Unforgiving Years (12 page)

The presses were humming quietly in the
Matin
offices, a glass-walled building painted a dirty red. Bruno Battisti quickly tracked down what he was looking for in the volumes of recent issues — the crime, not on place de Clichy but on a street off place Blanche, a murder needlessly illustrated with a picture that suggested a big cockroach squashed onto the page. A teenager’s body stretched prone, arms flung forward, lashed together at the wrists. Beneath the throat the sheets were stained black. The reporter, a pseudo-cultured hack, described the victim as “a disciple of the British aesthete Oscar Wilde, whose scabrous misdoings were the talk of the town in his day …” Stupid! Stupid! The reference to a “mysterious black dancer” cleared Monsieur Gobfin of the mists of suspicion.

“All’s well, Nadine. Do you want to go out and find some distraction tonight?”

“It won’t be easy,” replied the young woman, smiling gamely. “If you wish.”

Out of habit he turned to the classified ads, which he hadn’t checked since making the break. And the appeal he found there hit him like a blow in the chest. “JOSSELINE begs Yves to write. Urgent. Overwhelmed grief. Faithful.”

“Nadine, there’s a message from Daria …”

“I think we can trust her, Sacha …”

We can trust no one any longer. No one will trust us, ever again. That terrible bond, that most salutary of human bonds, those invisible threads of gold and light and blood attaching men sworn to a common endeavor — those bonds, we’ve broken them, and suspicion had already broken them before, we never knew how … “You’ve no idea. There’s no trust left in the world. Everything has collapsed. We were trust. We thought we understood the ways of history and were participants in it … And what are we? Wake up to the reality …”

But D stopped himself from saying this aloud. The Porte Saint-Martin, a shabby looming shape, resembled a triumphal arch dedicated to forgotten victories. Its old stone flanks were corroded up to arm’s reach by a whitish mold made of soggy old handbills and ads. That’s as high as the bill-posters could reach in their search for a pittance — or a steak — ready to pick it out of the gutter if necessary. Let’s not be fastidious! A third of the dressmakers, florists, and seamstresses who advertise for apprentices and part-time female employees have connections to a brothel, or at least to prime stretches of asphalt. Cabinetmakers’ notices are honest, as are cycle-repair signs (though these are a lure to bicycle thieves); but why can’t a pretty girl set herself up as a cabinetmaker? Nearing place de la République, the first lamps of dusk gleamed through a drifting grisaille that was sweet to see and breathe. Like a coward, D reproached himself with having — out of a moral reflex — revived a broken contact … .Daria’s call rose through him from the richest, purest, most distant sediment of the past. Yes, there are sediments that are pure, even beneath cruelty.

“I won’t have time to see her,” he told Nadine, rehearsing an excuse for himself. “We’re off in five days.”

“Do whatever it takes, Sacha, you can’t abandon her like that! She’s no threat.”

Five days, and the page will be turned. The neon signs of Paris bursting magically into life — all of them advertising businesses, many of them dirty, deadly businesses — merged together into a great fantastical poem. The little café bars and their friendly clientele, the metal cubicles on the sidewalk showing the trouser hems of pissing men (drink, citizens, piss, citizens, there are good things in life, why hold back? It’s fine to proclaim this along the boulevards!), the windows of clockmakers, cobblers, and booksellers, the elaborate foodstuffs, the color postcards full of gross jokes and sexual innuendo, all this bespeaks a vulgar, proud civilization, an extremely comfortable one too, in which human beings have attained the maximum possible degree of self-indulgence, and thus the height of freedom, of relaxation … A dangerous thing, relaxation … One of the charms of Paris, unique in the world, is that people here neglect ferociousness — that power — and the organized brutality that drives great empires. A grandeur of another order is germinating here in the very rottenness (all social grandeurs are rooted in a compost of decay), ahead of its time. We may pay dearly for this clumsy attempt at a human life, more human than ever … The six-story apartment houses were conglomerations of walled-off lives: dramatic, well-fed, grossly carnal yet exquisitely sentimental at times, curiously spiritual; in the vast place de la République, with its dingy affluence and bad lighting, Yiddish was heard as often as French and the floozies parading under terrace awnings were plebeians, servants gone over to the love trade, to another form of service … The blackened statue, stone and bronze, bronze blossoming from stone, of a solitary, decorative, and disarmed Marianne, stood ignored by the streams of people following their interwoven pathways around her feet. And no one gives a shit! That’s one way — perhaps the most genuine way — of being republicans …

In a few days’ time this will be the past, superimposed upon other poignant images more irrevocably gone. The Tower of the Savior and the Tower of the Dog … The delicate gray monastery, the flat colonnade of Smolny … What will become of Paris, what will become of our towers?

“I’ll take you to the Left Bank, Nadine, how about it? Don’t be depressed … The champagne’s on me.”

But it was he who felt depressed. Daria’s appeal reopened severed veins, poorly sutured. The veins of memory which no mental surgery can close.

* * *

In the beginning was surprise that enthusiasm could exist, that the new faith could be stronger than all else, action more desirable than happiness and ideas more real than old facts; that the world could be more alive than the self. The commissariat of an army in rags demanded uniforms — or any kind of clothing — for the worker and peasant battalions. (And let’s not forget the battalions of pickpockets, con men, burglars, convicts, and pimps, no worse than the rest …) The regional commissar rolled his
r
’s, the marbles of his eyes, his shoulders, his hips, whatever moved in that fleshy ex-acrobat’s body, and he would say, “With six weeks’ training I’ll shape you the dregs of the dregs into near-palatable machine-gun fodder, with a few heroes left over … I’ve got four decent noncoms and a captain of the old regime trained up like circus poodles. But I need britches! You can fight gloriously for the Revolution with no courage, no officers, no maps, and close to no ammo. The enemy’s got all of that, you just go and take it from him. But you can’t fight with nothing to cover your ass. Britches, that’s the first condition of victory!” An erudite listener objected, through an interpreter: “What about the sansculottes of the French Revolution … ?” “They wore long pants!” I was put in charge of supplying local manufacturers with material. I intervened forcefully, because pants would require more cloth than reasonably short breeches. I went to the socialized factory. A broad country road, lined with pastel-painted cottages enclosed by fences and trees, led to the bleak edge of town. Here the steppe began, the sky resting flat on the featureless land. The redbrick factory breathed neglect through shattered windowpanes; the holes in the picket fence gaped brokenly onto yards turned to waste grounds and on the black forests of the horizon. This palisade shrank a little every night, as the townsfolk scavenged the planks to restock their woodpiles. The half-dead factory filled me with a kind of revulsion. I knew that a tiny but invincible fungus was devouring the floorboards; that of the four hundred women in the workforce, fewer than half spun out days of hunger and bitter inactivity on the premises. Old women with no ties to life, war widows, mothers of vanished soldiers who might at this moment be roaming the highways of a world in thrall to the Antichrist. Their cow once bartered away, their dog stolen, their cat strangled by some Kalmuck, I could imagine how such women might have lost their last apparent reason for living had they not come here, propelled by a kind of somnambulism, to sit before the workbenches and sewing machines with their hands clasped on their laps as they told each other their troubles. More inexplicable were the emaciated, sly young women who came in to steal the last reels of cotton, odd needles, and pieces of drive belt, a booty they squirreled away between their thighs for fear of being frisked … The winters of this town were arctic, the rations meaner than anywhere else (every town claimed this distinction, and perhaps every town was right, contrary to common sense), and the social consciousness matched the conditions. I entered, as one enters a deserted windmill. A phantom opulence clung to the director’s office; the green desktop baize was torn, the couch broken, the dwarf palm dead in its pot since last winter. A slip of a girl met me with a brusque: “What do you want, Citizen? I’m busy.” In those days I always looked closely at women … This one wore a brown woolen skirt, a leather jacket, a fine wool shawl around her head and neck, and oversize boots. Monastic. Beneath her heavy garb I guessed her to be small-boned and neat, I sensed her chastity. Her pale oval face was drawn and yet charming. Blue lids, long lashes, strictness. Plain or pretty, I couldn’t decide. “The committee secretary?” I hazarded. “That’s me,” said Daria. “I am the committee. The others are half-wits and loafers.” I explained my mission. Checks, controls, imperative requirements on behalf of the Regional Economic Committee by virtue of the powers conferred by the central authority, military supply requirements; compulsory duty to inform the People’s Tribunals about any acts of sabotage, even if involuntary, and to report the least lapses to the Special Repression Commission … “Fine,” Daria said, without troubling to conceal her irritation, “but all your orders, threats, red tape, and tribunals won’t get you one blessed breeches leg stitched. And I warn you, in case you’re the arresting sort: you won’t take a single one of my people away unless you throw me in jail first. Even though they’re all thieves except me. Now let’s be clear: production is getting off the ground. The factory is working, insofar as a factory that’s four-fifths wrecked can be said to work. Come on, I’ll show you.” One hundred and fifty workers were apparently engaged in doing something … Indeed I heard, with a strange rush of delight, the purring of the machines. Stoves crackled hotly in some of the workshops, fed with doors and floorboards from the others. Four hundred breeches, and the same number of smocks and tunics, were pledged for the following week. Daria’s young voice was hoarse with a mixture of apology and defiance. “We can go on like this for three or four months. I burn moldy floorboards from the disused workshops. That’s illegal, I don’t have the permit from the Nationalized Companies Conservation Commission. I sell one-fifth of the output to the peasants, plus defective items, which means I can provide potatoes for the workforce. That’s illegal too, Comrade. I pay for sixty percent of my raw-materials allowance in kind — illegal. I provide a weekly ration of red or white wine to pregnant women, convalescents, over forty-fives, and anyone who’s clocked in ten days running, to everyone, really. That’s probably illegal … And I send cases of cognac to the president of the Special Repression Commission, to keep myself out of jail.” “That’s certainly illegal,” I said. “Requisitioned wines and spirits are to be placed at the disposal of the Public Health Bureau … So what’s your source for all this liquid fuel?” “My father’s bourgeois cellars,” she said, reddening slightly. “My father is a worthy liberal who can’t make head or tail of anything; he fled …” Thus Daria at nineteen — with the eyes of seventeen — in the year 1919, during the time of famine and terror. We walked through workshops buzzing with activity, and others where we could see the flagstones of the ground floor through the holes … And I sent her, both in the same envelope, a pile of proletarian denunciations directed against “the pernicious counter-revolutionary sabotage and waste carried out by the daughter of the former capitalist exploiter of the masses, et cetera” and a Certificate of Constructive Illegality.

In the year ’22, after a good deal of throat cutting, I ran into her again at Feodossia, tending to her lungs which she said were “as wrecked as the floors of that factory, do you remember?” and striving to keep a glimmer of life going in the body of a scrawny baby girl, ten months old, who was soon to die. Daria was a director of schools, “no paper, no books, twice the children, half the teachers” and those at their wits’ end. Hunger; two successive waves of terror. Premature aging had spoiled the childish charm of her youthful looks; her nose was pinched, her lips drained of color, her mouth twisted slightly out of line. I found her obtuse, almost stupid, with an edge of hysteria, one cool night on a pebbly strand bewitched by the most sparkling stars, when I tried to dispel the bitterness I perceived in her by defending the Party’s behavior … Forehead banded by a black lace scarf, hands on knees, squatting on her heels like a sulky tomboy, Daria answered me curtly, clipping her phrases as she would have coldly ripped up the beliefs without which we could not have lived: “Spare me the theoretical considerations. And the lofty quotations out of books! I’ve seen the massacres. Theirs and ours. Them, they’re made for that, the rubbish of history, the debased humanity of drunken officers … But us, if we’re no different, then it’s a betrayal. We’ve betrayed plenty, I can tell you. See that rock out there? Officers trussed together, driven with sabers to the edge of the cliff. I saw men falling in bunches, like big crabs … There are too many psychopaths on our side … Our side? What do I have in common with them? And you? Don’t answer. What do they have in common with socialism? Keep your mouth shut, or I’ll leave.”

I kept my mouth closed. Then she let me put an arm around her shoulders, I felt her thinness, I squeezed her to me in a rush of affection, I only wanted to make her warmer, she froze. “Leave off, I’m not a woman anymore …” “A great big child is what you are and always have been, Daria,” I told her, “a wonderful child …” She shoved me so violently, I almost lost my balance. “Be a man, then! And keep your platitudes for a more appropriate time.” We remained good friends. We took long hikes over the parched Greek hills of Feodossia. A kindly sun warmed the curves of the rock, the sea was incredibly blue, the horizons of the parched land were turning green. Great birds with azure plumage more shimmering than the sea alighted close to us from time to time, inquisitively. “Not a hunter, are you?” Daria asked. “Don’t you want to shoot at it?” She buried her baby, cured her lungs, rebuilt her morale.