by Michel Déon
‘A wretch stuff’ with cash!’
‘I’m not talking about that. I’m talking about my name, which I’ve allowed to be dragged through the mud. Me! The descendant of a crusader!’
‘An’ fuck your crusades!’
But La Garenne had got his breath back, and with it his snooping instinct, and was glancing around the studio. Ignoring the daubs he usually bought, he went up to an easel on which stood one of Jesús’s new canvases, a black and luminous landscape, a violent confrontation between a lava-covered land and the sea, under a blazing sky.
‘This is brilliant!’ he said. ‘I’ll buy it.’
‘Eh?’ Jesús said, dumbstruck.
La Garenne took out his cheque book.
‘How much? You tell me.’
‘I don’ feed the jam to the pig.’
‘Jesús, I’m not asking for compensation for your insults. Where genius is concerned, everything is allowed. How much?’
‘No.’
La Garenne signed his cheque, dated it, left the amount blank and handed it to Jesús.
‘You put down whatever you like.’
‘Go fuck yourself!’
As we may imagine, La Garenne walked away with the picture, leaving behind a cheque for twenty thousand francs and the promise that Jesús would deliver within the next week a series of six etchings for ‘hell’.
‘Edition of fifty, not one more!’ the dealer promised, his arm extended as if for a fascist salute.
Jean had reason to believe that, with the help of subtle manipulation, the fifty would turn into two hundred, plus several dozen artist’s proofs. La Garenne fiddled the documentary evidence and had already for a long time been forging the pseudonymous signature Jesús used for his bread-and-butter work. To buy Jesús’s landscape as he had, almost with his eyes closed and with an impressively faked passion and a cheque to match, had been a stroke of genius. Jesús wavered. For a time he even stopped heaping insults on Louis-Edmond, making an effort, without great conviction, to acknowledge a flair beneath his crudity, a sort of instinct for painting that only the treacherous circumstances and frightful materialism of the French prevented from showing itself. Jean refrained from pouring cold water on his friend’s enthusiasm and opening his eyes to the Machiavellianism of La Garenne who, almost as soon as they were back at the gallery, had handed Jesús’s canvas to Blanche, curling his lip contemptuously.
‘Put that in the toilet or the cellar. Yes, in the cellar. If I had that in front of me I couldn’t deal with two shits at once.’
Perhaps the important thing was that Jesús had found a buyer for a painting that he had begun to think was unsaleable.
What about Claude? I hear you say. We have not forgotten her. She explains everything. Without her Jean would not stay a single day longer in this new Paris, slowly beginning to fill with people again and to face the autumn with a kind of fearful, courageous expectancy. He puts up with the ignominy of working for La Garenne, with Blanche’s relentless gloom, with the disheartening experience of spending his days in the gallery’s hell, because when he finishes work Claude’s smile and the cool welcome of her cheek is waiting for him on the fourth floor of Quai Saint-Michel.
Cyrille would open the door: a pale little boy with curly blond hair and blue eyes sparkling with pleasure.
‘Maman, it’s Jean!’ he would shout.
‘Who else did you think it would be?’ she would answer from the next room.
She would appear, her face half turned to his, offering her cheek and the beginning of her smile. Cyrille would go back to his toys, and when the weather was fine they would lean on the balcony and look out over the city slowly disappearing in the twilight, the Seine velvet and immobile, its banks empty but for pedestrians hastening home.
The first evening Claude said, ‘It’s terrible!’
‘What’s terrible?’
‘Everything. Not knowing anything about the people you love, or even the people you don’t love. Not being sure of anything. What will happen to us? We’re using up the best years of our lives wanting to know, wanting to have an answer.’
‘I close my eyes. You should do the same.’
‘You don’t have anyone else.’
‘I’m the same as you. I have you.’
‘You don’t have me. You have to remember that.’
‘Well, I think I have you, whether you like it or not, and deep down it doesn’t matter if you do or you don’t.’
Yes, let us dispel the ambiguity. Nothing has happened between them since their meeting at Clermont-Ferrand, and it is Claude’s wish that nothing should happen. To all appearances that is not how things are: they are together, they see each other every day. When the gallery closes, Jean walks down from Montmartre to Saint-Michel. He likes crossing Paris like this, among crowds of Frenchmen and -women hurrying about their business, paying no attention to the signs in Gothic script that they encounter en route. The occupiers are still tourists. There were others like them before the war, and no one is surprised that this new wave of curious visitors responds to the same siren songs as their predecessors, making straight for the Opéra or the Folies-Bergère. Jean loves Paris for other reasons; for him the city is intimate and full of secret places. Turning a corner, catching sight of a theatre or a cinema, revives memories that no longer cause him pain. Claude is there, and she drives out Chantal de Malemort. As he crosses Pont Saint-Michel he looks up to see Claude’s windows and is flooded with happiness. Cyrille has his tea and goes to sleep in his mother’s bed. Claude has laid a table for two. They sit and talk. From time to time Claude looks down and the divine smile that Jean adores leaves her face. Then quickly, in a few words, he takes back what he has just said and what has upset her. Since the day he put his hand on her knee in the train that brought them to Paris, she has never had to be wary of him. Little by little she has learnt who he is and where he comes from, and is surprised that he has no desire to go and see what is happening at Grangeville.
‘Aren’t you worried about your father?’
‘He’s not my father. I love him, but I don’t feel I have anything in common with him any more.’
‘What about Antoinette?’
‘I’d like to see her again. There’s no urgency.’
‘And Chantal de Malemort?’
‘We have nothing to say to each other.’
He would love Claude to talk, as he does, about the people close to her, about her family whom she sees, he knows, during the day; but she seems to prefer to be without attachments where he is concerned. A single woman with a small boy, the two of them perched on a Paris balcony. Not a word about the husband. There is a photo of him in the bedroom, on the bedside table on Cyrille’s side of the bed. Jean hates this bed. He finds it hard to look at it when he goes to kiss the little boy on his damp forehead before he leaves. One night they go on talking for so long that when they stop it is after curfew. Jean sleeps on a couch in the sitting room; he has to curl up like a dog under an eiderdown. The night seems endless to him. Is Claude asleep? He swears that she is. A single police car speeds past along the embankment, then there is no other noise until the dripping, cold dawn reveals a lugubriously grey Paris.
Claude makes coffee and toast. Cyrille is in a bad mood. Jean cheers him up and the boy does not want him to go. After that night there are others, and now Jean sleeps practically every other night at Quai Saint-Michel. Sleeps properly. Lightly, in case Claude were to get up in the adjoining room and come to him. But, as we have guessed, she does not come. Occasionally he wonders what progress he has made since the day he first sat awkwardly opposite her. In all honesty he is obliged to say: none. The curious thing is that it does not make him feel bad, and little by little he has settled for this friendly and affectionate distance that she has assigned to him, like the trinkets – a silver snuff box, an ivory sweet tray, a tortoiseshell dance card, a crystal perfume bottle – laid out on a small side table that she often strokes with her finger as she walks past,
familiar mementoes of life in Russia that her mother has saved. Jean is there, just like them, though he is not from Russia.
In fact he would feel perfectly comfortable where she has put him, if he did not, at certain moments, desire her with a painful intensity. During the day she knows how to keep his desire at bay, but at night, asleep behind her bedroom door, she loses her advantage and Jean has a trio of images that help remind him of her reality: the silhouette of her body placed between him and the sun, beneath the transparent material of her dress; her knee on the train (which will stay with him for the rest of his life); and, one morning when she bent over to butter Cyrille’s bread, her dressing gown falling open and revealing a bare breast. Not both, just one; although with a modicum of imagination one could picture the other as very similar. She did not notice and Jean averted his gaze to avoid embarrassing her, but at night, as soon as he closes his eyelids, he sees again the curve and delicacy of this breast that looks like a young girl’s. It is maddening and unbearable. The funniest part of it is that his days are spent sorting, exhibiting, putting away, and selling Louis-Edmond de La Garenne’s ‘hell’, an unbelievable pornographic vomitus, an ocean of the most extreme erotica, of which Jesús is the chief supplier. In all honesty, Jean fails to understand how anyone can feel the slightest emotion at the sight of an obscene engraving, and he would need very little persuasion to consider all the customers who throng the gallery in Place du Tertre as suffering from some form of mental illness. And so, step by step, he is discovering what is particular to his own notion of physical love: almost total indifference when he is not in love, and contrarily, hypersensitivity when he is. He would not need much persuasion either to believe that all lovers of erotica must be impotent. Who among his customers would feel their heartbeat race when they looked at Claude because she had innocently worn a sleeveless dress or because, as she sat down, she had revealed her knee?
Jesús, when Jean attempts to explain these nuances, opens his eyes wide. In Spain only virginity can trigger an erotic frenzy. A married woman, the mother of a child, is totally uninteresting. Several times the discussions that follow last till dawn. The next day Jean is reeling. He accuses himself of naivety and clumsiness. Any man with any experience would already have obtained from Claude what he so passionately desires; and later, as he crosses Paris to see her again, he spends the journey making cynical resolutions he is determined to keep and every time fails to keep. As soon as she is there in front of him, he is disarmed. First there is Cyrille, who every day shows him more and more affection, then there is Claude herself, talking to him as if she has guessed his resolve and is herself determined to head it off.
‘Jean, I think you and I are going to make something wonderful, something completely unique in the world that no biologist could even think of. Born to different fathers and mothers, we are going to have the same blood.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘That you are my younger brother.’
‘Haven’t you ever heard of incest?’
‘Yes. And haven’t you ever heard of the curse that strikes down those who engage in incest?’
He tells her she is being overdramatic. She smiles and they talk of other things, of Jesús whom she wants to meet, and of Palfy, about whom there is still no news. Jean wonders if his friend has moved into the Sirène with all its comforts, continuing to dupe Madame Michette mercilessly. It is so unlike him to put up with the same fate as everyone else! No one who knows him can imagine him waiting for a visa along with three hundred thousand hopefuls waiting to cross the demarcation line and get to Paris. He has failed to reply to the interzone postcard Jean sent at the beginning of September. It probably sounded baffling to him anyway, with its series of permitted formulas, almost all to do with food or family.
The truth is that no one knows what is happening on the other side of the militarised border. When Parisian newspapers are not lampooning the Vichy government, they are dismissing it as a den of traitors coolly plotting vengeance. In Paris people live in a closed and isolated world. Beyond the palisade people might be mobilising or they might not: if the German communiqués are to be believed, in London, Coventry and elsewhere everyone has gone to ground.
The army of occupation continues to conduct its war without a scratch, a superb fighting mechanism whose resources were criminally concealed from the French. It has fuel, leather, endless supplies of machinery, perfect discipline, and all it can eat. The exotic London Jean once knew is impossible to imagine now, under a storm of steel: the majesty of Eaton Square that he loved, the doll’s houses of Chelsea, the elderly ladies in Hyde Park, the boats that steamed up the Thames to moor at Hampton Court among the oarsmen. It seems so distant now! The French are winding themselves into a cocoon, like a small child, while the Heinkel 111 bombers drone through the night towards Britain. They remain in a state of shock. The most pressing question is that of subsistence, a difficult problem for which the country is unprepared. At least love can make everything else go away. Jean does not stint himself. In the evening when he arrives at Saint-Michel there is always a package under his arm, something to make the dinner go better, whatever he has managed to extort from the grocer in Rue Lepic. Blanche de Rocroy’s cousin, who lives in the Seine-et-Marne region, sends her parcels of butter, lard and even game that she shares with Jean, who passes it on to Claude and Cyrille. The lift in their building is sealed off and he has to walk past the lodge of the concierge, a ghastly woman who wears her spitefulness on her face. Whenever she opens her door a crack, a smell of stew and decomposition fills the lobby. Jean is unaware that she has bought herself an exercise book in which she notes down the comings and goings of the tenants and their visitors. For the moment she does it because she enjoys it, with the thought at the back of her mind that one day it might be useful. Who to? The German police, or the French? She doesn’t know, but she tells herself she is a patriot and that if there had been more like her France would not be in the state it’s in now. Jean hurries up four floors. Claude’s cheek is waiting on the other side of the door.
‘You’re late!’ she says.
To excuse himself, he opens his package, which contains a hare. They skin it together on the kitchen table, an operation Jean has seen his father carry out a hundred times with an Opinel painstakingly sharpened beforehand. Alas, their own knife is far from razor-sharp and the skinning is a laborious business. The blood dries on their hands and Claude begins to feel sick. They will be cooking all evening, using up their last onions, a scrap of flour, four potatoes, some herbs and a glass of red wine. Cyrille proclaims that he does not like eating dead hare. He wants a live one. Because they have eaten late, Jean is to sleep on the couch in the small sitting room. Claude is on the other side of the wall. He strains to hear her breathing. Nothing. Not a sound. Neither the other tenants on this floor nor those on the floor above have returned to Paris. The ghastly concierge maintains they are all Jews; she has proof they are, in the form of the miserable New Year tips they used to give her before the war. In fact the only Jew is an upstairs tenant called Léon Samuel-Roth, a professor at the Sorbonne who for ten years has been writing an essay (eight hundred pages of his final draft are complete) on the Marxist aspects of the thought of Jean Racine as developed in his two Jewish plays, Esther and Athalie. At this moment Professor Samuel-Roth is hidden away in the Auvergne, missing his books terribly. Having succeeded in avoiding the increasingly widespread arrests, within four years he will nevertheless finish his essay (another four hundred pages), bring the manuscript back to Paris in October 1944, a few months after the Liberation, and leave it on a bus, a loss he will get over surprisingly easily, frequently telling his students that it was actually a fairly superficial piece of work, an academic’s distraction, and that at the age of fifty he felt the time had come instead to write a novel, whose action would be located in the same Auvergne where he lived for four years without seeing a thing, buried in his writing and with his nose, bristling with grey hairs, constant
ly to the grindstone. The other absent tenants on Claude’s floor are an elderly Alsatian couple, the Schmoegles, the husband a former officer in the Coloniale7 and since his retirement a technical adviser to a company manufacturing lead soldiers. No one knows what became of them when Paris fell and we shall hear no more of them; perhaps they died in the general exodus, hastily buried without anyone taking note of who they were. The fact that their apartment is empty will soon be passed on by the concierge to the German police, who will requisition it for one of their informers, who in turn will be denounced by the same concierge at the Liberation, be arrested and have his throat cut in a cellar, to be succeeded by an FFI colonel8 who will finally take his ease among the late Schmoegles’ belongings.
In the silence insomnia gnaws at Jean. He knows it will make his frustration worse, but he cannot stop himself from fantasising. He has to clench his teeth, get up and go out on the balcony, where the sudden numbing autumn cold freezes his temples. Quai and Pont Saint-Michel, Quai du Marché Neuf and the forecourt of Notre-Dame are deserted. Jean remembers a film by René Clair, Paris Asleep, that Joseph Outen had showed at his film club in Dieppe in the heyday of his cinema period. Alas, it is not the charmingly cocky Albert Préjean, his cap tilted over his ear, who is making the most of the sleeping city, but a German motorcyclist, fatly girdled in black leather and preceded by a brush stroke of yellow light, whose machine rips into the silence as it dashes past. What message can be urgent enough for the rider to wake up thousands of sleeping Parisians along the road to his destination? And talking of films, where has poor Joseph Outen got to? Has he been killed, taken prisoner, wounded? Did he make it back to Normandy, to a new hobbyhorse and another pipe dream? Freezing, Jean closes the window, moves across to the communicating door, and hears the parquet floor creak in Claude and Cyrille’s bedroom. The door opens, and in the doorway a figure is vaguely outlined against a black background. Claude closes the door behind her.
