The Avignon Quintet

by Lawrence Durrell

  “Hark at you!” she said with indignation. “Only yesterday I heard you express a hope that Israel might emerge from the present chaos as a coherent entity. And now?” Schwarz depressed his cheeks and looked shamefaced. “It is true,” he at last admitted. “I did say that I thought I saw an important role for Israel and hope she would come forth from the ruins. But Constance, the sense in which I spoke was far from political or geographical. For me the country is like a retort in which a vital experiment could and perhaps will be conducted. But this is in the domain of philosophy and religion – it has nothing to do with frontiers. I am hoping that something like the Principle Of Indeterminacy as posited by our physicists for reality will find its way into the religious values of the new state; I see you don’t quite understand me so I won’t labour the point. But I’m hoping for a materialism which is profoundly qualified by mysticism – a link between Epicurus and Pythagoras, so to speak. All right! All right! I think that our Hassidim have the creature by the tail and that they might help it to evolve. It would be a marvellous contribution to the future, for we can’t continue with this worn-out materialism of ours, it leads us nowhere. And while we are eroding the Indian vision, drowning it in our technology, India is eroding ours, drowning Europe in all the vast meekness of pure insight!” He stopped.

  “You mean the world is becoming one place?”

  “Yes! It so obviously must if there is to be a future for humanity. Surely we can dream? Why should man be the only animal who knows better but always fares worse?”

  This long, indeed interminable, argument of theirs wound its slow course across the weeks towards Victory Day which would mark the historic point culminant of things. Much of what he said was only imperfectly understood as yet by Constance and would come back to memory in the years to come – making her realise that with Schwarz she had received a sort of philosophic education invaluable for a doctor. But so often he was obscure, oracular, perhaps one could say almost ‘vatic’ in his vision, for he was after all Jewish in origin, with the broad stripe of mystical insight for which his race is known. The severe materialism of his apparent outlook was merely a façade to mask his other profounder preoccupations, as when he sighed, “To what extent have we the right to interfere with the principle of entropy, the cosmic submission which subsumes everything – the death-drift of the world?” It was the point at which East and West were still at loggerheads. Submission or intervention, which?

  “No!” he went on. “The Nazi in the woodpile is a too strenuous orthodox Judaism which we can evolve and modify slowly into a richer complicity with nature. Absolutes spawn restrictive systems; but provisionals in their elasticity allow us to breathe.”

  He struck the ground defiantly with his stick and said, “I have a right to hope, after all!”

  “That is what the Prince sometimes says!”

  Schwarz snorted, for he was slightly jealous of the Prince, sensing how deeply Constance was attached to the little man. As a matter of fact the news from Egypt – which had followed the Prince, so to speak – was hardly reassuring, for all of a sudden the British authorities after years of quiet suspicion about the orientation of the gnostic groups had decided to investigate, and about twenty-five of the Prince’s collaborators were at present under arrest pending an inquiry into their apparent political motives. It put him in a rage just to think of it! The shortsightedness, the imbecility, the waste of the whole thing! It really wasn’t worth being pro-British when they behaved with such ill-judged stupidity! The whole storm in a tea-cup would end in nothing, for there was nothing secret and confidential to be discovered. One could already foresee the climb-down which would ensue, the apologies offered all round to the arrested club members! Goodness, what a fool that Brigadier M. was! But the realisation did little to soothe the ire of the Prince who felt that the whole operation had made a fool of him and of his pro-Ally sentiments.

  Schwarz was thinking: “Larger than life or larger than death – which? The two ways, East and West!” What he wanted to do was to scale himself down to the size of his own death, which he could feel was not too far off now.

  So they limped their way towards the point of victory, and the day dawned bright with church bells and religious processions – it was treated like a Holy Sunday and public holiday combined. But for the clinic this meant little difference – one cannot call a truce to the unhappiness of the insane just when one wishes, even to celebrate the end of a war. So it was evening before they found themselves at the Bavaria while outside in the grassy squares massed bands played and detachments of motorised troops marched and counter-marched to the music, waiting for the first pangs of white light from the anchored pontoons with their brilliant historic tableaux. There was ample time to dine, and under the influence of the red wine Schwarz waxed almost eloquent about firework displays he had seen in the past, in Vienna, in his student days; and once on a visit to Venice. How would this Geneva display compare in style and originality, he wondered?

  But they were already walking across the park when the first maroons boomed out and the white effulgence coloured the dark air with sudden stabs of starkness, printing up the receding façades of the buildings like so many human faces and running with slippery unction from the lake surfaces tumbled by the night wind. Gradually, as they advanced, the whole axis of light slanted and the waterfront slowly took fire like a summer hillside, each section performing its duties with beauty and precision, so that the whole comprised a single jungle of impulses moving right and left, up and down, and printing out the city with every sulphurous stab, every explosion of light, every thirsty roar of rocket or meteor. And while this whole symphonic movement gathered weight the various historical tableaux began to print up, human figures began to move and bend and dance. (That afternoon the Prince had said to Constance: “Constance, you have suddenly started to walk like an old woman. It has got to stop! And you are letting your hair grow wild just like those pregnant girls who hope by doing so to conceive of a boy. Please pull yourself together. You must. Please use a little reason!”) Reason! She repeated this to Schwarz who snorted with disdain at the word-choice. He was thinking to himself that reason made strange bed-fellows: how Socrates sought suicide like Jesus, but did not want to take the blame for the act. What a contrast to Buddha who thought that felicity and the rounded tummy were best!

  They came upon a public telephone and Schwarz was impelled by a characteristic twinge of professional conscience to ring up the duty nurse at the clinic to find out if all the untoward banging and flaring had had a disturbing effect on the patients. But he refrained, he restrained the desire. He said, “The most haunting thing about human reality is that there is always something unexpected happening in the room next door about which one will only find out later on! Moreover it will prove surprising, totally unpredictable, and more often than not unpalatable!”

  “Pessimist!”

  “No, realist. Pragmatist!”

  They advanced upon the starkly blazing water frontage, dazed by the variety of the scenes which were now being simultaneously enacted for their benefit – some from the late war, some from historic circumstances and events, some perhaps from wars to come, wars not as yet engendered in the human consciousness. The flames and scenes were striving to offer them a sort of summing-up of the years wasted in brutality and strife – in the hope that by closing the whole chapter a notion might be launched of some change of direction. Geneva was the capital of the moral reproach, the lost cause, the forlorn hope!

  “When puberty came,” said Schwarz grimly, “when I was around thirteen or so, a sudden terror took possession of me one day in church. I suddenly saw that everyone around me was abnormal, was ill, was mentally disturbed; I had realised that to be a Christian constituted being deranged in the purest sense of the term. The Quia Absurdam leaped at me, just like standing on the head of a rake. Moreover it was everywhere, all around me – the thirty-nine articles or the sixty-nine varieties of Heinz beans. I trembled and broke
into a sweat just reciting the Creed after the parson – it seemed gibberish. Jesus was paranoid like Schmeister, driven mad by the strain of trying to break away from or assimilate the tenets of an orthodox Judaeo-Christianity. He had shared this fate with Nietzsche, the Christian syndrome. In the despair of my youth I could see no hope of ever escaping it myself. What an experience for a sensitive youth! It marked me. Even now when I tell myself that I have escaped the worst I catch myself up abruptly and wonder …”

  A dozen blazing swans whizzed heavenward spitting out tracer; sixteen pearls hissed after them trailing parabolas of flame. Constance thought, “We look to each other for nobility of conduct, for traces of the sublime. There isn’t any such thing, no such hope. How did we get such ideas and wishes in the first place? They were bound to be disappointed!”

  So they walked on like fellow-bondsmen shackled by the same ideas, swollen with the despair of hopes unsatisfied, of promises unfulfilled. What price their theories of health and disease when pitted against this sort of historic reality? She could feel the greyness creeping upon the outlook of her companion, could sense the cryptic sadness welling up in his mind. How senseless this huge and wasteful celebration seemed to her! It closed no door upon the past, it opened no door upon the future. It left them disconsolate and bereft – like beached ships. Abruptly – and without even waiting to see if she followed him or not – Schwarz turned aside into a café with a bar giving on to the lake gardens and angrily ordered double whiskies, but continuing the while to gaze at the display in all its distant splendour. Under his breath he was softly swearing – a habit Constance knew full well from the past. She put a hand on his arm to soothe him, and said, “Well, look who’s here!” She had caught sight of Sutcliffe and Toby sitting in a far corner, apparently deep in conversation with Lord Galen whose manner suggested the deepest elation. Schwarz showed some reluctance to join them, for it was obvious that Sutcliffe had been at the bottle, and possibly Galen also; but their appearance was greeted with such a display of welcoming affability that it would have been churlish to turn one’s back upon them without exchanging a word. So they advanced towards them, determined only to stay a few moments.

  After suitable greetings they took their place at the table which was admirably disposed vis-à-vis the continuing firework display, and allowed Lord Galen to monopolise the conversation, which in a curious sort of way echoed their own preoccupations and doubts. It concerned the problems which they might anticipate in a post-war state of things. “I felt quite lost and thrown aside, I must confess,” said Galen, “and I did not know which way to turn my talents. I knew that one day I must return to private enterprise. Then, like a signal from On High, I learned that Imhof was dead and that he had made a will in my favour – can you imagine? I had inherited those thousands of bidets which he had stored away in Dieppe in vast warehouses, just waiting to cross the Channel and convert the English, in order to help them to save water. Think, all through the war they had been laid up there, shrouded in anonymity, waiting. Suddenly I found I had inherited them. At first I was a bit panicky at the thought but finally my old business sense came to the rescue and I drafted a careful advertisement in Exchange and Mart. Sure enough – there is a market for everything if you can find it – I had an answer from the Society of Jesus, who proposed to export them to the Far East as part of a religious campaign. They found a way of printing ‘Jesus Saves’ on them in several languages, and away they went! I was left with a nice little sum after settling up the dues involved. I was able to consider leaving the ministry with all its insoluble problems. But of course civil life was also full of grave discouragements, I don’t deny it. I decided that I should diversify my investments but I did not know quite how when … guess what … I got an idea from Cade, of all people, Aubrey’s factotum. I heard him say to his master, ‘Lord bless you, sir, the future will be just like a past. Nothing is going to change. Everyone is going to go on in the same old way, you will see.’ It carried conviction, I suddenly realised that it was true. I saw that one should still invest in the old values, the old beliefs, with perfect security. So I decided to invest seriously in Marital Aids – for soon marriage would be booming again. I founded the Agency Vulva to sell a computer of that name – the only computer with a sex-life that is really life-like – it can twitch, throb, corybant at the pressing of a button. It is most exciting and is well on the way to building itself a world market. I owe all this to the insight of Cade!”

  He gazed around him with fatuous self-satisfaction, swollen with an innocent conceit at these antics. Sutcliffe banged his glass on the table approvingly and said, “I appoint myself your advertising manager. I will write you slogans of utter irresistibility like … ‘Bring splendour to your marriage with our hand-knitted french letters.’ Or for the Swiss something a bit aphoristic like ‘C’est le premier pas qui coûte quand c’est le premier coup qui part!’” Galen shuddered, but with gratitude. “For the moment,” he said hastily, “we need nobody. Perhaps later.”

  A Swiss military band with a pedantic goose-step marched across the middle distance against a blazing wall of Catherine wheels pounding out the music of Souza. Schwarz went on quietly swearing, with resignation, almost with piety, oblivious to the restraining caress of Constance’s hand upon his elbow. Soundlessly, one might say, inside all this triumphant noise. His lips moved, that was all.

  “I do not see,” said Toby with a judicial air which could not hide a certain insobriety, “that the future can resemble the past in any way. Thanks to science the world has come to an end, for the woman is free at last, though she remains bound to the wheel of generation; she is free to spread sterility at will. The balance of the sexes is beautifully disturbed.” Galen looked both perplexed and alarmed. But Sutcliffe nodded approvingly and said, “Exactly what I have been telling Aubrey, to his intense discomfiture. He also hoped that things would go on in the same old way. I was forced to disabuse him. Soon we are going to have to collaborate on a terminal book, and it’s important that we should see eye to eye, so that it will be written, like all good books, by the placental shadow, me! Actually if it is to be historically true it should be entitled WOMAN IN RUT AND MAN IN ROUT. And of course the secondary result of this confused situation will be an increasing impotence in the male – un refus de partir, mourir un peu beaucoup quoi! My basic genetic alibi, my cockstand, will go all anaesthetic.” He gave a low moan on a theatrical note. All this was calculated to increase the distress of poor Schwarz. If Sutcliffe was to be believed, what hopes could one hold out for the future of medical practice – specially something as fragile and contestable as psychoanalysis? Moreover they were joking about such a situation – joking about tragedy! He rose unsteadily to his feet and gazed wildly about him as if he were seeking a weapon. For the appropriateness of the subject-matter to the specific night – the victory carnival after nearly a decade of war – made the whole context ironic in the extreme. Constance rose also in warm sympathy with her colleague’s fury, and prepared to set sail with him despite the protests of the others. As they walked away from the braying and banging of the spectacle towards the shadows Schwarz filled in the picture in his own mind with bitter thrusts of thought: yes, after all, Sutcliffe was right. Semantics would replace philosophy, economic judaism democracy, sterility potency … and so on. There was no way round the omens. But at least he, Schwarz, refused to be flippant about the matter. He cared, he was concerned!

  At last they came to the last depleted taxi rank and he turned to bid her goodnight, for she had elected to stay at her flat in town for the night. “I am sorry to have been so very subversive on Victory Night,” he said ruefully, “but what is there left to hope for, eh?” They embraced and he gazed long and tenderly at her before turning aside – a look which would remain with her for years, for this was the last time she was to see Schwarz alive; a look which summarised the tenderness and professional zeal which linked them in the name of their defective science.

  She stood
gazing after the taxi, touched by a dawning premonition of something momentous about to happen, she knew not what!

  NINE

  End of the Road

  “ ATTENTION CONSTANCE,” SCHWARZ HAD WRITTEN ON their common blackboard in violet chalk before copying the phrase again upon a sheet torn from his prescription pad; this latter leaf he propped against the dictaphone. It bore an arrow and an exclamation mark and indicated the pyramid of wax cones upon which he had imprinted the true story of his death, his suicide. It would have been sad if by some inadvertence they had been overlooked or cleaned of their story. The cones were sorted most carefully and numbered; it was possible to hear his description and exposition of the whole business in strict sequence. Schwarz had always had a mania for order – it seemed to him to confer a sort of secondary truthfulness. And in this particular case he had been anxious to present his decision as reasonable, the act as pardonable because quite logical. Nevertheless there was some guilt mixed up in the business, for he had felt the need to make a case for himself.

  They had both always despised suicide!

  And now what?

  “Constance, my dear, I foresee that perhaps you may be a little shocked by my decision, but I did not take it lightly; it has matured slowly over a period of time, and has only come to a head during this week, after receiving the letter which you saw Cade hand me – a letter which contained strange news after so many years of silence. It told me that Lily had been found at last and still alive! Found among the dregs of Tolbach, the notorious camp for women, in Bavaria. At first of course my heart leaped up, as you can imagine, and a variety of conflicting and confused emotions filled it; but then the letter contained news which was disquieting rather than reassuring. She had lost her teeth and her hair, was suffering from malnutrition as well as experiencing moments of aphasic shock … My first impulse was to rush to her side, but when I phoned the units working on the problem the doctor in charge advised me to give them what he called “a breathing-space”, for he did not want me to be too shocked by her condition. He needed time to feed and rest her up a little. He posted me some photographs taken at the camp, of those who had been still alive when the place was discovered. Lily was only one of many, but fortunately she had been sufficiently coherent to give an account of herself, and they had found her dossier in the camp files. But the photographs they enclosed were hair-raising in their fierceness – this bald and toothless old spider, worn to the skeleton with hunger – this was all that was left of Lily, the lovely Lily!