by Paul Nizan
When she had left, Mme Rosenthal resumed her vigil and put her daughter-in-law out of her mind. Since the telephone had been in operation, people began to file past and console the mother. Claude came to join her and watched with her; he kissed his brother’s forehead. M. Rosenthal, who was weeping as men do, had to be sent home to Avenue Mozart.
Two days after Bernard’s death, Laforgue – who had read the news in Le Temps – arrived. Mme Rosenthal was still there. Laforgue in turn looked at the body, in which he scarcely recognized his friend: no dead person resembles the living person he has replaced, during that period separating decomposition from life. Everything about that yellow mask, that neck dark with blood beneath waxen ears, was foreign to Bernard. Laforgue found only the hair familiar, like the natural hair implanted on Chinese papier-mâché masks. Like most dead people, Bernard had that distant serenity which the rigidity of corpses creates. People were doubtless telling Mme Rosenthal, in order to cheer her up, that her son was so handsome in death he seemed to be asleep: but, as always, it was a lie – all dead bodies are horrible. Laforgue was not taken in by the myths of consolation. Anger suffocated him: they were all affected. He felt his throat constrict and his eyes fill with tears, which comforted him a little. What young man does not breathe easier when he suddenly sees himself less hard than he had expected? This softening gave him the strength to go and greet Rosenthal’s mother: she refused his hand, drew herself up and said to him, very quietly, in a tone of confidential fury:
— You can be proud of your handiwork, you and your friends!
Mme Rosenthal, in a flash of inspiration as she saw Laforgue enter, had just discovered the family version that would once and for all save the honour of the Rosenthals: the version which explained the taste for Revolution, the seduction of Catherine, the death. The fable of influences, the legend of evil friends, were going to find a new lease of life in the tragic folklore of Avenue Mozart – since Bernard had died of an illness, a deadly germ that had come from outside, and the Rosenthals knew they did not themselves manufacture the poisons that killed him. Laforgue looked at Mme Rosenthal’s heavy theatrical mourning and told himself that he understood almost everything. He felt like striking that long lugubrious face like the dried-out muzzle of a horse – but a person must be polite, after all, so he simply said:
— Come now, Madame.
The morning of the funeral arrived. It was high up in the Père-Lachaise, above the Mur des Fédérés. Laforgue, Bloyé and a few others had arrived by the Place Gambetta gate and were waiting behind a tomb, in the strong damp wind that was blowing. The procession finally emerged round a bend in one of the avenues. They were the last to file past the vault. One of those officiating, who had spots on his black tailcoat, proffered them a little shovel that appeared to be made of silver and a vessel full of earth and grit. None of them took the shovel, but all bent over the coffin whose brass plaque was already disappearing under the shovelfuls of ritual earth. Philippe went by last and dropped onto the bier an aggressive sheaf of red flowers. Then they went off without greeting anyone, casting insolent looks in the direction of the family: Bernard’s father was weeping as he clasped people’s hands, his shoulders shook with his sobs; Mme Rosenthal and Claude responded to the young men with curt glances of anger. Bloyé said between his teeth that it was good theatre, something which death never escapes. Catherine was not there. Mme Rosenthal told herself that her daughter-in-law had perhaps loved Bernard after all. Laforgue and the others went down towards the cemetery gates, past ruined tombs and worn statues from the days of the Restoration, after pausing to muse for a few moments in front of the Mur des Fédérés.
Two days after the burial, M. Rosenthal received a letter from Philippe Laforgue:
‘Although we know,’ he said, ‘that friendship has never conferred any right upon anybody and are ready to bow to whatever refusal you may make, we have nevertheless decided to ask your authorization to extract from among the papers our friend Bernard Rosenthal left the articles he had completed and the notes he had prepared.
‘We think the funeral tribute that he would have placed above all others would have been the publication of these writings in the journal he had himself founded and whose prime mover he was to the end.
‘We should be deeply grateful to you for allowing us to examine your son’s texts and agreeing to their publication.’
Several days passed. Laforgue said to Bloyé:
— You’ll see they’ll refuse. They’re upstanding people. Their sense of private ownership must extend to corpses. Rosenthal’s finally returned now to the Family bosom, they won’t let go of anything.
— It’s what’s called the return of the Prodigal Son, said Bloyé. Anyway, I always told you that your letter to the Father was in the servile mould. One never gains anything by that. You should have insulted them.
Eventually M. Rosenthal replied to Laforgue that he would await his visit next day in the apartment on Place Edmond Rostand. He had said nothing to his wife about the letter from the young men. The fact was that he felt oddly guilty towards his son and wished to obtain his shade’s forgiveness – for what enduring and fatal treachery he was not quite sure.
Laforgue came to the meeting, which was cool – or rather awkward. The broker and the young man intimidated one another dreadfully. And just you try talking about the rain and the bad weather and this gloomy season which seems as though it will never end – or about politics which isn’t getting any better – with a dead body full of bitterness between you. M. Rosenthal, sitting in an armchair, smoked and said nothing. One by one Laforgue opened Bernard’s drawers, which were full of yellowing papers as though Rosenthal had been dead for ten years. He read pages more or less at random, and took manuscripts fairly indiscriminately because he could feel the father’s gaze between his shoulder-blades. In the bottom drawer, he found two folders bearing the following inscriptions: Industry, Army. It was over. Laforgue straightened up, M. Rosenthal rose to his feet and coughed, suppressing the sound.
— This room is freezing, he said.
He opened the window to reclose the shutters, a gust of wind entered the room. Philippe turned the switch: the room was illuminated by the same light as on the night when Bernard died. As they left, M. Rosenthal said:
— I think we can turn out the light. You haven’t forgotten anything?
Laforgue gave a clumsy bow. M. Rosenthal ushered him ahead. On the stairs, he suddenly asked him, in a timid voice:
— Did my son sometimes talk to you about me?
Laforgue was shattered by this admission of defeat, this sudden surrender – but he was not going to miss this first opportunity to avenge Rosenthal.
— Never, he said.
M. Rosenthal sighed.
Laforgue took a taxi to return to Rue d’Ulm, and the driver protested because it was only just up Rue Gay-Lussac. But Laforgue was impatient to sort out Rosenthal’s secrets: to find among them Heaven knows what answers, what discoveries, what testament – and the least mendacious face of a dead man. At Rue d’Ulm, Bloyé was waiting for him. Without a word Laforgue threw him the two folders which he had had time to open in the taxi. Bloyé opened them in turn.
— Do you recognize them? Laforgue asked.
— I recognize them, said Bloyé. What a strange business!
They were André Simon’s interrupted notes and the plans for the boilerworks, all that remained of the great conspiracy of the previous spring.
— So he lied to us, said Bloyé, he hadn’t done anything with them.
— I’ve always been certain of it, said Laforgue. Don’t you recall his impatience, whenever we asked him what stage the business was at? He ended up telling me one day that it had all been handed over and that he was finalizing some other things. He was lying. But he’d lived for a month or two on the dreams of this venture . . .
— That’s what he was like, said Bloyé.
Both of them mused for a while on the disparity, the remarkable gulf, that had always existed between their ambitions and what they had accomplished, and on the miscarriage of various undertakings.
— We’re ridiculous, said Laforgue. Like paranoiacs. What a load of make-believe!
He added, however, that these setbacks were fairly irrelevant, that they should be taken merely for what they were, failed limbering-up exercises, and that life would not always be subject to the fluctuating rules of improvisation. They preferred no longer to think about Bernard, whom no life and no future would henceforth allow to make a new start, who was definitively a loser: it was essential for them to set aside death’s entry into their ranks. A group of young men defends itself not much less skilfully than a family against death.
Later, between the sheets of a handwritten article, Laforgue found an envelope bearing the date of Bernard’s death and addressed to Catherine. The envelope was not sealed, Laforgue opened it: it contained only an identity photograph of Rosenthal. The photograph was struck through with a big cross in blue pencil, and on the back it bore these lines:
Is it a sin to hurl oneself into Death’s secret abode before he dares come for you?
Then Laforgue recalled the evening at the Rosenthals’ place in June, just before the last summer holidays, and the way Catherine had looked at Bernard, and their conversation while waiting for the AX, and Rosenthal’s evasive air for months past.
He wondered if he should send Catherine the photograph with an insulting letter. But when he had hesitated for two days and turned over in his head various aggressive formulae, he no longer knew what letter to write and was afraid that the duty of avenging his friend might be mixed up with a profane desire to humiliate so beautiful a woman. The photograph never went off, it remained among Laforgue’s papers as the last appearance of a Rosenthal eternally young, eternally deceived, freed from time and the metamorphoses of life – for as long as a piece of paper and fixed impressions of light last . . .
Part Three
Serge
XXI
One can endure anything except a man’s gaze: it is a kind of fixed star whose light no one succeeds for long in bearing.
When Pluvinage lowered his eyes, he knew they were looking at him by a warmth on his cheeks or on his forehead; he raised his head quickly, but the looks had already eluded him.
The comrades from his branch stared at the table in front of them or at their hands and fingernails, or allowed their eyes to roam through the wisps of smoke filling the air, but they did not let their gaze be caught. Ever since the beginning of the meeting, Serge had been playing this game. Ever since he had felt on arriving a kind of expectation and suspicion, which transformed the very air itself and in which he was the centre of a furtive but weighty scrutiny.
He did not usually seek to meet anyone’s gaze, he was shifty. A man who has trouble controlling the muscles of his eyes does not seek the eyes of another: Pluvinage envied people with poor eyesight, who have only to remove their spectacles and they can stare at someone without seeing anything. No problem with his hands – they were good hands, which did not tremble or conceal themselves, which were not the damp, dissolving kind of hands people suspect. Serge would sometimes say to Marguerite, balancing a piece of cardboard on his nails:
— You see, Margot, they don’t move at all . . . I could be a pilot . . .
In general, he was not all that embarrassed about his body; and his voice was as obedient as his hands – it did not choke, or suddenly shift into the wrong register. He could stop himself blushing, or turning pale. He just had those two treacherous eyes.
That was how it had been since the end of his childhood: since he no longer had to seek answers in people’s eyes, but merely suspicions, judgements, questions, contempt, pride. What a life, living in a world of looks! All existence is like a courtroom full of judges, who turn you about, assess you, and there is no way of not feeling guilty. Ordinary people do not know the feeling of calm you experience in meeting the white eyes of a blind man, or the blank eyes of a whore – what confessions one would make to a deaf man! – or, more rarely, the eyes of men who share your secrets.
But on that particular evening, Pluvinage was seeking to meet someone’s eye all the same, because he wanted to be sure. To breathe again he needed a verdict. He recalled his interview with Laforgue and Rosenthal, their questions:
‘I gave myself away like an idiot,’ he told himself. ‘They must have reported me to the party.’
At last he knew the verdict, after which another dreadful life was going to begin. The others were speaking about the activities of the branch, and they were still discussing the 1 August arrests. Daniel, who was the branch secretary, spoke opposite him, fiddling with a very slender pencil in his large, scarred, metalworker’s hands. . Daniel stopped speaking, then asked:
— Are there no other speakers? How about you, Pluvinage, you haven’t said anything, do you agree with us?
At last Serge met some eyes, their gaze threatening and reflective. He shivered.
— No, he answered. I’m in agreement.
— Because if you had anything to add, I’d give you the floor, it’s not all that late, said Daniel.
Those eyes were still not moving.
— No, said Serge, I’m in agreement.
— Quite sure?
— Yes, of course.
‘Should I explode?’ Serge asked himself. ‘Take the initiative? Call them to account for their looks? Defend myself! But if, by any chance, they suspected nothing . . . Impossible. I know Laforgue. He’s talked. He loathes me. They know. They’re going to haul me up in front of the Control Commission, some frosty fellow will question me, he’ll have that way of lowering his voice at the end of every sentence, that tone they use in the party, I’ll deny it . . .’
It was over, neither he nor they would speak. If he had begun a single sentence, he would have told them everything: it was all useless after Daniel’s looks. Serge knew that they knew everything. That they had no evidence, no witnesses, but they knew, because he was all of a sudden utterly transparent to them – to their instinct, which did not deceive them. Serge sighed, because the explosion was not for this evening. Perhaps it would never occur. Perhaps the Control Commission would not even summon him. Perhaps they were simply going to abandon him, quite alone, to his fate.
‘It’s all settled,’ Pluvinage said to himself all at once. ‘I’ll never see them again.’
The meeting ended like this, in confusion, with the same hubbub and relaxation as every other week. All these men who had not moved from their chairs – who had spoken seriously, struggling with the words, about politics and the world – now felt like stretching and cracking their finger-joints. They went down the spiral staircase of the small café. On the threshold, a voice said:
— Hey, Pluvinage, you don’t look quite up to the mark. Serge gestured vaguely.
— I must be coming down with ‘flu, he said. What with this filthy weather . . .
At Place du Combat they walked towards another café that was still lit up, to have a drink at the bar before separating. Pluvinage said goodbye to them and crossed the roundabout in the centre of the square.
Running off Place du Combat are Rue Vellefaux, Avenue Mathurin-Moreau, Rue de Meaux, Rue Louis-Blanc and Rue de la Grange-aux-Belles. It forms a star of hot-tempered streets, despite the nearby oasis of the Buttes-Chaumont and the peaceful descent, between hauliers’ yards and hospital walls, towards the watery expanses of the Saint-Martin Canal. Because there are almost always trade-union meetings in Avenue Mathurin-Moreau (at the top of the stairs in No. 8) and at the back of the courtyard at 33 Rue de la Grange-aux-Belles, and because – ever since the rifle-shots and cries of the Commune – these have been the frontiers of Paris’s mo
st passionate districts, you always find blue knots of policemen there, at the exit of the Combat Métro station, in front of the gates of the Bellevilloise, and at the small gate to the Saint-Louis Hospital, where they look as though they were watching out for the secret egress of the dead. It is a gloomy area, but inspiring for any man who can freely enter the Grange-aux-Belles courtyard and climb the concrete steps in Avenue Mathurin-Moreau. Serge reflected on how he would be able to do so no longer, and on how this was the last evening of his double nature. He hesitated at the edge of the roundabout, like a man embarking for another continent. He knew the others were still watching at him, and that they were talking about him. That they were saying, for example:
— Who would have believed, all the same, that he was a cop?
Pluvinage turned and saw them in the doorway of the café: he raised an arm as a sign of separation. Daniel lifted his right hand limply and at once let it drop back. Pluvinage went down the left-hand pavement of Rue de la Grange-aux-Belles, along the Saint-Louis Hospital wall. It was fairly cold, but there was no frost, the weather was simply damp and oppressive. On Quai des Jemmapes, the wind blew through the branches of the trees beside the canal and the gleam of Paris illuminated the low canopy of clouds. Serge raised the collar of his overcoat and walked along the bank. Although it was November, there were still men and women sleeping in corners, and others who were talking or scratching so hard that Serge could hear their nails rasping on their skin. They had piles of newspapers in reserve for the cold of the night, to hold out until the hour when they would have to take flight and walk. In the glow of the streetlamps, the men had the beards of corpses. The women were buried under bundles of material. Serge thought about the tramps who shave in summer on the banks of Quai Notre-Dame, before a fragment of mirror stuck up on a wall or a tree. The destitution of the tramps, and the utter solitude he had just entered, were identical forms of pursuit and flight. A man as lost as he can always hope that one of these nocturnal characters – moving about on the utmost fringes of life, and to whom he feels appallingly similar – will help him escape the pit that engulfs him. But Pluvinage did not meet anyone. He merely stumbled against the legs of a recumbent woman who sat up and swore at him. He quickened his pace and the tramp shouted after him, in that pitchy, vault-like darkness:
