Unforgiving Years Read online

  “And why might that be? It’s none of my affair, of course, but since you bring it up …”

  “The foreign press is better informed than the Paris papers, I suppose?” asked Monsieur Gobfin, either playing for time or committing a major blunder.

  Very significant, that remark. Whenever he scented danger, D became perfectly, sinisterly calm.

  “Surely that’s not what’s perplexing you?”

  Mr. Gobfin’s wandering gaze locked for a split second onto the eyes of his companion.

  “No indeed, Monsieur Battisti, you are an honest man and I don’t need to know you to be convinced of it. A man of experience too.”

  All this is recklessly direct. He’s sounding me out. I’ve been nailed. How did They trace me so quickly … ? D advanced a clenched, square fist across the table. A clean and daunting fist.

  “I certainly hope we’re among honest folk here,” he said. “As for experience, I don’t mind saying I’ve had my share. Some rough experiences … the colonies, and I don’t mind skipping the niceties sometimes. And too bad for people who are a little too smart for their own good.”

  Gobfin responded to the veiled threat with rapture.

  “Ah, then I made no mistake, Monsieur, in turning to you! I am dreadfully perplexed, and in need of advice.”

  “Spit it out,” D said succinctly — perplexed himself.

  “It concerns a murder.”

  “You know what, I’m not a detective and I don’t care a fig about murders. I’ve seen enough of them. Just forget it. Will that do for advice?”

  “No.”

  Gobfin drew a small photograph from his cuff — or from a secret pocket in his sleeve, or from his tie, or from his long straight nose with a twist at the end — and flicked it with his finger in the direction of Monsieur Battisti’s fist. It was the picture of a black man, wreathed in a professional smile — the smile of jazz musicians entranced by their own cacophony.

  “The murderer.”

  This could be a consummately skillful move. D was nonplussed. What could be neater, at the right moment, than to whip out the ace of spades where the ace of clubs was expected?

  “So what,” he said, his breathing labored. “There are murderers all over Paris. What’s it to you?”

  (Are They about to have me arrested for murder? To request extradition, after framing me? There’s no treaty … but there might be an international police convention I don’t know about … hadn’t thought of that … This Negro fellow might have accomplices, he’s been bribed to accuse me …)

  Monsieur Gobfin, having produced his effect — or simply unstoppered by relief — now became garrulous, pouring himself out in breathy tones of irresistible intimacy. “The place de Clichy murder … Come come, Monsieur, you must have read the newspapers, it was exactly a week ago …”

  (Exactly a week? I have no alibi, I’ll never be able to say who I was with … We were working on the Crime of the Capital of the World …)

  “A young sculptor, queer, you know, very good family, millionaire parents, does that ring a bell?”

  “No.”

  “Found in his studio, hands tied, throat cut … naked … Now do you see?” “Vaguely …” D searched his memory, at the same time wondering whether it wasn’t a fiction. Adolescence, nakedness, tied hands, he recalled the gist of it or imagined he did. “But between you and me, like I said, I don’t give a good goddamn!”

  The “get off my back with your sordid gossip,” clearly implied in that last retort, could scarcely escape the cloying attention of his host. Either because he had made up his mind to persist or because he was just bursting with it, Monsieur Gobfin became even more confidential.

  “Look straight ahead. I believe we have the killer.”

  The Negro wiped his mouth and inserted a toothpick. His placid stare brushed against the more troubled gaze of Monsieur Battisti. “A trap,” thought D. “They’re both in it together, the black and this creep … To mix me up in some botched arrest — and by mistake — fine jam I’m in.” There was an obvious resemblance between this sharply etched, vigorous, shiny black head and the one in the photo. The living head, with its purplish lips and sharply etched eyes, pure white and pure black, appeared to D is if about to be chopped off. He saw the coppery tint, paler at the cheek-bones — a sign of previous interbreeding, like the delicate ridge of the nose. “The man in the picture is much blacker, I’d say …”

  “A trick of the light. The light is behind us. Look at his hand.”

  Darker than the face, the big hand curled loosely on the white cloth suggested animal strength refined by the exercise of some craft — a hand deft with a mandolin, a trapeze bar, a sharpened razor … Why not?

  “Hmm. An honest hand, why not?” Monsieur Battisti said. “You’re letting your imagination run away with you.” Monsieur Gobfin eyed the clenched fist on their own table and felt an unpleasant intimation of anxiety.

  “In short, Monsieur Battisti, what do you think?”

  “I’m loath to think anything. Except you should err on the side of caution. A mistake could land you in all kinds of trouble …”

  To stand up with no more ado, to say to this groveling sneak, “I’ve had enough. Now get my bill, you’ve thoroughly put me off your grisly fleabag …” — would that be reasonable? D weighed up the unspoken tenors of the conversation. “It needs careful consideration. Do you have any other pictures of the same sort?”

  “Not many. The inspector doesn’t like to let them go.”

  Mr. Gobfin opened a scuffed leather wallet. First he pulled out the photo of a frail-looking woman, probably blond, pretty, her eyes round with fright. A series of white numbers barred her chest. “Chronic swindler, I know her … She’s awfully nice to me since she learned that I carry this around, if you catch my meaning.”

  “Say no more.”

  “Her sort, you just got to know how to handle them,” snickered Gobfin, olive-yellow. “Then they’re nice as can be … Here, look, one that came in this morning.”

  D recognized himself straightaway. The picture had been snapped in the street without his knowledge. They were taking no chances! Or had I already been spotted? By whom? It was from six months ago, on his return from Madrid, with sixty frames from the Alcántara file rolled into the handle of a shaving brush … “Who is it?” he asked casually. Taken unseen on the big boulevards, the picture showed a man with tortoiseshell glasses and a broad smile, wearing a felt hat that obscured the upper part of his face, the collar of his coat turned up; he was standing beside a car. Beyond was a pharmacy, and two ladies seen from behind … A male shoulder faced the hatted man. Whose? On the back of the picture, in copperplate hand: X, alias Isoray; Marcien, alias Zondero-Ribas; Juan, alias Steklansky; Bronislaw … (1. The photo unquestionably comes from Them, from our people. 2. They haven’t got a more recent one, good. Or They don’t choose to release a clearer one … Good. 3. They haven’t listed my alias as Malinesco, Clément, in order to comb through the flat in peace … Therefore I’m being denounced as an agent of the others … Which others? 4. A useless photo. Only the lower half of the face is at all recognizable.)

  “An embezzler?” ventured Monsieur Battisti.

  “A suspicious foreigner, suspected spy … You think one of those birds would ever come to a decent unassuming place like this? They stay at palatial hotels.”

  Monsieur Gobfin looked Monsieur Battisti straight in the eye for the first time.

  “At any rate,” said Battisti lightly, “I think you’re after the wrong Negro.”

  “And I,” Gobfin responded, “am almost certain I am not — especially since our little chat. If you’ll excuse me …” The marionette withdrew, leaving after him the image of his politest smile — the smile of a stool pigeon in a dull black suit.

  * * *

  D did not wish to show any sign of alarm: the Battistis remained at the hotel. Past the reception desk, the hallway expanded into a very modest lounge, furnished with a rattan
couch and armchairs. A round table was littered with tourist magazines. This inhospitable setting was a good place to observe the outlines of people passing in the street, note the comings and goings on the stairs and elevator, and keep an eye on Monsieur Gobfin. The lounge was rarely vacant. Sometimes there was an ordinary-looking fat gentleman smoking and lolling drowsily over his paper. Sometimes a younger man, pencil in hand, attempting the crossword. Neither was interested in this corner of the world — the bottom of a jar where they were waiting to shrivel dry for all eternity. D settled into an armchair opposite the stout reader. The man blew his nose. Monsieur Gobfin, at his post, unhooked the telephone receiver. “Allo, Félix? Gobfin here. Send us a taxi on the dot of five twenty-five.” An ordinary request to all appearances but which, D noted, contained the figure 525. A female voice rang out shrilly, accompanied by muted trumpets of deliverance: “And you didn’t forget to order me a cab for five thirty?” “Not to worry, Madam, it’ll be here.” Still, five thirty was not 525 and this woman’s car might have been ordered beforehand … The trumpets faded away. The fat man folded his paper and moved off, with a heavy stare at D. He didn’t leave his key at the desk on the way out, passing Monsieur Gobfin without so much as a nod. Rude of him. Should I follow? As D tried to make up his mind, the appearance of Nadine rescued him from a budding obsession, but now Gobfin had picked up the phone again … “Well then,” Nadine said, “are you coming?” D blinked a signal; idly he toyed with his lighter before touching it to the cigarette. Gobfin was calling a Monsieur Stevenson on the line. A novelist’s name that had passed into the public domain, Treasure Island, and this Stevenson in turn will be communicating with a Mr. Milton on the subject of Paradise Lost, you can bet your life. “Yes, sir, I received a wire for you at three forty … Yes, sir …” One hour and forty minutes’ delay in reporting the arrival of a telegram? Fishy, that. And what’s three forty, 340, in code? I’m going crazy, D thought. He went outside. So many people, hard to tell anyone apart. The stout reader was returning to the hotel with a Spanish-looking woman on his arm. “They’re going to bed, that’s all, that’s why he kept his key … Unless he went to fetch her in order to finger me …” The couple, bent forward, dived through the doorway as though headlong into a hole.

  It’s not in their interest to have me arrested. After all, I could claim the protection of the French authorities. They’re only trying to locate me, which is worse. And have they? The question mark revolved around Monsieur Gobfin. The pros and cons oscillated evenly, like a pendulum. “Nadine, I need to check the back issues of Le Matin.” The hubbub of the city always comforted D, even if it’s a mistake to feel any safer, any more alone, any more lost on a pavement teeming with lives than behind walls protected by secrecy. It must be that mingling with other men and women restores our means of contact, of direct hand-to-hand combat. A host of random factors can work against the lone figure in the melee. Some of the odds are with him; but when he is pitted against huge, well-equipped organizations, the grim probabilities outweigh the lucky chances. All the same, big-city streets — sown with traps though they might be — appeared to give D the initiative. The city dweller, even when invisibly surrounded, relies upon himself at every turn. He reacts to encounters with the life-preserving ingenuity of a beast in its native forest, that sees a bolt-hole in every bush — a cruel illusion, if the beaters have done their job. But the hunters are also sure to make mistakes, and if their quarry doesn’t panic, there’s always a chance of salvation. What sets man apart from beasts is that humans have the option not to panic.

  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.