The Avignon Quintet

by Lawrence Durrell

  They looked at him with respectful attention. “But treasure there was none!” he said emphatically. “None!” There was a long silence. Everyone had half-inclined towards Smirgel, as if he perhaps was the oracle who alone had the right to pronounce upon the subject – as indeed he had, for his sole task was to do just that. He looked quizzical now, as he lit a cigarette; then, watching Constance closely as if for a reaction, he said, “That is not what we hear from the chief clerk Quatrefages, who is our prisoner and whom I have interrogated myself. I must add that the question is an important one for us as the Führer has a particular interest in the matter. I am here on his special instructions to try and solve the mystery.”

  The Prince looked rather peeved at this, for his suspicious mind toyed with the idea that perhaps after all Galen had unearthed the treasure but kept the secret to himself; perhaps he knew, Quatrefages knew, the whereabouts of the orchard with its fabled quincunx of trees? But no, it could not be! Lord Galen was too much of a fool to be able to manage a double-cross like that without giving the show away. He shook his head in a decisive manner and said, “No, it is impossible! At any rate, we did not get it. Nor did we ascertain whether it really existed. Quatrefages had been dismissed already when … you gentlemen crossed the border into France.”

  Smirgel was lying, in order to find out how much they knew – that was how the Prince summed matters up. It was obvious that the Nazis knew nothing either. But they had the task of convincing Hitler of the fact, and that could not be easy. He sighed. He would take up the matter again with Lord Galen when he was next in Egypt; could something be done for the poor clerk? “Where are you keeping the boy?” he asked, but no answer was forthcoming and the Prince let the matter slide, busying himself with preparations for a visit to Vichy with its notorious bureau for Jewish affairs. Meanwhile Constance agreed to show Landsdorf where the house was – he would call for her on the morrow and motor her out to Tubain, simply to familiarise himself with the spot and decide whether such a scheme was feasible so far from the town and the protection of the armed forces. This sounded somewhat disingenuous. “I am not likely to be shot by the French, after all!” she said, and Landsdorf turned a trifle red. “Nevertheless!” he said, and they shook hands on the deal.

  The duty car duly motored them back into Avignon later in the night; they were stopped on the bridge by an armed patrol whose task was to enforce the curfew which had been declared for eleven o’clock, but their shepherding adjutant made himself known and assumed responsibility for them. The hotel was in darkness, but as they tapped upon the front door the manager rose from the depths of an armchair where he had been dozing against their return. He had prepared a tray of something hot, and also hot water bottles for them to take to bed. They were glad to turn in, both being preoccupied and tired by the journey – a fatigue and depression that lingered on in irritating fashion. It was reinforced by a vague impression of unreality as if everything were swathed in cotton wool. The depression and sadness of the whole community seemed to be leaking out into the atmosphere, infecting it; even with the brief glimpse they had had of the town they had the impression everywhere of faces crashed down into depression. They had smelt the stench of war now; it was more than the smell of folly, of disaster. It was the smell of intellectual disgrace, of human deceit. Constance sat on the side of her bed, warming her hands round her coffee cup, and thought back over the evening she had just spent. A lighted candle puckered the darkness about her. She found herself recalling the conversations, she went over them meticulously, as if to come upon some clue as to what made these soldiers perform their acts. Suddenly the thought came to her: “They are not ashamed of what they are doing!” And of a sudden a chill of pure terror entered her heart.

  She got into bed and turned out the light, blew it softly out, to settle back in the cold sheets which smelt of damp. In her restless sleep she dreamed of the blue gaze of Fischer, its fixity and its mineral-like quality as of some worn-out gem. It was a gaze full of unconscious sexual information. He could deprave, this man, simply by smiling. In him she felt some buried puzzle which had never been deciphered yet. And yet there was magnetism, compared to the others who were easily understood, easily classified. The General was a harmless fool as apt for good as for evil – provided it came in command orders. He had looked quite confused by her beauty, he would be easy to handle if need be …

  The subject of this somewhat unflattering judgement had, for his part, also retired to bed – or, more accurately, retired in search of sleep which was to prove extremely elusive on that particular evening, coloured as it had been by the strange new visitor – in the guise of an apparition, almost. Constanza! He bathed in the memory of her blondness, of her warm blue regard, and the sentiment permeated his sensibility with tenderness made the more rich because its object was someone long since dead. But there were confusing cross-currents, rapids and shallows, which perturbed him, prevented him from sinking into his usual heavy slumber. There had been the letter from Katzen-Mutter, for example, which had stung him to the quick with remorse. It was a brief sad letter about the family house but which, halfway through, recounted the suicide of the Polish maid; she had stabbed herself through the heart with the old dress dirk belonging to some forgotten regimental outfit, and which had always been on the wall in his room, over the writing desk. On the desk itself she had left a message in clumsy German which read: “I do not wish to be a slave.” His mother did not expressly reproach him, nor in any way suggest that she might have known what the relationship between them had been … yet! It was as if she had known, and he felt a profound shame for something of which he could not be accused of being guilty.

  It came, too, hard upon a field episode which his rank obliged him to witness – the “judicial execution” of twenty citizens in a small village near which a franc-tireur had fired upon his panzers, killing two troopers. It made him feel old, indeed mad with fatigue, but he behaved with a dutiful sternness, walking up and down the line of dead with determined step. There was hardly any blood. They had fallen in all kinds of positions. They looked, with their shabby black winter clothes, like a clutch of dusty fowls lying beside the tiny war memorial. He returned to his office in the fortress with a splitting headache, feeling the two separate emotions of the two distinct events blend inside him and trouble his composure. He wondered if he was perhaps getting influenza. But that night and the next he dreamed of the Polish maid, and on waking he realised that he must find some way of attending confession. He must find a priest. And here once more the cursed ambiguity of his position as a Catholic came upon him like a huge weight. Why not the Cathedral? Indeed why not – but he could not, as force commander, move without escort for fear that someone might take a pot shot at him. Kidnap a priest, then? He laughed gruffly. Simply join a congregation for mass, then? He spoke very bad French!

  The situation worked upon him. He became a prey to constipation and colitis – childhood illnesses which no longer responded to senna or castor oil. And now, miraculously, after meeting Constance all was well. He knew he would have the courage to insist on being shriven somehow – he would go to the Grey Penitents’ chapel, he would go out to Montfavet with Smirgel; what did an escort matter? Nobody would notice, after all. He felt elated, as if this strange meeting had been an omen of a favourable sort. Constance! He had nothing to read and he felt the need of a calm half hour before sleep claimed him. He turned with renewed perplexity and respect to the little official booklet – the intellectual absolution offered by Dr. Goebbels. It was hard going, the Protocols of Zion, and he was not too sure about the historic role of gold in the matter; he felt an exaggeration somewhere but, after all, the document was an official one: who was he to question facts endorsed by Rosenberg? Rosenberg, himself a Jew – so he had learned! It was even more perplexing. Yet he was in a sudden mood of relaxation, almost of euphoria. Proof: his blocked entrails performed their duty now with rapture, with profusion, as if to make up for days of costiveness.
Overwhelmed by the feeling of relief he slept, having made a mental note to visit the chapel of the Penitents on the morrow.

  But to Constance sleep did not come so easily, troubled as she was by the memories of the dinner and the empty stare of admiration from the blue eyes of Fischer. It made her impatient, she tried to analyse the dynamism of the glance and came at last to the conclusion that it was his capacity for cruelty and mischief which gave him an almost sexual radiance. She was angry with herself for feeling such a thing and reflected ruefully that at any moment the woman keeps in mind, like undeveloped negatives, several sexual possibilities, several choices which circumstances might put in her way. She turned with impatience to a more troubling topic-Affad; when she had called at the hotel the Prince had asked her to see him, for Affad was indisposed and in need of a prescription from a doctor. “The simplest is to ask you,” he said, “though he is dead against it, doesn’t want you troubled.” She took the lift up to the elegant suite which Affad occupied and found him lying quiet, staring at the ceiling; he blushed with vexation when he saw that it was Constance, and expressed his displeasure with the Prince. “Nonsense,” she said briskly, “it’s much quicker for me to make out the prescription.” “Very well,” he said unhappily, “I have run out of Paludonin, that is all.” She sat down by the bed and said, “I shall get you some.” But she took his wrist in order to feel his racing pulse, and at once remembered her conversation about medicine in the bar with the two friends Sutcliffe and Toby. Perhaps he did too, for he turned scarlet and turned his face away to the wall, with a womanish gesture of shyness. She was, so to speak, left alone there with his pulse and her science – and bereft of words. It was as if he had slipped off a glove. But what came into her mind was a thought which confused her in her turn. She did not quite believe it, but she felt certain that he had fallen deeply in love with her, and the thought was both chastening and elevating. It forced her really to consider him, to evaluate him as a possible person she might love in her turn. A woman is a creature who keeps all her options open. “You have a blazing fever,” she said, because saying something filled an awkward space, and he nodded at the wall, keeping his eyes closed. “If you could just give me the prescription,” he said, and it was clear from his tone that he was anxious to see the back of her. But she had not brought her printed prescription block, so she elected to slip down to the pharmacy at the corner in order to fulfil his request. “I will send the bottle up with the chasseur” she said. “It should pull down the temperature dramatically – but you know that.” He nodded once more, and lay as if asleep. “Thank you,” he said. “By tomorrow I shall be up once more.”

  She thought this episode over very carefully as the lift swung her down to the main hall; trivial in itself, it nevertheless vibrated inside her like the echo to something long wished for, ardently desired. At dinner she asked the Prince to tell her about Affad, and followed with great concentration an account of his business life and his education in three countries. “He is really a sort of strange mixture of businessman and mystic. Perhaps he is a homosexual without being aware of it – I don’t know.” The Prince made a face to express his amusement at this hypothesis. “I certainly don’t think so myself,” he added more vehemently.

  All this and the emotional indecisions provoked by the encounter with Affad she recalled with great vividness bordering indeed on a sort of anxiety because of its ambiguousness. She was not ready to love anybody. Turning and tossing in bed she squashed the tepid water bottle against her toes to try and warm them. But even though sleep came, it was late and unrefreshing. At dawn she was up and dressed, anxious to take a walk across the town. Her feet on the stairs woke the night porter who had overslept and he let her out of the front door on request but without approval. “What will you do?” he said in a wondering tone. “Just look,” she replied, and set off for a brisk walk to fill in the time before the planned arrival of Madame Quiminal who was coming at ten to take her to the offices which had been proposed as a centre for Red Cross operations. The town had always been somewhat dirty and dilapidated, so that at first blush little seemed remarkably different about it. Then the smell of rotting garbage became pronounced and she observed mountains of it, overflowing from dustbins and packages everywhere – the stray dogs had enjoyed a field-day in dragging all this stuff about the main square where it mingled with the drifts of fallen leaves. No café was open so early, and the only public phone booth opposite the post office had been used during the hours of darkness as a sort of urinal by persons unknown. There were wall-portraits of the Marshal in a number of places but they were mostly defaced or covered with impotent graffiti. More imposing, for they reflected a history more recent, indeed of burning actuality, were the large command posters attached to walls and trees around the main square; they recorded the death sentences pronounced upon captured franc-tireurs by the German High Command. In some curious way the letterpress, crowded together as it was, gave a faint hint of Gothic script most appropriate to the subject, while the red ground upon which the whole was printed was precisely the dull red of arterial blood which had been, from time immemorial, used on the bullfighting posters. The dark red of bull’s blood, upon which the crooked cross had been overstamped. Sighing, she read through these condemnations, heavy in spirit, wondering how human beings with so short a span of life at their disposal should seek in this way to qualify and abbreviate it with their neurotic antics. It was a mystery. A deep-seated self-destructiveness was the most one could diagnose about such a state of affairs. But it involved everyone. You could not opt out. Even those comfortable neutrals up in Geneva, though they thought themselves out of reach, were involved in this calamitous historic process – it would reach them in time. Her absorbed steps led her in and out of the medieval cobweb of streets, past the Princes Hotel, where once (so Felix Chatto had averred) Blanford had spent an afternoon with a girl in a room belonging to Quatrefages the clerk. She had completely forgotten this incident until now. She followed the curving walls of the outer bastions, past the little bread shop which had always been the first to open in the mornings because it supplied the buffet of the railway station. But now there was no light in the interior and on the door there was a notice which read Plus de pain, which must have struck a heavy blow of dismay at the French soul: such an idea was unthinkable. Maybe it would bring home to the citizens of the town the reality of the New Order. On she walked and the north wind rose and sparkled through the bright sky.

  Back at the hotel the Prince sat in the breakfast-room with a bad-tempered expression on his face, spooning up the meagre fare provided for him while opposite him, with an ingratiating expression on his goat-like face, sat the Professor of last night, Smirgel, who seemed to have taken a great fancy to this new friend. “We could not speak freely last night in Von Esslin’s mess,” he said, “and I wanted to ask your help with the question of the Templar treasure.” The Prince in a somewhat irritated tone said, “I’ve told you all I know.” Smirgel made a soothing gesture with his hands and said hastily, “I know, sir, I know. But I have only recently arrived, sent by the Führer specially to deal with this problem and this has put me in rather a delicate position. For example your clerk, Quatrefages, has been very difficult; first he lied and then he pretended that he was tortured, while now he is pretending that he has lost his reason. I say ‘pretending’, but I am not sure.”

  “Why should he be pretending? He will probably die under interrogation like the secretary of Lord Galen – he was ‘pretending’ he was a deaf-mute, I suppose?’ Smirgel hung his head and allowed the Prince’s high indignation to sweep over him in a wave. He even nodded, as if he accepted full weight of the incriminating charge. Then he said, “All that was before I arrived; now things are different; we are proceeding in another manner now, with caution and sincerity.”

  The Prince looked as if he were about to throw a plate at him. He swelled up for a moment, filling his lungs with air, and then said, on an expiration, “The last info
rmation we had from Quatrefages was that we now knew the names of the five knights who were in the secret. It was a question of trying to trace through them the famous orchard with its quincunx of trees – I ask you! A hopeless quest, I should say.”

  “You do not believe it exists?”

  “I did not say that. Lord Galen seemed quite convinced that it did; but he is a strange whimsical man and could, I should think, be capable of believing anything. But Quatrefages offered us hope, and that is as far as it went. Clearly your inquisitors have driven him out of his mind, thus ruining any chance of getting hold of such information as he might hold. How typical! Where is he now? Is he to be seen?”

  The Professor deliberated for a long moment before answering; then he said, “In the asylum at Montfavet – where he can receive treatment and follow a sleeping cure to try and straighten out his mind. He was in the fortress but there was an attempt to help him escape by the gypsies – he was always their friend, no?”