Our celebration naturally did not contain any such references. The myth of fighting Spain was made up exclusively of elements from the arsenal of Bolshevik history, propaganda and art. The only element that came from another order, another world, was Rodrigo’s music. I’d sensed this when suggesting it to Roach and had dangled it before him for that very reason, but I hadn’t foreseen how much it would influence the proceedings. It didn’t even occur to me at the dress rehearsal. I didn’t realise it until I was at the piano and had begun to play – and even then the effects were not immediately apparent.
When the celebration was beginning, and the reluctant audience, herded together from every class in the school, sent out the first waves of hostility, disgust and ridicule, I felt a twinge of uncertainty. Perhaps my act of subversion would go unrecognised; perhaps they would think I was just a sycophantic, collaborating creep, sucking up to the authorities by offering my services? My misgivings increased when an incident took place that reminded me of the antics of the rabble at the community centre’s educational evening. One of the Speakers, droning on about the interests that bourgeois countries had in Spain, was launched on a long recital of Spain’s resources in raw materials, listing such strategically valuable assets as lead, tungsten and pyrite as well as copper, mercury and sulphur, when someone (it may have been Butch) yelled from the back of the room:
‘Especially the copper for stunts!’
Constructing impromptu Spoonerisms, the more obscene the better, was a popular game, and this example gave rise to indescribable hilarity, with much chortling and sniggering, shrill whistles and roars of appreciation.
‘What savages!’ muttered Roach with distaste in the darkness of the wings, where we were watching the proceedings.
‘You’re being too severe, comrade,’ I said, coming to the defence of the audience, although I was weak with apprehension and worry. ‘Though I can’t help noticing that your assessment of student attitudes toward the anniversary we are honouring was perhaps not entirely accurate.’
‘Don’t you try to be clever with me,’ he barked. ‘You’d better concentrate on your own performance. You’re on in a minute.’
When I made my way on stage, knees shaking, and sat down at the piano, it was in a silence eloquent with mockery and contempt. He’s sold out, he’s been bought, he’s sucking up, I could almost hear them thinking, condemning me in advance. But when the first melancholy sounds of Rodrigo’s theme flowed out from beneath my fingers, and especially when, swinging slightly, I incorporated the first jazz harmonies, adding a diminished tenth to the dominant chord to make a thrilling dissonance, the audience’s severity began to melt. And when, after prolonging a sequence to the limits of human endurance, I finally resolved it on the tonic and finished up with a diabolical glissando, I knew I was forgiven. The whooping and shouting that greeted the end of my performance expressed not only full absolution but gratitude, support and encouragement.
This impression was confirmed as the programme went on. With each of my entrances on stage the sounds of enthusiasm were louder, the cries of disappointment and shouts of ‘More flamenco!’ at the end of each interlude more insistent. Again I was reminded of the prize-giving ceremony in the community centre at the end of the AST festival, and how it had been dominated by The Firecats. My role was not what theirs had been: I was the humble provider of background decoration who had unexpectedly become a treacherous fifth column for the event’s main protagonists. My success with the restless rabble relegated them to a minor role, and the contrast between us further exacerbated the audience’s aversion to them.
‘We want to dance! We want fandango!’ the excited audience yelled as I waited in the wings for my last entrance.
I glanced at Roach. ‘The true voice of the people,’ I observed. ‘You just don’t have a feeling for what the masses want, comrade. Your alienation is so far advanced that you have no idea of their real needs.’
‘You’re wrong, comrade,’ he replied, in an ironic echo of my own mocking rejoinder to his baiting of me that day when he had come up to me in the upper corridor. ‘On the contrary. If we didn’t know what they really wanted, if, as you seem to think, we believed only what we knew to be established by theory, you wouldn’t be here. We wouldn’t have asked you to play. We asked you precisely because we do know – we know very well – what needs to be done to achieve the desired aim. When the elements you’re dealing with are as backward and ignorant as this lot,’ he went on, nodding contemptuously at the audience, ‘you have to take it into account. You have to throw them a few sops, a bit of glitter, in order to attain your objective. Conditioned reflexes, Pavlov – I’m sure you know how it works. These days, comrade, you can’t convert people by force. It’s been tried, and it doesn’t work. The carrot method is much more effective. You play them a few tunes, they have their bit of fun, they think they’ve had a good laugh – but they’ll remember something. Something will have been drummed into those thick mutton skulls of theirs. Without your flamenco the effects would have been much less satisfactory.’
‘Deceive yourself if you want,’ I replied, although I felt much less confident than before. My self-satisfaction, and the conviction that I’d come out on top, had evaporated. ‘You can’t change the facts.’
‘Don’t imagine you’ve won,’ he whispered coldly. ‘It’s a draw at best.’
For Whom the Bell Tolls (Constant’s Story)
When my memory had obediently unearthed this material from its archives and I had begun a hasty reacquaintance with it as I followed the silent Constant downstairs, I suddenly realised I couldn’t remember whether Madame had been at the ceremony or not. And this gave me pause. At events of that kind most of the teachers sat in the front row, and she, like a queen, always sat front row centre. When I made my entrances, and particularly my bows, I couldn’t have failed to see her. And if I had seen her, I couldn’t have failed to remember it – especially since I remembered the others, and quite clearly at that. The Tapeworm, for instance, as he reluctantly applauded or turned around to glare at the flamenco enthusiasts shrilly clamouring for more, or the Eunuch and the Viper, who sat next to each other and constantly exchanged whispered remarks and disapproving looks. But of Madame there was no trace, not even a blurred image, not so much as a fragment of an image – an expression, a gesture, the way she sat, some detail of her clothing. Nothing.
The more I tried to remember, the more I became convinced that there had been an empty chair in the middle of the front row, next to the Tapeworm, and the image of that empty chair became compelling. It also shed new light on the Tapeworm’s behaviour; the abrupt way he kept twisting around to look behind him now made better sense. He wasn’t just attempting to subdue the noisier elements of the rabble; he seemed, more and more clearly, to be waiting for someone. His twisting around was the restless, expectant fidgeting of a person impatient for someone’s arrival. My impression that she hadn’t been there, and that he was annoyed because of it, became stronger and stronger.
Now, in light of the story of which I had heard part and was about to hear more, Madame’s absence from this particular event began to seem significant. But I had no time to reflect on its implications, for by now we were out on the street and Constant was talking.
‘I don’t know how much you know about the Spanish civil war, and I’d rather not know. What they teach you at school, if they teach it at all, is certainly a pack of lies, and you probably don’t have access to literature – honest literature – on the subject, because it’s forbidden. Anyway, there isn’t much of it – of the honest kind, I mean. There can’t be another episode in modern history that’s been so distorted and lied about as this particular tragedy, and not just here, but in the West, in democratic Western countries, too.
‘However, I mustn’t lecture you about that now. I’ll just tell you Max’s story, and you can draw your own conclusions. But I repeat: everything I’m about to tell you is for your ears only. You’re not to talk ab
out it to anyone. Not anyone – not even your parents, let alone your school friends or, God forbid, in a lesson. You’d get into a great deal of trouble, and you’d get me into trouble, too. Promise?’
‘I promise.’
‘You give me your word?’
‘Word of honour.’
‘All right. Here we go. The Spanish civil war broke out in ’36, on the seventeenth of July. It was a very strange time. A bad time, a time of sickness – like a plague. A certain world order was coming to an end. The infection that had been incubating for a good twenty years blossomed into a full-blown disease. The microbes multiplied and attacked. The fever grew and brought on delirium, madness and crime. In the Soviet Union the terror was beginning – purges and trials, deportations to Siberia, hunger and slave labour. And, at the same time, the “red virus” was being smuggled out and disseminated throughout the world; Soviet agents were sent out to spread the infection and prepare the ground for world revolution. Meanwhile, in the devil’s other favourite playground, known as the Third Reich, the people were being spurred on to battle. On gigantic squares, among gigantic buildings, torches and blaring loudspeakers, inflamed crowds were succumbing to mass frenzy. Lebensraum for the Herrenvolk! The Third Reich would last for a thousand years! Weg mit den Juden und Slawen! The world belongs to us! And everywhere the scarlet banners, like a presage of spilled blood. Over there the yellow hammer and sickle, and here the black hooks of the swastika.
‘And the world went on its merry, carefree way. Parades, parties and the band played on. No one seemed to notice. No one wanted to hear. People were too busy genuflecting before the temples of avant-garde art. There was something desperate about it – like some sort of death wish. When I look back on it now, and at myself as I was then, I realise that I, too, was affected. All those mountain expeditions, the summit-conquering, the thrill of the risk, the roof of Europe, Mont Blanc – nothing but a form of escape. Into thin, pure air, into sun and blue skies, to vast, faraway spaces.
‘Max was also affected, and much more strongly. His constant travelling, his punctuality games, that extraordinary idea of his child being born on an Alpine peak – that whole mixture of extravagance and innocent mysticism – it was symptomatic of something rotten to the core. All very lofty and noble, of course, and carried off with great aplomb, but recognisable as whims typical of a decadent age.
‘But this sweet madness and innocent folly, this holder Wahnsinn, didn’t affect everyone in the same way. Some people rebelled. L’homme révolté, awaking suddenly and seeing that catastrophe was near, decided that a response was necessary, that something had to be done, attempted, at least, if only for the sake of rebellion. Have you read Conrad’s Victory? It’s all there, marvellously described. The protagonist, Heyst, is a man disillusioned with the world, full of contempt and loathing for it and the people in it, whom he sees either as locusts preying on each other or as dreamers chasing after rainbows. A Schopenhauer. A misanthrope. For him, the only solution is to withdraw from the game altogether. And he does precisely that. He decides to go and live on a tiny, isolated, almost uninhabited island somewhere in Indonesia. But on the way, as he’s waiting in some port for the ship that will take him on the last leg of his journey, he sees something that shakes him profoundly. He witnesses a scene in which some unfortunate girl, playing in a musical band the hotel has hired to entertain the guests, is nastily humiliated by her vulgarian employer. There’s nothing remarkable about it; he’s witnessed hundreds of such scenes. But this time he cannot remain indifferent. Surprised at himself, he approaches the girl and offers his help.
‘“I am not rich enough to buy you out,” he says to her shyly, in one of the book’s famous lines, “but I can always steal you.”
‘What happens after that is another story. You should read it some time if you don’t already know it. The point is the sudden impulse, the kind of compulsion that sometimes makes you get up and leave or do things regardless of the consequences. I think it must have been something like that that seized Max. But why? Because of some atrocity in Spain? The bombing of Guernica? The mass executions? No. Something quite different and much nearer home, something that was happening here.
‘Polish reactions to the war in Spain varied. The government procrastinated and shilly-shallied and secretly sympathised with Franco. Not a very laudable response, but then one must remember what kind of neighbours we had to the west. What I mean is that, compared to those other gentlemen of Europe who not only didn’t stick their necks out, even though the danger to them wasn’t nearly as great, but from time to time even agreed, for the sake of peace and quiet, to do the criminals a few favours, we weren’t so bad, considering. At school they probably teach you that the main initiative in giving aid and support came from the communists; that’s true, but there’s more to it. For one thing, you have to ask yourself what the PCP really was, on whose behalf it was really acting. And then there’s the question of whom it was really trying to help: the Republicans? the Spanish parliament? or the ‘Jacobins’, the radical left that was entirely under the control of Stalin’s agents?
‘It has to be said plainly: the Polish Communist Party was a gang of Soviet agents in Poland, and everything it did was done on orders from the comrades at central office – the Comintern. In other words, it acted in the interests of communist Russia, the interests of a mad criminal preparing his great assault on Europe. It was in his services, on his whims, that the PCP sent thousands of people to their deaths . . . But I’m straying from the subject.
‘Max was basically an apolitical person. He lived in a different world. It was as if he never came down from his mountaintop. If I had to describe his political worldview, I’d say he was a slightly left-leaning liberal. He was sensitive to poverty and injustice, but he was as far as one can get from any kind of radicalism, especially of the Leninist sort. He feared Soviet Russia and he loathed the Bolsheviks – he used to call them the Asian plague. Yet when our government initiated proceedings to strip the Poles fighting in Spain of their citizenship, he took it very badly.
‘“You just don’t do things like that,” he said. “It’s hitting below the belt. And sooner or later it’ll turn against everyone. Now it’s them, and tomorrow it’ll be someone else. It’s a dangerous precedent. It must be opposed.”
‘He surprised me, as he often did. Why was he reacting so strongly? Why was he suddenly so concerned about people whose views were foreign, indeed loathsome, to him?
‘I asked him about it. “Since when has the plight of ‘microbes’ worried you so much?” I said. “You must know what kind of people they are, and who they’re connected with.”
‘“That doesn’t mean they should be refused entry to their own country! Especially since most of them have been deceived. Don’t you know by now what it means when they call something a spontaneous reaction? These people were recruited, they were pressured into going, they had no choice. They were too poor, or perhaps too marginal, to resist.”
‘I began to get impatient. “What a touching story! You surely don’t expect me to be convinced by it. And anyway, even if it were true, what could you do about it?”
‘“Very little, it’s true. But one could always . . . go there, for example, and see for oneself.”
‘I was astonished. “What on earth for?!”
‘“Well, you know,” he said calmly, “to get an idea of what’s really going on, and so as not to leave the field to them.”
‘I saw there was no point in discussing it further: his mind was already made up. He was merely informing me of his decision. “What about Claire and the child?” I asked.
‘“Yes,” he said quickly, as if this had been his main purpose all along in seeing me that day, “there’s a favour I want to ask you. If you could stay in touch with her, and help her if necessary –”
‘“Why might it be necessary?” I broke in.
‘He shrugged. “Well, you know . . . all sorts of things could happen.”
‘I asked him whether he’d talked it over with Claire. He said yes, and that they were in complete agreement, as always. What could I say? I accepted the responsibility. Knowing him, I suspected he had everything worked out down to the smallest detail, and that the whole escapade was somehow connected with the people he knew abroad, especially in France. But I didn’t press him for details.
‘In any case, my suspicions were proved right soon enough: he got to Spain across the Pyrenees. For a few months he sent news of himself quite often, and fairly regularly. His contacts must have been in France, because his letters were sent from the Gard. And then, in ’38, sometime at the end of May, they stopped. He disappeared without a trace. None of the people he’d been in touch with there was able to say what had happened to him. We assumed he was either dead or captured and imprisoned.
‘She bore it all with incredible dignity. Her calm and composure, her unshaken conviction that he was alive and would return, were extraordinary. It was then, really, that I found out what kind of a person she was . . .’
Madame Page 21
