Madame

by Antoni Libera

  ‘Yes, that’s true enough,’ I said, ‘but we didn’t do the whole play, and our little drama circle certainly wasn’t any kind of Shakespeare Theatre.’

  ‘They say you know dozens of monologues by heart . . . and that you can even improvise in Shakespearean style . . . talk in heroic iambics on any subject.’

  ‘Oh, that’s not so hard,’ I said dismissively, echoing Constant’s casual response to my expression of awe when I heard that Claire, Madame’s mother, could read Gothic script with ease.

  ‘Not so hard?!’ He laughed. ‘Don’t be coy. Even for the great man himself’ – he mentioned S.’s name – ‘it was an effort to keep up with you.’

  ‘You exaggerate. Highly.’ I shook my head. ‘But the main thing is that you should know the facts, and they are as follows: the life of our drama circle, which, by the way, I put together with the greatest of difficulty, was poor and short. We gave just one performance, and it was a very humble one: no stage set, no props, no costumes. That was the All the World thing. And it wasn’t a play; it was a sort of collage, bits and pieces of different plays woven together. And as for the prize, yes, we did win the first prize at the Festival, but I wouldn’t wish my worst enemy that kind of success.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘It’s a long story. But to sum it up: how would you like to be rewarded for a Work of Art with . . . a Ruhla watch? Presented to you on stage by a prancing idiot? In the municipal community centre? In front of a bunch of adolescents who’d come to have a good time at the dance? And have to recite Jaques’s speech about the seven ages of man in front of them?’

  ‘I’d rather not.’

  ‘Well, then. But I had to.’

  ‘Yes, yes . . .’ he muttered to himself again.

  We entered the park. The sun shone brightly on the changing leaves; shrubs and trees shimmered with colour. Here and there a gossamer thread floated in the warm, still air of early autumn.

  ‘Can I ask you one more question?’ said the Sad Boy.

  ‘What is it? Ask away.’

  ‘You won’t be offended?’

  ‘That depends on the question.’

  ‘When you were at school,’ he began hesitantly, ‘the headmistress was a Frenchwoman, is that right? Or was she half-French? Something like that – I don’t really know.’

  I froze. But I had no glimmer of where he was headed. ‘She was Polish, actually,’ I replied, ‘but bilingual. She spoke French like a Frenchwoman.’

  ‘Oh,’ he said quietly. ‘And who was she, this . . . lady?’

  ‘I’m not quite sure what you mean,’ I hedged, pressing him for more. ‘What is it exactly that you want to know?’

  ‘Well, I mean, what kind of person was she? What was she like?’

  I cast about for a suitable answer. At length I said, ‘She was different from the rest. Well dressed. She was . . . an interesting person. Very intelligent.’

  ‘And very good-looking, I’m told,’ he put in, with an oblique glance.

  ‘Yes, not bad,’ I agreed casually.

  ‘Ah . . .’ He gave a shaky sigh. ‘And is it true –’ he began, and then stopped. He swallowed nervously. ‘Is it true,’ he began again, stammering, ‘that she . . . that is, that you . . . how should I put it?’

  ‘Clearly and simply would be best,’ I replied, echoing one of Freddy’s gently ironic replies. But my heart began to beat faster, for I could already hear the next part of his sentence: ‘. . . that you were terribly in love with her.’

  But the words he pronounced, when at last he found the courage to spit them out, had quite a different meaning. ‘That you and she had a passionate love affair,’ he said.

  It was a struggle to conceal my astonishment and stifle the hollow laughter that welled up within me. I made an effort, however, and walked calmly on, head down, slightly stooped, arms plaited together behind my back, to all appearances deeply absorbed in thoughts of the distant past.

  How vast, I thought, amused and a little awed, how extraordinary, is the power of the Imagination and the Will, that it can give birth to such myths, and pass them down through generations! That hand, that scene from Phèdre in her office, glimpsed by Mephisto and Prometheus; the dance; the meeting by the kiosk, observed by Roz (or had it been Kugler?) from the window – that was all it took to give rise to the myth, so much more powerful and enduring than the reality! But in that case, perhaps Madame herself was a myth of my own making? Perhaps her life, too, was quite different from what it seemed to me? Perhaps I had created it all – with the help of Constant, who had been in love with Claire?

  But what is truth, after all? Is it the thing-in-itself, the thing-for-itself? Or the thing as it seems to us, as we imagine it? Or perhaps it’s both? But then how do we choose? Which truth is the right one? The hidden? Or the apparent, however relative?

  And had it not, in a sense, been a ‘passionate love affair’? Didn’t this banal story of mine have all the typical characteristics of one? All the elements were there: the curiosity, the desire to know and possess the other, the obscure longing. The love letter in the form of a school essay about the stars, the pinch of innocent mysticism, the surveillance, the jealousy, the ‘Golgotha’ under her window that January night. The ‘resurrection’: Phaedra’s confession – the hand – the two hands joined in the ‘ritual of marriage’. The ‘Walpurgisnacht’: the dance; the midnight tryst; that mysterious, urgent plea; the promise of a ‘second coming’. And then that last message, like a sign ‘from the beyond’ . . .

  I went on walking in silence, analysing my life. Had I experienced anything like that since? There had been flirtations, flings, brief romances; encounters of one kind or another; cold affairs of the flesh. But nothing like that. Those things had been ordinary – ‘earthly’; there was no fever in them, no passion, no poetry. They also had little to do with what people call ‘happiness’. For Tonio Kröger was right: happiness ‘lies not in being loved; that merely gratifies one’s vanity, and is mingled with disgust. Happiness lies in loving, and perhaps snatching brief, illusory moments of closeness to the beloved object.’

  ‘I knew it,’ my disciple said into the silence. ‘I’ve offended you.’

  ‘I’m not offended,’ I replied, still absorbed in my thoughts. ‘I’m just wondering what to say.’

  ‘Tell me the truth.’

  ‘Ah, the truth! But what is truth, as Pontius Pilate said?’

  ‘Well, you’re probably the one who knows best,’ he said sadly.

  Puisque ça se joue comme ça . . . I thought, remembering a passage from the end of Fin de partie: ‘Since that’s the way we’re playing it, let’s play it that way.’ I made up my mind.

  I halted suddenly, looked my interlocutor straight in the eye (as Constant had a habit of doing), and said, ‘A gentleman, as you know, doesn’t normally speak of such things, even if they belong to the past. I’m going to diverge from this sacred principle because I like you. But you must promise me not to tell anyone.’

  ‘I won’t, I promise!’ he assured me earnestly.

  ‘You give me your word?’ I raised the bar a little, calculating that the more I insisted on his discretion, the quicker he would blab it all out.

  ‘Word of honour. Honestly.’

  ‘All right. Here we go. It’s true: she meant something to me. She fascinated me. I wrote elegant essays for her, and she entered one of them, an essay about the stars and the Zodiac and Nostradamus, in a competition organised by the French Embassy for schoolchildren learning French. It won a prize, and I got to take part in a summer course near Tours, on the Loire. The idea was that you went with your teacher, who would also take part in a course there – a training course for teachers. So we went together, she and I, teacher and pupil. At the end of the course there was a competition in declamation, which I entered. I recited a passage from Racine – one of Hippolytus’s speeches. I won first prize: a trip to the Alps. To Chamonix. I went there alone, but a few days later – on the sixth of August, I remem
ber – she came out to join me. We met at the train station and went up Mont Blanc together. She told me she had been born there – well, not right at the top, but in that area, near the “roof of Europe”. And when we got up to the Vallot refuge, she recited a poem that her mother had liked, and used to read to her in her crib.’

  I tilted my head slightly upwards, half-closed my eyes and, pretending to be imitating her, while in fact becoming the embodiment of Constant, recited (I give the poem in translation):

  A mystery is the pure of source.

  Even song can scarcely unveil it.

  For as you are born, so will you remain;

  Stronger than hardship

  And education

  Is the moment of birth,

  The ray of light which greets

  The newborn.

  ‘Did you get that,’ I asked, like Freddy, ‘or shall I translate?’

  ‘No, that’s fine,’ he said, echoing my own reply from long ago.

  ‘I’ll go on, then. The emotion, combined with the rarefied air,’ I continued, carried along on a wave of inspiration, ‘made her faint. I tried to revive her.

  ‘“What do you think you’re doing?” she asked skittishly, when she had come to.

  ‘“I’m presuming to come to your rescue,” I replied with a smile.

  ‘“Careful,” she said, wagging an admonishing finger. “Your devotion seems a trifle excessive.”

  ‘As a memento of this whole extraordinary adventure she gave me a pen – look, here it is. A Mont Blanc.’ I took the Hommage à Mozart out of the inner pocket of my jacket and showed it to him.

  He took it with trembling hands and gazed at it reverently. Then, in an undertone, he read out the words engraved on the little gold band which encircled the cap: ‘Meisterstück,’ he whispered; ‘Meisterstück . . . Meisterstück.’ He handed it back and raised his eyes to my face. They were huge as saucers and filled with a boundless longing.

  ‘That’s it,’ I said, shrugging. ‘That’s all there was. There’s your passionate love affair!’

  He lowered his head slowly. He didn’t know what to do with his hands. After a long moment of silence he whispered, half to himself, ‘Those were the days!’

  I made no reply. But the thought flashed through my mind, as I replaced the pen in my pocket, that perhaps I hadn’t been born too late after all.

  POSTSCRIPT

  My story is ended.

  I began writing it on the twenty-seventh of January, 1982 – a year and a half ago. By then ten years had passed since its closing scene – my conversation with the Sad Boy – and almost fifteen since the June night when I saw Madame for the last time. Poland had been under martial law for a month and a half. Once more people were being brutally crushed and broken; once more their dreams of freedom and a life of dignity were being beaten out of them. The Solidarity ‘uprising’ was quelled, and communication with the rest of the world was cut off. Tanks rolled around the cities; soldiers patrolled the streets; there was a curfew. Food and other goods were rationed, and you needed a pass to leave the city.

  I had long been disabused of any illusions about where I lived and the nature of the regime in power here; ever since deciding to publish my work in Polish presses abroad rather than entangling myself in further ‘arrangements’ with the censors, I had felt the touch of the ‘severe, reproving arm of the people’s justice’ in my own life. Its attentions were particularly unpleasant in the 1970s, after the publication, in the West, of my novel Defeat, about the tragic fate of Madame’s father. Described by expatriate Polish critics in the West as a ‘dark and powerful novel in the style of Conrad’, it was a denunciation of communist Russia as the power responsible for the Spanish civil war – the manipulator that had deliberately planted the seeds of madness and destruction in Spain and cold-bloodedly planned the fall of the Republic. It was also a challenge to writers who had allowed their brains to be addled by left-wing propaganda and distorted, in their work, the true picture of that war. In my account I followed George Orwell – a writer dear to me for many reasons, and certainly unparallelled in his treatment of the Spanish civil war.

  The book caused a stir and infuriated the authorities. I was vilified by the Party newspapers, denounced as a fascist and the ‘posthumous progeny’ of Franco, sneered at and ridiculed as a writer: I was a nonentity, a nothing, a ‘pathetic, hopeless scribbler greedy for his thirty pieces of silver and hoping for the applause of the extreme Right’. When the press had dragged me through the mud I was subjected to more concrete methods of harassment: a total ban on the publication of my work and the refusal of a passport. Then came harsher reprisals: direct acts of repression in the form of constant police surveillance, house searches, interrogations and arrests. The circle began to close.

  It was clear to me that I had ventured into forbidden territory, raised a subject that was taboo. I had touched a deep nerve – the very root of the leprous demon’s sore spot. Central Office didn’t let such things pass unpunished.

  ‘Spain’ seemed to suck me in like some sort of Bermuda Triangle. First it had swallowed up the man on whose life my book was based; then it had engulfed his wife. Then, for years, it had wrought revenge on their daughter. And now, all these years later, I, too, had been drawn into its vortex – only because I had dared to touch on the subject. Constant had been right when he’d warned me about it and made me promise to keep my mouth shut.

  I was out of town on the night of the thirteenth of December, when martial law was declared, and this saved me from the wave of internments. I went into hiding. Various friends took me in. Then, on New Year’s Eve, I took advantage of a momentary lapse of vigilance on the part of the police and slipped away to Gdansk, where the unfailing Andy found me a permanent place – one that was both comfortable and safe. It was a little attic room in an old German house, with a so-called kitchen nook and a view of the sea.

  It was there, in that little attic hideaway, that I began to write, and what emerged was this story. I had to find some occupation to fill the time, and I wanted to immerse myself in something clean and untainted, or at any rate remote from the world around me. At the beginning the writing was merely therapeutic; I viewed it as a kind of purifying cure, hoping it might disinfect me from within and help me regain my balance. With time, however, the wind caught my sails; the writing developed a momentum of its own and gradually carried me with it. I stopped regarding it as mere therapy. I was no longer simply writing; I was creating. With full deliberation I began to compose and hone, to structure and to shape: seven ‘large’ chapters, for the seven days of creation; and thirty-five ‘small’ ones, for the moment in our ‘heroic age’ when Madame came into the world, and also for my own age now – for today I find myself ‘at the midpoint of the journey of human life’.

  My diaries from those years, blessed, miraculous survivors of the ravages inflicted upon my flat by innumerable police searches, were immensely helpful. If I hadn’t kept diaries then, or if they had been found and confiscated, the book would be considerably poorer in detail.

  I should add that I wrote it with my Hommage à Mozart, in a series of school notebooks with ruled pages.

  Publishing it in Poland is out of the question. Not only because I am on the index of banned authors but also, indeed mainly, because of its content. The ‘war with the nation’ is still going on, and nothing heralds changes in the foreseeable future. The authorities, under the leadership of a loyal servant of Moscow, a man sick with ambition and greedy for glory, a man who takes his orders from the East, have the country in a tight grip. Everything is controlled; all resistance is smashed.

  I shall give the manuscript to someone I can trust, and it will be smuggled out to the West in the diplomatic bag. It should be published in six months at most.

  As for me, I don’t know what happens next. Practically everyone from my circle is gone. Constant is dead; Freddy has emigrated. Most of my friends from university are abroad. Roz has been a professor at Princeto
n for some years now.

  I feel it would be dangerous to remain any longer on this sinking ship. It’s not that I think my life is at risk; it’s life here I’m afraid of – what it would do to me. I think it would destroy my soul. I am afraid of internal devastation: of rotting away inside. More and more often, more and more clearly, I hear a familiar voice calling to me, urging me in the words of that memorable cry: ‘Jump, George! Jump! Oh jump!’

  Would it be a leap ‘into a well’ – into an ‘everlasting deep hole’? Or into something that would one day lead me to the summit, and let me see ‘the sun and the other stars’ again?

  I don’t know. But something tells me I have to do it. I must set off.

  I wish I could repeat Hippolytus’s sad parting words: ‘My mind’s made up, Theramenes; I leave today.’ But I can’t, for I am not fully master of my own fate.

  Voici l’oeuvre finie. I cast it out into the world like a message in a bottle onto the waters of the ocean. Perhaps one day you will come across it; perhaps you will fish it out, and give me some sign – my North Star, my Aquarius, my Victoire.

  Warsaw, 10 September 1983