,’ she said.

Paula climbed the stairway to the bedroom and Henri went over to the table. Suddenly he realized that he had been hungry. But he knew that whenever he admitted it a worried look would come over Paula’s face. He spread himself some pâté on a slice of bread and bit into it. Resolutely he told himself, ‘As soon as I get back from Portugal, I’ll move to a hotel. What a wonderful feeling it will be to return at night to a room where no one is waiting for you!’ Even when he was still in love with Paula, he had always insisted on having his own private four walls. But in ’39 and ’40, while he was in the army, Paula had had constant nightmares about falling dead on his horribly mutilated body, and when at last he was returned to her, how could he possibly refuse her anything? And then, what with the curfew, the arrangement turned out to be rather convenient, after all. ‘You can leave whenever you like,’ she would say. But up to now he hadn’t been able to. He took a bottle and twisted a corkscrew into the squeaking cork. Paula would get used to doing without him in less than a month. And if she didn’t, it would be just too damn bad! France was no longer a prison, the borders were opening up again, and life shouldn’t be a prison either. Four years of austerity, four years of working only for others – that was a lot, that was too much. It was time now for him to think a little about himself. And for that, he had to be alone, alone and free. It wouldn’t be easy to find himself again after four years; there were so many things that had to be clarified in his mind. What for instance? Well, he wasn’t quite sure yet, but there, in Portugal, strolling through the narrow streets which smelled of oil, he would try to bring things into focus. Again he felt his heart leap. The sky would be blue, laundry would be airing at open windows; his hands in his pockets, he would wander about as a tourist among people whose language he didn’t speak and whose troubles didn’t concern him.

He would let himself live, would feel himself living, and perhaps that alone would be enough to make everything come clear.

Paula came down the stairs with soft, silken steps. ‘You uncorked all the bottles!’ she exclaimed. ‘That was sweet of you.’

‘You’re so positively dedicated to violet!’ he said, smiling.

‘But you adore violet!’ she said.

He had been adoring violet for the past ten years; ten years was a long time.

‘You don’t like this dress?’ Paula asked.

‘Yes, of course,’ he said hastily. ‘It’s very pretty. I just thought that there were some other colours which might become you. Green, for example,’ he ventured, picking the first colour that came to mind.

She looked at herself in one of the mirrors. ‘Green?’ she said, and there was bewilderment in her voice. ‘You really think I’d look well in green?’

It was all so useless, he told himself. In green or yellow he would never again see in her the woman who, that day ten years earlier, he had desired so much when she had nonchalantly held out her long violet gloves to him.

Henri smiled at her gently. ‘Dance with me,’ he said.

‘Yes, let’s dance,’ she replied in a voice so ardent that it made him freeze up. Their life together had been so dismal during the past year that Paula herself had seemed to be losing her taste for it. But at the beginning of September, she changed abruptly; now, in her every word, every kiss, every look, there was a passionate quivering. When he took her in his arms she moved herself hard against him, murmuring, ‘Do you remember the first time we danced together?’

‘Yes, at the Pagoda. You told me I danced very badly.’

‘That was the day I took you to the Musée Grévin. You did not know about it. You did not know about anything,’ she said tenderly. She pressed her forehead against his cheek. ‘I can see us the way we were then.’

And so could he. They had stood together on a pedestal in the middle of the Palais des Mirages and everywhere around them they had seen themselves endlessly multiplied in a forest of mirrored columns. Tell me I’m the most beautiful of all women … You’re the most beautiful of all women … And you’ll be the most glorious man in the world …

Now he turned his eyes towards one of the large mirrors. Their entwined dancing bodies were infinitely repeated alongside an endless row of Christmas trees, and Paula was smiling at him blissfully. Didn’t she realize, he asked himself, that they were no longer the same couple?

‘Someone just knocked,’ Henri said, and he rushed to the door. It was the Dubreuilhs, heavily laden with shopping bags and baskets. Anne held a bunch of roses in her arms, and slung over Dubreuilh’s shoulder were huge bunches of red pimentos. Nadine followed them in, a sullen look on her face.

‘Merry Christmas!’

‘Merry Christmas!’

‘Did you hear the news? The air force was able to deliver at last.’

‘Yes, a thousand planes!’

‘They wiped them out.’

‘It’s all over.’

Dubreuilh dumped the load of red fruit on the couch. ‘Here’s something to decorate your little brothel.’

‘Thanks,’ Paula said coolly. It annoyed her when Dubreuilh called her studio a brothel – because of all the mirrors and those red draperies, he said.

He surveyed the room. ‘The centre beam is the only place for them; they’ll look a lot better up there than that mistletoe.’

‘I like the mistletoe,’ Paula said firmly.

‘Mistletoe is stupid; it’s round, it’s traditional. And moreover it’s a parasite.’

‘Why not string the pimentos along the railing at the head of the stairs,’ Anne suggested.

‘It would look much better up here,’ Dubreuilh replied.

‘I’m sticking to my holly and my mistletoe,’ Paula insisted.

‘All right, all right, it’s your home,’ Dubreuilh conceded. He beckoned to Nadine. ‘Come and help me,’ he said.

Anne unpacked a pork pâté, butter, cheese, cakes. ‘And this is for the punch,’ she said, setting two bottles of rum on the table. She placed a package in Paula’s hands. ‘Here, that’s your present. And here’s something for you,’ she said, handing Henri a clay pipe, the bowl shaped like a bird’s claw clutching a small egg. It was the same kind of pipe that Louis used to smoke fifteen years before.

‘Remarkable,’ said Henri. ‘How did you ever guess that I’ve been wanting a pipe like this for the past fifteen years?’

‘Simple,’ said Anne. ‘You told me.’

‘Two pounds of tea!’ Paula exclaimed. ‘You’ve saved my life! And does it smell good! Real tea!’

Henri began cutting slices of bread which Anne smeared with butter and Paula with the pork pâté. At the same time, Paula kept an anxious eye on Dubreuilh, who was hammering nails into the railing with heavy blows.

‘Do you know what’s missing here?’ he cried out to Paula. ‘A big crystal chandelier. I’ll dig one up for you.’

‘Don’t bother. I don’t want one.’

Dubreuilh finished hanging the clusters of pimentos and came down the stairs.

‘Not bad!’ he said, examining his work with a critical eye. He went over to the table and opened a small bag of spices; for years, on the slightest excuse, he had been concocting that same punch, the recipe for which he had learned in Haiti. Leaning against the railing, Nadine was chewing one of the pimentos; at eighteen, in spite of her experiences in the various French and American beds, she still seemed in the middle of the awkward age.

‘Don’t eat the scenery,’ Dubreuilh shouted at her. He emptied a bottle of rum into a salad bowl and turned towards Henri. ‘I met Samazelle the day before yesterday and I’m glad to say that he seems inclined to go along with us. Are you free tomorrow night?’

‘I can’t get away from the paper before eleven,’ Henri replied.

‘Then stop by at eleven,’ Dubreuilh said. ‘We have to go over the whole deal, and I’d very much like you to be there.’

Henri smiled. ‘I don’t quite see why.’

‘I told him that you work with me, but your actually being there will carry more weight.’

‘I doubt if it would mean very much to someone like Samazelle,’ Henry said, still smiling. ‘He must know I’m not a politician.’

‘But, like myself, he thinks that politics should never again be left to politicians,’ Dubreuilh said. ‘Come over, even if it’s only for a few minutes. Samazelle has an interesting group behind him. Young fellows; we need them.’

‘Now listen,’ Paula said angrily, ‘you’re not going to start talking politics again! Tonight’s a holiday.’

‘So?’ Dubreuilh said. ‘Is there a law against talking about things that interest you on holidays?’

‘Why do you insist on dragging Henri into this thing?’ Paula asked. ‘He knocks himself out enough already. And he’s told you again and again that politics bore him.’

‘I know,’ Dubreuilh said with a smile, ‘you think I’m an old reprobate trying to debauch his little friends. But politics isn’t a vice, my beauty, nor a parlour game. If a new war were to break out three years from now, you’d be the first to howl.’

‘That’s blackmail,’ Paula said. ‘When this war finally ends its coming to an end, no one is going to feel like starting a new one.’

‘Do you think that what people feel like doing means anything at all?’ Dubreuilh asked.

Paula started to answer, but Henri cut her off. ‘Look,’ he said. ‘It’s not that I don’t want to. It’s just that I haven’t got the time.’

‘There’s always time,’ Dubreuilh countered.

‘For you, yes,’ Henri said, laughing. ‘But me, I’m just a normal human being; I can’t work twenty hours at a stretch or go without sleep for a month.’

‘And neither can I!’ Dubreuilh said. ‘I’m not eighteen any more. No one is asking that much of you,’ he added, tasting the punch with a worried look.

Henri looked at him cheerfully. Eighteen or eighty, Dubreuilh, with his huge, laughing eyes that consumed everything in sight, would always look just as young. What a zealot! By comparison, Henri was often tempted to think of himself as dissipated, lazy, weak. But it was useless to drive himself. At twenty, he had had so great an admiration for Dubreuilh that he felt himself compelled to ape him. The result was that he was constantly sleepy, loaded himself with medicines, sank almost into a stupor. Now he had to make up his mind once and for all. With no time for himself he had lost his taste for life and the desire to write. He had become a machine. For four years he had been a machine, and now he was determined above all else to become a man again.

‘I wonder just how my inexperience could help you,’ he said.

‘Oh, inexperience has its advantages,’ Dubreuilh replied with a wry smile. ‘Besides, just now you have a name that means a lot to a lot of people.’ His smile broadened. ‘Before the war, Samazelle was in and out of every political faction and all the factions of factions. But that’s not why I want him; I want him because he’s a hero of the Maquis. His name carries a lot of weight.’

Henri began to laugh. Dubreuilh never seemed more ingenuous to him than when he tried being cynical. Paula was right, of course, to accuse him of blackmail; if he really believed in the imminence of a third world war, he would not have been in so good a mood. The truth of the matter was that he saw possibilities for action opening before him and he was burning to exploit them. Henri, however, felt less enthusiastic. Clearly, he had changed since ’39. Before then, he had been on the left because the bourgeoisie disgusted him, because injustice roused his indignation, because he considered all men his brothers – fine, generous sentiments which involved him in absolutely nothing. Now he knew that if he really wanted to break away from his class, he would have to risk some personal loss. Malefilatre, Bourgoin, Picard had taken the risk and lost at the edge of the little woods, but he would always think of them as living men. He had sat with them at a table in front of a rabbit stew, and they drank white wine and spoke of the future without much believing in what they were saying. Four of a kind, they were then. But with the war over they would once again have become a bourgeois, a farmer, and two mill hands. At that moment, sitting with them, Henri understood that in the eyes of the three others, and in his own eyes as well, he was one of the privileged classes, more or less disreputable, even if well-intentioned. And he knew there was only one way of remaining their friend: by continuing to do things with them. He understood this even more clearly when in ’41, he worked with the Bois Colombes group. At the beginning things didn’t go very well. Flamand exasperated him by incessantly repeating, ‘Me, I’m a worker, you know; I think like a worker.’ But thanks to him Henri became aware of something he knew nothing about before, something which, from that time on, he would always feel menacing him. Hate. He had taken the bite out of it; in their common struggle, they had accepted him as a comrade. But if ever he should become an indifferent bourgeois again, the hatred would come to life, and with good reason. Unless he showed proof to the contrary, he was the enemy of several hundred million men an enemy of humanity. And that he did not want at any price.

Now he had to prove himself. The trouble was that the struggle had shifted its form. The Resistance was one thing, politics another. And Henri had no great passion for politics. He knew what a movement such as Dubreuilh had in mind would mean: committees, conferences, congresses, meetings, talk, and still more talk. And it meant endless manoeuvring, patching up of differences, accepting crippling compromises, lost time, infuriating concessions, sombre boredom. Nothing could be more repulsive to him. Running a newspaper, that was the kind of work he enjoyed. But, of course, one thing did not preclude the other, and as a matter of fact they even complemented each other. It was impossible to use his paper as an excuse. Henri did not feel he had the right to look for an out; he would only try to limit his commitments.

‘Am I still your beautiful wisteria vine?’

‘Now and always.’

‘And do you love me? Do you really still love me?’

He did not have the courage at that moment to provoke a scene, he was resigned to avow anything – and Paula knew it. ‘Yes, I do.’

‘Do you belong to me?’

‘To you alone.’

‘Tell me you love me, say it.’

‘I love you.’

She uttered a long moan of satisfaction. He embraced her violently, smothered her mouth with his lips, and to get it over with as quickly as possible immediately penetrated her.

When finally he fell limp on Paula, he heard a triumphant moan.

‘Are you happy?’ she murmured.

‘Of course.’

‘I’m so terribly happy!’ Paula exclaimed, looking at him through shining tear-brimmed eyes. He hid her unbearably bright face against his shoulder. ‘The almond trees will be in bloom …’ he said to himself, closing his eyes. ‘And there’ll be oranges hanging from the orange trees.’

II

No, I shan’t meet death today. Not today or any other day. I’ll be dead for others and yet I’ll never have known death.

I closed my eyes again, but I couldn’t sleep. Why had death entered my dreams once more? It is prowling inside me; I can feel it prowling there. Why?

I hadn’t always been aware that one day I would die. As a child, I believed in God. A white robe and two shimmering wings were awaiting me in heaven’s vestry and I wanted so much to break through the clouds and try them on. I would often lie down on my quilt, my hands clasped, and abandon myself to the delights of the hereafter. Sometimes in my sleep I would say to myself, ‘I’m dead,’ and the voice watching over me guaranteed me eternity. I was horrified when I first discovered the silence of death. A mermaid had died on a deserted beach. She had renounced her immortal soul for the love of a young man and all that remained of her was a bit of white foam without memory and without voice. ‘It’s only a fairy tale,’ I would say to myself for reassurance.

But it wasn’t a fairy tale. I was the mermaid. God became an abstract idea in the depths of the sky, and one evening I blotted it out altogether. I’ve never felt sorry about losing God, for He had robbed me of the earth. But one day I came to realize that in renouncing Him I had condemned myself to death. I was fifteen, and I cried out in fear in the empty house. When I regained my senses, I asked myself, ‘What do other people do? What will I do? Will I always live with this fear inside me?’

From the moment I fell in love with Robert, I never again felt fear, of anything. I had only to speak his name and I would feel safe and secure: he’s working in the next room … I can get up and open the door … But I remain in bed; I’m not sure any more that he too doesn’t hear that little, gnawing sound. The earth splits open under our feet, and above our heads there is an infinite abyss. I no longer know who we are, nor what awaits us.

Suddenly, I sat bolt upright, opened my eyes. How could I possibly admit to myself that Robert was in danger? How could I ever bear it? He hadn’t told me anything really disturbing, nothing really new. I’m tired, I drank too much; just a little four-o’clock-in-the-morning frenzy. But who’s to decide at what hour one sees things clearest? Wasn’t it precisely when I believed myself most secure that I used to awaken in frenzies? And did I ever really believe it?

I can’t quite remember. We didn’t pay very much attention to ourselves, Robert and I. Only events counted: the flight from Paris, the return, the sirens, the bombs, the standing in lines, our reunions, the first issues of L’Espoir. A brown candle was sputtering in Paula’s apartment. With a couple of tin cans, we had built a stove in which we used to burn scraps of paper. The smoke would sting our eyes. Outside, puddles of blood, the whistling of bullets, the rumbling of artillery and tanks. In all of us, the same silence, the same hunger, the same hope. Every morning we would awaken asking ourselves the same question: Is the swastika still flying above the Senate? And in August, when we danced around blazing bonfires in the streets of Montparnasse, the same joy was in all our hearts. Then the autumn slipped by, and only a few hours ago, while we were completing the task of forgetting our dead by the lights of a Christmas tree, I realized that we were beginning to exist again each for himself. ‘Do you think it’s possible to bring back the past?’ Paula had asked. And Henri had said, ‘I feel like writing a light novel.’ They could once again speak in their normal voices, have their books published; they could argue again, organize political groups, make plans. That’s why they were all so happy. Well, almost all. Anyhow, this isn’t the time for me to be tormenting myself. Tonight’s a holiday, the first Christmas of peace, the last Christmas at Buchenwald, the last Christmas on earth, the first Christmas Diego hasn’t lived through. We were dancing, we were kissing each other around the tree sparkling with promises, and there were many, oh, so many, who weren’t there. No one had heard their last words; they were buried nowhere, swallowed up in emptiness. Two days after the liberation, Geneviève had placed her hand on a coffin. Was it the right one? Jacques’s body had never been found; a friend claimed he had buried his notebooks under a tree. What notebooks? Which tree? Sonia had asked for a sweater and silk stockings, and then she never again asked for anything. Where were Rachel’s bones and the lovely Rosa’s? In the arms that had so often clasped Rosa’s soft body, Lambert was now holding Nadine and Nadine was laughing the way she used to laugh when Diego held her in his arms. I looked down the row of Christmas trees reflected in the large mirrors and I thought, ‘There are the candles and the holly and the mistletoe they’ll never see. Everything that’s been given me, I stole from them,’ They were killed. Which one first? He or his father? Death didn’t enter into his plans. Did he know he was going to die? Did he rebel at the end or was he resigned to it? How will I ever know? And now that he’s dead, what difference does it make?

No, tombstone, no date of death. That’s why I’ve been groping for him through that life he loved so tumultuously. I hold out my hand towards the light switch and hesitantly withdraw it. In my desk is a picture of Diego, but even though I looked at it for hours I would never find again under that head of bushy hair, his real face of flesh and bones, that face in which everything was too large – his eyes, nose, ears, mouth. He was sitting in the study and Robert had asked, ‘What will you do if the Nazis win?’ And he had answered, ‘A Nazi victory doesn’t enter into my plans.’ His plans consisted of marrying Nadine and becoming a great poet. And he might have made it, too. At sixteen he already knew how to turn words into hot, glowing embers. He might have needed only a very little time – five years, four years; he lived his life so fast. Huddled with the others around the electric heater, I used to enjoy watching him devour Hegel or Kant; he would turn the pages as rapidly as if he were skimming through a murder mystery. And the fact of the matter is that he understood perfectly everything he read. Only his dreams were slow.

He had come one day to show Robert his poems, which was how we first got to know him. His father was a Spanish Jew who was stubbornly determined to continue making money in business even during the Occupation. He claimed the Spanish consul was protecting him. Diego reproached him for his luxurious style of living and his opulent blonde mistress; he preferred our austerity and spent almost all his time with us. Besides, he was at the hero-worshipping age; and he worshipped Robert. The moment he met Nadine, he impetuously gave her his love, his first, his only love. For the first time she had a feeling of being needed; it overwhelmed her. She immediately made room in the house for Diego and invited him to live with us. He had a great deal of affection for me as well, even though he found me much too rational. At night, Nadine insisted upon my tucking her in, the way I used to when she was a child. Lying next to her, he would ask me, ‘And me? Don’t I get a kiss?’ And I would kiss him. That year, we had been friends, my daughter and I. I was grateful to her for being capable of a sincere love and she was thankful to me for not opposing her deepest desire. Why should I have? She was only seventeen, but both Robert and I felt that it’s never too early to be happy.

And they knew how to be happy with so much fire! When we were together, I would rediscover my youth. ‘Come and have dinner with us. Come on, tonight’s a holiday,’ they would say, each one pulling me by an arm. Diego had filched a gold piece from his father. He preferred to take rather than to receive; it was the way of his generation. He had no trouble in changing his treasure into negotiable money and he spent the afternoon with Nadine on the roller coaster at an amusement park. When I met them on the street that evening, they were devouring a huge pie they had bought in the back room of a nearby bakery; it was their way of working up an appetite. They called up Robert and asked him to come along too, but he refused to leave his work. I went with them. Their faces were smeared with jam, their hands black with the grime of the fairground, and in their eyes was the arrogant look of happy criminals. The maître d’hôtel must have surely believed we had come there with the intention of squandering some ill-gotten gains. He showed us to a table far in the rear of the room and asked Diego with chilly politeness, ‘Monsieur has no jacket?’ Nadine threw her jacket over Diego’s threadbare sweater, revealing her own soiled, wrinkled blouse. But in spite of it all, we were served. They ordered ice cream first, and sardines, and then steaks, fried potatoes, oysters, and still more ice cream. ‘It all gets mixed up inside anyhow,’ they explained to me, stuffing the food into their mouths. They were so happy to be able for once to eat their fill! No matter how hard I tried to get enough food to go around, we were always more or less hungry. ‘Eat up,’ they said to me commandingly, as they slipped slices of pâté into their pockets for Robert.

It wasn’t long after this that the Germans one morning knocked at Mr Serra’s door. No one had informed him that the Spanish consul had been transferred. Diego, as luck would have it, had slept at his father’s that night. They didn’t take the blonde. ‘Tell Nadine not to worry about me,’ Diego said. ‘I’ll come back, because I want to come back.’ Those were the last words we ever heard from him; all his other words were drowned out forever, he who loved so much to talk.

It was springtime and the sky was very blue, the peach trees a pastel pink. When we would ride our bicycles, Nadine and I, through the flag-decked parks of Paris, the fragrant joy of peacetime weekends filled our lungs. But the tall buildings of Drancy, where the prisoners were kept, brutally crushed that lie. The blonde had handed over three million francs to a German named Felix who transmitted messages from the prisoners and who had promised to help them escape. Twice, peering through binoculars, we were able to pick out Diego standing at a distant window. They had shaved off his woolly hair and it was no longer entirely he who smiled back at us; his mutilated head seemed even then to belong to another world.

One afternoon in May we found the huge barracks deserted; straw mattresses were being aired at the open windows of empty rooms. At the café where we had parked our bicycles, they told us that three trains had left the station during the night. Standing by the barbed-wire fence, we watched and waited for a long time. And then suddenly, very far off, very high up, we made out two solitary silhouettes leaning out of a window. The younger one waved his beret triumphantly. Felix had spoken the truth: Diego had not been deported. Choked with joy, we rode back to Paris.

‘They’re in a camp with American prisoners,’ the blonde told us. ‘They’re doing fine, taking lots of sun baths.’ But she hadn’t actually seen them. We sent them sweaters and chocolate, and they thanked us for the gifts through the mouth of Felix. But we stopped receiving written messages. Nadine insisted upon some sort of sign to prove they were still alive – Diego’s ring, a lock of his hair. But it was just then that they changed camps again, were sent somewhere far from Paris. It became increasingly difficult to locate them in any particular place; they were gone, that was all. To be nowhere or not to be at all isn’t very different. Nothing really changed when at last Felix said irritably, ‘They killed them a long time ago.’

Nadine wept frantically night after night, and I held her in my arms from evening till morning. Then she found sleep once more. At first Diego appeared every night in her dreams, a wretched look on his face. Later even his spectre vanished. She was right; I can’t really blame her. What can you do with a corpse? Yes, I know. They serve as excuses for making flags, heroic statues, guns, medals, speeches, and even souvenirs for decorating the home. It would be far better to leave their ashes in peace. Monuments or dust. And they had been our brothers. But after all, we had no choice in the matter. Why did they leave us? If only they would leave us in peace! Let’s forget them, I say. Let’s think a little about ourselves now. We’ve more than enough to do remaking our own lives. The dead are dead; for them there are no more problems. But after this night of festivity, we, the living, will awaken again. And then how shall we live?

Nadine and Lambert were laughing together, a record was playing loudly, the floor was trembling under our feet, the blue flames of the candles were flickering. I looked at Sézenac who was lying on the rug, thinking no doubt of those glorious days when he strutted down the boulevards of Paris with a rifle slung over his shoulder. I looked at Chancel who had been condemned to death by the Germans and at the last moment exchanged for one of their prisoners. And Lambert whose father had denounced his fiancée, and Vincent who had killed a dozen of our home-grown Nazi militiamen with his own hands. What will they all do with those pasts of theirs, so grievous and so brief? And what will they do with their shapeless futures? Will I know how to help them? Helping people is my job; I make them lie down on a couch and pour out their dreams to me. But I can’t bring Rosa back to life, nor the twelve Nazis Vincent killed. And even if I were somehow able to neutralize their pasts, what kind of future could I offer them? I quiet fears, harness dreams, restrain desires; I make them adjust themselves. But to what? I can no longer see anything around me that makes sense.

No question about it, I had too much to drink. After all, it wasn’t I who created heaven and earth; no one’s asking me to give an accounting of myself. Why must I forever be worrying about others? I’d do better to worry a little about myself for a change. I press my cheek against the pillow; I’m here, it’s I. The trouble is there’s nothing about me worth giving much thought to. Oh, if someone asks who I am, I can always show him my case history; to become an analyst, I had to be analysed. It was found that I had a rather pronounced Oedipus complex, which explains my marriage to a man twenty years my elder, a clear aggressiveness towards my mother, and some slight homosexual tendencies which conveniently disappeared. To my Catholic upbringing I owe a highly developed super ego – the reason for my puritanism and my lack of narcissism. The ambivalent feelings I have in regard to my daughter stem from my aversion to my mother as much as to my indifference concerning myself. My case is one of the most classic types; its segments fall neatly into a predictable pattern. From a Catholic point of view, it’s also quite banal: in their eyes I stopped believing in God when I discovered the temptations of the flesh, and my marriage to an unbeliever completed my downfall. Politically and socially Robert and I were left-wing intellectuals. Nothing in all this is entirely inexact. There I am then, clearly catalogued and willing to be so, adjusted to my husband, to my profession, to life, to death, to the world and all its horrors; me, precisely me, that is to say, no one.

To be no one, all things considered, is something of a privilege. I watched them coming and going in the room, all of them with their important names, and I didn’t envy them. For Robert it was all right; he was predestined to be what he was. But the others, how do they dare? How can anyone be so arrogant or so rash as to serve himself up as prey to a pack of strangers? Their names are dirtied in thousands of mouths; the curious rob them of their thoughts, their hearts, their lives. If I too were subjected to the cupidity of that ferocious mob of ragpickers, I would certainly end up by considering myself nothing but a pile of garbage. I congratulated myself for not being someone.

I went over to Paula. The war had not affected her aggressive elegance. She was wearing a long, silk, violet-coloured gown, and from her ears hung clusters of amethysts.

‘You’re very lovely tonight,’ I said.

She looked at herself quickly in one of the large mirrors. ‘Yes, I know,’ she said sadly. ‘I’m lovely.’

She was indeed beautiful, but under her eyes there were deep circles that matched the colour of her dress. At heart she knew very well that Henri could have taken her to Portugal. She knew much more than she pretended to know.

‘You must be very happy; your party’s a great success.’

‘Henri loves parties so much,’ Paula said, her hands, heavy with rings, mechanically smoothing her shimmering silk dress.

‘Won’t you sing something for us? I’d so much like to hear you sing again.’

‘Sing?’ she said, surprised.

‘Yes, sing,’ I replied laughingly. ‘Have you forgotten that you used to sing once upon a time?’

‘Once – but that was long ago,’ she answered.

‘Not any more it isn’t. Now it’s like old times again.’

‘Do you really think so?’ Paula asked, staring intently into my eyes. She seemed to be peering into a crystal ball somewhere beyond my face. ‘Do you think it’s possible to bring back the past?’

I knew how she wanted me to answer that question, but with a slightly embarrassed laugh I said only, ‘I don’t know; I’m not an oracle.’

‘I must get Robert to explain the meaning of time to me,’ she said meditatively.

She was ready to deny the existence of space and time rather than admit that love might not be eternal. I was afraid for her. She had been well aware during these past four years that Henri no longer felt anything more than a wearied affection for her. But ever since the liberation, I don’t know what insane hope had awakened in her heart.

‘Do you remember the Negro spiritual I used to like so much? Won’t you sing it for us?’

She walked over to the piano and lifted the keyboard cover. Her voice seemed slightly hollow, but it was just as moving as ever. ‘You know, she ought to appear in public again,’ I said to Henri, who greeted my words with a look of astonishment. When the applause died down, he went over to Nadine and began dancing with her. I didn’t like the way she was looking at him. There was nothing I could do to help her, either. I had given her my only decent dress and lent her my prettiest necklace; that was all I had the power to do. I knew it would be useless to probe her dreams; all she needed was the love Lambert was so anxious to give her. But how could I prevent her from destroying it, as I knew she ultimately would? And yet when Lambert entered the room, she raced down the little stairway from the top of which she had been surveying us with a look of disapproval. She stopped dead on the last step, embarrassed by her too-open display of affection.

Lambert walked over to her and smiled gravely. ‘I’m glad you came,’ he said.

‘The only reason I came was to see you,’ she said brusquely.

He looked handsome this evening in his dark, well-cut suit. He always dresses with the studied severity of a person much older than himself; he has ceremonious ways, a sober voice, and he exercises a very careful control over his smiles. But his confused look and the softness of his mouth betray his youthfulness. Nadine, obviously, is at once flattered by his seriousness and reassured by his weakness.

‘Did you have a good time?’ she asked, looking at him with an affable, somewhat silly expression. ‘I hear that Alsace is very beautiful.’

‘Once a place is militarized, you know, it becomes utterly dismal.’

They sat down on one of the steps of the stairway, chatted, danced, and laughed together for quite a long while. And then they began to argue. With Nadine it always ended like that. Lambert, a sullen look on his face, was now sitting next to the heater, and Nadine was standing by the stairway. Bringing them together from opposite ends of the room and joining their hands was completely out of the question.

I walked over to the buffet and poured myself a brandy. My eyes glanced down along my black skirt and stopped at my legs. It was funny to think I had legs; no one ever noticed them, not even myself. They were slender and well-shaped in their beige stockings, certainly no less well-shaped than many another pair. And yet one day they’d be buried in the earth without ever having existed. It seemed unfair. I was still absorbed in contemplating them when Scriassine came over to me.

‘You don’t seem to be having a very good time,’ he said.

‘Well, I’m doing the best I can.’

‘Too many young people here. Young people are never gay. And far too many writers.’ He pointed his chin towards Lenoir, Pelletier, and Cange. ‘They’re all writers, aren’t they?’

‘Every one of them.’

‘And you, do you write, too?’

‘God, no!’ I said, laughing.

I liked his brusque manner. Like everyone else, I had read his famous book, The Red Paradise. But I had been especially moved by his book on Austria under the Nazis. It was something much more than a mere journalistic account; it was an impassioned testimony. He had fled Austria after having fled Russia and finally became a naturalized French citizen. But he had spent the last four years in America and we had met him for the first time only this autumn. Almost immediately he began calling Robert and Henri by their first names, but he never seemed to notice that I existed.

‘I wonder what’s going to become of them,’ he said, turning his eyes from me.

‘Who?’

‘The French in general and these people here in particular.’

I studied his triangular face with its prominent cheekbones, its hard, fiery eyes, its thin, almost feminine mouth. It wasn’t at all the face of a Frenchman. To him Russia was an enemy nation, and he did not have any great love for the United States. There wasn’t a place on earth where he really felt at home.

‘I returned from New York on an English boat,’ he said with a slight smile. ‘One day the steward said to me, “The poor French! They don’t know if they won the war or lost it.” It seems to me that that sums up the situation rather well.’

There was an irritating complacency in his voice. ‘I don’t think it matters much what kind of tag you put on things that happened in the past,’ I said. ‘What does matter is the future.’

‘That’s just it,’ he said spiritedly. ‘To make something good of the future, you have to look the present in the face. And I get the distinct impression that these people here aren’t doing that at all. Dubreuilh talks to me of a literary review, Perron of a pleasure trip. They all seem to feel they’ll be able to go on living just like before the war.’

‘And of course, you were sent from heaven to open their eyes,’ I said dryly.

Scriassine smiled. ‘Do you know how to play chess?’

‘Very poorly.’

He continued to smile and all trace of pedantry vanished from his face – we were intimate friends, accomplices, had known each other since childhood. ‘He’s working his Slavic charm on me,’ I thought. And as a matter of fact, the charm worked; I smiled back at him.

‘When I’m just watching chess, I can spot good moves more clearly than the players themselves, even if I’m not as good at the game as they are. Well, that’s the way it is here; I’m an outsider, an onlooker, so I can pretty well see what’s in store for you people.’

‘What?’

‘An impasse.’

‘An impasse? What do you mean by that?’

Suddenly, I found myself anxiously awaiting his reply. We had all been living together in such a tightly sealed circle for so long a time, with no intrusions by outsiders, any witnesses, that this man from without troubled me.

‘French intellectuals are facing an impasse. It’s their turn now,’ he added with a kind of satisfaction. ‘Their art, their philosophies can continue to have meaning only within the framework of a certain kind of civilization. And if they want to save that civilization, they’ll have no time or energy left over to give to art or philosophy.’

‘This isn’t the first time Robert’s been active in politics,’ I said. ‘And it never before stopped him from writing.’

‘Yes, in ’34 Dubreuilh gave a great deal of his time to the struggle against fascism,’ Scriassine said in his suave voice. ‘But to him, that struggle seemed morally reconcilable with literary preoccupations.’ With a slight trace of anger, he added, ‘In France, the pressure of history has never been felt in all its urgency. But in Russia, in Austria, in Germany, it was impossible to escape it. That’s why I, for example, was never able to write.’

‘But you have written.’

‘Don’t you think I dreamed of writing other kinds of books, too? But it was out of the question.’ He shrugged his shoulders. ‘To be able to continue taking an interest in things cultural in the face of Stalin and Hitler, you have to have one hell of a humanistic tradition behind you. But, of course,’ he went on, ‘in the country of Diderot, Victor Hugo, Jaurès, it’s easy to believe that culture and politics go hand in hand. Paris has thought of itself as Athens. But Athens no longer exists; it’s dead.’

‘As far as feeling the pressure of history is concerned,’ I said, ‘I think Robert could give you a few pointers.’

‘I’m not attacking your husband,’ Scriassine said, with a little smile that reduced my heated words to nothing more than an expression of conjugal loyalty. ‘As a matter of fact,’ he continued, ‘I consider Robert Dubreuilh and Thomas Mann to be the two greatest minds of this age. But that’s precisely it; if I predict that he’ll give up literature, it’s only because I have confidence in his lucidity.’

I shrugged my shoulders. If he was trying to soften me up, he was certainly going about it the wrong way. I detest Thomas Mann.

‘Robert will never give up writing,’ I said.

‘The remarkable thing in all of Dubreuilh’s works,’ said Scriassine, ‘is that he was able to reconcile high aesthetic standards with revolutionary inspiration. And in his own life, he attained an analogous equilibrium: he was organizing vigilance committees at the same time he was writing novels. But it’s precisely that beautiful equilibrium that’s now becoming impossible.’

‘You can count on Robert to devise some new kind of equilibrium,’ I said.

‘He’s bound to sacrifice his aesthetic standards,’ Scriassine said. Suddenly his face lit up and he asked in a triumphant voice, ‘Do you know anything about prehistoric times?’

‘Not much more than I do about chess.’

‘But perhaps you know this: that for a vast period of time the wall paintings and objects found in caves and excavations bear witness to a continuous artistic progress. Abruptly, both drawings and sculptures disappear; there’s an eclipse lasting several centuries which coincides with the development of new techniques. Well, just now we’re at the edge of a new era in which, for different reasons, humanity will have to grapple with all sorts of difficult problems, leaving us no time for the luxury of expressing ourselves artistically.’

‘Reasoning by analogy doesn’t prove very much,’ I said.

‘All right then, let’s forget that comparison,’ Scriassine said patiently. ‘You’ve probably been too close to this war we’ve gone through to properly understand it. Actually, it was something entirely different from a war – the liquidation of a society, and even of a world, or rather the beginning of their liquidation. The progress that science and engineering have made, the economic changes that have come about, will convulse the earth to such an extent that even our ways of thinking and feeling will be revolutionized. We’ll even have difficulty remembering just who and what we had once been. And among other things art and literature will become nothing more than peripheral divertissements.’

I shook my head and Scriassine resumed heatedly: ‘Don’t you see? What weight will the message of French writers have when the earth is ruled by either Russia or the United States? No one will understand them any more; very few will even speak their language.’

‘From the way you talk, it would seem you’re rather enjoying the prospect,’ I said.

He shrugged his shoulders. ‘Now isn’t it just like a woman to say a thing like that! They’re simply incapable of being objective.’

‘Well, let’s be objective then,’ I said. ‘Objectively, it’s never been proved that the world must become either American or Russian.’

I reread his books, listened to him, questioned him; I was so taken up with this new life of mine that I didn’t even think of asking myself why, exactly, he enjoyed being with me. I was already so involved that I had no time to discover what was happening inside my own heart. When one night he took me in his arms in the middle of the Jardins du Carrousel, I was offended. ‘I will only kiss a man I love,’ I said coldly. ‘But you do love me!’ he answered calmly. And when he said it, I knew it was true. I hadn’t been aware of it; it had all happened too fast. With Robert, everything happened so fast! In fact, that was precisely the quality in him that had captivated me at first. Other people were so slow, life was so slow. He burned up time and pushed everything out of his way. From the moment I knew I loved him, I followed him eagerly from surprise to surprise. I learned that one could live without furniture and without schedules, skip lunches, not go to bed at night, sleep in the afternoon, make love in a wood as well as in bed. It seemed a simple and joyous thing to me to become a woman in his arms; when the pleasure was frightening, his smile would reassure me. A single shadow lay over my heart – term was nearly over and the thought of being separated from him terrified me. Robert obviously realized that. Was that why he suggested we get married? The idea had never even crossed my mind; at nineteen, it seems as natural to be loved by the man with whom you’re in love as by doting parents or all-powerful God.

‘But I really did love you!’ Robert told me much later. Coming from him, what precisely did those words mean? Would he have loved me a year earlier when he was still taken up body and soul in political battles? And the year I came to know him, couldn’t he have chosen someone else as consolation for his inactivity? That’s the kind of question that serves no purpose whatsoever. Let’s drop it. One thing was definitely certain: he was determined to make me happy, and he did not fail. Up to then I hadn’t been unhappy, but neither had I been happy. I was always in good health and occasionally I had moments which I enjoyed. But most of the time I was plainly and simply disconsolate. Foolishness, lies, injustice, suffering; all around me a deep, black chaos. And how absurd it all was! Those days which repeated themselves from week to week, from century to century, without ever getting anywhere. Living was simply a matter of waiting some forty or sixty years for death to come, trudging along through emptiness. That was why I studied so avidly: only books and ideas were able to hold their own; they alone seemed real to me.

Thanks to Robert, ideas were brought down to earth and the earth became coherent, like a book, a book that begins badly but will finish well. Humanity was going somewhere; history had meaning, and so did my own existence. Oppression and misery contained within themselves the promise of their disappearance; evil had already been conquered, shame swept away. The sky closed above my head and the old fears left me. Robert hadn’t freed me with theories; he simply showed me that to live was sufficient unto life. He didn’t give a damn about death, and his activities weren’t merely diversions; he liked what he liked, wanted what he wanted, and ran from nothing. Quite simply, all I wanted was to be like him. If I had questioned life, it was mostly because I was bored at home. And now I was no longer bored. From chaos, Robert had drawn a full, orderly world, cleansed by the future he was helping to produce. And that world was mine. I had to make my own place in it. Being Robert’s wife wasn’t enough; before marrying him I had never pictured myself making a career of being a wife. On the other hand, I never for a moment dreamed of taking an active part in politics. In that domain, theories can interest me deeply and I harbour a few strong feelings, but practical politics aren’t for me. I have to admit that I lack patience; the revolution is on the march, but it’s marching so slowly, with such tiny, uncertain steps! For Robert, if one solution is better than another, that’s the correct one; a lesser evil he considers a good. He’s right, of course, but no doubt I haven’t completely buried my old dreams of the absolute. It does not satisfy me. And then the future seems so very far off; I find it hard to become interested in men who aren’t born yet. I would much rather help those who are alive at this very moment. That’s why my profession attracted me. Oh, I never believed that you could, from the outside, supply people with a prefabricated salvation. But sometimes only trifles separate them from happiness, and I felt I could at least sweep away those trifles. Robert encouraged me. In that respect he differs from orthodox Communists; he believes that psychoanalysis can play a useful role in bourgeois society and that it might still be of use even in a classless society. And the possibility of rethinking classical psychoanalysis in terms of Marxist ideology struck him as a fascinating idea. The fact of the matter is that my work did interest me, and very deeply. My days were as full as the earth around me. Every morning I awakened more joyously than the day before and every evening I found myself enriched with a thousand new discoveries. It’s an incredible stroke of luck, when you’re only twenty years old, to be given the world by the hand you love. And it’s equally lucky to find your exact place in that world. Robert also accomplished another feat; he guarded me against isolation without depriving me of privacy. We shared everything in common; and yet I had my own friendships, my own pleasures, my work, my worries. If I wanted to, I could spent the night nestled against a tender shoulder. Or, like tonight, I could remain alone and chaste in my room. I look at the four walls and the rays of light under the door; how many times have I known the sweetness of falling asleep while he was working within earshot. It’s been years since we lost our desire for each other, but we were too closely bound in other ways to attach any great importance to the union of our bodies. Therefore we had, so to speak, lost nothing. It seems almost like a pre-war night tonight. Even this worrying that’s been keeping me awake isn’t new; the future of the world has often seemed very black. What is it, then, that’s different? Why has death come prowling again in my room? It continues to prowl. Why?

What stupid obstinacy! I’m ashamed. During these past four years, in spite of all that’s happened, I somehow managed to persuade myself that everything would be the same after the war as it was before. In fact, only a little while ago I was saying to Paula, ‘It’s just like it used to be, isn’t it?’ This is what I am trying to say to myself: the way it is now is exactly the way it used to be. But no, I’m lying to myself; it’s not and it never again will be the same. Up to now, I always knew in my heart that we would somehow pull out of the gravest crises. Certainly Robert had to pull out of them; his destiny guaranteed that of the world and vice versa. But with the horrifying past behind us, how can anyone have any faith in the future? Diego is dead, too many others have died; shame has returned to the earth, the word ‘happiness’ has lost all meaning. All around me, nothing but chaos again. Maybe the world will pull out of it. But when? Two or three centuries are much too long; our own days are numbered. If Robert’s life ends in defeat, in doubt, in despair, nothing will ever make up for it.

I hear a slight movement in his study; he’s reading, thinking, planning. Will he succeed? And if not, what then? No need to think of the worst; until now, no one has ever eaten us up. We just go on existing, following the whim of a story that isn’t ours at all. And Robert has been reduced to the role of a passive witness. What will he do with himself? I know how much the revolution means to him; it’s his absolute. The experiences of his youth left an indelible mark upon him; during all those years he spent growing up among soot-coloured houses and lives, socialism was his only hope. And it wasn’t because of generosity or logic that he believed in it, but because of necessity. For him, becoming a man meant only one thing: becoming a militant partisan, like his father. It took quite a lot to make him withdraw from politics – the infuriating disillusionment of ’14, his rupture with Cachin two years after Tours, his inability to awaken the old revolutionary flame in the Socialist Party. At the first opportunity, he leaped eagerly into the political arena again, and now he’s more excited about it than ever. To reassure myself I tell myself that he has all manner of resources at his command. After our marriage, during the years he spent away from active politics, he wrote a great deal and was happy. But was he? I chose to believe it, and until tonight I never dared pry into what really went on inside him. I no longer feel very certain about our past. If he wanted a child so soon, it was probably because I alone wasn’t enough to justify his existence. Or perhaps he was trying to take revenge against that future which he could no longer control. Yes, that desire of his to become a father seems rather significant now that I look back upon it. And the sadness of our pilgrimage to Bruay is significant, too. We walked through the streets of his childhood and he showed me the school where his father had taught, the sombre building in which, at the age of nine, he had heard Jaurès. He told me about his first encounters with daily routine and disappointment with pointless work; he was speaking very fast, he sounded very uninterested, and then suddenly he said heatedly, ‘Nothing has changed. But I write novels!’ I wanted to believe it was only a fleeting emotion; Robert was much too lighthearted for me to imagine that he had any serious regrets. But after the Congress of Amsterdam, during that whole period when he was busily organizing vigilance committees, I saw him as he acted when he was really happy, and I had to admit the truth to myself: before then, he had been straining at the leash. If now he finds himself condemned once more to impotence, to solitude, everything will seem useless to him, even writing. Especially writing. Between ’25 and ’32, when he was holding himself in check, he wrote, yes. But it was a lot different then. He still had close ties with the Communists and some of the Socialists; he nourished the hope of a united workers’ front and of a final victory. I know by heart that phrase of Jaurès he used to repeat at every opportunity: ‘The man of tomorrow will be the most complex, the richest in life, that history has ever known.’ He was convinced his books would help to build the future and that the man of tomorrow would read them. That being the case, he wrote. But faced with a sealed future, writing becomes meaningless. If his contemporaries stop listening to him, if posterity no longer understands him, there’s nothing left but to be silent.

And what then? What will become of him? It’s awful to think of a living creature turning into foam, but there’s an even worse fate: that of a paralysed man who can’t move his tongue. It’s far better to be dead. Will I find myself some day hoping for Robert’s death? No. That’s unthinkable. He’s had hard blows before and he’s always got over them. He’ll get over them again. I don’t know how, but he’ll surely think of something. It’s not entirely impossible, for example, that one day he’ll become a member of the Communist Party. Now, of course, he wouldn’t dream of doing it; his criticisms of their policies are too violent. But suppose the party line changes, suppose there comes a day when, excepting for the Communists, there is no coherence left. If that ever happens I wonder if Robert won’t end up by joining them rather than remaining inactive. I don’t like that idea. It would be much harder for him than for anyone else to take orders with which he didn’t agree; he’s always had his own definite opinions on what tactics to use. And it would be useless for him to attempt to be cynical; I know he’ll always remain faithful to his old principles. The idealism of others makes him smile; he has his own, and there are certain Communist methods he would never accept. No, that’s no solution. There are far too many things that keep them apart; his humanism isn’t the same as theirs. Not only would he be unable to write anything sincere, but he would be forced to reject his whole past.

‘Too bad,’ he’ll tell me. Just a little while ago he said, ‘One book more or less isn’t very important.’ But does he really believe that? As for me, I value books greatly, too much perhaps. When I was an adolescent, I preferred books to the world of reality, and something of that has remained with me – a slight taste for eternity. Yes, that’s one of the reasons why I take Robert’s writings so much to heart. If they perish, both of us will once more become perishable; the future will be nothing but the grave. Robert doesn’t see things that way, but neither is he the perfect militant completely unconcerned with himself. He definitely hopes to leave a name behind him, a name that will mean a great deal to a great many people. And after all, writing is the thing he loves most in the world; it’s his joy, his necessity; it’s he, himself. Renouncing writing would be suicide for him.

Well, all he would have to do is resign himself to writing to order. Others do it. Others, but not Robert. If I had to, I could imagine him working actively for a cause halfheartedly. But writing is something else again; if he were no longer able to express himself freely, the pen would fall from his hand.

Now I see the impasse. Robert believes completely in certain ideas, and before the war we were positive that one day they would be realized. His whole life has been devoted to enriching them and preparing for their birth. But suppose they’re never born? Suppose the revolution takes a different tack, turns against the humanism Robert has always defended. What can he do? If he helps build a future hostile to all the values in which he believes, his struggle becomes absurd. But if he stubbornly insists on maintaining values that will never come down to earth, he becomes one of those old dreamers whom, above all, he has always wanted not to emulate. No, between those alternatives, no choice is possible. In either case, it would mean defeat, impotence; and for Robert that would be a living death. That’s why he’s thrown himself so energetically into the fight. He tells me the present situation offers an opportunity he’s been waiting for all his life. All right. But it also carries with it a graver danger than any he has ever experienced, and he knows it. Yes, I’m sure he’s already told himself everything I’ve been thinking. He’s told himself that his future might be nothing but the grave, that he’ll be buried without leaving any more trace of himself than Rosa and Diego. And it’s even worse: perhaps the men of tomorrow will look upon him as a dunderhead, a fool, a charlatan, a drone, a complete failure. It may even be that one day he’ll be tempted to look upon himself through their mean, cruel eyes. In that case, he’ll live out the rest of his life in disillusionment. Robert disillusioned! That would be an even more intolerable horror than death itself. I can accept my death and his, but never his disillusionment. No. To think of waking up tomorrow, and the next day, and all the days that follow, with that monstrous menace on the horizon! I won’t stand for it. No. But I can say no, no, no; I can say it a hundred times, and it won’t change a thing. I’ll wake up facing that menace tomorrow and all the days after that. When you’re faced with an inescapable fact, you can at least choose to die. But when it’s nothing more than a baseless fear, you have to go on living with it.