The tears keep coming … she explains … her manicurist is in Berlin! … the Landrat, by the way, where is he? … he was expected for lunch … not a word! … they must all be in their cellars … she smiles … we smile… the masseur, the Landrat, the dressmaker, all in holest… we here in Zornhof have no conception … all we know is that bombs are falling … and the earth trembling …
It was trembling all right … just then the big heavy tapestry in back collapses! … rod and all! kshsh! gone! … and somebody … the cripple in a rage … an apparition! … rolling his eyes at us!
“Schweine! swine! … raus! raus! get out!”
I translate for you … the cripple didn’t speak French … only German …
“Spione! Spione! … lauter Spione!”
Not just swine, we’re spies too! …
“You won’t throw them out? … Spione! Spione! ah, you won’t! Nicholas!”
The giant hands him his shotgun … and up there a-straddle he takes aim … point-blank, so to speak … well, ten twelve feet … we haven’t time to think … Inge, who’d been lying in a languid pose, charming us … thighs and sighs … springs like a tigress! she grabs his rod! she flings it across the room! and him with it! … he lands on his head … he screams at her: whore … whore! twice! … I see him on the carpet … he stays put … he drools, he writhes, he gurgles … ah, at last something definite that I recognize … he’s biting his tongue … thrashing and yelling … that’s no syringomyelia … a different kettle of fish! von Leiden Jr. is epileptic … there on the floor! … undeniably! all the earmarks … Inge’s surprised me … so quick on the draw! … the way she disarmed him! before you could say Tom Thumb! precision work! … Harras must have known this cripple was dangerous …
“You see, Doctor! … you see him!”
I saw him all right … he’d be writhing and drooling for at least an hour …
“It’s jealousy and the air-raid alarms! … he hasn’t slept for two years … I beg your pardon, Doctor … and yours too, Monsieur Le Vigan … he doesn’t know what he’s doing … I thought Harras could have him cared for in Berlin … really … really … I can’t stand it any more … especially for the child … he’s dangerous even for her! … he’s out of his mind … and he’s in pain … more than a man can bear … his back … his heart… his nerves … sometimes his attacks go on all night … can’t you do something for him, Doctor?”
“Well see, Madame … well see …”
Meanwhile he’s having a terrible convulsion … on his back … at our feet … his little stumps jerking … his anus fighting with the carpet … his face screwed up, framed in his wrinkles, and thick foam … saliva and blood … on his chin …
“You see him, Doctor! … he’s like that at least twice a week … worse and worse …”
“Of course he ought to be in treatment somewhere else … not in a place like this with the constant air-raid alarms … in Switzerland, for instance …”
“He’d never gol he’s too jealous!”
“Well discuss it with Harras!”
“Oh, him! if he ever comes back!”
“How long do these attacks last?”
“They vary … verschieden … ten minutes … two hours … the doctors all say to wait a long time … let him sleep … three hours … four hours … is that right?”
“Perfect! … but what medicine do you give him?”
“Come and see …”
She takes me to the medicine chest … everything … powders … ampuls … bottles … Luminal … Dolosal … heroin … a feast! … I ask her how many pills she gives him? how many ampuls?
“All he wants, any time he wants … Harras told me … some days two or three times … but especially at night … the attacks come on at about eleven …”
It wasn’t only the air raids that brought on his attacks … it could be some irritation … now it was jealousy … she was sure … he was pathologically jealous … jealous of Harras or the Landrat … Harras I could see, but us? nothing about us to make him jealous! moth-eaten beggars … absorbed in messkits and the trembling of the walls, with Article 75 on our ass … if the lady was interested in us, Cod bless her! actually no matter how crummy the situation, you’ll never make one of those sultry ladies understand that you’ve stopped wanting anything … appetizer, roast, or dessert! … they can keep it all! and for Christ’s sake leave us alone!
O rage! old men, it’s sure to be your death!
A woman’s life four hundred periods …
Out with the passion! Hurry! Fire! …
For us, Le Vig and me, it was out of the question … retired … retired for ever! … this awful obsession beauties have! the more cities in flames, the more people being massacred, hanged, drawn and quartered, the more intimacies they want … the worlds Article 1 is fucking! … I who forget very little (nothing to be proud of), I remember very clearly how in October 1914, when on the right bank of the Lys our regiment of dismounted cavalry was waiting for dawn under the constant fire of the batteries across the river, a crowd of women and young girls, middle and working class, came out under cover of darkness to feel us up and hoist their skirts, no talk, not a word wasted, from one dismounted cavalryman to the next … polite society takes ten months, ten years, dragging out engagements from one winter sports holiday, one art show to the next … surprise parties, automobile accidents, big dinners, little dinners, boozefests, belches, bans, and City Hall … but when necessary, when the circumstances are right, whole regiments of hot-loving ladies can copulate hoodie-boodle a thousand at a time … in one minute flat … under a canopy of bombs! … what’s going to stop them? … shell holes? stiffs all over the place? … jig-jig! they fuck like flies!
I give you my reflections, I feel I haven’t too long to live … if I don’t do it while I can, my enemies will have it top easy, they’ll put me down all wrong, they’re doing it already … nobody, you say, gives a damn … I do! I was, telling you about yon Leiden … the cripple … on his back … writhing … I’ll get back to the stinker … no collar, no tie … he’s flailing, he’s biting his tongue … but no danger of choking … a clear case of epilepsy … classical … his shotgun … I pick it up … it’s loaded all right… two shells … I put them in my pocket … “He threatens us too … often … me and my daughter!” I can imagine … hell, it’s her lookout! … worries of our own … no shortage … I’m dunking about Lili … she must be wondering what’s become of us … and getting her something to eat … the Tanzhalle is too far … so’s the grocery store … I can’t see us passing the bar again … or the huts … with all the wives and widows on the lookout … those women never shut an eye! … no, it can’t be done … I’ll help myself from the pot down below … I won’t ask anybody … if I ask Inge von Leiden, she’ll tell me she doesn’t trust her Russian servants, that they have orders not to dish out soup without the cripple’s permission … did anyone give them permission to keep our food cards? … the Landrat? the devil’s grandmother? … only one way … thieving, at certain times, comes natural … when everybody says no … not and no! the only way is to help yourself and split … watch my dust! We take our leave of Inge, oh, very discreetly, on tiptoes … her old man is still on his back, still writhing, but not drooling so much … he’ll come to in an hour or so … he won’t have seen us leave … he won’t remember his attack … we go down the steep little stairway, Hjalmar and the pastor are still there, dead to the world … they haven’t budged … the pastor in his chair, his back to the wall, Hjalmar stretched out in the gutter, his drum and bugle lying on the ground … though this would be the time for a bit of drumming and bugling … the sky is furrowed with RAF, Berlin-London round trip, breaking up the clouds … black … white … snowflakes, flecks of soot, fluff … Hjalmar’s snoring, so’s the pastor … but where are the kitchen girls? … I go in … not a soul! … the whole place deserted … cookpots brim-full, steaming, smelling good … I’ve only got to dig in … the ta
bles are covered with messkits … I go to it… I fill … one … two … three … four … we’ve only got to cross the yard, well be at the manor in two minutes … around the big pond, past the barns … the little road … the walk through the ash trees … the isbas … maybe the “objectors” had finished their carpentry … our conscientious silent objectors … good thing they’re silent! if they started talking … I wouldn’t want to hear them … one look at their mugs … more hate-ridden than ours … we’re passing the barns …
“Hey! Hey … come here!”
French! … hell, they’ve seen us! … and our messkits … they want some too … I say: “Okay … here … one apiece” … we keep two for our own supper … and I tell them how those bandits have glommed our food cards … la Kretzer, Kracht and Co… . a gang of thieves!
“Hell, they’re all pirates! all the same! … take the Russian cooks … they peddle the chow to the Boche women! that’s why they’re never there!”
Just then, way high up through the clouds … like a school of herring … we look …
“More and more of them!”
Joseph speaking … the other one, Léonard, who looks even more shifty and even more down on us, remarks …
“Good clobbering they’re giving ‘em!”
Never at a loss, I come right back with:
“The way Berlin looked when we saw it … you’d think they’d be finished with the job … eh, Le Vig?”
Le Vig agrees …
“Right! … what can they find to bomb? … the holes?”
“There’s still Boches in those holes! … they can’t burn too many! … right side up and upside down!”
That’s what Joseph thinks …
For Joseph’s money we should have been there in the big blaze, that was the place for rats like us! … nothing unusual … that’s what they all thought, not just Joseph the swineherd and Léonard Cowflop … Cocteau of the Academy, for instance, and plenty more, our friends in Montmartre and Cousteau who was condemned to death, and Vaillant of the Prix Goncourt … that’s the magic of my poor, insignificant person … everybody and his wife have accused me In black and white, they’re still accusing me, and in the sweet by-and-by they’ll go on accusing me of having drawn on every cash box … occult or official … crossed every iron curtain, fixed or movable, crawled through every mouse hole, every urinal, from one crust to the next! … the eyes are the mirror of the soul! … stinkers see stinkers wherever they look … you can imagine that these two voluntary prisoners weren’t discussing the pros and cons of our casé! they’d made up their mind! … and there in the barn without any Krauts around, Leonard spits it out.. .
“Doesn’t suit you, does it? … suits us to a T! … all the Nazis in phosphorus! … and the rest of the lousy Boches! … women and brats! … all of them! … you love them!”
“No, I wouldn’t say that … and they can’t stomach us either … that’s for sure!”
“Then why are you here?”
“Because Paris is even worse!”
“Worse than what?”
“Too high a price on our heads!”
“See?”
That clinched it … I’d confessed! Leonard and Joseph pack their pipes … with something …
“Hay! … all we get! … and lucky at that! … with our coupons!”
We sniff … it’s not exactly hay … there’s some tobacco in it … tobacco? tobacco? … it comes to me … hell, they must know too! … the cupboard! … and that I had the key! … I don’t think they’ve looked … not yet … but somebody must have told them … and about all the canned goods Harras brought back from Lisbon … no secrets in Zornhof! … everybody … prisoners, housewives, the grocery woman … spent their time sniffing out what was under lock and key … roaming around, trying to get a look, conferring in whispers … so naturally they knew … we were green, we’d just got there … they knew the ropes … those obstinate hate-ridden cow-floppity weasels … and there was plenty of stuff stashed away in Zornhof, not just my cupboard … my Lucides, Navy Cut, and sausages … those two, Léonard and Joseph, in their ham could see everything without being seen! … they saw what was delivered at the cripple’s across the yard … and the old man having fun, getting himself whipped … crawling around his study and bedroom on all fours … with the chicks on his back, giddyap horsie! … and his bare ass all red! … they saw all that from their barn without showing themselves … they knew all about the Dienstelle, which secretary was knocked up, and the goings-on in the village, which prisoner had taken a goose to the baker’s to be cooked, and the three of them had put it away … with chestnuts! … and if the Landrat, Simmer with his sparklers, had found out, would he have had them shot! … they even knew when and where, against what wall on the Moorsburg-Berlin highway … The Landrat always attended executions in person … especially in the last six months … he’d taken over the administration of Justice … both courts … civil and military … and the police … and the prosecution … was he popular! … Léonard and Joseph knew him well … frequent visitor at the farm, he came to lunch and to take Inge to Berlin for her manicure and other errands … all the châtelaines around there went to Berlin once a week … naturally the Landrat fucked Inge … first a spread, wines, liqueurs, two three kinds of meat, a turkey, then whoopsie-daisy, Madame! and coffee, real coffee! … ah, those Reich “Ordinances”! … for us total privation! for them, belly-busting superfluity! … a damn shame, said Léonard … he liked good food … Joseph wouldn’t have minded a piece of Inge … that was his line … which reminded me … I got to thinking about that woman … she’d risen in my estimation since I’d seen her leap … like a tigress! … I’d given her a low mark … 4! 5! … no … she deserved better! 8 out of 20! … they weren’t interested in aesthetic marks just then … they were interested in coupons … they didn’t get what was coming to them … not enough margarine or emergency tobacco …
“The best way would be to burn them all!… plus the Landrat!”
I suggest … for the laugh!
“Right! Right!”
Perfect agreement …
Now, twenty years later, the atomic warheads are ready, seventy-five thousand of them, it seems, so intensely desired and deservedl they should unload them quickl one big beautiful, explosion! and let ‘em disintegrate … into cosmic spray! …
Even then, twenty years ago, Landrat Simmer, Inge, her cripple, the old whipping boy Rittmeister, Marie-Thérèse in her tower, Nicholas the Herculean carrier, and our Harras, still absent, far far away, were birds of a feather, all really abominable scoundrels, and la waterworks Kretzer, and her two sons killed in the war, and Kracht the booted Apotheke, a bastard if there ever was one! … and the secretaries, even our little hunchback with her father the fish charmer, champion of the Spree, all in the same sack! … plop! … into the same oil! perfect agreement!
At this point, Léonard and Joseph, I can assure you, didn’t stir a muscle … I trotted out adjectives that kept them in their seats … that they’d never have thought of … which goes to show the advantage of high-power culture: wisecracks of every shape and color, mortal epithets … in political kitchens, people’s commissariats, censorship bureaus … the intellectuals of all parties are by no means superfluous, without them Prospero would flounder, his rages would end in raucous bellowing, diarrhea sounds … a little help from the local intellectual prevents such horrors, rescues the false note, erases the squawk …
Right there, if there was anything to rescue, it was our messkits … we’d chewed the fat so long they were cold … we’d warm them up, but where?
“So long, Joseph! so long, Léonard! we’ll be back soon … everything under control!”
The idea was to get a little friendly … well, to make them detest us less … when hatred calls the tune, when the whole world is out to slaughter you and you find two three executioners who aren’t in quite such a hurry as the rest, it’s not a bad idea to conciliate them with good manne
rs, two grains of tobacco, and a messkit! call it a miracle or something else! Lisieux ° never made it, but Bernadette in Lourdes packs them in! … that grotto is worth two billion francs and two thousand extra trains!
Bemadotte ° of Pau … the Marshal’s a different type … he turned his coat at the right time and got to be king! he still is! … I know forty million Frenchmen who’ve done the same, coats, pants, and gats! … but didn’t get to be kings! … smalltime profiteers … fighting over a hundred thousand corpses! … they say this! they say that! … the truth will come out later … when the archives are opened and nobody’s interested … if then! … three sniveling sclerotic old fogies who take ‘39 for ‘70! … de Gaulle for Dreyfus … Laval for the Abbess of Montmartre ° … and Pétain for a mayor of the palace …
I’m off again … I’d almost forgotten our messldts … wisecracks won’t warm them … that’s enough reflections! …
Passing the bibelforschers, I see one more isba … Christ! those guys work fast and well! … none of your lazy unemployed! … and no little sheds, big houses for at least fifteen twenty families … that’s what we need in France, not clouds of tonic blah or photogenic priests … but “objectors”! … the way they work, they’d rebuild France in less than thirty-five days … the time it took for the mad shit parade from Breda to the Pyrenees … I say it! … and I say it again … all very pretentious! … “we all of us know all there is to know, after the event!” the event in this case was our chow! … we had only to cross the park … here’s our peristyle … and our tower … I hear voices … the Kretzers … we open the door … oh, everything’s fine … conversation … no crisis … the Kretzers and at least ten secretaries crowded around a Gypsy woman … a Gypsy, I hadn’t expected that! … where’d this Gypsy come from? weren’t the Gypsies supposed to be eliminated according to the Nuremberg Laws? … highly contaminating! … crypto-Asiatics! … a Gypsy free and shooting the shit! might as well say the war was a waste of time! … Hitler’s New Order, let’s not forget, was just as racist as that of the blacks of Mali or the yellows of Hankow … we’d see what we’d see! … luckily, we’ve seen nothing! … except Monnerville ° king of France … and the Gauls booted out of their supposed Empire! … everybody can’t be a racist! Here this one squatting on our doormat, where’d she come from? … I whisper in Lili’s ear, I ask her … I ask Marie-Thérèse … and the Kretzers … they whisper back … very simple, she’s from Hungary … she’s not alone … five families in a wagon, in the park on the other side of the isbas … fortunetellers, skilled basketweavers, chair-menders, violinists, looters, it goes without saying, and almost certainly spies … the payoff, their passports are strictly in order, better order than ours! … with wax seals, photos, fingerprints, permits for all Berlin, ausweis and fuel card for their wood-burner … we can go see for ourselves, not far, right next to the bibelforschen … they were going to camp here for three weeks, time to give us five six shows, movies, singing and dancing, mend all the chairs, fix all the baskets and beehives … these craftsmen came in very handy … and there were plenty of willow switches … the ponds and ditches were full of willows … three weeks wouldn’t be long enough for all they had to do! … the good thing about the Fourth Reich, when the clamor dies, down and you judge it as History, is that they thought of every detail … take the Jews … how many employed at the Chancellery? … in close contact with Adolf? … plenty of both sexes! … someday a book will be written about them … like the super collaborators shot by the Courts of Purgative Justice … how many Nazi Yids? … Sachs ° was no exception … far from it! … at Sigmaringen, for instance, I met bigger and better examples! … the terrible calamity of the goyim is being such jugheads, such blithering Cartesians … according to them, anything that isn’t rational, clear, and congruous … just doesn’t exist … only what’s clear and simple counts! … “over here the little Loyolas! … over there Himmlers paid executioners!” … don’t try to look any deeper … Ask for details … and you’ll see them going plumb loco, pithecanthropic lunatics, all mad with alcohol, staggering, haggard with publicity! … as murderous as fifty movies, as swinish as “Advice to the Lovelorn,” the Mayol ° and the Grand-Guignol ° combined! you brought it on! …
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