Unforgiving Years (40 page)

“Yes, but how?” wondered Erna.

Alain continued slowly, as though groping for something in the dark.

“But where are the men? Where are the grand ideas? Perhaps ideas are nothing but ephemeral stars. They point the way while they last, and then they go out, and other stars should flare up … But they haven’t yet. And everything has been done to stamp out the light of minds. The old revolution is dead, I say. We need another, completely different revolution, and I don’t see it anywhere. Are you angry with me?”

Erna felt more nauseous than she ever had in the field hospital’s operating room.

“No,” she said, “go on.”

It was a superhuman effort not to implore him to stop. “
You must
hear this voice, Erna.
You must
.

“It’s a great thing to have won, but victory is hollow if it isn’t the beginning of something else … Wild beasts have always known how to vanquish. What will victory bring us? A tiny drop of equity, a tiny extra drop of humanity in an ocean clogged with dead bodies? Or the most highly mechanized secret and visible police forces?

“What about you, Erna, what will you do?” Erna was taking stock of her problem. Return to the great land of mute suffering? Already, while writing her latest report, she had felt uncertain about what political orientation to adapt to. Once the official line was established, this ignorance might become suspect in itself. She wished she could say, “Just let me go back to Ak-Aul, let me be a desert recluse again, writing my notebooks and burning them afterward.” Unthinkable words. Her one glimmer of a chance lay in feigning mindless zeal. Get an interview with the chief of the service, seduce him not so much by her devotion as by her willingness, quickly accept an assignment in Paris, Rome, or Trieste and resume her clandestine activities. During wartime, it was facts about the enemy that were wanted, the stark truth about resources, risks, losses, hopes. And there was no ambiguity as to the enemy’s identity or the necessity of destroying him, no doubt about the action to be undertaken which — transcending crime — became the saving exploit. Now, already, the smokescreens of doubt and deceit were spreading irresistibly. H, the liaison officer, had told her: “Your memorandum must stress what people think about us: the populations, the women, the Jews, the Americans, the prisoners, don’t leave anyone out … That’s essential …” Essential, ha! But how to say it? How to report the rumors of terror seeping from the liberated countries, the comments upon the rumors, the despair of so many comrades? It would be criminal not to record the truth. To record it would be worse … H also said, “For us, esteemed Comrade, the war continues … Indeed who knows if … Can two such different worlds coexist? We are the stronger by virtue of planning, realism, and discipline, and we have hidden allies all over the world … Our opponents enjoy technological superiority, for the time being, and wealth. But technology can be learned and wealth can be conquered. There are no clear boundaries between war and peace nowadays … Wars may be waged almost invisibly. Be very careful.” Wisely feigning to agree, Erna had stocked up on dollars and was close to obtaining an excellent passport … Years passed, wars passed, crushing millions of innocents, cities crumbled, a civilization was dying, and the same problems were rearing their heads … The river shimmered.

“It’s four o’clock,” said Erna. “I must be off. Will you go back to Paris?”

“Straight through the Porte de Bagnolet, the fastest way … But you, come on, you’re not going to remain in these graveyards, are you? Save yourself. We’ve every right to put life first, when what reigns is death.”

These words revolted her. (We have no life beyond working for a great common destiny. And what work is that, Alain might retort — is it humane and decent, is it liberating? By saving ourselves, we attempt to save what little we can save …)

“So this is where we’ve come to,” she said.

“Where? You look like you’re talking to yourself. Your face is all twisted. What’s the matter?”

“Nothing in particular. Goodbye.”

She thought: Farewell.

¹
The following exchange is conducted in English in original French text.

²
In English.

³
In English.

T
HE PASSENGERS
on the first ship to leave port the day after the end of a cataclysm in no way resemble the passengers escaping on the last ship … The refugees of the recent past carried the mark of defeat but also the joy of surviving in the middle of the storm. Some of them escaped with nothing but a shirt and a few papers, enriched — as well as ravaged — by ideas. Of another breed altogether were the two dozen passengers of the Swedish freighter
Morgenstern
(
Morning Star
). Outwardly, they belonged to a vanished or vanishing world, to a stable world impervious to apocalypses in which bank accounts, business deals, government ministries, compliant women, expensive liquors sufficed to make human existence bearable. A mix of businessmen and envoys, of women, middle-aged and younger — many of the latter sporting rank in various armies. One guessed the women had lovers doubly influential — in the bureaucracy and in semi-legal businesses … The gentlemen, frequently drunk, bandied stories about their times in Cairo, Bombay, Moscow, São Paulo, Ottawa, Tunis, or Sidney as though the globe of the earth were a ball for them to play with. They paid court to a chestnut-haired woman dressed in vibrant colors, who had been parachuted into Lombardy … Now the parachutist exhibited a coarse laugh, a worn-out voice, an athletic bust, and the inability to stand alone at the rail or suffer more than three minutes of conversation if it did not include open allusions to her femininity or valor.

Very different, this crowd, from the people at the front — or for that matter at the rear in the hospitals and shelters, in the railway stations and on the roads. As different as show dogs are different from the cringing, abandoned curs of blasted cities; as different as stallions on a stud farm from the sturdy ponies with matted coats and penetrating eyes patiently pulling an ambulance cart through the mud of the Ukraine under gray lowering clouds. “Domestic animals,” Daria reflected, “also participate in our sociology of iniquity, but they have no choice …” She was thinking too that the organization of today’s world has attained a perfection singularly hostile to men who suffer as well as to better men. The glaciers of the Himalayas, the jungles, deserts, and oceans have been conquered by motors more magical than any flying carpet; but this has not made escape, or the fulfillment of dreams, in any way easier. In order to cross borders, however fluid, you need to possess the mystic bureaucratic passwords of secret services and government stamps — those ridiculous, often sinister talismans; this magic can only be countered by the science of connections and checkbooks. Ordinary people — people, simply — can no longer move from one continent to another, as nineteenth-century emigrants used to do; neither flight nor discovery is open to them, neither enterprise nor mission. The pioneer life is denied them, although half the earth’s surface is waiting to be cleared … If Europeans were permitted to colonize the poles, Uganda, Rhodesia, the Ubanghi, the Matto Grosso, millions of eager daredevils would sign up with a fierce acquiescence — of which perhaps three-quarters would perish; still in a hundred years, the poles and the equator would be rich in scientists, philosophers, and artists, richer than golden-age Greece (which was an age of slavery). A cynical mystification presides over the captivity of peoples and individuals. The barriers against mobility are counterproductive, patently designed to be outwitted by their proper targets. These nets trap none but the anonymous irregular, the stateless refugee, the veteran of selfless struggles (for what could be more suspect than the generosity of idealists?), the fugitive from persecution whose papers were lost somewhere between a lake of blood and a penal colony, the good European thrilling to the call of distant lands, the Jew unnailed from his unimaginable cross. After the barracks of torture and humiliation, who wouldn’t appreciate a vista of palm trees over blue water? It should be an inalienable right … But the pillagers of the wrecks that were once sovereign states, the painted-over citizens of the sham democracies, the traffickers entrusted with profitable economic missions, the spies and the disinformation merchants, these by contrast know all the rules of the game. They fly at whim across the oceans as though the laws of mechanics and the strategic map of the world were theirs by rights (which they probably are). In this still-mysterious mutation of a civilization, it may be that such hybrid beings, their vitality all the more exacerbated in its final upsurge, will prevail for some time …

The freighter was making its way through the unstable element, cleaving the green seas. How many similar freighters and handsome steel submarines lay at the bottom? No one seemed to care … Daria was traveling on her last passport, her last money; outside every law, very possibly pursued, free, free! — but distraught. The last passport, as authentic as it was fake, delivered by her liaison officer, would within weeks be transformed (if it were not already) into a pass into deadly traps. The last dollars were barely sufficient to cover the expenses of this complicated journey, and would run out in three months. If she failed to locate D on the other side of the Atlantic, there was one final resort: a painless injection. Reassuring thought. Because, you see, there’s the philosophical “why live” and the concrete why (and how to) live; there’s the hunted individual, his unfailing will to live, his goals, infinitely greater than himself, his impasse at the end of a barren wasteland, his solitude there, the impossibility of scraping a hundred dollars together … Though not afraid of nothingness in itself, Daria felt unsettled by its approach, for she was delighting in being alive ever since the high seas had filled her lungs with bracing salt air and her senses and mind with an immense, intelligible poem. Suicide is often an act of vitality, and even — if it is not the result of neurosis — the act of a person who is powerfully attached to life. Eminent psychologists might dispute this, but only because they know nothing of the scientific experience of their colleagues who committed suicide in the ghettos … Daria clung to this argument, because she felt attached to too many things.

In a word, she was happy. The frenzied weeks of preparation, the lies she was forced to sow around her, the masks she had to wear, the sleepless nights, the crises of conscience in which true conscience played no part — usurped as it was by fear and a childish docility — all this was blown away by the sea air. She couldn’t stop smiling. Mr. Winifred, a businessman from Oslo, complimented her on her eyes: “They have the very hue of water at the crest of a wave …” “You’re being rather poetical,” she replied inanely, with a pointless laugh that made her look fifteen years younger — younger by one shipwrecked revolution, several descents into hell, and a universal war. Mr. Winifred said there was a poetry of destiny in business; that he had begun to write a play when he was twenty, that he would visit the Museum of Modern Art in New York. “Was it Shakespearian, your early drama?” “No … Closer to Ibsen.” He relished the opportunity to pronounce, for the benefit of the traveler with the eyes (that was it! Ibsen eyes!), a roster of potent names: Brancusi, Archipenko, Chagall, Henry Moore — the very latest in ultramodern moderns, and you’ll never guess the sums they go for! Mr. Winifred confided that, thanks to the war, art was acquiring new value. “I dare say it is,” exclaimed Daria warmly, “a profound value of creation and reconciliation …” Mr. Winifred listened distractedly to things said by women. He was listening to himself. Pillaging had given rise to a black market of minor masterpieces; under the auspices of this trade, the production of forgeries registered an unexpected increase; and some forgeries are themselves masterpieces! The Latin American market lapped up everything indiscriminately, for newly acquired or expanded wealth appreciates old masters and dependable moderns. Mr. Winifred, a specialist in the minerals trade, was expanding for pleasure his collection of mostly religious works from Eastern Europe. Under the Nazi occupation, old families were forced to sell their heirlooms, while representatives of the Great Reich conducted a roaring trade in the spoils of confiscation. Knowledgeable dealers combed the terrain from the mouth of the Danube to the Baltic, swiping the aristocracy’s every precious icon, seventeenth-century portrait, landscape, and battle scene. The treasures of the old worlds are being carried away in the deluge, to the profit of the quick-witted denizens of the new world — a thought that made Mr. Winifred smile slyly, for he was of the new world, and nothing if not quick-witted.

Mr. Ostrowieczki joined them from the bar, and the three of them leaned their elbows on the iron rail over the heavy, lava-slow seas. Mr. Ostrowieczki, an engineer on a government mission, had a broad, pale, fleshy face, a shaved scalp in the Russian style, a taciturn disposition, and pearl-gray irises so pale that they sometimes seemed white. Daria disliked him and he ignored her, preferring to flirt (like a bear in a tweed jacket) with a member of the Women’s Corps of an army that had covered itself in glory. The notion of the wealth of the old and new worlds merging under the pressure of merciless events provoked in him laughter more sarcastic than porcine. His tiny pearly pupils contemplated the waves as he said — congenially, for he too was half drunk — ”Ha! Ha! Lots of artworks will be drowned, not that it matters to me. It’s only old art perishing …” Daria felt a secret jolt. “What do you mean?” she demanded point-blank. “Old feudal art, old religious art, old bourgeois art … I am an engineer, Madame, and for me there’s nothing more beautiful than a turbine.” Daria threw him a sharp look which unsettled him. “The wind is coming up,” he went on, “how about something to warm us up, below?” Daria acquiesced. The technocrat’s bare, high cranium preoccupied her. She was all too familiar with this summary ideology, these doctrines set in polished stone — invented during the age of Einsteinean relativity! Mr. Ostrowieczki avoided speaking to her again, wisely, for she would have found him out. In the mess, they played gramophone records while the sunset glowed through the window frames like a memory of horizons set on fire.