—
AFTER EMMETT WAS GONE THEY WOULD GATHER AT DICK’S PLACE IN the eleventh—near to where, just off the Boulevard Richard-Lenoir, the Canal Saint-Martin plunges beneath a treed median in order to continue its journey underground. Carol had not yet left Dick, and Jack and Paige were together, too—not yet dispersed as they soon would be (he rather farther away than she). Like Alden, Jack worked at the embassy— though much higher up. How he managed it was a mystery to all of them; he was the least diplomatic man any of them had ever met. He would often joke about it himself as he happily enumerated his latest gaffes. It was no doubt that his extraordinary tactlessness, if it did not contribute to misunderstandings and grievances in the public sphere, led at the very least to the great unhappiness that was his marriage. More often than not, when Paige and Jack were together, Paige would sit there on the sofa, her fat lower lip jutted out, looking like she was going to cry, while Jack—one thigh swung over the other—leaned as far away from her as he could and talked sideways to whoever was within range. You could tell even her presence there beside him got under his skin, and before too long he would get up and begin prowling the room. He was like a cat—he always knew who in any given crowd didn’t like him, just on instinct, and would immediately approach, cornering them for an entire evening, in order to share his views on the latest topic, while his wife continued to sit alone in the corner, batting back tears from her big, beautiful eyes.
The poet Maurice Bonheur would be there, too: their only real “French connection,” as they called him. Everything they did delighted him. So Américain! he would say about the simplest and most inconsequential things, when no one else but him could see why. Then he would get that look on his face, and they would know he was storing whatever it was that had struck him so particularly away for a poem.
He would last the war. Later, indeed, when everyone else had left Paris, he would be Alden’s only friend. They would meet on the Boulevard Saint-Michel and he would read to Alden the long poems he continued to write, and once would even do him the disservice of suggesting that with his own small, cryptic poems he was really onto something.
Then there was Dick. He, too, would remain through the war—in the ambulance service. The two of them, Dick and Alden, would uphold a dwindling friendship, Dick distancing himself more and more, then finally going mad. He would stop eating and all the hair would fall out of his head, and after the war would be rescued by his mother, a Spanish princess, and taken to a well-reputed mental institution in upstate New York, where, as far as anyone knows, he remains.
Later, when Alden himself had returned to the States, he would think of him—about how interesting it would be to visit him, if he could ever get up the nerve and secure the permission to go. Imagine it! The madman and the condemned. They could talk about the old days. About that evening—just shortly after Emmett died—that had ended with Dick catching Jack with a back-fist to the eye, and making him bleed. About the way that Paige had sat there the whole time, watching, with the same irritatingly beautiful look on her face she always wore. He would ask Dick why he had chosen to go completely mad, or if he had—and if he had, if he was glad that he had, and what it was like. He would ask him if there were certain signs by which he knew he was going mad before or when he did. If maybe there were signs the rest of them could have picked up on, too—even all those years ago. That is, if there were certain clues that, if they went back even to that night they could have picked out and put together with other little clues and in the end formed some sort of picture of the way things would go. If they could have foreseen Dick himself, skeletal and hairless, emerging from his apartment after the war carried by two orderlies—his mother following behind, her face pinched, as though composing herself for the benefit of some observer to the scene, though there wasn’t any. Just Alden, standing at the bottom of the stairs next to the poet Maurice Bonheur. Maurice sort of glancing over at him from time to time with that look on his face, as if to say, I’m here, I’m here, and he, with a rising panic, wanting to shout at him, Goddammit, I know!
Alden would have liked to ask Dick if he sometimes felt that way, too. How excruciating it was to be sitting around with a bunch of people who kept reminding you they were still there. Well, we’re all still here, and that’s something. As if that were really something! To exist! He’d like to ask Dick if maybe that was what drove him crazy in the end—everyone so pleased simply to exist. If that was maybe why he wanted to disappear, why he had stockpiled rations in his third-floor apartment off the Boulevard Richard-Lenoir (which, unlike most of them, who lived only in a few rooms, was really—on account of the Spanish princess—an apartment, with a grand dining room and high ceilings and doors that swung out onto little balconies overlooking the street) until he had constructed a barricade, which the authorities actually had to destroy in order to be able even to get past the front door. Even standing outside with Maurice Bonheur, Alden could hear the great clatter of tins falling and then rolling around on the hardwood inside, and neither of them had the least clue what it was until afterward, when one of the policemen explained.
Alden would have liked, he thought, to sit down with Dick now, maybe hold his hand. The way he pictured it, Dick’s hand would be as thin and cold-looking as it had been the day he was first taken from his apartment (though, with any luck, being housed now in such a plush institution, he had managed to fill out a bit again), but either way Alden thought he would like to hold his hand, and ask, Do you still agree with what you said then? That evening, so many years ago now—what seems like centuries—when I read a portion of Emmett’s mother’s letter out loud? And if he had any trouble recollecting, Alden would say: That bit, you know, about how there was a certain “senselessness” to everything. You said—do you remember now?—that that was wrong. It did make sense, you said. All of it. There was a gleam in your eye, as I recall it—maybe that was a bit of madness in you, already then. You said that, of course, it was a shame about Emmett’s mother, and an even greater shame about Emmett himself, but there was a greater system in play than just the relation between mothers and sons, and certainly than between individual nations and men. If we expected Emmett’s mother to see the sense in it, or even to see it ourselves, then we certainly weren’t looking at the thing from the right direction. But she got one thing right, you said. There are no boundaries—no boundaries at all; and that—that (didn’t we see it now? you asked) was what Emmett was fighting for! Further, you suggested—and now there was that gleam more than ever in your eye, though everyone had begun to shift in their seats and Carol had got up to get more wine, rubbing her neck, because she always got physically sore when you talked this way—that if all those old soldiers, all of the dead relatives Emmett was buried beside now, could crawl out from their graves—if they could get up and dust themselves off—they would have been fighting beside Emmett, too, because they, of all people—they who had been dead for so many years and to whom all things had become gloriously relative—wouldn’t have known or cared anymore what they were fighting for, or for whom.
As gloriously relative, Alden had reflected at the time, as it had been for Emmett himself; at least as he had expressed it in the last letter Alden ever received from him (which he had not passed on to Emmett’s mother or shown to Dick or to anyone, but kept for himself). It had been written on the fifth of May, 1937, shortly after the street fighting in Barcelona had begun. He had dived for cover down a narrow alleyway—surprising a POUM fellow also seeking cover there. The fellow swore loudly when he saw Emmett—in English. It turned out, Emmett explained, the fellow was a Brit. Instead of shooting at each other, then, the two swapped cigarettes and stories, and discovered that for some months they had both been considering swapping sides, too. The POUM fellow thought it might be better to join the International Brigade, because he was sick and tired of wallowing in the mud at a distance of over a thousand yards from the enemy—unable to approach any closer because they didn’t have any weapons.
He grumbled that until this “play-fighting” in the streets had erupted a few days before he had been inclined to believe there wasn’t really a war going on in Spain at all—that it had all just been made up as a serial fiction for the News Chronicle. Emmett had joined the International Brigade himself six months before but it was becoming clear, he said, that the Soviets were deliberately sabotaging their revolutionary hopes in order to maintain diplomatic relations with Britain and France. He’d rather be fighting with the anarchists, he said—who at least believed in something.
In those moments, talking with the POUM fellow, and all during the time that led up to his death a few days later when he was caught in the crossfire (and who knew which bullets finally entered him first, and from what side?), what struck him more than anything else, he wrote (he, who had railed against Blum, and denied that the thing even existed as a possibility in the hearts of men!), was the absolute neutrality of all those who were fighting—or supposed to be fighting—in Spain. A sense of utter futility had descended over the whole affair. He had seen it happen himself, he wrote. Had watched as, over the course of the six short months he had spent in the country, its citizens had gone from behaving in good proletariat fashion (both men and women, dressed in overalls, addressed you as “comrade” and performed military drills in the streets) to behaving just as they always had. Gradually, the expensive restaurants were reopened. The rich people inside and the poor people out. It was not, Emmett wrote, that anything had changed—first one way and then back—from the beginning, the whole thing had been a sham! Now all anyone wanted was for everything to get back to “normal,” and as quickly as possible. It was absolutely despicable, Emmett wrote, how shortsighted we remain—insist on remaining—as a human race. The words on the lips of the rich as well as the poor—and even on those of the English bloke he had enjoyed a cigarette with while they dodged bullets together from their respective sides—regarded the “natural order” of things: that pervasive belief among everyone alike—the rich, the poor, the Fascists, Republicans, even the anarchists—that there existed some sort of natural state to which we might be able to return. That it was more “natural” somehow that the rich should eat in expensive restaurants—a thing inscribed in the blood, which no amount of marching around in overalls could change!
It was unbelievable, wrote Emmett in that (what would be his last) letter, that there should be, especially here, where even the war itself was the purest of fictions, a faith in anything being “natural” at all. How could they not also see how everything was, instead, contrived ahead of time—prearranged? Just as (he had once read) in ancient Mesopotamia whole battles had once been orchestrated in order to entertain the rich. They’d appeared to the guests as genuine contests of strength and chance, but in the ring every move was accounted for, and all the players knew from the beginning how it would end: the losing team ceremonially beheaded in front of the admiring crowd. Think of it! Emmett had written. Playing a perfectly choreographed game as if there were another outcome at the end than having your head cleanly removed by the opposing team, but knowing there was not!
You needn’t—he continued wryly—stretch your imagination very far.
It was the resignation inherent in this last line that inspired in Alden the slightest tremor of instinctive fear, or knowledge—whatever it was—that Emmett’s death had not been so purely accidental as his mother later claimed. He was prepared, however—so confused by the line that separated what one intended and what one did not had he become by that time—to understand this last comment, with which Emmett concluded his letter, as the most banal and everyday of prophecies. The sort we make, or could make, at any moment: there not being, ultimately, very many outcomes to this life, or too many variations, when you think about it, of when or how it will end.
WHILE ALDEN WAS LOSING himself in these reflections that evening— just after Emmett’s death, while they were all gathered, as usual, at Dick’s place, and Dick had said what he said about everything making sense after all—Jack had launched into a discussion of neutrality, and somewhere along the way the conversation had taken a turn. Later, he was told that it had to do, in particular, with the Stavisky affair, which the poet Maurice Bonheur had brought up by way of something Dick had said—before sitting back again, amused as ever, to watch both Dick and Jack (now anything but neutral) circle each other, while he exclaimed out loud, Oh-ho-ho! So—Américain! But even had he known this, by the time Alden’s attention had been recalled, he had no way of entering into the conversation—or of understanding why Dick especially was suddenly beside himself with fury.
Then Carol came in, still rubbing her neck, and holding on to a plate of American crackers; just as she did so, and before any of them—perhaps even Dick himself—knew it was coming, he had pounced on Jack with such force that, even with how much bigger he was, Jack was immediately knocked toward Paige on the couch, who—with her quick reflexes, which had only been quickened over the course of her close association with Jack—had already sprung effortlessly out of the way.
There they were, then: Dick and Jack scuffling on the floor, Alden to one side, Paige to the other, Maurice Bonheur perched on an ottoman, looking on with delight. And Carol. Still hovering with the crackers at the door and rubbing her neck. The struggle went on for some time without either Dick or Jack doing any damage to the other, or sustaining any, but then finally Dick broke free of the hold Jack had on him and succeeded in making genuine contact—planting a powerful back-fist directly under Jack’s right eye. Jack roared. Then came another loud crash. The dinner plate filled with American crackers had hit Dick squarely in the middle of the back, so that in another moment the crackers, the plate, and Dick himself went flying. Then all came to rest: the crackers and the plate smashing into pieces upon contact with the floor.
Dick stood up, off balance. He touched his hand to his back, and started to say something, but no one paid him any attention. Even Carol shifted her gaze—bored—to where Jack was rolling on the floor, holding his eye.
—
SERGE ALEXANDRE STAVISKY, FOR THOSE WHO NO LONGER RECALL the affair, had been found dead in Chamonix on the eighth of January, 1934—a gun wound in his side. Among other questions that persisted even many years later, there was the question (memorably touched upon that night by the poet Maurice Bonheur) of whether, as the official reports of the crime would have it, he had inflicted this wound on himself, or if he had died at the hands of the police—who by that time had been after Stavisky (or, as he was better known, “Le Beau Sacha”) for many years. It was more popular to assume (because it was also much more likely) that the police had killed him—but fourteen of twenty-two newspapers that reported the incident went with the official report: the death was ruled a suicide. Even with the forensic evidence, which described a distance the bullet would have had to travel far greater than the length of one man’s arm. The only concessions that were made to the discrepancy within official reports were sardonic allusions to what became known as Le Beau Sacha’s “long arm.”
For many years before the incident at Chamonix, Serge Stavisky kept busy selling inflated, worthless bonds, which—for some reason, never fully explained—even after the first whiffs of scandal, people continued to buy. Among his most famous exploits was a pawnshop run on the surety of an emerald necklace purported to have belonged to the late Empress of Germany—a necklace which turned out to have been made out of glass. But how Stavisky managed to operate his business for so long without getting caught, or losing the greater portion of his devoted clientele, is really only a small mystery. He had a keen eye for business and in a short period of time had contacts and partnerships with some of the most influential people in all of France— those who, quite simply, could not afford to be embarrassed. If he was threatened, Stavisky simply bought off the would-be whistle-blower— or someone very close to him—with the threat of exposing their own involvement in a scheme they could only have known from the beginning was not entirely as it appe
ared. Stavisky’s favorite method of settling accounts with the media, for instance (who sought at various times to endanger his integrity), was to buy large advertising blocks in the paper—in order to continue to promote, of course, his own false bonds. The real mystery of the Stavisky affair, then as now, was that it was considered a mystery at all—as if Le Beau Sacha were a sort of bogeyman, an aberration of a system that would otherwise have destroyed him.
This was, quite simply—as Dick had once, disastrously, attempted to argue with Jack and Maurice Bonheur—not the case.
IN 1927, SEVEN WHOLE years before Stavisky was finally brought to his grisly end, he was arrested. The trial, however, was “systematically” postponed. His bail was raised nineteen times; people with injurious stories to report no longer knew anything of the affair; a judge who claimed he had “secret documents” (which would, he promised, finally lay the whole thing to rest) was found dead, his head cleanly removed at the throat.
Quartet for the End of Time Page 35
